Clough Dispensations Lesson 4
The Dispensation of Human Government
Turn to Genesis 6:7, by way of review we have been working with the sections of Scripture on a dispensational basis and we’re going to take a dispensation a night, hopefully, our objective being to work through the entire Scripture and give you a framework. I’ve been asked to give this series primarily because so many people are fouled up when it comes to interpreting the Word of God and the reason why is that they don’t have the overall plan of movement of the Scripture, and unless you see this you are either bound to do (1) say there is contradictions in the Scripture, or (2) bound to misapply truth, such as the Church Age lives by the golden rule, such as the church lives by keeping the Ten Commandments and all the rest of the stuff that indicates that you do not know dispensations.
So the dispensation of human government; it begins in Genesis 6:7 and works through Genesis 12:1. This is the section of Scripture that has to do with this dispensation. So that’s the Scripture involved and the chief characteristic, remember on each dispensation we’re handling four things; the Scripture, the chief characteristic, the amount of revelation and the things that do not change. So Scripture is Genesis 6:7 through Genesis 12:1.
The chief characteristic of this dispensation: God has delegated authority for man to execute God’s judgment. In other words, human government is characterized by a delegation of authority. God has delegated, you might say authority and responsibility to the human race to execute His judgments. Now this is a fundamental, fundamental basic understanding of government. If you don’t understand this point you might as well forget it, any time it comes to any issue with respect to the government, because this is absolutely sine quo non as far as understanding what the Biblical position is on government, and therefore since everything seems to be involved in government, understanding where we stand in the United States, and also how we should look upon different issues.
So the chief characteristic of this dispensation is that God has delegated authority to man to execute God’s judgments. And this is epitomized by capital punishment. Now this dispensation, we have the broad category of Gentile dispensations, consisting basically of three, we have the dispensation of innocence, we have the dispensation of conscience, and now we have the dispensation of human government. There’s a catastrophe that divides each dispensation from the next one; the catastrophe that divided the dispensation of innocence from the dispensation of conscience was the fall of man and the cursing of creation. The catastrophe that divides the dispensation of conscience from the dispensation of human government is the worldwide global flood. Now the global flood is given in Genes 6:7 and following, and if you have doubts as to its universality, I can now refer you to an article that I wrote in Creation Research Society quarterly, September, 1969, and I go into it in detail there, so I don’t think it’s necessary to worry about whether the flood is global, it obviously is. And no one has ever proved, as I showed in that article, no one has ever proved that the flood is local from the Bible.
Beginning in Genesis 8:21, after the flood, “And the LORD smelled a sweet savor; and the LORD said in His heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake;” now it’s significant that he uses the word “curse” here because this draws attention to the fact that the flood elevated or escalated the curse given originally at the fall of man. This curse came to its fruition at the judgment of the flood. In other words, what God is saying here in Genesis 8:21 is that “I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake;” in other words, God cursed the ground in Genesis 3, but then in Genesis 6-8 when He flooded the earth, that represents the culmination of the highest level of cursing that God placed upon the earth.
You can see this and this is one of the many, many arguments for the universality of the flood, you can see this is you’ll just take a piece of graph paper, you can prove this to yourself by just simply taking a piece of graph paper and taking the x axis here as equal to the generation number, and then take the y axis and let this equal the age at death. And then take the data from Genesis 5 and Genesis 11 and you plot this on a piece of graph paper and you get a series of points like this. The flood is here, and if you connect the line of best fit through all the points, all the data points before the flood you get a straight line of best fit at 930, meaning that the median age at death was 930; that was the lifespan of people before the flood. And then after the flood you find the data rapidly decrease but they decrease exponentially, like this, down to an age of 70, and that is the longevity after the flood. Now people have often said oh, that’s just a calendar change or something. I think I can prove that it can’t be a calendar change because if it were a calendar change you wouldn’t get that characteristic curve; that curve is known in science, it’s called an exponential decay curve, and it only occurs when you move from one equilibrium to another equilibrium, it could be chemical equilibrium, it could be electrical equilibrium, biologic equilibrium or any other kind of imaginable equilibrium.
So therefore this kind of curve is very highly suggestive that these ages back here are literal, intended to be literal because I cannot conceive of a rabbi in the 5th century BC sitting down with a slide rule and working out exponential decay curve; it strains my imagination. So therefore this data is real and not made up, therefore it reflects a real condition and therefore we find that in the antediluvian period God held off cursing the earth to its full extent until the flood and the flood came and wiped out and destroyed civilization, so thoroughly in fact that it’s my opinion that most of the data or all of the data that you think of when you think of ancient history is all postdiluvian, there is not a remain of man, not a remain of civilization at all of any antediluvian time, so that what you hear about the pyramids in Egypt, what you hear about ancient civilization are all post-flood, not before the flood, for the flood itself is responsible for the deposition of most of the strata of the earth. That’s the only way you can fit the geological records of the Bible.
