Lesson 63
Administration of the Angels – Heb. 2:1-4
Turn to Hebrews 2; we have been studying Deuteronomy and we have
finished the section that deals with the Law and the stipulations. However, we have gone into Deut. 28 and we
encounter what is known as the blessings and the cursings. The blessings and the cursings are a set of
things that are stated at the institution of the Law. The blessings and the cursings, as we are
going to see, outline the mechanics of history.
Within these blessings and cursings you will find the dynamics of
history and you will see how these dynamics apply to one nation in
particular. These same dynamics apply to
every nation on earth, except they have a certain lag time and they aren’t
specifically directed toward Gentile nations.
But all of history is ministered, largely through the angelic
media. And we found, through various
verses last time, the existence of what we would call the angelic council.
The angelic council consists of a group of angels who are ministering
history. Their job is to deal with the
problems of history, to conduct history along the lines that God wants it
conducted. In Hebrews 2 we have a
reference to the angelic council beginning in verse 1. This epistle was written to people who were
in the eleventh hour of disaster. The
nation,
Verse 1, “Therefore, we ought to give the more earnest heed to the
things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip.” The things which they have heard are the
announcement and proclamation of the King by the Messiah; they have heard that
He has come in accordance with the prophecies of the Law. They have heard this, not only from the Lord
Jesus Christ but they have heard it from the first generation of believers in
that day. “Therefore, we ought to give
the more earnest heed to the things we have heard, lest at any time we should
let them slip.” In other words, if they
don’t rebound, if they don’t get on positive signals at this point their nation
is going to go into disaster.
Verse 2, “For if the word spoken by angels steadfast,” “the word spoken
by angels” is the Mosaic Law, this is how the angels administered the Law. We will show you other references to support
this interpretation as we go on, but “the word spoken by angels” is the Mosaic
Law, the angels gave this Law, it was actually given by God but through the
mediary of Moses it was essentially administered through the angelic council,
and therefore it becomes known as a “word spoken by angels.” “For if that word spoken by angels was
steadfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just recompense
of reward,” the transgression and obedience referred to in verse 2 is the
violations of the Law which would encounter the cursings of Deut. 28.
Verse 3, “How shall we escape, if we neglect so great deliverance,” or
“salvation which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed
unto us by them that heard him.” This
refers to the apostles. Verse 4, “God
also bearing them witness,” etc. and of course this word “bearing them witness”
was “them,” the Lord Jesus Christ and the apostles. This author is essentially saying that by
this generation the signs are dying out and are no longer active, a very simple
deduction from the verb tenses.
So in Hebrews 2 we have the angelic administration of the Law. If you turn back to Gal. 3 you have another
reference to the Law as administered by angels.
Gal. 3:19, Paul is dealing with the problem of the legalists in
In Acts
Back to the Old Testament and on the way back we’ll stop at a few
passages. The first one is 1 Kings
This is how history is done, it’s manipulated; God, I want you to
notice, operates through intermediaries.
God doesn’t have a set of switches in heaven, He flips one and things
happen. It is done by personal mediators
influencing history. History has
personal causes, not impersonal causes behind it, and you should grasp this. The Biblical view of history is that history
is intensely personal and it is not a resultant function of certain forces
where you can take a set of equations and diagram everything. It’s true, there are certain laws that we
know from physics and so on, for example in weather forecasting I can show you
the basic five equations of the atmosphere, put them in differential equation
form and solve them simultaneously and come up with a prediction model in which
we can predict certain basic things.
But, I can’t show you from these equations every rain drop, every little
detail. Those things are random and
those things are the areas where God influenced history, and He does so in just
this manner as in verse 20, “Who shall persuade Ahab, that he may go up and
fall at Ramoth-gilead?” And they had a
big discussion within the council and finally in verse 21 there emerged a
consensus on the part of the angelic council.
Verse 21, “And there came forth a spirit, and stood before the LORD, and
said, I will persuade him. [22] And the LORD said unto him, By what means? And he said, I will go forth, and I will be a
lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.
And he said, Thou shalt persuade him, and prevail also; go forth, and do
so. [23] Now, therefore, behold, the LORD hath put a lying spirit in the mouth
of all these thy prophets, and the LORD hath spoken evil concerning thee.” Just one angel had the authority to work
through the mouths of hundreds of people.
One angel, now how he did this, whether he had under his command one on
one relationship where you say you had 100 prophets and this angel happened to
be some sort of a platoon commander or something and he sent his angels down
and one on one, or whether he himself individually did this, we don’t know, but
this angel had he ability to produce supernatural phenomenon in his day and age
which would appear to be the word of God and yet was not the word of God. This is why you never can make experience
your criteria. The Word of God has to be
the criteria; you never can put experience over Bible doctrine. It’s always the other way around, Bible
doctrine first, experience second. This
is why the tongues movement and all the rest of it is off base. You never, never go by experience. You go first by doctrine, then by experience,
for supernatural manifestations can come both from Satan and from God, and you
can’t tell the difference unless you know the Word.
Let’s go to Deut. 32 and review another section referring to the angelic
council. In Deut. 32:1 is Moses’ song of
the testimony and the people of the nation were required to memorize the entire
chapter, chapter 32, this was their BMA course, basic, you couldn’t vote unless
you knew chapter 32. Reason: because
they had to understand the legal implications of their position as a nation and
chapter 32 gives us the basis in which God would condemn. It is essentially the witness, the setting up
of a trial. You see, what’s happening is
that you have the history of Israel down here on earth, and observing Israel is
the entire angelic council, and they’re all looking down at Israel. You have some angels in the angelic council
and they’re in heaven and you have some of their subordinate lieutenant angels
down here and they’re on earth. So Moses
addresses these angels in verse 1, “Give ear, O ye heavens, and I will speak;
and hear, O earth, the words of my mouth.”
Verse 3, “I will proclaim” or publish “the name of the LORD; ascribe ye
greatness unto our God.” Now this is an
address to these angels under the guise of speaking to the heavens and the
earth, and this is the same court which Isaiah, which Hosea, which Amos and
which Micah, all of these prophets address the same council. If you will study those prophecies you will
always see the prophets turn and say, “O listen heavens and earth, for the LORD
has a rib,” it’s pronounced riv but
in the Hebrew it’s rib and that is
the Hebrew word for lawsuit. So the
prophets would say “Hear O Israel, and behold heavens and earth, God has a rib with you.” Now a rib
is a lawsuit and if you have a lawsuit there has to be a court and the court is
the angelic council.
In Deut.
