Of Contracts and Covenants (Part 3) - The Separation of Church and State
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Hello and 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 your host this week, Bryan Broome, joined by Greg Uttinger.
Today we’ll be discussing more in the same general thread as the last couple of episodes, but specifically discussing King Uzziah. Greg, why don’t you start us off.
This is a story familiar to a lot of people, but maybe not to all. It appears briefly in Kings, but in a more expanded form in Chronicles. What has happened is that things haven’t gone so well in Judah. For a while they were really without a functioning king, but when Israel to the north, who had been kind of lording it over them, got theirs from Assyria, Judah reasserted itself. They put a young man named Uzziah on the throne when he was 16. Chronicles calls him Uzziah, Kings calls him Azariah, so he had both names. There’s probably a reason that the chronicler picks Uzziah, because we’re going to run into another Azariah before we’re done.
Anyway, Uzziah had done really, really well. He had rebuilt and restored. He sought after God through his prophets. He defeated the Philistines and other tribes around about. The Ammonites brought him gifts.
He was into creative building. He built towers in Jerusalem and built wells in the wilderness. He was a husbandman. He loved shepherding and farming and did all he could to promote that and expand it even into territories that had been wilderness. He organized a small professional army strike force to protect Jerusalem and built weapons. One of my favorite things is “He made in Jerusalem engines, invented by cunning men, to be on the towers and upon the bulwarks, to shoot arrows and great stones withal.”
We don’t have a lot of information from secular history as to when ballista and catapults actually came into existence. I don’t know if this was original with Uzziah, but it was certainly original, as far as we can tell, with Judah, with God’s people. They were getting into some fancy high-tech stuff here, and so far God was blessing it and everybody knew that Uzziah was a godly king. He knew he was a godly king. God really liked him, and when God really likes you there are things that you can do that other people can’t do, right? Yeah, sure. Hmm.
He decided, when his heart was lifted up, to go into the temple, into the Holy Place and offer incense, and for once the priests and Levites were on top of this. Eighty of them got in the way and withstood him. I don’t remember about the Levites particularly, but the priests who could be armed were supposed to protect the temple area from sacrilege, from transgressors, and this could include doing some dicing and slicing, if necessary, so they were there in a group telling Uzziah no. This is what the high priest, Azariah, says –
It appertaineth not unto thee, Uzziah, to burn incense unto the LORD, but to the priests, the sons of Aaron, that are consecrated to burn incense. Go out of the sanctuary, for thou hast trespassed; neither shall it be for thine honour from the LORD God.
Now, Uzziah was king. He was in the line of David. He was, in that sense, by covenant an adopted son of God. The king’s palace stood right next to the temple so that the kings could oversee the temple to some degree and make sure people didn’t mess with it and encourage its reform.
The kings of the line of David had more responsibilities and more privileges that Saul had had, or the kings of the north ever had, but this was a no-no. This was a big no-no. He was not anointed to enter the temple proper to perform any of the priestly tasks. He thought in his spiritual pride that he was the exception, that he could do this because he’s the king, but the Levites, eighty all together, withstood him.
You might think, with eighty old guys staring you down with swords at their belts, you might begin to think, “Maybe I should rethink this,” but no, and spiritual pride especially will sometimes do this to us.
He’s ticked off. He’s very upset with the priests. How dare they! Don’t they know who he is? He’s already apparently in the Holy Place.
Yes. “I came all the way here, and I got this incense, I got this fire from outside, it’s the right incense, it’s the right fire, the right place, it’s the right God, what’s the big deal here? Get out of my way. I’ve got stuff to do here,” and yet –
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.
The high priest bore on the miter on his head the words “Holiness unto the Lord.” It distinguished him and marked him and his whole person and ministry as being set apart to God and to his service. It was his right and purpose by God’s grace to be there, but now they look at Uzziah and they see leprosy on his forehead, uncleanness, something that not only means he can’t be an officiating priest even if he were a Levite, but he can’t be in the temple. He can’t be in Jerusalem. He’s become a total outcast.
God does not appreciate his will worship, his belief that what he pleases to do – however close in many respects it might be – is good enough when he’s violating God’s Word.
