Clough Deuteronomy Session 47

Deuteronomy 22:1-4— Purity of Ownership (vs. Socialism)

Fellowship Chapel; 15 March 2011

Handouts

Slides

We’re going to go to a chapter right after chapter 21 tonight but because of the content at the tail end of chapter 21 and some things that have just come to my attention we’re going to discuss some things tonight at the front end of class. I want to take this time to show you a major collision between the Word of God and modern national states with regard to the family and parenting. So we’re going to do that for probably half the hour and then we’ll do the first part of chapter 22 which will be the next section.

If you look at the handout we’re still going through chapters 12-26, and keep in mind the big picture is loving the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul; and all your heart was chapters 5-11, mental attitude, and then chapters 12-26, all the soul, these are the details of life. Last time we dealt with chapter 21. We went through the protocols protecting social life and we said that in most cases those are involving a sort of sandwich structure. So if you follow me on your outline first we’ll talk a little bit about that structure. It’s helpful when you read the Bible—this is why I’ve never been too enthusiastic about some of these Bible reading programs where you just read through, they’re very good to get us into the word—you just have to kind of take your time and observe what you’re reading. It’s not speed reading, it’s comprehension reading; it’s how much you comprehend, and if you’re slow at comprehending hey, there’s no problem, just read slowly, that’s all. But trying to read faster than you can comprehend is just a waste of time in my opinion.

So when we look at these chapters what I try to do is point out to you that there’s a pattern in the text. And if you get to see this pattern it’ll help you reading the Bible because you’ll see that there are these patterns and these patterns really give you a tip on the emphases that the author is doing. And remember last time, in chapter 21, if you look at the review section there, we’re back to that sandwich structure that we’ve seen again and again in this book. And apparently it’s the way Moses expresses himself, but he’ll start with a certain subject at the beginning of a section and he’ll conclude with that same thing at the end of the section. Then in between he packs different kinds of subject material. Now we’ve seen that several times, chapter 6, chapter 7, where he’ll deal at the beginning with a few verses on how to do something, and at the end of the chapter how to do something. Then in between he talks about their relationship with Yahweh, with God.

So it has two elements in it, it has the practical how to procedures but it also centers on the fact that it’s not a mechanical thing, per se, it’s a relationship with God. And if you emphasize one, the relationship, too much you get people frustrated because we all want a relationship with the Lord but we don’t know how to execute it. And then if you exercise the how to’s too much then you wind up with a very mechanical view of the Christian life. So the sandwich thing in chapter 21, verses 1-9 and verses 22-23 all dealt with the lethal force. Either it was a murderer using lethal force or it was the State, the civil powers using lethal force in the execution of the person, the criminal. Then in between, in verses 10-21 we had the family structure. And so the first part of the sandwich was the doctrine concerning the destruction of life, the destruction of life!

The middle part was the family’s structure that is the womb of life. So life was involved in both those sections if you think about it. Sometimes it’s kind of hard to get the simple theme. And so this goes back to what we’ve seen time and time again, God’s design of society, and that the family is basically the place where life is generated. Remember, you can’t have a family if you don’t have wealth and property to sustain the family, so that economics precedes family because family is basically an economic structure. It’s other things, but it’s an economic structure. And then you can’t have the economics if you don’t have integrity in the communication. If and you can’t make a contract and keep your word you’re not going to have economic prosperity. It can’t happen. And then underneath integrity you have to have a support for integrity, which is heart allegiance to God. And on the right side of that chart you see what happens to a society that collapses and this has happened, the rise and fall of nations. So there you go with life ultimately jeopardized.

In verses 10-24 we had the family integration of war brides; in verses 15-17 the inheritance laws, and then 18-21 we had the problem of the family, which was the hard text. I just want to make one comment about the family integration of war brides. There was one month there that this war bride would be kept in the house but she wouldn’t be married to the guy, and there was a cooling off period of a month. And I went on to say how that was a restraining device and so on, and that’s true, but one of the ladies in the group pointed out something, that the month was a test to see if she was pregnant and so if this guy was going to marry one of the war brides and the war bride was pregnant we’ve got another little problem here. So there was a reason, again there was a thirty-day period there. I point this out because the more I study the book of Deuteronomy and I’ve studied this for many, many years, the more I see there’s a tremendous amount of thought-through details. These are not random things just plopped here and there, there’s a structure underneath this and it’s really a revelation of the wisdom of God and how He plans things.

I want to take you now to the principle. Verses 18-21 is the most cited text by critics of the Bible, so this and Deuteronomy 7 and 20, which deal with holy war, everybody that wants to argue with you about the Bible will always quote holy war and they’ll quote this passage. And they’ll say see what a horrible primitive style was going on in the Bible. And the point we’re making is that the God of the Old Testament is the same God as the God of the New Testament, and that’s why I use that word there, the Marcionite heresy. Marcion was a guy in the early church who argued that the God of the Old Testament was not the God of the New Testament, and therefore the Old Testament was to be discarded. Now we know that Jesus Christ was Yahweh, so it kind of shocks people to think that the Jesus (of their imagination, it’s not the Jesus of the New Testament text), but Jesus of their imagination, gentle Jesus, all of a sudden in the Old Testament He’s doing these things, like telling parents to stone their kids. Yes, that was Jesus. So if that’s so then you have to say well wait a minute, Jesus doesn’t do this because He feels like it; there are reasons behind it. And so we went into that.

