Clough Divine institutions Lesson 14

Divine Institution #4, - The Christian War

Turn to Deuteronomy 5; tonight we continue our study of the fourth divine institution. Again, by way of review, God in His design for the human race has provided what we call divine institutions for the preservation of that race. These are called divine institutions and not Christian institutions because they are valid for both believer and unbeliever. No matter who man is they must abide by these four divine institutions. One is volition, and that means human responsibility; both the believer and the unbeliever operate in that realm. The second one is the realm of marriage which is a type of Jesus Christ and the Church; family, a type of relation of the First Person of the Trinity with His creation, and finally we come to national government. National government is the only one of these four that is not a creation ordinance. The first three are all features of creation itself. Technically the fourth one is not; the fourth one is something that was imposed upon the human race after the flood and it was imposed for the specific purpose of judging evil.

We defined the fourth institution as the delegated authority given to mankind to judge its own evil until Christ returns. Following that definition out we developed the delegated authority last time by discussing the issue of capital punishment and showing that basically government is grounded on this; it’s not something miscellaneous. Capital punishment is the sign that God has delegated the authority which is only His to mankind as a whole in their program of judging evil until Christ returns.

We said that tonight we’d deal with war; I would like to only develop partially that, and save the entire development of the Biblical doctrine of war after we finish dealing with this definition, and when we do so then I think it falls into more neat perspective and is much smoother and fits better with the Scriptures and their logical flow. So following the definition again, last time we dealt with delegated authority and capital punishment as the manifestation of this. We also would like to comment before leaving that term “delegated authority” that we have to develop one point which is often misunderstood, and that is that although God has delegated the authority God has not delegated the specific form of government. And therefore many different forms of government can exist on earth; it is not like family or marriage. There are only one kind of marriage, only one kind of family that’s legitimate in God’s sight. However, there are many kinds of government that are legitimate in God’s sight and Biblical Christianity has always been open to all forms of government.

In fact, you would be surprised if you read through one of the great reformers, John Calvin, in his essay on civil government when he spoke of the three forms of government as monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. Some of you have been brought up in American education to bow before the idol of democracy will be shocked to hear John Calvin say the following: “It is true that the transition is easy from monarchy to despotism; it is not much more difficult from aristocracy to oligarchy,” that means rule by a favorite class, “but it is most easy of all from democracy to sedition. Either aristocracy or a mixture of aristocracy and democracy far excels all other forms of government.” And so it was a very wise pronouncement by one of the greatest reformers in church history. And of course he got this from his doctrine of total depravity. So delegated authority, then, can take many forms, however it is still delegated authority.

I would like now to comment on Deuteronomy 5:22 because at this point we want to bring this issue in, when we deal with the next part of the definition, which is to judge evil. Government is to judge evil. This involves two basic problems. First of all, in look at this definition, government judging evil, it means that government primarily is negative, not positive. With this point we sever all connections with most talk about government today because most people view government today as a means of bringing in a millennium. We do not believe this; we believe the Lord Jesus Christ is going to bring in the millennium; the role of government is a negative one, not a positive one. It is to judge evil, but in order to judge evil the government must first identify evil and then secondly punish evil.

So it seems that to follow this out there are two things; identification of evil and secondly they must have a form of punishing evil. And thus we say that government is founded on two great principles, law and power, and all government must have both. It must have law, it must have a set of criteria of separating the good from the evil and all government must have power. That means all governments must have a police and a military force, and any clergyman who denies government has a right to have police or is campaigning against the police as the National Council does regularly, and as they do against the military, these are apostate groups and against God’s Word. God’s Word says government must have power to enforce law. A government with law and no power will be destroyed tomorrow; a government with power and no law will destroy all of it subjects so you have to have these two in balance.

