The Oldest Scam on Earth Is Still Running for Office

An op-ed on why mankind was never supposed to need a government in the first place

Just Because They Aren't Called Kings Anymore Doesn't Mean They Don't Rule the Same Way

Let me save you 2,500 words in case you’re in a hurry. Man does not need to be governed. Man needs to follow the laws of God. That’s the whole thesis. Everything below is just me showing my work, which I will now do at considerable length, because that is what you pay me for (some of you, anyway, and I love you for it).

It Started With Produce

The first law in human history was not a tax code. It was not a zoning ordinance. It did not require a permit, a notary, or a 90-minute wait at a government office staffed by one employee and eleven empty chairs. The first law was one sentence long and it was about fruit.

Don’t eat from that tree.

That’s it. That was the entire legal system of the human race. No enforcement agency, no appeals court, no lobbyists arguing that the tree industry deserved a carve-out. One rule, delivered directly from the Creator of the universe to the two people He made, in a garden He built for them.

Eve ate the fruit anyway. Adam went along with it, because Adam had the spine of a garden hose. And humanity got evicted from paradise over a snack.

Whatever. No biggie. We could work through it. God didn’t incinerate anybody. He let mankind walk out of Eden and figure things out, the way a father lets a teenager total the car and then hands him a bus schedule. Consequences, not annihilation. Grace, from day one.

But notice what did NOT happen. God did not respond to the fall of man by establishing a Department of Fruit Compliance. He did not appoint regional administrators. The law stayed simple, stayed personal, and stayed between you and God. That arrangement was the design. Everything since has been a corruption of it.

The Part Where the Kings Were Not Technically People

So God lets things run their course for a while, and mankind immediately demonstrates its single most reliable talent, which is lining up behind powerful and charismatic beings and doing whatever they say.

We have a word for those beings now. Demagogues.

And I want to be careful with the word “beings” there, because your Sunday school teacher probably skipped this part, but the ancient world’s god-kings were not always, strictly speaking, people. Genesis 6 tells you plainly that the sons of God took human wives and produced offspring, and those offspring were the giants, the mighty men of old, the men of renown. The Nephilim. Ancient cultures across the entire planet, cultures that had never met each other, all tell the same story about enormous semi-divine rulers who claimed the gods had given them the right to rule and who enforced that divine right at the edge of a very large sword.

And the humans complied. Of course they complied. Most people are terrified of death, and a nine-foot warlord with a bronze sword and a priesthood swearing he descended from heaven is a very persuasive constituent-services program.

That is the actual origin of government. Not a social contract. Not wise elders gathering under a tree to hash out the common good. Fallen beings and their offspring convincing frightened humans that submission was worship. The divine right of kings was not a medieval invention. It is the oldest scam on Earth, and it worked so well that we are still running versions of it, just with better graphic design.

God Hits the Reset Button

Eventually the empires got big and the wickedness got industrial, and the Bible says every intention of the thoughts of man’s heart was only evil continually. So God did something He has done exactly once and promised never to do again. He washed the entire planet and gave mankind a restart through one faithful family.

Now, before somebody in the comments informs me that the flood killed all the giants, let me head that off, because the text does the heading-off for me. Numbers 13 has the Israelite spies coming back from Canaan reporting that they saw the Nephilim there, the sons of Anak, and felt like grasshoppers next to them. Joshua spends chapters clearing giant clans out of the hill country. And a few centuries later a shepherd kid named David has to put a rock through the forehead of a Philistine champion who stood somewhere between six cubits and “absolutely not.” Goliath had brothers. Plural. Second Samuel lists them getting picked off one by one.

So no, not everything got wiped clean, and the heroes-of-old problem survived the reset in some form. Save me the lecture. The point is that even a planetary flood didn’t cure mankind of its addiction to kneeling before the wrong thrones. Which brings us to the moment God decided to stop being subtle.

The Time God Wrote It Down in Stone, Twice

By the time of the Exodus, God had apparently concluded that mankind needed the rules spelled out in writing, in stone, in a format that could not be lost, reinterpreted, or amended by committee. So He called Moses up the mountain and dictated the law directly. Ten commandments. You could fit the entire thing on one page with room left over for doodles. Compare that to the U.S. federal code, which is so large that the government itself has never produced an official count of how many crimes are in it. The people who enforce the law cannot tell you how many laws there are. Sit with that a moment.

The deal at Sinai was straightforward. Follow these rules and I will make you a people so blessed and so strong that you will never again need to fear the devil or his offspring. Not “elect good representatives.” Not “vote harder.” Follow MY law, and you won’t need theirs.

And here is my favorite detail in the whole account, the one they glossed over in Sunday school. Moses comes down the mountain carrying tablets written by the literal finger of God, the single most valuable physical objects in the history of the universe, and finds the Israelites, who watched the Red Sea split open like a screen door six weeks earlier, worshiping a golden calf that they made themselves, out of their own earrings, on purpose.

And Moses goes ape. He SMASHES the tablets. The original autographed copies. Gone. Then he has to hike back up the mountain and explain to God what happened, which has to rank among the most uncomfortable conversations ever conducted, although obviously God already knew, the way your mother already knew about the lamp.