So here we then have God cursing the land and He will not curse this any more; in other words, the cursing is not going to increase; the flood was the last time He escalated the curse, so that from this point on in history, and by the way, as far as the date of the flood is concerned, the problem is that we don’t know for sure whether the genealogies are absolutely intact in Genesis, that is are they continuous, so we could posit a date anywhere from 2800 BC to say, something in the order of 7,000 BC. And don’t let this bother you, those of you who are interested in radioactive dating and so on, we have a whole series of tapes where we go into that. But the curve here mentioned means that we will not have to worry about the environment deteriorating any further, except one factor and that one factor is ourselves, namely that if the environment deteriorates, such as Los Angeles, where you can’t see your hand in front of your face, then that is due to man’s silliness and his inability to use his environment wisely. So we can pollute the environment, but as far as God is concerned He’s not going to curse it any more.
Genesis 8:21, “I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth,” now that sounds a little incongruous, those two phrases. Here God is promising not to curse the land any more, and yet right away, He goes and turns and in the next sentence He says “for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” Now how do you connect those two sentences together; they sound like they’re going in opposite directions. Well, the reason is that God has said that since man’s heart is evil, therefore since you have a sin nature, I have a sin nature, and we have an inclination to sin, a total inclination to sin, by the way, don’t apologize, the Bible has the doctrine of total depravity meaning there is no morally good thing to man. That doesn’t mean man is junk, it doesn’t mean he’s not valuable, but it does mean that we are essentially running in 180 degree direction from God’s will. And this is our nature to do this. So therefore in verse 21 God is simply announcing that because this is our nature, He would have to judge every generation like He did in the flood, and He can’t do that, so therefore what He’s saying is that I hold off all global judgment.
I’m going to hold off all global judgment. And this is the key now for why you have human government developed; it’s directly linked with these statements that happen after the flood here. The flood is not going to come again because God does not want to globally judge the world again; after that promise, you say well all right, then how is sin going to be restrained; it’s fine for God to sit around and say oh, I’m not going to judge any more but then the perceptive observer will immediately ask the question, well that’s great but what do we do to stop the sin of man? Well, God has a solution and that comes out in this chapter.
Therefore He says in Genesis 8:22, continuing, “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” In other words, here is where we have the Biblical doctrine of the uniformity of nature. Now you have to contrast this, particularly those of you who are taking science courses, you must contrast this with the anti-Biblical doctrine of uniformity. The anti-Biblical doctrine of uniformity says that the universe is always uniform in its basic structure. But in verse 22 God says the universe is uniform from this point in history on down to another point in history denoted by the Second Advent of Christ. Between these two points in time the doctrine of uniformity does hold, but the doctrine of uniformity cannot be applied either to the right or the left of that line. If you move to the left of that point and you begin to speculate on primal earth history, assuming the doctrine of uniformity, you are making an assumption that is invalid from the Scriptural point of view.
This basically is the answer that Bible-believing Christians have toward physical systems of analysis of primal history, namely that these systems are all predicated on the assumption that nature is always uniform and we don’t make that assumption. We claim the Bible reports an event had happened back here that would undercut that assumption, and therefore it’s fallacious to try to discredit the Bible by assuming something the Bible says is false and then turning around and saying the Bible is wrong. It’s like saying I tell you 2 and 2 is 4 and you start out 2 and 2 is 5 and then you disprove me; well I started out in a different place than you did so naturally we’d come up with different answers, so it is not a logical refutation when one says, therefore, that carbon 14 and other forms of dating disprove the Bible. They don’t disprove the Bible, it’s impossible logically to disprove the Bible unless you take this assumption into consideration, which is automatically eliminated when people do these dating schemes.
So this is an important verse because this establishes true uniformity. Uniformity is a valid assumption that we can make in studying the real universe around us, within these two points, within the points of God’s judgment here and God’s judgment over here. But to extend the doctrine of uniformity either to the right or the left of that line is to assume something the Bible says is false and inevitably you’re going to get in trouble. So don’t be hoodwinked into making this assumption. This is an assumption that silently is made by all the people all the time it seems like, and people aren’t aware they’re making this assumption, and I say you can’t make it, not only I say but God says here in verse 22.
