Clough Proverbs Lesson 82
DI #4: The Heresy of Statism
I’d like to take
this time to catch up on answering the cards that many of you have handed
in. We have a number of interesting
questions this morning designed to loosen us all up, relax us. By the way, somebody asked me whether I makes
these up; no, I don’t make them up. Can
you justify the Klu Klux Klan on the basis of Deuteronomy 13? I have no idea which Klu Klux Klan you are
talking about, there were three in history and even if I did I don’t see
anything in Deuteronomy 13 that has anything to do with the Klu Klux Klan. Deuteronomy 13 is teaching the loyalty of
individuals to the Word of God and to religious truth first, but then it’s
talking about loyalty to this religious truth, irrespective of any other
authority. What may have happened in
this question is some of you realized that the third formation of the Klu Klux
Klan was very anti-Catholic and in other words, can you justify religious bigotry? Well, you can’t justify violence in that
sense or hatred for other people, but on the basis of Deuteronomy 13 you can
justify hatred toward religious systems.
There’s a difference between individual people and the systems they
profess. Obviously you’re called upon in
the Word of God to hate lies and systems that deny the Word of God are to be
hated, of course, but I don’t see that as anything… the Klu Klux Klan at the
time, the third time it formed, was mainly just hating people, it wasn’t that
it had anything to do Protestantism, Catholicism or anything else.
The next question
is: I just learned that one of my main platforms against tongues is all wrong,
namely that tongues were always intelligible language used for the spreading of
the gospel, so will you please take a Wednesday night or Sunday or something
and tell us about the gifts and what they are biblically and what churches say
they are today and what parts are demonic and so on. We don’t have time in this session to do
that; I would recommend if you want further reading there’s a very excellent
pamphlet out in the hall, The Doctrine of
Spiritual Gifts by George Meisinger.
Now as far as the tongues not being intelligible languages, I don’t know
where you get this from because as far as I know everywhere in the New
Testament tongues are considered to be intelligible language, so I don’t see
that that’s much of a problem.
Does a believer
who has been out of fellowship a long period of time producing human good lose
his rewards for divine good, or can they be cancelled out? I, at the moment, don’t know of any
Scriptures that would say that your rewards once earned are cancelled; there
are some that talk about taking what he has away from him but that seems to be
more to do with phase two, with the Christian life, than it does with rewards. I’m not going to be dogmatic on that, just
from my own study at the moment I’m not aware of any passages that teach that.
This one is an
interesting one. Also do angels appear
in clothing today? I’m not sure in what
sense you mean the question. In
Abraham’s day they appeared in human bodies with clothes on. I don’t think if I were an angel I would like
to appear in front of you without any clothes, but angels, when they do
materialize, appear in the normal garb of the day and you can see that many
times in the Bible.
Are a girls
characteristics she wants in her Prince Charming God-given basis to know her
right man by or are they purely idealistic?
I wouldn’t know because I wouldn’t know what the characteristics are
you’re talking about; it depends whether they’re biblical characteristics or
not. If they are, yes; so you’d have to
go back to the biblical norm for that area and check them out on the standard
of the Word of God.
How does man’s
practice of blowing divine institution four out of proportion relate to Satan’s
inevitable attack on the same? Is it
just part of that attack? I have to be
careful here; obviously Satan’s involved, but I have warned you over and over
and over again about this, particularly with The Exorcist and everything else going around is to keep your
framework orthodox, and in orthodoxy Satan doesn’t do anything. What Satan does is he tries to distort what
God has already first done; Satan is actually never creative, he’s always
following up something God has first done.
Similarly, in dealing with men Satan tempts men and after men sin Satan
helps them in their sin. And in that
sense, yes, but you can’t go around blaming it on Satan, Satan does this and
Satan does that; that’s not true. Men do
it because man positionally is the king of the earth; he is the one to whom God
has told to subdue the earth. And Satan
tempts and then once man sins he helps sin along.
If our salvation
depends on Christ’s intercession, is there ever a time in history when this
intercession is not needed? And the
answer is no, because in the book of Hebrews Jesus Christ is a high priest
after the order of Melchizedek forever, which means His priestly duties
continue always, for eternity.
Another question:
If animals were not carnivorous during the flood, when did this take
place? I thought this was due to the
fall, because in Isaiah 65:25 at the thousand reign the animals will go back to
eating hay. The problem here is that the
millennial kingdom is not a direct reflection of the pre-fall… here’s the fall,
here’s the flood, here’s the Second Advent.
Now before the fall you had the age of innocence; the millennial kingdom
is not exactly like the age of innocence; it’s close to it but the millennium
still has death in it. Death is not
eliminated till the end of the millennium.
So the millennium is not like the age of innocence. It’s more like the antediluvian period, and
in the antediluvian period animals were vegetarians by Genesis 9, you’ll see it
in there, if you compare Genesis 9 with Genesis 1.
Now the next two
questions have to do with abortion. Is
abortion of a child who will be deformed okay?
And another question: what is the biblical view of abortion when
pregnancy is not interfering with the mother’s life. Is it a sin to have an abortion simply
because you do not want a child at a certain point in time? Well, again we have to answer these questions
in detail and to give you good criteria I’d have to take about an hour. I would refer you to passages where I have
dealt with the origin of the soul in the framework pamphlet and other places
and we will shortly have in the library a paper on abortion by Professor Waltke
on abortion which you can find more verse.
