Of Cabbages and Kings
1 Samuel 1-7
Opening Prayer
“Father, we are so grateful we can come together this evening to feast
upon Your Word, to be reminded of Your grace, Your
goodness, and Your plan for history, how You through Your Word address every
issue of life. You help us to understand how to think about the issues today,
that what we have in the Scripture is not some stained, old, dusty, ancient
book. But it has significance, meaning, and relevance for every single day
today. It teaches us how we should live in the midst of this world that is
ruled and operated by Satan.
Father, as we study tonight, we pray that it might begin to shape our
thinking to reflect upon, especially, the political issues of our day from a
biblical framework. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”
We are indeed, as everybody knows, ever since the middle of last spring,
already deeply within the midst of political season. We are getting ready for
the presidential election, which will be a little bit less than a year away.
Things are really going to get intense. After the horrific things that occurred
in Paris last Friday with that attack, we see that any little thing can happen
here in the United States or internationally that will have an impact on this
election and will change how voters perceive the issues and what is going on
around the world. We need to be very much aware of what is happening, and how
it can impact us.
As we enter this political season as Christians, we need to think about
the question: what does the Bible say about politics?
It is controversial enough that we teach the Bible, that we believe the
Bible, and that we believe the Bible is the inerrant infallible Word of God.
Many people say that you can talk about anything, but do not talk about
religion and politics.
What a boring life they must lead. The only thing worth talking about is
the Word of God, and how we are to govern ourselves as His creatures. We have
to understand that from the framework of His Word.
I have been waiting for the time when we would get to this chapter, 1
Samuel 8, because this is a significant chapter in Scripture addressing issues related to human government. Let us review.
The title of tonight’s message is Of
Cabbages and Kings. Thinking about: what does the Word of God say about
rulers and about human government?
We look at Samuel, at the structure of 1 Samuel.
Part of that dramatic change is that there is going to be a shift that
occurs in terms of how Israel is governed. Israel has been governed one
particular way up to this point, and now the people are going to want to have a
king like all of the other nations.
Can anybody tell me who the first king of Israel, the first man crowned
king of Israel was? Abimelech, Gideon’s son.
Most people always say Saul. That is because people do not listen. They
always think I said who was the first man God anointed to be king of Israel?
I did not say that. I said who was the first man crowned king?
In Judges 9, the son of Gideon, Abimelech, is crowned
king by the men of Shechem. Judges 9:22 says he reigned over Israel
three years.
Saul is the first one that God has anointed as king. The rise of Saul is
covered in 1 Samuel 8–15, and 1 Samuel 8 is our transitional chapter because it
sets the stage for what happens in the coming of the king I have put in the
next division with Saul.
We see the decline of Saul and the rise of David in 1 Samuel 16–31.
In 1 Samuel 7:15–17, we get a summary of Samuel’s life:
He judged Israel. He is the first judge that indicates that they judge
over all of Israel. Most of the other judges, whether it was Othniel, Deborah and Barak, Gideon, Jephthah,
or Samson, were more regional, whereas Samuel judges Israel. He is the first
national judge.
He has a very narrow area where he travels: Bethel, Gilgal,
and Mizpah. These are areas in the hill country of Shomron or Samaria, north of Jerusalem. He does not go down
to Judah.
We looked at this last time:
As we look at this, I am going to introduce and talk about how we know
the Bible talks about politics—what it means and how it is significant.
I want to take us back to the founding fathers of this
country and why this is significant. We live in a world today that has
so secularized history and so secularized the founding of this country that
they have ignored and removed the role of Christianity on the thinking of the
founders.
Within the debates that go on among scholars, you have some who are all
the way on one side, who make it sound as if every founding father is a
committed disciple of Jesus Christ with biblically orthodox theology.
That is not true. That is one of the criticisms I have of David Barton.
He has a lot of wonderful material, but he overstates his case a little bit,
because a lot of the men he quotes like Charles Chancy and some others are
Unitarians. They were the first Unitarians.
