Joshua 27

Demobilization – 20

At this point, since this is close to the end of the last section in this book we do well to pause to review some of the basic principles that this book lays down. One of the principles we find in the book of Joshua is the principle that there is a continuity to God’s program in history. This continuity of God’s program in history is something that has to do with a fundamental claim that Scripture makes and it’s not without its base in a very deep area of theology, and that is the whole philosophy of history that the Bible gives the believer. We have found that the book of Joshua stresses over and over again that what is happening in the 14^th century [BC] with the conquest of the land and the tribes as they received their inheritance is a direct falling out of God’s work with Moses; therefore there is a continuity between Moses’ generation and the generation of Joshua.

The principle is that there’s a form and a freedom in history and these two words, “form” and “freedom” can be used to describe practically anything in history but Christianity alone gives both form and freedom. “Form” means that it gives you an authority, gives you standards, it gives you an overall pattern, and yet freedom; it does this without turning us into robots. Man still has a sphere of responsibility, a domain which he influences, and which he is responsible for. So Christianity gives us this and we have seen this principle operate in the book of Joshua.

In chapters 13-22 we have the details of the tribal inheritance. Chapter 13 dealt with the basis of the inheritance; chapters 14-17 with the first distribution to two tribes, Judah and Joseph; chapters 18-19 the second distribution to the other tribes. During these distributions we found form in history because these tribes all received land that typified their relationship back in Jacob’s day, some 400 years before. Remember, what you are looking at here is occurring around 1400 or 1390 BC. But the roots, the prophetic roots of all this were fixed in 1800 BC. So we find such things as the distribution of the land to Joseph and Judah had a pattern to it. The area in the south was Judah; to the north was Joseph. We said that historically in the story of Jacob and his sons that Joseph and Judah were reconciled one to another by one of their younger brothers called Benjamin, son of the right hand, “Ben-yamin.” Benjamin, when the lot is cast in the land winds up, his territory is between Joseph and Judah, typifying that in history the tribe of Benjamin is the mediator between the tribe of Joseph and Judah.

We found this principle to operate in several other things, so the lots… remember this inheritance is assigned by lots, and if you’re sloppy and you don’t pay attention to the Word of God you’re going to get the impression that the “lots” is somebody casting dice up at the temple some place and it cranks out such and such and they get it by sheer chance. But the thing to notice about this is a very amazing fact; that after the Urim and the Thummim, it’s not a pair of dice, it’s actually the Urim and the Thummim, the breastplate of the high priest. It is God actively determining the allotment to each tribe, the real estate that each tribe occupies. But when this divine allotment is made it turns out, lo and behold, to fulfill the prophesies of Gen. 49 and Deut. 33. So we find the tribes functioning in their land claims just as was prophesied in these two chapters, Gen. 49 in 1800 BC and Deut. 33 in about 1400 BC.

So we see form to history and this is something, by the way, that contradicts every philosophy of history and you can put it in capital letters and underline it. Only Christianity has this form to it. No civilization on the face of this earth ever studied history except one: Israel. And you can also put it in capital letters and underline it, there has never been a philosophy of history that has had any progress in history except that which comes from the Biblical base, and that goes for communism. Communism is one of the great competitors to Americanism today. The reason why it is is because most Americans are not Christians and they have lost the dynamic and the framework that originally gave them the basis that the communists stole through Hegel and used to develop their philosophy of history. The communists have one of the most potent philosophies of history on earth. This is why communist soldiers give their lives because it is a religious commitment they have. You don’t find communist troops having some of the problems that our troops have, fundamentally because they’re officers know how to use military force, etc. But primarily the communist push has been because they have discovered a tremendous thing; they have a philosophy of history.

Now everyone is afraid of the communists and yet if you are sitting there and you have personally accepted Jesus Christ, which means you have at least paid lip service to the fact that the Bible is authoritative, there’s not one of you that should be afraid of the communists or should be in any way challenged by them, by their philosophy of history because the communist philosophy of history was borrowed through a man by the name of Hegel, a German philosopher. Karl Marx derived his ideas of the flow of history from Hegel. But where did Hegel get his ideas from? The book of Daniel and obviously he got it from the Bible. So the communist philosophy of history is stolen from the pages of God’s Word. And of course it is given in an atheistic framework but nevertheless their phenomenon of progress that the proletariat will one day win over the bourgeoisie, that this philosophy comes directly from the Word of God, distorted of course, but you want to see the logical root.

It is impossible to have a philosophy of history unless you have a means of getting outside of history and getting a perspective. If you’re going to draw a picture of something you have to get away from it a couple hundred yards to get a perspective. And if you’re going to see where history is going you’ve got to get outside of the flow of history to see where it’s going. Therefore if you are shut up and you do not have a Biblical framework and you do not have the words of God coming to you from infinity then you can never get outside of the stream of history to have a perspective on history, therefore you never can come up with an over-view. It’s like an artist trying to paint a picture of something and you never can get away from the thing far enough to paint the overall. It’d be like trying to paint a picture of this building standing six inches from the wall. You never can get far enough away from history to see the overall picture and it is only as you see it from God’s perspective, because He is the only one that can get outside of history to see where it’s going; it’s only as you get His perspective that you can ever have any philosophy of history. So that is why, in very simple terms, why it is impossible to develop a philosophy of history outside of the Bible, outside of the verbal revelation from God. Incidentally, if the Bible is a set of myths then you can junk it because it’s not even going to give you a philosophy of history.

So this is the first principle we found over and over again in the book of Joshua, particularly as we have seen the tribes receive their allotment, namely that there is form and freedom in history, there is a continuity to God’s program. This has several applications which we want to also notice. One application this has is that the 20^th century, as we go down in time, here’s the 18^th century, the 19^th century, and we live right here, this means that the 20^th century is not absolutely unique; it means that the 20^th century is part and parcel with that when went before and while we have new things in the 20^th century, they are new in the sense that we have to deal with them, the major issues are the same as they always have been, there is a continuity to the flow of history; it is God’s history.

The second application of this principle is the fact that since we do have form and we do have freedom, we have to notice that prophecy is never water-tight. This is always a danger to students of prophecy. They think that when they study prophecy in great detail that they can ultimately come up with a chart of future history which will give them an exact picture of what is going to happen. This is not true and we have seen it in the book of Joshua operate. We have seen God promise Israel the land, and yet we notice that there was freedom. That was the form; the form said you will inherit the land and I will give each of you, the tribes, an inheritance. But, we also say there’s freedom, so that history is never totally determined and it turns out there were at least two different things that happened in chapters 13-22 of the book of Joshua that illustrate the principle of freedom.