But just say this, that abortion is not murder because the fetus before
physical birth is not breathing on its own and the Bible identifies true life
or nephesh with physical
breathing. So until the first breath,
the first spontaneous breath is taken, the fetus is not considered a living
thing in the Bible. So therefore we do
not agree with many theologians today who say that abortion is murder because
to be murder the baby would have to have life in it to take it away; if the
baby doesn’t have life obviously abortion is not murder. However, Psalm 139 also is a passage that
tells us that the unborn child is very precious in God’s sight, that God is
weaving it and building it for a future life, and therefore we go back to the
traditional Jewish position that has always been accepted in orthodox Judaism,
and that is that the unborn fetus is considered a very precious thing but not
as precious as life itself.
As far as the
defective infant is concerned, I’d refer you if you’re concerned with genetic
defects, how these can be used for God’s glory, one illustration is John 9 with
the congenitally born blind man. And
there you have a passage where Christ explains something about genetic
defects. Also, 2 Samuel 9 is a passage
that deals with injuries; this is a post birth injury, extreme crippledness in
Mephiboseth, and God’s attitude is shown toward this kind of a person through
David and his treatment of him in 2 Samuel 9.
So therefore in conclusion to the question is that you can say that
abortion is not murder but whether it’s the will of God in any given situation
you have to go to a lot of Scripture to justify abortion, and this involves a
process. If you have a personal problem
in this area I’ll be glad to talk to you about it but it gets too involved for
this part of the Proverbs series.
Some people I’ve
talked to that go here (I always know what’s coming after that), say that we
are taking in the Word but are not giving out in Christian service. What are the Christian’s obligations to help
the sick and the elderly and so on? And
does LBC have any programs or suggestions how we can fulfill this requirement
if this is a requirement? Now I’m glad
you asked that question, because Dan (?) the last three months has been
involved in trying to get something going for those who have gifts of helps in
this area and he is chairman of the membership committee. Dan, are you around here. That’s the man if you want to see if you’re
interested.
The next question:
Why don’t we have communion service on Sunday morning? Well, I was responsible for moving communion
to the evening service because I felt that in the morning service, this is the
service, one time we meet during the week where we have the most visitors. And as such we probably have the highest
percent of people here who are not Christians in any one of our services. Communion is a worship service to be shared
with believers only. And to make the
issue clearer we moved it to the evening service. That’s the theological reason. Then there is a second reason, a logistics
reason and that is we didn’t have anybody volunteer and haven’t had enough
people volunteer to take care of the elements, washing the trays out and
pouring the grape juice and so forth; right now in fact we don’t have anyone to
do it; I don’t know if we’re going to have communion tonight or not. So those kinds of questions we like because it
simply draws attention to the bulletin, and I would say this, that those who
ask those questions, if you had been reading the bulletin the last three or
four weeks you would have seen the appeals by the committee chairman to these
needs. So all we can say is read your
Bible and read your bulletin.
Today we finish up
the area of the fourth divine institution and this area is one in which we are
just about to the end and next week we’ll deal with the fifth divine
institution and that’s it for the Proverbs series. Here again, by way of review, are the divine
institutions, how God has divided society up into spheres. Any time you discuss a question you should
know the doctrine of divine institutions, this is your framework for
discussion. When you say God led me to
do this or God led me to do that, God never leads you to do anything contrary
to the structure of these divine institutions.
You can be absolutely sure what is not of God because what is not of God
will be contrary to the structure, health and welfare of these
institutions. We have been dealing with
the fourth one, indicated here in blue because the blue institutions occur
after the fall; before the fall there was no fourth divine institution. Historically it was inaugurated after the
flood, some centuries after the flood, but it was due to man’s sin.
We have dealt with
three parts of the fourth divine institution.
We have dealt with the legislative branch, we have dealt with the
executive branch and we have dealt with the judicial branch. Today we finish the fourth divine institution
by dealing with the heresy of statism.
Now we always try to teach divine viewpoint versus human viewpoint. I always try to show you what the Bible says
and what the world says. We always try
to teach you what is right and then show you what is wrong; we do not just
adopt the positive approach; we have a highly negative approach deliberately to
show you where errors lie and these errors will probably lodge themselves in
your mind; all of us live in Satan’s world and to some degree we all share
these errors.
Last week under
the judicial we left off with a highly controversial position that bribery in
the Bible is permitted under certain conditions. It is a sin in the Bible to take a bribe to
distort justice. But it is not a sin in
the Bible to give a bribe, providing that the bribe was given in order to bribe
an unjust source of divine viewpoint number four official. Where the fourth divine institution, before
Christ’s return, becomes so corrupt that justice does not function, the Bible
authorizes believers, particularly in times of high pressure and persecution to
bribe their way with these officials. I
was interested; someone brought up a news clipping afterwards from Warsaw,
showing how in Poland today the Christians are in a very similar position, and
how this would be a place where Christians could legitimately buy off the
police, buy off the judge and so on. And
I mentioned to you during the time I explained that, that Christians right now,
from well known evangelical missionary organizations are taking Christian funds
and using them, probably 60% of their budget goes to pay off the police at the
border of East Germany, and it’s simply bribing the police to look the other
way while they bring bibles and other materials behind the iron curtain. And this is certainly legitimate and
authorized in Scripture.
The other
interesting point that someone brought up an article on, under the legislative,
you remember we covered the fact in the Bible that a community should design
their legislation after the standards of the Word of God, and when we dealt
with the judicial a community is responsible for the execution of the
criminal. And if a community does not
then it has a moral duty to reimburse or in some way compensate for the victims
of unsolved crime. And somebody pointed
out the House judiciary chairman proposed legislation to reimburse victims of
violent crime for loss of income and cost of medical care. A judiciary committee spokesman said the New
Jersey democrat hopes to have specific langue for the bill ready in about a
week, and it goes on and describes the kind of legislation. The problem is that that legislation is at
the federal level rather than the local level, and the other problem is that
that kind of legislation is designed to reimburse victims irrespective of
whether a crime was solved or not. And
what the Bible is talking about is crimes that are unsolved, the community has
a moral responsibility to handle it.