They were not strict Bible believers in the same since that we are. But
they were theists. They do believe the Bible is generally the foundation of
authority, especially the foundation of morality, and gives the revelation of
that as significant in how man is to govern himself.
In a looser sense, these men were operating within a Judeo-Christian
worldview, like Thomas Jefferson, who even though he was a deist and a skeptic,
and took out his little razor blade and cut all of the supernatural passages
out of the Bible (you can buy Jefferson’s Bible, and all of the miracles and
anything supernatural have all been erased from that Bible), he was a
rationalist.
But even as a rationalist, Jefferson grew up, was educated, and was
taught within the milieu, the atmosphere of Judeo-Christian theism. He thought
in terms of the absolutes and the framework of Judeo-Christian theism.
Many Christians today are truly regenerate, but they have been so
trained by the relativism and the post-modernism of our modern culture, that
even though they have been saved for 10–15 years and go to church every Sunday,
they still think like a relativistic post-modern.
They have not let their mind be renewed or renovated by the Word. That
is how worldview works. We can go back and study the worldview and the thinking
of the founding fathers and answer the questions:
When the decision was made related to same-sex marriage back in July,
people would come out and say, how can we know what the original intent of the
founders was? We cannot get inside their minds.
No, but we can go back and read their letters. They did not have e-mail
and Twitter. They did not post on Facebook. They did
not have television. They did not have movies. They did not have the
distraction of so much entertainment that we have today.
They wrote tons of letters. Many of them kept diaries. They not only
wrote letters, but they gave many speeches and talks that were all written
down. We have massive amounts of information that can be evaluated.
One of those who evaluated this is a man by the name of Dr. Donald Lutz,
who is a professor of political science here at the University of Houston.
1. In 1983 Dr. Lutz published the results of an extensive 10-year
research project, which analyzed over 15,000 political documents that included
speeches, diaries, letters, and the private papers of the founding fathers
during the period from 1760–1805, during a period of 45 years.
This information was put into computers and analyzed looking for
phrases. They looked for citations:
They analyzed 3,154 citations. They published the results in the American Political Science Review,
Volume 78. The results were surprisingly in contradiction to what most people
expected.
2. The most often quoted source for political ideas was the Bible. They
got their ideas from the Bible. They got it directly from the Bible. They got
it indirectly from the sermons of the pastors in that time period, many of whom
published their sermons.
The most often quotes source for political ideas from the Bible was from
the book of Deuteronomy. More than 1/3 of all direct quotes came from the Old
Testament. They came from Deuteronomy, Joshua, Samuel, and some of the other
Prophets.
Over half of them came from Deuteronomy, which is a restatement of the
Mosaic Law. It was Moses’ summary—a reminder of all the stipulations in the
Mosaic Law to the people just before he went up to Mount Nebo and went to be
with the Lord.
Over 60% of all the references came from authors, as a secondary source,
whose original source went back to the Bible. They may have quoted from John
Locke, but the idea that was quoted from John Locke had its origin from the
Bible.
John Locke was raised in a strong Christian Puritan home in England. His
ideas and his thinking were deeply influenced by Scripture. He wrote a number
of theological treatises, along with his philosophy, and this influenced them.
When we look at these points we realize that they are quoting from the Bible
directly and indirectly.
3. The second most quoted source is quoted ¼ as frequently. That was
John Locke.
4. Another 60% of all the references came from authors whose original
source goes back to the Bible.
They understood the Biblical principles of humanity, that people were
corrupt. That is why they created the Constitution with checks and balances,
because they knew that human beings were corrupt to the core.
There had to be a check, that if any one person or one persons got too much power, it would threaten the survival
of the Constitution of the country. It would threaten the survival of liberty.
They understood the important role of righteousness.
Proverbs 20:28, “Loyalty and truth
preserve the king, and he upholds his throne by righteousness.”
Proverbs 29:4, “The king gives
stability to the land by justice, but a man who takes bribes overthrows it.”
If we do not have a king or rulers that have integrity, then it
threatens the whole system.
Sad to say, we do not live in a time when people have integrity. It is
amazing how political parties and political leaders threaten significantly
politicians.
