Clough Judges Lesson 1

Introduction

Tonight we are continuing the history series, we begin the third book, the first one was the book of Deuteronomy, the second one was the book of Joshua and the third one is the book of Judges. Tonight we will spend out time introducing the book and the theme of the book and things to look for as we go through the book. The first thing we want to know about the book of Judges is that it is the first major historical analysis of man in history. This book, you may never have thought of it this way, when it was written there was extant at that time absolutely no historical analysis of man. This book is going to paint man the way he should be painted, as my seminary professor used to say, warts and all. It’s an accurate portrayal of what man is really like. And the book of Judges is historical in two senses; it’s history centered and it gives you content of history, and the second thing, this book has made history because this is the first history book actually written. The book of Joshua can be seen as a compliment to the book of Deuteronomy, but it’s this book, the first real book where we have an analysis of history conducted.

Please remember that history is a subject that was not taught at all in the world until Israel. If you look on the tombs of the Pharaoh’s you find historical narratives but when you start to probe this seriously you find out one Pharaoh has the same battle the second Pharaoh had and you know that can’t be right, so you can only come to the conclusion that the historical details were not important to the Egyptians; historical details were not important to the Mesopotamians; only to the Israelites were historical details important. Always remember that because any concept of progress is history centered, I don’t care if it’s evolution, communism or something else, you cannot have a concept of progress in history until you have history and you can’t have history without the Bible. It’s as simple as that, and so evolution and communism and these forms that deal with process in history and progress in history basically are stealing their foundations from the Bible. That’s where they get them; they do not have these by themselves. So history is found only in Israel.

Now if we could summarize very quickly to get a contrast between the book of Deuteronomy, the book of Joshua and the book of Judges, we would see this: that in the book of Deuteronomy we have the constitution of the theocracy. In other words, here we have the covenant treaty, we have the theory presented, we have the form presented, we have God’s words given in all the details. We have, as it were, the operating instructions. All of this is laid down carefully in Deuteronomy but laid down, we quickly hasten to add, only in the book of Deuteronomy. In other words, you don’t have historical reality yet, it’s future. Moses, remember, in the Law he said when you get in the land, then you will do this. When God provides a place for you, then do this; when you get to this point, then do this. It all hinged on that which would be future. So Deuteronomy gives you the operating instructions; Joshua deals with the erection of the theocracy; Deuteronomy is the constitution of the theocracy, in Joshua we have the erection of the theocracy, the building of the theocracy. In this book, the book of Joshua, we covered the conquest of the land where now the theocracy is not just an idea on a piece of paper by Moses; it now becomes a physical space/time reality. That is Joshua. Up until this point, Genesis, as well as Deuteronomy and Joshua, have all dealt with one fundamental question. The question is, does God’s Word verify in history? That’s basically the point in all this; in one sense you can look upon the whole Pentateuch as an apologetic work, it is to show the evidence that God is really there.

So up until this point over and over the issue is not moral behavior; the issue is the existence of the God who makes words to men and these words come to pass on down the line. You always have that; this is the thrust up until this point. So therefore when you deal with immorality, and it’s a favorite conversation, I’m sure you’ve had this experience, where you have somebody you’re talking to about spiritual things and the first thing, they say oh, all that immorality in the Bible, I wouldn’t even let my children read the Bible. I’ve had people tell me that, I don’t let my child read the Bible, there’s too much immorality in it. It’s interesting to be concerned about morality but why bother if God isn’t there, there’s no worries about morality or immorality. It’s a lot easier to be immoral so why not be so.

So the whole Bible starts with, not morals, it starts with the existence of God, and what kind of a God is He and is He trustworthy to His promises. So up until this time God has made promise after promise after promise and with Joshua this comes about; we see that God does operate in history according to His promises. The vast part of Genesis, the section in Genesis 12-50, what is that? It’s simply showing the Abrahamic Covenant, how it works out; God promised to Abraham certain things and now we’ll see historical event after historical event after historical event showing that yes, God indeed does work exactly the way He promised. So this, as it were, forms the apologetic base so now you know that God is there, you know that when he says something His promise will come to pass.

Now beginning in the book of Judges we have a shift. The question now is no longer is God there; the question now is how does man respond to God. And so from this point forward in the Old Testament the emphasis is now not on God so much as on man’s response to God and the things that man does, etc., revealing man’s true nature. Please notice that this analysis cannot start until after you have the Law laid down in the book of Deuteronomy. So this actually, some of you history majors, this actually was the basis of history originally. Originally history was analyzed by the prophets of Israel to answer this question: what is man like? That’s basically what set off al history writings, to find out how God worked with man.

So now in Judges we have several things to look for in this major historical analysis, two things fundamentally. The first thing is that we have special revelation of the God-man relationship… special revelation! Let’s define a few terms here. I have used these two terms, general revelation and special revelation, not new to me, you read Lewis Chafer’s Systematic Theology it’s the same thing. General revelation means God’s works and words generally to the whole human race. Special revelation is that which is given through the nation Israel. The Bible and so on is special revelation and we summarize general revelation by saying man and nature. So we have three parts, man, nature and the Bible. You might add Christ if you want to be detailed. So we have basically these four parts: man and nature—general revelation; Christ and the Bible—special revelation.

