Human beings will always worship, and that impulse to worship will always find expression at the political level. Either, then, the government will endorse and safeguard conceptions of religiosity that are chaotic and idolatrous, and thus corrosive and immoral, or it will endorse a religiosity that results in the genuine moral unity of the State’s members. The only reason why we assume that the political arena can be secular or religiously neutral is because in the West we were until comparatively recently a Christian people.

The case below presupposes several assumptions, with which one may or may not agree, but it is necessary to declare them from the outset for the sake of clarity.
I take it as a given that human nature exists. We are not self-creating beings, and nor can we change our nature. We can warp our nature, mutilate it, and depart from its laws in innumerable ways that as a civilisation we are currently exploring with great dedication—but that is to do violence to our nature, not to change it. Such a view entails that there is indeed a law of human nature, with which we can seek to align our lives in our pursuit of flourishing—or indeed by our own volition we can depart from that law. The ways by which we may align ourselves with that law are diverse and dynamic, but such dynamism presupposes the acknowledgement of such a law. I further take it as a given that political life—by which I mean the moral or practical ordering of our lives in community, and its regulation through leadership and positive law-making—is proper to human nature. As individual persons, we emerge out of, and naturally maintain, corporate persons. 
Such communally reliant flourishing is not accidental to the kind of things we are, but rather it is proper to our nature. Humans are not found to be solitary, non-political animals anywhere on earth, nor have they ever been such. All philosophies that begin from the assumption that human beings are by nature solitary, and merely opt into synthetic communities with accidental forms for some prior, rationally apprehended reason, are flawed in their first principle.
Finally, I take it as a given that we are by nature question-asking and meaning-seeking beings, and hence, we are religious by nature. We ask questions about our origin, our purpose, and our ultimate destiny, and we come up with workable answers to those questions. More importantly, we develop art, mythology, and ritual by which we both seek to embody our quest for meaning and seek some personal encounter with the God or the gods who form the object of our devotions. Religion is baked into our nature.
Thus, because human beings are both political and religious by nature, there has never been such a thing as a secular society. Societies have always been religious. The moment society was declared secular in the 18th century by the French philosophes and their political activists, that society immediately erupted in a religious frenzy of sacrifice, paraliturgical activity, and the deification of the State as a new providential deity, with all the ritualistic expressions proper to religion subordinated to such anti-religious religiosity.
Given that religion is natural to mankind, and political government is the highest natural authority that exists over mankind—that is, mankind instantiated in his communities, nations, and empires, etc.—the proper authority over the religious life of any given natural community is its government. This fact has always been recognised. The Roman Emperor was arbiter over which were the public gods and which were the hearth gods, and eventually he even placed himself among the former. The Athenian statesmen were the protectors of religious life in their polis, and they lawfully executed Socrates for corrupting such religiosity among the young. The barbarian warlords of the north appointed their sacrificial priests and druids just as they appointed their lesser chieftains.
Why, then, is it so alien to us to think of political leaders as the apposite authorities over the religious beliefs and practices of the citizenry? The answer is simple: we are all stumbling about in the shadow of Christendom, and simultaneously we are attempting to run on its fumes.
Political leaders, as the highest authorities in any natural society, are the proper authorities over the religion of their people, which is always some manifestation of natural religion. But our civilisation has historically held that this is the age of Jesus Christ, and consequently supernatural religion has entered the world. Christians claim that their religion does not have its origin in the natural religious impulse of human nature, but has come into the world from without, and in doing so has assumed into itself that natural religious impulse, has transformed it, and superseded it. 
In short, Christians claim that their religion is not a natural religion, but a supernatural one. Thus, they claim it requires an institution of purely supernatural origin to be both its interpreter and promulgator, namely the Christian priestly hierarchy. Political leaders, whose role is rooted in the requirements of human nature, are simply not competent to be the highest authorities over this supernatural religion. Thus, in a Christendom model, we have two authoritative institutions on earth, one of natural origin, customarily called the State, and one of supernatural origin, customarily called the Church.