And now I want to take you to that principle, because that was the principle we ended with in that section. And I want to show you, tonight we’re going to look at three different slides and statements and we’re going to talk about how you ought to think about these things. These are ideas that are dominating our culture today and so you need to stop and just think about these things, pray about these things and see how you’re going to respond to this. Are you going to be swept along like the Japanese were in the tsunami, cars, houses and everything else, swept along spiritually or are we going to say no, we’ve got our feet anchored here and we’re going to think this thing through.

So I’m going to use tonight, the first part here, I want to deal with this principle that’s exhibited in verses 18-21, at the end of chapter 21. And that is, it’s expressing a truth about the social order by the God who designed it. So stoning an adult child who shows that they are incapable of carrying on the family, they are irresponsible, in this case it’s a “glutton and a drunkard” or something. Glutton and drunkenness weren’t bases for criminal proceedings, but why it became a criminal proceeding is a question and we have to think, because if they’re executing somebody that’s a civic action; a family could not execute. A family, divine institution number 3, family, does not have the authorization from God to execute anyone. The State does. So the parents hand over this child—or it’s not a child, it’s an adult ready to assume responsibility—over to the civil authorities for execution.

Now that shocks the modern people because modern people are so “humane” they can’t deal with fundamental issues. And the issue and the principle is this: parents' allegiance ought to be to the Word of God more than to their own children. That is very hard to execute, particularly as a Christian parent. You love your children; you want to see them succeed. But the blunt news given to us by God of the Bible is that He wants our allegiance before our allegiance to our children. And Jesus picks this up in Matthew 10:34, when He says, “He who loves son or daughter more than Me isn’t worthy of Me.” Now for a Jewish family, forget the Gentile pagan family, but for a tight-knit Jewish family this is a fundamental shocking text, a shocking text of what it’s saying about that family unit.

Now, the reason, we said, that there are these harsh measures taken by an adult child was this; this child, according to the text, had been raised by the parents, both mom and dad testify that they tried to discipline this person, tried to prepare this person, because, remember that the family is the womb of the next generation. So the family has expended resources to groom this child into a productive adult who will then join society. The child has failed, never learned responsibility, and obviously is not going to be a contributor to the social order. And so the point here is that he would be basically the development of a criminal class. He’s one of the kids who is involved in drugs and selling and so forth because they can’t do anything useful, and so here we have a useless person. Instead of doing what we do in our society, of dumping this useless individual onto the public welfare roles and then making everybody else support him, they get rid of him, and this prevents the rise of a criminal class.

So there’s a rationale behind verses 18, 19 and 20. Harsh, yes, but is it any worse for the social order to do it this way than to do what we’ve got now, where we confiscate taxes after taxes upon taxes of the productive families to do this program, this program, this program and this program? There was an article in the paper the other day: we are spending more on incarceration than we are on education. The jails, at $30,000 or $40,000 an inmate, are costing more than public education, which is about $8,000 or $9,000. So go figure. So this way you don’t have the problem because you eliminate that whole problem right from the start. And yes, it’s tough and it’s rough but there was a reason behind it. These are not arbitrary points; which leads me, then, to a point, if you look further and we’ll look at the next slide.

Jeek gave me, a couple of weeks ago, a magazine that’s produced by the Home School Legal Association. The man who wrote this is a lawyer, a trained lawyer and he’s getting his degree in international law and he discovered some interesting articles in the law journals, and I want you to look at these. I’m going to show you the three slides and then we’re going to go back to each one of these three slides and see if we can pick out a biblical response to them.

The first slide is by Kimberly Yurako, who is a professor at Northwestern University School of Law. So this lady is not only an attorney, she trains lawyers. And she wrote this article in the California Law Review, February of 2008. There’s a big long quote, I just excerpted some things, where you see the brackets I tried to summarize what she’s saying so you can pick up the context. “There must be legal and constitutional limits on the ability of home schooling parents to teach their children idiosyncratic and illiberal beliefs and values…. Government control must be exercised against parents who want to teach against the Enlightenment. Parental control over children’s basic education flows from the state rather than vice versa. States delegate power over children’s basic education to parents.” Now she’s laying it right out, this is big boys and girls now. We’re just putting all our cards on the table so everybody can see what’s in the hand here. She’s absolutely correct; she reflects the contemporary view.

So watch the next slide, this is another one by a Professor Catherine Ross. By the way, notice all these professors are women, I don’t know whether that has something to do with their interest in children or not, but it’s interesting, all three of these slides are by lawyer professor women. This is Catherine Ross, and her article is entitled Fundamentalist Challenges to Core Democratic Values, in the William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal in May of 2010. Here’s her quote: “This essay explores the choice many traditionalist Christian parents, (both fundamentalist and evangelical make to leave public schools in order to teach their children at home, thus in most instances escaping meaningful oversight…. Society need not and should not tolerate the inculcation of absolutist views that undermine toleration of difference…. If a parent subscribes to an absolutist belief system premised on the notion that it was handed down by a creator, that it, like the Ten Commandments is etched in stone and that all other systems are wrong, the essential lessons of a civic education often seem deeply challenging and suspect…. Such ‘private truths’ have no place in the public arena, including the public schools.” So once again this is a clear, clear statement of a certain attitude and position.