The first thing that happened was that they gained an area called Transjordania that was not on the list of prophecy, this area east of Jordan. This whole area, from about here on up east of the Sea of Galilee, all the way up here, is called Transjordania. That was not on any of the lists of prophecy and yet this is a surprise package that God gave them in Deut. 4. In other words, history is full of surprises, the little things; not surprises in the sense that the overall program is threatened, but there are these things that are unknown. And this is only logical because if you look at God, you know His attributes; one of His attributes is omniscience. You have a finite limited mind; I have a finite limited mind, therefore God can know all things but we can only know some things. And therefore no matter how detailed your plan of prophecy is, you can never know all things. Therefore there are always details that you know not, that slip into the overall framework. So this is something to remember in studying prophecy. Prophecy gives you the form to history but always remember that there is freedom within that form, that God can do things that are not prophesied and in ways that are not prophesied, so always allow for some freedom within the form of prophecy.

That’s the first principle of Joshua, the continuity of God’s program. The second principle we have seen in this book is that we have for the first time in the Bible, because Joshua is the first book that does this, we have the developing canon of Scripture. And this means that God’s Word becomes normative, and so we have set in motion a principle that applies down to the Church Age. If you have past revelation, if the canon is open, and it is not open today, meaning it is not added to, but if it were being added to, all future revelation would have to logically connect with past revelation. There could not be a contradiction between what went in the past and what will come in the future. There has to be a logical continuity to this.

And you will recall in the Deuteronomy series, Deut. 13 and 18 we showed how this was the way they measured a false prophet. They did not go around like Christians go around today and why so and so must be of God because so and so does miracles. So and so has a fine following, so and so talks about Jesus every other sentence and this makes so and so a great Bible teacher or a great Christian. Yet these Christians, naïve as they are, never stop to compare on a logical basis whether that man’s teachings fit with the canon of Scripture. And had Christians done this rigorously and in a disciplined way we wouldn’t be bothered at all by such idiotic things like Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormonism, etc. All of these come out of human teachers whose writings are placed above the Bible in their authority and which are in logical conflict with Scripture. But if Christians had been sharp and had used this rule developed in the Old Testament, that here you have the Law, you have five books in Joshua’s day in the Bible… now you have many books in your Bible, but Joshua had at least five books in his Bible and you can learn how to use the Bible by learning how Joshua used his Bible.

You’ll notice that although miracles were done in Joshua’s day and although God communicated verbally and actively with Joshua through Eleazar the high priest, nevertheless, the Bible that had been given, or the past revelation was absolutely inerrantly authoritative. There was no messing around; no compromising like evangelicals today that think it’s cute and smart to say that we allow certain errors in areas of history and science. If you are that kind of person let me tell you that once you allow errors in history and science you automatically undercut your whole position. If you’re going to allow errors at any point in God’s Word take your Bible to the nearest ash can and dump it; that would be the smartest thing you could possibly do if you are allowing errors. Just get rid of the thing and dump it in the garbage can.

Either the Bible has to be totally inerrant in every area or it should be trashed. There’s no middle ground, absolutely none. Yet we have believers attending churches all over the place who are denying inerrancy of the Scripture, they are partaking of their apostasy and they will be disciplined by the Lord for it. Any time you have a church or a religious organization that is trying to undercut inerrancy you have some undercutting and denying the character of God, the next thing they’re going to do is start denying the deity of Jesus Christ. That has to follow. This is the written Word, Jesus Christ is the living Word, if you deny one you have to, on logical grounds, deny the other also. If this is in error then Jesus is in error and therefore He is not God. This all follows through.

So the second great principle, very applicable to our time, is that Joshua tells us how to use the Bible; Joshua used his Bible in an absolutely authoritative way.

Now the third principle of the book of Joshua which we deal with tonight is the holy war principle. We’ve seen this over and over again. For example, the first half of the book of Joshua, chapters 5-12 dealt with the conquest; chapters 13-22 deal with the inheritance. Which comes first? Conquest, battle, always comes before rest. You don’t get to the rest and the finished produce without a battle because we live in a fallen world. Now a person is very naïve if they think they’re going to bring in the millennium and a perfect society out here without going through holy war. Holy war is absolutely essential and this is why we try to prepare believers for war and why I try to stimulate in believers an aggressive mental attitude, in their academic areas to aggressively pursue the application of divine viewpoint and not passively accept all the garbage that’s passed out in the name of higher education.

This is the way it has to go, holy war; the believer is called to holy war. If this irritates you I’m sorry but that’s your calling as a believer, to fight. This is what the early fundamentalists did in the first part of the 20^th century and that’s what our job is to do, is to fight, fight, fight and to fight in the areas in a way which will honor the Lord, not be obnoxious but to define the issues carefully and with a surgeon’s blade excise the evil as necessary. So we have this whole problem of holy war and the necessity for it.

Now out of this comes a problem of civil justice. We have seen that you cannot have a rest without battle; we have seen another principle along with the holy war concept, that when these areas were given, this area [on the map] indicates unconquered territory so that when these territories were allotted to the tribes, notice that there was still unconquered territory. For example, here’s Judah. Judah’s territory included the Philistine pentapolis here, and a whole mass, square mile after square mile of yet unconquered territory. And it shows you that when God gives you salvation He doesn’t expect you to sit down on your rear end and do nothing about it. He expects you to actively apply the Word of God in every area, aggressively, and this is what He intended Judah to do, to take the Philistines and just push them out into the Mediterranean. He ordered them to give them swimming lessons and they’d be swimming all the way to Spain before Judah got through with them. However, unfortunately we have, in that day as well as today, believers who want to sit down because of peace and wealth. They don’t want to ruffle feathers, they want peace and they want material prosperity so when they get it they just take it as a sign that God has blessed and stop.

But in that day Judah made that error, Joseph made the same error, zone two, that extended from Gezer all the way on up to Sidon, this whole coastal stripe, the Canaanite Phoenician strip that wasn’t pushed, they should have pushed them into the Mediterranean and the whole northern area that extended up to what is now Syria and Damascus, they should have shoved them all the way up to the Caucuses Mountains and they didn’t do that either. So you have unconquered territory and this is because believers are lazy and so they refused to push these people out. But that’s another principle of holy war.