Genesis 9:1, “And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth.” Now here you have the reinstatement of Genesis 1:28 and this will be summarized, when we finish this human government tonight and I’ll show you that principles from one dispensation carry through on down through history, so that as you get this picture of the Bible, since we’re going to take one of these dispensations every night, you’ll see the whole sweep of the Bible and it’s a good way to sort of fit this in your mind, in your thinking. God blessed Noah and He repeats the admonition of Genesis 1:28.
Genesis 9:2, “And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moves upon the earth, and upon all the fish of the sea; into your hand are they delivered.” Now this represents a fundamental difference in man’s interaction with the animal kingdom. There’s a fundamental difference here, and again you see, we’re involved with uniformity, namely that evolution and the evolutionist today all presume that the ecology, that is the relationship of the plant and animal kingdom is basically a constant and the Bible says no, that’s not true, it’s not basically a constant; it’s a constant from verse 3 on, that’s when it’s a constant but you have no right to say that, for example, the present balance of nature in which man is carnivorous was always true. You have no right to say that. All you can say, the Bible says is that this is a good assumption, back to this point, but in back of this time that’s a wrong assumption to make and you’ll misread all the data if you’re making that assumption.
So in Genesis 9:3, “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.” So here we have man’s authorization to be carnivorous, and here we find that man now terrifies the animal kingdom; the animal kingdom no longer is a partner with man but the animal kingdom becomes the hunted victim of man.
Now there are reasons why this switch occurs. I believe one of the reasons is very logical and that is that in the postdiluvian world in which we live, this side of the flood, the whole structure of the earth is shifted so that now the earth is not as luxurious in its vegetation as it was, which therefore means that if man is survived his nutrition much come, such as protein, his protein needs have to be furnished by animal meat rather than just by plants. Evidently there’s a high protein content in the plants that antedated the flood.
Now we have a strange verse in Genesis 9:4, “But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.” Now this is a greatly misunderstood verse, very difficult to really master what the content here is, but life and blood are tied up in Scripture. Now here’s why; those of you who were not here when we dealt with the doctrine of anthropology, let me just develop the word “life.” The word “life” or “living” in the Bible does not have the definition that we apply when we use the word “life” in the English language of the 20th century. When we use the word “life,” because we’ve had biology courses and so on, we’re taught that basically the word “life” is to be attached to any organic system. That is, you separate animals and plants so that if you have a hierarchy, if we say we list the hierarchy of creation and make out little list from top to bottom and on the top we put God, under Him we have angels, under angels we have men, under men we have animals, under animals we have plants, and under plants we have machine. If we have that hierarchy, we are used to, in the 20th century of saying that the boundary between life and non-life is between machines and plants; anything above that line is living; anything below that line is non-living material. Now that’s basically the way the word “life” is used in our English language.
That is not the way it is used in the Bible. To the Bible authors life was right here; plants are not considered to have a soul and therefore are not considered life in the technical word that the Bible uses, as it uses its words, so watch out for that. This is why you can have people eating plants before the fall and not have death; this is why you can have people eating plants before the flood and so on and not have death. Life in the Bible means, it’s a technical expression that refers to the fact that you have a union of the spirit and the material, so that you have matter, that is flesh, plus spirit, equals life; the body without the spirit is dead. Now that’s an important thing to remember because sooner or later someone is going to come up to you and say, oh what do you think about creating artificial creation of life in the test tube. I’m asked this, quite often in fact, and I just simply say what do you want me to say, that I’m shocked. Of course I’m not because I expect it to happen, but I say that doesn’t bother me in the least because that’s not life according to the Bible. That is an organic system that’s being created in the test tube, virus and so on, but that is not a union of matter and spirit as the Bible speaks of; it’s not animal life, it would be more like plant life, so it has nothing to do with the Bible’s creation of life.
So this is what the word “life” means. You see, this is why you have to study the Bible in context; you can’t just come tearing in at sixty miles an hour and grab a word and go on, you’ve got to study these things in context.
Now blood, Genesis 9:4 says “the life thereof, which is the blood thereof,” in other words, this life, matter plus spirit, this life is tied into the blood. Why? The Bible is not so crude as to believe that the blood is the life; it’s not saying that; it’s saying that the blood and the life are tied together.
The reason it does this, and by the way,
you can prove that it doesn’t mean that life is identical to the blood because
life is said to exist in the resurrection body and the resurrection body has no
blood, so the Bible is not equating life with the blood. But what life means, and why it’s tied and
linked with blood is this reason. If you
go back to Jesus Christ’s careful teaching when He rose from the dead and His
remarks that He made that are recorded in the Gospel of Luke, they answer this
problem; namely, when the disciples saw Jesus in His resurrection body they
thought He was a spirit because He had risen from the dead, and He was
alive. And this is the natural tendency,
and it is the tendency for the modern 20th century
So here we’ve got matter, plus spirit, that’s our present situation. In our resurrection body you have matter plus spirit. And you say well what’s the difference? The difference recorded in 1 Corinthians 15 is that the resurrection body is minus blood; our present body, plus blood. Why? Because our natural body, as Paul says, the soulish or psuchikos body in 1 Corinthians 15 is dependent upon the physical environment. This body, the soulish body, that’s why it’s called soulish, is dependent utterly upon the physical environment; the resurrection body is independent of a physical environment.