This is the Bible, therefore this is special revelation. Special revelation deals with God’s Word and His works. But there’s a little subtlety here I want to warn you about, something that maybe will transform your attitude toward some of the pages of God’s Word, and that is, what do we mean when we say special revelation is God’s works and His words? You might say well, I can see it real clearly, God’s words are Deuteronomy and His works are these historical things that we’re going to deal with in the book of Judges. Or we might say Joshua, some of the acts there, and in Judges and so on, all these actions here. So Deuteronomy gives us God’s Word and here we have the acts of God; the words of God, the acts of God, both are consistent showing God is trustworthy. You might leave it there, except if you did you’d rank with the liberals because the fundamentalist goes further than this. We do not say that we just have Deuteronomy as God’s words and later on we have God coming along and acting; we add a third element and that is that it takes inspiration to inspire a man to tie the two together for us. Here is God’s Word, here’s God’s works, but how can you tell that the work is God’s work. So you have to add to this, actually, a prophet; you have to have a man with prophetic insights to tie the two together and write an analysis. And so we therefore have the beginning of the prophetic analysis of history with the book of Judges.

Turn briefly to the New Testament, to 2 Peter 1, where you see the New Testament norm. The reason I spend time here is because I want to counter the mentality that goes with these red-letter editions of the Bible. If you have a red-letter edition I’m not personally attacking you but my point is be careful about these things; the red-letter edition gleans the idea that there are certain parts of the Word of God that are more important than other parts, more authoritative than other parts, and that basically the analysis sections, you can kind of take it or leave it, that sort of thing.

In 2 Peter 1:20-21 Peter deals with the prophetic analysis of history, not just future, please don’t make the mistake of thinking of a prophet as only future; these men were past and future. It takes a man of prophetic insight, for example, and we don’t’ have one, but it would take a man of prophetic insight to write a history of the United States from God’s viewpoint. We can have Christian historians that try to do their best but they’re fallible and their product would be fallible. But suppose we had a real prophet living in this century, in our generation, he would be a man who could sit down and start with 1776 and move forward and say—God’s acts, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, just like that. I think it would be kind of interesting, read directly God’s mind on the history of our country and have a complete historical analysis with the significance of every major national event since 1776. I think that’d be a most fantastic thing to read imaginable. But nevertheless, this would be a prophet, and he wouldn’t have to predict a thing, he is simply showing how God works in history.

This is what 2 Peter 1:20-21 is saying, “Knowing this first, that no prophecy,” that includes both past analysis and future predictions, “no prophecy of the scripture springs forth,” literally, “originates out of any private interpretation.” Now I know some of you may have looked at verse 20 and I was raised and went to school in Boston for five years and the Catholic Church in that part of the country had everybody brainwashed that verse 20 meant that you could not interpret the Bible, and basically verse 20 was saying that you must go to your priest to find out what the Bible says. That’s just the way everybody took it; unfortunately for them, this has nothing to do with Bible interpretation; this has to do with Bible generation, this is the writing of the Bible in the fist place. And what he’s saying here is that you don’t have this prophet sitting down here and just with sheer power of his brain crank out his prophetic analysis of history. In other words, his prophetic analysis does not come strictly from his own mind; that’s what verse 20 is saying. “Of his own interpretation” means… he’s not some TV news anchor or commentator or something and he sits down with omniscience five minutes after the President gets through discussing something and can tell exactly what’s right and what’s wrong with what the President said. We don’t have any of this commentary business.

This is what Peter is saying in verse 20, that this does not come forth out of somebody that just sits down and comments on what happens. This comes forth in verse 21 because the Holy Spirit works carrying these men along. [“For the prophecy came not at any time by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.”] I introduce the book of Judges this way because if you’re like me, the first time you heard the book of Judges you thought oh great, what’s in the book of Judges, something about Samson running around with his girlfriends is about the only interesting thing but what else is there in that book, not much. But if you have the divine viewpoint you will understand and orient to this book. This book would not be in the canon of Scripture if it were not for God’s will. God has sovereignly taken a prophet or prophets, we don’t know who they are, the best guess is Samuel, for reasons I’ll tell you in a moment, the best guess is probably that Samuel is probably the man who put the book of Judges together, and he analyzed the thing and wrote it down. Well, if God inspired, and it was the Holy Spirit that caused the prophet to write this book, don’t you think the book is important? Of course it is!

So the book of Judges is very important and has a message for our generation. With that, let’s go back to the book of Judges and begin to study a little bit about it. Let’s get a good background. The first thing we find about the book of Judges is that this is as authoritative as Deuteronomy. Don’t make a division in your mind where mentally you keep thinking the Law of Moses is superior to all of this Sunday School stuff about Judges and somebody runs around and shoots somebody. The book of Judges is very important, and the book of Judges is of equal authority, not less than but equal authority with the rest of the Bible.

