Lesson 34
Introduction to Righteous Government –
We begin a new section in this book, actually part of a large section
that we’ve been going through but by way of review and orientation, we’ll
review once again. Deuteronomy is
divided basically into the sections of an international suzerainty vassal
treaty. Archeology in the last ten years has discovered that this book, so
called by the liberals as a late writing, is exactly in its outline like an
international treaty of the second millennium BC, which means therefore that
this book is not a late book like all the college religious [tape skips or
something] … when it was supposed to have been written by Moses. And it was not a late writing, it is not a
fabrication and it is not a retro-progression of the views of the 6th
century back into the second millennium.
This book was written, actually from a sermon Moses preached and takes
on the parts and format of a legal treaty and this is most crucial to
understand. And the middle part of the
great section of the treaty which we’re discussing goes from chapter 5-26. This is the heart of the book and this is
where you have all your law. We divided
that in half between chapters 5-11 and chapters 12-26 based on the first and
great commandment, “thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and
with all thy soul,” and the word “heart” in Scripture refers to inner mental
attitude and the word “soul” here refers to the details of life. These details of life include fellowship with
other believers, relationship with your friends, relationship with your family,
relationship with government and society, it includes your work, whatever it
is, what kind of job you have, it includes your possessions, whether it’s money
or in some other form, clothing, etc. It
includes physical health, it includes rest, relaxation, it includes sex, it
includes all of the details of life and these are the details that make up
loving the Lord with all your soul.
So that we might say today, to be contemporary, thou shalt love the Lord
they God with all thy life, in other words, all attributes, all aspects,
categories and compartments of your life.
So therefore Moses in the first section, chapters 5-11, dealt with the
inner mental attitude for without this all the outside is just hypocrisy. So he begins on the inside with the inner
mental attitude and works outward to the various details of life. We’ve worked so far up to chapter 16 and it’s
gone this way. Chapter 12, 13, 14, 15
and part of 16 all dealt with one theme, up to verse 17; 17 is a termination of
this first section. And this all dealt
with the unity of the nation
So therefore in these chapters Moses says this is where
And then in chapter 13 Moses laid down a very dogmatic principle that
any person that did not conform to Mosaic theology was to be executed by
capital punishment. The reason for the
execution was that since God was king over the nation, as we will see tonight,
any act of violating His word was an act of treason, and in those days they
knew how to spell and what the word meant, as we do not know today. But they had such a thing as traitors in
their country. They didn’t believe in giving blood to North Vietnam, etc. Anybody that did that would be executed as a
traitor. Therefore in Israel in chapter
13 we have anybody that fools around with the Word of God is to be eliminated
from the society.
Then in chapters 14-15 we have the details of life. Certain of the details of life here involve
funerals, attitude toward death, involves your physical environment, involves
welfare systems and we found out there the Biblical concept of a welfare
system, based, first of all on a volition of the individual, based on the fact
that no individual in the nation would go hungry, there would always be food
available, but, and this was one of the great marvels of the design of this
kind of welfare system, the person in order to get the food had to work; he had
to at least go into the field and glean.
The people that could not hold title to property such as widows, for
example, that could not do this had supplies based on the town.
But the very interesting thing about Biblical welfare is that they took
the tithe of the nation which was ten percent tax, it was akin to our income
tax, and the tithe of the nation was the income tax of Israel and each third
year this tax went to welfare, went to the welfare system. So every two years
you had it go to Bible teaching. How do
we know it went to Bible teaching?
Because it was given to the Levites and the Levites were the people who
taught the Word of God to the nation. So
the ration in the national budget between welfare and Bible teaching was two to
one and that shows you, of course, the fantastic financing that went behind
missions in that day.
Suppose, for example, we talk in the United States of two to three
billion dollars in a welfare program.
Multiply that by two and you’d have how much Israel would be devoting to
teaching the Word of God or missionary endeavor. So if they had a two billion dollar aid
program they would have a four billion dollar missionary program. And needless to say, I bet most missionaries
wouldn’t know what to do if we had a four billion dollar missionary thing. This shows you our priorities nationally and
shows you why we’re in the mess we are in.
Then in chapter 16 we dealt with the calendar of the nation, a most
fantastic chapter because it’s said that the nation each year would celebrate
certain feasts. They would celebrate
Passover, which really isn’t a feast, it’s one day, but then they’d celebrate
the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and then they’d have the Feast of Firstfruits,
and then they had the Feast of Pentecost.
