The King as Priest
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger, and we are talking today about the end of Saul’s reign over the kingdom of Israel.
We talked last week about his coming to the throne, the role of image in his campaign, shall we say, in his becoming king, and now we’re sort of skipping to the end to see how he ended up, which was not exactly auspicious.
The thing is, it’s not exactly the end. It’s more like the beginning of the end, which came really fast after the end of the beginning. Saul gets rejected a number of times before we’re done, but it goes something like this.
Saul has reigned two years and he has his armed bodyguard with him by now, and he has his son, who’s a grown man by now, out in the field also. His son Jonathan wins a victory so everyone’s excited, and the Philistines decide, “Nah, not tolerating that,” so they gather themselves together to fight with Israel. The Israelites are just getting way too uppity as far as they’re concerned. The Philistines have 30,000 chariots and 6,000 horsemen and “people as the sand which is on the seashore in multitude.”
Wow. That’s a phrase that’s supposed to be used of God’s people, so there’s a slap on the wrist at the very least to Israel. This is a promise that’s supposed to be yours, and yet your constant unbelief, your constant apostasies, your constant dragging your feet in unbelief – the enemy is basically getting your blessings and turning them against you.
When the men of Israel saw that they were in a strait (for the people were distressed), then the people did hide themselves in caves and in thickets and in rocks and in high places and in pits. And some of the Hebrews went over Jordan to the land of Gad and Gilead.
But there were some who were still following Saul in the area of Gilgal, which is near Jordan, and they followed trembling, so things are not looking really good. The Israelites are turning into cavemen. They’re running and finding holes and dens and anything where they can get away from the bad guys.
Saul has a small force and the enemy has a huge force. Saul is religious enough to know that before you go into battle you sacrifice to God and ask for his blessings.
Yeah. You do those kinds of religious things when you’re a religious person. Saul has proved to be rather religious at this point. So he’s waiting for Samuel, who is God’s prophet.
The place of offering sacrifices was not a kingly function. It belonged more generally to the priesthood, or if one of God’s prophets was on the scene, a prophet certainly had the right to do it because he’s God’s court-appointed attorney. He’s God’s right-hand man. He’s God’s spokesman. So he’s waiting on Samuel, but Samuel doesn’t come and doesn’t come and doesn’t come and doesn’t come, for seven days.
I just realized that the reason I thought this was at the end of Saul’s reign is because I was mixing it up with when he really wants to hear from Samuel at another point.
Yeah, this happens more than once. He would like to hear from Samuel. A funny thing – religious people like to hear religious words from religious guys. Think of Herod Antipas and John the Baptist. He loved hearing John the Baptist. Didn’t do much of what he said. He did some things. Actually, one of the gospels says he did many things.
He didn’t let John go. He did execute him eventually, but he was religious. Religion can be exciting and thrilling and inspiring, and it’s nice to have a religious guy tell you religious stuff, so he’s waiting for Samuel to show up. But after seven days he says to his guys –
The order would be – if there had been sin involved you would offer a sin offering, then a burnt offering, then a peace offering. Saul feels that he’s on good terms with God so he goes directly to the whole burnt offering, the ascension offering, and then he will offer the peace offerings after that, which involves a fellowship meal with God. Saul would be acting as the priest, so he would get a lot of meat out of that one. But no sooner has he offered the whole burnt offering than Samuel actually shows up.
Saul is excited. He goes out to meet him to say hi. Samuel probably can smell well. There’s this note of burnt carcass in the air.
Yeah, and eventually he sees the altar or fire or whatever, and he says, “What hast thou done?”
Saul registers something unpleasant in Samuel’s voice and realizes that Samuel is not happy, and he begins to think, “Why would he not be happy? Oh. Oh, maybe he wanted to do the sacrifice and maybe I wasn’t supposed to. I mean, kind of like he told me,” and then it begins.
And Saul said, Because I saw that the people were scattered from me, and that thou camest not within the days appointed, and that the Philistines gathered themselves together at Michmash; therefore said I, The Philistines will come down now upon me to Gilgal and I have not made supplication unto the Lord. I forced myself therefore, and offered a burnt offering.
This is better than Adam in Paradise. Saul manages to get three things in here. “The people you gave me – if the people had been brave and bold and stayed with me I would not have felt the pressure, but they needed to be reassured by a sacrifice, so it needed to happen right away. Samuel, they just really don’t trust God very well, so I needed to do it for them.
“And you were late, may I point out. I mean I waited seven days and you weren’t here. When that happens, sometimes you take things into your own hands to get them done because they’re crucial, like talking to God. Sorry you couldn’t make it.
“And of course there’s the external threat, the Philistines, because they’re not going to wait until I sacrifice. They don’t know the rules, so they’re just going to swoop in at any time and I will not be on proper terms with God. I will not have sought and got God’s blessing, because you have to do a sacrifice to do that.
“So with all of those very strong reasons, I forced myself. It was difficult. It was hard. But sometimes, you know, when you’re the leader you have to do those things. You have to make the hard calls and maybe take a little flack, but I believe that sacrificing to God at the beginning of any undertaking is just crucial. So I forced myself to do it.”
I’m going to get up on my soapbox here and say this is exactly what Adam did. Saul is in this covenant relationship with the nation of Israel and he’s just blamed the people he’s supposed to be taking care of, as well as God and God’s messenger.
