ANARCHY AND AWAKENING IN CALIFORNIA

Senator Jim Nielsen reports that even though schools received new funding in the recently enacted budget no effort is underway to repay billions in coerced loans when the state raided education funds over the past several years. The purpose of Prop 30 in the last election was supposedly to fund schools, but – frankly – anyone who believed that has been smoking their medicine. The governor has meanwhile approved a loan of half a billion dollars from funds dedicated by law to reducing greenhouse gases, but this is not new; we have been “borrowing” gasoline tax monies legally intended for highways for decades. These loans will likely be repaid around the same time as the schools’ monies are restored and pigs begin to fly.

 

Nielsen also reports some twenty-five hundred small business persons paid into a state program called the QSBS tax incentive that promised tax breaks and an improved climate for entrepreneurs. An appellate court found the law unconstitutional and the state is now assessing these same investors back taxes with penalties and interest over the five years of the program – as though the investors were at fault – with no allowance for monies already received. After the courts reprimanded the state and redrew boundaries because rural residents had been charged for fire services outside their residential zones, the state refuses to refund fees already collected.

 

In recent weeks a federal appeals court found the legislature illegally cut Medi-Cal funding for rural clinics in defiance of both state and federal law when it wanted to save money without cutting programs like the state’s Dream Act for illegals. Shortchanged doctors are expecting no back pay.

 

The Church has been largely silent about this blatant bullying of citizens by the very government that is supposed to protect them from the bullies. Some leaders call themselves helpless to intervene and others declare their concerns are not of this world; the sacred shall not invade the secular. Yet Old Testament prophets regularly confronted kings with their wrongdoing and the New Testament apostles – while still an illegal community within the Roman Empire – effectively ended abortion and infanticide by standing against it. The feudal system was as brutal as it was corrupt, but the Church managed to limit it through Her witness of word and presence. It was dedicated Christian leaders – and their followers – who awakened a nation to the horror of slavery in the 19^th Century and Jim Crow in the 20^th – without violence. It is high time to stand again if we take seriously what we pray – that it shall be on earth as it is in Heaven.

 

God calls Christians to pray for and bless those in government (Romans 13 and 14) whatever their behavior. When we must stand against them we must do it in love and respect just as Moses, Daniel, and Paul prayed long life for the emperors whose anarchy they opposed. But if we claim to serve One who embodies Truth we had best be prepared to speak hard truth to powerful people. Anarchy tortures the powerless wherever it originates.

 

At the same time the Body of Christ needs to clean its own house and hands first. Divorce, abortion, and other social scourges are as high in our ranks as in the so-called world. Californian Christians were complicit in enacting nationwide trend setting legislation for no-fault divorce, signed by evangelical icon Ronald Reagan in 1969. If a commitment as fundamental as marriage is negotiable with us we are less than credible witnesses against what we call anarchy.

           

The good news is that conference calls and prayer meetings across the nation are all about repentance – re-focus – on the Lord and the identity we have in Him even as others scramble to blame any scapegoat that precludes personal responsibility. As we Christians get a clue we gather the moral credentials – through the abundant life we exhibit – to expect our leaders to get a clue. And abundant life – a Great Awakening – will follow across the board.