Ecclesiastes Lesson 15

Government “Under the Sun” – 5:8-9

We have been going through the book of Ecclesiastes to prove a point and I don’t know how well we have proved the point because I’ve been very disappointed at some of the reaction that we have had, with regard to things like the rock festival. You should understand why this is going on, why people think the way they do, why you have a young generation in our day who have no purpose for life. Many of you have expressed that it’s hard for you to believe that non one has purpose to live; it shouldn’t be if you’ve been paying attention to Ecclesiastes. The book of Ecclesiastes says very clearly that no one on a non-Christian base has a purpose for living. In fact, the people that are fooling themselves most are the non-Christian moralists, people who believe in the laws of Christianity, etc. and yet personally have never trusted in Christ because these people insist they have a purpose when really they don’t; there’s no real purpose there. For example, we have communists and they believe that they’re going to bring in the perfect society and they’ve never answered the question about man’s significance or man’s purpose. Why bother to bring in a perfect society, why not just drop the bomb and do away with it, there’s no reason why you don’t. Communism can’t provide you an answer to that question either.

Only in Biblical Christianity do you have an answer to the problem of the fact that you are significant and a very precious individual because God created you in His image and made you for Himself.

In Ecclesiastes 5 we begin to deal with a series of knocks that Solomon delivers to various institutions of his day. This man has derived two basic conclusions, in chapters 2-3 and a little bit in chapter 4, namely that the universe has a purpose but you can’t find it out. So here you might say it’s an undiscoverable purpose. He thinks the universe has a purpose, there’s a time for everything, but he says God has put eternity in my heart and yet I can’t know. In other words, I can’t know absolutely what is really out there and I can’t grasp the purpose behind my life and the purpose behind the world in which I live. I know there’s a purpose out there somewhere but I just can’t find it. This is exactly what many of the young people in our day are saying now, I can’t find the purpose and you cannot expect them to behave like the Christianity generation of an era ago when they don’t have any Christian base to behave from. There’s no base, no pattern, no expectation for it; obviously they’re going to behave this way because they don’t know any better. That’s the whole point.

And that’s what Solomon says, apart from the Word of God you cannot discover purpose in life. This is what’s wrong with our educational system; it doesn’t do any good to educate people; one of the most educated countries in the world in the 20^th century was Germany and look at the monstrous machine that Germany cranked out between 1930-1940; education is not a solution to man’s problems. Education cannot give you purpose; education can train you to think but it doesn’t even do that any more. It trains you to feel, it trains you to react, it trains you to respond but it is not training people how to think.

In recent days I’ve been involved with trying to share the gospel of Christ with certain individuals in this town and I’m appalled at the fact that people who are college graduates, people who have gone through the educational pipe, it’s almost impossible to get them to believe, not on the basis of their own hardness of heart but they have to think in order to accept Christ. You’ve got to reason through why He died on the cross for you and because our educational system is so anti-thinking, so anti-content and is trying to give people experiences instead of hard content… the only justification for education in God’s Word is content; content centered, not experience centered; always content, content, content, content, content. And the educational institution exists for one reason, communicate content and no other reason. And yet we have turned the schools into a laboratory of social experience. And that is absolutely wrong and we are reaping the results of it. The Word of God is full of content and this is why so few people understand God’s Word today because they’re educated to deride content, educated not to think. So Solomon says education isn’t going to give you this purpose, nothing is going to give you this purpose.

Then he comes to another problem, he says that he has inexperienced justice; he says I know there are rights and wrongs and yet I look out on society and I see wrongs. When I was out at the rock festival I had two types of people; I had people in town that said long-haired people are bad. Why? They have long hair, that’s why. There’s no Biblical authorization for a man to go around looking like a woman but that’s another thing, that’s for Christians. However, the point still is that people were saying these people are bad because they have long hair and yet on the other hand you’d go out to the festival and they were saying that the people that are in charge of industry today are bad because they’re polluting the environment. Who are you going to believe, you have two different standards of right and wrong. Here you have one group of society saying you’re bad; the other group says you’re bad. So how you decide the issue? You decide the issue on the basis of the Word of God, that’s the basis. If you don’t have any basis you might as well forget it; as far as I’m concerned if I didn’t have the Word of God I’d laugh at them both, wear hair as long as you want to and let us all die of smog, we can choke to death gracefully and I could care less because if man doesn’t have any purpose and the Word of God isn’t true, so what.