Let me illustrate this: what does blood do in the body? Basically blood is a transport system; it has only one basic function and that is to exchange oxygen for CO2, it moves between the lungs and the tissue; for this purpose it moves between the GI tract and the tissue for nutrition and waste. So the blood is a transfer mechanism and it basically has as its job to provide us with material from the surrounding environment and to discard waste material into the environment. So therefore this is the one big feature of our natural body, and it’s the blood because this is the one feature of the body that speaks on its utter dependency on the physical environment, whereas the resurrection body doesn’t have blood because the resurrection body is not dependent upon the environment.
Now what does this mean as far as verse 4 is concerned? It means that when blood is shed that you have ruined a body for the indwelling of that spirit, you’ve ruined it. It no longer serve as a vehicle for the incarnate human spirit, or in the animal spirit in this case. The body, you’ve just smashed the whole thing and so when blood is spilt it means you’ve rendered the natural body incapable of performing its function, namely sustaining the human spirit. So this is why body and blood are identified in Scripture.
Genesis 9:5, “And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man. [6] Whoso sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God made He man.” Now there’s two things to notice about this and I don’t think you could miss it if you just read slowly through verse 5. Who is doing the requiring? It’s God, not the community and not the society. This is not saying that capital punishment is community vengeance. I don’t know how many times I discuss this with people and they always think that because I advocate capital punishment I’m parading around revenge tactics. That’s not what I’m saying; I’m saying what Reformation Christianity said, John Calvin, what this verse says; that is, that God has delegated the responsibility for judgment upon man and in verse 6 where you see, “Whoso sheds man’s blood, by man,” now that word “man” in verse 6 refers to humanity as a whole, not individual.
This is not, in verse 6, an authorization for one person to take vengeance upon another person. That’s not what verse 6 is saying. Verse 6 is saying that God has given to humanity at large the judicial right to take life. Now that’s what it’s saying; it’s not authorizing individual…this is not short-circuiting, in other words, due process; this is government. And here you have the basic installation of government; it’s at verse 6 where in the Bible human government first appears, because it’s here first where you have man given the duty of executing judgment.
Now do you see why this fits logically with the context? What have we just had? A flood. What was the promise coming out of the flood? That I won’t curse the earth again, that I won’t judge the earth again, namely that God has turned off His powerful types of judgment and so the only kind of judgment left is for human government to carry on in place of God, until God gets ready to break into history again. So human government has been set up in a capacity to execute God’s judgment in lieu of God doing the judging directly. So here is the basis for government.
The second thing to notice beside the fact that it is God that does the requiring and not society, the second basic thing to notice is that man’s life, in verse 6, is said to be higher than the angels. Both man and animal are living but only man, not animals, is said to be in the image of God. Now what do we mean when we say that man is in the image of God. Now this is something that we, as Christians, have to be careful of. We hold to the doctrine that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God,” that is, all men have sinned, but that does not mean all men have lost their image. If you will compare, for example, James 3:9 where James says men are still created in the image of God.
The image of God, as best I can tell from Scripture includes the following: it includes volition, it includes conscience, it includes personal affections and it includes rationality and memory. These are features about man that God alone possesses. Animals do not possess, for example, the power to reason through things; in a programmed sense they do but not in the sense that man has. Animals do not need personal relationships; they have sexual relationships but not personal relationships, or they have herd relationships but herd relationships are not personal as far as the Bible is concerned. Conscience, and here is the sense of right and wrong and man alone has this. For example, one physiological feature of man that absolutely separates him from the animal kingdom, man is the only animal that cries, a very strange feature; you can’t find any other animal in the animal kingdom that cries. Why? Because this is a basic feature expressing this imagehood of God. Volition, here you have man actually choosing, he’s independent of his environment, unlike an animal. An animal is driven by instinct to do things. You’ve seen this, if you’ve raised animals you know they are driven by instinct to do certain things. But man is not driven by instinct; man has volition and he chooses; sometimes it would be better if he was driven by instinct. But nevertheless, man does have this freedom of choosing, and this is what the Bible means by imagehood.