Exactly, it appears on his forehead as a counter to the high priest with a gold plate on his turban.
And Azariah the chief priest, and all the priests looked upon him and, behold, he was leprous in his forehead.
That’s not just a note of, “Hey, look at that guy!” The priests were the ones who were to diagnose leprosy. In Leviticus, where the original instructions for diagnosis are given, the language is very similar. “You, the priest, shall look upon the man and here are the things you look for.” So we’ve got 80 experts on what leprosy looks like, and as one they all confirm, “That’s leprosy.” And it’s in the Holy Place, so even though God put it on him, that means he should not be here, so they begin to hustle him out, and he somehow realizes what has happened. It may be that they all at once said, “Leprosy!” but somehow he’s got it figured out and he decides he doesn’t want to be there either.
Yea, himself hasted also to go out, because the LORD had smitten him. And Uzziah the king was a leper unto the day of his death, and dwelt in a several [separate] house, being a leper, for he was cut off from the house of the LORD. And Jotham his son was over the king's house…
We’re talking here about the relationship of two covenant institutions, two things that God himself has established, particularly in Israel but there are broader applications. People will often look at the Old Testament and say, “In Israel, church and state were the same thing.” No, not really.
They were significantly intertwined in a certain sense of the term, but they were very much not the same entity.
Yeah, they were not the same thing. Here the king is basically trying to give orders in the temple, and not only do the priests stand up to him and say, “No way,” but God himself intervenes to make very clear, “This is a distinct sphere of responsibility and authority. You may be the king, you are the king, you’re a king I’ve blessed greatly, you’ve done a lot of good stuff…”
At this point I think we kind of look at the whole Old Testament economy and see some important distinctions. You may remember, of course, that Saul had done something similar. When he was supposed to wait for Samuel, a priest and prophet, to come and offer sacrifice, he got antsy because the Philistines were coming and his own people were deserting, and he offered a sacrifice.
Then Samuel shows up and Saul makes excuses and Samuel says, “No.” He doesn’t specify the rule that’s been broken, but it’s pretty clear that Saul should not have been offering the sacrifices. It doesn’t say why, just no, that’s not it, and this passage here helps us understand why.
Exactly. Kings don’t do this. Now, kings can ask that it be done. They can stand by there while it’s being done. They can pay for the sacrifice. They can call for it to happen. But the actual work of administering this sacrament was a priestly thing. It’s true of the sacrifice, it’s true of the incense altar, and of course it would completely be true of going through the veil and standing before the ark of the covenant.
God had ordained the Davidic kingly line, made tremendous promises to it, given it responsibilities that included some things, as I said before, that weren’t necessarily the responsibility of all kings in all time, but there was a limit. There was, if you will, in modern language, a wall of separation with regard to function, with regard to particular responsibilities, not with regard to the God they serve. They serve the same God, king, and priest, and they both were to know the law of God. The king, in fact, was required by law to write out a copy of the law in his own hand and read from it day by day throughout his reign as king. But there were some things that the king couldn’t do. And of course, by the same token, there was a lot the priests couldn’t do.
Priests did not collect taxes, although they collected tithes, but they didn’t send a Levite with a sword to your door if you didn’t pay your tithe. The king could force compliance to taxation. Priests in general did not enforce civil penalties, with some particular exceptions. Back in the days of the judges, if a priest like Eli was also acting as a judge, then things got a little confusing. But as you read through the Old Testament, and the histories particularly, it becomes to become clear that kings and priests don’t do the same thing, and when they try God isn’t happy about it.
When people look at Christianity that talks about a godly society or honoring Christ in all of culture or something like that, they get antsy and say, “You want the church to control everything.” Actually, no, we don’t, where the church as an institution 1) is not competent, 2) is barely competent to do its own affairs at the beginning of the 21st century, but that’s not what we’re talking about.
The church has its job description. It’s supposed to preach the Word, administer the sacraments, maintain church discipline, assemble its people on the Lord’s Day to worship, evangelize the nations, and keep on calling all sorts of people, commoner and king alike, to hear the Word of the Lord and do what it says.