Finally, we have a third article, Martha Fineman, who also teamed up with Karen Worthington to write, What is Right for Children? The Compelling Paradigms of Religion and Human Rights. She says, “The risk that parents or private schools unfairly impose hierarchical or oppressive beliefs on their children is magnified by the absence of state oversight or the application of any particular educational standards…. Public education should be mandatory and universal.” A third statement that I think depicts things quite well.

Let’s go back to the first one and look at that statement. Look carefully at it and on your handout, right after these three statements I’ve got the three basic questions. You’ll see the ethical question, the epistemological question and the metaphysical question. Now look at those questions and let’s see how, if we asks those three questions, those are the basic questions, ask those three questions of this quote and what do you come up with. Let’s look at the ethical question. And the ethical question is: What is your moral authority? What right (remember what we said the ethical question is) do you have to tell me how I am supposed to live my life? In this case, what ethical standard does Kimberly Yurako have that she is telling parents how to raise their children?

Where is the ethical authority that this woman has? So let’s think about that; if you’re involved in this. If you’ve got kids, and you’re going to face this, what do you suppose is the answer here? What is her moral authority? [someone answers] Faith, okay, she’s saying the State delegates power but the subject of that sentence is what? Power, authority. Now she’s saying the State has the authority to do this. So what do we do with the ethical question then? Push it back. Where does the State get its ethical authority? Which, in this country gets us back to what fundamental issue? In American history, when this country was founded, what was stated in the founding documents as to the moral authority of the country? Before they even wrote the Constitution, there was another document. What was it? The Declaration of Independence. And in the Declaration of Independence a moral authority was cited in that Declaration. What was the moral authority? The Creator; man is endowed by whom? The Creator. With what? Inalienable rights. Now what’s important about that adjective, “inalienable,” in this debate? If it’s inalienable the State cannot change the values, correct? So if you start with the Declaration of Independence, which is declared of our founding fathers, you can quibble about whether they were Unitarians or Trinitarians and the rest of that, but for our purposes, when this country was founded the moral authority was derived from the Creator to whom? In the Declaration who is endowed with inalienable rights? The individuals. Is the word “State” even in the Declaration of Independence? No.

So right from the start it’s the individuals that are endowed with inalienable rights. Now along comes Professor Yurako and she’s saying that the State somehow has acquired this authority. Now the only way the State could have acquired this authority would be for the people to grant the authority to the State. Have the people granted the authority to the State? Let’s think about that one: Have the people granted the authority to the State to dictate education? Yes they have, by default, haven’t they? What did we have a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago in this country? How were kids raised? Were they raised in public schools or were they raised in one-room school-houses, paid for by whom? The State? Not really, it was the parents.

Public education came about through welfare. Public education originally in this country arose to take care of the kids whose parents were too poor to pay for their education. But like all government programs, what happened is that once the program gets established everybody somehow feels entitled to it, so more and more people threw their kids into the public school because it was cheaper. Now once the parents have all put their kids in the public school they’ve abdicated their parenting. So now we shouldn’t be surprised that the State suddenly assumes itself to be a surrogate parent. And if the State indeed is a surrogate parent, then it has the right, doesn’t it? If the State is the ultimate surrogate parent of children it has the right to dictate to parents how they should educate their children because the State can say you guys, you gave the kids to us.

This is why I’ve said again and again, home schooling is one of the true revolutions occurring in this society, because in it parents are challenging the authority of the State itself. There’s no compromise here. Either the right to educate children comes directly from the parents, that they have been endowed by God with this, or it comes from the State because the parents have abdicated or foolishly let the State take over this area. And once the State takes it over you don’t get it back. So now we have this sort of thing: “government control must be exercised against parents who want to teach against” [the Enlightenment] what? Now look at this one. Now those of you who have studied history what’s wrapped up in that last noun? This professor knows what she’s doing, she’s very careful at directing that sentence and that last noun shows you exactly where she’s coming from. She’s not just flailing away, trying to be cute, she’s making a profound statement here, that the State, control must be allowed against parents who want to teach against the Enlightenment.

What is true of the “Enlightenment?” The enlightenment goes back three or four hundred years, it was the end of the Middle Ages and in the enlightenment you had the Western society casting off the authority of the Word of God. It was called the enlightenment, and even that is a misnomer, isn’t it? That men start working out from themselves outward, all authority now rests in man and they kind of hee-hee and haw-haw that we’ve got rid of the infallibility of the church. No you haven’t, you’ve transferred the infallibility from the church to man. That’s the Enlightenment, and that was considered the Enlightenment. That’s why, all of us when we studied history, what do they call the Medieval period? What’s the other name for that? The Dark Ages, and the Enlightenment is an innuendo against Christianity. Yes, there were screwy things going on in the Middle Ages, but frankly, there was a lot clearer thinking about the implications of the Christian faith on society in the Middle Ages than there was after the Middle Ages.

So she is going back three to four hundred years in this sentence, and she’s declaring war against parents who refuse to go along with the Enlightenment. And parents who take their obligation seriously by Scripture are rebels. You can’t be for the Word of God and do this. Let’s go back to Deuteronomy 6. This is a theocracy, yes, but the way God ran Israel where did He invest the educational responsibility? It’s very clear, right after Deuteronomy 6:4; 6:4 was the Jewish creed, this was the heart of the entire unity of the nation, and immediately in verse 6 we have God saying how does the Word of God get inside the heart? And it gets inside the heart, not because we take pills or we dream or we go burn candles and incense; the Word of God gets into the heart by parents teaching their children day in, day out, day in, day out. And what group in society is doing that? The family. Parents are doing that.

