“When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.” The world is seeing Proverbs 29:2 in action, proved and re-proved on the nightly news. In fact, this perfectly summarizes every government in every country in every generation. When righteous men rule, the lives of the people are so much better: Evildoers are punished and restrained; people are freer and more prosperous. When the wicked rule, freedoms are curtailed, rights are stripped from people, corruption spreads, taxes increase, wealth is confiscated, evil goes unpunished, transgressors come to the full, good people are oppressed.
Human beings need righteous government, yet the world lacks it. As Herbert W. Armstrong explained in Chapter 6 of Mystery of the Ages, this is exactly why God raised up His Church. Restoring His government—rejected by Lucifer, then by Adam and Eve—to Earth is His highest priority. And true Christians urgently need to prepare themselves to be in that government. Godly leadership is revolutionary, and at the same time, it is day-to-day practical. True Christians must learn to lead.
Let’s study into the most fundamental quality—you could say the crowning quality—of godly leadership.
David’s Last Words
God called King David “a man after mine own heart, which shall fulfil all my will” (Acts 13:22; 1 Samuel 13:14). David devoted his life to God, and he learned profound lessons about godly leadership. At the end of his life, he looked back and looked forward to his son Solomon’s reign. His “last words” begin: “The Spirit of the Lord spake by me, and his word was in my tongue. The God of Israel said, the Rock of Israel spake to me, He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God” (2 Samuel 23:2-3).
In your current and future roles of authority, you must be just. This means lawful, righteous, conducting yourself at a godly standard and seeking justice for others. “It is not enough that they do no wrong,” the Matthew Henry commentary states, “but they must not suffer wrong to be done.”
You must also rule in the fear of God. This is the quality lacking in this world’s leaders, a quality we must be developing.
In your roles of authority, you must recognize that God is the real authority, that you are under the rule of Almighty God and are accountable to Him for how you use the authority delegated to you. You cannot be just without godly fear. But with godly fear, you will be just. Verse 4 describes the beautiful effects of such righteous rule.
A leader who lacks that fear will make terrible mistakes. This world’s leaders are accountable to no one but themselves. This is why they readily abuse power, and it is the cause of so many problems. Connect this lesson from world events to your own conduct. Take personal warning: This is what happens when leaders are not “just, ruling in the fear of God”!
When Lucifer sinned and became Satan, he boasted, “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God … I will be … the most High” (Isaiah 14:13-14).
He later told the same lie to Adam and Eve. God’s plan is to reproduce Himself in His human children. But Satan tempted Eve away from that: Don’t become a God who is under God, but rather in place of God! In other words: Do what you want, and don’t fear God! (Genesis 3:4-5). “Adam the first human rejected knowledge from and reliance on God. He chose to rely on his own knowledge and abilities,” Mr. Armstrong wrote in Mystery of the Ages. “The modern world, developed from Adam, relies wholly on human self-reliance. The psychology taught in our day is self-reliance. Rely on the innate powers within you, they teach. An atmosphere of self-reliant professionalism pervades most modern university campuses. It is the spirit of vanity.”
That attitude came from Satan. When you add authority and power to this attitude, Satan can oppress and spread sin and cause people to mourn.
The spirit of self-reliance and vanity is the opposite of what God needs in a leader.
Men Who Fear God
God formally established the crowning quality of good leadership in Israel. Moses received counsel about the main quality required of Israelite leaders: “Moreover thou shalt provide out of all the people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness; and place such over them, to be rulers of thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens” (Exodus 18:21).
Note four qualities: able men, capable and competent; honest men, truthful in their dealings; non-covetous men, insusceptible to greed and corruption; and men who fear God. These leaders had to submit themselves to God’s authority and tremble at His word. That is how God’s government works: One man at the top fears God, and everyone under him administers the same government because they also fear God. God is always in the picture.
Whether you are a man or woman who fears God is evident in how you live your life and how you exercise what authority you have.