The terminology of Church and State, however, is deeply misleading. States, once they are Christian political communities, are no longer deemed by Christians to be merely natural communities. They are supernaturalised natural communities by virtue of the baptism of their members and the recognition of Christianity by their existent political and legal organs. Thus, in a Christendom model, what we customarily call ‘Church and State’ are more accurately called the spiritual and temporal divisions of the one supernatural community of Christians called the Church. The monarch or prime minister or president of a Christian nation, then, is as much a leader in the Church as any bishop, except as a layman he is ordinarily competent in the temporal matters of that supernatural community, and only extra-ordinarily competent in spiritual and doctrinal matters—whereas this is the reverse for a bishop.
If the Church’s kerygmatic enterprise withdraws from the public arena, or it is excluded from that arena by a political movement of apostasy, this has several harmful effects from a Christian perspective. First, the Church atrophies, as it cannot fulfil its own mission, and it increasingly attempts to justify its own existence by presenting itself as a club committed only to temporal concerns, within the jurisdiction of an increasingly anti-religious State. Second, this situation leads to a kind of moral schizophrenia among the baptised—especially baptised statesmen—who are expected to be Christians at home and secularists at work. Third, such an arrangement does not lead to what is widely claimed—namely a religiously neutral public arena. 
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All things depend on Him for all of their existence. The fact you are breathing now is because the Lord has so ordered the earth to produce the proper amount and type of air you need in order that your lungs will inflate and deflate to a sufficient degree that your body stays on this side of the grass. A particular actuality that we do not spend enough time mediating on is how much the physical world which we need to survive is held together by its Creator, and how we can do nothing to make the parameters different than how God designed it. 

Today as the divines open our eyes to see the depth of how God works in history and why He does what He does there is an opportunity here to put a plug in for something we are going to begin to do at Bethany ARP Church on Sunday evenings beginning Sunday November 13th. As we close out Ruth the week before we are then going to start a new series in our second service on the Lord’s Day where we’re going to mainly work through this portion of the Larger Catechism. Gaining a better sense of how God operates in His works of predestination and election, and how that plays out in His providence is vital to dealing with the day-to-day troubles we face as believers living in a sin-soaked world. For those of you unable to attend at that time of night for whatever prudential reason they will be recorded and placed on our YouTube channel.
So as not to spend too much more on this let us go ahead and look at the Q/A’s below:
Q. 18. What are God’s works of providence?
A. God’s works of providence are his most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all his creatures; ordering them, and all their actions, to his own glory.
Q. 19. What is God’s providence towards the angels?
A. God by his providence permitted some of the angels, wilfully and irrecoverably, to fall into sin and damnation, limiting and ordering that, and all their sins, to his own glory; and established the rest in holiness and happiness; employing them all, at his pleasure, in the administrations of his power, mercy, and justice.
Q. 20. What was the providence of God toward man in the estate in which he was created?
A. The providence of God toward man in the estate in which he was created, was the placing him in paradise, appointing him to dress it, giving him liberty to eat of the fruit of the earth; putting the creatures under his dominion, and ordaining marriage for his help; affording him communion with himself; instituting the Sabbath; entering into a covenant of life with him, upon condition of personal, perfect, and perpetual obedience, of which the tree of life was a pledge; and forbidding to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, upon the pain of death.
One of the truths of the Bible as it relates to these questions is the reality that no created thing ever is independent of God. All things depend on Him for all of their existence.
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The prophet will endure the three days and nights as a man made ready to receive and obey YHWH’s call. Having completed his ordeal and preparation, the sovereign God will ensure that Jonah’s mission resumes.

The Fate of the Reluctant Prophet
It is impossible to imagine the misery Jonah endured for those three days and nights he spent in the belly of a huge fish–both his tomb and his salvation. Jonah’s distress is great–it is that of a dying man. Yet, Jonah is not dying. Beyond all human expectation, YHWH sent a huge fish to rescue the “reluctant prophet” from certain death in a watery grave. Jonah’s entombment in the fish is neither the end nor even the high point of the Jonah story. But it is the literary hinge upon which the story turns from Jonah’s flight from YHWH to the fulfillment of his prophetic mission in Nineveh.