What does the book of Judges concentrate on? It concentrates on man; it is a history to written to find out what happened by the time of 1000 BC. In 1000 BC the nation Israel faced a crisis. It faced a tremendous crisis over the problem of what we call kingship. This book was written after 1000 BC but it was written before David conquered Jerusalem so we’ll have to date it between the time of Saul and the time of David in the first half of his reign, somewhere in there, this book was written after the kingship had occurred, but it was written before David conquered Jerusalem, so somewhere in that bracket this book was composed. Probably the disciples under Samuel worked this thing together. But the crisis surrounded the king; should Israel have a king?

If you turn to the last verse of the book of Judges you see how the book ends; the book is an argument, it is a historical analysis and argument why a king is necessary. I might note here, the book of Judges is one of the key books in the Bible for obtaining a Christian philosophy of politics and government. The book of Judges is one of the key books of the Bible to lay a base for the Christian doctrine of politics in the government. Judges 21:25, notice how the book ends, “In those days there was not king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”

Let’s go back and look at how this theme is developed. Turn back to Judges 8:22, this is an incident in what is called the Gideon cycle. Gideon has just been successful in destroying the enemies of Israel and the men of Israel come to him in verse 22, “Then the men of Israel said unto Gideon, Rule thou over us, both thou, and thy son, and thy son’s son also; for thou has delivered us from the hand of Midian.” Notice what they’re asking—set up a dynasty. Gideon, your son and your son’s son, it is a request for kingship; it is a request to start the monarchy. And Gideon, in verse 23 politely declines the favor, “I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you; the LORD shall rule over you.” Gideon recognizes something that by the end of this book collapses entirely, the concept that is God alone sufficient to rule a nation, is God alone sufficient to rule a sinful society and here Gideon says He is and you should let him rule over you. But by the end of the book it becomes obvious they will not and so therefore we have the argument and the base set for kingship.

Look at Judges 9:6, “And all the men of Shechem gathered together, and all the house of Millo, and went, and made Abimelech king, by the oak of the pillar that was in Shechem.” Some of you thought Saul was the first king of Israel; he was not, Abimelech was, unauthorized but nevertheless here he is, they actually made him and installed him as king over the nation Israel. He didn’t last long, obviously without God’s sanction nothing can last. Look at Judges 17:6 notice the refrain, “In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”

Look at Judges 18:1, “In those days there was no king in Israel. And in those days the tribe of the Danites…” and he goes on but notice, “In those days there was no king,” which implies that in the day in which it was written there must have been a king. In Judges 19:1, “And it came to pass in those days, when there was not king in Israel…” see the refrain, over and over the point is being made in this book, there’s no king, there’s no king, there’s no king, we’ve got anarchy without a king. This is the argument of the book of Judges; sinful society without a power structure will decrease and decay into chaos, finally anarchy and everything breaks loose. So the argument is that we must have a strong centralized authority of power, force mind you.

But let’s look at how this first started out, lest we get the wrong impression about force, power and centralized government. We have to place this sovereignly into the historical background of the times. What was going on in the other countries? Let’s look around Israel for a moment and see what was happening. Here’s a map, Israel is located here; here is Egypt, here is Mesopotamia; these are the two great power axis in the ancient world. In Mesopotamia you had a mild form of kingship; in Egypt you had a strong form of kingship. In Egypt you had the rule of Pharaoh and Pharaoh is god-king, Pharaoh is Amon-Re incarnate, Pharaoh is the almighty peg that holds society together and thus, for thousands of years he went on in a highly regimented society with a tremendous power structure that enabled Pharaoh to have a G-2 squad that would make the G-2 squad of our day look ridiculous. Pharaoh had the greatest informant system.

Pharaoh had the greatest system of corvee labor the world has ever seen; think of the thousands and thousands of men that sweated out their guts dragging rock to make the pyramids and you get an idea of what it must have been like. It’s easy to compute, all you do is take some body mechanics and compute the energy that’s needed to lift the volume of granite and the volume of these rocks that were hauled up these tremendous inclines and they did it by sheer human power, just pushing these things on rollers up. Think of the quarrying that had to go on down in Sinai, think of how they got the blocks across the hot Sinai peninsula, with human sweat, and how they had to get it down across into these giant barges and have these barges push north along the Red Sea and then deposit it and then slaves by the thousands would take these great blocks and begin to push them across the hot sand until they got to the Nile valley to build these tremendous edifices for Pharaoh. And all during that time not one armed revolt, perfect government. How did it all happen? Because Pharaoh was more than a politician, Pharaoh was the god-king, you worshipped Pharaoh, he was not just the President, he was not just the king, he was Amon-Re, and you therefore respect Pharaoh as you respect no other human being.

This was shown by the Egyptian artists; you look at these things, Pharaoh is big, the men are small, when he is pictured with the gods he is of the same stature. It wasn’t that the artist sat down and made propaganda films for Pharaoh; it was rather they sat there and as they cut into the rock they said this is our Pharaoh, this is what Pharaoh is, and if you look more closely at Egyptian art every Pharaoh’s body is the same at except one, who was the great freak monotheist and it appears that the Egyptian artists made fun of him by showing his body to be a very ascendant Pharaoh, Amenhotep IV, but apart from this one Pharaoh you compare the statues of the Pharaoh’s and they all look the same, except for some of the facial features but the body is just mechanical, to the artist it didn’t matter what the individual personality of the Pharaoh was, he would just appear as Pharaoh and you have this tremendous power, the expression of fierceness.