And these four items were on their spring calendar and these four items
were to be celebrated each year by way of national education so that the nation
would be educated as to its destiny.
Passover stood for the fact that as Israel in the past was redeemed from
Egypt, so in the future Messiah would come and die on the cross as a perfect
Lamb. This is why John the Baptist, when
he saw Jesus coming down the bank, evidently it must have been near Passover
season when this happened, and John pointed up and said “Behold, the Lamb of
God that takes away the sin of the world.”
He was able to do this and to communicate because the people had
categories built in from the Old Testament.
How do you preach the gospel to a group of people who don’t even have a
vocabulary of revelation? God in history
solved the problem by giving us the Old Testament. You see, the Old Testament is in your Bibles;
it’s interesting why people have the Old Testament, the average Christian
doesn’t open it except occasionally in the Psalms. But actually that Old Testament has been
preserved in history to provide us with a vocabulary of revelation so we can
understand the concept and nuances of meaning so that when you get into the New
Testament you can pick it up just like that.
In the early days of the Church the apostles assumed that even the
Gentiles, who did not have the Old Testament by way of a heritage, that these
people, these early Christians would know cold the Old Testament. We know this because some of the apostles
arguments presume a fantastic knowledge of the Old Testament and they expected
the people to know it. They didn’t
repeat, repeat, repeat and repeat. They
said Paul went into Thessalonia for three weeks, held an evangelistic campaign
and taught them so much doctrine that it takes us a year or two to even
understand the epistle, which shows you the concentrated teaching, teaching,
teaching, that Paul went through. He
didn’t buy the line that you hear today, oh, you can get too much of the Word
of God and get spiritual indigestion. I
would like to see what those people did in Thessalonica when Paul went in there
and gave them a cram course over a three week period in eschatology, in prophecy,
etc.
So therefore w have this national calendar that looks past, it looks to
certain things in the past but also spells out things in the future. The Unleavened Bread spells out the
separation of the believer from the world.
The Firstfruits spells out the doctrine of resurrection, Jesus Christ
the New Testament says was the Firstfruits and we are part of those later
on. And then Pentecost, which was to
celebrate, the grain had come in, the nation should have been ready to execute
the program of God, the harvest was in, the spring harvest was complete,
Pentecost was a celebration of the completion of the harvest, and therefore it
looked forward to the time when Israel would be complete and ready to go.
Therefore God sent His Holy Spirit on Pentecost on schedule but the
tragedy was that the nation Israel was not ready to receive the Holy Spirit and
therefore the Holy Spirit did something very interesting, He, instead of
fulfilling Joel’s prophecy of Joel 2 where when the Holy Spirit came the Holy
Spirit was to produce visions, He was to produce prophecy, He was to produce
astro-catastrophism in the stars and in the solar system, etc. produce physical
signs, none of these were accomplished on the day of Pentecost; all were
crossed out and in place of this you have tongues. And tongues was not even in the prophecy of
Joel. The only place you find tongues in the Old Testament is in Isaiah 28 and
in Isaiah 28 Isaiah is not speaking of blessing, he is speaking of
cursing. Tongues is not a sign of blessing,
tongues is a sign of cursing and discipline.
Tongues are saying to Israel in effect, you have rejected My program,
now I will teach the gospel to you through Gentile languages. Therefore we have
the tongues gift which is confused today with ecstasy.
Now ecstasy today is not equal to tongues, don’t ever confuse the
two. Non-Christian religions have
ecstasy. I have anthropologist that
reports where they have shown that non-Christian religions, Buddhism and Confucianism
are doing exactly what we do when we call this phenomena speaking in tongues. I never call the modern ecstasy movement by
tongues because it’s not tongues.
Tongues in the New Testament was given to the early Christian church to
talk back to the nation Israel to announce the discipline, and of course,
there’s no need to announce the discipline after 70 AD when the Temple was
destroyed. So therefore this is part of
a national calendar.
Now as we said last time, those are four feasts in the national
calendar: Passover, Unleavened Bread, Firstfruits, Pentecost. But the calendar was split and in the fall of
the year we have two other things. We
have Trumpets, that’s one thing, and we have the Day of Atonement, that’s
another one. And then we have the Feast
of Tabernacles. These are very
interesting feasts because they are the only feasts left on Israel’s calendar
that have not been fulfilled.