So here you have the second problem that Solomon had, he sees justice but he doesn’t see it experienced in history so he begins to question. Finally he gets down to the point, get it now; that’s Solomon’s philosophy, whatever pleasure you can, get it now, nothing else matters as long as I personally satisfy myself. But don’t have too high expectations because he said I tried that too, I had the wine, women and song, I had building companies, stock investment holdings and all the rest of it, and that didn’t satisfy either. Just like a lot of people today, you have the so-called hippie and the hippie generally comes from a wealthy background or a well-educated background and he has had materialism until he’s coming out his ears and he’s dissatisfied with it, he’s had no purpose and so he says back to the ghetto type living. Then you have the kids in the ghetto and they haven’t had materialism so they think materialism is the answer. And then you have the radical and he thinks they’re both wrong and he’s going this way because he wants something else. That’s what’s happening, everyone wants purpose for living. So you can analyze every social movement in our time as man’s religious spiritual search for meaning. And Solomon has pictured it out here and if you grasp and listen carefully to Solomon you won’t have any trouble understanding any movement of our time and it will help you communicate, it will help you to understand why people think as they do, and will help you communicate the gospel to that generation.

In chapter 5:1-7 Solomon begins to draw some proverbial statements, and in verse 1-7 we found his big point is avoid squandering your uncertain life on religious entanglement. His theme is outlined in 6:11-12, this is the end of this large section; chapters 5 and 6 form one unit. At the end of this unit he says this: “Seeing there be many things that increase vanity” or emptiness, the spiritual vacuum that Solomon feels, “what is man the better? [12] For who knows what is good for man in this life, all the days of his vain life which he spends as a shadow? For who can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun.” Given this situation, what Solomon is saying, given the fact that I don’t have any Biblical basis for my life, either I’m an ignorant Christian or I’m an unbeliever and I have no Biblical background, given that situation what do I do? How do I behave? So beginning in chapters 5 and 6 he is going to give you a positive system of behavior which is the only system, basically, that’s logical to his starting point.

In chapter 5 he begins by saying in verses 1-7 religion is fine but don’t get involved. In other words, believe in God, undefined; believe in God it kind of helps you out psychologically and so on, but don’t get too involved in things. And his point here is that God doesn’t reveal Himself to men so you can understand Him so just respect Him but don’t get too involved. And of course he’s right if God doesn’t reveal Himself. This is why we defend here at Lubbock Bible Church the Word of God as the inspired, literal word by word revelation from God. If it isn’t that, then we’d just better close up shop. That’s the way it is, and you can’t be dishonest and pretend that you love all these great wonderful things about Christianity and dump the Bible. It’s either one or the other.

In verses 8-9 Solomon moves on and here we are saying that well, given the situation my life is uncertain, my life is so uncertain that I don’t want to get involved with things so I’m not going to get involved with religion and now in verses 8-9 I’m not going to get involved in society; I’m not going to get involved in social problems. I look out and I see the problem of pollution and I’m not going to get involved. You can’t fight the system, you can’t fight city hall; I see pollution in government, I see all sorts of foul things in government but I’m not going to get involved because it’s hopeless.

So in verse 8 he says, “If you see the oppression of the poor, and violent perverting of judgment and justice in a province, marvel not at the matter; for he that is higher than the highest watches,” literally, “regards; and there are higher than they.” In other words, the whole system, if you think it’s bad down at the lower eschelons and you’re looking at the hierarchy of government, and you look at this hierarchy and you look down here and here you are, a little peon and you see some trouble down here, Solomon says don’t sweat it, you think that’s a little trouble, look up here, there are problems here, problems here, and problems all the way up. He says so why fight the machine.

