Addiction to Despotism
By Hal Lindsey
The world’s nations are being strangled by an ever-growing web of laws and regulations. It gets harder and harder to do anything without Big Brother’s costly intervention. Productivity is held back just when we need it to increase. Quality of life is taking a major hit. There are multiple reasons for this dramatic increase in government overwatch.
First, new and sometimes dangerous technologies are leaping into existence at every turn. They need legal guardrails. Yet these complex new laws must be written and voted on by nonspecialists. This makes politicians ever more dependent on experts, and experts tend to come with an agenda. While legislators are tasked with writing laws, the real work often falls to members of industry, ecology groups, or other special interests.
Nevertheless, even long laws tend to be too vague. The Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare,” is about a thousand pages long. Supporting regulations brought that up to at least 10,000 pages, and some sources say as much as 40,000. Lawmakers wrote 1,000 pages and regulators added tens of thousands more. And for us, all of it amounts to law.
This gives unelected bureaucrats enormous power. And, more and more, the world’s government bureaucracies have come to be run by extremists and activists — people drawn to an area of government because of their great passion regarding that subject. This gives extremists and activists enormous levels of control over countries and their people. Activists, perhaps nobly motivated, want to “change the world.” Too often, that means they want to run everyone else’s lives. So, government intervention grows to ridiculous levels.
But there is another, even more deadly reason for increased government — declining moral standards. As individual’s lose their grasp of ancient verities such as honor, love, and compassion, government tries to compensate. They do this in order to keep society from falling into the abyss. At the end of 2011 (the last year for which I could find numbers), the National Conference of State Legislatures put out a press release stating that US states and territories passed more than 40,000 bills and resolutions into law that year. Even though some of the resolutions are merely ceremonial, that’s still an overwhelming number of laws, and it does not include counties, cities, or the federal government.
At the same time, we have District Attorneys who refuse to consistently prosecute crimes. They seem to want fewer people in jail, and a smaller police presence in our communities. But they are creating cities where crime runs amuck. Violence spills into the streets and seeps into homes. People are afraid in neighborhoods they once considered safe. Activist DAs may want fewer police, but their actions are already beginning to have the opposite effect.
When crime is allowed to pay, the people become afraid. With enough fear, people stop worrying about their rights. They put safety ahead of everything. According to the Bible, “peace and safety” will be the primary issues of the last days. When chaos and fear rise like the flood waters of a mighty tsunami, people begin to cry, “Peace and safety… anything for peace and safety.”
“Peace and safety” will one day be the mantra of Antichrist. It all begins with a societal embrace of sin and depravity that paints police as the enemy. It ends in an Antichrist-run police state where laws are not written on human hearts but forced on people from the outside. The loss of personal morals in the populace inevitably leads to increased government control, and the destruction of human rights and human dignity.
We do not look at these things to evoke fear. Instead, we should see them as signposts. Our destination is getting closer. We don’t know when the Lord is coming, but we see the signs He told us to look for. As Christians, we are not to join the fear and the chaos, but to be “salt” (a preserving agent) and “light” in the world.
In all this, remember what Jesus said in Luke 12:32. “Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”
