Who was Herod? He was the government. But God is not a Nazi. Yes, God ordained him to execute wrath on them that doeth evil, but God did not ordain him to do evil himself. God did not ordain him to usurp His authority. When he did those things, God smote him, struck him down with a death worse than a bullet in the head.

So, yes, God ordains government to do His will by using His delegated power. When government uses that power for wrong, God punishes it. He removes it. Hegel notwithstanding, there is nothing divine about government. Men run it, men just as venal as you and I. Remember that what happened to Herod is related in Acts, also in the New Testament, the book that comes just before Romans.

Where does our government come from? Remember that God ruled the children of Israel directly, through his judges. But the children were rebellious and unhappy. They were not satisfied with rule by God. They wanted to be like everyone else. They wanted a king. God had made them special by adopting them, so they already had everything, but did not appreciate it. They wanted more.

God told them through Samuel what a king would do. He would take their sons for his chariots and their daughters for cooks. He would confiscate the best of their farms and livestock. And when they cried out, God would not listen. But they persisted. They rejected God. He had fought their battles and won, but they wanted a king to fight them.

So God gave them what they wanted. He is very easy to get along with. If you want to make a damned fool of yourself, He won’t stand in your way. He told Samuel to give them Saul, whose chief qualification was his height. He was taller than everybody else. That was the origin of government and, sure enough, this curse has done exactly what God said. Remember, government is a punishment we got for rejecting God.

Look through scripture from beginning to end. What happened to Herod is rather late in the book. Pharaoh was the government. He was hard-hearted, so God plagued him and drowned his whole army. Eglon, king of Moab, was the government and the children of Israel cried out against him. God raised up Ehud, who killed him with a dagger.

Sisera was the government, but he was an oppressor and the children cried out. So Jael nailed him to the ground through the temples while he slept, and Deborah the prophetess led praises to the Lord. Is it really necessary to remind you of Queen Jezebel and Ahab? They too were the government and were utterly destroyed. Wild dogs ate Jezebel. There was not enough left of her to bury.

From beginning to end, scripture is full of stories of government gone bad. What does God do when government goes bad? He removes it. He exterminates the rulers. He sets the dogs on them. God is not a Nazi. What was that you said about Romans 13? You can make scripture say almost anything you like by snipping and pasting, by ignoring the all-important context; you can even make it endorse totalitarian dictatorship, the exact opposite of what it means.

Because the message of scripture is a unified message, always in harmony whichever book you consult, ignoring the context can make you dead wrong. The Bible doesn’t teach one message here and a different, even contradictory message there. The message is the same because scripture is inspired of God and I AM changes not.

But the God the celebrity preachers preach is not the God of scripture. The God of scripture is a God of serene, inexhaustible, overwhelming power, a God who spoke Creation, the universe—every last thing there is—into being, a God who created it for His pleasure alone, a God who, before He did so, elected those from every nation, kindred, tongue and people who will be with Him eternally in Heaven because He, Jesus, did it all.

He is the God who forced Jonah to obey, the God who parted the sea and commands the winds, the God who died, was dead for three days and yet lives, the God who comforts His children in the Kingdom of Heaven, a God who is gentle with His own but Who is also a consuming fire, a man of war.

On the contrary, the god of the celebrity preachers is a weakling, who cannot do it all, who must plead for our help, who must wait until we decide whether or not we shall accept him. How could we reject the God of scripture when scripture says Jesus will not lose even one of His own? How could someone dead in sin, hopeless, a worm, decide to give God a chance? If God created the universe—everything there is—how is it that He can’t do anything He likes without assistance?

What is the effect of such unbelief? Does the unscriptural idea that man can save himself eternally not also spawn the idea that man is to be worshipped and can save himself here, in this brief portion of life? And someone who can do all this deserves worship. These are the basic precepts of the competing pseudo-religion of Humanism, which worships man and calls Christianity a "rotting corpse."

To the extent that it adopts those principles, Christianity swallows the poison of the Humanist pseudo-religion that would destroy it. Humanist fools believe God does not exist. Humanism in the Church believes that God is weak and needs help, that He cannot do alone what He promised.

What differences do these competing world views produce? The Christian world view is at peace, rejoicing in the blessings God has bestowed. But Humanism is a species of satanic disobedience. Man, its god, has "saved" himself, and strives endlessly to "perfect" himself and everything around him, denying that I AM changes not.

The Humanist church is the Communist government school. That is why it has ejected Christianity, a competing faith, for the same reason the Catholics would not allow the Baptists to conduct services in their church and vice versa.

The Humanist church worships Humanist government, the bigger and more totalitarian the better, because such government means more "perfection," more Humanism. The problem is that because man is not God, the results of his tinkering are horrors like Dachau, the gulag and laogai, where slave labor make the Red Chinese products you enjoy.

The preachers of scripture—with Paul—called themselves unimportant worms. God was all. The Humanist preachers of today strut and preen because worship in their gilded palaces is all about them. Yes, God exists there, but merely as baggage, as a superannuated magician past his prime. He must knock to get in. It is an easy step from there to Il Duce, to the "Horst Wessel" and Bush.