But in Deut. 4:19 you have the structure of world history and here you
see how God has divided and distributed His angelic forces to manipulate in
world history. “And lest thou lift up
thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the
stars, even all the host of heaven, you should be driven to worship them, and
serve them, which the LORD thy God has divided unto all nations under the whole
heaven.” This reference, as I said when
we originally went through this, refers to the fact that these deities, these
angelic deities, tend to manifest themselves in certain times of history as
astro deities and so they are known to certain ancient peoples as the God of
Venus and the God of Love, etc. and they tied in with the planets. Now whether that is due to the fact that
these angels actually come from these planets or not we don’t know. It’s not a joke, incidentally, that they
come; obviously they’re creatures of space and time. So they come from some place and whether they
make their homes and that’s why these angels introduce themselves as these gods
to the various ancient we don’t know.
But in verse 19 God says that He has set up world history… this box
represents all the nations of history. Therefore we have certain categories of
nations. One very special category is
Coming back to Deut. 28 we begin to see that when these blessings and
cursings are stated they are serious, for these are the creeds, or the orders
that God lays forth for these angels that control history. In other words, what God is saying here is
that I will announce and describe a set of blessings and a set of cursings, and
this set of blessings and cursings that I am announcing here, blessings on
positive volition, if the nation goes negative, cursing; these blessings and
these cursings are orders. We know they
are orders from the vocabulary of verse 7 and 8, for in Deut. 28:7 it says,
“May the LORD [The LORD shall] cause thine enemies who rise up against thee to
be smitten before thy face; they shall come out against thee one way, and flee
before thee seven ways.” He is going to
manipulate in the hearts and the minds of the enemy. Verse 8 is a stronger statement, “May the
Lord [the LORD shall] command the blessing, “blessing is an impersonal object,
and yet the verb to command is always addressed to a personal object. So why is it then you have a verb, a personal
verb plus an impersonal object. And the
answer is that this impersonal object stands for personalities. There are certain personalities behind the
blessing and those personalities are the angels that will administer the
blessings.
And the command of verse 8 is God’s command to the angels to bring this
blessing about in history. This is how
God is going to manipulate history. So
you want to see and get a grasp of the mechanics of history that explain the
whole Old Testament basically, you can’t understand the Bible unless you
understand the angelic council and how it basically operates through
history. And you want to see this
because the angelic council is still in charge of history today. This is why we, as Bible-believing Christians
shouldn’t go off on the panic button as far as politics are concerned. This is what distinguished Bible-believing
Christians from the normal conservative.
The Bible-believing Christian says that God is sovereign, that God has
His angels in charge of history and God can do fantastic things in
history. Our job is to mind our own
business and in our own areas of responsibility see that we obey the Word of
God, propagate the Word of God, etc. and when we mind our business then God
will take care of the rest. This is how God is able to respect, as He has done
in American history, certain things which are coming up and you’ll see how,
because we had believers at a certain in history that went on positive volition
over an extended period of time God ordered to the angelic council to bless the
United States of America and the angelic council has blessed. And why we are frittering away our national
destiny. It all has to do with the
spiritual mechanics of history and you can lay up all the conservative causes
you want to and fight the system all you want to and never come up with
anything. The reason is that you’re not dealing with the spiritual
problems.
God has the power to change history tomorrow. All that’s necessary is that the citizens,
the individual people within the national entity, go on positive volition
toward the Word of God, begin to build up an edification complex in the soul,
begin to become mature believers and God will take care of the rest. That’s
what’s needed. That’s why conservatives
that are running around spending 99% of their time on politics are all wet and
why God is never going to allow Christians in this country to win by sheer
political force. He is going to allow
them to win, perhaps, but it’s going to be first on the basis of the Word of
God and then as the Word of God is carried over into the political realm. But don’t you sweat it. There’s one thing to sweat in this country
and that’s negative volition; that’s the thing to sweat, not the communists and
not somebody else, and not a bunch of other people. These people can be taken
care of, God can take care of these people.
And proper people in proper places can also take care of them, but that
taking care of cannot happen until the first spiritual problem is dealt with.
You look at the communist infiltration in this country and you can see a
very interesting thing; the reason they infiltrate is not because they
themselves are doing it, it’s because we have opened the door first and they
walked through the door. That’s how it always happens. This is how the mafia moves in on operations,
you first have an out of fellowship believer or something and gets involved in
some activity, he opens the door and who comes in when the door is open, the
bum crowd, crime syndicates, etc. That’s
how they move in; they don’t begin to move in until someone else is there with
the door open. It’s just like in health,
you don’t get sick because there are bacteria, you’ve got bacteria in the air,
in your body, you’ve got bacteria all over the place; you get sick because you
weaken you body and then the bacteria strikes.
It’s the same thing in politics.
First you have weakness, and the parasites of history will inch their
way into any nook and cranny they can to destroy, to tear apart and to
annihilate, but you have to open the door to them first. And you open the door to them when you go on
negative volition toward Bible doctrine, as we have in this country. But we have opened up spiritually to this
thing and now we’ve got it, it’s a plague.
But read the signals, don’t misread the whole point. The point is the reason why we are in trouble
as a national entity is because we have neglected Bible doctrine, that’s why
we’re in trouble, and that’s the thing that has to be solved first and then
these other things will take care of it.
Beginning in verse 7 we come to a section of Scripture of the
blessings. Last time we went through the
summary blessings in verses 3-6, these are the blessings that would be shouted
during the ceremony as the covenant would be made. Now we come to verse 7 and this is the
beginning of a section that runs down through the end of verse 14. Verses 7-14 deal with an amplification of the
blessings but in order to catch and understand this section of Scripture, we’re
going to do a strange thing, we’re going to deal with this not verse by verse
but verse after categories. The reason
for this is that this passage is written in a chiastic fashion; by chiasm we
mean this, “chi” is this Greek letter, and usually you have a verse by verse
thing, A, B, C, D. In a chiasm you have
things reversed, so you have A, instead of the next one being B you have C come
up and then you have D and then you come back to B. So you have A, C, D, B, and it peaks, it goes
here and then it goes back. So, for example, if we had a set of numbers it
would look like this: 1, 2, 3, 2 1, in other words the passage builds to a peak
and then returns to this, called chiastic construction.
For some reason Moses put this thing in a chiastic construction and if
you don’t see this you’re going to miss the point. So let’s break this down. The first section is verse 7; look at verse 7
and I’ll show you why this flows this way.
Notice the subject material of verse 7, “The LORD shall cause thine enemies
who rise up against thee to be smitten before thy face; they shall come out
against thee one way, and flee before thee seven ways.” That is a military situation involving
foreign policy and international diplomacy.
Now if you look at the end of verse 12, 12b “and thou shalt lend,” so
you skip from verse 7 to 12b and verse 13.