So you have Deuteronomy 6:6-9 versus Professor Yurako. And Professor Yurako, though she doesn’t cite it, she in effect is saying, because she uses the word “Enlightenment,” that man makes his own moral authority. But remember, back, I guess it was 15, 16 sessions ago I had that little chart about ethics and what did I say was true? They’re subjective. If they’re coming from man they’re subjective. So in one sense we can dismiss Ms. Yurako’s statement as simply that’s Ms. Yurako’s own personal opinion, but it’s not mine. And I think she’d have a hard time defending against that accusation. She’d probably say, well, a lot of people agree with me. Well then, Ms. Yurako, how many people ought to agree with you before that becomes an absolute standard? 91.5% of the population, 50% of the population? Tell me, now many people have to share this opinion before somehow it attains objectivity? And even if you had 100% it’s still emanating from man, is it not, the moral authority, versus the Bible, versus our own Declaration of Independence: "Man is endowed by his Creator with certain inalienable rights". Okay, you can’t have both, you can’t locate the moral authority in the human being and locate the moral authority in God; it’s one or the other but you can’t have them both.

So let’s go on. That’s the ethical question. So this lady is making an ethical statement and she ought to be challenged on that basis. She also makes another statement in here, the last one, that we could argue is a metaphysical statement, where she’s saying: “States delegate power over children’s basic education.” Yes, they get moral authority but what is the State? What is the purpose of the State? Now if you’re going to answer that question, which is a metaphysical question because it deals with purpose and meaning, what you have to then deal with is what is the State like, what is its purpose? And to answer that question you either have to make something up or you go back to the Word of God and ask yourself, what is the purpose of the State?

And by the way, what is the purpose of the State in the Bible? Where would you go in Scripture to find out the purpose of the State? Go back to where it originated. Where did the State originate in biblical history? Anybody know? Genesis 9, the covenant of Noah. Right? That’s when the State was vested with lethal authority. Before that there was not State, before that in the flood, the whole civilization prior to the flood there was anarchy. So you go back to that original document. See, this is how you think through the Framework. You take a big question like this and you ask yourself, now wait a minute, I’m dealing with DI #4, the divine institution of the State. Now where in the Bible do I go to find the function, the purpose, the meaning of the State. You go to where it was originally generated. And the Bible tells us that, and it verifies it because in Romans 13 it also deals with the State. What is the symbol of the State in Romans 13? The sword; lethal force. That’s always the symbol of the State because the State is to restrain evil, not, by the way, to promote education.

Now this is the second slide, the third slide in sequence but the second quote. And this, she raises another question, she says, she has a moral question, you see where her moral statement is, where it says, “society need not and should not tolerate the inculcation of absolutist values.” You see where that says, “should?” Now a bell should ring with you. When you see a sentence like that and you see an “ought” or a “should” bells, bells, bells; what is being asserted here when you see “should?” Ethics, it’s an ethical judgment; an ethical question comes up here now. Says who? That’s the answer. “The State should not tolerate inculcation of absolutist views that undermine toleration of difference.” Now in her behalf, you can understand what she’s probably is getting at. She’s getting at people who are unloving, who are troublemakers, who refuse to live graciously with others. If that’s all she meant, we wouldn’t have a problem with that because Christians are to exercise grace. We’re not in a holy war, in a sense of flesh and blood; we coexist, so we tolerate.

So this idea that we have to give up a belief in order to tolerate is nonsense; that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of Christianity, because the gospel is voluntary. We’re not compelling anyone to believe, because if people were compelled to believe, that would be a false profession, and you all know how dangerous that is. You pressure somebody to believe because the girlfriend won’t date somebody until they believe or the boy won’t date her or something, or there’s peer pressure, or it’s a company situation where your boss says this or that, that’s all peer pressure and it results in false conversions. So real biblical Christianity has never been compulsory, but real biblical Christianity is absolutist.

So I would have to ask this woman, what do you mean by saying, “absolutist views that undermine toleration of difference?” Do you mean by toleration that I have to accept what Joe Blow believes, or are you saying that I just have to be nice to Joe Blow? Now that’s massively confused right now. Toleration means not just that you accept Johnnie, but you accept his belief system. That we cannot do. We can be gracious, we can coexist, but we are not going to accept his belief system; we draw the line in the sand there. That’s where the difference comes.

Then she goes on to make this statement, and this is great, I mean, this lady has really understood something here: “if a parent subscribes to an absolutist belief system”, so right here now she’s defining what she thinks is absolutism. So this gives us an insight into how this woman thinks about absolutism. So in the previous sentence when she talks about “absolutist views” it wasn’t quite clear in that sentence what she was talking about. But by the time you get to this sentence it’s very clear what she’s talking about, isn’t it. “If a parent subscribes to an absolutist belief system premised on the notion that it was handed down by a Creator”. Honey, you’ve got that one right, that’s exactly what historic Christianity believes, that it was handed down by a Creator.