Near the end of his life, Moses reviewed this counsel and how it had been implemented. As God’s representative, administering His government, he chose men and instructed them to be just in their leadership, emphasizing “the judgment is God’s” (Deuteronomy 1:17). A godly leader must administer God’s authority, rendering His decisions, carrying out His wishes and exercising his leadership as closely as possible to how God Himself would! He must not do what he pleases. And he must not be a people-pleaser but rather a God-pleaser.
The most important point in godly leadership is to seek God’s will.
Study God’s Word Daily
Deuteronomy 17 records the laws God gave for Israel’s future monarchy. When they established a king, they must not do it by vote of the people or appointment by the elites. It must be God’s choice. God then had specific commands for the king. His heart must be turned to God, not led astray by lust for women or riches. He must not trust in his military. And he must be a diligent student of God’s law. Why? “[T]hat he may learn to fear the Lord his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do them” (verse 19).
Fearing God is something we learn over time through continuous study. Matthew Henry wrote that the king learns from such study that, “as high as he is, he must remember that God is above him, and, whatever fear his subjects owe to him, that, and much more, he owes to God as his King.”
Effective daily Bible study teaches us to fear God properly. Without that daily study, we can assume we know God when we have only a shallow understanding. Many people think they know God, but it is really just a god they’ve set up in their own minds after their own image. No wonder they don’t really fear that god!
Study and get to know the real God, as Job did (Job 42:5-6). Then you realize: He is a God of judgment. He rules. He punishes the wicked. We must study daily to get to know Him, to keep His words, to fear Him enough to obey Him.
Ruling in the fear of God means ruling according to the Word of God and, therefore, the law of God. Administering the law of God requires studying it.
The more you know human history—including human law and government—the more you realize just how unique and revolutionary and special God’s laws are. They reflect the wisdom and the love of God. God’s laws are just. They prevent tyranny. They protect property. They limit human government. They check the power and human nature of leaders. They protect the poor and needy. Ruling in the fear of God means helping such people rather than ignoring or abusing them.
God has rightful authority over all men. Deuteronomy 17:20 shows what happens when a leader co-opts that authority and uses it as he sees fit: His heart is lifted up above the people. He begins thinking of himself as better than them. Invariably, he abuses his authority. The wicked rule, and the people mourn.
Exploiting the People
History has written this mournful lesson for thousands of years. “[M]ost people lived lives of misery and exploitation in tyrannical empires that covered huge areas,” Rodney Stark wrote in How the West Won. “[A]s the centuries passed, most people lived as they always had, ‘just a notch above barest subsistence … little better off than their oxen.’” The cause was largely the wicked rulers. In the ancient empires, monumentalism was common: Kings and pharaohs constructed huge statues, immense shrines, massive pyramids and ziggurats, built on the backs of millions of their fellow human beings, largely for their own vanity.
“Despite such monuments and fabulous royal wealth, the great empires were very poor,” Stark wrote. The emperor was filthy rich, but “because of imperial opulence, ‘century after century the standard of living in China, northern India, Mesopotamia and Egypt hovered [around] the threshold of pauperization ….’ Too often historians have noted the immense wealth of rulers without grasping the sacrifices this imposed on the populace.” In the shadow of the impressive pyramids and other structures, “peasant families always wavered between abject poverty and utter destitution. [T]he economic system of ancient empires and of all despotic states has come to be known as the command economy,
since the state commands and coerces markets and labor—to exact wealth for itself—rather than allowing them to function freely.
The people are usually subject not only to confiscatory taxation but also to forced labor, which accounts for the monumentalism of empires” (ibid).
These regimes don’t hire workers but rather use their power over the military and the police to force people to do their will, often barely feeding them and many times killing them! For example, probably a million people died to build the Great Wall of China. Billions of people throughout history have lived under these conditions, where anything of value that someone has—land, crops, livestock, buildings, even children—could be arbitrarily seized. Leaders rarely invested the wealth in their people. Instead, they consumed it, often in various forms of display. “The Egyptian pyramids, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and the Taj Mahal were all built as monuments to repressive rule; they were without productive value and were paid for by misery and want” (ibid).
This is why God explicitly commanded His kings not to greatly multiply to themselves silver and gold (Deuteronomy 17:17). This not only protected the king and his character, it protected the people.