This is one section. 12 b, “and
thou shalt lend unto many nations, and thou shalt not borrow.” This is again in the international sphere of
relations; instead of military it’s economic but it’s still international. Verse 13, “And the LORD shall make thee the
head, and not the tail; and thou shalt be above only, and thou shalt not be
beneath, if thou hearken unto the commandments of the LORD thy God, which I
command thee this day, to observe and to do them.” In other words, this then refers to an international
situation. So that’s one line of
material and this line of material is the international empire of
Now the next interest of verses, you have to go back to verse 8 and pick
up the next topic. This starts in 28:8
where we have “May the LORD command the blessing upon thee in thy storehouses,”
this is domestic now; see we’ve switched from international areas of concern to
the domestic policies of the nation, “The LORD shall command the blessing upon
thee in thy storehouses and in all that thou settest thine hand unto; and he
shall bless thee in the land which the LORD thy God gives thee.” So here you have the national
prosperity. Now if you’ll skip to verse
11 the national prosperity scene picks up again, so verse 8, verse 11 and verse
12a. Verse 11, “And the LORD shall make
thee plenteous in goods, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle,
and in the fruit of thy ground, in the land which the LORD swore unto thy
fathers to give thee. [12] The LORD
shall open unto thee His good treasure, the heaven to give the rain unto thy
land in its season, and to bless all the work of thing hand,” there you have
domestic policy and so that’s the second area, this is domestic, domestic
prosperity.
And now the inner circle of verses, this is verses 9-10, “The LORD shall
establish thee an holy people unto Himself, as He hath sworn unto thee, if thou
shalt keep the commandments of the LORD thy God, and walk in His ways. [10] And all people of the earth shall see
that,” and we have to retranslate this “the name of the LORD is called over
you, and they shall be afraid of thee.”
Verses 9-10 deal with the spiritual center or we might say the Lordship
of the nation. And you want to see this, if you don’t see the structure you’re
going to miss Moses’ point because in his sermon the people of that day would
have understood what Moses is doing. You
haven’t lived all your life in the Hebrew culture so you don’t understand what
he’s doing, so I’m telling you what he’s doing.
He’s building up to a climax and then he moves away from it. This is the sermonic technique that Moses was
using at this point. He would start here
with the international position, then he moved to the domestic position, then
he moved to the spiritual center, then he’d start moving back to the domestic
prosperity, and then he’d move back to international situation.
Do you know why he did that? What’s emphasized in that structure? The center, that was his way of calling
attention to the fact that this wasn’t just a set of priorities, the whole
thing hinges on the center. That’s why
he structured the whole point and you’re going to see the same thing with the
cursings, he does exactly the same thing.
The Lordship of the nation is the center of the whole point and the way
he emphasizes it is how he sets up his sermonic presentation. So he starts out, you can visualize it this
way, three circles, here’s Lordship, there’s verses 9-10, then you have an
outer ring of domestic policy, verses 8 and 11-12a. Then the third outer ring, international
policy, verse 7, 12b-13. And you can
visualize it that way. So he moves from the rim to the center back out to the
rim. This is how Moses is going to
present his material. I want you to see
that because this is deliberately designed to draw attention to the center of
the circle for everything hinges on the center of that circle.
Let’s look at some of these things and let’s move from, as Moses did,
from the inward to the center. Verse 7,
international empire, “the LORD” or it’s actually, “May the LORD cause thine
enemies that rise up” these are the enemies that are going to attack Israel. Israel is God’s chosen nation at this point
in history and these Gentile nations are going to try to attack her. So the enemies rise up, but “May the Lord
cause” them “to be smitten before thy face;” to be smitten is a Hebrew niphal
participle, a niphal just means it’s a passive, and participle is the motion
picture tense which means let them constantly be smitten, constantly,
constantly, constantly. In other words,
let them never even win a battle, that’s what Moses is saying. Every time these
jokers show their heads clobber them; God is going to do it every time, not
only are you not going to lose the war, you’re not going to lose the battles,
everything, constant victory. This is
what was promised the nation Israel, BUT, there was a condition to the promise
and that was if they would adhere to His commandments.
The word “be constantly smitten” is interesting because it tells you
something about spiritual confrontation.
It tells you first of all that you have to be in the conflict to get the
victory. A lot of Christians aren’t
getting the victory because they are not in the conflict to begin with. But war has to start before it can be ended
and that’s the point Moses is making; there has to be an obedience to the will
of God. When you begin to move along the
lines of divine guidance in your life and you begin to follow God’s will for
your life and you begin to move out in various areas of job, school and other
things and begin to perform according to the will of God you’ll find
opposition. And the moment you hit opposition in the Christian life you can do
one of two things; you can lay flat on your back and say all the obstacles must
be of God, closed doors are from God.
Closed doors are not from God, closed doors are often from Satan. If you’re one of these Christians that’s
guided by opened and closed doors, forget it.
You’re guided by the Word of God, not by opened and closed doors. You are guided by the Word. We have people, of course that get out on a
Sunday morning and 9:00 o’clock rolls around and they can’t start the car, so
well it must be God’s will not to listen to the Word today and that’s it. That’s not God’s will, you know what the will
of God is, it’s in 1 Peter 2, “Desire ye the sincere milk of the Word,” so
there’s your clue. Therefore the obstacle is not to be passive accepted; it’s
to be analyzed in the light of the Word.
It goes back to the fact that when you’re mature you should have a
divine viewpoint framework, God at the center, Bible doctrine all around it and
you built this up in the mentality of your soul.
Divine viewpoint framework and it
covers all areas of your life; it includes the cultural areas, it includes
science, history, philosophy, art, music, it includes the social areas of your
life. It includes your fellowship with
other believers, fellowship with loved ones, fellowship with friends,
fellowship with society. It includes
individual things, your job; it includes sex, it includes your possessions, it
includes your health. It includes all
these details of life, everything. But
if in a divine viewpoint framework, when there’s something in this category,
let’s say it’s some friend, there’s problems, so now here’s your friend and you
analyze it in light of the Word, you don’t go by your feeling, you have certain
principles that you know from the Word and you begin to move between these two
poles, talk to the Lord about it, prayer, but you control it with Bible
doctrine. That’s divine viewpoint
framework.
This is what God expects us to have and when you begin to erect, through
maturity, a divine viewpoint framework in your mind you begin to encounter
obstacles. For example, you accept
Christ and you start to grow in the Word and then all of a sudden some day you
take a Bible study in Gen. 1-3 and you say oh-oh, this is not what I learned in
school; I had some idiot tell me that evolution was it. I have asked Dr. Bolton David Heiser,
professor of Biology from Biola to come; he has his PhD in genetics from Johns
Hopkins University. He has written a
book, Evolution and the Christian Faith; after 7 pages it has 81 footnotes; the
book in total has 1000 footnotes. I have
read liberal reviews of this book and they say it’s one of the most fantastic
books on the subject ever written.