In Deuteronomy 5:22 we have one of the sources of law. “These words the LORD spoke unto all you assembly in the mount out of the midst of the fire, of the cloud, and of the thick darkness, with a great voice; and He stopped.” The phrase, “added no more” in the King James Version is equivalent in the Hebrew to “they stopped. And He wrote them in two tables of stone, and delivered them to me.” And then later on it goes on to point out that God later continued speaking to the nation Israel through the mediatorship of Moses. But the thing I want you to see is that law, the criteria that a government must have to identify good and evil has to come from somewhere. It just doesn’t materialize in thin air, it’s got to come from some place, and there are only four places that law can come from.

First, it can come directly from God, in that case you have what you’re looking at right now in verse 22; that was a time in history when the legislation of the nation Israel was given verbally by God through Moses direct and through the prophets. Now Israel’s government was unique in this respect. Our government has three functions, the executive, the legislative and the judicial. Israel did not have three functions in her government; she only had two, an executive and a judicial. Israel had no legislature because the Bible was her legislation. And so therefore we find an abnormality, you might say, to Israel’s government that shows this first great prime source of law, God’s Words. However, obviously God does not speak His words to all nations, and thus we are faced with the problem, what do the Gentile nations do for their law. They must do something indirectly. The Christians in Gentile nations must carry over the principles given by God in the rule of the theocracy and later on developed in the New Testament and develop their legislation based on these principles. So again we root law in God’s words, God’s revelation.

And then the second source of law also is from God. Now with that we must draw a radical line because the last two sources of law come from men. One is the theory that law comes from the state and the other is the theory that law comes from the individual. You are going to hear before the end of this sermon an interesting tape recording of the Black Panther conference of summer ago and you’re going to hear the forces of sedition that are operating. And I have particularly chosen on this tape the section in which the Black Panther party plus 300 other revolutionary organizations gathered in Oakland, California in July 18, 1969, gathered together to destroy the form of law in the United States by means of a series of schools for lawyers, especially training a cadre of lawyers to manipulate our court system and to destroy it. And so very obviously the revolutionaries of our time are interested in destroying law and rooting it in the individual or in the state. Both three and four emanate from man; one and two emanate from God. When this country was formed we basically had the idea that law came from two, and indirect; the Puritans were the people who had studied God’s Word and said that legislation must be grounded on God’s Word. Today, since particularly Oliver Wendell Holmes, we have moved to part three, when American legislation is now based on the state.

So we have this crucial question that we as Christians face: is law to emanate from God or is it to emanate from man. There’s no compromise, it’s either one or the other and so we’re immediately introduced in this problem to a controversy between liberalism and conservatism in our time and the Christian stand in this—the liberal/conservative controversy.

First, the conservative controversy: the conservatives believe basically that individuals are sovereign, and the conservative theory of government that is the individual who has his sovereign right and gives up that right voluntarily through entering into some sort of social contract, and therefore we as a people have given up our individual sovereignty to the United States government through the United States Constitution. This, basically, is the tradition of American politics and this, of course is the conservative position today. But if you will examine the premise of the conservative position you will find it to be apostate and anti-Biblical because they say that the source of law is the sovereign individual. We, as Bible-believing Christians cannot accept that. The sovereign individual is not the source of law, nor is the individual sovereign. God and God alone is sovereign and therefore we reject the premise behind the conservative attempt.

We come over to the liberal side; the liberal side will be articulated through such groups as communism, fascism and the various welfare state-ists operative in both of our political parties. Here the state becomes the source of law, not the individual is sovereign but the state itself is sovereign. And the state will give the law for all people; the people must be submissive to the state. However, again this is apostate and anti-Biblical because again you have man generating the law and not God and therefore the liberal theory of government is also apostate.