Now if that’s what she means by an “absolutist belief,” now we’re dealing with substantive things here: “premised on the notion that it was handed down, etched in stone and that all other systems are wrong, the essential lessons of a civic education seem deeply challenging and suspect.” Okay, so right there she’s against any claim that an idea could have arisen in God’s mind and transmitted to man, which is the doctrine of what? When we say an idea is transferred from God’s mind to man’s mind, that is the doctrine of revelation. So here’s the epistemological question. Remember, your second question: what is truth and how do we know it? So this lady is making an epistemological dogma that no information could ever flow from God’s mind to man’s mind. That’s a shut door; it’s an impenetrable barrier. So she has made an epistemological statement here without explaining what she’s talking about; but nevertheless, her readers probably just zip right along because they’re not asking the three basic questions. That’s why I keep saying, watch the three basic questions; they are your guard; they are your preservative; they are you filters that you use to filter this garbage out when it flows in your direction. So here we expose it; she is making an epistemological dogmatic statement that no God exists who could reveal Himself, because obviously if a God did exist who could reveal Himself it would be an absolute disbelief. And she doesn’t want to accept such an absolute disbelief. Well, I’m sorry honey, but you have made even a metaphysical statement because you're saying there couldn’t be a Creator that does that. So now she’s in violation of the first and second question.

Then she comes on down to the next one, and says, “Such ‘private truths’ have no place in the public arena.” Now go back, to what we said back in the ethical question. If it’s coming out of a person’s heart it’s subjective. She thinks… now watch the non sequitur in the logic. She’s arguing that absolutist beliefs come down from outside. Right? They’re external to man. God external to you, external to me, gives an idea from His mind to my mind. So it comes from outside of me and from outside of you. That’s an absolutist source. But she can’t believe that there is a God, so in her mind the claim of absolute truth is still coming out of the human heart. See the point? In her mind it’s phony to assert that you have an absolutist belief because your ideas all come from inside. But she’s wrapped herself in a circle; she’s begging the question. The question is: is there a God who informs people from outside? She’s denied that and then she has private truths, so any claim to absolute truth must be a private thing; it’s just your opinion, my opinion, just private stuff. And she has to say that because she’s made this titanic metaphysical assumption here and an epistemological assumption that no God could exist that does this.

This is in our law journal, look at the date, May, 2010. Now these law journal articles, in peer reviewed legal literature are the sum and substance of what influences the courts; judges read these. So this is going to infect and affect judges who are going to decide cases involving families and their education.

The last quote. Now this is in a book, and notice the title of the book, it’s an interesting title, What is Right For Children? Which of the three questions is involved right there? Ethical question. Right? You’re dealing with “right,” what’s right, what’s wrong. So a bell ought to go off in your head and say oh, what’s right, well, Martha Fineman and Karen Worthington must be having some moral authority that they must be referencing. So she’s obviously asking what is right for children and by what standard is she going to answer that question. And that should hit you when you read somebody that says that kind of stuff. The Competing Paradigms of Religion and Human Rights. Now that’s an interesting competition, is there competition between religious values and human rights? The Declaration of Independence again. Were the writers of the Declaration of Independence thinking there was a conflict between religion and human rights when they said “all men are endowed by their” what? “Creator, with” what? “Inalienable rights.” Where is the competing paradigm of religion and human rights in the Declaration? See, it’s not there, is it.

So what has happened here is we’ve had a total worldview change. So now, because religion is being viewed as private subjective, coming out of the heart, it’s not objective; it’s subjective, because it’s all their ideas of subjective so they think the absolutist claims also are subjective in coming out of the heart. So that’s subjective, but somehow we have objective human rights. Now that’s interesting. Where do we get objective human rights if they’re coming all out of man? There are a lot of questions here that are not being asked and that’s my point, why you heard me in this Deuteronomy series say over and over and over and over again, there are three basic questions, there are three basic questions, there are three basic questions, why you see me go through this chart that I have gone over again and again and again. Why do I keep showing that? Because I’m trying to show you that there’s a structure in the Word of God to support all of what we cherish about families, about their roles, about how society is to progress, how society is to be prosperous, how it’s supposed to function, and it’s all based on religious values. It’s all based on an external idea that God has given to us and He has given historical confirmation of that to us.

And this is why we really come down to this. Remember we showed this over and over again earlier in Deuteronomy, and maybe then it didn’t have the force it might have after tonight’s discussion. But remember what we said, that when you’re dealing with political questions and you can’t resolve the political question you have to go at least one layer deeper to the ethical questions. And you see, we’ve had to do that, haven’t we? Here we’ve had three women, professors in law schools, writing in peer review journals or a published book, that are going to be read by legal authorities. Judges are reading this literature and being influenced by it because they’re busy. The judge himself has a docket, he’s got busy things; he’s got to this; he’s got to do that. Judges that are functioning as real judges don’t have time to do all kinds of philosophical thinking, so they just absorb what they read in the journals.

So here we have this kind of thing and we saw the problems. Where in any of those three cases are the ethical questions ever answered? It wasn’t even asked. So then, if that’s the case, and the ethics differ, then we say we have to come back down to epistemology and metaphysics, because the last lady, remember, she said the idea that a God, a Creator could give human rights, ridiculous, that’s absolutist, incompatible with our civilized society. So she’s made a metaphysical statement. Has the question really been seriously asked, leave alone answered? No, it’s just assumed because everybody is so busy texting and doing this and reading e-mails or something else we don’t ever ask the fundamental questions, and then we wonder why, like the tsunami comes in and there we are floating along with the tide. So I hope this discussion tonight will show you why, when you read Deuteronomy, you’re reading something that challenges the very guts of the society around us.