The sanctions that it would use to enforce this are its prayers against unbelief and disobedience, and if the person disobeying happens to be a church member, admonition, rebuke, and possibly excommunication. The church is not to run through the streets killing people because they’re idolators or guilty of some other moral perversion.
When we look at the state in the Old Testament, yes, there were a couple things it could do that we would probably feel uncomfortable with. If you raised an idol in the center of the city to any god, even Yahweh, the state was supposed to do something. We see kings leading revivals and smashing idols. The same thing would go for public sacrifice, but you know what? That’s about it.
As you look at the Old Testament laws, in the law of Moses there is nothing about asking people if they believe in Yahweh, if they come to synagogue, if they come to temple. That just wasn’t a job description for the state. There was no point where even under the old covenant, even the Davidic kings were ever supposed to say, “Are you a true believer in Jehovah? We must punish you if you are not,” or we must expel you from the land or some such thing. What people believed, what they held in their conscience was simply not the state’s business.
In that sense it was an incredibly free society. If you were a pagan, you could hide that in your heart and nobody would probably ask you about it, beyond maybe casual conversation if they tried to win you to the fear of the Lord.
Yeah, because search warrants are a thing. If you didn’t have two or three witnesses to the same overt act, then the state’s not going to come breaking down your door and saying, “We’re looking for idols. Got any?” That would be a gross violation of the law. So there are a number of things that, as long as you kept them out of sight, are not okay with God but they’re simply not functionally the business of the state, unless you get public witnesses to an overt act.
For instance, if you were a Satan worshiper in Israel, to stand up and say, “Hey, I worship Satan,” might get you a visit from your pastor or the village synagogue leader, but that’s about it. It’s not a crime. People might be concerned about your soul, but saying you’re a Satan worshiper is not a crime. Now, if you take your first-born child into the public square, build an altar, and sacrifice him to Satan, that would be a violation of all kinds of laws, and the state would be involved.
It's very hard at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century to talk to people who assume that the state has total control over everything, to talk to them and say, “The state should be bound by God’s law.”
“That means you want the state to absolutely control everything and force everyone to be a Christian and act like a Christian and kill them if they don’t!”
What was the old phrase – winning hearts and minds. They’re afraid that we’re going to take American foreign policy and turn it into a religious policy.
Exactly, no matter how hard you say “No, that’s not it.” The civil government in Israel was in many respects extremely libertarian. It wasn’t supposed to be doing much of anything, and the only time it did was when it was in apostasy.
Now, the king was allowed to be a really good businessman on his own, and often the kings made a lot of money on their own, but they weren’t supposed to squeeze it out of their citizens beyond that. They were supposed to enforce the laws – that is, catch criminals, punish criminals who had violated laws by overt acts, not thoughts, intents, adopted philosophies. They had to actually do something and there had to be two or three witnesses, or the equivalent in circumstantial evidence. And then they were supposed to defend the land from invasion.
That’s about it, so if you’re not being invaded and if crime is low, the magistrates or judges are pretty much sitting around playing chess or something because they don’t have that much to do, nor do they need a great deal of money to not do much, to have a fairly inexpensive civil government.
It would be not Libertarian in the sense that there are some things that Israel did not permit, but even those, honestly today do we see people raising huge statues to Baal in Times Square?
There are a handful of places that have built statues to Satan, but it’s not super common.
It has happened, and in other countries where the gospel has not reached you can see lots of idols. But the kind of law that Israel’s government, both civil and religious, was to enforce was a law for a people who already believed in Yahweh and supposedly knew the fear of the Lord.
There were no instructions to go into the Philistine cities and execute everyone who had been an idolator, because you don’t get many converts that way. The overwhelming emphasis of the New Testament is, “They’ve got idols? Let me send you Jesus. Go preach Jesus, and then they themselves will throw their idols away.” The civil government doesn’t need to be busy with that.
This is the broad pattern. It is possible to have a covenanted society under God that is relatively free, and even the answer of the Old Testament, let alone of the New, is yeah, it actually is. It’s healthy. It’s strong. It’s free. Again we’ve brushed on Libertarianism before. It is in many respects very close to how most Libertarians would look at this.