Therefore what is left? If both left and right are basically grounded on an apostate assumption that law comes from man and not from God, then where does the Christian stand? The Christian, therefore, has to develop his own concept of politics and based on the fourth divine institution. That is this, that God in society has created certain spheres; He has divine institution number one, volition; government cannot interfere with volition, that is God’s creation and no government is to coerce volition, that is something that God has created, that is something that the government can only control in its relation to other things but it cannot destroy it. Divine institution number two, marriage; the government of either the local, city, state or federal has no authority before God to move in and destroy marriage. Marriage is a viable institution from creation and therefore government is limited in this area. Government has no sovereignty in the area of marriage; government has no sovereignty in the area of volition. Furthermore, in divine institution number three, the government has no sovereignty over the family. The family cannot be destroyed by the government or encroached upon by the government. Therefore again we have the limitation of government power.

Other things that I will add and we will deal with later are such things as economics as we will develop from Isaiah and Deuteronomy. Economics—there are certain laws of supply and demand in the money system that are given by God at the point of creation and cannot be tampered with by the government unless the government wishes to destroy itself. Another area in which the government has a problem and must bow before the laws of God is in the consideration of natural resources. Natural resources are a creation from God and the government cannot destroy these natural resources. A further limitation upon government is education; education is the will of God for the human race when it means a creation of the divine viewpoint framework in the mentality of the soul. When Bible doctrine is taken in and is fed in so that the human spirit digests it and develops an educational framework, then again this is the creative will of God and the government cannot destroy this. Furthermore the arts and the sciences are grounded in Genesis 1:28 and following, and therefore this is an activity in human society over which the government has no sovereign. And finally, the last thing is the church; the church is a creation, the new creation of God and the government has no sovereignty in this area.

Therefore what is the sovereignty of the government? We might summarize by saying this: the government in judging evil has as its main task to judge the balance of power between all of these elements, between the first divine institution and the second; between the second and the third; between the third and economics, and between economics and natural resources, and education. In other words, the government has as its job to judge evil, evil being defined as when one of these outfits gets out of line with respect to the other one, but the government cannot change the form of any of these. It’s like this; if I give you ten blocks you can put those ten blocks into the form of a building, in the form of a house, in the form of anything; you can make different things with those ten blocks and that’s your right, and government can do this; they can shuffle the blocks but they can’t change the shape of the blocks, that’s the point and therefore the Biblical doctrine of government is that the government does not have sovereign right over the form of these basic created orders in society.

And so when we say that the government is negative, the government’s job…and if people would understand this we could recover as a nation within 10 to 15 years, if people would realize that these are sovereign spheres that God has set up and the government does not have power to change their form. The government does have power to, for example, deal with the problem of education versus the church; to maintain balances of power in this area, yes. But the government has not the option of destroying education, changing its form, mixing it into the church and so on. When you begin to grasp this concept you are going to see how far America has drifted from the Biblical ideals of government and we will show you in subsequent evenings every place that the United States government, and I’m not talking just at the federal level, has violated these areas you tend to get a reaping, a horrible result, not only physically but also spiritually because this inhibits the evangelism process and it inhibits the flow of the gospel. So this then is basically the outline of government.

Now we said one of the last parts of the definition of government was until Jesus Christ returns. And so if we look at history we find this: we find that God has a program for history and as far as we are concerned tonight, beginning with Noah. At Noah’s time God set up the fourth divine institution, in Genesis 9. At that time He gave man the sovereign power delegated to man to judge evil. At the tower of Babel He destroyed the first attempt at the United Nations; He destroyed the time to gather together in one world brotherhood all nations. This, of course, is anti-scriptural and this was destroyed at Babel and frustrated. Later on, however, God tried “operation Israel” with Abraham, in which He developed one culture and said I will reveal My words through this culture.