Now here’s where we have an interesting debate with our friends who
amils, people who do not believe in a millennium, people who say that Jesus
Christ died, we go down through history, Jesus Christ comes again and that’s
it. We don’t say that, we say Jesus
Christ died and we go down through history, rapture of the Church, Tribulation,
Jesus Christ comes again, one thousand years of perfect environment and then
the eternal state. The reason we say that is because these other three feasts
have to be fulfilled. The first four
were fulfilled; how were they fulfilled?
Literally fulfilled. How are the
next three going to be fulfilled?
Literally! Trumpets, we said, is
going to refer to some autumn in the future, toward the end of the Tribulation
when something is going to happen to the nation Israel to alert her that God is
resuming His work with the nation. Then
the Day of Atonement, if you have Jewish friends you may have heard them use
the expression, Yom Kippur because Kippur is the word for atonement in Hebrew
and so therefore you have the Day of Atonement in the nation and here’s the day
which will fulfill the prophecy of Zechariah when the nation will look upon Him
whom they have pierced and confess their sin and you will have national
repentance at that point. Then the Feast
of Tabernacles which will celebrate the beginning of the Millennium, a literal,
one thousand year reign of perfect environment.
Therefore this nation was tied together in many ways, through chapters
12-16 producing this unity. Now in verse
18, Deut. 16:18, we get an entirely new section that is going to go for several
chapters. It’s going to be very
interesting material, we are going to find out how they disciplined in the
home, how the local police functioned, how the court system functioned. We are going to find the only passage in
ancient literature which gives women the respect that they have earned and that
they think they’ve earned in the 20th century which they really
haven’t. It comes out of Scripture, for
women in the ancient world were treated a little better than expensive cattle
and the only country that had real freedom and respect and dignity for a woman
was Israel. We are going to see the famous passages in this book that
originally gave women their rights in society.
This is an interesting section and it’s going to go from 16:18 down to
the end of chapter 21, verse 23, and the theme of this section, not unity;
chapters 12-16 dealt with the unity of the nation and here we move in a very
logical thing. That’s one thing about
the Bible, it’s always logical, ALWAYS logical, and we move from unity to
national righteousness. And this is one
of the great progressions of Scripture.
Notice what precedes national righteousness. You first have to have unity; you first have
to have something that unites the nation around a standard, for righteousness,
the very word means standard. Where are
you going to get your standard if you do not first have a unified consensus on
something, particularly in religion?
So in Deut. 16:18 Moses starts out by saying, “Judges and officers shalt
thou make thee in all thy gates,” now gates is a synonym for cities. In Handel’s Messiah where you hear that
famous phrase, “open, O ye gates,” I often thought of gates opening and the
Messiah going in. Well that may be, but
that’s not what he’s talking about, basically, because the word “gate” is a
metonymy for the city council and what it’s saying is towns, get set because
here comes the Messiah, open ye gates means the leadership of each city is to
receive their king. And so therefore in verses 18, “Judges and officers shalt
thou make thee in all thy cities, which the LORD thy God is giving thee,
throughout thy tribes, and they shall judge they people with righteous
judgment.” “Just” here is the word
“righteous,” with “righteous judgment.”
Now let’s look at that a moment and apply it to our own country. How are
laws made? Laws can only be made in one
of four ways. Now I don’t care what
country you come from, I don’t care what the cultural background, always law
must be formed on one of these four bases. First, you can form it by direct
revelation. In other words, the standards
that you incorporate in your legislation are given directly by God, direct
revelation. Historically this is unique
only to Israel, Israel is the unique nation on earth, her legislation in the
ancient times of the kingdom of God were given by direct revelation. Now we don’t have that. No Gentile nation can ever claim that. The last time God addressed a nation as a
group of nations was in the Noahic Covenant and in the tower of Babel. So here we have direct revelation unique only
to Israel.
What’s another way that nations can gain their standards for righteous
law? The second way they can do it is by
consensus based on the Bible.
Historically this is shown in northern Europe, Germany, northern France,
England, Ireland to some degree, parts of Canada and the United States. And
these basically are the areas of the world whose laws reflect… you’ve heard of
British common law, etc. These laws
basically grow out of a consensus that people have and they are deriving that
consensus, that opinion of law basically from the Bible. This does not say everyone in these countries
are born again believers in Jesus Christ.
We make a careful distinction.
What we are saying is that the concepts of the Bible predominated in that
culture; they have predominated in northern Europe, they have predominated in
England on up to about 1900 and they have predominated in our country I’ll say
to 1900-1930. So here is where we have
had in our country in the past laws based on consensus that have been built off
of the Bible.
