Well friends, things are happening now. What kinds of things are happening? Well, that remains to be seen. It remains to be seen for several reasons. Let me lay out a few of them:
1, David Weiss is who has been made Special Counsel was the US Attorney who was in charge of investigating and prosecuting Hunter Biden over a long period of time—this investigation has been ongoing for 5 years.
2, Under David Weiss’s lead, Hunter was charged with misdemeanor tax crimes and a felony gun charge—so, presumably Biden will face at least one felony charge when this all shuffles out.
3, Under Weiss the Government offered Biden a sweetheart deal that was rejected by a judge and was so bad and so obviously corrupt that AG Merrick Garland had to do something.
4, Weiss has said that the Government never interfered with his work.
5, Weiss said that there were other people who made charging decisions.
6, Despite some of Weiss’ protestations at least one whistleblower has claimed that Weiss’ investigation was hampered and that there was political pressure.
And those are just questions about Weiss—this doesn’t even begin to consider whether this is part of an internal Democrat coup to get rid of President Biden and replace him with pretty much anyone before the 2024 election. Because that’s the thing about politics. When you see someone like Merrick Garland doing something like this it’s obviously because a) the pressure has gotten so high that he had to give in or b) this is a way of placating the right while simultaneously getting rid of a demonstrably AWFUL candidate in Biden. Garland is a political animal, make no mistake. He is arguably the most partisan Attorney General in my lifetime—and Ted Cruz argues the most partisan AG in history. Garland is not going to do something that looks like it hurts his own side out of the goodness of his heart or some kind of noble loyalty to duty. If Merrick Garland is doing something that hurts his own side it’s because he’s either being forced to do it or because it’s a red herring or a coup that will actually make the party stronger.
Merrick Garland is loyal to his party. He’s loyal to the Progressive Agenda. And he’s loyal to the liberal-left Federal bureaucratic apparatus. Indeed, listen to this comment from Garland:
“I certainly understand that some have chosen to attack the integrity of the Justice Department and its components and its employees by claiming that we do not treat like cases alike…This constitutes an attack on an institution that is essential to American democracy, and essential to the safety of the American people.”
Garland is basically pulling a Fauci saying that an attack on Garland is an attack on Justice. And this shouldn’t come as a surprise. America has been moving this direction for quite some time. We no longer view politicians as officers who hold offices and are entrusted with the powers of that office and who have power by virtue of the office to which they have duties and obligations and which they will have to surrender when someone else is appointed.
This is of course the danger of a permanent bureaucracy. This is the danger of a single-party-government technocracy. People gain offices and positions and after a certain length of time they come to view their office and their power and authority not as something lent to them by we the people, but as their own personal fiefdom that they hold by virtue of birth or personal excellence.
The permanent bureaucracy sees itself not as a collection of private individuals who have been given temporary extraordinary power to act for the people with power given of the people and by the people. No. They are a class. They are the specials. This is the power that they should have—that they deserve. Unlike the great unwashed, these people have Harvard degrees and know the latest politically correct speech and have the right opinions and it is their right and duty to hold power and to exercise it as they see fit—whether how they see fit conforms to the constitution, the will of the people, and truth, justice, and the American way, or not. Indeed, often it is their duty—a duty they owe to their own personal excellence to act in ways that would be unconstitutional and corrupt and illegal in lesser men.
As E.Y. Harburg wrote for the musical Finian’s Rainbow:
When a rich man doesn't want to work,
He's a bon vivant, yes, he's a bon vivant,
But when a poor man doesn't want to work,
He's a loafer, he's a lounger, he's a lazy good for nothing, he's a jerk.
When a rich man loses on a horse, isn't he the sport?
Oh isn't he the sport?
But when a poor man loses on a horse,
He's a gambler, he's a spender, he's a lowlife, he's a reason for divorce.
When a rich man chases after dames,
He's a man about town, oh, he's a man about town,
But when a poor man chases after dames,
He's a bounder, he's a rounder, he's a rotter and a lotta dirty names.
The preferential treatment that Hunter Biden has received and very well may continue to receive is nothing that should surprise anyone. And Merrick Garland’s attempts to drag his feet and slow-walk the prosecutions and restrict investigators and all the other corrupt things he’s done are bad. And they should be recognized as bad. And his Faucian notion, his Luis XIV notion, that Garland is the personification of justice is gross and bad. I don’t want to minimize it.
