Law, polytheism and the state

I have been reading just a little bit of Rushdoony's book, The Institutes of Biblical Law and I feel excited this morning to share a little of what I understand from it.

God is a law giver. In His first commandment, He requires us to worship only Him, recognizing Him as the only God. Implicit in this command is that we recognize the authority of no other "god's" laws, correct? This means Bhudda has no more authority to tell us what is right than our ancestors might under Shintoism. The same would go for Islam. They cannot define righteousness or rightness to us because they come not from God. This is simple stuff, right?

The rub comes when we interject the state into this equation. The state has authority, but it doesn't define righteousness. Its authority comes from what is termed imperialism--the ability to force compliance with its "law". It may be able to force compliance, but that does not make its law righteous. Might does not make right.

As Christians, if we recognize the state's law as more than an authority by force, then we are at best becoming polytheistic and at worst idolaters. This is because we are either agreeing with the state's definition as "another" valid righteousness or we are altogether supplanting God's righteousness and justice and replacing it with the state's form.

How do we do this? This is when we reject God's justice from His unchanging law and then agree that the state's form of punishment is superior or at least equal to God's way of punishment. If we say, "It's ok we don't make thieves pay back what they stole two to seven fold. The state's punishment of three years incarceration is sufficient or superior." then we are supplanting God's justice. If we accept the moral implications of justice from some state law which doesn't even have a corollary in God's law, we are accepting a substitute--idolatry.

Any justice which does not match up with God's law is a miscarriage of true justice. We cannot accept another moral code. Accepting such is polytheism at best and following after false gods at most.