Now the third way you can get law is a consensus based on something
other than the Bible and some samples of this would be sociology, I will show
you what I mean in a moment. Sociology, you can base it on psychology, you can
base it on aristocracy, you have a certain class who gain control and it’s
their consensus that runs the show. So
this is another way you can obtain law from a consensus built on what we call
non-Biblical sources.
And finally you have anarchy and here’s where it’s every man for himself,
dog eat dog, I determine my own standards and I don’t care about your
standards. Of course now as we spell
these four out you can begin to see what’s happening in our society. In our society we can trace it historically
throughout the early pilgrim era, our society basically was built on part two;
American law has in the past been based on a consensus that has been influenced
by the Bible. Now in our century, if we
don’t recognize this as Christians we’d better give up. In our century this has gone on and has
failed gradually so that now we are moving to three; the United States today is
slowly moving out of a consensus based on Scriptural truth to a consensus based
now on sociology and other sources, and we’re groping around for what we want
to believe is the right standard. So now
we’re moving in our country and you have to see this.
Now at the same time we have another movement; at the same time the
national society is moving from two to three we have some intellectuals that
are moving down to four. We call that
SDS and a few other things, and these students, a lot of them may be
communists, but mark my words, it’s not sufficient just to call these kids
communists because you miss the point. The point that they’re saying is if you
can give me a reason for the base of your law, then I’m not going to obey your
law and that’s what they’re saying to the college administrations. Who in the last thirty years has torn apart
the Bible? It’s been the college
administration, and now the birds have come home to roost and they’ve reaped
what they have sown. So the students are
turning around and saying you can’t give me a base for obeying your law, you
say the law says this and I ask you, what is the base of your law; what right to you have to tell me
what I am going to do and what I’m not going to do. And you see, you don’t have anta right when
it comes right down to it if you deny the Bible.
If you deny the supernatural you have nothing to say to the radicals of
our time, absolutely nothing. And this is
a tremendous crisis today, is that the liberals have all of a sudden found
themselves out on the end of a limb, they don’t want to go all the way with the
radicals and yet they find themselves unable to defend themselves against the
radicals because the radicals are saying ah, we are going to be
consistent. If you can’t give us a base
for your law then we are going to go out and raise hell. So this is anarchy and frankly if I was an
unbelieving student on the college campus I’d be one of them. And the reason is because these hypocrites
that tell me they have this fat standard over here and I’m supposed to obey it
and I ask them why should I obey. You
can’t give me one good reason; the only reason for a standard is found in God’s
Word and it goes back to the essence of God.
This is the ONLY base of law in society.
That is God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love,
God is eternality, God is omniscience, omnipotent, omnipresent, and
immutability. These are His attributes.
Two of these attributes are righteousness and justice and there is where you
have the base of law.
I have an answer to the student radical, it’s simply this, I believe in
a personal God who is absolutely holy and it’s from Him that I gain my
standards. Those standards don’t come
from me, they don’t come from the government, they don’t come from a
Congressman, they don’t come from any human leader, they come from God because
of who and what He is. And that is the
base of my law. Now if you said that, a
person may reject you, but he can never come back to you and say that you have
no base, that you’re just cranking these things out to make a straightjacket
existence.
Therefore the basis of our law is the righteousness and justice of God
and this basically is the only answer that we can give to the problem of the
base of law. Now you see what’s happened
in our country. We have had this base, we have had it back in the 1900’s, and
then we had a man who was a Supreme Court justice from 1902-1932, Oliver
Wendell Holmes. He typified the new
legislation and when he became the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court he made
this statement, and this statement tips you off as to what has happened. When you have a man who’s at the top of the
jurisdiction, top of the judicial arm of our government make a statement like
Oliver Wendell Holmes made you can see what has happened, for he made this
statement: Law is only a prophecy of
what the courts will do in fact and nothing more. That’s what he said, in other words, law
doesn’t reflect any absolute standards.
This man is a Supreme Court justice and when you get that kind of fuzzy
thinking at top levels you see why we have had a mess in this country. It’s because first you have negative Bible
doctrine. You see it’s always a failure
to teach the Word of God. It’s always
rejected and it always fouls up society.
People talk about oh, these fundamentalists don’t have any social
concerns. That always bugs me because
what do they think we’ve been doing for the last 50 years, sending out
missionaries, if we had no social concerns. What do they think they do about
these men who preach their heart out over the radio if we have no social
concern? We preach the Word of God
because we do have a social concern.