So with that we’ll go to Deuteronomy 22 and we’ll start. Are there any questions? In what we’ve done so far, are there any questions in this area. [question asked, can’t hear] She’s asking, I’m repeating this for people who listen to the tape, you’re asking, this lady, when she makes the claim of private truths whether she’s really saying, in effect, that the only allowable truths for the public have to be non-religious truths? That’s exactly the point, exactly the point. [she says more] Yes, if they’re thinking without reference to God and the correct answer, think of your three basic questions—the metaphysical question, what is our purpose on earth, the epistemological question, how do you obtain truth, and how do you recognize that—she hasn’t discussed that, she’s just stated it and what she’s done is she’s created a bias against any revelation claims; any revelation claims can’t be in public discourse because you’re going to have unbelievers out there that reject it. And that’s true, there will always be conflict but the big issue here is tolerance is being defined in relativistic terms. Now we all believe in tolerance, and being gracious. What is added to the word “tolerance” today is relativism. And it really isn’t relativism; it’s an absolute statement of what is tolerable. So beware, it’s a buzzword. It’s all over the place, it’s in the papers; it’s in the media. When you hear the word “tolerant” you need to say whoa, I need to learn a little bit more what you mean by tolerant. And it’s right for us to question that.

[another question asked] Yes, Jeek has just said that when the lady is making the claim that children that are home schooled are escaping oversight. Well they’re not escaping oversight; the parents are giving oversight. She’s saying that the schools need to give oversight. Now the irony of this is that the very people she’s according the authority to give oversight to children, what have they produced in this country at the tune of millions of dollars? Are we considered a well-education nation relative to other countries right now? Are our math scores better than, say, Japan, China, some European countries? [someone says something] Yeah, 14^th in the world but I would wager we spend more per child than any other country. Why are we spending more money per child and producing less if the State is such a wonderful arbiter? I’ll tell you. The problem is this, because I became a Christian first year in college. So I grew up all through school in public education as a non-Christian, so I’ve lived both sides of the fence. So you can’t accuse me of oh, you were always raised a Christian; I wasn’t always raised as a Christian. So I lived all that. And I can tell you basically that public education never asked the big questions. I was just bright enough so I could get grades easy and then I’d fool around, probably be arrested for the things I did in school now, stink bombs and everything else, but the point is, that I did it because it was a waste of time; I thought school was a joke. I could pass a test, no problem, so you know, don’t have to study so let’s do something interesting. And the point is that I only had one or two teachers that got me interested in things, and even they never asked the basic questions.

So when I went to college I was spiritually hungry, because there was no purpose, no meaning in my life. And I had the best, I grew up in New York state and at that time New York state had a wonderful education system. They had state regents in every subject and we had to study hard. When I graduated from high school I had advanced math, I had all kinds of science courses and everything; it was a hard long row to hoe through high school. But no time did anyone ever take me down to the basic question, never. I went through MIT for four years and then one year of partial graduate work. Nobody ever dealt with the epistemological, underlying what it meant for scientific methodology. Not once. And that’s one of the top schools in the country. So I can tell you, based on my own personal experience, that these questions aren’t asked. And I can also tell you, if you sit there and ask the question you get a very impatient, let’s not bother with that, what relevant is that? It’s relevant because of this stuff, that’s why it’s relevant.

We only have a few minutes so let’s at least start with Deuteronomy 22. Deuteronomy 22 is kind of a hard one to categories. I worked hard with this because I’m trying to kind of unify these sections, and this was a hard one to unify, and that’s why I say in your notes, the section goes from chapter 22:1 to 23:18, and it starts with a series of “positive” admonitions. If you look back in 21 it’s “if” this, in verse 1, of 21, “If,” verse 10 of 21, “If,” verse 15, “If,” so they’re all kind of like case laws. But then you start off with 22:1 and it says, “You shall not see your brother’s ox,” it’s not an “if,” it’s not a case, it’s sort of a positive thing. So that’s something noticeable where the structure is changing.

And then it ends in chapter 23, verse 19, and the subject matter all of a sudden from that point on, 23:19, it emphasizes the economics, it’s talking about charging interest and so on. So in between there we’ve got a problem: what’s this whole big picture all about? Because we’re getting into talking about sexual things, we’re talking about vineyards, we’re talking about clothing, we’re talking about bird’s nests, I mean, you name it, it’s all in this section. So what is the deal with this section?

So there seems to be in your notes there, where the blank is: "Themes seems to be boundaries which can’t be crossed in field, flock, clothing marriage, suggesting a preservation of life as God created it,” so the blank there should be “a preservation of life as God created it.” And it has emphasis in the seventh commandment because it’s dealing with the structure of the family. But it’s larger than just the seventy commandment. So that’s why I just warn you that it’s hard to get it clear.