Verse 7, these are the mechanics of international history. God “shall cause thine enemies who rise up
against thee to be constantly smitten,” they’re always going to be leveled,
“before thy face; they shall come out against thee one way,” this is an idiom
for absolute order, they are going to come out in perfect formation, everything
is going to go according to plan, it doesn’t mean just one column, it’s an
idiom which means everything is going to go to their plan, they’re going to
come out to you and it’s all systems go. And when God gets through with them
they are going away seven ways [“flee before thee seven ways”], that’s the
idiom for total chaos. Total chaos is
that kind of situation when you get up and can’t even get a drink of water;
ever have one of those days, you get up and turn the cold water on and it’s hot
and you scald yourself, then you look in the mirror and that was a mistake, and
then you do something else and after five minutes you decide you’d better start
all over again. That’s total chaos,
that’s getting up “seven ways” according to the Hebrew. So this is what the enemies do. After they meet the Lord in the battle field,
working through Israel, they’re going to be totally scattered.
Now in verse 12b and 13 we have to skip down here to pick up the last
part of this phrase, dealing with the nation, “and thou shalt lend unto many
nations, and thou shalt not borrow,” now here is economic prosperity over and
against the international situation of the day.
In other words, the point is that relative to the rest of the nation
they are going to economically prosper, financially and in every other way but
particularly financially. They are going
to have so much gold that they can control the world economy; this is going to
be a blessing that God gives to Israel in the Millennium. Verse 13, “And the LORD shall make thee the
head, and not the tail; and thou shalt be above only,” notice the word “only,”
absolute superiority in every way on the international scene because Israel is
God’s chosen nation in the Millennium.
God’s plan for history once again, here’s the cross of Christ, Church
Age, rapture of the Church, seven year tribulation, second return of Christ and
1,000 years of perfect environment. During those 1,000 years of perfect
environment the world will be ruled by Jesus Christ come again, ruling from the
nation Israel, Jerusalem will be the United Nations of that day, and there
won’t be a United Nations because there’s going to be a dictatorship under the
Lord Jesus Christ.
So this is the first circle, remember the three circles. This deals with the international
sphere. Now we’re going to come to the
domestic sphere in verse 8, “May the LORD,” again, it’s an admonition, Moses is
looking forward with great anxiety, “May the LORD command the blessing upon thee
in thy storehouses, and in all that thou settest thine hand unto,” here is
economic blessing on the nation in its domestic areas. You see obviously the next most important
thing, think of the 3 concentric circles, outside here you have the international
blessing. Obviously you can’t get international
blessing unless you have domestic blessing; you can’t support a world empire if
the homeland is collapsing. You have to
have strongness at home before you can support a world empire. So the next inner circle begins in verse 8,
God is going to command the blessing not upon thee, but “with thee,” in other
words wherever these people go inside that nation there’s going to be blessing,
blessing, blessing, blessing, blessing.
And this is physical blessing; this is not just spiritual blessing. “The LORD will command blessing with thee in
thy storehouses,” now in that day with an agrarian economy it meant that the
tremendous business of the ancient world would prosper, tremendously
prosper. “…and He shall bless thee in
the land which the LORD thy God gives thee.”
Now go to verse 11-12a and pick up the rest of this inner circle. This is again still under domestic
conditions. “The LORD shall make thee
plenteous in goods, in the fruit of thy body,” that’s population, “in the fruit
of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy ground,” both animals and plants, “in
the land which the LORD swore unto thy fathers to give thee. [12] The LORD
shall open unto thee His good treasure,” that is explained by the next clause,
“the heaven to give the rain unto thy land in its season, and to bless all the
work of thine hand, [and thou shalt lend unto many nations, and thou shalt not
borrow.”] We had a rain yesterday and
the economic implications are tremendous, absolutely tremendous. Now if that can happen by one rain in this
part of the country, what God is saying, listen, Israel is going to be blessed
fantastically because I can manipulate the climate. People living in agricultural economy should
be very sensitive to the effect the climate has on your economy. And that’s the economy is; these people are
going to be agricultural and when God blesses in the area of climate there’s
going to be tremendous blessing agriculturally, tremendous blessing. So we have this blessing that God is going to
command, and notice He commands it. You
see, if He looks down and sees oh, this nation is getting with Bible doctrine,
this nation is really moving on with Me, so you know what I’m going to do, I’m
going to send an order to the angelic council, give them some rain. So the order goes up and the angels come down
and start manipulating and the first thing you know you have rain. Now that’s how God’s going to work.
Please get this open view of history.
Many of you have been brought up to think of history as some sort of a machine
going on and it’s wrong. That’s not
history; not from the Biblical point of view.
History is open; it’s open to divine manipulation at every turn… every
turn. You have to begin to look upon
historical events as the interplay between tremendous personal forces, both
spiritually and materially. You’ve got
to see this; this is the way the Bible sees history. Otherwise you won’t get anything out of
history at all.
All right, the center, the center circle, the most important, the
Lordship over the nation, verse 9, “The LORD shall establish thee an holy
people unto Himself,” a “holy people” means a set apart people, “if thou shalt
keep the commandments of the LORD thy God, and walk in His ways.” And here’s
the condition, “if,” this is a parenthetical condition, it means that if they
get with Bible doctrine, if they begin to build an edification complex, if they
begin to mature as believers in that national entity and begin to develop this
thing on the citizen grassroots level, then this is going to happen, but not
until. They can go to all the society
meetings they want to and they can try to wave the flag as much as they want
to, and nothing is going to happen until they get this business straightened
out, the spiritual aspect. It’s got to
happen; it’s slow but it’s got to happen.
God is the One who is ruling history and it’s going to be ruled on His
terms, not mine and not yours. That’s
the name of the game, and this is the game that He’s playing.
Verse 10, “And all people of the earth shall see that” now this is what
they see, “that the name of LORD is called over you,” the King James tried to
smooth out the translation with the result they lost the whole thing. This expression, that “the name of the LORD might
be named over you” means ownership. Turn
to 2 Sam. 12:28 and you’ll see the usage of this idiom. 2 Sam. 12:28 is a situation in which General
Joab, he’s a commander in the Israeli army at that time, and he” fought against
Rabbah, of the children of Ammon, and took the royal city.” Now in verse 27 Joab does a strange thing,
“And Joab sent messengers to David, and said, I have fought against Rabbah, and
have taken the city of waters. [28] Now, therefore, gather the rest of the
people together, and encamp against the city, and take it, lest I take the
city, and it be called after my name,” literally it should be “my name be
called over it.” Do you see the point,
how that idiom is used. It simply means
that Joab is giving David a chance to have the city named on his conquering
list, as something that he has personally conquered. And he’s saying look, I’ve broken the back
of the resistance here, I’ve completely destroyed the enemy troops and there is
just a minimum amount of men, maybe a battalion or two holding the walls, and
that’s all. I’ve destroyed everything,
so now all you have to do David is move in and take it and it will be
yours. So “let your name be called” is a
Hebrew idiom for possession, for ownership.