Every time you witness for Jesus Christ you have a social concern. What the liberals really mean is that you
don’t have an interest in their left-wing program. That’s what they really mean. But don’t ever accept this line that
fundamentalists have no social concern.
Who established city missions? Fundamentalists. City missions are doing far more than inner
city poverty programs ever will do. Therefore you find that fundamentalists
have a social concern. In fact I would
dare say we are the only people with social concern. Therefore Oliver Wendell Holmes was the man
who started the ball rolling.
Then later on we had another man, Chief Justice Vincent who was Chief
Justice from 1946-1953 and this statement is just fantastic because he made
this statement: There is nothing more
certain in modern society than the principles there are no absolutes. Now think of that, think of who is saying
that, that’s the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and he says there is
nothing more certain than there are no absolutes. If I’m an unbeliever I’m going to say okay
buddy, if there are no absolutes do you know what that means, you just cut your
own neck because I’m not going to listen to you. If there are no absolutes for me to obey,
then I’m not going to obey any standards. Do you see the dilemma? Do you see what we’re in? Without the base of
the law being the character and holiness of God, you have no base for law. The only reason you can invent for law is
just some sort of convenience contract, we don’t like to kill each other, it’s
a problem sweeping up the blood or something, so therefore we’ll get together
and we’ll agree to live peaceably. It’s
sort out of mutual convenience. This
always devalues the value of human life.
Then we come to 1954 which I feel is the watershed of American
jurisprudence for in 1954 the Supreme Court made their famous Brown versus the
Board of Education decision to desegregate schools. Whether you’re for or
against segregation that’s not the issue here.
I’m not talking about that issue, I’m talking about the basis on which
that issue was made. For in this issue
of 1954 the Supreme Court did something that was absolutely unheard of in the
history of law. Up until that time when a
court decided a case, it would always go back and find previous court cases;
there was a tradition of jurisprudence that was respected. So when this case came to court the judges
always studied the precedent of the court and said, say back 50 years ago we
had a situation like this that came up and we decided this, back in 1980 we had
a case and we decided this, therefore it is in the tradition of American law to
decide this way. But in 1954 the Supreme
Court tossed all this out and made the base of their decision on sociology,
strictly sociology, it had nothing to do with law. The people that they employed in this case,
basically a man who wasn’t even an American; he was a Swedish socialist who
came to this country and openly called the United States Constitution
impractical and unsuited to modern conditions.
And this man wrote a book against conditions in the United States and it
was that book by Günter Murdall [sp?] that was used as one of the great
authorities of the Supreme Court decision.
Now do you see what’s happened? American law has shifted terrifically in
your lifetime. If you are up in years
during your lifetime you have seen a revolution in American law. You have seen the whole system of American
law move from a base founded on a Reformation law over to a base now on
sociology and convenience. Therefore if
someone gets killed, some guy in Chicago kills six or seven nurses, his lawyer
can come out and say I am so sorry, but he couldn’t any more help but kill
those girls than a man can help his navel.
This is basically what he said, he couldn’t help it, he’s a just a
machine, he’s a being that’s not spiritually alive, he’s dead, so therefore he
couldn’t help it. And what happens to
the girl’s lives; you have swept them under the carpet, under the pretext of
being so concerned that we not execute a criminal. And ironically we have destroyed the value of
the victims of murder. I’ll show you
some of the most powerful texts that will burn some of your ears when we get
into this where God says when someone is murdered in this land I am not going
to clean it up until you have spilt the blood of the one who has spilt that
blood. That’s an awful powerful
statement but God says that blood of the innocent pollutes the land and the
only cleansing agent for innocent blood is the blood of the one who killed
him. And not because he was dropped on
his head when he was a baby. God says
kill him.
The reason for this is not because the Old Testament is bloody, is gory
or is anti-humanitarian because if you will just stop and think and get the
emotions down to a reasonable temperature zone, you will understand something
very profound about the Word of God. The
only reason why the Word of God warrants capital punishment isn’t for vengeance
on the murderer. That’s false; the Bible
is not saying you murder the other person for vengeance. The Bible is saying
you kill the other person who killed because the life of the one he killed is
so precious that no fine can ever pay for it.