Our salvation today is in holy war, not against flesh and blood, Paul says in Ephesians 6, but against principalities and powers. And how do you conflict with the principalities and powers? You conflict with principalities and powers by conflicting with the ideas that these demonic powers put forth, such as welfarism. Welfarism is one of the great demonic delusions of our day and anybody that attacks welfarism is on God’s side. If you have other areas, such as an attack against capital punishment by a lot of sentimental legislators, again you have people destroying our society. We have people attacking the United States military establishment and they are on Satan’s side. We have people that are supposedly Christian senators going around wanting us to surrender all our territory and to give up our arms. They are on Satan’s side. Any time you have people undermining the United States military establishment you have the voice of Satan because it is always Satan’s attempt to undercut the national military strength. Any disarmament program is satanic; we learned that through the book of Samuel, through Isaiah 2, through Jeremiah. So disarmament in this age before Jesus Christ is always, always satanic.

So we have, then, this problem of holy way and until the sin nature is destroyed and until the demonic forces behind society are removed through Christ’s Second Advent there must be civil justice. With this we come to our safeguard from freedom that the Bible has given Israel and which we as a nation should practice today. These safeguards for freedom began in Genesis 9 and extend down to the Second Advent of Jesus Christ, and that is the institution of government. We’re going to see this institution and how men should be governed by law. But the problem of government is a problem of justice. So the problem we’re facing in the text of Joshua 20 is fundamentally the problem of justice.

There are two parts to man’s problem of justice. The first part has always plagued thinking men wherever they are and that is “from whence,” that is, from where do you get your concept of justice, of right and wrong; where, what is your base for erecting law and order. Where do you get your laws and the concepts of right and wrong from? Basically there are only five possibilities that you have today of getting right and wrong, actually only four but in history there are actually five. One possible source of right and wrong for civil law is a direct revelation from God. This is only given to one nation and only one nation during this time period between Genesis 9 and the Second Advent. That was given to the nation Israel, and during this time, from Genesis 9 to the Second Advent, we have at least method number one, God revealing Himself, the Ten Commandments, Him verbally speaking from Mount Sinai giving the Law. However, this can’t be true for our nation, it isn’t true for England, it isn’t true for any other nation, God hasn’t spoken to us in a national covenant and so this mode is out. This leaves four other sources of national and civil law.

The second source would be a consensus of society operating from the Bible. This was the source of early American law; this was the source of British common law and all in the Reformation countries, so you have a consensus. By consensus I mean not everybody is a believer, not even 51% of the people are believers. I don’t believe this has ever happened in any country except one country and that’s America. America at one time was 90% believers when the Puritans came to this country. But apart from that one phenomenal generation in history, we have never had a national entity with a high percent of believers. But we have had times when believers have been influential in making the non-Christian think Biblically. And during these times we have seen the great eras of freedom in history. This is why you are not going to see any more freedom in the 20^th century unless there is a Biblical revival there won’t be any freedom. You will see mob rule, you will see police states replace the existing democracies, etc. Democracies probably are satanic too; they do not provide maximum freedom. Maximum freedom is always provided in a republican form of government where you have a written constitution. But apart from these areas or a very wealthy and a very wise aristocracy, that’s another very excellent form of government, where you have an upper class that are dictators and the upper class, as long as they are biblically oriented and are in power and authority then you have also a good society, a free society, and a very productive one.

The second mode then would be a consensus based on biblical norms and standards. That would be the second source of civil law. The third possibility, which is the possibility we’re getting into in America is the tyranny of the 51% and that is when you take a vote and the vote determines right and wrong. We’ve seen that all over the nation, where you just take a vote and if the majority like it, that’s right, and if you oppose the majority you’re a stinker and you’re wrong and unchristian. So this is the third source of law that we could have, and that is the tyranny of the 51%, where an editor or somebody else determines right and wrong by generating a great majority feeling on an issue so that if you oppose the issue you’re automatically classed as “you’re out of it” or wrong.

The fourth, and this is the one which we will probably end up with, is what Plato argued for and that is the philosopher king, John Kenneth Galbraith is also arguing for this, a group where you have an elite, the industrial management elite and they will make the decisions. Galbraith goes so far as to argue that the elite will even make the decisions as to what is acceptable art and what is not acceptable art. They will dictate your artistic tastes for you, etc. So this is the fourth possible source of law, the philosopher-kings of Plato or the elite.

The fifth possible source of law is anarchy, that’s when everybody is for himself. So there is only five possibilities and if you’re here you have to realize that you are getting your norms and standards from one of these five sources, actually only four because God doesn’t speak to you directly. So you’re getting your norms and standards from one of these four; either you’re going along with the 51%, you’re listening to some other person who’s very influential, some person’s writings or something; you’re listening to a philosopher-king; or you’re making up your own standards as you go along and you’re an anarchist. Or, you believe the Word of God and you’re trying to apply norms and standards from the Word of God. So you have these four sources of law.

Now in Israel you obviously have source number one, God speaking, and so now that problem is solved. The Bible’s problem in Israel is solved, there’s no discussion about where law comes from. For example, at all times in Israel’s history you have no legislature. You ought to think about that, the three areas of government, the legislative, the executive and the judicial. Has it ever struck you, as you’ve read the pages of the Old Testament, that there’s no legislature in Israel. There’s no legislature in Israel. Do you know why? God is the law, God gave the law; it was men’s job only to carry out the executive and the judicial function but there was never a legislature in Israel. This Book was the legislation, so they didn’t have the legislature. That was one of their blessings; so we have, then, a tremendously wide set of laws in this nation, a beautiful set of laws.

Now men have always been troubled, after solving this problem, well, that’s fine, you have a legislature but what do you do about the executive and the judicial? How do you carry out justice in the practical 24 hour a day situation? So now we come down to chapter 20. “The LORD also spoke unto Joshua, saying, [2] Speak to the children of Israel, saying, Assign you cities of refuge, of which I spoke unto you by the hand of Moses. [3] That the slayer who kills any person unintentionally and without premeditation may flee there; and they shall be your refuge from the avenger of blood. [4] And when he who does flee unto one of those cities shall stand at the entrance of the gate of the city, and shall declare his cause in the ears of the elders of that city, they shall take him into the city unto them, and give him a place, that he may dwell among them. [5] And if the avenger of blood pursue after him, then they shall not deliver the slayer up into his hand, because he smote his neighbor without premeditation, and hated him not before hand. [6] And he shall dwell in that city, until he stand before the congregation for judgment, and until the death of the high priest that shall be in those days; then shall the slayer return, and come unto his own city, and unto his own house, unto the city from where he fled. [7] And they assigned Kedesh in Galilee in Mount Naphtali, and Shechem in Mount Ephraim, and Kiriath-arba, which is in Hebron, in the mountain of Judah. [8] And on the other side of the Jordon by Jericho eastward, they assigned Bezer in the wilderness upon the plain out of the tribe of Reuben, and Ramoth in Gilead out of the tribe of Gad, and Golan in Bashan out of the tribe of Manasseh. [9] These were the cities assigned for all the children of Israel, and for the stranger who sojourned among them, that whosoever kills any person without intent might flee there, and not die by the hand of the avenger of blood, until he stood before the congregation.”