Back to Deut. 28 and we’ll see what the meaning is. “All the people of the earth,” this means the
entire world, “shall see that the name of the LORD is called over thee, and
they shall be afraid of thee.” They
shall respect thee; the word “fear” means respect. And it means that these nations are going to
look at the nation Israel, and they’re going to be absolutely amazed, and the
blessing of God is going to be so obvious on this nation they say we can’t win,
if we sent an army against Israel it’d be wiped out. Financially, where are we always wanting to
get our money? If our national treasury
goes down where do we have to go to get the gold? We have to go to Israel to get it. So the reputation they’re going to gain in
the world of that day… look, this is going to be something fantastic. But please notice Moses’ emphasis, it all
hangs on one condition, that the Lord of the nation is God Himself and not
negative volition, in other words, that they have positive volition toward
Bible doctrine.
You say that was nice for Israel, what about today? Are those principles valid for the United
States of America in 1970? And I’m going
to show you that it is. Turn to Acts 17,
this again shows you a principle of the administration of the angels in history. Acts 17:26-27, “And has made of one blood all
nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined the
times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” Now if you want to summarize in contemporary
language there’s two dimensions: space and time. It means, for example, the United States,
from 1776 officially on down to whatever, maybe that’s the span of the United
States in time; geographically the expanse of the United States, up to Alaska
and over to Hawaii and the Continent, so this is the space dimensions of the
United States. That’s what Paul is
saying, he says look, God has done this, He’s set up the dimensions ins history
geographically and chronologically, verse 27, “That” the purpose that controls
the design of history, “That they should seek the Lord, if by chance they might
feel after Him, and find Him, though He is not far from every one of us.” In other words, this is a blind groping. The idea here is that God is setting up
geographical dimensions to history and chronological dimensions to nations in
order to operate on the population of that nation. You have millions of people involved in this
national entity and God so designed the boundaries in space and time the
produce a maximum irritation to set off positive volition.
In other words, God is actively seeking; He’s not leaving sinners
hardened in their old sin nature.
Sometimes He does that, if a person rejects, rejects, rejects, rejects,
rejects, like Pharaoh did, the Bible says God hardened his heart, it simply
means God said all right, I have it, I am not going to exercise My common grace
any more in restraining this person; if this person wants to go out and raise
hell then he can raise all the hell he wants to and he’s just going to harden
his own heart and that’s just going to be it.
So that’s one way God works. Other
times God does not work this way, other times God patiently, lovingly tries to
bring people back to Him. And He does it
in great acts of history. And this is
what makes history exciting. If you can
begin to read the sign posts in history of God’s manipulation.
I’m going to now give you some of the sign posts in American history of
God’s manipulation behind our country and show you that this rule of blessing
always stems from positive volition.
Positive volition always moves toward blessing in history. [Blank spot]
Sometimes this blessing is delayed, other times the blessing does not take the
form that it took to Israel. Remember
the form of the blessing and the exact conditions of the blessing are laid down
in Deut. 28. We do not have a Deut. 28
but the principle still holds that God will bless a national entity that has
maximum positive volition toward Him. To
see this let’s go back to a group of people called the Puritans. Many of you, because you’ve been brainwashed
by idiot high school history teachers have got the impression that the Puritans
were the worst people who ever lived.
You’ve learned that the Puritans were the sort of people that never
recognized there were such things as females.
You’ve got the impression that the Puritans wore blinders when they
walked down the street; maybe you’ve gotten the impression that they were the
biggest prudes who ever lived. Now the
Puritans had their quirks and their idiosyncrasies, and in some manners
theologically they were all wet. In
certain areas of theology we would violently disagree with them.
But the Puritans as a people were one of the most fantastic people who
ever lived, and you can thank your freedom today to the Puritans. Some idiot high school or college professor
can get up and malign, malign, malign and laugh at the Puritans and cause the
whole class to laugh at them and all the rest, but don’t you ever forget, your
freedom to sit in that classroom was gotten out of the blessing that came from
the positive volition of these people.
Let’s go into the Puritan history a little bit to see what
happened. You have to go back to the
nation of England. In England in 1558 a
queen ascended the throne, known in history as Queen Elizabeth, of the Tudor family
and this queen was one of the most brilliant rulers who ever lived in this era
of history and probably one of the greatest rulers that England has ever had,
much to the dismay of a lot of the male leaders, this woman was a fantastic
leader. Queen Elizabeth, she succeeded
her half-sister known in history as Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary was a Roman Catholic and the
reason she was called Bloody Mary was she had a hobby, going around killing
Protestants. She liked nothing better
than to get a few Protestants and kill them, so they called her Bloody
Mary. Bloody Mary is the half-sister of
Elizabeth, and the half-sister of Elizabeth was a Roman Catholic but Elizabeth
was an Anglican.
And when Elizabeth ascended the throne in England she began to relax the
previous policies on religion in England.
And this was by taking the top off the boiling pot, because immediately
the water boiled all over the place and you had a four-way dispute in England
at this time in history, between the Anglicans, which would correspond in our
country to the Episcopalians, believing in a bishop form of government. You had the Presbyterians; the Presbyterians
were from Scotland, although they were down in England, just remember they come
from the Scottish area after John Knox. The
third contenders were the Congregationalists.
The Congregationalists were people who in our time have come down as the
Congregationalists; they were essentially Presbyterians who rejected the elder
form of government and began to operate on a congregational system. Then you have a group of people, the
independents. You always have the
independents and these people couldn’t get along with anybody and they just
wanted sheer independence. They didn’t
want to go along with the Congregationalists mainly because they felt that they
had to have local autonomy in the pastorate, and they were right, of the four
groups of these people they were the most Biblical.
The separatists under the next monarch on the throne was James I; James
I took the throne of England in 1603 and under his rule was produced the Bible
you hold in your hands. It was James the
First that ordered the translation of the King James Version. You want to remember that because James I
was not the greatest Christian who ever lived and the King James Version was
not translated by all Christians. So
every once a while I have this pious believer come walking up, well the King
James was not a translation… that’s true, it’s a very beautiful translation but
it’s not beautiful because Christians did it, in fact, probably over half of
the translators of the King James weren’t even Christians. It was just that they did a very marvelous
job of translating. But James I came to
the throne, he was known as James VI, I believe, in Scotland and he came down,
he was known as James I in England.