And when we charge a person with 2-3 years in jail, $20,000 bail, what
we have said is that the life that that man took is only worth $20,000. The Word of God says that life is so precious
that no fine will ever pay for it and you can only pay for it with the blood of
someone else. That is a redemptive. The
Bible is not retributive justice, the Bible is redemptive justice and this is
the principle. By capital punishment it
is teaching the value of human life, just exactly opposite to the way people
picture the Bible.
So we have come a long way in America and we are heading down to a time
when we are going to see, as Christians, a consensus be built up. I do not think anarchy is going to prevail, I
think you’re going to find a consensus gradually build and when that consensus
builds we are going to [blank spot]
I don’t know what to do about this, so father-in-law was sitting back
there, he says hey son, come over here, I want to clue you in. And so at this time Moses listened to his
father-in-law. That’s a very interesting
case, by the way because Moses’ wife couldn’t take it. She was one of these weak
women and she didn’t like Moses, and Moses was going to follow the Word of God
and his wife didn’t like it. So Moses
said all right, honey, you just stay there, I’m going on with the Lord. And so he went off and left his wife because
she was the kind of person that wouldn’t get with it and Moses was going to get
with it whether she liked it or not; she just moved on. There it shows you one of the interesting
principles of Moses’ determination to adhere to the Word of God.
Now, this new form of government that his father-in-law, and evidently
his father-in-law said apparently, okayed that he had raised this girl all her
life and apparently found that Zipporah was a weak-kneed daughter and so he
evidently liked Moses and the thing didn’t rupture the relationship at all,
Moses had a fine relationship with his father-in-law. So evidently both men pretty well thought
this girl was kind of out of it. And so
they had a nice time together and this father-in-law told Moses, actually set
up stage two of their government. And it
looked like this. You have Yahweh up
here, you have the Law, then you have Moses, and in between Moses and the
twelve tribes he set up what he called “captains.” Now this word, I am going to give you the
Hebrew transliteration; that’s the only way we can keep these terms straight
because the King James doesn’t do it.
The word here is sarim, and sarim were people who were appointed by
the congregation to function in the military marching units. You see the people
out here were marching through the desert and instead of appointing captains
over hundreds, over thousands, over hundreds, over fifties, over tens, those
people were called sarim; now sarim are people who are going to come
up again; simply stated they are appointees, the government appoints these men
as sort of administrators. They perform
both judicial and executive function.
Please notice something else and it’s very interesting. There is no legislature in Israeli
government. Why? Because who makes the Law? God does, you don’t need a legislature and so
therefore this government is very interesting.
Our government has three branches, legislative, executive,
judicial. Israel’s government had only
two, executive and judicial because the legislative was handled by God. And so therefore these men performed both
executive and judicial functions. The
performed executive functions, example of this, Num. 31; they performed
judicial functions, Exodus 18. Therefore
that is the second stage of Israel’s government.
Now they came to a third stage. The third stage looked something like
this. And this was in Numbers 11 when
finally Moses had another problem. Before it was the problem of just sheer
administration, he had to get himself organized. Now it came to the problem of people that
were spiritually rebelling and he had spiritual problems all over the place. So
then he modified it and we have this situation set up. Yahweh, Law, Moses, we have the sarim down here, we have the twelve
tribes here. Now in between here,
actually along with Moses we have seventy.
That’s his board; he had a board of seventy men who were imbued by the
Holy Spirit to perform spiritual functions and so they are on an equal plain
with Moses and you begin to develop what later in history came down in the New
Testament to be known as the Sanhedrin.
Now there’s a debated connection between the Sanhedrin and the seventy,
but anyway, the people claimed in Jesus’ time to pattern after this board of
seventy. We have nine men on our board
at Lubbock Bible Church but they had seventy and I imagine they had
subcommittees and so on, but this was the board. And that isn’t a very large board when you
consider there were 3,000,000 people in the nation. There was only seventy men on the board so
they must have had a very efficient system.
Now we have stage four and this is the stage that begins in verse 18,
for now the people are moved into the land and they’ve settled down. He’s got to do one thing anyway, all the rest
of this has been functioning by a marching unit, in other words every time you
have the government it’s in terms of thousands, hundreds, fifties and
tens. Well they are no longer going to
be in marching units, they’re going to be in cities. So now it looks like this. Moses is going to die, so something’s going
to have to happen. Moses dies, all the
marching units go so you’ve got to rework the government and this is what’s
happening in verse 18. This is the final
stage of reworking and so here we have Yahweh, we have the Law, Moses is going
to die so he’s not going to be there and in his place you have a supreme
council. Now the supreme council had on
it both judges and priests. The priests
handled the religious end, the judges handled the civil law end and that was
the supreme council of the nation. These
were the men that controlled national policy, etc.