Verse 9, and this verse is all fouled up, we’re going to have to correct the translation, “Moreover the profit of the land is in all this: literally, (colon) “the cultivated field has a king.” And that’s the only purpose he sees for an ordered society and that is it gives you some order in which you can work, you can live, etc. “…the cultivated field,” “the field served,” that “is served” is a participle, I’ll show you what happened here in the translation. You had “is served,” it literally means is worked; it’s passive, it is a passive participle; the passive participle in the Hebrew can denote character or action. It is connected with the word “field” and in the original text it says “field is worked,” literally, and that is an idiom in the Hebrew for cultivated field, a field that is worked. The word “field” means a plot of land on which people would grow crops, etc. and this field is cultivated. So the best way of handling it in the English is to say a field that’s worked is one that’s a cultivated field, and this cultivated field has a king. The Hebrew literally reads: “there is a king for a field is worked,” and what it means is the cultivated field has a king.

So he says this is basically the only benefit of this hierarchy of social structure and that is that it gives you some order in which to live, in which to make your money, in which to enjoy yourself. And that basically is his point; he says I can’t find any real purpose in life but on the other hand I experience these desires so if I want to really satisfy myself in any reasonable degree I’ve got to have an ordered society in which to operate. So he says at least it gives you that so don’t sweat it. If you see iniquity and you see these things that are bothering you, don’t worry about it because you can’t fight the machine, don’t get involved.

Now this introduces us to a concept of divine institutions number four or human government. In the course of this we’re going to answer some of your feedback cards; one says “how can war be justified when we owe allegiance to God before man’s worldly laws.” We’re going to answer this question when we go through the doctrine of divine institutions number four.

There are four divine institutions in history. These divine institutions exist for the perpetuation of the human race. They are not Christian institutions, they are divine institutions and they apply to both Christian and non-Christian. The first divine institution is volition or freedom. This means that God has not made you as a robot; He has given you a right of choice and God Himself is not going to change, interrupt and tamper with it. God does not tamper with volition and down through history He has made history so that you have to pay the results of your choices. He is not going to stop you from choosing certain things. He sat by as Adam sinned and He knew it would cost Him the death of His Son and yet He still let Adam sin. Why? Because He respects volition. God is a gentleman and He never coerces volition.

Secondly, the second divine institution in history is marriage; male and female within the human race, and we’ve gone through this and shown you why this exists, and why sex outside of marriage is not just something that God set up to be a meany, He set this up to preserve the institution of marriage and to make this a strong viable element in society.

The third divine institution is family and this is the basic social element in society; government is not basically this, it’s the family unit. People wonder what’s happened to the United States… well just look at what’s happened to the families, that’s what’s happened. And people say what are we going to do to resolve the situation. Really there’s not too much you can do until things start shaping up at home; there’s not much you can do while the home is falling apart. Homes can fall apart and that might be okay when only 1% of the homes in the nation are falling apart but when this percent gets up in the 20% and 30% how far can it go before the whole thing comes tumbling down. That’s basically our problem today. This is why, for example, one Christian girl that worked in the crash tent at the rock festival, 95% of the kids that had problems with dope that she met, this is not a bona fide total overall estimate, the ones that she met she said 95% of them came from either no home or broken home. There’s an obvious correlation. What are you going to do, you can’t stop it until you work in the family. And as I see it no social program is ever going to stop it until there’s a spiritual change in the family. You can say we can’t get it fast enough; well then we can’t get it fast enough, but that’s the only way it can be stopped.

That’s the third divine institution, now we come to government, that is the fourth divine institution. The first three were set up before the fall; the fourth is the only one of the four divine institutions that was set up after man became a sinner. Let’s go back to Genesis 1 and get some background as to why we have government and why there are such things as wars. In Genesis 1:26 we have God establishing Adam as the head of the world. “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the foul of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” Now this means that God had a hierarchy to begin with consisting of Adam; one individual.