The Prophecy of Jonah opens with YHWH commissioning Jonah to go and preach to the Ninevites, something which Jonah refused to do. Attempting to flee from YHWH’s call, Jonah boarded a ship bound for Tarshish. But YHWH sent a great storm which threatened both Jonah’s ship and its crew. Realizing that it was his sin that was the cause of the storm, Jonah was confronted by the pagan crew–whose own gods were of no help in calming the storm. Unless the storm ceased and soon, all onboard would be dead. Jonah told the crew who he was, what his mission entailed, and that unless the crew threw him overboard, they would not be spared. The frightened crew did exactly that–they threw Jonah into the sea where he was certain to drown.
The moment Jonah was off the ship, YHWH relented, calmed the storm, and delivered the crew, who witnessed YHWH’s great power. The grateful crew offered YHWH sacrifices of thanksgiving. But unbeknownst to them, YHWH miraculously rescued Jonah. At this point, Jonah’s story turns from an account of his flight from Nineveh, to a time of prayer and repentance (chapter 2), which are the preparation for the fulfillment of YHWH’s greater purpose that the gospel be preached in Nineveh (chapter 3), Jonah’s ultimate mission.[1]
As we have seen in prior installments, the Book of Jonah is neither an allegory nor a moralistic fable designed to teach the reader that opposition to the will of God is futile. No doubt, attempting to run from God is one of the most foolish things we can do. But the underlying message of Jonah is not the usual moralizing object lesson–obey God’s call or else suffer the consequences. The Prophecy of Jonah reveals that it is YHWH’s redemptive purpose to save Gentiles who are outside of his covenant with Israel. While dwelling in Canaan (the promised land) YHWH intended his people (Israel) to serve as witnesses of his holiness and righteousness to the neighboring Gentiles nations. Once the unified nation of Israel (as in the days of David and Solomon) was divided by a civil war and the Northern Kingdom became more and more apostate and disobedient to YHWH’s covenant, Israel was no longer a faithful witness, but instead became a sad illustration of happens to those who reject YHWH’s gracious covenant promises and protection in exchange for a helping of pagan porridge.
As Israel failed in its role as YHWH’s witness, covenant judgment came upon the nation as foretold by the prophet Amos and described by Hosea, the last of the prophets YHWH sent to the Northern Kingdom). During the days of Hosea’s ministry (he appears shortly after Amos and Jonah) the Assyrians invaded and conquered Israel, decimating its people. Since Israel failed to be YHWH’s witness to the nations, YHWH calls Jonah to serve as a prophetic witness to the Gentiles–Jonah is to preach in Nineveh, the very heart of the pagan Assyrian empire.
Jonah the Patriot
But Jonah was a Jewish patriot and deeply hated the Assyrians (Israel’s current enemy). Jonah even claims that he would rather die than see the Assyrians converted through his preaching (Jonah 4:3). So, like the nation from which he hailed, at least initially, Jonah also fails in his role as YHWH’s witness to the neighboring Gentiles. He refuses to obey YHWH’s prophetic call and attempts to flee to Tarshish only to discover that you cannot escape from YHWH. YHWH’s word will be preached in Nineveh, by Jonah, and to great effect just as YHWH decreed.
Jonah’s reaction to his miraculous deliverance from certain death is revealed in the second chapter of his prophecy. Somehow surviving in the belly of a large fish appointed by YHWH to save him, once inside the fish Jonah might have thought it would have been far better had YHWH simply let him die. It is hard to think of a more uncomfortable and miserable environment. In this “song of deliverance” (Jonah 2:1-10) also known as “Jonah’s prayer,” we learn of Jonah’s change of heart which leads him to go to Nineveh and preach in fulfillment of his divine call. Jonah shows himself to be quite familiar with the Psalter as his words and expressions frequently echo well known passages from the Psalms. In this, Jonah models how Christians ought to face pain and suffering–clinging to God’s words and promises. We also see Jonah’s expression of thanksgiving unto YHWH for delivering him from certain death, as well as an indication that now confined in the most difficult of conditions, Jonah will become a student of YHWH’s ways, and of YHWH’s mercy.[2]
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