Yup. If God wanted him to do this, God would have had Samuel there on time, so you know, providence and all. Providentially that means God kept him from being here, so that’s kind of God’s fault.
Well, the whole thing is God’s fault because anything that is external to my will and choices – if you believe in some kind of god at all – is the hand of God, the providence of God, or if you don’t believe in a god it is the environment, which I have no control over. I don’t control the clocks, the train schedules, or anything like that.
It's obviously not me because my heart was good. I wanted what was best for the people. I wanted to do the good religious thing that good religious people do. It’s not my fault that everyone else was screwing it up for me. I’m sure that settles that and answers all questions, and now we can get on with the blessing, right?
It’s very like Adam in Paradise. Saul is the new Adam for this garden we call Canaan, and this is the beginning of his fall. He goes through three at least by the time we’re done, but this is the first one and it’s directed directly toward God. It’s sacrilege, something you pointed out earlier.
Sacrilege is a word that America doesn’t get. We don’t have a category called holy anymore, so we don’t understand. If we like God, if we like Jesus, if we like the church, if we like Christian worship music, we put it in the category of those things that are fun and cool.
Setting “Holy, Holy, Holy” to something that you might hear at the Super Bowl – if anyone goes to the Super Bowl anymore – is completely fine because that’s how we show we’re jazzed about something, that kind of celebration. Maybe you put it to a rap tune or something, or get your favorite pagan movie star to sing it, because that’s what we do when we’re excited about something. There’s no concept that God is holy.
I’d say 90% of the time I hear the word sacrilege or even use the word sacrilege myself, it’s in a joke about something that I really like, like Star Wars. It’s like, “Oh no, the first three movies are sacrilege. You can’t say that the prequels were good.” That’s a violation of this principle, and that’s probably 90%.
If Americans even have a place for it, it would be something like that. “You violated my standards of excellence and propriety, my standard of what’s cool, what’s hot,” and that’s not how the Bible uses holy and sacrilege at all.
Holiness is the ethical character of God, in that he (or they, the three Persons of the Trinity) love each other infinitely, are absolutely faithful and transparent with one another, keep their promises to one another, and act within history to honor and glorify each other. Nothing is allowed to stain that, diminish that, interfere with that, and the penalty for anyone who tries to generally is hellfire forever and ever, unless you have a sacrifice to cover you. It’s that serious.
When God calls someone to the holy, to work with it or administer it or minister in terms of it, that comes with grave responsibilities. You can’t clown around in the face of the holy. You can’t bend the rules. You can’t reach out and touch the ark because “I’m going to tell my family that I did.” These things don’t work, because God is of infinite glory and not to be trifled with.
Sacrilege is trifling with the infinite. It’s messing with that which is holy. It’s diminishing absolute purity. Therefore, God puts very harsh punishments on it, and the more you know, the more responsible you are and the more you should know because of your office or position or calling.
Now, Saul does not come across as a master theologian, which might have bought him a little leniency, but he is very willful here. It’s not just that he didn’t get it and he didn’t know. In one sense he didn’t. He didn’t know this was going to cost him the kingdom. He didn’t know God took it that seriously, but he should have. He should have understood that God is to be taken seriously.
The things that are holy, particularly those that center around the gospel – and that’s what sacrifice was; it was a preaching of the gospel – they are not to be trifled with, messed with, diminished, smeared, darkened, or corrupted. You don’t. You shouldn’t even go near them unless you have authorization from proper authority. Unless God has said, “You go do this,” you should probably stay away from it.
With that in mind, he goes ahead and does it for pragmatic reasons. He wants the loyalty of the people, and if he’s serious about God at all he has now taken sacrifice to the level of magic, because he’s been told to wait. That’s the word from God’s prophet, God’s covenant lawyer, covenant spokesman, Secretary of State, if you will. The guy who speaks for God has said, “You will wait.” You better wait then!
“Well, you know, I don’t want to wait, but I want God’s blessing.” So you’ve just decided that you can get God’s blessing without obeying him. You can step out of the circle of obedience, which coincides with out of blessing, and you can perform an act which you have no authority to perform, and God will therefore necessarily bless you and do good things for you. That’s magic. That’s not Christian religion. That’s not the gospel. That’s not covenant theology. That is blatant magic, if you even believe it.
It might be simply the level of Madison Avenue advertising pressure. “If I can get the people to think that God’s with me, they’ll fight better, they’ll be more loyal, and they’ll stop talking about running away.”
We don’t know where Saul’s heart was, and Saul may not even have known where his own heart was. If we had sat down and said, “Let’s talk about this thing. Do you believe in God?”
“No, no, let’s talk about who God is, this kind of God, because everything you just did says you don’t.”
”No, no. See, that says that you don’t think God is who he says he is, and that God can in fact be disobeyed and gotten around. You sound like Adam in Paradise, Saul.”
Thou hast done foolishly: thou hast not kept the commandment of the Lord thy God…
…in case there is any doubt. This was not some abstract obstruse theological principle that Saul didn’t know about. He’s not being caught on a technicality that escaped his limited intelligence or limited theological knowledge. It was a commandment – in fact, Samuel says it twice.
Thou hast not kept the commandment of the Lord thy God, which he commanded thee…
…by Samuel. Samuel had said wait. He said it as a prophet, that is as the active voice of God on earth, and that was God’s commandment. You want God’s blessing? You do what God says – not that that’s going to earn it, but God has already promised to bless you. You just have to wait on him. But you went ahead of God, thinking you could manipulate God and get God’s blessing on other terms, so you have now reduced this to magic.
