Clough Manhood Series Lesson 41

Wealth-Part III: Taxes

In this series we have endeavored to go through various examples of believing men in the Scripture, just to watch, nothing more profound really than just to kind of watch their example, how they operate in different environments and circumstances. And so we said a few weeks ago that we’d conclude the series by turning to two subjects on every man’s heart, love and money. But we’ve reversed the order and we’re dealing with money and love, and so we have go to the third part of our money series and the usage of funds. But tonight we come to a very, very famous passage in the New Testament; Matthew 22:16. This is the “give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.”

Now so far in the series on money we have worked with the reason for worshiping God with it. In a very practical way giving money to God and giving time to Him in a focused way is a demonstration of the fact that he has total claim on all our resources. We can talk theoretically that we believe God is in total dominion and that we, as Christians, have a finite ownership under His total ownership but it really doesn’t come up to the foreground until we actually express it the way we use our assets. And therefore last week we went through three areas in the Bible from the Old Testament where giving occurred. First was the tithe and we said that that was basically an income tax; today we’ll get back into the tithe again but on the first go round we’re dealing with worshiping God with money. Basically what we’re doing here is just simply taking what we always do with premarriage counseling and urging young couples to have a budget and one of the first things on the budget is your use of money as far as God is concerned; that ought to be a priority and then, of course, the next thing is taxes. And these are two items that certainly display the boundaries of where the Word is and where human viewpoint is.

Tonight we want to review the giving to God in order to contrast it with the passage before us. We said tithing was one way; an income tax of 10% and we also noted that that 10% tax went to various functions besides just teaching of the Word. The tithing was paid to the Levites and the Levites, as they received the tithes would finance their own Bible teaching institution, they would finance what is called the cultist, or the things that were going on at the tabernacle, which included things like music, and all the art forms in Israel’s culture they were concentrated around the cultist. It was a culturally rich place, unlike in most fundamental circles where we act like cultural paupers. So the Levites formed this kind of a situation. They also used the tithe for relief of welfare, and in particular we know the percent they used because every third year the tithe would be gathered by the local city council for distribution for the next three years in that city. Showing, incidentally, how welfare was considered by God, the care of the poor, was considered by God to be just as important as caring for Him by means of the choir, the art forms and so on.

This has ramifications because if we go into a period when the government does collapse, the only institution historically that has ever done anything in that kind of a social context is the Church. You just have to go back several centuries in western civilization to understand what happened when the Holy Roman Empire disintegrated; it was the church that picked up the tab. It was the church that picked up the tabernacle; it was the church that kept learning alive. Yes, the dark ages are called dark ages, but be careful of that word; it was invented by liberals because they said that before the rise of the renaissance it was all dark. There was a lot of light available in the dark ages and it was largely available to the monks and to the individual priests of the Church, and these same groups that kept learning alive, that kept the translations alive, that kept the great classics available down through Europe, which later on led a lot of a lot of [can’t understand phrase] were people who took care of the poor. You might ask yourself, we’ve always had poor people, how did they make it before social security? How did they make it before the great [can’t understand word] of the 20^th century? They made it for hundreds of years through charity. And it wasn’t as gross as you think, as it’s been made out to be in the propaganda by the liberals. So the tithing was used in that respect, it was considered to be giving money to God in the area of Bible teaching, in the area of counseling, in the area of worship, in the area of culture and in the area of providing for the poor.

Then the second means of giving in the Bible was over and above the tithe and it was the free will offering. And these free will offerings would be gathered from time to time for special projects. The tabernacle was one project; another project were the wall projects of Ezra and Nehemiah. So from time to time the populous would be called upon to give and in the original free will offerings, such as in Exodus with regard to the tabernacle, you saw them give willingly. And this was an expression; it had an ascetics to it, and we said that the free will offering is an offering to produce something that is beautiful; not necessarily something extravagant, but if you have five bucks and you want to invest it in something, make it worthwhile, don’t make it look like a piece of crap. And this is exactly the word that describes much of what you see in fundamental circles.

And then the third means of giving to God was charity loans; charity loans in the Bible, distinguished from commercial loans, could not be interest bearing notes. There was a prohibition against usage, a prohibition which we said was misunderstood for many, many generations and led to the forcing of the Jews in Europe into the banking industry and why to this day right-wing conservatives who are anti-Semites have never got their stuff together, always accusing the Jews of some great conspiracy of history. Beware of such right-wing conservative anti-Semites. It’s because of people like that, largely, that God has not given His blessing to much that goes under the name conservatism. The Jews were forced into the banking by stupid interpretations of the charity loan formula in the Mosaic Law. The charity loan formula said if your brother has need you must provide for him at zero percent interest and if he hasn’t paid your note back at the end of the six year period, you lose it. And there’s considerable instruction in the Mosaic Law that anticipates all the objections, but God, I can’t give money to him because, gosh, it’s the fifth year of the cycle and I know he’s never going to repay it before the next year, and so I’m not going to be so liberal with my giving. God says you trust me, you just trust me, you give and you trust me with the results.