Notice again verse 1-6 you have the command of the Lord, again following out the same literary form this book has followed throughout, the command of the Lord, obedience of the people; command of the Lord, obedience of the people; command of the lord, obedience of the people. The only time this cycle is interrupted was when we dealt with the sin of Achan. There they went out without a command of the Lord and they got in trouble. So in verses 1-6 is the divine command, verses 7-9 are the people’s obedience to the Word of God, carrying it out.

Verse 2, “Speak to the children of Israel, saying, Appoint out for you cities of refuge, whereof I spoke unto you by the hand of Moses.” Now the cities of refuge involve a concept in law of manslaughter. What do we mean by manslaughter? Manslaughter is accidental murder. In other words, you kill an individual and it’s involving an accident. For example, the Bible gives one illustration: you’re in the woods chopping wood, and the ax handle comes off the head of the ax, flies over and hits somebody in the head and kills them. That is manslaughter; you have taken a life, but it wasn’t really your fault. So therefore we have not murder but manslaughter. The cities of refuge are a system under the justice of the Old Testament by which they would protect you from judgment if you had committed manslaughter. So we have the concept involved of manslaughter but in order to understand manslaughter we have to understand first capital punishment and how this applies to the problem of murder.

Now the greatest true, that’s true in one sense as Dr. Chafer used to say at Dallas Seminary, there’s no such thing as a sinner’s skyline where you have some sins more than other sins and yet socially, according to God’s Word there is a sort of gradation, and the greatest sin that society can allow to go on is the murder, the sin of murder. This is looked upon in a way different from other social sins in the Bible. It is, for example, far… far more grievous to God than some of the sexual variants, etc. mentioned in other passages of the Law. Why is murder so crucial in God’s Word? It’s because of who man is and what happens when murder occurs. Man is made in the image of God and the image of God, then, becomes the reason why murder is so heinous in God’s sight, for murder is the destruction of one who is made in God’s image and when people hate the image of God it means they hate God Himself. So murder, therefore, is looked upon in the Scripture as a direct attack upon God’s character Himself. And man made in the image of God has infinite value; therefore when you take a life you have done something that can never be paid for and there’s no fine that will ever cover it, no jail sentence that will ever undo it. You have murdered a completely unvalued, invaluable crime.

Now we have to understand, then, why capital punishment in the Bible is always given for murder… ALWAYS given for murder, in both Old and New Testament. So we want to take time to review briefly a few points on the doctrine of capital punishment. The first thing we want to review about capital punishment is that it was found in Gen. 8; Gen. 8 and 9 give the installation of government and capital punishment is the ground of all government. Why? Because up until this time in history men had social organization. By the way, it didn’t as John Jacque Rousseau said, by some social contact. It came because God ordained social structure but what man did not yet have before Genesis 8 is the ability for a police action. Man had, as the father of the family, power over his children but he had no way of handling disputes between families. Within the family, yes, the father had authority but outside of that family you had no way of handling this. And so God intervened in various ways before the flood. Finally, the flood itself came and took away that whole civilization, the antediluvian civilization.

After this, God said in Genesis 8 and 9, I will not judge the entire world again; in other words, negative on direct intervention. You have to see this because this is why you have government. God said at the flood there would never again be a direct intervention; He would never again come into history except one time, and that would be the Second Advent of Jesus Christ but apart from that one divine intervention He would never come into history to stop and redeem the human race. Therefore you have immediately a problem and this is the problem that God had to face in eternity past, knowing that the human race was fallen what do you do with this problem? You have millions of people living on earth with old sin natures, millions and millions of old sin natures on earth. How do you preserve the human race from destroying itself? How do you preserve freedom for the individual? How do you keep the human race from self-destruction? God’s answer was through capital punishment, through giving the highest right to man. If you turn to Gen. 9 and look carefully at verse 6 I want you to see the phraseology of Gen. 9:6. All the bleeding-heart maudlin sentimentalists today are against capital punishment and this is a satanic attempt to undue the divine institutions of government. Any believer who is against capital punishment is for Satan.

So you have millions and millions of people with sin natures. And you have these people on earth and they are going to destroy one another and so God says what I will do to keep the human race going until the return of Christ. Now you say why does He want to keep the human race going? Simple, he wants a maximum number to receive Christ as Savior. It’s an act of grace, so God perpetuates history as 2 Peter 3:9 says, “He is not slack concerning His promise” but He wants men to come to know Him personally. So He allows history to go on, He doesn’t cut it short. He allows history to go on and on and on and on and on. Why? To give men a chance to receive Christ; it’s an act of love, it’s an act of grace. So in order to preserve the human race during the period of grace, he establishes government.

And you’ll notice in verse 6, “Who sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed,” this is not a prophecy, it is a command. It’s worded like a prophecy, it’s part of a legal covenant with Noah. It is a command. “Who sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed,” notice “by man,” it is a collective use of the word “Adam” in Hebrew and refers not to individuals. In other words, the point here is that if X kills Y and you have Z over here who is a friend of Y, it’s not Z’s job to avenge Y’s death by killing X. The concept in verse 6 is not vengeance. The concept in verse 6 is that man collectively as society is given the right to take life. And of course, implied in verse 6 is the right to have a policeman, is the right to have law, is the right to order society. All of that flows out of this one statement. But verse 6 takes you back to the ultimate right, the right to take life is the ground of all other rights. So if government has been given the right to take life then government has all the other rights. So this is the ground of government in Scripture. This is why accepting the Bible as literal history I have a philosophy of government that no non-Christian can ever possibly have. You’d have to go over to something like Rousseau and say government is this and a social contract and all the rest of the nonsense, etc.