I know pretty much for a fact in this last issue with the Iran nuclear
treaty that there were a number of democrats that wanted to vote against it,
but they were personally threatened with “if you vote against this the
President controls the purse strings of the party, you will not get one dime
from the party for your next election.” “You have five million dollars
designated for a project in your congressional district, that money is going to
go away, and you will not get that done if you vote for this.”
Over and over it was political blackmail. This is how Washington works.
This is not how the Founding Fathers designed this nation to work, but
corruption reigns supreme across the board and in both parties, which is one
reason why many people get frustrated because they vote in a lot of people from
one party or another. They want to know why they cannot get anything done.
It is because of this codependence between a lot of big business and
insurance. The insurance companies are making out like bandits with this Obamacare. Many people say it would seem like common sense
that they would be threatened by it, but they are making more money.
It all comes down to those things. It is corruption when you do not have
righteousness and truth. Then the country erodes and rots from the inside.
We are talking about these ideas. And the ideas that came into the
United States Constitution (lower right) have their ultimate source in the
Bible.
But in our heritage, as English-speaking peoples coming out of England
and the colonies, we trace the ideas in the Constitution and Declaration of
Independence back through several intermediate sources.
The laws were not based on a lot of previous laws of the Danes or the
Saxons, but primarily from the Bible as it had its impact on English culture.
He was responsible for translating the Psalms from Hebrew into English. He
translated some other parts of the Bible into Old English at that time. He was
a very committed believer.
Over against that there were the English who said no, no, no, no. We
have this tradition in English Common Law that the king is also under the law.
He serves at the behest of the barons.
That was how everybody learned to interpret law for the next 100 years.
What Blackstone said was the standard. He went through the history of law. He
explained all these things of the law.
As Americans, with our Constitution and Declaration of Independence, we
are structured on a system of laws that has its source in the Bible.
When we come to chapters like 1 Samuel 8 that has a lot to say about
politics and the problems with the authority of a king and what we might call
federal government, then we need to pay attention to these things and take time
to understand what the Scripture is saying.
As we come to 1 Samuel 8, let’s review it in a flyover:
That is how we ought to react to things that we do not like. We need to
initially and immediately take it to the Lord in prayer. He goes to the Lord in
prayer and the Lord says, look, they have not rejected you. They have rejected Me. You need to tell them what the consequences are for
rejecting Me.
The people are just set in their thinking. They are not going to listen.
Remember, God said that the Jewish people were stiff-necked and rebellious.
They have set their mind on it. God is going to give them what they
deserve.
That is going to be Saul. All of this is foreshadowing that the first
king is not going to be the best king.
I have a video that was sent to me today by Calvinist chance. It just
fits this last part so perfectly, where Samuel tells the people this is what is
going to happen. You are going to get a king like this.
This video is from a group called Government
Gone Wild. It is interesting. It is like it was written just for this
chapter.
Video: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Government+Gone+Wild+video&ia=videos&iai=xOAgT8L_BqQ]
Does that fit 1 Samuel 8 or what? That is the modern paraphrase of what
Samuel is saying in 1 Samuel 8. That is where we are. Do you think the people
in this country will listen any more to this kind of a warning than they did in
1 Samuel 8? I do not think so.
The only hope is the Word of God, because we live in a culture that is
so imbued with post-modern relativism that we have lost integrity. I do not
even want to get side tracked and talk about what has been going on at
universities: Missouri, Yale, Dartmouth, and probably coming to a school near
you soon. As you have students who are under educated, under informed, and are
riled up by special interest groups whose goal is to create chaos on the
college campus and to tear down what we have so that they can move on with
their agenda, the only solution is to get the Word of God out for people to
understand it.
Deuteronomy 32:34. I
have already covered this.
A couple of things we ought to pay attention to from the Founding
Fathers. The reason I am going into these quotes is because we have a culture
today that says:
1. We never were a Christian nation.
2. We have a group of people today that say that Christianity should
have no place to go except inside the door.