So we learned from last time in all of this giving and the formulas thereto that behind it all was a faith technique applied. A person can’t give joyously of his time or anything else unless he is confident that he’s not wasting it. You don’t want to give to something if you think it’s going to be wasteful. And so you try to use your eyes, and we gave fifteen principles of New Testament giving so that you evaluate, God has given you a brain, He expects that brain to be used; He expects wisdom principles to be applied; he’s not going to do the work for you. This is why in our congregation we have an outreach committee that functions to serve, to find out what different missionaries are doing so you’re not completely in the dark. I don’t think there’s a week goes by that I don’t get requests from two or three missionary outfits wanting to put their pitch in. And I’m very, very particular, because we’ve had some bad experiences in the past of people that later on we found out just were not cutting it. So to protect you the outreach committee functions and its their responsibility to screen out this kind of situation.

Now tonight in Matthew 22 we have the collision of Jesus with the Herodians. This collision occurred in a series of other collisions. Some of the collisions Jesus had at this point in His career were collisions over spiritual issues. This one, however, was only indirectly spiritual; this was a collision over the issue of politics. The Pharisees were the instigators, notice Matthew 22:15, “Then went the Pharisees, and took counsel how they might entangle Him in His talk.” So what you’ve got is a setup. It’s not a real true discussion of the issue; it’s an entrapment, and it involves the issue of Roman overlordship in the Palestinian area. Notice in verse 16, “And they sent unto Him their disciples with the Herodians, saying, Master, we know that You are true, and teach the way of God in truth…” blah, blah, blah. But “Tell us,” verse 17, “What do you think? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not?” Interesting question.

Here’s the background. In the political context of the day there were several groups vying for power; there were the zealots; the zealots were the super Zionists who insisted on nationalism now, freedom now. The Pharisees were into this zealot movement slightly. And it was grounded on a national conscience for freedom; they had a desire to be free. It had been recently exercised within about 200 years with the Maccabean war. And the Jews wanted freedom and they couldn’t stand to see the Roman legionnaires marching through their cities and villages; they couldn’t stand to see the Roman coiners with Pontifex Maximus on the corner when Pontifex Maximus being the greatest and highest priest of all, when they knew that the great high priest functioned in the temple he wasn’t on a Roman coin. And so there were lots of frictions and the zealots wanted freedom now; it would be analogous to super patriots; unfortunately, like some super patriots they lacked spiritual insight and therefore they didn’t see that the time was not right for freedom now.

Then the second party were the Herodians. Now you notice something right away, with just this little bit of background, you’ll notice in verse 16 the satanic unity. Christ’s enemies, who are enemies among themselves, all agreeing that they must eliminate Christ. Under normal operating conditions the Zealots would never have formed a political alliance with the Herodians, but they do now because their mutual hatred for Jesus Christ exceeds their hatred for each other and so normal enemies unify around their hatred for Christ. A modern illustration of the Herodians would be the Vichy Franks of World War II, those Frenchmen who capitulated to the Germans and who volunteered to run the government of France under German occupation, the ones that De Gaulle and the free Franks fought; the one’s whose neighbors, the British, destroyed. The Vichy Franks formed a group compatible with the Herodians.

The deal was here that the Herodians would make agreements with the Romans, deals with the Romans to stay in power. They were, you might say, the smartest of the political elements in the nonbiblical point of view. If you couldn’t get freedom then try to make some compromises along the way and do the best you can. Now that’s not entirely wrong; as we become more politically active and alert in our own circles as Christians this is a principle that we ought to start working towards, and that is you have your ideal position here, but you have to understand that you can’t always get to that position. The art of politics is the art of compromise. You don’t have to compromise your basic principles but to get there you often have to take it step by step. And that’s just common sense; you don’t blow up the ship with an either or because in this generation we’re not commissioned to wage a physical holy war. We are only commissioned to wage a spiritual war.

And so these Herodians made deals to stay in power in a delicate balance, the family of Herods was under Caesar and under them is this seething caldron of Jewish nationalism, and they had to balance between the two. And they had, for many decades, got the balance going and maintained, and then along came two people who deeply threatened that political deal. One’s name was John the Baptist and the other one Jesus Christ. Both those men preached a strange new kingdom, a kingdom of God, that threatened to undo the political equations that had been so carefully set up by negotiation. And therefore they became a threat to the welfare of the community. And so now the test comes; tell us, is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar or not. If Jesus says yes, it is lawful to give tribute to Caesar, then they can say to the zealots, aha, did you hear what your rabbi said? Take out your coin and look on it; on one side of the coin it says Tiberius Kaiser Augustus son of the divine Augustus, a claim to deity. And turn the coin over and on the other side of the coin we have Pontifex Maximus, the highest priest. In other words, in Kaiser you have the union of state and church in one almighty authority, that is higher than the authorities of Judaism and the high priest; your rabbi said give the coin to them.