Now, there are issues regarding sexuality and regarding religion where we would have to talk out differences, but as far as economics and government intrusion and government regulations, they really didn’t exist in Israel. The assumption was that God’s people were supposed to be self-governed. They were to fear God, know the law of God, have it in their hearts, teach it to their children, and when that happened the civil government becomes not the Savior that fixes a wrecked society, but simply the backstop for the few things that get through that are so outrageous they have to be dealt with in a very public and decisive manner.
At this point, since we’ve talked a little bit about how would this work in America, first of all, America needs to be converted. America needs to come to Christ. Does that mean we can’t have some laws that are in harmony with scripture even now? We have quite a few of them, actually. Don’t murder would be one. The few laws remaining that still favor marriage over against breaking up a marriage – they are increasingly few – are there. Crimes against perjury, that’s something the Bible is in favor of. You should not perjure yourself in court. Theft – the Bible says you shouldn’t steal from people. So there’s already a lot that’s there, and the thing is that most people in America give at least some kind of nod to it, for whatever reasons.
As we look at the controversy on abortion, most Christians are fine with saying the Bible is clear on this. You should not kill a baby in the womb. Not every American agrees with that. “Well, they don’t agree. We should just be quiet.” No, this is important. This becomes an area of wisdom. Which things do you push on and which things do you say, “Until America knows Christ better, this one the church needs to straighten it out for herself, but this is not something we need to make a big deal of yet.” That’s just an issue of studying Christian ethic.
God told Israel what to do. Israel was covenanted. Israel was redeemed. We look at America and the American colonies were covenanted. The American states originally reinforced this idea, but America today is an apostate nation, and simply stepping in with a gun and trying to tell people, “Trust in Jesus or I’ll shoot you” is ridiculous and contrary to the gospel absolutely.
I want to keep saying that, because anytime you start talking about Christian ethics in America, someone is going to not hear you. “I listened to this podcast and you know what they were saying? They were saying you should force everybody to do this and this this!”
No, but having said this – “Ah! He said but!” – yeah, I did, okay. I mentioned the 13 colonies. When the colonies were founded there was an overriding sense of their Christian mission here in the new world. Now, was it all sincere? Probably not. We’re really good at saying religious stuff we don’t necessarily mean or don’t completely understand, and yet they said it.
In Virginia’s charter the king says to the people who were going to settle Virginia, “We greatly commend thee and are graciously accepting of their desires for the furtherance of so noble a work which may be the providence of Almighty God hereafter tend to the glory of His divine majesty in propagating the Christian religion to such people as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God…”
Now, the king who said that was King James and he was not the most holy spiritual king to ever sit on the throne of England by a long shot, but at least publicly he was telling the people who were going to settle Virginia, “Our public reason is that you propagate the Christian religion to the aboriginal people.” The people I was taught to call American Indians we now call Native Americans or whatever the proper term is these days.
Whatever they want to be called is fine with me. I always believed that people should be called what they want to be called, as long as it’s not a flat-out lie. Here is the King of England saying out loud in a public record, “One of the functions of this colony is to spread the gospel to these people there.” Did they do it? Not very well.
I’m trying to think of the guy’s name. He wrote the first Bible in a local Indian language.
That brings us to the next one, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut. Connecticut was a branch off of Massachusetts Bay and the – we would call it a constitution – they wrote for themselves spoke of “The importance of the maintenance and preservation of the liberty and purity of the gospel of our Lord Jesus, which we now profess, and also the discipline of the churches, which according to the truth of the gospel is now practiced among us.”
So one of the purposes, the founders of Connecticut said, for separating from Massachusetts and establishing this new Puritan colony was to maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Did they do it perfectly? I’m not an expert on Connecticut’s local history, but as far as I know they were very serious about this with regard to the churches. You can run through what we have of the charters of the other colonies and find very similar things.
When the revolution came and we made our break with England and the churches were no longer under the authority of the Church of England even by some indirect claim, the colonies as they established themselves as states began to come up with their own constitutions and their own bylaws, and here’s a couple of examples.
Anyone serving in the state of Delaware was required to make this profession. “I, _______, do profess faith in God the Father and in Jesus Christ his only son and in the Holy Ghost, one God blessed forevermore. And I do acknowledge the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration.”