But the Bible gives you a totally satisfying philosophy to government because it tells you what government is. What is government? Government is man temporarily taking care of God’s judgments. Now that’s an important statement. Government is man temporarily executing God’s judgments. Remember… God’s judgments! The government does not execute man’s judgments. The government does not execute the community’s judgments. The government executes God’s judgments. It’s God that says this in verse 6, not man. This is not community vengeance as lawyers want to argue in the court and get the jury all emotionalized—oh, you can’t give this man the death sentence, there’s an [not sure of word]. Nonsense, of course you can give the man the death sentence because you’re commissioned to carry out God’s directives and this is God’s directive. Nonsense, this has nothing to do with community vengeance; this is God’s directive and it hasn’t been superceded. Why hasn’t it been superceded?

Let’s go to the New Testament and I’ll prove it hasn’t been superceded. Acts 25:11, remember this is not a matter of community vengeance, it is not a matter of what the sociologist says, it’s not a matter of what the judge says, and it’s not a matter of what the lawyer says. It’s a matter of what God has said, period! In Acts 25:11 we have Paul and what’s does Paul say? Does he say capital punishment is wrong? Of course not. “For if I be an offender, or if I have committed anything worthy of death, I refuse not to die,” Paul recognizes that he personally will submit to capital punishment if he has done that which warrants judgment. Why does he do this? Because he recognizes that it is not community vengeance, it is God’s Law.

Romans 13 is the same thing, the classic statement in the New Testament. How can anybody who has Romans 13 in their Bible, I know the new translations are bad but I don’t think they have eliminated Romans 13 yet. How can anybody with Romans 13 in the Bible stand up and say the New Testament undoes capital punishment. What a statement of nonsense. What does Rom. 13:4-6 do? Look at this! “For he,” the government official, “is the minister of God,” who? Society? The social contract as John Jacque Rousseau? No. He “is the minister of God,” no matter who he is; he may not be a believer himself, but the government official “is a minister of God to thee for good. But if you do that which is evil, be afraid; for he bears not” what? “the sword in vain,” what was the sword used for. I’ll tell you something, it wasn’t used just to wave in people’s faces. Not the Roman soldiers, they had a two-edged sword, the machaira, one of the greatest fighting instruments in the world. In fact, our police would do well to have a machaira, it would really solve a lot of the riot problems because you get a line of men standing up marching after you with six bayonets or a machaira out in front and something happens to the mob line; it’s amazing, this is something that’s more terrifying, I think, than having someone come after you with a gun. The idea of having a group of men marching toward you with sharp steel pointed in your direction just has an unnerving effect on a group of people. And if our police force was armed with the weapons they should be armed with you wouldn’t see any problems with riots.

This is the way the Romans put down insurrection, and by the way, we have historical precedent and the Christians have always been against riots. Martin Luther in the peasantry revolt of 1500, the early 1500s sided with the German princes who were not all Christian. You say what, Martin Luther was a Christian, Martin Luther was a teacher of the Word of God, what did Martin Luther have to do siding with these [can’t understand word] hungry German princes against those poor peasants that were revolting in Germany. You remember what Martin Luther said? He said we’ve reasoned long enough with those anarchists; he said those people cannot be reasoned with and their ears must be unstopped with musket balls until their heads pop off their shoulders. Those are the words of Martin Luther. Do you know why he was this way and why every historian in the modern liberal classroom always attacks Martin Luther for this, always holds Luther up to ridicule for his position on the peasant’s revolt? Because none of them understand what Martin Luther understood in verse 4, the German prince, whether he were Christian or not, was a minister of God and the peasants, no matter how just their cause, had no reason to overthrow government in a move of anarchy and therefore they must be crushed with all the armed force necessary. The Christian will always be on the side of the police against mob violence because the police have always protected believers. In the book of Acts it was the police always that saved Paul from the mob; no Christian ever has the authority by the Word of God to participate in mob violence. And if any Christian is involved in mob violence he deserves to shot; if the police shoot in the crowd, he should get it, and probably based on Rom. 8:13 he probably will get it.

So the position in the Word of God is very clear, if you want a just cause there are ways open to you that you can do. You may be like a little baby, like these kids that are always out mobbing, they remind me of my three year old, if he can’t get his way, what does he do? Throw a fit. What does a one year old do? He throws his rattle around when he can’t get his way. That’s exactly what the mob is doing, they haven’t got time to exercise their prerogatives as citizens, they get mad and they want it right now and we’re supposed to give it to them, spoon feed everybody, give them a job, give them this, give them that and everything else. And this is just like a little tantrum raised by little kids. So mob violence today has nothing to do with social justice; don’t get swayed by some national council of clergymen that gives you some party line about the poor underprivileged. There are no underprivileged people in our country, at least not underprivileged to the point of starting anarchy.

Now I want to show you just one verse, Luke 22:36, as long as we’re on the topic because I want you to see the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ. I’ve given you Paul, I’ve given you the Old Testament, I’ve given you Martin Luther, let’s turn to Christ and see what He says. The closing words to His disciples… remember when He sent His disciples out and the Kingdom of God was imminent, back in the days when He was ministering in Israel it could have been a theoretical possibility that the Kingdom of God come about in history and if the Kingdom of God had come about in history there would be perfect social justice; there would be no need to protect yourself. But Israel rejected her Messiah and after Israel rejected her Messiah what did Jesus do? In Luke 22:36 He gave some closing instructions to believers and He said: “But now, he that has a purse, let him take it, and likewise his bag; and he that has no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.” Arm yourself, the teaching of Jesus Christ; arm yourself! Do you know why? Because we don’t live in the Kingdom of God and until the Kingdom of God comes with the return of Jesus Christ it is up to government and law and order to use armed force to subdue evil. This is the principle of Romans 13, it is a principle here.

By the way, this is justification to bear arms. All this poppycock about legislating firearms is another satanic plot. Luke 22:36 teaches that you have the right to own a gun and keep it in your house, regardless of what the government says, because Jesus Christ says it’s necessary to defend yourself and with the government going the way it is. So you might as well get a gun and defend yourself and Luke 22:36 gives the authorization. It teaches that every person has to, if they don’t have protection from the police and if the police are handcuffed by the court, then it’s up to the individual citizen to have his own gun loaded and ready to use. Now there’s one state in our union that has an excellent law it has just passed and it probably is one of the most helpful freedom promoting laws that has ever come on American books; the state of Nebraska has passed a law that says that you as a citizen can take any means necessary to protect your life against violent assault, murder, rape or any other violent crime. …any means necessary; that means if you have to shoot the person shoot them. As the person who told me that said do you want to bet that Nebraska’s crime rate goes down next year… you bet, because it’s following a Biblical principle. I know some of you don’t like this but I’m sorry, this is the Word of God and this is the way it is. You’re used to hearing some sentimental thing cranked out by some minister, oh, isn’t it terrible that people have guns, and all the rest, all the bleeding-hearts, etc. Listen, the day they outlaw firearms I’m going to buy a handgun and a holster and wear it to the pulpit.