And the reason the coin is given is not just because of the emblem on it; in the ancient world this is a strange sight; we’ve lost it in our country, and I guess we’ve lost it pretty much in the West, and possibly we’ve just lost it all over the world, in the East but I’m not familiar with that, but coins in the ancient world were looked upon… when they said “tribute” they weren’t kidding. We look upon coins as just an exchange of wealth. No-no, not in the ancient world. When you gave your coin you were giving tribute and allegiance to the one who was on the coin. In Rome, for example, prior to the time of Caesar Augustus, they used to put the gods on the coin, the Roman pagan gods. And when these gods were put on the coin they were passed around and used as devices of worship and when Kaiser Augustus came into the power at Rome, he decided that he was going to alter the constitution, the constitutional processing. It’s a very famous chapter in Roman history when this happened.

But one of the things that historians always point to that Kaiser meant business was he did something that no Caesar had ever dared to do before him. What he did was change the effigy on the coins. He issued all the new coins that had to be completely redone; the coins now no longer bore the gods and goddesses; they bore Kaiser’s own image. What does that acclaim? To deity. With Caesar Augustus you have the rise of Rome, in theory, to the almighty divine state. And you see if Jesus says “yes” to the question of verse 17 He’s trapped. And they can say okay, now we can create a schism between the Messiah’s followers and the Zealots; He is an unpatriotic conspirator; He believes in worshiping Pontifex Maximus over there in Italy. But on the other hand, let’s suppose that Jesus said no; let’s suppose that he said it’s wrong to pay tribute to Caesar, then he would be guilty of starting an armed revolt for not to pay taxes is to declare revolution to the Roman throne. Interesting thought, isn’t it? It’s in that kind of spot that Jesus Christ gives his classic answer.

Matthew 22:21, “…Then He said unto them, Render, therefore, unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God, the things which are God’s.” Now that is not a hedge. Let me show you why it isn’t a hedge. It goes back to the doctrine of divine institutions. Under God’s law there are spheres of authority; these spheres of authority are defined not by the sphere; they are defined by the Word of God which transcends the spheres. For example, it is not the church that defines the domain of the state; it is the Word of God that defines the domain of both church and state. It’s not a question of the church competing with the state; it’s a question of what saith the Word of God; the church must run under the Word of God and so must the state, though that is a very radical concept today. But wherever we have apostasy, divine institution four always expands; visualizing this section of the circle expanding and expanding and expanding and expanding, and expanding and takes over all the others. You always have an idolization of the state. Man collectively likes to claim that he is God. We saw this in Daniel 7.

When Rome first began, the principles of divination were already there. At the founding of Rome something happened, something new in history happened. It’s recounted for us by a myth. I don’t believe that the myth is a myth; I think this event actually happened and I think this is why this event was recited decades after decades and centuries down in Roman history. But it’s the one that I told you about before, how Romulus kills his brother, Remus. These are two brothers and that’s the whole point of the myth; they are two brothers united by their blood, united in their families. And so Romulus builds a wall and declares that this is my city, and Remus, his brother, laughs, and he jumps over the wall and he says and this is what your enemies do to your city. Romulus threw his sword and slit his brother’s throat and said: And that’s what I do to the enemies that come across my wall.

And so from the founding the defining point of Rome that unified it wasn’t the blood relationship or the tribe, it was power, the power of the state. And that, at the very beginning of Rome, plays out. You see, there was no Roman tribe; before we could trace certain tribes as countries would be very racially centered, but in Rome you have the incorporation of all people, now not united any more by their culture but united by state power; it makes them unified!

And the book of Daniel expresses the outworking of that principle in history which we have yet to see that insidious nature. Turn to Daniel 2; it’s the Daniel 2 version, not the Daniel 7 one; in Daniel 2:40 this “fourth kingdom,” according to Daniel, “will be as strong as iron” at first, “forasmuch as iron breaks in pieces and subdues all things; and, as iron that breaks all these, shall it break in pieces and bruise. [41] And whereas thou saw the feet and the toes, par of potters’ clay” or ceramic, “and part of iron, and the kingdom shall be divided; but there shall be in it come of the strength of iron, forasmuch as thou saw the iron mixed with miry clay. [42] As the toes of the feet were part of iron and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly broken.” The prediction of Daniel is that the principle of forcible unity under the power of the state will go on in history until the very last days of that fourth kingdom when it begins to get weaker. You can’t make a bond between steel and ceramics that holds.

And the point of Daniel is that no matter how powerful the state, there are limits to how close it can bring people. If you want an illustration look at American school integration and ask yourself, has the power of the state really integrated us? Not at all. And there’s still resistance in the streets of Boston; you are never going to get Irishmen to do what the government expects them to do telling them they are going to do it. Some weenie bureaucrat in the system forgot that and never did his research on Irish mentality in an Irish ghetto. The name may be Kennedy; it still has no weight in the Irish ghetto.