The goal there is to remove all Christian influence from the
bureaucracy. Listen to what the Founding Fathers said:
John Adams, “The general principles on which the fathers achieved
independence were the general principles of Christianity. Now I will avow that
I then believed and now believe that those general principles of Christianity
are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God.”
Elias Boudinot, who was a President of the
Continental Congress said, “If the moral character of a people once degenerates
their political character must follow …”
In other words, you get the leaders you deserve because the leaders come
out of the mass of that corrupt population.
“These considerations should lead to an attentive solicitude to be
religiously careful in our choice of all public officers … and judge of the
tree by its fruits.”
For those who say that the courts have said we are not a religious
country, we are not a Christian country, the New York Supreme Court ruled in a
case in the late 1800s that:
“The morality of the country is deeply engrafted upon Christianity. The
people whose manners and morals have been elevated and inspired by means of the
Christian religion.”
Without Christianity this country will not have freedom or liberty
because they go together. Only the Judeo-Christian framework that values life
and individual responsibility can give fruit to a nation of liberty and
freedom.
The Florida Supreme Court said that:
“The Christian concept of right and wrong, or right and justice,
motivates every rule of equity. It is the guide by which we dissolve domestic
frictions and the rule by which all legal controversies are settled.”
In the Florida Supreme Court the Bible is the foundation for our whole
legal system.
This is a three slide quote from Noah Webster
from his book on the History of the
United States. He says:
“When you become entitled to exercise the right of voting for public
officers, let it be impressed on your mind that God commands you to choose for
rulers, ‘Just men who will rule in the fear of God.’ The preservation of a
republican government depends on the faithful discharge of this duty. If the
citizens neglect their duty and place unprincipled men in office the government
will soon be corrupted, laws will be made, not for the public good so much as
for selfish or local purposes.”
“Corrupt or incompetent men will be appointed to execute the laws; the
public revenues will be squandered on unworthy men; and the rights of the
citizen will be violated or disregarded. If a republican government fails to
secure public prosperity and happiness …”
… that is not republican in terms of the
Republican Party; that is a republic as opposed to a democracy or monarchy.
“If a republican government fails to secure public prosperity and
happiness it must be because the citizens neglect the divine commands and elect
bad men to make and administer the laws. Intriguing men can never safely be
trusted.”
In summary, Noah Webster says:
What we see here in 1 Samuel 8 is a warning of what happens when
government goes out of control. It is not that government is inherently evil.
There are some libertarians who I have heard say that. That government is evil.
It is not government that is evil. It is evil people in the government.
If we are going to talk about what the Bible says about human government, we
have to understand where human government derived.
In the first part of the Bible, up through the call of Abraham, Genesis
1–11, we have an age called the Age of the Gentiles.
God creates the planet in perfection, perfect environment, no sin, and
this is during the period that Adam and Eve are in the Garden in Genesis 1–2
and the first section of Genesis 3.
It is called the Dispensation of Innocence. It ends with the Fall [of man].
Then God revises the covenant that He made with Adam at Creation. This
is what is described as the curses in Genesis 3:13–19. This begins a
dispensation called the Dispensation of Human Conscience.
In the Dispensation of Human Conscience, the highest form of authority
that God has delegated is either the individual or the leader in the home, the
father. It is patriarchal.
This of course was quite successful. Was it not? Wrong.
Man’s heart was so evil that God decided He needed to destroy everybody
on the planet. The human race was so immersed in the demonic that the daughters
of men were marrying these fallen angels who took on human flesh.
They were called the sons of God. That led to the need to eradicate the
human race, so that a perfect gene pool could be restored through which the
Messiah would come.
God established a new covenant with Noah after the flood, after he got
off the ark. That began the Dispensation of Human Government. We say that human
government is the fourth divine institution.
That all occurs before there is any sin. God initiated these
institutions in the social structure of mankind in order to provide for the
stability and the perpetuation of the human race when there was no sin.
If there is sin, there has to be some additional divine institutions in
order to preserve man in a sinful environment.
In the Noahic Covenant there are five basic stipulations:
If a human being murders another human being, they are to lose their
life. Not killing in warfare or self-defense, but only murder. Genesis 9:5–7.