So the subsection are the first four verses of chapter 22, that’s at least pretty easy to see and I think we can do it pretty hurriedly. If you follow with me in chapter 22, verses 1-4, I think it’s quite clear what the subject is. “You shall not see your brother’s ox or his sheep going astray, and hide yourself from them; you shall certainly bring them back to your brother. [2] And if your brother is not near you, or you do not know him, then you shall bring it to your own house, and it shall remain with you until your brother seeks it, then you shall restore it to him. [3] You shall do the same with his donkey, and so shall you do with his garment; with any lost thing of your brothers, which he has lost, and you have found, you shall do likewise; you must not hide yourself. [4] You shall not see your brother’s donkey or his ox fall down along the road, and hide yourself from them; you shall surely help him lift them up again.”

Now what of the Ten Commandments is at least peripherally involved here? “Thou shalt not steal,” 8, right, it’s dealing with property; it’s dealing with ownership. Now that commandment is negative, “thou shalt not steal,” a negative can be reinforced by the State, right? It’s overt. But when you have positives, like verse 1, verse 2, verse 3, verse 4, can the State really enforce these? See, it’s not addressed to the State, it’s addressed to the heart of the private individual, and here’s an excellent illustration that in the Old Testament there is a spirit involved in these laws. It’s not some just mechanical “thou shalt not steal,” I mean, a person could go by and see this ox and didn’t know who it was and ignore it, not take it home, not take care of it, or take it home because gee, I don’t know, I’ll use it myself, and technically it’s not stealing.

But you see, this thing goes one step further and that is it’s emphasizing, as we will see, a boundary. And the boundary is ownership, that it’s important that the ox, the donkey, the clothing, the item, it’s owned by someone and you don’t transgress that boundary. God has put that boundary there. So the emphasis, you see it three times in those four verses, what’s the verb you see it thee times there? “Thou shalt not” what, you see it and you “will not hide yourself.” Now what do you suppose that verb, “hide yourself” is like? How would you translate that today in our society? Ignore it; don’t get involved. That’s how we would say it. If you see these things, ah, don’t get involved with it. The good Samaritan is an example. A lot of people went right by the guy that was hurt by the side of the road and they ignored it and didn’t get involved, but the good Samaritan did get involved. And that’s what we’re talking about here, it’s ownership and taking ownership to the point seriously enough to get involved when there’s something lost. Whatever that object is that’s lost, it’s owned by someone, and there are certain things that come out of this.

And in the blank on your handout in verse 1, like all of the Ten Commandments it speaks to the heart and works out into every day life. It “speaks to the heart and works out into every day life.” All these are talking about loving your neighbor, the last five commandments. And the word “hide” is don’t get involved. And then it says, “certainly bring them back to your brother,” it’s a Hebrew infinitive absolute; it means you must bring it back to your brother. The emphasis is on the obligation to bring it back to the owner. [22:2] “bring it to the house” if you don’t know who the person is, which means if you found somebody’s ox, the ox was the tractor of the day, heavy equipment; if you saw that ox and you brought it to your house, what does that economically cause you to do? Take care of the ox; that means there’s money involved, there’s a little maintenance going on here; this is an economic cost to take care of this ox or the donkey until you can find out who owns it. Now hopefully the owner will reimburse you when he finds it, but this is not just some innocent thing here, this involved dollars and cents. So you assume the cost of maintenance and that applies to anything.

And I’ll conclude here, on your outline, giving you five things from Dr. North’s economic analysis of the passage, and I think this is insightful so that’s why I’m citing it, I do not subscribe to his postmillennialism but I think as an economist he’s discovered some things in the text.

Point 1, the sanctity of ownership, and there is where the Bible is capitalist, not socialist. Ownership is essential to a capitalist society. And so when the Bible is concerned about ownership you can bet your bottom dollar, there’s where capitalism is being taught in the Bible.

Point 2, Animals rank under man in God’s created order; violence entered the animal domain after the fall, wild animals were considered to be a threat to civilization, the owner was also responsible for damages domesticated animals did to other people’s property, and I give you two verses there, [Exodus 22:35; 22:5]. If your ox went over and trampled someone else’s garden or someone’s vineyard you were legally responsible to take care of the damages.

Point 3, Economic prosperity depends upon respect for God’s delegated ownership. Remember, human ownership in the Bible is delegated ownership. We don’t absolutely own anything, including our own bodies; God is the ultimate owner. He delegates, however, ownership to us.

Point 4, delay in returning the property exposes thievery. If this guy has a yard full of oxen that he’s found along the road and he hasn’t been doing anything, you can pretty well figure this guy is a thief. So he wasn’t involved in promptly returning it.

Point 5, it incentives branding to reduce search and restoration costs to both owner and finder. There’s none of this “finders keepers, losers weepers” here, this is exactly opposite to that in the text.

And finally the last concept is the concept of entitlement, which is so used today politically. The word “entitlement” has the word “title” in it, right. So it’s “entitlement” means I have title to a property or I own it, and when you hear the word “entitlement,” the claim is being made that if somebody is entitled to something that it’s not an act of charity to give it to them, they own it, they have a right to it. And it’s very clever how in our socialist society what’s happened is politicians don’t want to call it charity. You read some of the socialist’s writings you’ll see that they hate the word charity, they consider it to be demeaning, but they have to have a name for whatever this is where we confiscate property or productive people and give it to unproductive people, so the name that they’ve chose is entitlement; so we have entitlement programs, but it’s really not that, it’s a misuse of the word.