God cut a second set. The second time around He was, I’d argue, a little more measured about the whole thing. But the calf cult never really died. It changed outfits. It learned new languages. It put on a suit and ran for office. Which brings me exactly where I’ve been driving this whole time.

The Two Masters Problem

Yeshua said it plainly. No man can serve two masters. He will hate the one and love the other, or hold to the one and despise the other. He said it about God and money, but the principle scales, because money and government have been the same racket for a very long time.

And the modern golden calf is not sitting in a museum. It’s sitting in a capital city near you, wrapped in a flag, asking for your loyalty oath every morning before homeroom.

Let me tell you what government actually is, structurally, when you strip off the pageantry. Government is organized crime that wrote its own laws about itself and then convinced you that following those laws is a moral duty. It claims a monopoly on force in a territory. It demands a percentage of everything you earn. It punishes competitors. If a private organization did any of this we would call it a cartel and make prestige television about it. When government does it, we call it civics and make your kids memorize the branch chart.

Ronald Reagan, a man who ran the thing, famously said the nine most terrifying words in the English language were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” The president told you, on the record, that his own institution’s offer of help should terrify you. And everyone laughed and clapped and then went right back to believing the help was coming.

The help is not coming. The help was never the product. The product is compliance. They keep you in line so that big business can make more money exploiting you, and big business gratefully recycles a slice of that money back to the politicians who write the laws, and everybody in that loop gets their third lakefront cottage and their fifth mistress half their age and their half dozen quietly settled paternity situations, and you get a sticker that says you voted.

If you’ve watched Game of Thrones, you already understand how government actually operates, minus the dragons (as far as I can prove). The scheming, the buying of loyalty, the ruthless disposal of anyone inconvenient, the absolute contempt for the smallfolk whose grain and taxes and sons fund the whole carnival. People watched that show and thought it was fantasy. It was a documentary with better costumes. Just because they aren’t called kings anymore doesn’t mean they don’t rule the same way. They just discovered that a man in a suit holding a press conference can extract more from you than a man on a throne holding a sword, and he never even has to sharpen anything.

The Politician Is Not Your Savior

Now I have to say the part that gets me unsubscribes, and I will say it anyway, because the truth is not a subscription perk.

If you are currently foaming at the mouth telling everyone that some politician was sent by the Creator to save America, I have hard news about which list you’re trending toward, and it is not the nice one. I don’t care which politician. I don’t care which party. I don’t care how good the speeches are or how many times he holds up a Bible like it’s a product placement. The habit of anointing charismatic strongmen as God’s chosen deliverer is not patriotism. It is the oldest idolatry on Earth, the exact same reflex that had our ancestors bowing to giant warlords who claimed heaven’s mandate, the exact same reflex that melted the earrings into a calf while Moses was still on the mountain getting the actual instructions.

I know this reflex from the inside, by the way. I’ve pulled the lever for a savior before. The savior did not save. Saviors with press secretaries never do. There has only ever been one legitimate King on this earth, and He is the Son of God, and He is coming back sooner than most people are emotionally prepared for. When He does, He will not be requesting your vote. And the folks who spent their finite mortal energy campaigning for the calf are going to have an awkward conversation on the mountain.

What Man Actually Needs

So let’s land this thing where it started.

Man does not need to be governed. Man was designed to govern himself under the law of God, and that law is not complicated.

Love God. Love your neighbor. Don’t steal, don’t murder, don’t lie, don’t covet, honor your parents, keep the day of rest, stay off the idols. Yeshua compressed the entire law into two commandments, and neither one of them requires a legislature, a lobbyist, or a form filled out in triplicate.

Think honestly about your own life. What keeps you from robbing your neighbor tonight? Is it the criminal code? Did you look it up first? Or is it the law already written on your heart, the one Paul says even the Gentiles carry, the one installed at the factory? You are not good because Congress is watching. Congress could not catch a cold. You are good, when you are good, because God’s law lives in you, and every functional thing about human society runs on that law, and every dysfunctional thing runs on the counterfeit.

I am not telling you to torch anything or stop rendering unto Caesar his sad little coins. Render away. Caesar needs it more than you do; he’s got mistresses to feed. What I am telling you is to get the thrones straight in your own heart. One master. One law. One King. Everything else is a calf with a marketing budget, and the mountain smoke is already visible if you bother to look up.

Man doesn’t need to be governed. Man needs to follow the laws of God.

That’s all.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

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Now the Part Where I Pass the Collection Plate, Sort Of

If you just read 2,500 words about how you shouldn’t fund corrupt institutions, allow me to introduce you to a deeply non-corrupt institution consisting of one guy living in a rundown motel room with an e-bike chained to a lamppost outside, plus an editor named Lily who is currently spending her summer at a camp teaching children which end of a canoe is the front. The Wise Wolf takes no money from big business, no money from politicians, and no money from fallen angels (they keep offering, the terms are terrible). That means we run entirely on readers like you. A paid subscription costs less per month than one lakefront cottage costs per minute, and unlike your government, I will actually tell you where the money went. It went to the motel. It went to the motel and journalism.