Remember Eve came out of Adam. God did not create the couple; He created first the man and out of Adam came Eve; the principle of marriage is that the male is the one that has the plan of God; God gave the plan of God to the male first and then he made the female to compliment the male when the male is operating on the plan of God. So therefore we have in Scripture the solution to the problem of Christian marriage, right man and right woman; both are right when they surround the plan of God. When God leads the male like God gave instructions to Adam He gives purpose to the man. For every man that He has given a purpose to He has made a woman to compliment that purpose. This is why so many people can’t decide who they’re going to marry, it’s simply because this plan of God factor is dropped out. This plan of God factor isn’t there and so there’s nothing to unify the thing and the man doesn’t know what he’s doing, and so obviously if he hasn’t got a grounding to the will of God for his life it’s hard for him to see in any woman how she’s going to compliment him if he himself doesn’t know what he’s going to do. This is one of the things that you get out of this tremendous passage in Genesis 1 and 2.

Anyway, the first point about divine institution number four is that Adam was the ruler; he intended, since he was immortal at this point potentially, Adam would rule over all men, there would be one family of men on earth and Adam would be the head of it; no government; it would be solely a family matter. So we have this first thing; Adam was the family ruler of the entire world, not government, a family ruler.

The second thing; there was a fall and at the fall certain things happened, man became a sinner, the human race fell, we picked up our old sin nature. Every member of the human race has an old sin nature, this is what makes you a stinker. Any person that knows you well enough knows you’re a stinker at times, I’m a stinker and you’re a stinker and this is a manifestation of our sin nature. Every member of the human race has it; some people like to dress theirs up and pretend they don’t have it, and yet every person has a sin nature. Then we have other things picked up; we have physical death picked up. Physical death was picked up and our bodies are physically and biologically deteriorating as a result of the fall.

When this happened God began to start government, but He didn’t give it to man. Genesis 4:14, this is the problem of Cain; Cain was an unbeliever. Cain offered a vegetable sacrifice. I can remember as a young fellow reading the Bible, wondering why did God get angry at Cain, he was just a farmer trying to bring some of his crops up to Him. The reason why God got mad at Cain wasn’t because of his vegetables, the problem was that Cain brought a non-living sacrifice to God. In the Bible, watch this, the word “life” does not mean organic life in our technical sense of the word today. The Bible described as nephesh only things that have the spirit with it, spirit plus matter in union equals nephesh in the Bible or soul and plants do not have spirits; plants have organic compounds and so on, but they don’t have the union of spirit and matter. Now don’t ask me what you do down at the microscopic level, how this boundary is established I do not know; I only can tell you that as far as the Word of God is concerned there’s a differentiation and this is why the Word of God says there must be animal sacrifices. And this is what Abel understood, it wasn’t because he was a rancher and the other guy was a farmer; that wasn’t the problem and it wasn’t the start of the homestead war. The point was that one offered an animal sacrifice and the other offered a non-living sacrifice; that’s the discussion.

Cain gets mad at God and gets mad at his brother and can’t stand him and so he kills him. And in 1 John we find out how he killed him. Cain killed Abel with a knife; he slit his throat and how the murder was done, it wasn’t done because he took a rock and pounded him over the head. It was done because he took a knife and 1 John tells you how he did it and tells you want kind of a knife he used. Verse 11 of chapter 4, “Now thou art cursed from the earth,” God says to Cain, this is the first crime recorded in history; watch, no human government and yet there is a decree. Murder is committed, and “thou art cursed from the earth, which has opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand. [12] And when you till the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee in her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth. [13] And Cain said unto the LORD, ‘My punishment is greater than I can bear. [14] Behold, Thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth, and from Thy face shall I be hid, and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass that everyone that finds me shall slay me.’ [15] And the LORD said unto him, ‘Therefore, whosoever slays Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.’”

God here specifically prohibits capital punishment. Now He’s going to reverse Himself; He is specifically prohibiting man to kill. God alone has the right to take life and only God alone at this point in history. Only God, no man can take vengeance upon Cain; and that’s the mark of Cain, it’s not the color of his skin. The mark of Cain has to do with what God had to do to deal with crime before you had the institution of government.

Now after the flood we have the institution of Government, Genesis 8:21. We go on down in history, here’s Adam, here’s the fall and here’s the flood. In that interval between the fall and the flood you had no human government. What have we defined by human government? Not social organization, they had social organization back here, they had cities, they obviously had social organization. The essence of government is man taking the authority of God to himself to judge. That is the kernel of government; that is how government is defined in God’s Word. It means the delegated authority and that authority must come from God; delegated authority and it’s summed up in capital punishment because God and only God can kill, unless He so delegates that authority to man. Now in Cain you saw specifically He had not yet delegated the authority, therefore there was no government, there was no one man over another except in the family sense or in the sense of some sort of social organization.