As I always say, when you think of the rainbow do not think of God’s
promise that it will never rain again. Think:
But do not forget those first two because they are very important. When
we get into the Millennial Kingdom I do not think we are going to be eating
steak anymore. Get it while you can!
Let us think about what the Scripture says about human government. As we
look at government, God established government at the Noahic Flood. He designed
it to restrain evil and to promote righteousness. That is the role of
government:
When government is perverted by paganism, it does not recognize the
ultimate authority is God. In paganism man is looking to something in the
creation as the ultimate source of meaning. Then the function of government
shifts. Government is viewed as something that will replace God and provide
what only God can provide.
Security can only come from God. Only God can provide us with happiness
and a meaning in life. But when we have a government that rejects God or
ignores God, then that government seeks to be the source of security and
happiness.
It is the government that is going to take care of everybody from the
cradle to the grave. The state, rather than God, becomes the source of
happiness and prosperity.
In the pagan counterfeit political theory the ultimate architect is
Satan because Satan is the prince and the power of this world. Man becomes the
source of ethics, the source of laws, and this is going to be relativistic. Man
becomes a god unto himself. Yahweh,
the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Creator-God, is left out of the
picture.
Man then becomes his own ultimate reference point and his own standard.
His values focus on self-love, self-absorption, self-indulgence,
self-justification, and self-deification.
We have a great example of what is going on right now in the debate over
what to do with all these Syrian refugees. On one side you have people who say
we need to exercise compassion. But this is a compassion that is based on
self-love, the desire to feel good about helping people.
It is just like the arguments against harsh penalties for crimes. The
focus is on the potential criminal or the needy person, rather than on the
innocent person, whose life may be totally changed by opening the floodgates to
let all these refugees come in.
Is it compassionate to let a flood of refugees come into a country,
bringing with them who knows what disease? Is it compassionate to bring in a
flood of refugees that may include, we do not know, maybe they do and maybe
they do not, but could very likely include those who wish to do us harm, those
who are terrorists, those who seek to come in under the disguise of a refugee.
There was at least one that did that. We do not know.
I have heard people say that we do not know. There has never been a
refugee that has done terrorist acts, but that does not mean that they are not
out there. The past is not the key to the future. When you look at what has
been happening in this country over the last 30 years since 1980, a huge number
of people have come in illegally, and in some cases legally with student visas,
who seek to do us harm.
I have a good friend I was in college with who instead of going into the
military went to work for the Houston Police Department. He was with the
Houston Police Department for about 25–28 years. During the last 15 years that
he was with HPD, he was the liaison between HPD and the FDI counterterrorism
task force. He retired from the job in 1999, two years before 9/11 (2001). The
stories he tells me will scare you to death.
Part of his job was to track down students who had come over here to
places you would never think. You are thinking Rice University, University of
Houston, and A&M University.
No, they are places like San Jacinto Jr. College, Wharton Jr. College,
and all these out of the way smaller schools. They would come and go to school
for a semester. Then they would dropout. Then they would lose them.
He figures that there were probably close to several hundred thousand of
these students that from 1985–1999 dropped off everybody’s radar. He said most
of them were sleepers. But even if 95% of them got seduced by American Western
culture, that is still going to leave 15,000–20,000 jihadists out there that
are waiting to be called up. That is a lot of people who can do a lot of
damage.
Not only that but I have had other people, former boarder patrol, former
customs agents, former law enforcement people, who have told me that somewhere
between 20,000–50,000 Hezbollah sleepers came across in the period from the
1980s and 1990s, even into the period since 9/11 (2001) because we have not shut
the door.
Try this analogy on for size. If you are being compassionate because we
have had a whole bunch of bad floods here and you live down by the Buffalo
Bayou, and all of a sudden one of your neighbors gets flooded out of the house.
They are soaked and everything they have is soaked. The bayou has risen up and
soaked them. As you know, there are nasty critters in the bayou. There are
cottonmouths and all kinds of stuff. These people come to your door. They just
want to come in out of the cold and get dried off. Yet, you think you see
something move in their stuff.
