Prophecy and the Ten Commandments

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 Bryan Broome.

Recently, a famous pastor commented that we should unhitch the Old Testament from the New Testament, and we’re not in favor of that. [laughing]

[laughing] Oddly enough, neither is God.

Right. We’ve been talking a lot about the Ten Commandments lately, and today we’re going to talk about why the Ten Commandments still apply today. We’re going to get back to that – hold that thought – because we have some things to address. We have an email that we would like to respond to.

“Dear HTZ crew, I have a disagreement with a point from the Divine Property episode. I was going to do a bunch of reading and write you a long email with extensive discussion, footnotes, and citations.”

We love footnotes. They are better than endnotes.

Endnotes, no. Get rid of them.

No one will read them. We will read footnotes, but he didn’t send us footnotes or citations. He said he should ask for clarification first, which is pretty cool.

That’s wisdom. I appreciate that.

“Mr. Uttinger said at one point, ‘The State has the right to tax.’ Can you please support, explain, or clarify that for me? Thanks. Love the podcast.”

Glad he still loves us after that.

First of all, I think we need to establish where we’re all standing. We’re standing on the Word of God, so we’re not appealing to logical principles or traditions in the conservative sense. We’re looking and seeing what does the Bible say about such things, and whatever the Bible says – once we’ve understood it correctly, and that may take some work – that’s what’s true. It does not take a lot of reading of Scripture to see that God tells Christians to pay their taxes.

There’s a couple ideas that go into this. First, the State, the Commonwealth, the social community – call it what you will – is a divine institution. Although God does not specify all the details that go into creating – let’s just use the word State to be consistent – he does set some parameters and he does describe the morality that should govern the State and that the State should enforce.

He hands the sword very explicitly to the magistrate and tells the State to act as his servant, his deacon, to punish injustice and iniquity, to maintain peace and protect the lives of the citizens from evildoers within and without.

We can look at all the texts, but I assume that most people who have read the Bible a couple times could think of those kinds of passages. Romans 13 is the obvious one, but no means the only one. And as you read a little bit further in Romans 13, Paul comes up with a very simple reason. The magistrate is doing a job. He deserves to be paid. The word ‘right’ here is the same ‘right’ that you have, that if you do a job for someone and you’ve agreed up front on payment, you have the right to be paid because that was the deal. So that’s for starters.

I would not think that most Christians have a problem with that part of it. Yes, the State is supposed to do some very simple things, and people who do them faithfully should be paid.

I think the problem more often comes when the taxation rate begins to soar and the forms of taxes become ridiculous and rationally questionable. Bryan, what was that line that you used earlier that I liked so much?

Taxation is exploitative, or it can reach a point where it becomes exploitative.

And insofar as it is exploitative, is theft. Is that what you said before?

Something like that.

And I think from a Christian point of view I don’t have a problem confessing that. There are two passages that come to my mind at least with regard to such a thing, and there’s a couple issues that go into that. First, is it theft? And then secondly, what if it is? What are Christians supposed to do about it?

The first passage is when the children of Israel ask for a king in the days of Samuel. Samuel warns them this is a bad idea, not because of the kingship as such, but because of their attitude, their unbelief. They don’t want a king to rule under God. They want a king instead of God. They don’t like God’s order. They don’t like the work of the prophet.

They want a king like the other nations.

Yeah, they want to be like all the cool kids and have a king like that. What Samuel says is, “Have you looked at those kings? Do you know what that means?” He does a little spiritual tirade on what that kind of king – no matter how good he starts out, this is what will happen. It’s not like, “Well, it might, it could, possibly, probably.” No, it’s like, “This is what’s going to happen. If on those terms – if you’re moving in unbelief and a rejection of God’s sovereignty, the sovereignty of his Word – this is what you will get.”

This is I Samuel 8, and I’m not going to read all of it since this is not our main point, but he talks about military draft in peacetime, an industrial draft (taking your sons and daughters to reap his fields, to be bakers and cooks), and imminent domain (he’s going to take your fields and your vineyards and give them to his servants). With regard to taxes, he will take a tenth of your seed and your vineyards and oliveyards and give it to his officers, and a tenth of your sheep.

In other words, you’ll recognize the tyranny when this king dares to claim 10% or more of your income, because 10% is what God claims. That’s the tithe. Anyone on earth who thinks he deserves as much as God is obviously a tyrant. He has delusions of godhood. He’s a thief.

We might think at that point God might say, “So when that happens, throw him out, crush his skull, run a sword through his heart, burn down his palace,” and all of that stuff. But what Samuel actually says is this:

And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day.

In other words, one day the results of these socialist policies, this Statism, will produce an economy, a governmental system, and a system of taxation that you will find abhorrent, oppressive, tyrannical, and you’re going to want to play the God card. “This is contrary to God’s Word!” and God’s going to say, “Didn’t I tell you this at the beginning? So what do you expect me to do now? I’m not listening – la la la la, not listening – because you chose this. I told you this is where it was going. You didn’t listen. These are the consequences. Kiss the rod.”

Now, does that mean that there would be no recourse left? No, there were still elders in Israel. The kingship in Israel was contractual and covenantal. There was a covenant document. It was a constitutional monarchy, I guess is the term I’m fishing for, and the elders could have done something. They never did. They never got the guts to stand up to Saul, even when he murdered the whole priestly caste or when he was trying to hunt down the Lord’s Messiah. They never had the guts to stand up, and the elders are effectively the Senate. They didn’t stand up to him.