So these are the kind of evidences we see where government power simply breaks down when you don’t have a unity on some other base. Well, Daniel prophesied that and along in history we had a resurgence of Rome. Rome went down into sort of a collapse, the Holy Roman Empire and so on, when Christianity had its maximizing mitigating influences, and then since the Renaissance Rome has been building again; it was temporarily held in check, maybe, by the church, but nevertheless the Romans manifested through Italy has risen. We have these kinds of ideas that recent Rome… Frederick II, led [?] to 1250 said this: he had a post millennial idea that he was going to be the Messiah to bring in the kingdom through the nation/state. He said: “The Messiah Emperor who was expected and who shall set up an empire of justice must show himself the reviver of the Ancient Roman Empire, the reincarnation of Augustus.” Of all the Caesars, who does he pick? The one whose image is on the coin of Matthew 22: Kaiser Augustus. “The reincarnation of Augustus, prince of peace, restoring Imperial Rome to her old position in the world.”

Where did the idea of world government start? One of those who was earliest in its writings was Dante, who wrote The Divine Comedy. He worked, said his biographer, for a united world for chartering the United Nations by over 600 years. And here’s what Dante cites. Now keep in mind, as Bible-believing Christian, listen, listen to these men tell you in their words, not mine, their words, what’s on their heart, how they think. I already quoted what Frederick said, and here’s what Dante said: “I am certainly of the firm opinion that the stones which remain in Rome’s walls are worthy of reverence, and it is asserted and proved that the ground where on [can’t understand word] stands is worthy beyond all other that is occupied by man. Aristotle is the master and leader of human reason, insofar as it aims in its final operation, the [can’t understand word] of Rome.”

So these men know what they’re doing; these are the theoreticians. True, it took 600 years for Dante’s ideas, amplified by Immanuel Kant to come to fruition in the West, but they have. And understand where they came from, fitting exactly the prophecies and warnings of Daniel.

Well, the point here is that the fourth divine institution has crowded out all the other divine institutions, so three, two and one are squeezed by divine institution four. Now Jesus answered. Back to Matthew 22:21. What was Jesus saying, “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and unto God, the things that are God’s.” It’s very simple. On one hand, Jesus said, yes, you are obligated to pay tribute to Kaiser; yes, no justification for the zealot position of revolution, now it’s not the time for it, so you go ahead and pay your taxes. But, when you pay your taxes, be clear in your mind that it is not an act of worship to Kaiser Augustus. It may say Pontifex Maximus on the coin, hand them the coins that they want to coin, but don’t you buy the image of the coin. Deny it in your heart; pay your tax, but in your heart never give consent to fact that the fourth divine institution is God. Render unto God the things that are God’s. Said another way, pay your taxes because they force you to do it, but worship God, not the tax agents; worship God. So Jesus, then, in Matthew 22 is cutting government down to size. He says yes, we have to put up with it, but just remember, don’t you ever take what is due God and give it to the government.

Now let’s go into a little bit more practical vein, that’s the theory of Jesus’ reply; how do we express it? Well, let’s look at the taxes in the Old Testament for a moment, for an ideal model. We don’t have an ideal model today but let’s give one so at least we have somewhere in our brain stored the idea of what it ought to look like if it were to function perfectly. Under the Mosaic Law the first tax was the tithe. See, we come back to the tithe because it formed two functions. It was a way of worshiping God because God was king of the nation, but yet it was also a tax. So tonight we come back to the tithe but now we look upon it as an idea for designing a tax structure. And the tax structure is, first of all, an income tax. It is not a tax on what you own, on your car, on your property, on your real estate, whatever. Those things are never taxed. What is taxed is your productivity. That’s one feature of the tax structure.

The other feature of the ideal tax structure is that it is un-graduated. In the 20^th century even Bible-believing Christians have been sucked up by this foolish notion that the right ought to pay a higher percent. Now somebody who knows a little mathematics ought to understand that when you take a percent of something the total amount that the rich pay already is more than the amount that the poor person pays. That’s why we have such a thing as percents; don’t tell it too loudly, but that’s a big secret of higher math. So the fact that it was an income tax expressed in percent already gave the wealthy a higher burden; you don’t add to the wealthy person by upping the rates. To do so is discriminatory and taxes must be just and therefore impartial.

Now there’s another reason why income tax ought to be un-graduated; not only is it discrimination against a class of people, and always, incidentally, your wealthiest, most creative, most socially beneficial class of people, instead of killing them off with graduated tax, the other tragedy and we are reaching it today like crazy, is that the graduated tax guarantees the government ever increasing revenue by inflation. Watch. Let’s take a graph of the tax structure. Let’s say this is 8% and this is 28%; there’s a 20% rise based on an income of $5,000, or we’ll say on up to income of $10,000 or something like that, make it round figures. 20% increase over $5,000, it doesn’t matter the exact parameters you use, it’s the principle. Now under inflation what’s constantly happening to the income. It’s moving to the right on the graph, isn’t it, because the more inflation you have the more dollars you have. So now isn’t this a model to behold. The government sets up a graduated income tax and then begins to pump more money in the economy. Look what’s happening to Caesar’s pockets; as he cranks out more money he forces everyone in a higher tax bracket, so there’s an automatic increase in tax. Think of the geniuses who cooked it up, always, of course, in the name of helping the poor. We’ve got to coat it with good Christian ethics so we get all the suckers to vote for us, but in essence the graduated income tax is a planned program of theft, so the government doesn’t have to arbitrarily increase taxes, all it has to do is inflate the currency and the taxes automatically increase. So income tax un-graduated would have prevented this, and that is biblical wisdom.