For now would the Lord have established thy kingdom upon Israel forever. But now thy kingdom shall not continue. The Lord hath sought him a man after his own heart, and the Lord hath commanded him to be captain over his people because thou hast not kept that which the Lord commanded thee.
Three times…it was a command. Saul broke it. “But can’t I just do…I mean, doesn’t God like religious stuff? Why is he so picky here?” I think I explained that, but let’s run back over it again.
No…well, yes, actually he did. It didn’t occur to him that that’s what he was doing. He didn’t use the name of a false god. He didn’t pray to Baal or Moloch. He directed his prayers doubtless to Yahweh, Jehovah, the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He said the right words. Presumably as he sacrificed he prayed. He’d been raised in Israel. He knew the kind of words to use. It was not hard. And in his mind he was praying to God and he was beseeching God and he was sacrificing to God.
Sacrifice was something that God ordained. He didn’t just invent a ritual. “You know what God would like? God would like it if we all painted ourselves purple, because God just delights in purple, so if we do that, that will make God happy. God would like all of us to shave our heads. God would like us all…” and go down the list of things that people could do and have done to try to win God’s favor, to get something from God.
No, he stayed within the apparent channels of orthodoxy, but since he was doing it on his own terms, in his own way, it’s no longer directed toward God. He is honoring his own religious notions, passions, ideas, theology, rather than honoring the word of God.
There are many institutions in this country and around the world that call themselves Christian churches, who say they are worshiping the God of the Bible, who use the name of Jesus, who use religious words, words drawn from the Bible, but their conception of God is thoroughly humanistic. It’s thoroughly man-centered.
They are not honoring what God’s symbols and God’s words and God’s institutions are structured by God to say. They’re making it up. They’re playing to the crowd. They’re reaching for popularity. They’re buying themselves Lear jets or whatever. They have this thing that they want, and because man is essentially religious, and because the religion of fallen man is that of the flesh, there are an awful lot of people who, if you say “Do this and live. Do this magic thing and God will bless you. Keep this list of rules. Give this amount of money. Go through this stupid ceremony and you’ll automatically get God’s blessing,” an awful lot of people are going to go along.
It doesn’t matter how stupid the ideas are, and how ultimately unbiblical they are. They have a semblance of being somehow biblical or at least religious in some broad sense, and people will buy into it. If you call them on it they will say, “What? This is religion. I like religion. Religion is fine in its place. It can’t help to have a little help from God.”
Or even the popular slogan, God and country. I’m sorry, when did the United States become co-God? We are not keeping the boundary between that which is holy and that which is secular – the sacred or the secular. There is a legitimate biblical boundary there.
The holiness of God in the Old Testament was institutionalized and ritualized in ways it’s not in the New. There were holy places. The tabernacle was holy, but there was a Holy of Holies, then a holy place, and the courtyard was holy, and the encampment was holy, and the land of Israel was holy – degrees of holiness.
And the people were to be holy, and yet they couldn’t go into the Holy of Holies.
Yeah. There were all of these limitations and restrictions to teach God’s people, as teaching kindergartners, that God takes his holiness seriously, and at the certain of that holiness – at least where man’s salvation is concerned – is the death of the Lamb of God, the death of Messiah. This is what the gospel is about.
When Saul is offering sacrifices, he ought to be preaching the gospel, but he’s not designated by God to preach the gospel in that way, in that form. He’s a king, not a prophet, not a priest, so when he takes that upon himself it’s horrible presumption. It’s taking an area of real authority, an area of holiness that God has not given him access to, and then because of that and because of the commandments he breaks to do it, he reinvents the message.
The message is supposed to point to absolute human inadequacy, absolute human sin and inability. It now becomes, “If I do this, I can get God’s blessing.”
Yes, and it must. That’s the nature of the thing. So because of this, Samuel says, “No, we’re done, or we’re in the process of being done.”
Now, Saul does not lose the throne immediately, but God tells him what’s coming. Samuel says God is seeking out a man after his own heart. At this point, David the shepherd boy would still have been quite young. It would be a few years before we get to the battle with Goliath, and David entering the army and becoming a war leader, then being anointed. Well, actually he was anointed earlier.
So what’s next? Oh, Saul getting jealous, then Saul trying to kill him repeatedly, then finally David going on the lam and having to run, and Saul pursues him and other things happen along the way.
I don’t know if it’s in the storylines we’ve planned, but Saul will fail to execute God’s wrath against Amalek. He will not kill Agag. He will turn his political mission into “get the glory” kind of thing. He will try to kill the Lord’s Messiah. He will kill the priests, and in the end he’ll consult a witch.
Also, he will at one point try to kill his own son Jonathan because Jonathan is getting a little too much attention and a little too much fame, so there’s a progression of sin and fall. First there’s the sin against God. There’s the sin against Jonathan, his son, then there’s the sin with regard to the Gentile world with Agag. After that it just falls apart and things go everywhere.
Is there a parallel here with Cain too, in that Cain’s sacrifice in the Levitical system was supposed to follow another sacrifice? Saul as king had a sacrifice that was supposed to be offered on his behalf for his sin, and he’s not following that procedure.