Since he was a Presbyterian everybody thought that he would resolve the
four-way conflict by jumping on the Presbyterian bandwagon.
However, James I said no, as long as I’m down here I seem to like the
Anglican system, so therefore I’m going to stay with the Anglicans. This time the first group of what we would
call the Puritans, or the people related to them, left England in 1609. They’d had enough of this stuff and they had
enough of James I and enough of everybody else, and they were the separatists,
they were the independents that moved out, known in history as the
Pilgrims. They were not called Puritans;
the reason, you have to understand that these were the independents. They were most like us today, and they came
first to Holland and then they stayed in Holland for a while and they decided
no, we don’t want to stay in Holland because we may get absorbed and lose our
identity, so they took off and went to the new world. And they aimed for Virginia and landed on
Cape Cod, and 104 of them, to show you what happened, one half of those people
died the first winter. That’s the kind
of tough people that came and settled this country. And do you know what, they didn’t get a
handout from England, and they didn’t have some federal government sponsoring
their program. Can’t you just see a
federal program to sponsor the Pilgrims, we could set up a special vineyard
recreation center on Cape Cod and all the Englishmen could go over there and
have their vacations. No federal
handouts, these people raised their own money and left, and they paid for
it. 50% of them died in the first
winter; a very fantastic group of people.
But these were later absorbed by the next wave that came out of England
in 1620 and 1630 and these were known in history as the Puritans. Why? Because they belonged, not to the
independents but they belonged to the Congregationalists and Presbyterians and
many of them Anglicans. Although they
differed on policy, most of them were Anglicans incidentally, they were very
emphatic that they would not go along with the existing situation in
England. They wanted to leave England
and they came over to America and set up various congregational forms; they
actually transferred the whole Anglican format over into a Congregational
form. You have to understand that during
the years 1620-1640 17,000 of these Puritans came to this country, a fantastic
group of people. This country started off with some of the best people in the
world. We started with the cream of the
crop; these people were brilliant people, they were tough people. Many, many of them were Bible-believing
Christians solidly grounded in the Word.
And this is the kind of people that started our nation.
Let’s look at some of them.
Education wise let’s see what they did.
One out of five, only one out of five people in the colony were church
members. That may surprise some of
you. Do you know why? Because they had rigid requirements; they
didn’t let anybody that rolled down the aisle and they admitted them to church
membership; you had to know Bible doctrine, and if you couldn’t pass the exam,
you weren’t a member period. And do you
know something else, if you couldn’t pass the exam to get into the church, you
couldn’t vote either. That’s why some of
your history teachers don’t like it, because they’re offended any time someone
believes in absolute truth. These people
recognized something, if we’re going to run a colony over here, we’re going to
have the voters schooled in Bible doctrine, and you’re not going to vote unless
you know Bible doctrine, period. Now if
we passed that law in the nation that would mean about 1% of us could
vote. But this was one of the most
fantastic systems that we have ever seen.
You had to pass exams on Bible doctrine before you could vote. Can’t you hear the liberals hollering at that
one, oh, bigotry, religious bigotry.
Today voting, you don’t even have to write your name to vote in the
United States. And you want to see the
greatness, they didn’t let any Tom, Dick and Harry vote, they had people who
knew Bible doctrine. You want to vote,
go learn some doctrine, and when you learn some, come back and we’ll let you
vote. That’s the way they handled the
situation. One out of 44 people in the
colony had a university education; was schooled in the classics, could carry on
discussion for hours on many, many subjects, a brilliant set of people.
Now I’m going to read you some quotes; some of these are extended quotes
but I want to let history speak for yourself so you won’t say this is just my
distorting the Puritans or something, it’s just my analysis. I’m going to read certain quotes from various
authors and authorities on the subject.
The first one I’m going to read is from Ralph Perry who for many years
was a professor of history at Harvard University; he wrote a book called Puritanism and Democracy. On page 74 of that work Dr. Perry says
(quote): “The Puritan colonists of Massachusetts developed the social and
political implications of their faith on a scale that has never been equaled
before or since.” Now that’s a strong
statement, never in the history of the world has there ever been a people who
took Bible doctrine so seriously and moved it into every area of life. Now are you beginning to see something about
the past history of this nation, why we are great, because this is how we
started, we started with Bible doctrine.
And these people knew it and they were the most outstanding people in
history, bar none.
The second authority, this is a Christian professor, I wouldn’t say his
book is outstanding but he has several good observations, C. Greg Singer, A Theological Interpretation of American
History, page 11, he’s speaking now of the Puritan doctrine of the old sin
nature; every person has an old sin nature, you have a sin nature, I have a sin
nature, and everybody has a sin nature and the Puritans recognized this and so
therefore they didn’t hold any allusions about society. Dr. Singer says: “Their political, social and
economic philosophies were beholden to the doctrine of total depravity.” That doesn’t mean that every person takes his
sin nature out to the logical conclusion.
Total depravity, let’s understand it or else you’ll misunderstand what
I’m saying. Total depravity does not
mean you’ve gone to the depth; that’s not total depravity. Total depravity means that you are depraved
in every area of your life. A better
word would be comprehensive depravity; it means horizontally, not
vertically. In every area of your life
you are depraved. Now I didn’t tell you
that, the Bible tells you that, “all have sinned and come short of the glory of
God.” So “their doctrines, their
political and economic philosophies were all geared to the old sin nature. Both
the nature and function of government were articulated by Puritan writers in
the light of the fact that man is a sinner.”
Isn’t that news. Can you imagine
some politician coming out and saying I believer all you sinners are going to
vote for such and such and everybody would be offended. We’d have these people that write editorials
all shook up because somebody used the word “sin.” “Of no less importance in Puritan thought and
life was the doctrine of redemption; man as a sinner stands in need of redeeming
grace if he is to be saved. The Puritans
recognized the distinctive role of sovereign grace and the redemption process
and they never,” now listen to this, The Puritans “never expected human
political, social and economical institutions to usurp the place of the church
in society or to accomplish for man either here or on earth, or in the future,
that salvation which comes alone through the gospel.”
Do you understand what he is saying?
He is saying that the government’s job is not to redeem man, the
government’s job is not to improve humanity; the government’s job is to rule
sinners. The government has a negative
function, not a positive function. I
want to show you an ironic fact, they had a program of social betterment but it
came about by containing the sin nature; that was how they got a better
society. They started off negative and
wound up positive; we start off positive and wind up negative, exactly the
opposite of the Puritans.