Now beginning in Genesis 8:21 we have an amazing statement and it shows you why God had to bring government onto the scene, as corrupt as it must be and remember when God brought government onto the scene he knew in His omniscience that His own Son would die as a result of misjustice. These bleeding hearts that say oh, what about the misjustice; well what about God’s Son, Jesus Christ died in a trial that was phony from the start; Jesus Christ was a victim of one of the greatest acts of misjustice the world has ever seen. They took a man who was perfect and crucified Him. That is the most ghastly act of misjustice that government has ever done, explained further in 1 Cor. 2. But the point is, God in His omniscience took the risk and knew his own Son would become a victim of the machine that He had set up. What does that tell you about government? It tells you something is absolutely necessary, it’s very important to have this authority; if it wasn’t God would never have instituted it, knowing in advance that His own Son would die falsely under its wheels.

Genesis 8:21 tells you the background for the purpose of government. “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; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every living thing, as I have done. [22] While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” There will be the beginning of uniformity of most of natural laws and processes at this point.

So what is He saying? He’s saying here that I, in this first period between the fall and the flood, I took care of crime on a modified restricted basis; I had conscience, I let conscience… people say let conscience be your guide; God let conscience be guide, for years and years and years between Adam and the flood He let men try to rule by the basis of their own conscience and it didn’t work. That is a lesson you learn from history, but of course people are too busy dumping the first eleven chapters of Genesis to learn from history. This is one of the great lessons so when the liberal clergy come out, like Bishop Pike did, and say well I just follow my own conscience… well dear sweet boy, what does it say in verse 21, “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” Conscience is an insufficient means of preserving society and it was proven by the generation that God had to judge.

Now what did God do? God brought a catastrophic judgment into society to terminate it, but he says in verse 21 I’m not going to do it again. All right, now put yourself in God’s position; you’ve judged the human race once but you haven’t changed man’s nature. With no judgment hanging over man, with no threat of a Second Advent of Christ, remember Enoch, Enoch lived a couple of generations before the flood, and Enoch preached the intervention of God. We have one of his sermons in the book of Jude in the New Testament, but Enoch preached back here and he preached the threatening impending judgment of God upon society. That was all that held man in check; conscience on the inside, threat of a catastrophic judgment on the outside. Well if God here is promising the termination of one of those threats in verse 21, then what is He going to use to contain and preserve the human race on down through history.

Now He is going to introduce in Genesis 9, government. “And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. [2] The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth,” etc. and verse 5, “And surely your blood of your soul [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 blood, by man shall his blood be shed;” and the word “man” doesn’t mean… this is not vengeance, verse 6 is not teaching vengeance, it says “by Adam,” and Adam is a collective word for the human race and it means Man with a capital “M” and it doesn’t mean an individual, you kill me and say my brother or someone kills you, that’s not what he’s instituting here. He’s saying I am now delegating the authority to take life to mankind; I haven’t done this before, this is something new in history. So now beginning with the flood we have the institution of divine institution number four. And at this time God delegates the authority to take life to man. He knows it’s going to be wrong, but what does it teach you? It says that before the flood conscience resulted in anarchy and anarchy is bad, so God says because anarchy destroys all freedom, so therefore in the end what God says, I can’t have anarchy and I’ll risk having poor government to anarchy. That’s the way God has designed history and it wasn’t by some social contract thought up by Rousseau. It was an institution of God given in Genesis 9 and it is epitomized in the delegated authority that by man shall a man’s life be shed.

We come to the fourth thing about divine institution number four and that is that there are limitations to government. The Word of God gives limitations, Genesis 11. “And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. [2] And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east,” the human race after the flood, “they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. [3] And they said to one another, Come, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.” And you have the creation in verse 4 of the city and a tower, the first United Nations building. “And they said, Come, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. [5] And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of mend built. [6] And the LORD said, Behold,” now watch this, this is why God says no internationalism at this time yet in history, we have not moved into that age of internationalism yet as far as God is concerned. God said, “Behold, the people are one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” So God says in verse 7, “Come, let us,” that’s a conference of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit together, “let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. [8] So the LORD,” singular, Jesus Christ, “scattered them abroad from there upon the face of all the earth: and they ceased building the city.”