I think the absence of a sin offering is at least interesting, but certainly he should be having someone else do this.
With Cain’s offering, people look at the vegetables and say, “Well, that’s dumb.” No, it was alright if, as you say, it had followed a blood sacrifice. If it had been as the grain offering or tribute offering upon a blood sacrifice, a whole burnt offering, it would have been alright. The problem was that Cain decided he didn’t need that, kind of like Saul here. “Me and God, we’re alright. We’re just like that, you know.”
We’ve talked some about sacrilege and holiness and perverting the means of grace that God has given. Now in the new covenant it’s much simpler. We have the preaching of the gospel and we have the two sacraments. There’s less room to mess things up.
The printed Bible is not a holy thing. The message it contains is holy. I’ve seen this with small children and even sometimes in adults. The Bible falls apart and you’re afraid to throw it away because – isn’t there something sacrilegious about throwing a Bible away or burning it? No, there isn’t. If you’re not going to use it, it’s alright, you can throw it away.
If you deliberately burn it just to make a religious point, that’s something else.
Yeah, but it’s not because it’s holy. It’s because you’ve got an attitude. Destroying a Bible is one thing. I had a student who would never put his textbooks on top of his Bible because the Bible was holy. It’s a symbolic act. You can cut him some slack for that.
Someone asked him, “What happens if you’re carrying three Bibles?” His response interestingly was, “You always carry them side-by-side.” This was a high schooler, but here’s the point. It’s not the ink. It’s not the paper. It’s not the calf leather that binds it together, or paperback binding or whatever you’ve got. It’s the contents. It’s the message. The gospel message that the Bible contains is sacred, and to mess with that, to corrupt that, to pervert that, to say it’s something it’s not, to try to reinvent it – that is sacrilege.
With regard to the bread and wine – the bread is bread, the wine is wine, and I think Protestants mostly have figured that out. However, the act is the communion of the body and blood of Christ, and therefore during the act of communion, how you behave does matter.
Paul warned the Corinthians not to come if they were not coming in a worthy manner, that is coming in repentance and faith. To come in self-righteousness or spiritual pride, to come not recognizing the unity of the body of Christ or the presence of Christ in the supper – these are things that could bring judgement. Paul said, “Because you’ve been doing these wicked things, many of you are weak and sickly and many sleep.” People had died in the Corinthian congregation for the act of sacrilege.
But if after it was all done someone went over and took a swig of the wine that was left, that’s not sacrilege. That’s getting a glass of wine that may or may not belong to you. Whereas in the Old Testament God used rituals and places and times, in the new covenant it’s about the message. It’s about the gospel message that points us to Christ.
Jesus says, “My words, they are spirit and they are life.” To corrupt the meaning of words, that’s where sacrilege more likely than not is going to occur in the New Testament, whether it be largely with respect to gospel preaching and teaching, or possibly with regard to the application of the sacraments, to actually performing them in the way God said. This kind of sacrilege is less common.
We could talk about Paul’s warning of sacrilege with regard to our bodies as temples of the Holy Ghost. The temple of God is holy, which temple you are. Some people will immediately go to, “Well, that means you shouldn’t have tattoos and you shouldn’t eat this…”
Yeah, and in context that’s not at all what he’s talking about. The primary thing he’s talking about is visiting temple prostitutes.
In fact, he says that particular sin, that of fornication, is not like other sins because it’s a sin against your own body, that is against God’s own sanctuary, because you have become the temple of God. Doing something to the outside of your body or even to the fatty tissues in your body is not sacrilege. It may be unwise, it may be unhealthy, but that’s something else.
Now, trying to use magic on your body – if those tattoos reflect some kind of magic formula – that’s a little different, and that’s what Leviticus primarily is warning about when it talks about cuttings in your flesh for the dead. You’re trying to do magic upon your body by bringing your body into a demonic relationship. Yeah, you should not do that, messing with demons. When you’re the temple of God, that too would constitute sin.
Still today that’s not like a “that was then, this is now” situation, where tattoos are still fine. Demonic tattoos are still a bad idea.
Yeah. So we’ve talked about that, but the original design of this was to talk about the whole church/state thing, because here we have one of the first obvious interactions between the political state and the ecclesiastical institution.
It was a king and a prophet – a prophet who was a Levite, by the way, and adopted into a priestly family, but apparently not in such a way that he is eligible for the priesthood, because the High Priestly line does not pass through Samuel. It is as a prophet that he’s offering sacrifices, but that process is something that God had committed to the priests. Therefore, other people were not to do it.
There had been a time, in fact a very long time, when heads of families sacrificed for their families. Job is an obvious example. He sacrifices for his children. We see Abraham sacrificing, and Jacob and so on. But when we get to Mount Sinai, God says, “We’re not doing that anymore. You’re used to offering your sacrifices out under the open heavens, and in consequence you’ve kind of done whatever you wanted to. In fact, a lot of the things you’ve been sacrificing, you’ve been sacrificing to demons, so we’re going to stop that and you’re going to bring all your sacrifices to this one altar.”
This is where the tabernacle is instituted, the forerunner of the temple, and as long as the tabernacle stood that’s what they were to do. Unless God himself intervened and through a prophet or an angel said, “Build an altar here and offer a sacrifice to me,” the only acceptable sacrifices and only acceptable altar was the one in the tabernacle, and sacrifices had to go there. So not just anybody could offer a sacrifice. Our focus here for the next few minutes is going to be church and state, but just in passing, at the same time he took the priestly keys out of the hands of fathers as well.