Later I will show you some slides where the head of Pharaoh, and they take the human ears off and put on lion’s ears and they put a lion’s body on him. You say did they really think that such a thing, like a sphinx for example, existed—no, they knew that there was no such thing as a sphinx, they weren’t saying that. When they built the sphinx they weren’t saying there was such a thing as a sphinx; what they were saying was this is our Pharaoh, the same power that’s in the lion is the power brought to the epitome in Pharaoh. This is what their thinking was. It’s a diagram; learn to look at the sphinx as a theological diagram and you understand the Egyptian mind. This is a diagram of power and this is why Pharaoh’s face is placed on the body of a lion, to convey power; the power of the king of beasts is the power that is manifest through Pharaoh.

So you have to see Pharaoh as this: he becomes the absolute monarch and Pharaoh, of course, as he rules over Egypt has no law; there’s no law in Egypt, none whatever. It is only the Maat of Pharaoh, Pharaoh rules by Maat the Egyptians poems and hymns say over and over again, Pharaoh’s word is god’s word and so Pharaoh is the absolute. So here you have one concept of kingship that’s very strong.

But if you go north to the Mesopotamian valley and you look carefully at this, they too have the concept of king, and they have a centralized authority except their king, when they are depicted by the artist are the same size as the armies; you see the king who’s leading his armies and the artist has his figure the same height as the soldiers in his army. So it shows you that they recognized their kings were men, and all the statutes of the kings had individual features, which shows you again that the individual personalities of the kings was not lost in Mesopotamia. But even in Mesopotamia the king was on a high order of authority; he was a super king in our words because in Mesopotamia he performed three functions. Now only was he a king in that he administered, he was also a prophet and a priest. Later on I will show you texts where the prophet as a prophet, the Mesopotamian kings would go into the temple and they would go in there seeking omens and god’s will for the country. And so in that sense, seeking god’s will, they would interpret god’s will to their countrymen and they would act as a prophet. At other times of national calamity the Mesopotamian kings would walk in and they’d offer penance for the nation before the gods, acting as a priest. So they were super kings, in that they were not just kings, they were also prophets, priests and kings.

Think of this and pretend you are living at 1000 BC; to the south you have the most magnificent form of centralized government imaginable in Pharaoh. To the north you have the super kings of the Mesopotamian valley and then what have you got in your own country. Let’s see what they had by comparison. We’ll do it by a word study. We’re going to take four countries; we’ll take Phoenicia, we’ll take Akkad, which was a Semitic-state in Mesopotamia, we’ll take Rome, and we’ll take Israel. Four countries and let’s look at some words that were used. I’ll draw a little diagram. I will put the consonants down, I won’t put vowels on these words so you can see the similarity because the vowels do change from country to country, but a Semitic language is conservative as to the consonants. And so in Mesopotamia they had kings over Tyre and Sidon, and they were called malek, kings, just as they are called malek in Hebrew. So they had the king, malek, and they had people under the kings which we will preview, spt, and the “p” is to be understood as a “ph” in the English. It was pronounced the [sounds like: soup a tiim] and these were officials underneath malek, the supatim, keep that word in mind because it’s going to connect with the book of Judges. Here is Phoenicia; malek over all, and under him the lesser officials, the [sounds like show ter im or show fer im].

Then in Akkad we have the Akkadian word for king, lugal or ensi, these were two nouns used for king and they were the equivalent of malek; they are the super-kings, the prophets, the priests and the kings were called by this name. And under them they had officials called spt again, the same kind of official, [sounds like: shup a tool] is the way they pronounced it in the vowel system that went with those consonants. But notice, basically the same structure, the consonants are the same.

Then we come to Rome and Rome had almighty Caesar, Kaiser, and under him we had what was called consuls, who were very similar historically to the suptarim of the Phoenician city states.

Now we come to Israel and what do we find, there is blank, nothing equivalent to kings. Under here we have the shaphatim and these are the judges; notice the structure and compare it carefully. See all the countries; they all had their big-man, the super ruler, and underneath they had the lesser officials which were equivalent to the judges, the word “judge” in the Hebrew is shaphatim, again, spht, the same consonants. But Israel alone in the ancient world had no super king. Notice this. This is a radical innovation with Israel. You have a social society structured this big and no super-man to control it; amazing, amazing! Here is where you have freedom politically start. When God’s theocracy began you had a perfect concept of freedom; here is where freedom burst into the ancient world like a light in darkness; there was no super-man over Israel, and this is the argument of Judges. On the one hand are we going to give up all this precious freedom, after all, look at this, an exciting innovation in history, no nation is like us, and yet as time goes on in sinful society becomes evident that they can’t work with the system, they can’t work in a perfectly free society and so the greatest freedom, the most patriotic organization that had the greatest freedom of all time collapses under the power of the flesh because men are sinful and rebellious and eventually the whole system comes grinding to a halt. This is the theme of the book of Judges, a very, very important one.