Is it compassionate to the people in your house to let these refugees
come into the house when they may be harboring a poisonous snake? That would
not be kind to the people in the house. That does not mean you are going to
shut the door on your neighbors and tell them to go somewhere else, but you
want to make sure that you thoroughly search all of their possessions and
everything that they have with them to make sure that it is safe, that they are
not going to be bringing a little nasty into the house with them.
That is the idea. It is great to be compassionate, but compassion is not
in one direction. Compassion does not just look at the needs of the refugees.
It also looks at being compassionate to the citizens of the United States to
protect them.
There is a mandate in the Constitution to provide for national security,
but there is no mandate in the Constitution to show compassion. We have to
understand the distinction. It is not that we should not, but there is a
priority. The safety of the United States is superior to compassion to those
who are somewhere else.
When we talk about the Bible defining government, the first assault on
it came in Genesis 11. This is at the Tower of Babel. In Genesis 11 you have
Nimrod who comes along. He establishes a counter-government and a
counterculture, an autonomous government, at a place called Babel. They built a
tower as a direct affront to God, called the Tower of Babel. It is still a
symbol. It is a literal place, but it is still symbolizes everything that is
evil in the earth that is counter to God.
That is the first attack with literal Babylon that also becomes the type
and the model for the future kingdom of the antichrist. Nimrod becomes a type
of the antichrist. It sets the stage for this conflict between autonomous human
government versus human government that is submissive to God.
When God called His own people to establish His own nation, the Jewish
people, He established a distinct form of government known as a theocracy.
Theocracy means God rules. This is an important thing to understand
because when God rules, He is going to define the nature of the government. He
defined the laws. He gave the Torah,
the Ten Commandments, and the 603 other commandments that make up what we call
the Mosaic Law.
The Mosaic Law was designed to be the government for the people, the law
code for the people. That was like their constitution, but they did not have a
president or a prime minister, or a king, because God was the ruler. That was
based upon His character and His integrity.
Deuteronomy 32:3–4, Moses says, “For
I proclaim the name of the Lord: Ascribe greatness to our God. He
is the Rock; His work is perfect; for all His
ways are justice.” You
have a perfect Ruler who is perfectly right all the time. “All His ways are justice; a God of truth without injustice, righteous
and upright is He.”
Often today what we hear, from people on the left and some libertarians,
is that the Christian right wishes to impose a theocracy on the rest of us.
This is an argument based upon:
There was a book that came out by Kevin Philips, who had a minor
position in George W. Bush’s government. He wrote a book called American Theocracy. He made some
outlandish claims. He made claims about economics. He made a lot of claims
about the oil business. I do not have background in those. But the center
section of the book had to do with the role of Christianity in this country.
Philips cited a whole lot of people, people, many of whom I personally
knew. People like Tim LaHaye, Jerry Falwell, numerous other people who I knew well. He said
that they all wanted to establish a theocracy in America.
No they did not. They just wanted to go back to the Constitution. They
just wanted to establish the frame of government that was built into the
Constitution. They did not want to establish a theocracy where God rules.
See, we have a segment of people in this country who are so licentious
and so against any source of absolutes or moralities that if you even want to have a government that says this is right, this is wrong,
these people are evil, these people are not, then you are immediately being a
theocrat because you are trying to impose God’s morality on them.
But, the Founding Fathers, and that is the point of those quotes I put
up earlier, our Founding Fathers understood that some morality has to govern
some country. Every country in this world has a moral system. Some are
terrible.
The United States has one that is built on the Scripture. That is why we
have the freedoms and the liberty and the success that we have in this country.
We would not have it if it was based on the
kind of ethical system that you have in India. That is what produced the Indian
culture that only became successful as a result of the British Raj.
That is what happened in China, but what became good in China, before
the Communists came along, was the result of the British missionaries that took
the gospel there and began to impact that culture for Christianity back in the
late 1800s and early 1900s.
What made a difference, in many of these nations and has brought them
out of the dark ages, especially in Africa, had to do
with the influence of biblical Christianity and biblical ethics.