Therefore in verse 6 what God is saying is that I require judgment; I authorize man to do this, and the reason why, and this is the second feature, the reason why I do this is because of the preciousness of man’s life. Man’s life is very precious to God, even the life of a fallen man is still precious in God’s sight. And this you can’t forget. Don’t look upon the unbeliever as a piece of junk. The unbeliever is still a brother in Adam, and he’s still made in the image of God and no matter how fouled up and no matter how many hang-ups he has, he’s still is the image of God. He’s a sinner yes, doomed forever, yes, but he still is made in the image of God and therefore precious. So in verse 6, the second feature that I want you to see is that capital punishment was given not to degrade the value of life, it was given because of the value of life; precisely the opposite. So when the people are always shouting and raving and ranting against capital punishment, they say this is a primitive institution, this is demeaning to the human race, to human dignity. And yet in the Scripture the reason why it’s given is because of human dignity. The shoe is precisely on the other foot; people do not understand this.
So here we then have the institution of capital punishment, and I might add as a principle to this, it’s interesting in our society that the usual fundamentalist gets all upset because he sees some ramifications in the sexual realm that are out of line, and yet the same Christian will stand by and let violence, violence, violence, murder and everything else all around the place and that somehow isn’t sinful. Now what right does fundamentalism have to make a sexual thing that’s sinful worse than a murder; where do you find that in Scripture. You can’t. And if you’re going to pick on something, pick on murder, that’s the thing you pick on; you don’t pick on some sex thing. These are wrong, I’m not condoning these in any way, but let’s get our priorities Biblical and not traditional. I don’t call this the Bible belt any more, I call it the tradition because everybody has these traditions, they think they get from the Bible; they’re not in the Bible. They just have heard them; their grandparents heard them and they heard them and so everybody does them but nobody asks why? Well, they’re not in the Bible. A big strong point here is that murder is a big issue, and violence.
Now let’s look down to Genesis 9:13, “I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between Me and the earth.” Now basically this is a hint once again that the doctrine of uniformity is valid only back to this point, because what this is saying is that there was no rainbow before the flood. Now we know physically what is necessary for a rainbow, namely the fact to get a rainbow, that is to get a rainbow with all the color spectrum in it, your raindrops have to be equal to three-tenths of a millimeter, or larger, the diameter of them; you must have droplets suspended in air that are at least three-tenths of a millimeter across, or larger. If you would suspend drops that are smaller than this you’ll get optical effects, white and so on, but you won’t get the full spectrum dispersion that you get with these larger diameter droplets.
Now significantly to get rain you have to have a droplet of approximately four-tenths of a millimeter in diameter; you have to get a droplet about that size before you can get it to fall. So here, then, is a strong hint which I feel again shows the inspiration of the Bible and that these people were really reporting things that God said and didn’t make this up, because no person back then would have had the physical knowledge to say the kind of thing that is said here, about the rainbow being put in the cloud, and the same thing that was said back in verse 22 where the hint is given that seasons began. Now in order to get rain you have to have vertical motion in the atmosphere; you have to have all sorts of turbulent overturning and this can only be brought about by a temperature difference between the pole and the equator. And it’s strongly suggested in verse 22 that if seasons begin here, then seasons are a reflection of a polar equated temperature [can’t understand word], which evidently also did not occur before this. The reason this is the first mention, not of day and night, but it’s the first mention of seasons and so on in the Bible.
And the third hint in this chain of evidence is found back in Genesis 2:5 where it says it did not rain. And I put all these together and say that these are not just accidents; these people were not clever enough in that time to understand the mechanisms of meteorology; but when you put all these things together you come out with a physically consistent picture; namely that there was no rain before the flood, there was an entirely different type of atmospheric motion and so on. And after the flood you have the present system take over and operate.
So this, then, is the key chapter on the institution of government. Now I want to take you to some other verses to try and sharpen up our definition of human government so there won’t be any confusion about this. Turn back to Genesis 4:14. In Genesis 4:14-15 we have sort of what appears at first glance, when you first read this text it appears like it’s a random thing, something just happens, just got stuck there in the text. But if you put this together with what we’ve just read, all of a sudden you get a tremendous picture of what happens. Here in verse 14, here’s Cain talking to God. “Behold, thou hast drive me out of this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hidden; and I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that any one that finds me shall slay me. [15] And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever ever slays Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.” Now here God is not allowing Cain to be killed. Now why is this, this shift? Because here you have no human authority constituted to execute this capital a punishment.