Then later on in 1 Samuel 8 we have that great and sad crisis when Samuel must finally ordain a king but it’s not done with joy. Keep this is mind, Israel makes an innovation in the ancient world, a large vast country without a super-king. Can you imagine the impact and the witness this must have had; just imagine this, think in your own mind creatively of some incidents, if you were a short story writer, how you could write up some short stories about this time in history, how you could have a traveler coming down from the Mesopotamian valley and how he had lived all his life under the super-kings and now he comes along the coast and he comes along Tyre and he goes into Tyre and he sees they have a malek, and he goes up to Sidon and he sees they have a malek, and wherever he goes everybody has a malek or a super-king or a number one man, and under him lesser officials. And then he comes to the nation Israel and he says hey, where’s your malek, where’s your king? Oh, we don’t have a king, God rules us. Do you see the force? Then he’d go on down to Egypt and they’d have Pharaoh, and he says you know, I met a group of oddballs on the way down to Egypt, the only place I ever stopped in where they didn’t have king.

Now if you grab this you see how Israel, just by being Israel, was a testimony in the ancient world. All Israel had to do to be a testimony was just be Israel, just follow what God had said; fantastic testimony. And I imagine you had best sellers written in Egypt, The Oddballs we Met on the Way Down, describing this fantastic structure that we have going on here, no king, can you imagine that. No king, it’s amazing. And eventually this probably led to some frictions with Egypt, Pharaoh probably got a little hacked, this group up northeast were kind of undermining his authority basis, saying that he wasn’t necessary, they had God. So you can begin to see the tensions that develop. All you have to do is think creatively in your minds of what life must have been like in this kind of thing, where you cross a geographical boundary and all of a sudden something happens, a radical shift in the whole political climate due to God, and God gets the glory. Who is your king? Jehovah is our king.

So in 1 Samuel 8 the whole thing comes falling down; it’s a sad, sad moment in the history of the nation. 1 Samuel 8 is a classic statement about the evils of centralized power. Samuel says you want a king; all right, I’ll ordain a king but when I ordain a king I’m going to remind you of a few things you’re going to give up; you’re going to give up your great freedom, your precious freedom that God gave to you. Think of it, God physically redeemed the nation Israel from the greatest power on earth at the time, Pharaoh, the most intense form of centralized power imaginable. Talk about the communist party, the communist party had nothing compared to the centralized power of Pharaoh. Pharaoh would make the communist party envious, that a man like Pharaoh could have such power over all these people. And here God redeems them and gives them the greatest political system the world has ever seen and they blow it. That’s the theme of 1 Samuel 8.

So he says in 1 Samuel 8:6, “But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, Give us a king to judge us.” See the word “judge.” In other words, these judges were not doing the judges properly so we have to have a super-judge to do it. “Give us a king to judge us. And Samuel prayed unto the LORD. [7] And the LORD said unto Samuel,” and here’s a tremendous and yet it’s a sad word, “Hearken unto the voice of the people,” see, all power to the people, a very great theme today, and you watch how the slogan is repeated in the Bible in a different context, “Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee; for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected Me, that I should not” malek, here is the Hebrew verb for king, the noun and the verb have the same consonants, “they have rejected Me, that I should not be king over them.” And so under this situation, verse 8, “According to all the works which they have done since they day that I brought them up out of Egypt even unto this day, wherewith they have forsaken me, and served other gods, so do they also unto thee.” God says they rebelled, rebelled, rebelled, and now after…

In 1400 they move out, this is 1000, so you’ve had four centuries of experimentation with political freedom; 400 years. If you think that’s short just look at your own country; 1776 to 1976, how many years? 200 and it looks like the whole system is ready to cave in. 200 years, a very short period; these people had 400 years, twice as long as we’ve had as a nation but they finally went down; 400 years, and this sad, sad thing.

We go back to Judges now and I want to go all the way back to Deuteronomy 16. We’re going to deal with the Judge but we’re going to start in Deuteronomy. We have here a set of instructions that scholars have called the amphictyony [Webster’s: “an association of neighboring states or tribes in ancient Greece, originally established to defend a common religious center and later developing into a league with certain legislative and judicial functions; broadly, any association with neighboring states banded together for their common protection and interest”], or the amphictyonic period. Why? God lays out a tribal confederacy. Let me diagram the power structure here; you have basically the Holy of Holies or the Tabernacle and you have twelve tribes around this thing. Twelve tribes, the center of their political unity is a spiritual thing; the Tabernacle with God’s presence. So there are twelve tribes around the shrine and they are a tribal confederacy without a king, their only political unity is God Himself appearing at the Tabernacle. This, by the way, has tremendous repercussions.