What I’d like to
do today is take divine viewpoint and human viewpoint and let’s examine the
heresy of statism by contra sating the divine viewpoint of the fourth divine institution
with the human viewpoint distortion of that, called statism. Necessarily we will be very skimpy on various
verses of Scripture because we have a lot of quotational material to justify
the statement that this heresy goes on today.
Now, just because we don’t exegete a long passage of Scripture verse by
verse is no sign that this is spiritually irrelevant. What this means is that if you are a
Bible-believing Christian today you ought to be fighting this heresy. If someone would walk around the streets
denying the deity of Jesus Christ you’d be upset; someone comes to your door
peddling literature that undercuts the Scripture, you’d blow a gasket but
people all the time can deny the fourth divine institution and the average
Christian sits there and says it’s great.
You see, we are not applying the Word of God in every area and the
mandate of Scripture is to teach all that Christ taught, the whole counsel of
God as it applies to every area. Now
this is going to make you persona non
grata in certain circles. If you
really have the guts to apply the Scriptures to every area of life, including
the fourth divine institution, you will not be well-liked in many circles
today. You will be a thorn in the side
of people because the heresy of statism is so widespread, so deeply ingrained
we find ourselves thinking about it without even being conscious of it.
So let’s talk
about the heresy of statism and the best way to break it down is to start by a
review of human viewpoint. Human
viewpoint, always, wherever you find it in your heart, someone else’s heart,
the country’s heart, can always be identified, since it emanates from negative
volition, by an autonomous attitude; an autonomous attitude, I don’t want God’s
authority. I will go on the basis of my
emotion, how I feel about something; I will go on the basis of experience, what
I see out there, pragmatism. I will go
on the basis of something else but I will not go on the basis of God’s Word. So an autonomous attitude is a rebellious
attitude toward the authority of God’s Word.
That’s one central characteristic of human viewpoint.
The second
characteristic of human viewpoint is that it always, therefore, becomes
idolatrous. That is, if you deny God
you’ve got to have a God-replacement.
The problem is what is your God-replacement. It can be money, success, or it can be
various parts of the creation other than those named. Idolatry follows autonomy. Part of my schooling while I was away was in
nuclear warfare and the instructor was explaining and reviewing some elementary
atomic physics with us, and he was going through and he kept saying “nature
says,” nature says this, or nature did that, and when nature made the hydrogen
atoms she did this, and later on she did that.
I was tempted at the end of the lecture to come and ask who this woman
was; I’d like to meet her. But we had a
good chance and it opened up discussion to discuss why what he was teaching,
whether he was aware of it or not was a highly anti-Christian pantheism. That’s an example of idolatry.
Now there’s no
exception, wherever you go you’re going to have an idolatry, so what do you
suppose happens in the heresy of statism?
You’ve got autonomy, you’ve got negative volition toward God’s Word and
therefore what the Word of God says about the fourth divine institution is not
accepted. What the Word of God says
about the first divine institution is not accepted. What the Word of God says about the second
divine institution is not accepted. What
the Word of God says about the third divine institution is not accepted. So since you don’t have any authoritative
word to organize marriage, you don’t have authoritative word to organize family
and society, you don’t have any organized standard to do anything with, how do
you cope with social chaos? It’s simple,
you have a God-replacement and the fourth now gets blown up all out of shape
and it becomes God.
In effect, the
heresy of statism makes the fourth divine institution equal to God. The other divine institutions, divine
institution one, divine institution two, divine institution three, are all
squashed and suppressed. Divine
institution one is suppressed, loss of freedom.
The second divine institution is suppressed, the attack upon
marriage. The third divine institution
is suppressed. Now for the remainder of
the time we’re going to show you how each of these three divine institutions
are killed off by the heresy of statism.
Again, I preface
everything I say with the fact, don’t think just because we’re not exegeting a
long passage of Scripture verse by verse this isn’t important. It’s very important. There is no more obvious denial of the Word
of God in 20th century America than the heresy of statism. This is not an attack on either political
party; it’s an attack on both. It is not
an attack on left or right, it is an attack on both because basically both
operate from a human viewpoint premise.
Very, very few thinkers today in the political operate on the basis of
biblical presuppositions.
Let’s see how this
plays out. Let’s start by observing how
the heresy of statism destroys the first divine institution. Remember these divine institutions again,
they are all carefully balanced in the Bible.
If you spread one you’ve squashed the other. If you spread this one over here out you
increase and inflate freedom, you squash the fourth divine institution and you
get anarchy. You expand the fourth
divine institution to get order and law and you wind up having tyranny. These divine institutions are very delicately
balanced; much more delicately balanced than the gears in your watch. And they’re very sensitive and you just don’t
go in like a bull in a china shop saying we need this reform, we need that
reform, we need this program, we need that program without seriously disturbing
the machinery. It takes long and very
prayerful and very careful thinking before you can go in and apply the Word of
God into these areas.
Let’s take the
first divine institution and how when you expand the fourth you destroy the
first. The first illustration of the
destruction of the first divine institution is the heresy of eminent domain and
to see this we’ll review once again 1 Kings 21.