A second kind of tax is found in the passage of Exodus 30:11. This is interesting for a course on the doctrine of a Christian man; not only in the Christian man’s use of his money but also in the Christian man’s responsibility to pay his taxes. Exodus 30:11-16, “And the LORD spoke unto Moses, and said, [12] When you take the sum of the children of Israel,” and what he’s talking about here is the census, “When you take the national census, then shall they give every man an atonement [a ransom] for his soul unto the LORD, when thou numberest them; that the be no plague among them, when you number them. [13] This they shall give, every one that passes among them that are numbered, half a shekel after the shekel of the temple,” and that was a big one. [14] “Every one that passes among them that are numbered, from twenty years old and above, shall give an offering unto the LORD. [15] The rich shall not give more, and the poor shall not give less than half a shekel, [when they give an offering unto the LORD, to make an atonement for your souls]” that isn’t graduated either. You’d think with all this data in the Scripture there’s probably an evil behind graduated taxes. [16] “And thou shalt take the atonement money of the children of Israel, and shall appoint it for the service of the tabernacle of the congregation, that it may be a memorial unto the children of Israel [before the LORD],to make an atonement for your souls.”

This is a covering for every male twenty and older. All single males, or married males, at that age had to pay a poll tax. It was given to provide a basic income; not a terrible large amount, but it was also given to provide income for the national treasury. So two forms; a poll tax, a tax basically that represents the fact that you are covered by the government; that is, you are brought under the protection of the government. It’s sort of like the government protects the rich to the same decree that it protects the poor; therefore both rich and poor owe the same percent back. In this case it’s not a percent, it’s just a fixed amount, to pay for basic services, shall we say.

But now here’s a model in the tax structure of the Old Testament that totally contradicts all the tax structure today. Turn to Deuteronomy 10:14; again, we’re not saying that this is possible today but we’re saying that as Christian thinking people we ought to have the ideal in mind at least. Here’s why; there could be no taxes on the property because in verse 14, “Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens is the LORD thy God, the earth,” which is eretz, “the land also, with all that is therein.” A tax, theologically, on property is a tax on God. When Caesar taxed property he is taxing, in effect, God.

Turn to Psalm 24:1, the principle recurs there again, just to show you it’s not sitting isolated in the Mosaic Law. “The earth is the LORD’s, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.” God is the owner of land; eminent domain is God’s and so for the Caesar to tax it means that Caesar owns it and it is a claim to divinity. Any government that taxes property, and I know… I know, we’re in it, but it’s part of the fact that we live in the West, we live in an extension of Roman thought, we live to that degree in an apostate structure that claims divinity because it owns the land under our feet. Yes, if we did away with that it would have radical implications, I am aware of that, but I also believe that had the West not chosen the path you would have had just as high order of society developing by itself on another principle.

So the tax structure in the Old Testament gives us the ideal; you have the poll tax, you have the tithe, but you never have a property tax or a land tax, because the property and the land represent your raw assets, given to you by God Himself, and those are His, not the government’s.

Now another principle about taxes, because as a Christian man struggles with his family budget, and he sees a vast amount of outlay in taxes, when you compute your sales tax, when you compute your property tax, when you compute the automobile taxes on the gasoline, etc. etc. etc. and you add it up and you get depressed when you see this tremendous volume of taxes, hidden here and hidden there, and hidden all over the place, you begin to get discouraged.

Let’s turn to our familiar passage, 1 Samuel 8, and read one verse; 1 Samuel 8:9, Samuel is told in verse 8 [“According to all the works which they have done since the 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. [9] Now, therefore, hearken unto their voice; howbeit, yet protest solemnly unto them, and show them the manner of the king who shall reign over them.”] to warn the people that their apostasy, that is, their rebellion against the Word of God in all areas of their life, will bring about a bloating or a fourth divine institution, obesity of government. Somebody in the last election said let’s put big government on a diet. Excellent, excellent slogan. But the problem with big government being on a diet is that most people want big government.

See, that’s the tragedy; we’ve had a recent demonstration right here in the city of Lubbock, we have a certain amount of funds that the city government has available and so we have all the citizen interest groups grabbing for their portion, making sure that the government does something for them before it does something for some other group. And it is just depressing to watch normal human citizens reduced to the level of beggars… beggars, that’s what it is, thousands of people in the city of Lubbock, the beggars, the hands-out, begging quickly that the coins may fall in their hands before it falls into southwest Lubbock’s hands, or northwest Lubbock’s hands or some other hands; the beggars of the year.