But notice in verse 17, “And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bore Enoch: and he built a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch.” Now this is significant; what do you have to have to have a city? You have to have organization, you have to have some sort of social structure. So now watch what’s happening here. The Bible is making a distinction that the modern mind never makes. I’ll guarantee that you’ve never seen this distinction before. The Bible is distinguishing between social organization and government. Now today we identify those two things as though they’re one unit. That’s not what the Bible is doing; they had social organization back in Genesis 4 but they did not have government. Now what’s the difference? Social organization means that people specialize. If you have some sort of a social organization, let’s say you have a ballgame with rules; that’s social organization. But you have no way to enforce the rules; that’s government. So now that’s the difference; social structure means you’ve got rules all right, but the lack of government means you can’t enforce the rules, and it’s the enforcing of the rules that begins in Genesis 9. There is where man has been given the right, even to take life, if necessary, to enforce rules.
This is something that government is not; government is not talking about social organizations. Government in the strictly narrow sense of the word means the right to judge, the right to execute judgment. Now do you see something? Do you see something radical here that’s utterly against most modern thinking about government? Most modern people think of government as the means of bringing about social order, of the means of developing society and yet the Bible doesn’t ascribe that function to government at all, not at all. The Bible ascribes social organization and the advance of society to the individuals in the unit to getting together, but government itself is strictly a negative thing, it judges, judges, judges, judges, and can’t do anything but. Now that’s a radical concept to our time. Now it never was until the 19th and 20th centuries but in our day that is a fundamental concept that 99 out of 100 people know nothing of, that government is a negative thing brought into existence by God to execute judgment.
Now let’s look at another passage, Leviticus 24:17, “And he who kills any man shall surely be put to death.” The Mosaic Law reiterated the principle of capital punishment. Let’s go on to Numbers 35:33, “So you shall not pollute the land wherein ye are; for blood defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.” “…by the blood of him that shed it?” Now this is where you want to exercise a little discernment, I’ve just gotten hold of the latest issue of Life’s big history books, one is called Cradle of Civilization and in the back of this book they have a quick summary of law and it’s a quick one all right, in fact the person who wrote it must have read about five minutes because he talks about the laws and the codes of Babylon and so on, and he starts slamming these things as unduly primitive and makes all sorts of…he misstates the Mosaic Law, in one sentence, it’s amazing how many errors could be compacted in one sentence; I take that back, the author must have spent two hours figuring out how he could have so many errors in one sentence. First of all they misstate the Law of Moses; second, they misdescribe the code of Hammurabi, they misdescribe that so there’s two errors in one sentence. And then they continue on and deny the Mosaic Law had any due process in it. And I had just gotten through here at least three nights going through the due process of the Law in the Old Testament. This is all in one sentence, I didn’t even bother to read the next one; this is three errors, massive errors, absolutely inexcusable errors, even on the part of a liberal scholar, absolutely inexcusable. So this is the kind of stuff that we get bombed with, Life and Time Magazine. Those magazines are very important because what Life and Time are saying is what basically the culture is saying, and if you understand what they’re saying you understand how our culture is going, but when they make this statement, that is the image that the average school teacher, for example, has.
Now Romans 13:4-6, this is to show you that
capital punishment was not knocked out by the New Testament. It was again reiterated. Speaking of the government official, “For he
is the minister of God to thee for good.
But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he bears not the sword
in vain; for he is the minister of God, an avenger to execute wrath upon him
that doeth evil.” Now look, who is this
epistle written to? Romans. What does
the sword mean to someone who lived in
Now turn to Revelation 19:17-21, here’s the end of human government. Here is where God at last takes the reigns of judgment back into His own hands, after waiting century after century after century after century in His mercy and letting history unroll land unroll and unroll, letting men kind of foul up and go along but try to executed judgment in His stead, now Jesus Christ takes that power of judgment back into His own hand and you have this dramatic picture here in Revelation 19. “And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying, to all th fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God, [18] That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses and of them that on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and slave, booth small and great. [19] And I saw the beast, and the kings of the earth, and their armies, gathered together to make war against him that sat on the horse, and against his army. [20] And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before him, with which he deceived them that had received the mark of the beast,” and so on, and here you have the climactic judgment at the Second Return of Christ and here in history is where Christ, as the God-man takes the judgment to Himself. And now He is the One, from this point on in history, that authorizes and handles all the judgment.
But not until this point, not until Revelation 19 is man excused from this job that he has to do; nasty job it is. Remember of the four divine institutions, what are they? Volition; marriage; family, government, of those four institutions government, the fourth one, is the only one instituted after the fall. It is deliberately instituted after the fall because of sin, whereas the other ones, volition, marriage and family, were instituted before the fall and in that sense not related to sin.