And so we have the beginning of Israel which lasted from about 2000 BC until 568 BC and the fall of the southern kingdom. In 721 BC the northern kingdom fell and in 586 the southern kingdom fell as a result of divine discipline. Ezekiel, in the book of Ezekiel, describes what happened in 586; among the horrible catastrophes that were visited upon that nation, we have people starving to death and all the rest but the horrible thing that Ezekiel records is the departure of the Shekinah glory. The glory of God has departed from the nation and immediately, simultaneous with the departure of the glory of God another man in another place begins to write a book. Ezekiel is watching the glory depart from the temple and while Ezekiel is watching the glory depart from the temple in the end of the theocratic kingdom in the Old Testament we have another young man who at that time is just out of his teens by the name of Daniel. And Daniel begins to write a book of the four visions of the Gentile kingdoms and so he begins to write of the Neo-Babylonian kingdom, the Persian kingdom, the kingdom of the Greeks and the kingdom of the Romans. And he says all of history will basically be explained in terms of one of these great four Gentile powers. Today we are in the time of the temporary collapse of the Roman influence. But we have these four great Gentile powers that will go on throughout history, therefore showing that the form of government will shift in strength and form throughout time with the dispensations. So we have to make this added thing, until Christ returns the governments are in the hands of men; they are going to make mistakes and we as believers must abide by those mistakes.

Now I would like to move to the first great area of the doctrine of government and that is the basis for a national group, the basis for a nation, and we are going to deal with the execution of the nation and so on, discipline upon the nation, but I’ve tried to summarize and we’ll be working through the book of Deuteronomy tonight as a model nation and show you principles from the book of Deuteronomy that give eight areas where a nation can be formed. And our position is this, that the Bible gives us insight into how to strengthen a nation. If any of these eight factors are tampered with the strength of the nation begins to decline, and thus when we play this tape of the Black Panther conference you will hear one of these points being destroyed and I think it will show you how it works.

Turn to Deuteronomy 3:18, this is an obvious principle of unity of a nation or the basis of a nation but still it’s worth looking at. This is the principle of geographical proximity; there must be a geographical proximity to that nation. In other words, you can’t have the nation strung out for thousands and thousands of miles along a narrow strip against which it can be easily defended and so forth. You have to have the nation close together geographically, and it was this fear that prompted the following in Deuteronomy 3:18-20, “And I,” that’s Moses, “commanded you,” Israel, “at that time, saying, The LORD your God has given you this land to possess it; ye shall go over armed before your brethren, the children of Israel, all that are meet for war. [19] But your wives, and your little ones, and your cattle (for I know that ye have much cattle) shall abide in your cities which I have given you, [20] Until the LORD has given rest unto your brethren, as well as unto you, and until they also possess the land which the LORD your God has given them beyond the Jordan…”

Geographically this was the situation. We have the eastern Mediterranean, we have the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee, and Moses had run up the east side; he had made certain military penetrations in Moab and Ammon and so on, and has basically destroyed Gentile power in this area. This ceded all this territory to the east of the Jordan Valley to Israel; three tribes were selected, actually two and a half, to dwell I this area east of Jordan. However, Moses faced a tactical problem at this time based on the principle of geographical proximity. He realized that in order to develop a strong nation he must keep its geographical proximity intact and not have it divided up. And so therefore he made an agreement with these two and a half tribes; he said look, you can keep your wives over here in a holding force to lay out your basic civilization and so on, but I do not want you to settle over here; I want you instead to take most of your young men and put them in the army and move over with Joshua westward across into the western area of the Jordan and use them to conquer the land. Later on you will see in the book of Joshua some problems that came up theologically because of even this rift; just the simple river Jordan dividing the land caused a theological controversy in the book of Joshua. So geographical proximity is very crucial and you must have geographical proximity in any national entity to develop its strength; its strength is based on geographical proximity.

The second principle, Deuteronomy 2:4, and this is the domination by one race. Now this doesn’t mean that one race excludes the other in rights; what I mean by domination, and let me be clearly heard at this point, domination by one race. I am talking about a large majority should be of one type of race for this reason. In Deuteronomy 2:4 you have the classical way the Old Testament refers to a nation. “And command thou the people, saying, Ye are to pass through the coast of your brethren, the children of Esau,” now Genesis 11 and 12 and 10 plus passages throughout the Old Testament, even in the New Testament, always call a nation by the father of that nation, the racial father of the nation, and so the term goia, that’s the way it looks in the Hebrew if you translate it into the English, goia or goiim, the goia, these people are actually a racial group, and so the nation of Edom was called the sons of Esau. Why? Not because everybody in that nation was of the genes of Esau; that’s not why it was called that; it just simply meant that here you had a majority, a race out of Esau, you had a group, Esau and everybody had the genes of Esau dominated this geographical area, and so you had strength in this area, such strength that it could be called you are “the children of Esau.”