So we have Rev. 19, the last in our series on capital punishment. Now in Revelation 19:13 it shows you that Jesus Christ Himself executes by capital punishment at the final climax and here we have the last of the capital punishment, although of course it goes on during the millennium, etc. but the principle is that when Christ comes He Himself takes over the role that He had delegated to government. Remember I said what was government? Man temporarily taking over God’s judgment. Temporarily, temporarily! And then when Christ comes in Rev. 19 He takes back the authority that He had previously delegated and I want you to notice the picture of Jesus Christ here. In verse 13, “And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood; and his name is called The Word of God.” Is that a very nice picture? That’s what Jesus Christ looks like when He comes back. And that blood isn’t animal blood, that’s people blood from execution of people who have resisted him.

So I just want you to see that capital punishment is taught in both Old and New Testament and you can see that it is the foundation of all government. This is why it is very, very serious when we have people all over the world advocating against capital punishment. It is an attempt by Satan… I’m not saying these people are deliberately making league with Satan so don’t walk out here and say that I’m saying that they’ve prostrated themselves to Satan. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying behind the scenes I can identify that as a work of Satan by the norms and standards of Scripture, that it is Satan who is behind disarmament; it is Satan that is behind all moves to do away with capital punishment. Now the person who is doing away with capital punishment may be believers, they may be very naïve believers, believers who haven’t studied the Word of God, believers who don’t know the will of God, and they may be promoting it. But it is still Satan; it is Satan operating in and through their lives.

We have three closing arguments against capital punishment and I just want to add these to the footnote before we finish chapter 20. I’m trying to give you a basis for the overall civil justice tonight. There are three basic counterarguments against capital punishment. The first counterargument that you usually hear is that capital punishment does not deter crime, that statistics can be shown that in areas where they don’t have capital punishment they don’t have any higher crime rate than areas where they do have capital punishment. Our response to this is two-fold; first of all, capital punishment wasn’t given just to deter crime. Capital punishment was given to execute God’s judgment. And our second reply to that counterpoint is that if capital punishment were done biblically, it would deter crime. What do I mean being done biblically? Simple, that it be done publicly, so everybody could see it. Now that may sound very gruesome to you, but this is the way it is done in Scripture and this is the way people learned that crime doesn’t pay and that if you take somebody else’s life, somebody has to pay for it and the criminal has to pay for it in public, quickly.

The second argument against capital punishment is that it’s community vengeance, and of course, I think by now you know my answer to that. It’s not community vengeance at all, it’s the fact that it is God’s judgment and we are called and commanded to carry it out.

The third counterargument is that you can’t justly administer it in a fallen society. The answer to that is when was this command given? It was given in Genesis 9; the fall happened in Genesis 3. Don’t you think God knew that? Of course God knows that it couldn’t be just; do you know why? Because His own Son was killed by capital punishment in a mistrial. In other words, the wheels of justice failed with Jesus Christ and Christ was put to death because capital punishment was not justly administered. Don’t you think the Father knew that when He risked it. If, therefore, God in His omniscience knew His own Son would die under the wheels of a miscarriage of justice then your argument holds no water whatever. God knew there would be miscarriages of justice when He instituted it and He risked His own Son even then.

So now we come to this city of refuge problem. To get the background on this let’s go back to Exodus 21:12. I want to show you how the concept of the city of refuge arose. Remember, we’ve dealt with murder; we’ve dealt with capital punishment, now we move to manslaughter. A life has been taken but it was done in an irresponsible way. How, in practice, was God’s judgment executed in this situation. What do you do in practice? They had a very, very interesting way of handling the problem. “He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall be surely put to death. [13] And if a man lie not in wait, but God deliver him into his hand; then I will appoint thee a place to which he shall flee. [14] But if a man come presumptuously upon his neighbor, to slay him with guile, thou shalt take him from Mine altar, that he may die.” Notice that phrase, “take him from Mine altar, that he may die.”

So the first area that we have developed for the protection of a person in a manslaughter situation is the altar of incense. Now the altar of incense, if you remember the tabernacle in the Old Testament, there was a Holy of Holies and a holy place. The furniture in this tabernacle spoke of the work and person of Jesus Christ. It was always picturing Jesus Christ in some way or the dynamics of salvation in some way, shape or form. And right here in the holy place they had the altar of incense. This article of furniture had incense always burning on this altar. Now if you’re sharp, that should recall to your mind something about the function of incense. As you read the Bible and you really get a Biblical mentality if you’ve read it at all, where does incense usually come? Remember those phrases over and over; God says your prayers are incense in My nostrils, sweet smelling. All right, so the altar of incense is actually a picture of prayer. It is a picture of a man coming before the Holy of Holies, the presence of God and asking for mercy, from the Old Testament this is what they did.

So a man who had committed manslaughter could be safe if he would run and hold on to the horns of the altar. Two examples that can be found in 1 Kings 1:50 and 2:28, you have two instances there of men who actually did it. But you have the altar here, it had horns on it and these men would run in before the altar and they’d hold on to these things and it would preserve them from the avenger of blood, which I will explain in a moment. But that is how they were safe. Now I want you to notice something. Where did they go? They went to the altar of incense which is a picture of a believer pleading for mercy before God. Notice where they did not go? They did not go to another member of the society. It was not a horizontal deal; it was a vertical one. The person who was engaged in manslaughter pleaded his case before God who gave the Law in the first place. Again you have the divine dimension to judgment in civil law. Don’t be swayed, just because we preface l-a-w with the word c-i-v-i-l, don’t think of this as a horizontal thing; you’re tracking your humanistic thinking into the culture. You’ve got t think of it vertically. Civil law under the providence of God accomplishes His justice. So this is a picture of it here.