If you understand anything that we’re taught today in these United Stated in 1971 with the increasing discord and division within our nation you can easily see the cause of this if you go back to the book of Deuteronomy and you see that in the first place a nation’s unity is a spiritual one; this is throughout Scripture. A nation must have a spiritual unity; the unity can be apostate or it can be godly but it has to be one or the other. The United States has always been in tension between the godly and the ungodly elements in a very unusual sense and so today we have this discord in our nation. We can’t get harmony because basic value systems are colliding. It has nothing to do with government programs; the government programs are all superficial, they have nothing to do basically with political philosophies of the conservatives and the liberals, it is deeper than that; it is the [can’t understand word] of which God is being worshipped. That’s the fundamental thing, and most Americans are materialists in practice in their personal lives they worship the god of matter and then there are others who worship the spiritual God, Jesus Christ, and there’s a collision between the two. So this is where the clash is that leads to all these other things.

But you have this amphictyony develop; now the interesting thing is that in the history of the world the amphictyony begins to spring up, of all places, in Italy and Greece after this period. See, up until the time of Israel we have Egypt and we have Mesopotamia. Both are strong kingship areas. Then in 1400 BC you have Israel burst on the scene with the amphictyony where you have perfect political freedom, tremendous freedom and interestingly enough there seems to be echoes; this must have made an impact in the ancient world and scholars believe the impact was transported by the merchant men and others to the shores around the Mediterranean and began to show up in Italy and began to show up in Greece. And from about 1200 to around 800 BC, approximately, from 1200 to 800 BC you have amphictyones begin to develop in Italy and Greece. That’s very odd because we never have anything that precedes them, we have nothing that follows them and it just looks for sure that they’re copying from some place. For example, you go to Italy you have the Etruscan league of Voltumna, you have twelve tribes around a central shrine. Where did they get that from? It looks like what they’re trying to do is mimic the tremendous free policy of the nation Israel. If you go to Greece you find some of them in [can’t understand word]; I’ll just list some, there’s gobs of them but let me give you three. You have seven cities in the amphictyony of Caluria around the temple of Poseidon, you have the great shrine, Poseidon and you have the seven city states around, allied in amphictyonic organization. The parallel? None, except in Israel. We have eleven tribes in another place in Greece around the grove temple of Poseidon in the amphictyony of Boeotia, so there you have eleven and again it looks like they’re trying to imitate a perfect political system but they can’t do it. The pan-Ionic amphictyony is another one.

But the interesting thing is that when you study the problems in Italy and Greece, all these amphictyones lacked one very, very crucial thing; they lacked a law, there’s no verbal law. And the will of Poseidon is never spelled out; the pan-Ionic amphictyony had no revelation of what their god wanted them to do; as a result these tribal confederacies fell apart quite rapidly. They tried them, they experimented, and they couldn’t make it work. Why? They didn’t have the Word of God. It’s very simple. And probably one of the greatest political experiments that could have changed the course of western history floundered in the fact that they had no living Word of God.

What happens after this? I want you to get the grasp of history and begin to look at history as one long line; we have Egypt, Mesopotamia, we come to the amphictyony that lasts from 400 to 1000, during this same period we have imitations in Italy and Greece and then finally the classical period of Greece with Plato and Aristotle moving down in 500 and following, Plato and Aristotle and the Sophists, and you begin to have the concept of the polis. By the way, this is where America gets its political philosophy; the polis is the word for city, and you begin to have a tremendous debate go on in Greece over the nature of the polis. There are two positions that you can take on the polis; you ought to understand this, by the way, it’s a free lesson. The polis was divided in its authority; on one hand you had the Sophists and Protagoras who were the relativists of their time; I might say what distinguishes a polis?

You see, you have three phases of history: the kingship phase, with Egypt and Mesopotamia, the amphictyonic age with Israel and it mimics here and then we have the polis stage. Now what is key about the polis that separates it from the amphictyonic period and the kingship period? The key idea that the Greeks bring into the system is that the community is the source of value, nothing outside of the community. Now does that sound familiar? The community is the source of all value, no God, no human outside control, it is the community; the community and the community alone that sets up the values. And here’s where this idea started, in apostate Greece. This is the same idea that comes down through the so-called social studies curriculum of our schools. It is the community that determines values, not someone outside the community, key word. You see, Egypt had someone, you might say, outside the community, Pharaoh, he is god, and he decreed what society did. In Mesopotamia you had the gods revealing themselves to the king; you had an authority outside of the community. In the amphictyones of Israel you had an authority outside of the community, Jehovah. But when you get to the Greeks, all that is chucked, thrown out the window, and now it is man who makes his own values, and you have a debate on which men are going to make the values.

And so you have the Sophists with their plays, the Theban plays and so on, and you begin to have Protagoras and all these men with relativism and they laughed and they ridiculed at the whole concept of authority and on the other hand you have two arch conservatives, Plato and Aristotle, and they fight for the fact that the community must be glued together and the only way you can glue it together is with absolutes. So you have Plato, do you know what Plato called slaves? The tools of man, a horrible phrase, I guess it was Aristotle that called them the tools of men; in other words, they justified the degradation of humans; they justified slavery by saying that women are weaker and therefore they should have a weaker place in society; the slaves are where they are, don’t feel sorry for the slave, you’re stupid to feel sorry for the slaves because the slave is a poor dumb slob, he can’t do anything else and he fulfills his perfect role in the absolute system by being a slave. The woman is a poor dumb woman, she doesn’t know what she’s doing and she has her position in the kitchen, leave her alone. And this is simply the way it is, sorry for you women’s lib types but you’re not going to get any help from Greece; the only place you’re going to get help from is the Word of God. That’s the only place where the woman is liberated in her true glory, the Word of God. And if you go back to Greece all you’re going to find in your great philosophic tradition is women’s slavery, it’s not women’s liberation. So you have all of this fighting; today we still are fighting, the absolutist, the latter day Plato’s and Aristotle’s versus the latter day Protagoras’ that say everything that’s relative and it’s just kind of an anarchy.