Those examples may seem extreme, but the world is moving in the same direction today. Leaders spend what they want—$140 billion here, $3.5 trillion there—to preserve and augment their power and, often, their personal wealth. They print new money, making the dollars in your bank account worth less and less. It’s a form of modern monumentalism that gets swallowed up in special interests, corruption and worthless or destructive government projects.
God’s law prevents such abuses. Ruling in the fear of God keeps those from happening.
Nehemiah 5 records a wonderful example of godly government. When Nehemiah was appointed governor in Judah, he refused to take a salary so as not to burden the people. Why? “[B]ecause of the fear of God” (verse 15). “Nehemiah also made sure that his servants or assistants did not take advantage of the people,” Gerald Flurry writes. “He did this out of fear of God” (Ezra and Nehemiah). God was real to Nehemiah (verses 17-19). That inspired him to be a true servant of the people. He used his authority to look after the people and care for the poor the way God does.
Every Man Under His Vine
Human governments that do not rule in the fear of God act in their own interests. That is why they get bigger, consuming more and more of the people’s resources. God’s government does not do that. It acts in the people’s interest because
God is at the top, and God is love!
He always seeks the people’s benefit.
Nations that descended from ancient Israel have had traces of this thinking. Their constitutions have protected personal liberty and property from those in authority. This has contributed to those peoples and nations prospering in wealth and power above other nations. As Adam Smith wrote in Wealth of Nations in 1776, “That security which the laws of Great Britain give to every man that he shall enjoy the fruits of his own labor, is alone sufficient to make any country flourish.” These are biblical concepts, enshrined in God’s law. God wants every man under his own vine and under his own fig tree (Micah 4:4), and He gave laws to ensure that.
Stark wrote that French farmers commonly tried to appear poor so their taxes wouldn’t be so heavy. In fact, most nations in history have incentivized poverty. Britain’s farmers, by contrast, were far more productive, which fed the nation well and improved general productivity and prosperity. “French farmers, for example, were less productive, to the point that during the 18th century as many as 20 percent of the French were so poorly fed that they couldn’t do even light work for more than three hours a day. In the late 1700s the average British soldier was four inches taller than the average French soldier,” Stark wrote.
This is a specific example of how living by godly principles works. There are tremendous advantages of “every man under his vine,” secured by godlier leaders.
In early America, under British Common Law, “individuals had an unlimited right to property that they had legally obtained, and not even the state could abridge that right without adequate compensation.” It produced what Stark called the “American miracle.” God used these Bible-based principles to bestow the birthright blessings!
At America’s founding, its Declaration of Independence established that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” If the rights of human beings are indeed endowed by their Creator, then anyone with authority had better respect those rights!
“In a nutshell, our rule of law is our firm stance against tyranny,” Stanley Zir said. “… The intensity with which our Constitution was created with the sole purpose to prevent and block tyranny can only have been divinely inspired and manifested through our … Founding Fathers. Without the Ten Commandments, the underpinnings of moral advancement in humanity, we would not have had the ethical imperative that produced the laws that framed our Constitution, without which the ideals that our republic adheres to could never have been actualized.”
This is easy to take for granted—except now, when that system is being overturned and dismantled!
Psalm 12 was written in a time when the unrighteous were everywhere: “Help, Lord; for the godly man ceaseth; for the faithful fail from among the children of men. They speak vanity every one with his neighbour: with flattering lips and with a double heart do they speak” (verses 1-2). Verses 3-4 speak of people speaking pridefully, saying, “With our tongue will we prevail; our lips are our own: who is lord over us?” Note the cause of all the arrogance and pride: They don’t recognize God. They lack godly fear.
But God sees the oppressed, and promises: “For the oppression of the poor, for the sighing of the needy, now will I arise …” (verse 5). He will step in and intervene! As verse 6 says, you can have absolute confidence in His promise.
The Perfect Example
Jesus Christ is the perfect example of godly leadership. He was the second-most powerful Being in existence, yet He became human to suffer and die. He said, “My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work”; “I can of mine own self do nothing”; “I do nothing of myself; but as my father hath taught me, I speak these things” (John 4:34; 5:30; 8:28).