That’s kind of explicit, but there are loopholes there. A Mormon could claim that, although there were no Mormons at the time. A good Arian could claim that. But to hold office you had to make something that at least sounded vaguely Trinitarian, and you had to acknowledge both the Old and New Testaments to be given by divine inspiration.
No. In Vermont, each member of the House of Representatives was required to subscribe to this declaration – “I do believe in one God, the Creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and punisher of the wicked. And I do acknowledge the scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration, and own and profess the Protestant religion.”
Protestant – that’s pretty wide. It basically means you’re not Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox, but you claim to be a Christian of some sort, so there was no favoring of one denomination over another. You could be Baptist or Methodist or Quaker or whatever. You could have your own little house religion for that matter, as long as you called yourself a non-Roman Catholic Christian.
Here’s something from the constitution of North Carolina – “No person shall deny the being of God or the truth of the Protestant religion or the divine authority of the Old and New Testaments, or who shall hold religious principles incompatible with the freedom and safety of the state shall be capable of holding any office or place of trust or profit within the state.”
They realized that religion can be your “get out of jail free” card. If you can say, “But my religion requires this of me,” there are cases where, okay, that’s well.
In making this statement, North Carolina was saying in effect, “We’re going to be very generous in how we interpret Christianity, but there’s going to be some absolutes. And if your version of Christianity allows you to wage war against the civil government or civil society, that’s an invalid interpretation of Christianity. The people that we know are fine, but if you come in and you think you have divine revelations and you can lead a jihad against the existing government, no.”
There are limits to freedom of religion, and yet by and large, freedom of religion. And you can go on and look at the other states. Some are clearer, some are not. Rhode Island was pretty much, “The state should do absolutely nothing along these lines.” Georgia’s was not very strong.
The things that seem to come up the most in what I’ve read of them is God, and very often the Triune God, the Bible, and sometimes the Christian or Protestant interpretation thereof, and interestingly enough, the last judgement.
For a civil society the reasoning was really simple. If you do not believe that someday you’re going to have to stand before the living God and answer for how you conducted your office and whether or not you kept your oath, then how can we trust you?
For the same reason, a lot of people were not allowed to give evidence in court because they couldn’t swear an oath before Almighty God, and if you can’t, then in life and death issues why should we take your evidence into account when we already know you’re not reckoning with reality properly?
You can argue back and forth on that as to what degree you should listen anyway and all that, but it shows the mind of that generation. They’re making a break from the Church of England. They’re the ones who are going to agree to the amendment that says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, and yet they realize that Christianity had something to do with the founding of the colonies, with the preservation of the states even after the revolution, and that this new federal government thing that they were creating shouldn’t mess with the status quo.
That’s true to the American spirit and American vision. The civil government shouldn’t come along and force you to be a Christian or force you to say or do Christian-y things like go to church, and yet there is an absolute moral code in the background that is derived largely, if not entirely, from scripture, and they felt no need to justify that. The Bible says it, and therefore these things are right and these things are wrong.
This has nothing to do with the church telling the state what to do, or the state telling the church what to do, which actually was a far greater threat the original colonists saw, because so many of them fled from Europe and from England and Scotland because there the state was telling them how to worship. It wasn’t the church telling the state what to do, it was the state telling the church what to do, and that’s why the first amendment was written.
The first amendment was not written by free thinkers and deists and rationalists primarily. It was written largely by Baptists and people like that who did not trust the federal government one bit and were afraid that when they got this new over-arching government that it would do what over-arching governments always do, assume a specific religion and then enforce it. So they said, “We’ll support this thing of yours, but the freedom we have is the freedom we want to keep.”
So no state church. No state telling you how to worship or when not to worship or how you can’t worship, but the freedom to worship with the assumption that, yes, religion meant Christianity, and everyone knew more or less what that meant, and they knew more or less things like murder is wrong, theft is wrong, marriage is good, adultery should not be allowed to break it up. You should not blaspheme the name of God or the name of Jesus. You should show respect for the church and its worship and things like that. And you know what? Our Founding Fathers didn’t become a bunch of religious slaves or idiots because they took on that perspective.