This is history; now do you see where Judges fits in the flow of history, government and politics? It fits right in the middle, it denies the kingship and yet it rejects polis. These two eras can be described—the era of Egypt and Mesopotamia as the era of men, when you have nature over man. In other words, Pharaoh is part of nature, he is over man because he is one of the gods of nature; Amon-Re, one of the great polytheistic gods, and so Pharaoh rules and you kiss his feet. Why? Because he is one of the great nature deities incarnate and you must kiss Pharaoh’s feet; if you don’t, too bad for you. Nature rules over man. And then we come to the Greeks and a reversal into the age of philosophy starts and you have a switch and now you have man ruling over nature. Notice the switch, a titanic switch happens in this time; the Greeks overthrow everything, they put man over nature.

But I wonder, and this is just a speculation on my part as to perhaps it will someday be found the reason why the Greeks dumped the myths is under the stimulation of Israel. The nation Israel played a vital role and the Greeks later misunderstood this because it looks to me like what we really have is this: we have nature over man, then we have Israel that places God over man and nature, and then the Greeks, apostacizing God have man over nature. It looks to me like that’s the sequence in history that happens although I can’t prove it. You have nature over man in the age of myth, you have man over nature in the age of philosophy, and I think Israel was the catalyst that did it. They had this radical [can’t understand word] where it was Israel that freed man from his slavery but now look what happened; man is now a slave to whom? To man. And so you’ve got one despotic regime where you have man kissing the feet of a nature deity and now you have man kissing the feet of man, and the only freedom is when man is kissing the feet of the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s the only freedom. Do you see the difference? You put this perfect society given… originally start out in the book of Judges, that was given to them in the book of Deuteronomy, you’re going to watch it here disintegrate but it was this society that apparently affected this gigantic transformation in history. So for this reason this book is very crucial.

Now let’s look at the provisions for this government and we’ll be ready for next time when we work with the text of Judges. What were the provisions that God gave to the nation Israel. In Deuteronomy 16:18-17:13 we have a section that deals with the judges and who they were and the restrictions upon them. Please keep this in mind that the hierarchy is this; God, the kingdom, the Law and the judge, in that order. God, the kingdom, the Law and the judge! Deuteronomy 16:18, “Judges and officers shalt thou make thee in all thy gates, which the LORD thy God gives thee, throughout thy tribes, and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment. [19] Thou shalt not wrest judgment [distort justice]. Thou shalt not respect persons, neither a gift, [bribe],” you see the emphasis in verses 18-20 is that you must have loyalty to God’s standards of justice.

Deuteronomy 16:21-17:1 you look there and you say wait a minute, what’s that got to do with it. “Thou shalt not plant a grove of trees near unto the altar of the LORD thy God,” you say I thought we were talking about courtroom, what’s going on? What does planting a grove near the altar have to do with a guy that’s judging? Very simple; you know what a grove was? A grove was a worship center in the ancient world and the altar was the place where the judgment was done in its highest form and so what it’s saying is don’t corrupt the religious base that underlies all the judicial system. Once you do that you’re in trouble. See, the Supreme Court hasn’t learned that yet; you cannot absolutely interpret the Bill of Rights autonomously cut off from the rest of the Constitution. This is what they have done in the Supreme Court; they have cut the Bill of Rights off and have made these rights as absolutes and refuse to interpret them in the concepts of the United States Constitution. And so they have, as it were, planted groves of trees in the Supreme Court because they undermine the careful balance that was there from the original. “Thou shalt not plant a grove of trees…. [22] Thou shalt not set the up any image,” see there’s your false religious values….”

Deuteronomy 17:1, which should be the last verse of chapter 16, “Thou shalt not sacrifice unto the LORD thy God any bullock, or sheep, that is blemished,” in other words safeguard the depth of your whole system. It starts with God and His Law.

That’s what the judge was to do. Verses 2-7 and verses 8-13 deal with some of the inquiry processes. Deuteronomy 17:2-7, “If there be found among you, within any of thy gates which the LORD thy God gives thee, man or woman who has wrought wickedness…, [3] And has gone and served other gods, and worshiped them,” verses 4 and 5 tell you what to do with them, if you skim down you see this has to do with an inquiry process to find out whether the accused party is truly guilty or not guilty. So this gives you at least one half of the role of the judge.