But later what does He say? Well, that’s fine but what do you do when the people inherit the land, and here’s Shiloh, there’s the altar of incense, there’s the tabernacle. What are you going to do if you commit manslaughter down here? You’re going to have a long hike up to the tent and there’s going to be somebody breathing down your neck, and unless you’re a track star and in shape it’s going to be tough. So therefore what God is going to do, He’s going to decentralize and so the next passage of Scripture is Num. 35. And in Num. 35:14 He decentralizes the method of obtaining mercy from Him. “You shall give three cities on this side of the Jordan, and three cities shall you give in the land of Canaan, which shall be cities of refuge.” These now replace the altar of incense as a place to go if you have committed manslaughter; I have positioned these six cities on this map and you will notice that they are positioned in such a way that they are equal distance from all points in the land. If you measure these out they are roughly equal distance. The reason why some of them are closer than others is because of terrain problems. Some of these cities are up in a high area and it would take you a long time to run up the hill, so therefore God shortens the distance. So God divinely designed six places of cities of refuge so that no matter where you were within the land, when you committed manslaughter you had an equal opportunity to run and be saved. So the cities of refuges are six.

In Deut. 4:41 you have the assigning of three of these cities. “Then Moses set apart three cities on this side of the Jordan toward the sunrising, [42] That the slayer might flee there,” and in verse 43 you have the three named, “Bezer in the wilderness, of the Reubenites; and Ramoth in Gilead, of the Gadites; and Golan in Bashan, of the Manassites.” That last one should be familiar to you if you read the newspapers, Israel in the Six Day War got the heights of Golan and there it is; that was the city of refuge back in this time. So you have the three cities east of Jordan; Moses gave them to Israel.

Now Deut. 19:2-3 we have the other three prophesied. Moses explained, “Thou shalt set apart three cities for thee in the midst of thy land,” see, we’ve already got these three cities over here, east of Jordan these three cities are already assigned. But Moses said when you get into the land you’ve got to have three more to cover all the land. Verse 4, “And this is the case of the slayer who shall flee there, that he may live: whoso kills his neighbor ignorantly [unintentionally], whom he hated not in time past,” etc. So he gives you the mechanics, and verses 1-12 of this chapter protect against undue vengeance. Verse 13, however, protects against sentimentalism. Notice the two great areas that you will have. If you ever serve on a jury, always look around carefully because there will be people on that jury who will be swayed by one of these two motives and you as a believer, your job is to give stability to that jury. You should have enough doctrine to be able to walk in a clear cut case and give some good judgment on the jury. And your job is going to be to fight against two tendencies; one is against vengeance, just get the guy, and verses 1-12 are all listing safeguards against vengeance, because it is not vengeance; the issue is justice from God type judgment.

But then in verse 13 there’s another problem, sentimentalism; if the guy is guilty then he has to be judged, “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.” So these twin problems of justice, the problem of vengeance and the problem of maudlin sentimentalism are both dealt with in a very fantastic way.

Now let’s go back to Joshua 20; I’ve given you the background for the cities of refuges. In verse 3, “That the slayer who kills any person unawares [unintentionally] and unwittingly [without premeditation] may flee there;” now we want to look at that sentence structure because it tells us a lot about manslaughter. “Unwittingly” is actually in the Hebrew sh^egagah and it’s the word that means to err. And this introduces the fact that a man is not really totally innocent if he’s committed manslaughter to the Hebrew mind. In the Old Testament their thinking was that you were careless. You may not have intended to do it, but somewhere along the line you were careless about taking precautions necessary to save life, etc. For example, this is the basis why in modern society we have laws against drunks on the road. A drunk may not mean to hit you but if he’s coming 60 mph at you and you’re going 60 mph and you collide and you’re dead, whose fault was it? He may not be able to be charged with murder because he didn’t deliberately do it to you but he is guilty in a sense because he had no business being on the road drunk.

So manslaughter has a slight guilt to it and it’s out by this phrase that you find in verse 3, “unawares,” I don’t know why they translated it “unawares” but it means to do it but do it in a sense of you erred, you made a mistake. And “unwittingly” means without knowledge, and this means that you are not totally responsible either. So this means there was a sense in which you made a mistake but the other word negates it in the sense that you are without knowledge, literally in the Hebrew, meaning you didn’t plan the thing out, etc. So there’s a delicate balance between these two words, it gives you a bad taste but it doesn’t completely say that you’re to blame either.

Verse 5, “And if the avenger of blood” comes chasing after the guy, verse 3, “they shall be your refuge from the avenger of blood.” Now the avenger of blood is called goel; if you read the book of Ruth, Boaz is a goel. Now goel is usually translated redeemer, but the goel didn’t do just that and rather like to use the word “family protector” as a good translation of goel because a goel was a man, usually within a family, see they didn’t have lawyers and they didn’t policemen, so say for example a woman survived, her husband had been murdered, she might go to the brother of her husband, her brother-in-law and the brother-in-law would act as her goel. Now what does that mean? It means that the brother-in-law, first of all would perform the function of a policeman. He would go and he would capture… it would be his job to go capture the person who murdered this woman’s husband. The second job of the goel would be to bring this man to trial and act as the prosecuting attorney. Now the book of Ruth gives you a third function of the goel, to act also as a lawyer in civil matters. So you might say it’s a big brother concept where a man in the family took care of the legal matters of that family, a goel, and that is the avenger of blood, meaning that this is the policeman who’s going to come after this guy; he has murdered, say this lady’s husband, he’s killed this lady’s husband and he did it by an accident and the goel is to find out whether he did it, and so he’ll come after him, he acts as a sheriff or a policemen and he’ll go chase him.

And verse 5, this person goes inside the city of refuge, and he will stay there, verse 6, until two things happen. “And he shall dwell in that city until he stand before the congregation for judgment, and until the death of the high priest.” So there are two things that determine his tour of duty in the city of refuge. The first one, appear before the congregation, means he will come to trial. Before he can be cleared to stay in the city of refuge his guilt must be determined. So the goel will act as a prosecuting attorney, verse 4 tells you he picks up his defense attorney from the elders, and they have a trial. Suppose he is determined not guilty of murder, in other words, it was an accident. So they’ve ascertained by trial that it was manslaughter, it was a case where he was not guilty of murder. Therefore, however, he is not free. And here again you see the slight off-colorness of this, that the Bible doesn’t strictly clear the person because the implication is he still could have been more careful. So he has to stay there until the death of the high priest. At the death of the high priest he is freed.

Now I want to show you something about this. Suppose ten years ago somebody in this congregation committed manslaughter and he fled to one of the cities of refuge and he’s been there ten years. Yesterday somebody else did it and he’s been there one day. Tomorrow the high priest dies; both are released. You say that’s unfair, this person spent ten years there, this person spent one day there, both are released upon the death of the high priest. This is a foretaste of divine grace and you have here through this type acting how God justifies the sinner. A person may have committed eight million sins and you may have committed two million, or think you have, so you think by golly, how did he get in here? Look at what he did, and pick out some heinous sin that you can’t stand, and this person is perfectly acceptable in God’s sight. The blood of the Lord Jesus Christ acts as an atonement for him and he is perfectly clear and you can’t stand it because of your legalism. And you want to just get that individual because that other individual has to suffer, he committed more sins than I did, and yet he is equally forgiven. And that’s God’s grace and that’s one of the greatest lessons believers can learn is the lesson of grace. And until you learn it you’ll have a lot of misery in life because God always operates on the grace principle.