When we think of the three covenant institutions we think of church, state/commonwealth/civil government, and family. These are all things that God has ordained. They are all covenant institutions. God establishes them in scripture. He defines and delineates their functions and their powers, and what their final weapon of last resort is. The family can disinherit, the church can excommunicate, and the state can execute, and that’s not transferable.
Right, which in itself is kind of a huge deal. The state can’t excommunicate and the church can’t execute. These are – Abraham Kuyper used the word ‘spheres of authority’ – and Dutch tradition uses the word ‘sphere sovereignty.’ That’s not my favorite word because it’s open to misunderstanding, but as a label we can pick it up and use it.
It means not that the sphere is sovereign but that God is sovereign over the sphere. At least that’s about the only right way you can use it that I can think of, because if you say the sphere is sovereign then you end up with the state can never tell the church what to do, and the church can never tell the state what to do.
Excuse me, that’s not biblical either, because right here we see a prophet telling a king what to do, and it’s with regard to something ecclesiastical. They’re going to offer a sacrifice. That’s a church function, a priestly function.
And the state, for very practical military things that are their responsibility, needs this to happen. The state should want the intercession, the prayers, in this case the sacrifice that the prophet is going to offer, this priestly institution, so there is a shared interest in this thing and there’s a shared involvement. They each bring something to the table, or the altar if you prefer, but each comes with a particular place and authority.
The king comes beseeching and asking for help and guidance, and the prophet or priest provides it. He leads worship toward God. Then the king goes out and fights a battle. The priest may or may not as a private citizen, but as a priest it’s not his job to go out and fight the battle. That’s the king’s job.
We have at least one occasion I can think of off the top of my head where the prophet does go into battle. That would be Deborah, of all people, but she doesn’t fight. She’s just there as a symbol of the presence of God. And we have a couple times – Samuel for one – where when the king has absolutely failed, the prophet picks up a sword and hacks the bad guys in pieces. Elijah will do this later with the prophets of Baal because the prophetic office was a little different.
Now, the priests, there is an interesting spillover there. When we were back in the wilderness, when the Midianite women are sent in to seduce the men, some of the men go only too gladly. One of them, a Simeonite prince, finds a young woman that he is attracted to and brings her back into Israel, back into the camp, past the tabernacle.
At one point I actually looked at the layout of the tabernacle and the camp of where the various tribes were parked, and there was absolutely no reason for him to go there. He had to go out of his way to go past the tabernacle. He wasn’t just wandering around and people happened to see him. He paraded her into the tabernacle precincts, in fact flipping off God and the priests and Moses and everybody else. “You know what I’m going to do. Try and stop me.”
“Yeah, because you just brought it into the holy area of the tabernacle, you just activated my call to duty,” because the one place that the Levites and priests could actually execute somebody was in the tabernacle. If you violated God’s holiness, they could pick up a sword and kill you.
They bore swords, and part of their mission was to guard God’s holiness, not that God couldn’t take care of himself, but if they didn’t then God could very easily be angry with an entire congregation that was so lax as to let some bozo come in and defile his presence. So for the sake of God and for the sake of the congregation, they were authorized under those circumstances to use the sword. But that was it, and those events were rare. I can only think of one or two in the entire Bible, and we’re going to talk about one of them in just a second, where the priests actually assume a police power with regard to the temple.
With regard to everything else? No. They didn’t go around and act like policemen, looking through windows, taking down names, drawing up charges, and hauling people before courts. That was not their function. They were there to worship God and to guard his presence and declare his gospel message.
The king was there to maintain justice, to protect the innocent, and to protect the nation from invasion. They’re both guarding something. The one is guarding the holiness of worship. The other is guarding the physical safety of the people, and these are not jobs that are at odds with each other. There was no separation here because they have their authority from God. What they’re to do with that authority is in the Bible. They’re to look at the Bible or listen to God’s words and God’s servants and say, “What does God tell me I’m supposed to do here?” Then they’re to do that.
What God tells the king to do, and what he tells a priest or, in the New Testament, an elder or pastor to do aren’t necessarily the same things. If a man commits fornication, the civil government may or may not have a standing there, depending upon the nature of the sin. If he has committed fornication with a young child, that’s called statutory rape and the state has a clear thing it can do there. If he commits fornication with a married woman, that’s called adultery and that’s an attack on the family and that was a capital crime in Israel.
What’s the church supposed to do? If he’s outside the pale, if he’s an unbeliever, the church can preach in general against sexual sin. If he’s a believer, it’s time for some spiritual counseling and probably some spiritual discipline. He may be suspended from the Lord’s Supper or be excommunicated altogether until such a time as he repents, and he will be told the Word of God.
So the state responds with potentially deadly force – that is, if the man will not submit to the correction prescribed the state, if he tries to tell a judge, “No way, man. I’m not doing what you say,” he can be executed for contempt of court. With the church, if there’s not repentance there’s excommunication, and all the while the church should be yielding the Sword of the Spirit, the Word of God, the gospel.
Now, if the guy has a family, they’re going to be involved too, but that’s not our primary topic today. But they’re going to come with different things, with the past and tradition and love and hugs and tears and getting in the guy’s face, and yes, the Word of God also. So each is going to respond to this sin, this crime, in a different way.