We do not make any apologies for reviewing. While I was at school most of the class were
either active military people or retired military people and it was amusing to
me that most of these men had spent 20 or 30 years of their life training men
for war. And of course the outfit we
were engaged in they were training civilians to survive nuclear war. But they had been active in training men to
survive war on the battlefield and in spite of all that you learn in modern
educational theories, these men didn’t buy any of it. Their key formula was repetition of basics,
over and over and over and over and over and over. And along toward the end of the school, in
the last couple of hours of instruction, we had some sweet little thing come,
about 35 and had her PhD in education trying to tell these men 60 years old who
had 20-25 years of training men for the worst possible situations in life, how
to educate people. And you would have
enjoyed it, those of you who knew the Word of God to sit back and watch these
guys mumble while she was going on with her bazaar theories about how to
educate people, about how you do this and you do that and you reinforce
behavior here and all the rest of it. I
won’t repeat some of the response on the part of the men that were listening to
her lecture but you can obviously guess what it was. Of course, this is how men who are involved
in real education always look upon this theory business; it’s not that theory
is bad; good theory is good, it’s just bad theory.
1 Kings 21, here
is one way in which the first divine institution is destroyed. There heresy is the heresy of eminent
domain. Now eminent domain is how
statism shows up in one area. See, it’s
like a hydra head, it has many, many tentacles that show up in one area and
another area, and you’ve got get used to watching where this pops up. And one place statism pops up is eminent domain
concept. What is eminent domain? Eminent domain is the concept that the state
owns all property potentially. That is,
that in the city of Lubbock, for example, the government of this city owns all
property within the city limits and it, so to speak, lends it out by licensing
you to own property within these city limits but actually the city owns the
property, which means that if the city wants to build a highway through your
backyard they can take it away from you.
In other words, the city has final say as to the disposition of
property. That’s the heresy of eminent
domain.
1 Kings 21 is the biblical answer to eminent domain. In verse 2, “Ahab spoke unto Naboth, saying,
Give me thy vineyard,” Ahab is the king and represents the state, Naboth is a
citizen who has private property. The
Bible is pro capitalism; the Bible is pro private property. By the way, there’s always private
property. Those of you who are following
the silent song of the left, who like the centralization of authority in power
and the government is going to do this and the government is going to do that,
the government owns the property. Now
you say oh, no, everybody owns the property.
Well, everybody owns the post office building, right, because that’s
government property. You go down and try
to get your brick and see what happens.
See, when everybody owns the property what you’re really saying is
nobody owns the property; that’s what actually has happened. So Ahab is the state; Ahab comes to Naboth;
Naboth is a private property owner. And
so if eminent domain is really true, like all municipal governments say it’s
true today in the United States, like all state and federal governments say
it’s true in this country, and in the world for that matter, if eminent domain
is really true Ahab should be able to get the property from Naboth. But let’s see what happens.
1 Kings 21:3, “Naboth said to Ahab, The LORD forbid it me, that I
should give the inheritance of my fathers unto you.” In other words, private property is the possession
of the third divine institution, not the fourth. That is the biblical position. It does not belong to the state, this
property, this vineyard, it belongs to Naboth and his family. His father gave it to him. This is why many of you have been influenced
by statism to the extent that you like inheritance taxes. Some of you see nothing wrong whatever with
inheritance tax because you’ve bought the sucker line that inheritance tax
represses the wealthy large powerful families.
It never has done anything of the sort.
Inheritance taxes can always be gotten around by a person who has
adequate lawyers. The only persons that
inheritance taxes hurt are the middle class, you. You’re very and stupid to buy the argument of
inheritance taxes. Inheritance taxes
says that I, as a father of four sons, cannot give my sons something without
tipping the state. Yet I have, in the
Bible, a mandate to provide for my own, 1 Timothy 5. I have a mandate in 1 Kings 21 that it is my
property and I will give to my sons what I wish to give to my sons,
irrespective of what the state desires and wishes. That is my business and not the state. If John D. Rockefeller wants to give five oil
refineries to his sons, that is his business, not yours, not mine. To argue that wealth should be stopped
inheritance taxes is to say a person who is wealthy, automatically, without
doing anything wrong, is a criminal. In
other words, it’s a crime merely to be wealthy.
That’s false. It is a crime to
misuse wealth, not possess wealth. So
there’s a fallacy in your argument.
There is no such things as a biblically justifiable inheritance tax;
it’s anti-biblical to the core and it is just simply statism showing its ugly
head. It destroys private property.
Naboth, in verse 3, rejects the state’s claim to his vineyard, and
Ahab, beginning in verse 4 comes and he designs a system by which he kills
Naboth. In verse 13, his fabrication is
that Naboth has blasphemed God and the king, “they carried him forth out of the
city,” Naboth, “and they stoned him with stones, that he died. [14] Then they
sent to Jezebel, saying, Naboth is stoned, and is dead. [15] And it came to pass, when Jezebel heard
that Naboth was stoned, and was dead, that Jezebel said to Ahab, Arise, take
possession of the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite, which he refused to give
thee for money” now notice in verse 15, the state, you can argue well wait a
minute, wait a minute, 1 Kings 21 really isn’t analogous to our day because
Ahab was going to take the property away and not give him just compensation but
we’re different in our day. If the city
of Lubbock wants to build a highway through your backyard they’ll take your
property away but they’ll give you just compensation for it, so you’re wrong.
No, this verse teaches in verse 15 that Ahab was going to give him just
compensation, that’s that clause “for the money.” So the state was going to give (quote) “just
compensation” for private property. But
because it was private property and not state property the final owner has the
final say. Naboth has the final say as
to what he will and he will not do to his family estate, not the state.