Now we know, as a matter of fact, that Israel had all races in it; if you study the archeological frescoes of the Old Testament times you will see colored people, you will see Orientals, you will see people of all races living in the nation Israel, and the Old Testament never makes an issue out of it… never makes an issue out of race. But it does say Israel is Israel, and that’s significant because you know what Israel is? That’s a personal name, that’s not a name of a nation. Israel is the name of a man; it’s the name of Jacob. And therefore the very nation Israel testifies to the dominance of one race because everybody who has the genes of Jacob dominates this geographical area. And so therefore it’s called Israel. Why? Not because only this race dwells there but because this race is in the majority, this race has dominance in this geographical terrain. So therefore we find this principle in God’s Word and you can find this and test it for yourself by looking through the various areas of the concordance in the Old Testament.

And so this second principle, a domination of a nation by one race is crucial. This is why as much as it is glorified in high school history books, beware of the term “the United States is a melting pot of all peoples.” You cannot, on Biblical grounds, have a melting pot of all people without melting the pot and the point is that the United States can absorb many, many minorities but to remain strong as a nation and to be identified as a nation this nation must have some coherence racially. And so this is a principle of God’s Word. Now this has nothing to do with legislative rights before the law; it has nothing to do with that. I’m just citing a principle of history that it seems that from God’s Word and God’s viewpoint that nations are tended to be identified on the basis of racial proximity and so on.

Now the third principle that contributes to national strength; Deuteronomy 16:11. Here we move to a passage that explicitly states there are peoples of other races that live in the nation Israel, and so we come to the third principle. The third principle is that there must be a strong national feeling of belonging; there must be a feeling of belonging, regardless of the background of the person, whether he’s a recent émigré or not, he must have a sense of belonging to that country and it must be almost a cyclical sense. So in Deuteronomy 16:11 we have the ceremonies and the celebrations at the religious shrine, the temple of the nation Israel. And when these people would come together Moses says, “And thou shalt rejoice before the LORD thy God, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant, and thy maidservant, and the Levite who is within thy gates,” and the Levite there is a person who was the Bible teacher of that time, “and the stranger,” and the stranger is one perhaps of another race, a person who is outside of the national boundaries of Israel and so on, “and the fatherless, and the widow who are among you, in the place which the LORD thy God has chosen to place His name there. [12] And thou shalt remember that you were bondmen,” there’s a sense of belonging, these people, many of them, you might say from various diverse backgrounds, but when you worship, when you come together there should be a sense of belonging, or a feeling of togetherness. And so therefore the third principle that contributes to the generation of a nation is a common sense of belonging together.

The fourth principle is found in Deuteronomy 6 and that is a common way of thinking about life’s problems. Deuteronomy 6, a domination of similar ways of thinking about life. I’ve gone through this passage oftentimes from the standpoint of education and family, how you educate your children in the Word of God. Moses gives you one of the greatest hints that you’ll ever receive in Deuteronomy 6:7, “And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sit in thine house,” and if you grasp the force of this, this doesn’t mean that you necessarily have to read the Bible 24 hours a day; the point he’s saying here is that you will talk in terms of these commandments. In other words, the parent’s conversation in the home, this is the fourth reason, the parents conversation in the home should be dominated by the divine viewpoint they get from Scripture. So whether it’s talking about the latest news event or whether it’s talking about some other factor, the framework of the discussion is based on the Word of God, Biblical principles, and that’s what it means. And that is how the people in the Old Testament taught their children diligently. They taught them by constantly putting the problems inside of Biblical positions and it would be discussed in terms of a Biblical position.