But it’s not new and it shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows anything about history and human nature. What Garland is espousing is not some historically aberrant view—it’s the norm of history.
Now, I must admit, I’m not a political theorist and the theories about power are extremely complicated and there are an awful lot of them. Indeed, I considered doing an elective for my Master of Theology about just defining power and the professor who was going to supervise it, who had previously been the Chair of Theological Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary, who was nearly 80 years old and had founded seminaries in India and was highly respected in the field told me that it would be a wonderful topic and that he would be interested because he too wondered about what power was!
Power is complicated and there are a lot of theories about it. But what isn’t really debatable is the reality and generally speaking, throughout history, the norm is to view the office and the officer as inseparable. You can’t differentiate the king from the kingdom or the duke from the duchy or the count from the county—this is part of the reason why kings were killed in the ancient world rather than merely deposed. The concept of kings living in exile after being overthrown is a rarity. Typically the king or prince of chief had to be killed. This isn’t ONLY because of fear that the deposed ruler would try to take back power—though that was part of it—but because the ideas of political power and personality were inseparable. This is similar to the notion of the “cult of personality.”
In America, VERY classical Greco-Roman, democratic and republican ideal that power is bestowed upon an individual by the people for a short time period so they may serve the state is a rarity. The Roman Republic had an enormously complex system to keep powerful individuals from becoming kings in all but name—or kings in name, for that matter!
But as Athens and Rome prove, the desire to separate offices and officers, to keep the cult of personality at bay is a never-ending battle. And there are many reasons for this—no doubt. And there are many bad reasons for this that are rooted in our own sinful nature.
But there’s actually a very good reason that we want a king and a kingdom that are co-extensive: Christ.
Born into all of us is the belief that the king and the kingdom, the might and the man, the lord and the lordship are the same thing. Inherent in human nature is the presupposition that political power and personality are inseparable. This is because our nature has been designed to desire Christ. God has made us to desire Jesus and so political history demonstrates how societies anticipate our God-King.
Ancient pagans—and modern pagans for that matter—worshipped kings as gods on earth or descendants of the gods. Now, part of that was effective propaganda to be certain. Part of that was our anthropological urge to worship what we conceive of as the greatest. Part of that was the fact that many of the heroes of antiquity were the offspring of human women and demons which gave birth to giants—to Nephilim who were heroes of old and men of renown.
Sure. But this worship of god-kings has often been used as a way of undermining Christianity. The critic will say, “Oh Luke, you fundy rube, don’t you see that your Jesus is just a Second Temple Jewish manifestation of the god-king phenomenon, and this is proof that Jesus is not divine but just some Johnny-Come-Lately.”
To which I reply, “No, rather it proves that all mythology anticipates Christ because God has made humans to desire Jesus. Our very nature cries out for a God-king!”
We want a king to rule us—or at least we have been made to desire such a king. Unfortunately because of sin we either reject God as our king or we want to be the king ourselves. Human beings have a bad habit of thinking that we have it in ourselves to rule over our fellows by dint of our own personal goodness or greatness.
Not only has God made us to desire a god-king but sin causes us to reject the real king and for us to seek to be that king ourselves. But we’re not fit for rule. None of us is so good, or so great that by virtue of holiness or wisdom or insight or strength or competence that we’re truly capable of ruling over others. All of us are frail. All of us will fail if called upon to rule. We’re not good enough, plain and simple.
And neither is anyone else. Only Christ is good enough. No human is able to rule others. Unfortunately because men will not be governed by God we must be ruled by men. I would it were otherwise—but it isn’t. Until the kingdom of the world is become the Kingdom of our God and of His Christ and Jesus takes His place on David’s throne, we will all be ruled by men who are at worst themselves ruled by base passions and at best subject to them.
The founders of our system of government were all frail men with their own sins and failings. But they left us a legacy that recognizes and safeguards against the reality that men are not Christ and only Christ is capable and worthy of rule. They recognized that man needed to be governed by men but that men were incapable. They gave us the best form of government the world has ever seen, insofar as it protects against abuses. But that legacy, that system, those rules, and this legacy is just a paper tiger unless we have a society capable of producing men who will surrender power, subdue their passions, and submit to Christ.
If we want a better government we must make better men.