“In Puritan political theory the magistrate derived his power from God
and not the people; human government was divinely ordained for the realization
of the purposes of God and history. His
powers did not come from the people, nor was he primarily responsible to them
for stewardship of his office. It is
true that these magistrates were elected by the people and that the people had
certain definite powers from the legislative process but it must never be
forgotten that both the voters and the magistrates were to look to the
Scriptures as a guide for the conduct of government.”
How long has it been since you’ve seen that happen? That’s the way the Puritans ruled the
operation, these are the people that are always being made fun of. After you start studying it you say now who’s
crazy, the modern historian that laughs at the Puritans or the Puritans
themselves. Let’s read a little bit
more.
“Both the church and the state had their own spheres of action and
neither was to transgress the domain of the other. The state was concerned with the earthly life
of the people of God and the unregenerate who might live in their midst; the
state was concerned with the enforcement of the Ten Commandments, not for the
purpose of bringing people to a knowledge of salvation or to force them to a
kind of external righteousness as a means of earning redemption. The state existed
for the purpose of maintaining the sovereignty and holiness of God for His own
glory.” That was their call to the
state, fantastic calling of the state.
“American history is characterized in its political aspect by a
continuing conflict between the Puritan political philosophy on one hand and
the rise of a democratic conception of the state and human liberty which is
emanated from non-Biblical sources.” What this man is saying, if you analyze
American history, it looks this way; you have the divine viewpoint that has
come to our shores by the Puritans and that heritage is carried down to our day
and on the other hand you have the skeptics and the so-called freedom crowd,
brotherhood crowd, liberty crowd and these people all want this thing and this
has come down as human viewpoint and there’s a struggle going on, always has
gone on and is going on before our eyes today.
The next quotation I’m taking from an enemy of Christianity, this is all
the more astounding, a tremendously astounding quote because this man was not a
Christian. This man, however, is a man
who was a very perceptive observer and he could look upon people and analyze
character. I want you to see something
as I go through this quote. Here is a
man who had enemies; the enemies were Christians. But this man was mature enough to look under
the lid and he didn’t buy the nonsense of oh, the Puritans have all these
quirks, the Puritans wear black and the Puritans do this and the Puritans do
that and all the rest of it. He said
wait a minute, I’m not interested in what the Puritans wear and I’m not
interested in all their personal idiosyncrasies, I’m interested in learning
what kind of a depth character these people had, what are they made of deep
down. That’s what I want to find out and
he wrote a report, Thomas McCauley, Critical
and Historical Essays. “We will
speak first of the Puritans, the most remarkable,” now remember, this man is
knocking Christianity, so this is not a braggamony on Christians, but watch
this; this is a man who speaks with knowledge.
“We will speak first of the Puritans, the most remarkable body of men,
perhaps, which the world has ever produced.” Take that with the other statement
that I just gave you about Dr. Perry at Harvard saying there’s never been a
people on earth that took Bible doctrine as seriously as the Puritans. And I want to tell you something, the
Puritans didn’t speak in tongues and the Puritans didn’t have revivals with
everybody frothing at the mouth and rolling down the aisle. You’ve heard of Jonathan Edwards’s sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,
Jonathan Edwards would stand before a group of people and read his sermon
monologue, there was no emotion to Jonathan Edwards. The Puritans didn’t believe in emotion, the
Puritans believed in Bible doctrine and as a result they were tough.
Now listen to this, “The odious and ridiculous parts of their character
lie only on the surface. He that runs
may read them, nor have there ever been wanting attentive and malicious
observers to point them out. For many
years after the restoration,” now this man is looking at the Puritans back in
England, you want to catch the context, he is talking about the Puritans, not
the ones that came to America, they are of the same stock, however, and
basically had the same core of believers, so you want to be clear, these are
the English Puritans. “For many years
after the restoration they were theme of unmeasured invective and
derision.” See, the press and the TV
etc. were the same in that day as they are today. “They were exposed to the utmost
licentiousness of the press and of the state at the time when the press and the
stage were most licentious. They were
not men of letters, they were as a body unpopular,” and he goes on to list a
whole set of funny characteristics.
Ha-ha, the Puritans did this, the Puritans did that and all the rest of
it.
But then he says, and listen to this, a fantastic statement, “But it is
not from the laughters alone that the philosophy of history is to be
learned.” You don’t learn history from a
joker; you learn history from a man who studies and studies and studies, and
not the guy that gets up in the classroom and mouths off about the Puritans but
the man who presents you with source material, who gives you fact, fact, fact,
fact, fact, those are the people to pay attention to. “Those who rouse the people to resistance,
who directed their measures through a long series of eventful years, who formed
out of the most unpromising materials the finest army that Europe had ever
seen, who tramped down the king, the church and aristocracy, who in the short
intervals of domestic sedition and rebellion made the name of England terrible
to every nation on earth, [can’t understand words.] Most of their absurdities were merely external
badges. The Puritans were men whose
minds had derived a peculiar characteristic from the daily contemplation” and
he put it, “superior beings and eternal interest” which is they daily studied
the Word of God, daily, meditated on Bible doctrine. And as a result he says their minds derived a
peculiar characteristic from this. “To
know God, to serve Him, to enjoy Him, was with them the great end of
existence. Instead of catching
occasional glimpses of the deity through an obscuring veil they aspired to gaze
full on His intolerable brightness and to commune with Him face to face. They
recognized no title of superiority but His favor. They despised all the
accomplishments in all the dignitaries of the world. If they were unacquainted with the works of
philosophers and poets they were deeply read in the oracles of God. If their names were not found in the registry
of hell, they were recorded in the book of life. On the rich and the eloquent, on nobles and
priests they looked down with contempt, for they esteemed themselves rich in a
much more precious treasure, nobles by the right of an earlier creation,
priests by the imposition of a mighty hand.”
See, these Puritans had the concept of positional truth, they realized
that at the time you accept Christ, Christ puts you in union with Himself and
you’re there, that’s your position and you get that position by God’s
grace. Every believer has that position
and you share it with Christ. One of the
things you share is that you are a believer priest forever, and nobody can take
it away from you and the Puritans knew this doctrine and they meditated upon
it, so when they walked up to a priest or some person that was high in the
society they’d look right through them and say you don’t impress me; my position
in Jesus Christ is higher than you ever thought of being. So these men, really
it doesn’t say they despised in the sense that they ridiculed authority in
their day but they weren’t impressed, that’s all, you couldn’t snow these
people.
“Events which short-sighted politicians ascribed to earthly causes had
been ordained on His account, for His sake,” this is God’s sake, “empires had
risen, flourished and decayed. Thus was
the Puritan made of two different men, the one of self-abasement, the other
proud and sagacious. The Puritan
prostrated himself before his maker but he set his foot on the neck of the
king.” In other words, here is a man
who was positive volition toward God and it always… you know you often hear it
said that people that bow down to God are weak; it’s strange that in history
the strong men are always the men that have bowed to God because when you bow
to God you don’t bow to any man; you only bow to one person and that’s the Lord
Jesus Christ. Then you can turn around
and stand up and look straight in the eyes of any man on earth and that’s the
way the Puritans were. These people were
tough and that’s why they are really not liked.