However the judge actually had two roles, the second one isn’t presented here but let me present them together. The first role was given to you in this chapter, that is a domestic role. The judge is to be a judge; he is to carry out the judicial areas and needs of the country. But the judge also had an executive function; it wasn’t just judicial and this has to do with foreign relations. The judge was the military leader; he would arise in the time of national crisis to lead his nation and to vindicate the law of Jehovah. He would be the great leader, as we have had rise in our times of a nation, the Douglas MacArthur’s, the Stonewall Jackson’s, the Robert E. Lee’s, the George Washington’s, the men who have always risen to assume the military command when needed. These were the judges, so they have to keep two groups, the domestic and the foreign relations. Keep that in mind because the book of Judges goes between them, the book of Judges emphasizes this one more than it does that one. So these are the two areas that are judge.

If you look in Deuteronomy 17:14-20 you’ll see a provision has already been made for a king that is not yet. “When you are come into the land which the LORD thy God gives thee, and you shall possess it, and shall say, I will set a king over me, like all the other nations,” then beware. God realizes that we have flesh, that we’re made of sin, and that we’re going to fail and God always provides for us. And here as though it must break God’s heart to destroy a perfect system of freedom for the sake of sinful man He realizes that it will have to be done. Some day this great experiment in political freedom will come to a grinding halt and through the sinfulness of man you’ll have a conglomeration of power in a king but certain safeguards are put in here because God doesn’t want any super king, like Mesopotamia and God doesn’t want any Pharaoh king like Egypt.

And so he lists certain restrictions and if you read verses 14-20 you want to make this more applicable in your own life the best way to do this is to think of it this way. These verses give the restraints that God would have on our government today. As we go down through these, just compare. God would like these restraints to be placed on our government. Imagine in your own mind what would happen if our government tomorrow began to follow out these constraints.

Beginning at Deuteronomy 17:15, “Thou shalt surely set him king over thee whom the LORD thy God shall choose,” right away you have done away with popular elections. God is going to choose the man. And this could be done in a democratic process; we recognize a local congregation that the Holy Spirit works through believers. Now obviously the United States doesn’t have every believer so you can’t have this operation but ideally God would want to be in on the choosing of the man. So that’s the first restriction, it’s not what you want, it’s God wants. God picks the man. “…from among thy brethren shalt thou set king over thee; thou mayest not set a stranger over thee, who is not thy brother,” and this protects the culture, no foreigner’s allowed. It’s not discriminating against foreigners, it’s simply that this culture is a supernatural culture and it must not be disturbed in any way. And so to protect this there are restrictions on the leaders.

Deuteronomy 17:16, “He will not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt,” Egypt is the place where the horses were available at that time, “to the end that he should multiply horses; forasmuch as the LORD has said unto you, You shall not henceforth return to that way.” In other words, don’t go back where you came from, like Americans go back mentally to Europe where our forefathers left. I don’t know about your forefathers, mine left the polluted mess to come to the United States and get out of it. And then we have Americans that thinks it high culture to go vacation in Europe. Well, they didn’t want any vacations down in Egypt, you’ve been down there, I have redeemed you from it so just forget about it. So He doesn’t want any military power structure developed, verse 16. Now why is this? Haven’t I said military is part of the legitimate requirements of an [can’t understand word]. Yes, but when a national entity gets a military system set up where it begins to put its trust in the military power and not in the Lord you have troubles. You can have too much military, that’s not a danger today; we don’t have to worry about that. But it was a danger at one time where you had an over-centralization of power in the military. And you’re not to have this. God knows the temptation.

Deuteronomy 17:17, “Neither shall he multiply wives to himself,” now unless you live in Salt Lake City you wouldn’t have trouble with this one, “that his heart turn not away; neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold.” And in verse 17 this would mean a centralization of wealth, a conglomeration of wealth in the national entity, in other words, in the power of the national treasury. By the way, some of you may have connections with Christian organizations. One policy to always follow is never endow a Christian institution; you are asking for trouble. Down through history godly men have spent thousands of dollars, millions of dollars investing in various forms of government and various Christian organizations and every time they go flat down the drain with millions of hard earned Christian dollars. So in verse 17, “Thou shalt not multiply greatly to himself silver and gold.”

Look at Deuteronomy 17:18, can you imagine this being followed in a national entity, “And it shall be, when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he wall write him a copy of this law in a book out of which is before the priests, the Levites; [19] And it shall be with him, and he shall read therein all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do them, [10] That his heart be not lifted up above his brethren,” now isn’t that amazing. Can you imagine President Nixon having three to four hour Bible class for the entire cabinet every single day in the White House? I’m serious, this is the concept where you have God’s Word ruling. There was a man, a Puritan, who wrote a famous work, Rex Lex, those of you know Latin you have the king and the Law, or the prince and the Law. And he raised a question during those days when the centralization of power was going on in England, Rex or Lex, which is higher, the king or the law, and Rutherford proved his point with passages like this, that it is always the law over the king, God’s law over the king; God’s law over everything else.

So a Christian then that’s committed to God’s Word that commitment takes precedence to all other commitments to country, to everything else. You’re committed, if you are a born again child of God, first and foremost to the Word of God and second and beneath that to your country, insofar as your country follows the Word of God. You are committed first to the Word, second to everything else. That was the divine order in the nation Israel.

Next time we’ll start with the first verse of Judges.