1 Kings 21:16, “And it came to pass, when Ahab heard that Naboth was
dead, [that Ahab rose up to go down to the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite,
to take possession of it].” He took
possession of it, there’s the state confiscating private property. Now watch God’s reaction. [17] “And the word of the LORD came to Elijah
the Tishbite, saying, [18] Arise, go down to meet Ahab king of Israel, which is
in Samaria: behold, he is in the vineyard of Naboth, whither he is gone down to
possess it. [19]And thou shalt speak
unto him, saying, Thus saith the LORD,” now right here is God’s answer to eminent
domain, “Have you killed, and also taken possession? And you shalt speak unto him, saying, Thus
saith the LORD, In the place where dogs licked the blood of Naboth shall dogs
lick your blood,” that’s God’s answer to the state seizing private property,
even with just compensation. All right,
so the heresy of eminent domain is contrary to the Word of God, the key passage
is 1 Kings 21.
Another key passage is Ezekiel 46:18, turn there just a moment, it’s
very, very clear, you can’t mistake what the Bible is teaching in this
area. Now granted today we’re a long
ways from this; I teach this only in the hope that many of you as voting
citizens, those of you who are aspiring politicians, and some of you should be,
you shouldn’t think of politics as necessarily a dirty game, it’s no more dirty
than any other business going on today.
Those of you who can get into positions of leadership on the campus, in
your political party, whatever it is, in government, state, local, federal, you
have opportunities to apply divine viewpoint.
You think witnessing on the job is just talking about Jesus Christ and
the gospel; that’s not true. Witnessing
on the job means carrying divine viewpoint to the best of your wisdom and
knowledge and skill at that hour and applying it further to your job in all of
its areas. So some of you sitting right
here this morning may someday have an opportunity to access policies at high
levels. Don’t sell yourselves short. If you’re prepared in the Word of God, God
will open doors for many of you. Those
of you with the skills God will promote to places where He can trust you with
decision making power. So don’t sell
yourself short; selling yourself short is selling God short. There’s no reason why some of you who study
the Word of God faithfully, who are diligent to apply it in every area of life,
you can’t attain positions of power and authority some day. You just have to do it God’s way, like David
did, trusting the Lord at every step and not trying to do it with some human
viewpoint gimmick.
In Ezekiel 46:18, one of the blessings of the millennium, according to
Ezekiel is that eminent domain is not valid.
When Jesus Christ comes, and this is the ultimate answer to those who
say well what about highways, you can never get highways built if we did it the
biblical way. Yes you could, because
they’re done in the millennium.
“Moreover, the prince shall not take of the people’s inheritance by
oppression, to thrust them out of their possessions, but he shall give his sons
inheritance out of his own possession, that My people be not scattered every
man from his private property [possession].”
Now that is a vision of the millennium future. So when you hear some radical despising
private property and say oh, private property is the source of materialism
lust, huh-un, the source of materialism lust is inside, not in external
property. All right, that’s divine
viewpoint.
What are we to do as Christian citizens? Try, in proportion to our position and
opportunity to dismantle the doctrine of eminent domain. Two areas that this might be done is that the
state should not be able to force individuals to sell their property even with
just compensation. Another area where
this could be done is the state does not have a right to tax everything you have. The state does not have… in the Bible that’s
clearly spelled out in the Mosaic Law, the state does not have unlimited
control over all your resources. You see
where eminent domain justifies taxes, put it together now. Some of you are getting really tuned in to
this framework; you’re beginning to connect things up. Now watch how things link up here, things
that before you didn’t see, now watch what happened. Suppose we pursue the doctrine of eminent
domain that the state really owns everything.
Do you see how that leads to massive taxation? Do you see why that attitude fits well, we
can tax those people for everything they’re worth, as much as we can get out of
them. Why? Because we own it anyway, they live in our
city, we own this place. And so the
mental attitude behind eminent domain is really a mental attitude that promotes
massive taxation. So by striking at the
roots and questioning the very doctrine, here is radical Christian thought, in
fact, Christianity, when properly applied is more radical by a thousand fold
than the most radical left-winger today.
It’s far more radical before it strikes far deeper.
Another heresy part of where statism hits the first divine
institution. We’ve studied on concrete
example, eminent domain. Let’s study
another one where the statism attacks the first divine institution; the heresy
of welfarism. Does that mean the Bible
is against welfare? Does that mean the
Bible is going to neglect the poor and the needy? No it doesn’t. Israel had one of the most fantastic welfare
systems the world has ever seen; nobody starved to death under Israel’s welfare
system. The poor were adequately taken
care of, but it wasn’t done the way we’re trying to do it.
The fallacy and the heresy of welfarism is the state, being god, see
that’s the heresy of statism, the overall picture, in this area, because the
state is god, the state must provide for all the necessities of every
citizen. It follows, see the logic to
it? If you grant the state divine status
then God must provide for every need, and if the state is god then the state
must provide for every need. We question
that; we don’t believe that the state is God and therefore we question the
morality of the statement that the state must provide for the necessities of
every citizen. Besides the obvious fallacy
is that the state can’t provide for every citizen.
Turn to Deuteronomy 14:28 for some divine viewpoint on this issue. I’m going to show you how the Bible handles
the problem. The Bible recognize the
problem exists; the Bible recognizes that many people in the community are
going to be hard hit, there are going to be economic disasters happen to you;
there are going to be times when economic failure in business and you have a
mass of medical bills, you have these things that happen happen, yes, and the
Bible is cognizant of that but the Bible rejects the welfarist concept. The reason the Bible does this is because
whenever you have a centralized power you have made the fourth divine
institution bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, it doesn’t get
better and better and better. It gets
worse and worse and worse. And so you
have bad administration of funds, people who are honest, people who have a
justifiable need for welfare are often the last people to ever get it; it’s
always the dishonest leeches, the lazy people, who get the money and the hard
working people don’t seem to be able to swing it.