Your history teachers make fun of them because they don’t know what else
to do with the Puritans so this is why you get them ridiculed, because the
history teachers can’t stand these men, they are so fantastic and liberals
never like to look up to anybody except themselves. The point here is that these people just despise
the Puritans.
He’s talking about one particular Puritan, “The Puritan would cry in the
bitterness of his soul that God had hid His face from him, but when he took his
seat in the council, or he gird on his sword for war, these tempestuous
workings of the soul left no perceptible trace behind him. People who saw nothing of the godly but their
uncouth visages and heard nothing from them but their groans and their whining
hymns might laugh at them, but those had little reason to laugh who encountered
them in the hall of debate or in the field of battle. These fanatics brought to civil and military
affairs a coolness of judgment and an immutability of purpose. They went through the world like [can’t
understand words] crushing and trampling down oppressors, mingling with human
beings but having neither part nor lot in human infirmities, insensible to
fatigue, to pleasure and to pain, not to be pierced by any weapon, not to be
withstood by any barriers.”
That is an analysis of the Puritan character by a non-believer. You say that’s all fine but where did it
lead. Let me give you one quick
illustration to show you from the Puritan character positive volition you had a
strong set of people. They were strong in England and they were strong in
America and out of this has come blessing upon blessing upon blessing t this
nation. Let me give you an example of
this blessing. This blessing came about
100 years later in the 18th century.
In 1704 the exports of the British empire in pounds was 6,500,000. This gives you some statistical idea of the blessing,
the material blessing on America. In
1704 England exported 6,500,000 pounds of goods. By 1772 to America alone, the American market
was so fantastic that by 1772 England was exporting to America 6,000,000 pounds
alone, just to America, and it shows you that the American market had grown to
include the entire export of England, just within one man’s lifetime. And there was a statesman in England at the
time, Edmund Burke, who got up in Parliament and gave a speech, Conciliation with America. And he’s trying to demonstrate to these
people that you can’t fight America.
This man pleaded with England not to take America on; America was being
blessed, America was expanding, and Edmund Burke said this:
He’s going to use an illustration in his presentation and this
illustration consists of a certain individual, and he says now listen, just
imagine this man, he’s an old man in 1772 but let’s suppose he was a young boy
back here in 1704. And let’s imagine he
was a young boy sitting in his chair and an angel spoke to him. And the angel came to this young fellow and
said listen, I’m going to give you a prophecy and the prophecy is going to be
of America. And Burke would say would he
have believed it in 1704, and here’s what he said.
“Young man, there is America, which at this day serves for little more
than to amuse you with stories of savage men, uncouth manners, yet shall before
you taste death shall show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now
attracts the envy of the world.”
Remember in 1704 England was number one in the world. To catch a glimpse of this, take the United
States exports in 1970. Imagine, pick
out country X, and imagine in about 60 years from now that the exports of
America to this nation equal our whole 1970 exports, fantastic growth. And this is what this angel is saying to this
man, he’s saying you can laugh at America now, “the stories of the savage man
and uncouth manners, yet shall before you taste death this country will show
itself equal to the whole of that commerce which not attracts the envy of the
world. Whatever England has grown to by
a progressive increase of improvement brought in by varieties of people, by
succession of civilizing conquest and civilizing settlements in a series of
1700 years,” it took England 1700 years to build this, “what it took England in
1700 years you will see added to her by America in the course of a single
life.”
That’s the contrast; America did in 70y ears what it took England 1700
to do. Do you think that’s an accident? That’s
an obvious empirical sign in history that God blessed. Why did He bless?
Because there were people who knew Bible doctrine. And although later on the Puritans weakened,
the Puritan effect lasted, the positive volition built up Bible doctrine, Bible
doctrine built up an interest in law, so Burke was able to say in the days of
the American Revolution this: “Permit me, sir, to add another circumstance in
our colonies, which contributes no mean part toward the growth and effect of
this [can’t understand word] spirit. I
mean their education, in no country perhaps in the world is the law so
generally studied. The profession itself
is numerous and powerful and in many provinces it takes the lead. The greater number of deputies to the
Congress were lawyers but all who read and most do read” contrary to today,
“all who read and most do read, endeavor to attain by a smattering in that
science.” In other words the colonist,
the normal people in the country knew law. Why did they know it? Because they had the residual Bible doctrine,
it was passed on down; they had the concept that you by law not by men, you
don’t elect somebody President on the basis of a scintillating personality or
because he combs his hair or doesn’t comb his hair. You elect on the basis of law and so he said
all who read and most do read attain training in this area. “I have been told by an eminent book seller
that in one branch of his business, after tracts, the popular devotion were so
many books as those on the law exported to the plantation. This study renders men acute, inquisitive,
dexterous, prompting attack, ready in defense, full of resources. In other countries,” now listen to this, this
is Burke drawing a comparison between Colonial America and other countries, “in
other countries where the people are more simple, they judge of an ill
principle in government only by an actual grievance.” In other words, in another country it takes a
riot before people understand the principle is wrong. “They judge of an ill principle in government
only by an actual grievance, but here in America they anticipate the evil,
judge the pressure of the grievance by a badness of principle. They [can’t understand words] government at a
distance and they sniff the approach of tyranny in every painted [can’t
understand word].” In other words, the
point he is making is these Americans are so sensitive to principles that they
can smell trouble before it happens. In
this country today we’ve gotten to the sad situation it takes a riot before we
realize there’s something wrong, yet in the early days of Colonial America
these people knew, you stated a principle, they said there’s something wrong
there, something wrong, they were alert, mentally alert people.
I hope this has shown you the blessing and it’s been an illustration
that Deuteronomy 28 is true today in history. We have had a [can’t understand
word/s] the Puritans, 1630, the independence of the nation, 1776, and by about
1900 Bible doctrine had begun to slide in this country. We are in 1970; we have just about lost all
the steam and credit built up on God’s account. We have had Bible doctrine,
Bible doctrine, Bible doctrine and we have run out as a nation because since
1900 we have not had a strong Biblical movement in this country. God blesses
only when there is positive volition linked with His Word. How long is He going to bless America? It’s God’s grace that we’ve lasted till 1970
and the only reason for extending our blessing as a national entity is if we
will get back with Bible doctrine. If we
don’t, the momentum built up by the blessing God has given our nation on credit
of the Puritan’s positive volition is going to be exhausted.