You can’t say, “No, this is a civil crime, so the church has nothing to say to this,” or “This is a violation of God’s law; therefore, the state has nothing to do with that kind of thing. This is a purely religious kind of thing, or this is a purely familial matter. Church and state should mind their own business.”
When we say sphere sovereignty, we must not say it in such a way that we’re saying these three spheres are wholly independent, wholly autonomous, and do not, cannot, and should not coincide their efforts on the same act, because we all stand – at least if we’re Christians – at the nexus of these three spheres. We all are members of a family, all members of a church, all members of the civil society. In fact, in a civil society we may be citizens of a town, of a county, of a state, and of a federal government, a nation, so layers upon layers, levels upon levels.
This is true in the others, too. In a church you have your local church and you may have a wider denomination you're accountable to. In your family you’re going to have your immediate family, you’re going to have your wife’s family or your husband’s family – there’s just so many things that are going to coincide here.
It’s an interdependence and it’s overlapping. These are three spheres that should be working together. The problem comes when one of them thinks it’s got it all together, that it’s all that. As Chuck Swindoll would say, “All that and a bag of chips” or “something on a stick” – one of his great metaphors that I don’t understand at all. Then we have a problem.
There’s another story later in scripture about King Uzziah. This is II Chronicles 26. He’s called Azariah in the book of Kings, so he had more than one name. He’s had a successful reign. He started when he was 16. The northern kingdom has gone into eclipse. The Syrian power is strong in the north, but is leaving him alone so he’s flourishing, building up his kingdom, establishing peace. Everything is going just great. God’s blessed him. I mean, it doesn’t get much better than this. Then verse 16 –
But when he was strong, his heart was lifted up to his destruction, for he transgressed against the Lord his God and went into the temple of the Lord to burn incense upon the altar of incense.
“Well, I’m a son of David. The sons of David have a special relationship with God. They’re adoptive sons of God. My palace conjoins the temple grounds. I mean, my Heavenly Father has his house and my house is right there snug against it. I’m special and I’ve been a good king, unlike all these other scumbags, and God has really blessed me. So, you know, what’s wrong with me coming into my Father’s house and getting more involved in worship? I don’t see why I should be kept at a distance.”
Yeah, in the tabernacle of David. So you could come up with all kinds of reasons if you try. The simple fact was that God had said no. But Uzziah thought he knew better than God. This is what happens in religion, in worship specifically, when we start thinking we know better than God.
“I know the Bible says that, but…” Anything that follows “but…” is going to be heresy, probably blasphemy and sacrilege, because you know what God said but you think you’re smarter than God. This was the original temptation. “You shall be as God, deciding for yourself what is good and evil.” This is Satanism, plain and simple. However holy it may appear, however religious it may seem, it’s a defiance of the gospel.
The incense is supposed to represent the prayers of Messiah, the intercession of Christ, and here comes this guy who is not ordained and authorized to administer this, and he comes in and claims it for himself. He is taking the place of Christ, because he’s good enough. He’s been blessed enough. Whatever thing you want to fill in there, it doesn’t matter, because God had said, “No, it’s not your job.”
To their credit, the priests understand this. There’s a priest whose name was Azariah, which is Uzziah’s other name, so that may be one reason here that he’s given the name Uzziah so we can keep it straight.
And Azariah the priest went in after him, and with him fourscore priests of the Lord [that would be 80] that were valiant men.
Why do you need valiant priests? Because they were to guard the holiness of the temple, and that on occasion might mean throwing some people out physically. It might even mean pulling a sword on them if they were doing something horrible. So they go in.
And they withstood Uzziah the king, and said unto him, It appertaineth not unto thee, Uzziah, to burn incense unto the Lord, but to the priest,s the sons of Aaron, that are consecrated to burn incense.
There is a due order that God has set up. You have to be consecrated. You have to be of the right tribe, of the right family. You can’t just do it because you have good feelings about God. There’s no room for self-ordination in scripture. The phrase, “How shall they hear except they be sent?” is not “…except they go on their own.” The church is authorized to ordain people to the gospel ministry, and in Israel God ordained the family of Levi and particularly the sons of Aaron to be priests and to carry on the work of the temple.
But he’s doing this good religious thing. Shouldn’t good religious people who want to be religious do religious stuff? No, they shouldn’t, because there’s no such thing as religious stuff. There is what God has set forward on his own terms to be observed on his own terms, the way he said in his own book. You don’t get to make it up. That’s so hard for Americans.
We live post-Reformation and so the priesthood of all believers is deeply engrained and mixed up with all of our American individualism. “Well, I’m equal before God so why shouldn’t I do this, too?”
Yeah. “Why can’t I get up and preach?” Because you’re not ordained to preach. If you want to get up and talk about Jesus, that’s great. You want to bear testimony? That’s great. But you want to act as a preacher of the Word, then you need someone who’s not you ordaining you. You need someone who has the authority. You need established elders in an established church to do this. You want to serve the Lord’s Supper? Have you been ordained and consecrated to this task?
Have you recognized that that’s an exercise of authority that you’ve not been given?
It is authority, and people often do not get that. “But I’ve got grape juice and crackers. Why can’t I just serve them and we’ll call it the Lord’s Supper and we’ll remember Jesus.”