So you have here the attack made against internationalism in the Word of God. No internationalism is bona fide and you will never get true internationalism because God has fractured the culture; He fractured the culture of humanity by dividing linguistically man from man. Linguistic confusion has been injected into the race supernaturally. Probably the only remnant we have of the language that was once universally spoken is mathematics, and maybe some people could argue music, but those are basically the only remnants we have of that one original language that all men, everywhere spoke.

Now God didn’t do this arbitrarily, He realized the sweat this would cause the missionary, He realized that in our day the language barrier is one of the greatest barriers to the gospel. He realized this would require funds and funds and years and years of training as you have heard from the people we support in Wycliffe Translators. He realized that this would act as a detriment but He did it because of a higher need to protect man from himself. If man has a sin nature and you have one-world government, what is the probability of having a right world government? The probability is of having a big fat old sin nature up there, that’s what the probability is. And so you have a total hierarchy all over the world and you have Satan at the head and that’s a real thrill, just what everybody want. So this is why God has fractured the human race and why attempts to bring about internationalism in our day are not only doomed to failure but they are attempts that are going to be used to destroy the national strength. And anytime you see somebody moving toward the area of internationalism you will generally find them weakening the national structure. You have to weaken one to build the other up, and since you can’t build the other up because of these inherent blocks that God has put into history, then you are fallacious if you think you’re going to try it. All you’re doing is weakening the national entity and inviting war and catastrophe.

So in Genesis 11 is the mandate from the Word of God against internationalism. This is one limitation He has put upon government. The other limitation is found in Acts 17:26 in which He says that I have up history like a ship, you remember back in the days of the Titanic, when ships began to have these concepts of water tight holes in them so that if you had a hole in the hull it wouldn’t flood the whole ship. That’s basically what God did, He fractured the human race into cultural and linguistic groups so that if one group went on negative volition and had apostasy in there it wouldn’t spread rapidly to the other groups. So in history God could play off one national entity against another, one culture against another and keep the balance. And that’s what it teaches in Acts 17:26-27 where Paul says He “has made of one blood all nations of man to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” “Times” refers to age in history; “bounds” refers to geographical boundaries.

So you have space and time, and those space/time boundaries of each culture are determined by God in accordance with His criteria of positive volition. Any national entity that allows negative volition to move and to begin to take over, usually manifested in an apostate religion, God says that culture is doomed. And we can find example after example in history how God has played off one culture… he’s not saying this culture over here is better than this one, he’s just saying relatively speaking this one may be better than this one because this one has entrenched negative volition, I demand that every member of the human race have a right to choose for himself and if he is embedded and encrusted in an apostate society he doesn’t have that right. He’s not going to get a chance to hear the gospel and so therefore God disciplines whole cultures and one of the systems of adjustment within the world system is warfare. That’s one of the functions it produces, that’s not saying it’s good. The reason you have the function in the first place is why? Why do you have these fractured things. It goes back to Genesis 11, because man in his negative volition tries to rule himself instead of letting God rule. So the ultimate reason for war goes back to negative volition, so don’t blame it on God because He set up history this way. He set up history that way in order to protect ourselves against ourselves.

Genesis 14:17, here you have an example of how God ruled history before Israel came onto the scene. This explains a lot of what many of you have studied ancient history come across again and again and that is the idea of a national god. “And the king of Sodom went out to meet him after his return from the slaughter of Chedorlaomer,” it’s talking about Abraham and he’s just won a victory. And in verse 18 it says, “Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought forth bread and wine; and he was the priest of the most high God.” And as a priest he was, obviously in that time he was a Gentile, and during the time from the flood until the year 2000 BC when God called Abraham out of Ur, during this time, evidently from what we can gather from the Genesis record is that He ruled through divinely appointed leaders which have come down to us as myths. And this why in the mythology you read about Hammurabi having a discussion with so and so and the gods, and the gods did this, and the gods came down and spoke to this ruler, etc. Basically that’s mythological distortion of what actually happened back here of God personally appointing leaders to rule the human race at this time in history. So we had rulers over various areas of society.