We’re going to move on to recommendations now. My recommendation this week is from my favorite living still-writing historian, Tom Holland. He’s not Spiderman Tom Holland, he’s another British Tom Holland. He’s written one of my favorite books on Roman history called The Rubicon. That was my first introduction to him. I’ve recommended his podcast to listeners of our podcast before, The Rest is History.
The book I read this week, which I am recommending, is called Persian Fire. Ostensibly it’s about Xerxes’ attempted invasion of Greece, but because he’s a good historian he spends a lot of time – I think he starts about 150 years before Xerxes shows up, and that’s only when he’s getting to the relatively major players. He actually starts even earlier than that at first, discussing the origins first of Babylon and then of Persia itself. It's very good.
When I first read Rubicon you happened to be in the room one of the days I was reading it, because I think we were at Austin’s house. I don’t know where I was in the book, but I read something and I closed the book and I looked at you and I said, “You remember how in high school you said every historian should take a creative writing class? This guy listened to you and he didn’t even know you!” He’s very good at writing and actually writing prose.
I noticed something that, if it was spoken you would call it a tic, but it’s a writing pattern that he does. Every end of a chapter he would give this lead up and it would be super dramatic of, “The forces were marshaling on the outer edges of the border and doing XYZ,” and then there would be a paragraph break and one sentence like, “The forces of Persia were marching to war!” I noticed it like four chapters in succession. He's very excellent and it’s very good.
One of the things too is that he does kind of point out, “You know, we talk a lot about Sparta and Athens. These were the heroes of personal liberty against an encroaching world empire that wanted to conquer them and crush them into the dirt, but they weren’t so hot themselves. They had slaves. They were monstrous warmongers, even the Athenians.”
He kind of puts that at the start, and then he goes on to talk about all this history stuff that they have done, like the events and what not, but at the start he’s like, “They’re not great. No one comes out of this looking great,” which as usual I think is a really good approach to history, especially if you’re coming at it from a Christian worldview and Christian mindset of ethics. No one outside of Christian history really is up to muster on ethics, and even those within Christian history don’t always come up to muster, so it’s always nice to at least have somebody acknowledge it and be like, “This didn’t work out so well in hindsight.”
Why is it called Persian Fire? We know what Greek Fire is, but that’s much later.
I imagine it’s a reference to something in Persian religion that he talked about. He didn’t tie it directly. He didn’t make an exact statement that I can recall, but the Persians, specifically Xerxes and his father Darius, worshiped the lord Ahura Mazda, and the whole thing about Ahura Mazda is he’s the god of truth against the demons and against the Lie that spreads throughout the world. And it’s the duty of all who follow lord Mazda to drive out the Lie and replace it with the glorious light of truth.
If I remember correctly, there’s even a bit where when Darius dies there’s a sacred flame on a mountain that is very special to them in their history that was then extinguished. It was the flame of his reign.
There’s a lot of probable reference points where the Persian fire is what’s in mind. It could mean the fire of the Persian’s spread of empire, like a blazing forest fire or something. You could do anything you want. It could also just be a play on Greek fire, who knows.
A couple things come to mind, since we have a little bit of extra time. First, your point about Christian worldview as a platform for evaluation. How do you teach history? How do you evaluate history? How do you say, “These are the bad guys, these are the good guys,” or “These guys got this right. These guys got this right. They were both wrong in this.” How do you do that if you don’t have an absolute standard?
How do you judge between the colonizers and the colonized if there are no absolutes? Hey, they’re both doing what they want and one side lost. What’s the big deal? How do you make judgements if you don’t have a standard that stands outside and above all limited human standards?
The other thing I appreciate is I’ve been a long-time fan of the Persians because the Bible is. As you read through Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther you can see that, with a couple slips here and there, by and large the Persian empire is given more than passable grades. Cyrus is the Lord’s anointed, his shepherd, the man who will do all his pleasure, even to re-building Jerusalem and ordering the temple to be rebuilt, and his decree functions as the beginning of a second exodus for God’s people out of Babylon.