Now what can we say about the amount of revelation available. I think we’ve pretty well seen that this dispensation, what it is like, the characteristic, I think you see that this characteristic persists on down through history, beyond the formal end of that dispensation. Let’s see what they knew back in this dispensation. They knew two things, two basic groups of statement. One, they knew what the other dispensations knew, again going back to this diagram, let’s draw those three again, innocence, conscience and human government. The people that lived in innocence, only two, Adam and Eve, but nevertheless there are people living there. The dispensation of conscience, maybe a million people or so lived in there, and so this point in here, all these people plus Adam and Eve, knew certain things that God had revealed. Now those revelations from God still carry over into the next dispensation in history.
What are they? First, the command to reproduce; the command that the human race was to diversify. Secondly, the command to subdue the earth carries over into human government. This is manifested today by science and technology; the Bible is not anti-scientific. Three, they knew a knowledge of God’s judgment; they knew experientially about this, they lived through the flood, they knew what judgment was and they never forgot it. And the fact that God instituted human government means that they had an experiential know of government and prophecies that Enoch preached, they knew that there was going to be judgment in the future. So judgment was known to them. They also knew a knowledge of grace from the promises of salvation. These people were saved just as you and I were saved.
Let me give you a little diagram that’ll keep you straight on salvation in all the dispensations; if you’re confused on how people were saved in the Old Testament, just remember a simple chart. First, there are four things that you to remember. First the basis of salvation; second, the means of appropriating salvation; third, the object of faith; and the fourth one is revelation about that object, the amount or revelation that is to be believed. So you see, the basis of salvation, the means that salvation is appropriated, that is faith, the object of that faith, and the revelation about the object; if I’m going to believe I’ve got to know something about it.
Now watch, the basis of salvation in every dispensation is Jesus Christ’s cross. There is no change in the basis of salvation. Those of you who’ve gotten Ryrie’s book, Dispensationalism Today, you’ll see this in there, it’s a tremendous summary, and don’t buy this jazz that people say, oh you dispensationalists have seven ways to be saved. That’s nonsense; the basis of salvation is always the cross. Future, yes, looking forward to it, hoping it would happen, yes, but still it was the cross. Secondly, the means was always faith. Remember Adam last time, how did he get saved? Adam was a lost man. How did He get saved? Because God, Jesus Christ in His preincarnate form stood there and said you see that woman, she is going to be the mother of all living, she is going to be the one who through whom I will bless the world, and Adam said I believe it, and Adam was saved. Faith, so you have the means of salvation, always the same. The object of salvation is always God the Son. And finally the revelation, this changes and increases from dispensation…so the only thing that increases from dispensation to dispensation is the revelation of Jesus Christ. It gets clearer and clearer as history goes on, but that is not to say that these people back here didn’t believe on the Lord Jesus Christ in the sense that they believed in the promises, by faith, on the basis of the cross, and that’s how every person was saved. So just remember that, this is how these people were saved.
So they had a knowledge of grace and also the fifth thing that they had, they had a knowledge of death. So they knew all these old things carried over from these previous dispensations; the command to reproduce, the command to subdue the earth, knowledge of judgment, knowledge of grace, and the knowledge of death. These they inherited from their forefathers living in the other dispensation. But now they had new things and the basic new thing was that man is to execute God’s judgment, that is, they now became aware of human government. Notice again, those of you who have gone to school and have been crammed, just saturated with this concept of social evolution, evolution of forms and institution, throw it out, that’s a wrong concept. Institutions did not evolve, they were given from heaven by God.
Two, and this is important in our time and
it’s found in Genesis 11; there are two little hitches besides the knowledge of
government, they had two little hitches about the limitations of government,
and they apply to us as believers today.
One principle is found in Genesis 11.
So not only did they inherit these five areas of doctrine from their
forefathers but now in their age of human government they had available to them
this new information about the institution of government. Genesis 11:1-9, “And the whole earth,” this
is the postdiluvian world, our world, “the whole world was of one language, and
of one speech.” One part of that
language still holds today and we call it mathematics. [2] “And it came to pass, as they journeyed
from the east, that they found a plain in the
And here you have one of the most profound moments in history, a moment that is mysterious to all the students of language, the confounding of the linguistic structure of man’s communication, the confounding of his culture and basically in the same chapter, the racial differences also originate in this general time period, different colored races and so on. So you have the diversification of the human race at this point. Why? Now remember, there’s a reason for the design. When a guy designs something he’s just not designing it because he likes it. God is the reason for this, and when you hear this jazz that we all got to get together in one big fat world government, and we’re going to have peace and everything else, and everything will be great, just remember, the cultural, linguistic and racial divisions have been put into the race for safeguards. Safeguards, not to cause men to have problems but to prevent him from having problems.