But the point is, as you look at verses 8-9, this follows the great commandment of the Old Testament immediately. Verses 4-5 in this chapter, remember, are the great commandment of the Old Testament; isn’t it odd that right after this great commandment is given to the nation Moses says this. He knows that one of the principles of developing a strong nation is to develop a common way of thinking about life and the way to do it is through a common framework of thought. And so he instructs all parents to teach their children God’s Word, and this will produce a unity of thought. So the fourth great factor that contributes national strength is similar thinking about life. This is why when you have two very diverse cultures you never can build a strong nation because they have different values about different areas of life and it’s very difficult to bring these two together and have any sort of strong ties.

The fifth concept is found throughout the Old Testament, no particular verse, and that is a unity or dominance by one language. And this is the principle of Genesis 11, when God broke up the nations He did it linguistically. He confused their tongues; in other words, language becomes a source of division because language is the means by which you transmit thoughts. You can’t get away from it; if you switch language you switch your form of thinking. Those of you, some of you have already started studying foreign languages and if you really grasp a foreign language, and it’s hard, you struggle with it and struggle with it and struggle with it until finally you can begin to…when you get to that plateau in studying another language you’ll get to the point where you can think in terms of that other language and when you get there you’re on your way; there’s just a form of thinking. You talk to missionaries that are learning another language and they say this is a problem. You’ve got to start thinking in terms of that language. I was talking to one our people back from the mission field in Chinese and she has to learn Chinese and she was telling us that you have to think this way. So you think in terms of a language. Dominance of one language is a means for building a nation.

Now there were two great people who recognized this principle. One was Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great followed his father, Philip of Macedonia. Philip of Macedonia was a genius but his son was a more brilliant genius and Alexander realized if he was going to outdo his old man he would have to construct some way of getting the Greek nations together. He had Ionic Greek, Doric Greek, many different kinds of Greek and so Alexander said now this is ridiculous, I can’t lead an army when I have to write my orders in four different kinds of Greek. And so Alexander said from now on I am going to decide what the language is going to be and out of that came Koine Greek, not exactly but approximately. Koine Greek, Alexander decided, was going to be the language of his army and so Alexander said I am going to build an empire and it’s going to be wed on one language, the Koine. And that is why the New Testament is written in the Koine language, for wherever Alexander went he did something that no conqueror had ever done before. The other conquerors learned the languages of their people, but not Alexander, he says you’ve got to learn my language. And so wherever he went, into Egypt, when he went over into Persia, wherever Alexander want he forced the people to learn his language and as a result the effect of Alexander was felt for centuries and centuries and centuries, all during the time of the New Testament and the apostolic preaching of the Word.

It was actually Alexander the Great that prepared the way for the gospel because had Alexander not forced and compelled the eastern end of the Mediterranean world to learn Greek, to think Greek, then you would have problems later on with the missionary endeavor. As it was, men like Paul, Peter, and Thomas and the other apostles had to just master the doctrines of the New Testament in Greek and they would automatically be able to transmit these doctrines throughout the eastern end of the Mediterranean. So language is very important.

We’ve had another illustration of this in our own generation. A man by the name of Lenin took over in Russia, 1917 and he realized that the Russians had a similar problem and so he assigned linguists from the communist party to develop and refine the Russian language. And so in the later part, after 1917 and the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian language was modified by order of the communist party. Again Lenin showed the principle that to build a strong nation you need dominance by one language. So that’s the fifth principle of domination of a nation.