So these are just thoughts, we’ll get into these next time when we go further in this chapter but I just wanted to kind of introduce; we’ve got four verses here and we’re already with major political terminology. So let’s close and we’ll have just a few minutes of Q and A.

[question asked] Well, that’s a good question. The question is why hasn’t the state exercised its authority already on home school? I’ve wondered that for years. I wondered how long the home school revolution could take place and still stay under the radar of the State. It’s amazing that it’s taken the State this long to start… the State from time to time politically would try to involve itself, I was talking to one of our Christian representatives in Annapolis and she was telling me back three or four years ago that when the State of Maryland to put out feelers to certify parents to be able to qualify to educate their children they received more e-mail phone calls and letters of any issue they had ever faced, so like good little politicians they took that hot potato and dropped it so it wouldn’t go to other things, because when the politicians have found out when they deal with home-schoolers it’s like going into a hornet’s nest, because parents… I mean, think about it, parents who home school have taken an economic hit, because it’s deprived at least one of them of a job, economically outside the home. So generally if you have a couple where the husband and wife are working or have their own business, one of them has had to sacrifice their job just to get the home schooling done. Second of all, home schooling is very difficult and frankly, in the home school movement we have parents who aren’t doing their job and it’s sad, but there’s a soft underbelly to this home school movement, and you have parents that well, they just don’t want to push their child. Well, sorry, but you know, you’ve got to meet standards here. So there is a soft underbelly.

But the real issue is what you saw tonight, it’s the collision between the power of the State and the power of the parents, and it’s going to erupt, and thank you for bringing it to my attention, but I’m sure this is going to erupt into some court cases because the politicians will let go of a hot potato but these kind of people won’t stop with that, we certainly have seen that in the homosexual movement, they don’t care whether there’s a proposition out or a resolution and 80% of the people vote for it, they still will go after it in the courts. And you see, here are the stats, already in peer review law journals, you’re getting the arguments. What I showed you tonight will be used in court cases because that’s what the judges read, the law journals.

[something said] Yes, she brought out an excellent point, did you notice in all the quotes tonight the issue had nothing to do with math, had nothing to do with physics, where did you see any discussion of chemistry in any of the statements. Did you see any statement? Was there any discussion about literary analysis? No, the statement was over toleration, a social end, and I would like to see some of these law professors, if that’s what they’re really concerned with, why don’t you go to your local Muslim mosque, like the one that’s down here in Virginia that’s supported by Saudi Arabia and where they have textbooks showing how they should conquer America.

[something said] He just brought up the issue of international law, this article, I didn’t have time to point that out but in the article he went on to show that behind these law journals is Article 29 of the Children’s Rights’ Commission or something, I forgot what the name of it is but it’s some U.N. thing, BUT, the author of the article did his homework and he went to the U.N. and you can do this on the web, go to the Declaration of Human Rights, it’s a 1948 document, that came out right after 1948, think about the date? What is that date right after? World War II when the Nazis took over the educational system of Germany and indoctrinated the children, so guess what’s in Article 26 of the Declaration of Human Rights? Parents have prior claim to the State and see, they’re inconsistent with their own rule book because back in 1948 they were concerned that the parents retain control because of what they had seen the fascist state of Germany do, and so here we are, a generation removed, forgetting the lessons of the people who lived back then, and saw that and experienced it, they’re all dead now or dying or in wheel chairs or nursing homes, so we’ve discarded the lessons of that generation, so now what are we doing? Exactly the same thing Hitler was doing, now it’s the State. So interesting how these themes are recurring.

Time for one more question. He brought up the tragic case in our county where a home school family allowed their child to starve to death, basically, and you’re going to find those kind of cases but if that happens, that’s a criminal case, it has nothing to do with education, I mean, they could have done that if the kid was in public school, it’s just that the public school teachers would have seen it earlier. But that’s a criminal situation. What he’s talking about is that that’s the sort of thing that these people are just waiting for, to use that as an excuse to jump in with the power. The irony, as he also pointed out, is simultaneously when that case was going on in Harper county we had the episode with the schools in Baltimore where teachers were being beaten up in the classroom, and if you look back at your Sunday paper, The Baltimore Sun, front page, I think it was Sunday, there was an article there, little, down at the bottom, talking about one of the school principals, sounded like an Asian lady, of one of the schools in Baltimore country I guess it was, and before the Maryland thing, you know, where they’d take their exams for state to see how they do, to rate the school, she got the people together and they voluntarily asked for prayer so the kids could concentrate on the test. So now the ACLU is all fired up, came against the principal of that school for breach of Constitutional boundaries and so forth, about praying before the test. Well, the irony, again the same thing he’s talking about, the irony was that the rest of the article went on to discuss who else but the President of the teacher’s union, who said I’m for that lady because ever since these smart-alecky politicians took God out of the classroom the misbehavior and discipline problems have just mounted like crazy in the classroom, and every teacher is reaping the results of it. And I thought man, I might not be too friendly to the union, but by golly, I give an award to that guy for saying exactly the point. You know probably why, because he probably was a teacher and he saw the disruption.

The only good thing I can say about this is if this happens and they knock the home schooling movement and you have to send your kids to school, the silver lining in the cloud is that the classroom is so disruptive they’re not going to learn anything anyway, so if they try to indoctrinate them with stuff the kid’s never going to get it.

Our time is up.