Then in each city you had three categories; judges, you had officers who
were assistant judges; those are the two words here in verse 18, judges and
assistant judges, and you had sarim. Now the sarim
were sort of secondary administrators in the city councils and the judges and
the officers were the leaders. You might
say they correspond to our city council and mayor. So these are the men who performed. Don’t let the word “judge” throw you. Often times I think of the book of Judges and
I think of somebody in a black cloak sitting behind a bar but the judge in the
Bible is not our judge. The judge in the
Bible performs executive functions as well as judicial function. Samson was a judge; a lot of men in the Old
Testament in the book of Judges were judges.
We even had a woman judge. Do you
know why they had a woman judge, Deborah?
Because no man was able to take responsibility so God had to use a woman
and He did and she had a fantastic testimony.
But it wasn’t God’s will, it was just that all the men were sitting
around doing nothing and God had to have something done so like the missionaries,
women run the mission field practically, you go out on the mission field and
why do we have two or three times the number of women? Because you can’t get any men out there. And it’s a man job and women have been doing
it. So this is the old problem you have
of getting men off their duff to do something spiritually for the Lord. And it’s always the problem; the Church has
always had it and probably always will because of various reasons.
So you have the judges, officers and the sarim; these are three categories of officers in each city and
beginning in verse 18 these two are appointed, “Judges and officers thou shalt
make,” notice sarim are not mentioned
because sarim are actually sort of
city employees hired by the judges and officers. These judges and officers were part time
people; in the cities on the local level they were just part time people, the
supreme council were fulltime. “Judges
and officers shalt thou make thee in all thy gates, which the LORD thy God
gives thee,” so every city is to have its set of judges and officers, they are
to be local people, and they are part-timers.
They were evidently from Scripture just people that were paid part time,
much like our city council.
Verse 19, “Thou shalt not leave judgment [distort justice],” now verse
19 and 20 will be our concluding verses, but notice the command. This is a charge given to civil government in
this nation. I want you to notice some
details about this. “Thou shalt not
wrest judgment” and the word “wrest” here means leave judgment and what it
means is that look, you people who are
government officials have a standard and this standard is not to be left. The idea here is that you have the standard
set up by the Word of God and it gives you a pathway, don’t cross it. Stick to the standard. Now do you see why Moses had to devote
chapters 12-16 to develop the base for his standard before he could talk about
the Law. What good would it be to just “hey judge, will you live up to a
standard” and the judge says what standard, what is the standard, show me a
standard.
Well you have to have a standard before you can have law and order. So that is why chapters 12-16 give you the
standard, the Word of God, personal relationship with Him.
Now this standard is charged by the civil government to adhere to it and
never depart from it. Now that’s one
problem that civil government always has, it doesn’t know the standard. And by the way, as a Christian citizen voting
you can help because when you look at the political situation, every time you
cast a vote you have the opportunity of setting forth the standards of
God. You say oh I don’t have any
opportunity. How many voted in the
election recently? This is why our
country goes down because Christians don’t exercise the rights that they do
have. This is one of the great problems,
adherence to a standard. That’s always a
problem with a government. The second
problem is given later in the verse, “thou shalt not respect persons,” now this
is a fantastic problem with government, and it deals with the problem of
partiality. Now I’m not sticking up for
the radicals, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve talked to several of them and heard
about others and one thing that they always point out, it’s very
interesting. They say you people are
always griping about the way we’re acting and yet you go down to the city
government of this city and you watch who gets off. People can be charged with all sorts of
things, right in your city, and get off if they know the right people, or their
brother is so and so, or their relative is on the city council, etc. It goes on and don’t say it doesn’t because
every city has a problem. Therefore do
you see what happens? When you have
partiality it breed disrespect for the law, for the underdog says well baloney,
if so and so can do this and get away with it, then why can’t I do it. So every
time you have these people in high places with (quote) “good citizens” (end
quote) who compromise and bring in partiality, and they say what’s wrong with
the younger generation, there’s no more respect for law and order. Well it’s very simple, the younger generation
is standing by and saying well, look at you hypocrites, you talk about law and
order, why don’t you obey it yourself.
So here we have partiality; partiality always destroys law and order
because it breeds disrespect for the standard.