You see, our generation is just totally confused. Our culture is basically totally anti-Biblical. In every number of issues it’s going in exactly the opposite direction. I just said capital punishment, people say capital punishment is primitive, the Bible says it’s elevation, it’s glorifying humanity. Our generation says these divisions are evil; the Bible says the divisions are good. Do you see where we’re going? And this is why you have to know the Bible, and this is why the most important thing for you to know is the Bible. Don’t buy the fact, like some people, oh if I’d just get an education everything will be right. If you get an education everything will be wrong if it’s not founded on the Bible. So if you have to choose between an education and the Word of God, you get the Word of God, never mind the education; you can pick that up any time. And some of the most brilliant people in this world are self-educated individuals. So if you have to choose, you choose the Word of God over the education.
So here we have then Genesis 11, the first
limitation, that God…it is not, repeat, it is not God’s will for world government in this age. It is not God’s will for world government in
this age! Why? There’s a reason, He’s not a nasty nasty up
there flapping His hands and saying I’m [can’t understand words] now that’s not
God. There’s a serious issue here. The issue is this, and the best illustration
I can think of is the holds of a ship.
When designers first had the concept of the open hull, and these ships
began to go across the
In other words, He has quarantined, He has
put a type of quarantine into the race so that the disease will not spread
fast. Sometimes it will spread, and
Satan even, in the tribulation is going to do his best to avoid this
problem. Communism in our day has tried
desperately to dig two holes; do you know what those two holes are? The culture of
So this is important to remember, that
efforts directed in this attempt toward world government are bound to fail and
while we oppose them is the fact that it is a waste of time and money and in
trying to promote world government you actually will induce suffering. You will cause suffering. If we didn’t have the United Nations fooling
around in
The second limitation on government is found in the classical passage of Matthew 22:21, so you have the first limitation on this institution, that it is to be restricted to cultural units; that is, if you want to use the phrase, although in some areas it has a nasty overtone, and that’s why I don’t like to use it, is nationalism, because people have misused that term. The Bible is nationalistic in the good sense, not in the bad sense. The gospel is not nationalistic in other words, in the bad sense, it’s universal. But as far as government is concerned it is.
Now in Matthew 22:21, this is the famous
passage, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesars, and unto
God the things that are God’s.” And what
Jesus is simply saying is that somewhere Christian in your mind you’d better
have thought this out because some day you’re going to be called upon to choose
it; somewhere in your mind you should have the criteria clearly drawn as to the
allegiance that you have to Jesus Christ and the allegiance you have to your
country, and you’d better have the demarcation clearly drawn because some day,
such as what did not happen to the Christians in Germany in the 1930s when your
government adopts a policy of anti-Semitism, for example, as Nazi Germany did,
that should have been the tip off for every German Christian to say no, we want
nothing of this. That should have been a
tip off, but the Germans, you see, had become involved with liberalism, the
Bible was thrown out the window and so on.
See, it doesn’t pay to drop the Bible in the basket because you see what
happened. Those of you who heard Pike in
that debate, you saw what happened; you see the mess you have when you drop the
Bible? Horrible thing! And so
Now let’s summarize this together with the unchangeable thing. We’ve covered the following things we’ve picked up from older dispensations that are unchangeable. We found the nature of God and man is constant from innocence onward. We found verbal revelation is the same; man needs God’s Word, “man shall not live by bread alone but by every words that comes from the mouth of God.” Angelic conflict, plan of salvation remains the same. We found last time that we learned from the last dispensation that conscience is an insufficient base for social order. You remember what happened? They had anarchy before the flood; conscience alone cannot build a social order.
This is why in our present American
politics we have the right and the left, and this is why both extremes are bad
in one sense. Watch what happens. Here’s
the left; the left basically in
We also found long life span and a plush environment cannot be properly dominated by man; that was proved from before the flood. We found that culture was insufficient to satisfy man; that was proved before the flood. We found that angels cannot intermix with the human race, that was proved before the flood.
Now we add to those statements that we’ve already dealt with two more; in a sinful world man cannot even judge himself properly for God. You see, here’s an institution that God has brought about for man to take care of his own problems, you might say and man can’t even take care of his own problems. Once again demonstrating the fact that man is helpless before God. The second thing we would add is that judgment may be postponed by God but it is never permanently eliminated from the system. In other words, God may be saying to us in the 20th century, all right, I held off my judgment for some forty centuries, but don’t you think that I’m going to let it go. God does not cancel His judgment, He may postpone it. That, then, is what I would summarize as the basic thrust of the dispensation of human government, and I think you can see from this, although we’ve covered it and just very barely scratched on all the Bible has to say on government that you have a definite positive constructive philosophy of government in the Bible. Never say that fundamentalism is all negative; you have laid out for you here a very positive program of government in Scripture.