In Deuteronomy 4:28-29 here’s how they did it in Israel. “At the end of three years you shall bring
forth all the tithe of your increase the same year, and shall ay it up within
your gates.” Now that’s interesting,
every third year; the tithe was the income tax on what was produced. Because it was nationally given, and by the
way, they did not have graduated income tax, they did not penalize the wealthy
person because he made more; it was a flat rate, 10% across the board. Wouldn’t you be blessed if your income taxes
were only 10%, and yet do you realize that computer studies have been done on
the United States tax structure that shows that if the United States would drop
the whole mess of tax laws and just go to a flat rate with no exceptions, the
average rate in America would come down to 6.5%. That way your millionaires would be paying
6.5%, elected officials would be paying 6.5% and peons would be paying 6.5% and
the result is we’d have more money to use.
Now that’s what happens when you have a flat rate but we won’t do that
because obviously that might involve somebody stealing. So back in the Bible times they didn’t have
that problem, they had a tithe, a flat rate 10% across the board.
Every third year the entire national tax was given for poor people and
it was given in the form of food. So
they would “lay it up within the gates: [29] And the Levites,” here are the
people who qualified for the welfare. So
the welfare, first of all, isn’t for the luxuries, it’s for the essentials of
life, for the food and so on, “And the Levites, the stranger, the fatherless,
the widow, who are within thy gates, shall come, and shall eat and be satisfied;
that the LORD thy God may bless thee,” see God is for this kind of aid, for
legitimate needs and they’re spelled out.
Now to show you how carefully that the Bible spells this out turn to 1
Timothy 5. I want you to see how the New
Testament church… this is going to answer the question someone raised, a good
question, is there a need today to care for the elderly. Yes there is, I would hope that later on in
this congregation some of you younger people, who have all this surplus energy
to burn, can do just simple errands for some of the people around here that are
older and need it done. You’d be
surprised how much sanctification doctrine you can learn behind a lawnmower, or
behind a dish towel.
1 Timothy 5:3, the Bible is not naïve when it comes to welfare. Watch what it says. “Honor widows that are widows indeed,” the
implication being you’re always going to have problems so set your requirements
carefully. And then Paul goes into some
of these requirements, verse 8, 9 and 10, “But if any provide not for his own,
and especially for those of his own house he has denied the faith, and is worse
than an infidel.” What does that
mean? That means if a person comes for
welfare, to apply for welfare and they have a family that is not providing for
them, they don’t qualify. The family’s
job is to do that; the state is not to interfere with family responsibility,
see, here’s where we’re getting into the third divine institution. If the third divine institution has the
responsibility to provide and the fourth divine institution comes along and
says we’ll provide, what has the fourth divine institution done to the third;
what has government done to the family in that case? It’s weakened it, hasn’t it, because it’s
taken something away from the family that should be that family’s
responsibility?
And so it says, “if any provide not for his own,” in other words,
family responsibility, “he’s denied the faith, and he is worse than an
infidel. [9] Let not a widow,” notice
verse 9, “be taken into the number under sixty years old,” now there’s the
biblical precedent for setting standards to qualify for welfare. Paul set a standard and this standard was the
early church’s welfare system. “…having
been the wife of one man, [10] Well reported of for good works, if she has
brought up children, if she has lodged strangers, if she has washed the saint’s
feet, if she has relieved the afflicted, if she has diligently followed every
good work. [11] But the younger widows
refuse; for when they have begun to act wanton against Christ, they will
marry. [12] Having damnation” or
“condemnation because they case off their first faith,” and so on and so
on. He says let them get married, verse
14. Now the number involves something
other than welfare but it includes welfare and that’s the issue I’m trying to
show you this morning.
Let’s go back to Deuteronomy 24:21, still on the subject of the welfare
problem, another way welfare was administered, one divine viewpoint insight you
get out of the Old Testament, if you are some day called up to serve on the
city council, upon some advisory council to the mayor, some advisory committee
to the state government, some advisory committee to federal government, and
don’t sell yourself short, some of you may wind up there. You should at least remember back somewhere
fifteen years ago I heard somebody say in Lubbock Texas that the Bible has
something to say in this area.
Deuteronomy 24:21 says how they did it, another way; one way they did it
was through taxes administered to qualified recipients. And they were careful, by the way, to protect
the third divine institution. Divine
institution number three was protected and not destroyed with that system.
A second system that was used in Israel was the system of
gleaning. What is gleaning? “When you gather the grapes of thy vineyard,
you will not glean it afterward;” that means go through and pick up every
little grape off the ground that you dropped and strip the whole vine completely
of all the grapes, “it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for
the widow.” Now if you want an example
of how that actually works, the book of Ruth gives you it. After the harvesters went through, they have,
say a square field, and they didn’t have tractors but they would leave a border
around that field and they’d leave some of the grain left in the center, and of
course lots of grain on the sides. And
God promised that the man who manufactured, who did his work this way, if he’d
leave the scraps to the poor, these were really just as… I mean, nothing un-nutritious about the
grain, you can read how Ruth gathered it in the book of Ruth. And so the other poor people would come into
the field and then they’d glean it; it would be free food for them. It was gleaned. The nearest thing we have to that would be
Goodwill Industries; that is actually a form that’s designed on the gleaning
principle. Same kind of thing except
that’s indirect; this is a direct form of gleaning. So if you want to see how welfare was
conducted these will give you some ideas.
And with creative thinking as unto the Lord you can think of some more
ways it can be done in a more modern situation.