No, we are not trying to have a theocracy, but we have to have the same
kind of moral, ethical, righteous foundation for law so that we can:
But there are many people who are so hostile to God that they are
hostile to anything that reflects God.
The theocracy today that we have on the scene is Islam. The theocratic
rules of Islam are codified. The laws are codified in what is called Sharia Law in the Koran. The result of a nation that
implements Sharia Law is that they want to remove all
women from public life.
I always want to ask people who are committed liberals and feminists, why
are you so easy on the radical Muslims who want to take over the culture
because they are going to put all you women who have these jobs, who are
working for CNN, ABC, and NBC, they are just going to take you home and put a hijab
over you and a burqa over you and you will not be
seen or heard from again. They will probably rape you because that is what they
do.
If you do not understand that, read some things, just Google “Rapes in
Sweden”, “Rapes in Norway.” 100% of the rapes that are taking place in the
Scandinavian countries because they have opened their arms. They have embraced
the viper. It is in their culture.
Sweden is the #1 rape country in western civilization, #2 in the world.
100% of the rapes between adults that do not know each other are between
immigrant Muslims and ethnic Swedish girls. The same is true in Norway. The
same is true in Finland. This is what is produced by that culture, because if
they rape a non-Muslim then it does not count. It is a freebie. It is okay.
That is Sharia Law. They will execute all
homosexuals and adulterers. They will execute all transvestites and
cross-dressers and other gender-confused individuals. They will cut off the
appendages of thieves and robbers.
That is not in the Bible. That is Sharia Law.
That is hostile to freedom. You have never seen a Muslim country produce
liberty or freedom or emphasize the dignity of the individual. That is because
it is counter to their whole religious system and their whole structure.
God as a Creator of men and women gives dignity to every human being,
every man and woman, because they are created in the image and the likeness of
God. Government is later designed by God, after the
flood, in order to restrain evil.
There is a lot of hostility toward George Bush from the left. I figured
out a long time ago it was because as soon as he called the terrorists evildoers,
he was buying into an absolute category that they rejected. They knew that if
America bought into an absolutist morality, where there was true evil and true
good, the liberal progressive agenda was over with.
That is why they hated George Bush with such vitriol. It did not have to
do with anything else. He was progressive. True conservatives really do not
care for a lot of things George W. Bush did, because he was not an ideological
conservative. He was not a committed constitutionalist. He did love this
country. He did support the military. He has great personal integrity, but he
was not a committed constitutionalist. This is a problem.
Earlier we were talking about the geography. I will show this slide and
come back to it next week. Here is Jerusalem. Here is Ramah, about 8–10 miles
north of Jerusalem, where Samuel lived. The cycle of his movement was here: Gilgal, Bethel, and Mizpah. This
was where he went in the hill country of Samaria. Here is Beersheba down here.
This is where he sat and where Samuel sent his sons to govern. That gives you a
little bit of a framework.
1 Samuel 8:1–3
I think one of the reasons they said that Samuel’s sons were out of
control, and that they did not walk in his ways, turned after dishonest gain,
took bribes, and perverted justice, was that they were a long way from daddy’s
oversight. He probably did not get down there so much. They could get away with
it.
We laid the foundation for what the Hebrew of the Old Testament
Scripture says, laying the foundation for human government and the need for
leaders with integrity. We will come back and look at passages in Deuteronomy
to further set the stage before we get into 1 Samuel 8 next time.
Let us bow our heads together and close in prayer.
Closing Prayer
“Our Father, we are thankful for the opportunity to go through the
Scripture, to understand that as the Creator-God, who made the heavens and the
earth and the sea, You address every issue in life.
You address every issue related to individual personal life from marriage and
family to government. You teach what is needed to have good government, what is
a danger to a civilization and a people when that government goes out of
control.
Father, we pray that as we continue this study that you will help us to
think through these issues, especially in light of choosing leaders from the
local level all the way to the highest office in the land in the coming year.
Father, we pray that You might help us to focus on our
spiritual life as well, as our walk with You. We pray this in Christ’s name.
Amen.”