So 1 Samuel 8 says, that the king shall rule over you, you get what you deserve. The description, verse 11 and following, we dealt with it last time, how he’ll take your fields and confiscate your property. Verse 17, he takes a ten percent tax of your sheep. And then in verse 18, the last verse, very depressing because obviously when centralized overweight government takes over, what happens? What happens? Taxes go up, and people will complain. Verse 18, “And you are going to cry out in that day because of your king which you shall have chosen;” look at who’s chosen the king; you have chosen the king, and I’m not going to hear you [“and the LORD will not hear you in that day.”] You chose him, you made the bed, you sleep in it. That’s God’s attitude toward society and civilization.

We have a practical illustration of that in the Old Testament with a man, Joseph. It’s hard to figure out Joseph’s exact contribution in history because Joseph was the builder of the finest piece of bureaucratic power the world has ever seen. Joseph set up the machinery for oppression and we have to ask what are the political consequences, I thought Joseph was a wise man, what’d he do setting up the greatest totalitarian state that the world has ever seen? Joseph judged Egypt; he was a judger and he was savior. What Joseph did was simply take the Egyptians lust for overweight government and say oh, you like overweight government, have it, have it first class, and he gave it to them. The people were slaves in their mental attitude and slaves can’t be free without a spiritual change in their heart. And as long as that spiritual change doesn’t occur then they deserve slavery so give it to them. Give them good slavery, give them good organized slavery. And so Joseph gave the Egyptians organized slavery with a vengeance.

To show you how effective it was turn to Exodus 14. So effective was this slavery that when the Exodus occurred and Moses brought the people out even Moses had a problem erasing the mental attitude of slavery. You see, this is a strange thing but it’s a very interesting thing and you will never get this in sociology. You will never hear this topic discussed in political science courses. It is a very unpopular subject because I don’t know how you can teach it without sounding like a bigot. Now I’m used to sounding that way so we’ll go ahead and teach it. But the point of the text is that when a civilization has a mental attitude of slavery, unless you change the mental attitude you can’t get freedom by changing the institutions. That’s a very vital principle. You have to change what’s up here before you can change the physical environment. If we would only understand this; this is what’s happening in Africa.

I had lunch with General Keegan the other day; he was telling us of his visits to Africa; he was saying that you go into these… he recanted one African nation that he was at with the United states ambassador and they were sitting at this table discussing and the remark was… he looked around this table at all these diplomats in his country and there was a graduate of Cambridge, there was a graduate of Harvard, there was a graduate of Oxford, there was a graduate of… there were graduates of all the great universities of the world, trained people, not a trace of an accent in their voice, perfect English, but in attitude dictators. They had gone back to Africa and blended perfectly with tribal warfare; there hadn’t been a degree of shift in their heart; they just do what they do more efficiently. After all, one with a degree from Oxford is far more efficient than a native out in the grassroots. And while this party went on, one of these men, graduates of Oxford, decided that he was going to dress down the United States delegation so he climbed on the table and pushed the dishes off with his feet and decided he’d stay up on the table so everybody would see him. And as he began to attack the United States for its racial policies, for its fascist attitude toward business and so on and so on and so on, he goes through this big long harangue embarrassing General Keegan and our ambassador sitting nearby the table, going on for half an hour or so. While this speech was in progress one of the other men in the ministry of this particular nation leaned over to General Keegan and said, Don’t take what he says too seriously, that man is married to a woman who has seven children and he keeps her in a grass hut outside the capital city and that woman has never been allowed inside this city. So General Keegan sat there for about ten or fifteen more minutes and then he decided that this was about enough. So when he was through, he didn’t get on the table but he got up in the party and said well, it’s very nice of Dr. So and So to make these remarks, we in America have our institutions, we recognize that our American institutions are not perfect, we have our problems, we invite criticism and we hope that one day this country will get to the point where they treat their women like we do, and don’t put them in grass huts outside the city and not let them in. But this is the kind of dressing down that the United States is exposed to everywhere in the world, and it’s through their foreign policy that is denying this very principle.

In Exodus 14:12, Moses has the Jews in a position where they are going to get physical [can’t understand word] from slavery and look at the attitude. “Is not this the word that we did tell thee in Egypt, saying, Let us alone, that we may serve the Egyptians? For it had been better for us to serve the Egyptians, than that we should die in the wilderness.” Now look at this; look what Moses has done. He has pulled off, under God’s power, yes, but he has pulled off the only successful revolt in the history of ten thousand years of Egyptian life. No nation ever did this in history; a bloodless revolt, by supernatural means. The model of political freedom, and they got it and what happened? He leads them a few miles out beyond the boundary and oh, dear, I can’t stand it, freedom is threatening. You bet you! It sure is, and if you had a mental attitude of a slave you will be terrified of liberty. Liberty puts responsibility on your shoulders and there will always be a percent, the scum of the human race, who are the slaves, who cannot stand responsibility. And they will whimper and they will cry, please don’t give me liberty, give me death. That’s exactly their cry, and it stems from this mental attitude slavery.