Darius, because he’s misinformed, at first tells the Israelites, “No, you can’t be building stuff. You can’t be building your city,” and then the prophets come along and say, “But you can build the temple. Get with it, guys.” And when the next word comes to Darius he says, “Temple? Oh, that’s completely different. Yeah, they should be building that. Furthermore, they should be offering sacrifices for me and my sons and praying for us so that the God of heaven does not get angry with us,” which either means that he was moving toward faith in the true God or he was confusing Ahura Mazda with Yahweh. But monotheistic deity – at least there’s an opening there. In fact, he says, “You guys are complaining? You can take money out of your own treasury and give it to them to build this temple that you don’t like.”
Then we have Ahasuerus who marries Esther, and is not above criticism in his personal and sexual morals, but in the end he stands with Esther and her people, and when he can’t come up with a solution of his own he says, “I’m making your older cousin here Prime Minister, and you two figure out how to save your people and I’m with it. I just don’t have a clue on this one.”
What we see from scripture of the Greeks is mostly by prophecy. None of it’s terribly optimistic. The picture of Alexander is “He will be a king who will do according to his will. Then he’ll die really early and his kingdom will be split.” Okay, that was fast. Then we run eventually into Antiochus Epiphanes who defiles the temple and all that.
The Bible doesn’t really like the Greeks a whole lot, but it does have a soft spot for the Persians to a point. Daniel worked with another Darius, who may have been Cyrus. Esther marries one of the emperors. Nehemiah is a cup bearer for one of them. Another one, or perhaps one of the same ones, favors Ezra’s ministry.
So what is this thing that we always side with the Greeks? “Well, they were naturalists. They believed that you could get your morality just from nature.” The truth is, that’s not at all what they believed, but that’s what Renaissance and Enlightenment scholars managed to get out of it, by ignoring what they were actually saying and saying, “See? They’re talking about reason, and their reason coming up with laws and things, and it’s all completely secular.”
No, it’s not. Go back and read what the philosophers actually wrote. But that made Greece dear to the heart of every humanist for a while, until we found out that reason also has its problems that somehow keeps pointing us back to God, and that’s uncomfortable.
Yeah. I’m about halfway through and I got sidetracked, so I need to get back to that so I can read this one.
That means that now I have to come up with a recommendation. I’m going to get really serious here for a second, as a Bible teacher and an elder. These last couple years have been really, really hard on the churches, on Christian individuals, on young Christian couples, people who’ve just started out. The enemy has been throwing all kinds of things at God’s people and it’s been very hard.
My recommendation is something that is very serious, very personal, and so essential, and that’s an ongoing personal relationship with Jesus Christ, beyond studying theology and Christian philosophy and a Christian worldview and Christian principles for government and all that stuff, which most certainly has its place and we talk about all the time. When that becomes your Christianity, you may suddenly find out that your marriage and your personal life are falling to pieces. And your pastor and elders may find out in the church there’s something wrong. There’s something eating away at things.
Why are so many young couples not making it in their marriages all the way? As an elder, I know the first thing we ask is, “So how is your devotional life? How is your prayer life? How is your reading of God’s Word? Why aren’t you in church more often?” and we get really lame answers, as if knowing a lot of theology can give you a good and happy life, let alone make you acceptable to God.
Yes, by all means, read a book now and then on Christian history or Christian philosophy or Christian economics or a Christian approach to art and all that, but above all, my friends, know Jesus. Spend time in his Word. Make it a habit, make it a discipline. Pray to him as one man talketh to his friend, and throw your heart and your life on him. Open your heart’s sorrows and hopes to him and talk to him and call for his mercies. Make this the center focus of your home, your private life, your marriage, your business.
And go to church and don’t drag your feet in getting there. Go with joy and flowers in your hair, as Dr. Schaeffer would say. Be excited about knowing and loving Jesus. That’s my recommendation for today.
Thank you very much for this discussion and that recommendation in particular, an excellent reminder. And thank you to all of you for joining us, as well. If you would like to follow us you can do so on YouTube and Rumble. You can follow our Facebook page, which is currently not very active, but you can still go Like it. If you want to subscribe to us and listen to us more, you can do through any podcast catcher.
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