Then along came Abraham and Abraham was picked out and especially chosen by God and this leads us to the rejection of the Gentiles. We come down to the time of Abraham and God said I am going to pick one nation, Israel, and I’m going to define social order, but it’s only going to be a definition for that nation. And this is why we’ve been going through the book of Deuteronomy. This is why every society that has ever existed, even societies in our own day, even our own country, have the perpetual problem of the Gentile dilemma and the Gentile dilemma is by what standard do we rule and balance between the need for order or form and the need for freedom or liberty. How do we get the balance? No Gentile nation ever can get a permanent good balance, it’s always jockeying in history. The reason is that God hasn’t revealed the standard for the nation; there’s only one nation He ever gave that balance to and that was the nation Israel. He has left the Gentiles in a state of dilemma and which I would call a Gentile dilemma. How do you get a standard to govern people by and how do you keep the balance between form and freedom in society. This thing is a problem that we have to face by just pragmatic adjustment, debate and discussion, etc. We’re left to this alternative, not because God is angry at the Gentiles but because we have failed in history as a human race to follow the leading of the Lord and He’s left us with this kind of opportunity.

Finally, perfect government can only come about by the intervention of Jesus Christ. Turn to Isaiah 2. God says this is not going to continue in history; if we look at history in review we have Adam, we had Adam potentially set up to have one family of men, the original brotherhood of man. But that brotherhood of man does not exist today because it has been fractured by the fall. After the fall, to the flood, we have the reign of conscience alone and the reign of conscience alone led to anarchy. That was ended and beginning with the flood and going on to the Second Advent of Jesus Christ we have the reign of government. And in government we have the problem of capital punishment, we have the problem of war, we have the problem of these things but don’t you be a sucker, don’t you ever fall for the idea that says this: the reason why we have trouble in our society is because of the structure of our economic system; the reason we have trouble in our society is because of something else, equally trivial. You can have all of the economic things straightened out and you’d still have trouble. Why? The problem is in man’s heart. The sin nature is the problem and you’re always going to have this trouble and it’s not due to… you can change the economic system every day, we could have 365 different economic systems, today it’s system a, tomorrow it’s system b, then system c, etc. You wouldn’t do a thing, you’d wind up in just as big a mess as you are right now. The economic system is not the cause, it could amplify some of the problems but it certainly can’t solve the problem.

Perfect government, though, is on tap for the human race so we do have a hope in history and it’s given in Isaiah 2, “And it shall come to pass, [2] In the last days, that the mountain of the LORD’s house shall be established on the top of the mountain, and shall be exalted above the hills, and all nations will flow to it.” Here’s world government. Verse 3, “And people shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob, and He will teach us of His ways, we will walk in His paths,” do you see now where you get world government from? You can only have perfect government when the Word of God is the world authority. Where are these nations going? They are going to submit themselves to the Word of God. And until that comes about in history through the return of Christ you cannot have perfect society. The reason: because you’ll have one person after one standard, one person after another. “…and many people shall go,” etc. and verse 4, “And He,” that’s the Lord, so the second requirement for perfect government is not only the Word of God but you have to have a perfect government. To have a perfect society you have to have a perfect leader; the perfect leader is going to be Jesus Christ Himself, verse 4, “And He shall judge among the nations,” He is going to act as a world tribunal, and Jesus Christ is going to mediate international disputes and He will mediate these during the millennium.

Here we are in history, here’s the cross, the Second Advent of Christ after the rapture of the church, the seven years, etc. you have the return of Jesus Christ setting up one thousand years of perfect government. During that time Jesus Christ will be in charge of the world government and He personally will mediate international disputes. “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.” Why are they going to do this? Because if we have a perfect world government and world court and one that can enforce world law then we don’t need armies. Armies exist in history to defend national rights. “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more,” military science will be passé.