So Moses had to take the people out of their wilderness and you know the story of how God dealt with this mental attitude. Do you know what God had to finally do? Turn to Exodus 16:3, we’ll develop it and show you how God finally had it with this group. This is a passage in Exodus where the same mental attitude persists and we’ll see here how they defy him again. “And the children or Israel said unto them, Would to God that we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full; for you have brought us forth [into this wilderness]” into the freedom, the wilderness is a place of hunger, you brought us out of the place of freedom. We don’t want freedom, Moses, we want security. Do you take a quick personal inventory. What would you predict if you went out here on the sidewalks of Lubbock, Texas, with a simple survey, one question: Give an example, give a real concrete example of freedom, what freedom would be like, you’d be on your own, you’d have to make your own living, with your own resources, and you’d have to bear you own lumps as a family unit. Would you prefer that to the present situation? What percentage do you think that people out here would want freedom over what they’ve got. They fuss about the high taxes and they fuss about the bureaucracy and they fuss about the other things, they want it; it’s inconvenient but they want it a lot more than they want freedom.

So turn again further, after this gripe, God, in Numbers 11 has a little program for dealing with the problem; it expresses in part God’s sense of humor but also expresses in part God’s wisdom. Now all this is background for this business of paying our taxes. Why do we have taxes? Why do we have to really work with our family budgets have this tax problem? It ultimately goes back to the populous, not the leaders… not the leaders, the populous.

Numbers 11:4, here they are again. “And the mixed multitude that was among them fell to lusting, and the children of Israel also wept again,” now they’re crying, see, see how terrified they are, they’re weeping, crying, because they have food. Who gave us this food to eat, we remember the fish… and by the way God is giving them food, He’s giving them manna every 24 hours; He was giving them the most perfect nutritional program that man has ever received. They’re still fussing. “We remember the fish which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic. [6] But now our soul is dried away; with nothing at all, besides this manna,” ugly stuff that God gives us every 24 hours. Verse 7, “And the manna was coriander seed,” and we still don’t know from that description what it was, [8] “And the people out, and they gathered it,” and so on.

Numbers 11:10, And so “Moses heard the people weep throughout their families, every man in the door of his tent; and the anger of the LORD was kindled greatly.” What’s the issue? It’s simple. Are you going to trust the Lord for your provision or not? That’s the issue. [11] “And Moses said unto the LORD, Why have You afflicted thy servant?” And he has to get his stuff together, that’s when he made his famous male prayer that we went through one evening and I said there’s not one man I know, including myself, that hasn’t gone through this agony of verse 11, 12 and 13 at least once or twice a month, that ought to be exercised as the typical male prayer. Verse 14, “I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too heavy for me,” and so on. And it goes on to describe what happened, the organization and so forth.

But, after the organization was recovered, I didn’t go on last time to show you what’s going to happen next, in Numbers 11:18-19, “[And say unto the people,] sanctify yourselves for tomorrow, and ye shall eat meat; for you have wept in the ears of the LORD, saying Who shall give us meat to eat? For it was well with us in Egypt; therefore, the LORD is going to give you meat, and you will eat. [19] And you will not eat one day, nor two days, nor five days, neither ten days, nor twenty days, [20] But even a whole month until it comes out of your nose, and it be loathsome unto you, because ye have despised the LORD who is among you, and you have wept before Him,” and so it goes on, and it comes out their nose. So that’s the Lord’s solution to that little problem. He decided He’d heard enough of the griping and gave it to them. That is, by the way, an example of how God can answer your prayer and you can be damned by the answer to your prayer. God sometimes will answer bad prayers just to teach us lessons. So don’t consider answered prayer necessarily a blessing.

Now the mental attitude of freedom was there and finally triumphed. But we have to come to the pages of the New Testament to get some control of our attitude of this business of taxes and freedom and the best place to go, I think, is 1 Corinthians 7. Notice where we’ve come. We’ve talked about taxes; we’ve said that taxes, Jesus says, are to be paid. Taxes are to be paid! But now is there something that we can do besides just simply paying the taxes? Biblically does the Bible provide us with any kind of information, any principle that can be brought into the situation to help us cope with the situation?

1 Corinthians 7:21-22. Paul talks about a slave here. He says, “Art thou called, being a servant?” That is, did you become a Christian when you were a slave? Don’t be anxious by it [Care not for it;] but if you may be made free, use it.” Now what’s the principle? Don’t agitate for the freedom, but if you’ve got an opportunity to increase freedom, increase freedom. That’s what he says. Use opportunity! You don’t revolt about it but if you can do something about it, do something about it, and there’s lots that people can do; we can express ourselves politically through the system, that’s one way. And historically that usually hasn’t done too much because by the time a nation has a bloated government the bloated government an effect, not a cause. You see, that’s why our problems keep multiplying. We’re talking about an effect, and it’s an effect of a servitude, a mental attitude of people who can’t trust the Lord or who are irresponsible and won’t do what they are supposed to do and therefore they want a guardianship, they want a master/slave relationship. And so as this goes on historically there has only been one of two solutions to the problem and neither one is very pretty.