While He was in the flesh, Christ “offered up prayers and supplications, with vehement cries and tears to Him who was able to save Him from death, and was heard because of His godly fear” (Hebrews 5:7; New King James Version). He reverenced His Father. He remains perfectly under His Father’s authority always. He rules in the fear of God.
Mr. Flurry describes this crowning quality of the great I Am in John’s Gospel—The Love of God. Of John 8:28, he writes, “What a precious scripture. This all-powerful God said, I do nothing of myself. And whatever my Father taught me, that’s what I teach you. No person on this Earth has ever come close to that example of humility! … We are pitiful human beings. Compared to the I Am, we are less than worms. Yet can you and I submit to the Father as the I Am did?”
We need this humility in how we treat our spouses, how we rear our children. We need to submit to exactly how God wants it done. In your family, you rule for God. You administer His authority. Our children are not ours to do with as we please. They are God’s, and we are accountable before God for how we rear them. To succeed in child rearing, we must be just, ruling in the fear of God!
“To rule in [God’s] coming Kingdom,” Mr. Flurry writes, “we must rule exactly as God instructs us today. … We must burn into our minds this truth: We are here to imitate the I Am. That means learning to use authority as He does and learning to submit to it as He does” (ibid). Whatever authority God has given you, use it just like He does, the best you can.
If a man doesn’t do what he believes is right for his family because he fears how his wife or his children will react, he is not using his authority properly. He is ruling in the fear of a woman or in the fear of a child, not in the fear of God. If he submits to schoolteachers or administrators who are feeding his children immoral propaganda and fails to speak out, or withdraw his children from that environment, he fears the state more than he fears God.
Exercising Dominion Over Them
The mother of James and John approached Jesus to ask for high offices for them in the Kingdom of God. The other disciples were upset by this. Human nature wants position for honor and privilege, power and wealth: selfish reasons. Jesus took the opportunity to teach about godly leadership.
He told them, “Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them” (Matthew 20:25). Examples of men exercising dominion fill the history books and today’s news. Rulers routinely exercise authority arbitrarily. We have seen this in monarchies and atheistic communistic societies and everything in between. The underlying belief is that whatever problems exist in the world, they alone can solve them. What a disaster when a Communist leader, king or president believes there is no authority higher than himself! As President John Adams said, “Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak and that it is doing God’s service, when it is violating all His laws.”
God’s approach to leadership is radically different. “But it shall not be so among you,” Christ continued, “but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant: Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many” (verses 26-28). That is how Christ used authority and how we must as well.
We must be like King Solomon early in his reign, bowing before God and asking, Who am I to rule so great a people? Who am I to have authority given to me by God? Who am I to lead my family? Who am I to serve God’s people? Who am I to lead these employees? (1 Kings 3). Your wife, children, students, employees—they are God’s. You are accountable to Him for that authority and you must govern by His law of love.
Do the people you lead get to know God through your leadership? If they do, that is an incomparable blessing. When God’s government is practiced, it makes people rejoice!
The Master Is Coming
In the Olivet prophecy, Christ told His disciples, then and now, that He would return in power and glory to Jerusalem, and He exhorted them to stay ready. Then He gave this parable: A servant is given a position of responsibility over the other servants. He must remember where his authority came from and to whom he is accountable. He must rule in the fear of God! If he does, he will do well. But if the master slips from his mind and he begins to feel he can do as he likes with his authority, then his life will end in disaster (Matthew 24:44-51).
This can happen even to God’s own people. It happened to God’s Church in this era. And the world can see it happening in the modern nations of Israel today. Christ says God will judge them! (verses 50-51). They may not fear Him today—but they will! He will put the fear of God in them.
Jesus Christ prophesied the end of human self-government and the restoration of God’s government, beginning with His Second Coming. Millenniums of oppression and injustice and mourning are about to end.
If you want to be part of the incoming government, you must be learning and practicing this crowning quality: He who rules over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God!
To learn about the government God has placed in His Church and that will rule the world, request God’s Family Government.