There’s an awful lot of ignorance that goes with the presumption, because once you understand, it’s not only presumption, it’s something else. “Yes, I know exactly what the Bible says, and we are doing something else.” That should be frightening. At that point we are nearing what the Bible calls desolating sacrifices, the abominations in God’s presence that render his sanctuary desolate. It should be scary. Uzziah should have been very frightened, but he wasn’t.
But before things can go much further, the priests say, “It won’t be for thine honor from the Lord. God will not honor you for this,” and Uzziah was wroth. He’s angry. “Come on, guy. You know the rules. You know how this works. Getting ticked off is just making it worse. It’s showing your foolishness and your pride, like you think you’re the center of the universe and you can make rules for God. It’s not going to fly.”
Uzziah had a censer in his hand to burn incense, and while he was wroth with the priests, the leprosy even rose up in his forehead before the priests in the house of the Lord, from beside the incense altar.
That’s scary. God smites him with leprosy. The 80 priests are standing there watching. The temple was rather large, so there was lots of room here and they could all be standing around, and they see it. We’re not given play-by-play, but no doubt Uzziah is looking at them and glaring at them and about to get angry, and maybe he feels a tingling or something in his body, and suddenly he sees all of their faces. Their jaws are dropping and their eyes are going wide, and some may be turning away, and others are muttering things that involve the name of God.
“What? What?” and he’s going to reach up and he’s going to realize, “Oh no!”
The priests say, “Okay, you are now ceremonially unclean. There is no longer any way even you can pretend that this is okay.”
That is, they looked upon him not simply in the sense that they saw him, but as priests within their own demean they judged him. It was the priest who was to diagnose leprosy. They’re diagnosing the leprosy. “Uh, you’re a leper. You’re unclean.”
…and they thrust him out from thence; yea, himself hasted also to go out, because the Lord had smitten him.
He realizes, “Oh wow, I crossed a line and I’m a leper.” The track record for leper recovery in the Old Testament was not good.
Miriam, who God smote and almost immediately promised he would restore after a week, and Naaman, a Gentile who comes out of nowhere and is given very odd instructions as to how he could be cleansed.
When Jesus comments on this he says, “There were lots of lepers in the land in the days of Elijah, but he was the only one cleansed.” So if you’ve got leprosy, the odds are it’s for life. Even though God had set up an entire ritual system for cleansing lepers, there is no evidence aside from Miriam that it was ever used until Jesus came.
Cleansing is not healing. You had to be healed before you could be cleansed ceremonially.
Right, and the cleansing would restore you to worship. So healing was not happening and cleansing was not happening, even though God set up a complicated ceremony for it. He waited for Jesus to come until you could get much use out of it.
And Uzziah the king was a leper unto the day of his death, and dwelt in a separate house, being a leper, for he was cut off from the house of the Lord.
He couldn’t even stay in his palace because his palace did share common ground with the temple, so he had to go someplace else. Even that honor was lost to him. And he couldn’t effectively reign because he couldn’t have contact with hardly anybody. He had to yell “Unclean!” all the time.
So Jotham his son was over the king's house, judging the people of the land.
The point is, here’s a man who had a reputation for godliness, who had outwardly all of God’s blessings. He had done the right things. He was seemingly God’s guy and he was honored by being in the line of David, seemingly an ancestor of Messiah – actually, an ancestor of Joseph, since the bloodline passed different – but he was in the line of the kings, through whom the title would pass to Jesus.
And yet, when he steps over the line and says, “I want to do something priestly,” God slaps him down hard. Even the priests stand up and say, “No,” to the point where they are bodily going to throw him out.
They’re not going to say, “Well, you know, we must submit to the civil government at this point, because God tells us to obey our authorities.” Yeah, God tells us to obey our authorities, and the relevant authority here were the priests. They were in charge of the temple. The king had nothing to say about this. His authority with regard to worship ended at the temple gate. At that point he was to be in submission to the priests.
Now, if his soldiers were chasing a murderer, and the murderer happened to run into the temple, presumably they would be allowed to go on, with the help of the priests, and secure the guy and pull him out again. That’s an unusual circumstance.
By the same token, if we’re holding our church services and some scoundrel rushes in with the police hot on his tail, we will welcome the police to come and take him, and we will suspend our worship for a moment while they secure him and lead him out, and we will thank them for doing their job.
But if they then say, “All right, we’re taking over this worship service now,” we’ll say, “No, you’re not. No. You will not lay your hands upon the gospel ministry, upon the sacraments. This is the job of the church.”
Now, how exactly you’re going to do that – there’s a lot of ‘it depends’ going on – but simply sacrificing and saying, “Well, they’re the authorities. I guess they get to put their Nazi flag in our churches,” as many German churches did – no, that’s not what the church is to do. This is the church’s authority. That’s the state’s authority. They’re both from God.
It’s not a physical separation. It’s a covenantal separation. They have different covenant responsibilities within the broad kingdom of Jesus Christ. They are alike servants of Jesus.
My wife just said, “What happens when the state says you can’t sing in church?” You sing in church. What if the state says, “You can’t preach in church”? Now, if all that means is you can’t preach in that building, we can debate that one, but if that means “You may not preach the name of Jesus,” we know what the apostles did with that one. You go on and preach. They preached even in the temple precincts, where they technically were not exactly the authority – the priests were – because God told them to.
So we need to be careful, and of course Americans are really good at pushing things to extremes. To push for escalation is an American colloquialism, and there may be times to do that in wisdom, and there are times not to do that in wisdom.