One solution has been armed revolution; just simply armed revolution, no way around it. Finally taxes go up to a point where people can no longer hack it, they can’t pay any more, everyone’s going down and then some subordinate official under Calvin’s doctrine of the lesser official will take up arms and break his segment of government away from the overall segment, and when that happens then the Christian is justified in armed civil revolution. This was the justification by the congregational ministries in New England during the American Revolution; it has been the classic position by Bible-believing Christians; armed revolution, when done properly, under a bona fide leader. The south, in the Civil War was a case where the Christians could have gone in, with no problems whatever on their conscience, and put their lot in with Robert E. Lee and the southern confederacy; it was a legitimate organization biblically speaking, it was grounded on biblical principles, it was legitimate government officials. And in that way it could command Christian support.

So we have this situation where government is finally destroyed. That has happened, and that will usually happen when the second thing happens. Hopefully we don’t go the first step, hopefully it can be taken care of more conservatively. But prior to armed revolt you will always have a purging of the mental attitude. How this occurs, it varies from case to case. In American it happened because the mental attitude never had got into servile; the British were pulling their [can’t understand word] off by trying to unite the colonies under George, and the Parliament of England. And they pulled it off and they never got very far with it. But we also have to realize, going back in history a little bit further, who was it that purged England’s mental attitude politically? The Puritans. Remember the film, Oliver Cromwell, that was what it was all about. The Puritans said no to the divine monarchy and they answered it with a very simple thing, they cut the king’s head off. And so the Christians did a great thing in history by saying we are students of the Word of God, we worship Jesus Christ, and according to Jesus Christ’s words, government is not God, and we defy you. And that’s what the Puritans did; they defied government in their day. But it took them almost a generation to breed that through an intensive program of Bible teaching. The great Puritan pastors, like Richard Baxter, who incidentally, wasn’t with Cromwell in this kind of situation, but he illustrates the principle, the great Puritan pastors taught hours and hours and hours; they went into the homes of people in their parishes and began family training programs, with the father of the family. Baxter would have a program where every single family in the congregation would have to pass a doctrinal examination once every year. And it was those quiet hours and days and weeks and years of teaching the Word, teaching the Word, teaching the Word, teaching the Word, and the world wasn’t noticing, it was all quiet activity inside the Christian community.

And then there came the fatal moment of history when the two forces collided, when at last the Christian strength had grown and grown and grown and there were thousands of people that had broken the shackles up here that they then broke the shackles down here. Now that’s how it’s done historically. And that’s what I say as Bible-believing Christians your answer to the problem of taxes. The immediate answer to the problem of taxes for the Christian man is you have no choice under God, the Scriptures command you to pay. Painful, as odious as it may be when you see where your tax money is going, you have no choice, but every time you give a dime to the system, every time you write out a check with your taxes, tell yourself, will you, I’m a slave; I’m a slave to the new Caesar. When I see this and this and this and this that are holy out beyond the biblical dominion of limited government, I am a slave. Why am I a slave? Because a generation, two generations, three generations ago we had a group of Americans who were numbskulls up here, who never applied the Word and they let it slip and now I pay for it. I say realistically, if the Lord doesn’t return, realistically, what we as Christian men today can hope for is that we can train our families and our sons so they can make the break. Our generation is probably too late, but hopefully we can build for tomorrow with the large families, with trained children, they will carry the torch of freedom and they will not put up with a deified governmental agency. And if there be armed revolt in our son’s day, then let’s give them our blessing, for they can reduce this trend.

Remember the Exodus, the book of Exodus and how it started. We’ll close where it started. Exodus 1, this was the first blow for freedom. Exodus 1:10, they multiplied like crazy; maybe that’s the reason for our nursery problem. In verse 10 they had so terrified the bureaucrats of Egypt that this population wasn’t doing the [can’t understand words] Oh, why, we can’t have people multiplying like that, look at that, they’re having more than 1.7 children. We’ve got to do something about this. And do you know why? Because in verse 10 there is a fear on the part of the non-Christian populous about Christians, in this case believers, who are multiplying and are getting a power base. “Come on, let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply, and it come to pass, that, when war occurs, they join also unto our enemies, and fight against us,” we can’t be sure, in other words, the government officials are saying, of these people’s allegiance in the pressure situation. And not only can’t we be sure of their allegiance, those people are multiplying. Give them one more generation and they’re going to take us over. You betcha!

Now that ought to be our response when we pay taxes. Conservative movements today are not hacking it; they’re just not hacking it and the reason they’re not is because everywhere you go the only people interested are people who have been in the Word of God. And so it simply confirms what we have said, over and over again: we have got to build our base spiritually and be patient and go on and then in the future we can have our freedom.