Another question that has come in concerns our consistency as kingdom Christians. And this question is asked a lot, particularly by people who don't accept the teaching of the two kingdoms. So this is what a sister wrote in.
She said," Christians are dependent on the societies in which we live for many things: food, gasoline, money, electricity, water." I understand that these things are not our primary focus, but the idea of total separation from the operation of the world by not participating in politics of any sort seems like shirking our responsibility of stewardship and not being truthful to ourselves with regards to just how much we rely on the world of which we are abdicating the care.
And she quotes there from Genesis 1 and chapters 1 and 2, where Adam was given the responsibility of the care of the earth. As I said, this is a valid question and one that is asked a lot, and it's an accusation frequently hurled at kingdom Christians. Now, the idea of our living as citizens of God's kingdom being separate from this world isn't something that we kingdom Christians have invented. It's not something the Anabaptists invented. We have the example of Jesus and His apostles.
How involved did they get in the affairs of this world? They didn't get involved at all. I mean, they weren't out there discussing the environment. I assume they weren't destroying it. I can't imagine that our creator didn't show respect for his own creation, but they didn't make that their big cause. They didn't get involved in the politics of the day. They didn't get involved in various good causes for this and that. Jesus preached the gospel of the kingdom.
He said," It was for this reason that I was sent to the earth was to preach the gospel of the kingdom." And that is what he did and is what he focused on. At the same time, it's not true that we're shirking our responsibility. Now, when Jesus was asked," Is it proper to pay taxes to Caesar?" He didn't say," No, we're in a different kingdom.
We let those people alone." No, he said," Pay back Caesar's things to Caesar," but then he added," But God's things to God." So his application then, he said," Show me whose head is on the coin." And it was Caesar's. He said," All right, pay back." That's when he said," Pay back Caesar's things to Caesar." So we pay our taxes. So these various things that you mentioned, you mentioned electricity and water. And there was a time when electricity was furnished by the government in cities. You paid the city.
Nowadays, that's generally been privatized. Everywhere I've lived in the last, I would say, 40 years, I've paid electricity to a private company. But yes, we pay for our electricity. Now, perhaps in most cities or rural communities, water is still it could be a private company or it could be the municipality. And again, we pay our city taxes. We do pay for those things. So as Christians, we're like everyone else. These things the government does, the government builds roads. It provides fire protection.
It provides police protection. Again, in some areas, it provides utilities. Those are just a few of many things. It coins money. It prints money. It provides the economic system that we work under. And we acknowledge all of those things. We are part of that. We pay our taxes. We work to you mentioned food, gasoline. We work as Christians with our hands.
In fact, we are actually more responsible than, I would say, a large part of the people of this world who don't work, who just live off of the government, who take more from the government than they give back. As kingdom Christians, I would say it is the opposite that we work hard with our hands. We don't live on government welfare as a rule. We buy our food or grow it. We buy our gasoline. We contribute to the whole economic system because we are productive citizens.
We are working with our hands, producing goods and services that help the entire economic system, and that provides taxes to the government to provide these different services. Now, we don't get involved in various causes because our cause is the kingdom of God. And bringing people to eternal life rather than focusing on things that are just involving this life, but it doesn't mean that we ignore those things. Now, some Christians, and to me, they are really, really mistaken.
They show little regard for the environment because they feel like the end is very near. Well, the end very likely could be very, very near. But people, Christians, have been expecting that for centuries and centuries and centuries. So we can have that hope, but that doesn't mean we are relieved of our responsibility to be good stewards of the earth. So we should be concerned about polluting water or polluting the soil or the air or whatever. We just don't make that our God.
We don't make that our big mission in life. But we should as obedient Christians, as Paul taught us in Romans 13, we obey Caesar unless Caesar is telling us to do something that directly contradicts Jesus Christ. Yeah And we have a lot of environmental laws here in the United States, and I would say probably most countries on Earth today have those. And as Christians, we should live by those laws, and we can certainly exceed them by showing good care for the earth and for the animal creation around us.
Okay, so the only thing we don't do as kingdom Christians is to go to war or join the military or the police. Now, in times of peace, most of the rest of the population, they don't join the military or the police either. I mean, we're not doing anything different from them in times of peace. And when there is war, again, most of the population don't voluntarily join the military to participate in the war.
Instead, half of the population, the men are conscripted, the other half of the population, the women, they're not expected that they can join the military, but they're not the ones who are there on the front lines normally being killed and fighting the wars. And you know the world is good with that. I mean, the principle that, okay, you can live in a country and not materially contribute to its defense other than the fact that you pay taxes to the government. And that is fine.
It's only not fine if you are male or if you're a male in a certain age bracket. But Jesus set a new model of what it means to be a man, that we not only pay back Caesar's things to Caesar, which his example was money, but he said God's things to God. It is God who created us. Our life came from God, not from Caesar. We give our life back to God. We don't give it to the government. And we certainly don't kill other people. We don't violate the commandments of Jesus Christ because our government tells us to.
So as the early Christians point out, Christians are actually better citizens than most of the population. The government is not having to spend you know untold millions of dollars to protect the population from kingdom Christians. Now, I know we have some bad apples that do commit crimes, and many times these are sexually molesting children or something like that. We do have those bad apples. I wish I could say we were totally free.
But even Jesus among His 12, He had Judas who you know committed the worst crime ever in the history of mankind by betraying Jesus. So yes, we do have that, but the government wouldn't need to spend all the money it does on police protection if all they had to deal with were kingdom Christians. I mean, they would have very little need for courts, for police, for they wouldn't have to be a drug or it could be a very small you know drug enforcement agency, et cetera. So yeah, we pay back what we owe society.
We definitely pay back, but we also pay back to God what is God's. As Origen wrote this, he said," Men of God are assuredly the salt of the earth. They preserve the order of the world, and society is held together as long as the salt is uncorrupted." And so our job is to make sure we remain uncorrupted so that we are the salt that are preserving the world. And that through our prayers, we bring peace to countries. We hold back wars.
And of course, if we neglect our responsibility, well, then, yes, we do have accountability. I think someone can criticize us. Our responsibility is to be the priests of the world, praying to God, interceding so that there won't be wars. It doesn't mean that we're going to have 100% effectiveness because Jesus already told us there's going to be wars and rumors of wars until the very end. But our prayers can make a huge difference.
As Origen pointed out, and it's still true today, to this very day, he said," During war, you never enlist the priests in the army. You want them offering sacrifices on behalf of your country. And we Christians are the priests who do this on behalf of every country on behalf of the entire world."
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