Question: How do broken, sinful people govern themselves?
Answer: The way porcupines make love, very carefully.
Political commentators have used bales of print and bushels of words since the election last month to convince us that what we really want is for everyone in Washington to get along. I couldn’t disagree more, and I believe the founders of this land shared my opinion.
The founding fathers knew what an unbridled ruling elite could do to personal liberty because they experienced it and rejected it. Their experience caused them to design a system where power was never to be concentrated in the hands of an agreeable few. They (founders) knew that man was fallen and prone to selfishness, so they proposed to use the conflicting self-interest of elected officials and ordinary citizens as a system of checks and balances.
Our system of government pits state against state and the combined states against the federal government. The federal government itself has conflicting powers, the Congress against the Senate and the president against both, with the Supreme Court acting as referee and using the Constitution as a rule book to keep each in line. In each of these powers there are financial interests, issues of ambition and power, as well as regional preference and a multitude of political complexities that stand in the way of “getting things done” and bi-partisanship. Each in the pursuit of his own goal would run into some conflicting goal of another, and the resulting standoff would result in lack of action. Doing nothing is ok; it is the way it is supposed to be. In those rare situations like invasion or some other incident that affects a large portion of the population, there would be agreement on a common solution driven by the several interests involved.
The Tower of Babel illustrates the power of sinful man to rebel against God and do as he pleases. The system of regional self-interest as a curb to man’s godless ambition that our founders used was first used by God. The New Testament tells us to avoid legal agreement with unrighteousness. I’m praying for godly gridlock.