The sixth principle is the principle of Deuteronomy 22:1-4 and that is the principle of harmony among neighborhoods; neighbor harmony. I have picked this particular part of the Law of Moses because I want you to see something, they didn’t have any police to enforce the law in Israel; the citizens were the police because they had a common sense of obligation before the law. “Thou shalt not see thy brother’s ox or his sheep go astray, and hide thyself [withhold thy help] from them; thou shalt in any case bring them again unto thy brother. [2] And if thy brother be not near unto you, or if you know him not, then you shall bring it unto your own house, and it shall be with thee until thy brother seek after it, and thou shalt restore it to him. [3] In like manner….” And so on. In other words, each person was to care for the other one in this nation. And so there was a sense of harmony. And yet today we find dissent, we find professional agitators hired to go into ghetto neighborhoods and cause trouble. We have people that are destroying out nation from inside, deliberately and by design.

When Stalin set forth his program for conquest of the United States he recognized that the United States could be undermined by destroying these eight principles that I have given you. And so he developed the following program. Now I’m not saying and I do not mean to say, as I indicated this morning, that Stalin is responsible for all that’s happened; we’re not saying that. But please notice the insight that Stalin and the communist party had in trying to destroy the guts of the United States. Here’s what he said: as to religion; by philosophy, mysticism, the development of liberal cults and the furtherance of atheism discredit all Christian creeds. Ethical: Corrupt morality by advocating promiscuity and advocating high school and university students to practice the same; introduction of companion and marriage ideas, advancement of theoretical interracial practices, marriage of white women to colored men by actual consummation through willing participants where obtainable; destruction of the family, abolition of inheritance, even to the extent of names; destruction of all records of title, birth and family history. In art: cultivate the ugly, the futuristic and the abhorrent. In literature; drama and music: the practice of crude orientalism, modernism and degenerate perversion. In the political; set up the idea of thinking internationally so as to undermine national patriotism, weaken all government departments by corruption, attack all political parties and create suspicion and distrust upon any and all occasions, amplify facts by fiction and create startling exposes, ridicule all patriotic effort and undermine all preparation for defense, carry out our set forth policy for world revolution outlined in Reicoff’s position. So you can see that they had insight, the communist players have insight in how to destroy a nation.

Now I’m going to play a portion of a tape that I consider to be crucial at this point because it will show you that I am not just talking into thin air, this is going on around us. July 18, 1969 three hundred radical groups met together in Oakland, California. At this one convention there were four thousand delegates; please remember when Lenin started his program for the Bolsheviks, he had a handful; these are four thousand and they are bent on the destruction of the United States. And you are going to hear, I selected one portion of this tape where they have concentrated on the means of capturing the law system, to destroy American law and if you destroy the law you see what you’ve done? You’ve destroyed the whole point of government. What is government’s principle? Law and power, and so if you want to destroy a nation you destroy its law and you destroy its power. How do you destroy its power? Disarm the military and emasculate the police force. How do you destroy the law? Do it through the courts.

[Tape: We hope to be able to in the next sixty days, through the national lawyer’s guild, to be able to have seminars throughout the United States, to have lecturers and study courses for lawyers and law students so that they can better represent you, so that you are not limited to two or three or four lawyers throughout the United States, so that we’ll have a thousand lawyers to fight this fight against fascism. [Applause] I want to tell you that I have been speaking throughout the country in the various law schools. The hope is great; these young law students are full of the same kind of vim and vigor that you are. They don’t like the system, the way it’s run, in a haphazard, one-sided, lopsided way any more than you do, and when those men and women become lawyers and become fighters in the same cause for freedom that we are fighting, some changes are going to take place. But in the meantime, we can’t wait for that to happen because we’ve got to move and move now. That is the affirmative step that the lawyers are taking in this regard; I hope the rest of the conference will have some affirmative steps to fight and combat fascism in the same spirit. Thank you very much. [Applause; someone says Charles R.?]