Verses 7-8 deal with the specific things of the cities and the delegation for them. Verse 9, “These were the cities appointed for the children of Israel for the stranger that sojourns among them, for whosoever killeth any person unawares might flee.”

Now I want to close with five parallels between the city of refuge and the cross of Jesus Christ. I want you to see something. Remember I opened this evening with the concept that history has form and it has freedom. Do you know what this allows us to say? It allows us to say that when the Bible says God is just it means to define the word “just” as you would define justice in the area of the court downtown. In other words, the categories that apply to men are categories that apply to God; there is a connection between God’s character and the categories inside history. If there wasn’t, we wouldn’t know God. For example, if I tell you God is absolutely righteous and God is absolutely just, but suppose by that I mean something different than what you mean by righteousness and justice in the normal every day life. How could I say God is righteousness and justice to you? What would that mean? It wouldn’t mean anything. But I can say God is righteousness and just and you can understand what I’m saying, and you can understand what the Bible says because you understand righteousness and justice. So here’s why the Bible has something called typology. Typology means God is here, history is here and there’s a connection between the two, so that acts and events inside history are pictures of God Himself and we have connections.

Very briefly, what are the five parallels between the cities of refuge and the cross of Jesus Christ? The first parallel is that the cities were appointed ahead of time. I took you back to Exodus 21, that was at least ten years before they settled the land. They didn’t need cities of refuge back then, that was a prophecy, God had already prepared in advance for man’s need. And the cross of Christ is the same way because we read in Rev. 13:8 Jesus Christ was slain before the foundation of the world. God provided for man’s sin before man even fell. Think of that; Jesus Christ, in God’s mind, was dead on the cross before Adam even fell. So before there was even a need God had provided for it. And that goes for you as a Christian, your life, God has provided everything you will ever need for meeting every problem in your Christian life. There is never a problem that comes up, no matter how swiftly it comes up in your Christian life for which God has not provided total and complete assets of grace. And it’s the same thing here, God provided these cities ahead of time; God provided the cross of Christ ahead of time. That’s the picture of grace too.

The second parallel is that the city of refuge was a shelter from judgment. In other words, if that guy decided to take his garbage can outdoors to the garbage man outside the wall and the goel was standing there he could have killed him. So the city of refuge, as long as he stayed inside the city of refuge, he was in a shelter from judgment. Now when we are “in Christ” we are sheltered from God’s judgment. To see that this is not something that Clough generated out of his own frontal lobe turn to Heb. 6:18 and we have exactly the point being made by the author of Hebrews, that Jesus Christ is like the city of refuge, a shelter from real judgment. Notice the wording, that we “have a strong consolation, who has fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us,” and the whole imagery is somebody fleeing to the city of refuge to avoid judgment. And that’s the point, so the second parallel is the application that in Christ we have a shelter from judgment.

I just want to pause for a little footnote here; this is the real gospel. Now this is something you don’t often hear today, but this business about receiving Christ because He’s a psychological aspirin and He’s going to get rid of all your problems, etc. you’re going to be a wonderful person and you’re going to have this and life is going to be a bed of roses, all you have to do is receive Christ… this is not New Testament gospel presentation. The New Testament presentation says that you receive Christ as your Savior and a Savior from real judgment and wrath of God, that’s what savior means; it doesn’t mean psychological savior, the power of positive thinking and all the rest. It’s talking about savior from the wrath of God. Imagine yourself in a city of refuge if you want to get the picture. Do you want to go outside that thing and let a goel slit your throat? That’s not psychological salvation, that’s physical salvation; it’s the same thing in Christianity. You come to put your trust in Christ because if you don’t you’re going to be exposed to the wrath of Almighty God in hell. Now that’s the story and that’s the alternative and you may have been fed this line, come to Christ because He’s going to help you… He will, but that’s not the primary reason. The primary reason is to avoid the exposure of the wrath of God.

The third parallel between the city of refuge and the cross of Christ we’ve already seen and that is that both are accessible. Remember on the map, those cities were equal distance; they were set on a hill so everybody could see them; they were set and all the roads to those cities had to be repaired. They didn’t have a state highway works department to take care of their highways but they did have men that every spring would go out and the first roads they would repair in the spring after the rainy season were the roads to the cities of refuge. They had to go along these roads and pick off every stone so if a man was running along the road he wouldn’t stumble on the stone, every stumbling stone had to be removed from those roads. And every crossroad they had to have a sign pointing “city of refuge.” They had to erect their signs and keep their road surface; every road that went to the city of refuge had to be clear and plainly marked.

And so with the gospel of Christ, we have the gospel accessible, accessible to people and accessible to all men. Notice to the last passage I read to you from Joshua 20, it was for the sojourner, the Gentile as well as the Jew, and so the gospel of Christ is for female and male, regardless of your age, your education, it’s accessible and free to all who will come.

The fourth parallel between the cities of refuge and the gospel of Jesus Christ is that the death of the high priest was necessary as atonement, and so salvation is not available to us until the great high priest gives His life and then we become free. So we have the cross, the death of the great high priest.

And finally, the fifth parallel, remember we said there was a trial. And the person who had really committed murder could not be accepted in the city of refuge. The person who was genuinely guilty, who had not conformed to the conditions of admission to the city of refuge, was thrown out and handed over to the avenger of blood, and he’d be killed right there on the foot of the wall. And so similarly people are not acceptable in Jesus Christ who come insincerely, who have not fully placed their trust in Christ as their Savior. They may pretend to become Christians because they like other Christians; some people just associate with believers because they like their company. I don’t know why but nevertheless, people do like believers and their company and so they associate with them and then they start coming to church but they themselves never personally received Christ as their Savior and so they fool themselves. They sing the hymns, they give the money, they go through the motions and they join the Christian group but they are like the murderer that comes to the city of refuge, and they’re going to face a trial some day and they’re going to be thrown out, and this is what the New Testament says, the weeping and the gnashing of teeth, because many people who thought they were believers are going to be chucked because they never personally received Christ. With out heads bowed….