In a day when civil and religious liberty is being vacated in favor of total state control, and when society demands that we give the state allegiance rather than Christ, we must go back to the basics and remember the simple teaching of the Lord Jesus; that no man can serve two masters. In application of that maxim, Paul says in 1 Cor. 7:23, "Ye are bought with a price; be not ye the servants of men." As Christians we were once full-time servants of the devil; but we were saved to serve a new master, the Lord Jesus. Because we have been purchased from former servitude to sin by Christ's precious blood, we are not to sell ourselves back into bondage, and therefore cannot allow ourselves to be made the slaves of an increasingly evil, tyrannical and despotic state. We must now bear in mind that submission to any another master is idolatry (Romans 6:16).
This message begins with a comprehensive teaching on the aspects of our servitude to Christ, and then ties in with application to the great sin of submission to the "beast" (global empire) of Revelation 13. In essence the great sin of the "mark of the beast," for which eternal punishment is decreed in Rev. 14:10-11, is denial of the sovereign lordship of Christ, by bowing to the supremacy of the state. What today's Christians seem totally oblivious to is the extent to which they are being, and indeed have already been, indoctrinated to receive and operate under a government-issued number without which "no man might buy or sell." God says to His people in Rev. 18:4, "Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues." We can only be servants of one master. |