All right, that’s two areas where statism destroys the first divine
institution. A third one is the heresy of
fiat money, still under the first divine institution, still how heresy attacks
the first divine institution. It attacks
it on the eminent domain, it attacks it under welfarism, it attacks under fiat
money, Isaiah 1:22 is one of your central references in God’s Word against fiat
money and conservatives, well known conservative organization still believe in
fiat money. “Thy silver has become dross
by wine mixed with water,” Isaiah says, and he declares it is a sin to be
identified with rebellion at the level of the fourth divine institution. “Thy princes are rebellious,” he says in
verse 23.
So fiat money, where the government decrees the value of a piece of
paper that’s worthless, Ludwig von (?) the Austrian economist once said that
government is the only entity known to man that can take something valuable, a
piece of paper, print it and make it absolutely worthless. And that’s what fiat money is. What can you use a dollar bill for if it’s
worthless, you can’t even draw on it, it’s got all that green stuff all over it
and you can’t even see what you’re drawing, it’s not even worth being a scrap
piece of paper. About the only thing you
can use money for when it’s worthless is a book mark, then it’d get the pages
of your book dirty. So paper money is
worthless; fiat money is again an accomplishment of our modern generation and
it’s a heresy. The biblical answer to
fiat money is money with historic value and that is a gold and silver backed
currency. That is the sound divine
viewpoint way of handling the problem.
Summing it up then, the first divine institution is destroyed because
private property is destroyed when the fourth divine institution is
bloated. One concluding illustration
that is very contemporary as to how, when the fourth divine institution blows
up it destroys the first divine institution.
On the first divine institution we have what is called industry
today. One of the great things you read
about in your papers every day is the so-called energy crisis and everybody is
going around saying it’s a big plot by all the oil companies to do away with
competitors and so on. Maybe there’s
plots involved but the basic problem is a heresy of statism once again. We are paying the price for this heresy.
The problem has been, as the
U.S. geological survey has estimated in the Gulf of shelves in the United
States, the (?) shelf on the east coast and the Alaskan oil fields we have
within our own continental boundaries 500 years of petroleum supply. Our problem is not that we do not have petroleum;
we’ve got gobs of it. We have 1,500
years supply of coal. Our problem is not
lack of resources. Our problem,
obviously, is getting the resources. And
who gets the resources? Industry gets
the resources. How do they get the
resources? They drill for oil; how do
they drill? With money to buy the
equipment to drill. Over the last 20
years the United States industry has drilled 14,000 offshore rigs, that’s a
total. Those rigs, when they are in over
800 feet of water cost the company 32 million dollars a feet. How many gallons of oil do you think they’re
going to have to sell from that platform before they pay off the loans to the
bank on the drill? A lot of oil, right. So what has happened? Fifteen years ago the oil companies appealed
to the United States government, they said look, it costs us 32 million bucks
to build one of these offshore rigs, you’ve got to allow us to increase the
market cost of our product or we can’t make enough profit to pay off the bank
note. Nope, not going to do it. The government [can’t understand words]. All right, and so the oil industry never
reinvested because obviously if you’re in debt, multiply 32 million, by the
way, not all these wells are that costly but multiply 32 million by about a
thousand, and you’ll get how much money that the oil companies owe that they’ve
got to pay off. Where do they get the
money to pay off if they can’t sell a product and a product for profit?
So they don’t because government, instead if it were done biblically
who would determine price? The free
market price. Companies could amortize
their loans. And so to add insult to
injury after the government refused to do this, obviously they refused to drill
any more wells. But then to add it all
up we have the ecology people starting around the country and they managed to
really foul things up real good when in 1969 the Santa Barbara oil field had a
blowout. A Union Oil Company rig blew
out. The field was shut down because as
CBS news and NBC news would have you believe, oh, these tens of thousands of
birds, all up and down the beaches of California, were just horribly
slaughtered as the oil got on their feathers and so on. Out of 14,000 offshore rigs the history is
that only 25 ever had a pollution causing blowout; of those 25 only 3 were
major. And of those 3 only 1 did that
kind of damage. Now isn’t that a pretty
good average? One in 14,000; do you
think the companies are being unnecessarily risky? No, the oil they lose in a blowout, the oil
that they lose is profit out of their pocket; they’re not going to allow the
oil to spill all over the place if they can help it because they need the oil
to pay off their loan.
All right, in that Santa Barbara incident somebody, after all the
emotionalism of the media stopped, somebody went back to do a little counting
and they talked to some of the people that were involved in the wildlife
department. The sum total of birds that
were hurt in the Santa Barbara fields were 600, not tens of thousands. So isn’t this an interesting thing; thanks to
CBS News and NBC, for the sake of 600 birds we have closed down major oil
production. So obviously if you don’t
take the oil out of the ground the profound conclusion is you won’t have it. And this is again a manifestation of the
heresy of statism.
All right, we come to marriage, the second divine institution. Let’s see the attack there. The second divine institution is also under
attack. Why? Because certain people have the notion that
the state marries you and the state divorces you, so therefore all I have to do
is go down to the courthouse and I sign the marriage license and I’m married;
all I have to do is have my divorce papers and I’m divorced. Oh no you’re not. Malachi 2:14, here is the classic passage
that proves that the second divine institution….
When you young people trot down the aisle and you marry somebody you
just take a long look at what you’re doing.