Until we get the idea of how authority works, we’re going to be tripping all over ourselves and making all kinds of mistakes. Authority of all sorts comes from God. It is all mediated through his Word. You want to know what the state can do? Read the Bible. You want to know what the church can do? Read the Bible. You want to know what the family can do? Read the Bible.
“Well, there are people who don’t believe the Bible.” That’s their problem. It doesn’t change anything. What if someone said, “You know what, I know I’m being arrested and tried in this federal court, but I don’t believe in the Constitution.” “And that matters to us because…?”
It is, and the Bible – whether the Constitution acknowledges it or not – is the supreme law of the land. This is not mixing church and state. This is recognizing the lordship of Jesus Christ over all institutions, particularly the three covenantal ones, family, church, and state.
This is where Romans 13 comes from, that these civil leaders are the ministers of God. The Greek word is they’re deacons. They too serve God. They too have a divine agenda given them by God, and they are to submit to it, and therefore they are not above being challenged, because only Jesus is God and man.
Often this is where in our age particularly, but in every age I guess, the discussion actually begins with the incarnation, because in the ancient world everything was God, and God was in everything, and everything could be a manifestation of God. Some things were more a manifestation of God than others, and wherever you saw power particularly, that was God.
The king was God. The emperor was God. The emperor was the son of God. And once you knew that, you knew, “Well, he’s the son of God. He’s God manifest in the flesh so you have to absolutely obey him. You have to obey him about everything because he’s Lord of everything.”
When the church ran into the Roman Empire, the issue was not, “What gods do you worship? Do you worship Zeus and Hera and Mars and all those?” No one cared about that. The Christians were required to take an oath, “Caesar is Lord,” and to sacrifice to the genius of Caesar and the fortune of the city of Rome, and that’s where Christians refused.
Had they been willing to do that, to in effect by the license from the state acknowledge the lordship of Caesar, “You can worship if you admit that Caesar has the right to tell you whether or not you can worship” – if they had done that, they could have had their churches. They could have preached. They could have had seminaries and hospitals and libraries and whatever the equivalent of Christian TV programs would be in the first century.
They could have the whole thing, but it would be with the understanding that it was with Caesar’s permission, that his authority trumped that of Christ, and this is what sent the Christians to the lions and to the stakes and to the crosses, that they would not compromise.
The first creed of the church was Jesus est dominus, Jesus is Lord, and that’s where they would not compromise because the gospel says that, first of all, God made the world. God is not the world. God is not in the world or a part of the world or an expression of the world. The pagan world believed in the continuity of being, “All is God.” But the gospel said that God created the world. God is not the world. There is no continuity of being, so when God became man, that was a unique act.
Even in Christ, the human and divine are not blurred or mixed, without division, without confusion, without separation. The difference of the natures being in no way annulled by the union, both coming together to form one Christ, one person, one subsistence. This is the confession of Chalcedon. This was the faith, the gospel that even in Jesus, God and man are not mixed. God became man exactly once in Jesus, and therefore Jesus has all power in heaven and earth.
No human being, no human institution can legitimately claim all power in heaven and earth, and any that does has just set themselves against Jesus, and therefore is fair game for absolute destruction by Jesus and by the gospel. When they push that and they tell us to bow down, we respectfully say, “No. Jesus is Lord.”
So over against the Roman doctrine or pagan doctrine, a unified monolithic society where the guy at the top, this king, this emperor, this son of God rules everything and every aspect of our lives because he owns us because he’s God – the Bible says Jesus is the one who owns us, because he is God and sets up human institutions that are limited in authority and in responsibility, and that counter-balance each other, interacting with each other, holding each other accountable, and in that there is tremendous freedom.
The doctrine of the incarnation is the foundation of Western freedom because it gives us one God who entered history once in the person of his Son, and in his Son rules heaven and earth. And all human authority therefore is limited, delegated, and subject to the authority of Christ, whether they get that or not, whether their people believe that or not. “I don’t believe in your God” doesn’t free you from your responsibility to obey God. We could talk about that for a long time, and probably we have and will as this series goes on.
But for now we must stop there. Do you have any recommendations to wrap up our episode here?
I’ve recommended it before, but I’m going to recommend it again. This is R.J. Rushdoony’s Foundations of Social Order. It’s a book on the confessions and creeds of the early church, and particularly the chapter on the Council of Chalcedon, some of which I just borrowed from.
Some people will find it difficult, others will not, but it’s a solid book that you can chew on. What he does is he goes back to the most basic things that Christians should all agree on, and shows their social and political and cultural implications. Some of the things I’ve said now I first learned either directly or indirectly from that book, so Foundations of Social Order.
Cool. I’m going to recommend jigsaw puzzles. I’ve been home this week, a little under the weather, so I started a jigsaw puzzle today and it’s very difficult and very frustrating and it’s taking me a long time, but I feel like it’s aiding my sanctification in some way.
I got one for my daughter Emily for Christmas because she likes them, and this is a jigsaw puzzle of Shakespearean insults. It is a lot of fun.
Thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to our financial supporters. We appreciate you keeping the show rolling. If you’d like to join their number you can visit our website, anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion.
If you’d like to reach out with any comments, questions, bouquets, brickbats, you can send us an email at [email protected]. Thank you so much for listening. We’ll see you next week.