“…neither take a gift [bribe]; for the gift [bribe] doth blind the eyes
of the wise and pervert the words of the righteous.” And “blind the eyes” refers to
observation. Bribes, do you know how we
can bribe today? You might not have
thought of it but votes are a system of bribes, vote for me and I’ll give you
such and such, I’ll see that such and such program gets through. And this guy may be a communist, may be a
left-wing senator, I have known radicals in our government who are out and out
radicals and they always are re-voted to office and you go into the areas where
they’re voted and you say I thought you people around here were conservative,
what’s the idea of re-electing this guy to office again? They say well I know, but you know, he’s got
seniority on all the committees and if we don’t elect him we won’t get our
project. And then they turn around and
blame it on the communists. We’re so stupid
the communists don’t have to do anything, just let our own greed take care of
us. And so we have the people,
conservative businessmen back people they know that hate capitalism and the
reason they do it is because they want some money, that’s all and then they
turn around and blame… oh, the communists are behind all this. Maybe they are, but don’t forget it’s the old
fat lust that’s behind a lot of it, flat plain bribery. And it’s explained right here, “taking a
gift, it blinds the eyes of the wise, it perverts the words of the righteous.”
Now in verse 20, one correction on the translation, “That which is
altogether just,” there’s one correction here, what the Hebrew says, literally
it says, “righteousness, righteousness shalt thou follow,” that’s literal. And when the Hebrew reiterates a word what it
means is “righteousness and righteousness alone shalt thou follow,” and the
word “righteousness” is zedek, and zedek means standard. You know the very word righteousness from the
Bible means standard. And what it says
is I want you to follow the standard and only the standard. Now that’s going to be the theme for the rest
of this book as we study it. As we go
through this and we look at various characteristics, we’ll look at the home,
we’re going to look at marriage, at civil government, and you’re going to see
this theme come up again and again that there’s a standard “and this standard
only shalt thou follow.” You see why
they can say this? Because of chapters 12-15 that brought it up.
Conclusion to verse 20, “that,” result clause, “that you may live and
inherit the land which the LORD thy God gives thee.” And what is this looking back? It goes back to the Mosaic contract; the
Mosaic contract looked like this: it gave the nation two sources; the nation
had blessings or the nation had cursing.
Blessing was if you adhere to the Law and you submit to Me, then I will
bless you, economically you will be prosperous, you will occupy the land,
militarily you will have victory and you will have a worldwide testimony. But if you play games with Me, I’m warning
you Israel, that I’m going to apply discipline.
And God had a system of five stages of discipline outlined in Lev. 26
and Deut. 28 and He said I’m going to spank you once, and I want to see what
happens. So He’d spank the nation once and they wouldn’t do anything. So He’s say okay, next time twice, I’m going
to spank you twice as hard and they didn’t do anything. And so the third time, and God had a system
that He spanked them, actually five times, and the fifth time He spanked them
was going to be it.
The fifth time He spanked them He was going to take this business
prosperity and turn it into calamity; they were going to have runaway inflation
described in Isaiah 1:18, they were going to have a [can’t understand word]
collapse of their country. Occupation of
the land, they would have the dispersion known in history as the Diaspora. In place of military victory they would now
have military defeat and in place of a worldwide testimony they’d be an
abomination on the earth. When God got through with them in 721 BC in the
northern Kingdom, that tough Assyrian army walked through and remind yourself
that the Assyrians were tough people, they walked in and they thought nothing
of taking one of you people and taking a knife and skinning you alive. This is some of the way the Assyrian
commanders got their amusement with prisoners. That’s the kind of people that
took over the northern kingdom in 721 BC, they’d come in there and just skin
these people alive and they’d scream and blood would go all over the place and
the parents and the children would stand by and watch their people slaughtered
like this and this was the actual nature of these Assyrians, one of the most
fierce barbaric hoards of history. These
Assyrians would come in and they would look around at the devastation that God
wrought and say what did this nation do to deserve this. It would cause amazement even in the eyes of
the Assyrians when God got through disciplining, God is still disciplining.
Now the concluding phrase, “That you may live and inherit the land” is a
promise that if you will adhere to the law I will give you this. Now God is always going to obey this, even in
the Millennium when Israel is restored, remember it’s not God just tampering
with their volition. Israel is going to
be restored at the end of the Tribulation because she chooses to be, because
she goes on positive volition, she responds to Messiah and she recognizes her
Messiah again and then we have the Millennium. So this principle is always
followed: blessing flows out of obedience to the Word of God.