[Someone else on tape says: Power to the people; power to all political prisoners [thunderous applause] political freedom for everyone in this world and this country, [applause], you gonna tell me that you don’t know how to recite after the teacha taught ya? You don’t have to recite, all we have to do is know an understan’ that we developin’ a united front against fascism in Amerca. This is the beginning of it, it’s not idearlistic, it’s very real, and we gonna move it from a lower step, step by step, excuse me, from a lower level to a higher level. Many of you are thinkin’ bout political parties commin’ outa this, a mass political party, don’t give it up. Think about it but don’t just think about it and write about it, we have a lotta work to do. The national committees that combat fascism has been formed, as you know, we hope you fill out the form, for workin’ on the national committee to combat fascism. Tomorrow we will continue with this conference, we will be continuin with people’s help and fascism will be continuing with religion versus fascism, Rev. Jesse Jackson from SELC who worked with the operation red baskets [applause], Rabbi Abram Feinberg at [can’t understand word] Memorial Park. Tomorrow the barbeque dinners will be on time….

Clough: When we get to discuss the military you’re going to hear a rather shocking report. You’re going to hear a report by a man who was an enlisted man in the United States Army and his fulltime activity is going around the world, and enlisting enlisted GI’s, arming them, training them to destroy the morale toward the officers; their objective in the military is to create a break between the enlisted men and the officers for they know if they can do this they can break the backbone of the United States Army, and by the way, this is exactly the tactics the Bolsheviks used in World War I when, if you’ve seen Dr. Zhivago you remember what happened to the Russian army on the eastern front? They destroyed the rapport between the Russian officers and the Russian enlisted men and this broke the backbone of the Russian army and later the fragments of this army were picked up by the Bolsheviks to be used against the Bolshevik Revolution. And so I will try to excerpt points of this tape as we go along to illustrate my point that this is going on, and it’s not something to think this is all theory and this is just some preacher mouthing off or something. This is important, it’s horrifying and it shows you how imminent we are as a nation in these areas, how near we are to collapse by destruction of these factors.

Now I would like to conclude by going to Deuteronomy 19:13. You’ve already seen the destruction of the neighborhood harmony by calculated dissent, by professional agitation, penetration even into the areas of law. In Deuteronomy 19 we have the seventh great principle that unifies a nation and that is the widespread patriotism, the concern for the country. Here it comes out in a very interesting text because this text has to do with the enforcing of law and it would be the natural tendency for people to pity this person who had been trapped by the Law of God. And so verse 13, “Thine eye shall not pity him, but thou shalt put away the guilt of innocent blood from Israel, that it may go well with thee.” Turn to Deuteronomy 21:18 you come to the very human situation of a parent dealing with rebellious children and in verse 18 there isn’t a problem of should they prefer their own children over the nation. And they are called by Moses’ Law that “If you have a rebellious son, who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and that, when thy have chastened him, and he still doesn’t hearken,” then take him out and destroy him, in verse 21, with stones. And then that last phrase in verse 21, “So shalt thou put evil away from among you, and all Israel shall hear and fear.” So even the children were not to take higher priority in this point, in this area, over the welfare of the nation. Here you have patriotism and the unashamed concern for the country.

And finally, the last principle, which is the principle that underlies it all, and that is the eight one and that is the issue of dominance of the concept of the sovereignty of God over the nation. And here is where a nation is not neutral; a nation is either saying, as we introduced that it’s laws and its history and everything are in the hands of men or it must acknowledge that its nation, its leaders and its destiny is in the hands of God. It’s one or the other, and this is why it is not silly to have “In God we Trust” on the coins, and why it is not silly to use these slogans. It is true, they are meaningless to many, but at least it is a legal manifestation of the recognition, by pressure yes, but nevertheless it is a recognition that there is an influence in this country which recognizes the sovereignty of God over the nation. This is an absolute necessity, for a nation must either root itself in historical process or root itself under the sovereignty of God. And of course our problem as Christians is to develop this spirit of community and so on.

Now these eight principles for a national group we will take and in ensuing evenings developing these, analyzing the United States in the light of the Word of God and show how by collapsing these Biblical principles we as a nation today are suffering, just the beginnings of the judgment of God. We have seen Romans 1 and will see, and you will see why, as we examine each of these specific principles and show their violation leads to a destruction of the nation.

With our heads bowed…