You are entering into a covenant and that is a barith and that is a thing not in the eyes of the state, but that covenant
you just made with your vow is a covenant before God. Whether it gets recorded in the courthouse or
not is not the issue because there wasn’t any government before Noah. That’s not what marries you; what marries you
is the vow, that is the point you are married, not at the point of the first
time of sex either. The first time you
are married is the time of the vow. And
when you make that vow you are exercising your first prerogatives under divine
institution one, to go into the next one, divine institution two and that is a
transaction done before God. That is why
we have witnesses and so on, because you’re making a vow before other believers
in the eyes of God. The unbeliever too
is entering into this covenant, whether he’s aware that’s what he is doing or
not, but this is a classic passage. So
when the state says you’re divorced, you may be legally divorced but in the
eyes of God is another question whether you’re actually divorced or not.
Remember that before you go making something under this idea, well,
I’ll try it out and see if it works. You
don’t handle God’s covenants that way; you just try the Word of God out and see
if it works too, and then you won’t get in trouble; trust the Lord to lead you
to the right person, you’ll have the biblical criteria in your head so you will
see the right person, you will look at their soul and understand the right
person when you see them, you will have the Adam and Eve model where Eve was
created to help Adam in his calling before God.
A young fellow has no business taking on the responsibility of being a
husband until he has at least a basic knowledge of where God is leading him in
life. And you girls, if you see some guy
you’d like to grab hold of, just wait and take one long look at how stable he
is in ascertaining God’s will for his life.
And if you have some character that is completely up and down, this way,
that way, somewhere else, you’d just better drive with the brakes on for a long
while, until you figure out when he gets straightened out and has some sense of
God’s leading.
The third divine institution, we’ve spent some time on the second one
earlier, how does this heresy of statism affect the third divine
institution? We could go on and on and
on about this one, we’ll only take one aspect and that is the problem of state
education. Under the Bible’s concept the
third divine institution has the responsibility to educate. The fourth divine institution does not. When you have government taking over the
education of children you are having the government turn to what? A super parent, that’s what’s happening, and
the government now is expanding. This is
the heresy of statism. This is why at
Here’s what Martin Luther said, back in the days of the Reformation
about this very thing. (Quote) “I am
much afraid the universities will prove to be the great gates to hell unless
they diligently labor to explain the Holy Scriptures and to engrave them upon
the hearts of youth. I’ll advise no one
to place his child where the Scriptures do not reign paramount. Every institution where men are not
unceasingly occupied with the Word of God must become corrupt. It is an alarming fact that one time in this
(?)” as an illustration of this principle, “after another has been trained by
(??) among the educationalists to the western world. Chou en-lai, premier of Red China went to
What is the classic passage to justify the role of the parent? Turn to Deuteronomy 6:6 once again. So sometime, some day, after enough
repetition, this passage will come naturally to you. This is the classic reference amplified in
the New Testament and I’ll show you where in a moment. After the great commandment of verses 4 and 5
in Deuteronomy 6 what is the very next thing that God says… the very next
thing, what does He say? “And these
words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart,” great, how is
the Word of God to get in the heart? By
the third divine institution. Watch
verse 7, “And you will teach them diligently unto your children and talk in
terms of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and
when you lie down, and when you rise up.
[8] And you shall bind them for a sign upon your hand,” etc. etc.
etc. There teaching and education is to
be done inside the home, not outside of it.
Now a while ago a man wrote an article showing what has happened and
how gradually as the fourth divine institution has moved over and over and over
and gradually takes over the area in terms of education away from the third
divine institution, certain things happen.
And he begins to discuss the 1965 elementary and secondary education
act. “Title 3,” this is a federal law
that applies to your children, you’ll notice how sweet this works, and it’s obviously
the heresy of statism operating. “Title
3 of this act calls for a program of grants to be set up to supplement the
education centers and services in each state.
These centers would stimulate and help the states to provide (?)
educational services,” etc. etc. etc.
“To qualify for cash benefits under these far reaching programs each
state board of education must submit plans for its own educational centers and
services to the commissioner of the U. S. Office of Education. This produces a clear revolution in the
structure of our public school system.
For the first time we now have the
In other words, this principal stuck by his teachers and he said these
teachers should not be forced to tell the federal government principles of
what’s going on, personal information of the students in their classroom and
because of that he was fired. “This
literature,” the government literature, “clearly states that any local school
district applying for federal funds under the 1965 act must first establish
local goals. These goals must then be
revised to conform to state standards and the final goals must be revised
further to meet the federal requirements.
The only way to avoid inevitable federal control is either to (?) accept
no federal money or to seek to repeal the elementary and secondary education
act of 1965. Educational leaders,
behavioral scientists and professional family meddlers are absolutely
determined to diminish parental influence over school children. From the day he or she enters the school the
series of modern plans move to overcome the values and standards established in
the home. Dr. Benjamin Bloom and a few
other psychologists and educational leaders got together some eleven years ago
and redefined the purpose of education as,” (quote) “‘behavioral
modification.’ That simply means that a
handful of people decide that schools are primarily to be used to change the
behavior of each student. Eight years
ago Congress passed a set of laws that gave the federal government the
authority to apply a program to child education designed to bring about
officially approved attitudes. This,
before, had always been the responsibility of parents in the United States, but
now the federal government is telling teachers that they have to promote
government selected attitudes and values among their students, even though they
are in direct conflict with those of a vast majority of American homes. The
And it goes on to describe this kind of thing. So I’m not an alarmist, this is happening and
it’s happening because we have a breakdown in these divine institutions. And those of you who are in education, I pity
you because you’re going to have to work in this kind of a system, unless you
fight the system. And in fighting the
system you’re going to become persona non
grata. That’s why we go over the
Word of God time and time and time again here, to fortify you with the doctrine
that you’re going to need in standing for Jesus Christ in this kind of
situation.
Next week we’ll finish with the fifth divine institution.