So here you have the situation but I want you to see the requirements; the Word of God is not naïve, the Word of God says there has to be two basic things; there’s a third hidden one in here, it also has to be minus satanic forces. We know from history the role of these demonic forces and the nineteen ways Satan deceives. One of these ways in which he deceives is that he operates behind the scene to cause wars and rumors of wars, etc. Jesus said this, He said listen, until I come there is going to be wars and rumors of wars; that’s hot wars and cold wars in our lingo today. And Jesus said these are going to continue and continue and continue until I come again. And He didn’t mean spiritually, He meant physically, until I physically manifest Myself again into history, as prophesied in the book of Revelation. When this happens the satanic forces are bumped off and you just have the reign of the Word of God through a perfect government headed by Jesus Christ. That and only that is the means for getting peace.

Now I’ll show you what’s happened in a nutshell. We have had people in the Middle Ages who took… the millennium plus Jesus Christ, this is the union that you can’t break up, but we had people during the Middle Ages who said aha, I like that millennial kingdom, that gives me hope, I like that vision that the millennial kingdom gives me, but we’ll subtract Jesus Christ, get Him out of there so we won’t have anything supernatural. But we like that vision. So we find men like Muenster, and others, who were forerunners of the communist party and a lot of the forces that operate in the economic sphere that is trying to bring about one-world order. And the reason these people are doing this is they think they can get that millennial kingdom apart from the supernatural dynamics of Jesus Christ. The place they got the vision in the first place was from the Bible, and that’ the ironic thing. Communism on a materialistic basis has no reason to say there’s golden age; ever stop to think of that. If man is just matter in motion, there is no reason on that base for saying there’s going to be a golden age. None whatever. The communists sneak in this presupposition from the Word of God, they themselves are blind to it but it’s actually a sneaked in vision that they’ve got; it doesn’t belong to their system. And that’s why you can come around and laugh at a person who is for world government and say ha-ha, you can’t bring it about, you have no business saying it’s even going to come about.

When you’re in the company of a non-Christian who thinks this way you ought to start ridiculing them, laughing them, this is the most stupid idea that ever happened. Just beware that you don’t do what people are doing in our time; there is such a thing as a person and such a thing as an idea, and some people have this little procedure confused. To a person you exercise grace, to an idea you have legalism or you have tight debate in the Word of God. You smash the ideology but you never smash the person, that’s the difference. And you can have a person that may be 90% right, ideal wise he’s either right or wrong, but the point is that it’s a personality, you have to deal with that man in grace and you never come in and clobber them; you treat individuals as people, so therefore if they have long hair, short hair, wear clothes or don’t wear clothes, they’re still people. Their ideas you can fight hammer, tooth and nail, and you should, but what do we have? We have it reversed, Christians are fighting people and not ideas. Just because a person acts a certain way, looks a certain way, he’s a bad person. What you should think of is bad and good ideas, that’s where your battle is, in the realm of ideas, not in the realm of people.

So this is an exposition, very briefly, of the ideology of government, why it’s there, what it’s doing. The reason for was is because of the satanic operations in history; the reason we have the right to defend ourselves is that this is a delegated power, given to us by government. War can be justified given the situation that exists in the Bible. This is why Martin Luther said this, some of you are going to be shocked but this is the words of Martin Luther as he dealt with a war in his day in which he visualizes what was called a just war, the idea that we as a nation are being invaded by another one, he said in a war of this sort… now listen to his words because they’re awful hard hitting. Martin Luther is a hard hitting individual.

“In a war of this sort, it is both Christian and an act of love to kill the enemy without hesitation, to plunder and burn and injure him by every method of warfare until he is conquered.” I know to some of you that strikes friction in your mind, but think it through. The Word of God doesn’t say these things are good, the Word of God says this is the way history has come about; given the fact history has come about this way, given the fact we’re in this situation that the Word of God says we’re in, we have to fight. This is something that every Christian young man must face, he must see it from the basis of the Word of God and he has to make up his mind that if this war is a just war in the principles of the Word, then he can go out asking the Lord Jesus Christ’s help to be an efficient killer. This goes whether you fly an aircraft, dropping a bomb on a factory and blowing it apart including the people in it, whether it involves an infantry operation, etc. you must do it.

With our heads bowed.