There’s only two times on record where the collective other authorities in Israel stood up to the king. One of them was not so bright. That was under Jeroboam, where they opted for golden calves over the line of David, and they used tax rebellion as their rationale. The other was in the days of the boy-king Joash who was hidden in the temple, and the priests staged a coup to take back the throne for the rightful heir.

By and large, the accordant authorities in Israel did not do a good job of holding their king in check, and that’s sort of implicit here from the beginning. It’s not, “And you will cry and I won’t listen so you’ll turn back on your own resources, and you may or may not have some success.” That’s not there. It’s, “This is what’s going to happen.”

That doesn’t mean it’s wrong to try other recourses. They’re there. That’s how they’re actually supposed to function. They just never made them work because, once you’re committed to Statism, you begin to look for Statist answers. If your god is politics, you will seek for political answers, and they generally don’t work because the State usually has more political power than you do. It’s just the reality.

The other place in Scripture where this comes up, of course, is with Jesus, when the Pharisees and the Herodians bring the question to Jesus, “Shall we pay tribute or not?” These two parties were antagonistic to each other. The Herodians were champions of the Herodian dynasty. They wanted to pawn Herod the Great off, and then his sons, as the Messiah, or close enough. “It’s the best we’ll get. Get in bed with Rome and we’ll at least have some kind of bargaining chip if you’re behind the Herods.”

The Pharisees said, “No, we’re waiting for Messiah. Our only king is God. We have no king but God,” which is not what they would say later.

So the trap for Jesus supposedly was that if he says, “Don’t pay your taxes,” then he’s a revolutionary, a tax rebel, and they can hand him over to Pilate and that’s that, it’s all done. But if he says, “Pay your taxes,” then isn’t he renouncing his role as Messiah, as King? In fact, isn’t he turning on the one he calls his Heavenly Father, who said “You shall not establish a foreign king over you”?

The Pharisees are trying to play God’s law. “We want to be faithful to God’s law,” and of course there’s the terrible irony. No, they didn’t. They wanted to play this one card. They wanted to take one thing the law said that they saw as favorable to their cause and play that or have someone else play it. They were too chicken to be tax rebels themselves. They just said, “If there were a Messiah, certainly he would be against paying Roman taxes. We’ll just pay them quietly and grumble a lot, because we don’t want to go to jail.”

But what Jesus said to them completely dumbfounded all of them. He said, “Show me the tribute money,” because they’re talking specifically about Roman tribute, and the Pharisees and Herodians pull out a denarius, the coin used for tribute, and Jesus says, “Whose picture is on it? Whose name is that?”

“Well, Caesar!”

“Well, you’ve got Caesar’s stuff. You probably should give it back. He’s providing services for you. The fact that you personally may not want them doesn’t change the fact that, 1) most of your community actually does, and 2) that all of you are using them, whether or not there might be alternatives that would flow under a free market far better. This is the economic reality. You get to the point where you can produce an alternate system that provides all of these services on the free market, that’s great. Then maybe you can make a transition. You can downsize your government.”

Well, with Caesar it’s kind of hard because that is a foreign invader.

“You got in this situation because you rejected God and his law, just as Samuel said would happen. This time it’s a foreign king. God’s not terribly impressed with you trying to use him as your wedge to get out of paying taxes.”

That’s Jesus’ basic response, but there’s one more thing. He says, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. Give back to Caesar what’s Caesar’s. It’s his money.”

Ever look at one of our dollar bills? Federal Reserve System. Huh, I wonder whose money it is.

Not the government’s. Wait a second.

“Render to God the things that are God’s,” by which he means everything is God’s, including Caesar, including your political life, including your political convictions and who you vote for and your basic ideas about economics. All of that belongs to God so give that to God, but in meantime you have some taxes to pay.

That doesn’t answer all involved in Bryan’s beautiful definition of, “What about things that are exploitative? Things that are beyond the scope of government, things that at this point we actually could turn around?”

Well, I suggest you turn them around. Start some Political Action Committees and stop voting for people who keep raising taxes.

We’ve been talking a lot in your answer about the Christian’s reason for paying taxes. The question itself has to do with where governments retain the right to do this. I will just preemptively say that when I referenced this Scripture to the question asker, “I know, I know everyone uses this as a trump card. I promise I’m not using it the same way,” but Romans 13.

When Paul tells us, “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers, for there is no power but of God, and the powers that be are ordained of God,” and then later on he says, “For this cause…” – specifically the cause that the State does not bear the sword vainly but is an avenger on God’s behalf against evil, for that purpose do you also pay tribute?

For this cause pay ye tribute also: for they are God’s ministers, attending continually upon this very thing.

The basis for taxes comes in the simple economic reality that, like you were saying before, there’s a service that is being done. In this case it happens to be a service that is expressly ordained by God for his good purposes, and therefore the right to levy taxes is based in the authority they derive from God to do that very thing, which happens to cost money.

And then the tyranny comes in when the scope of government goes beyond that, and when it does go beyond that, that’s when we talk about the conscience of the believer to submit in I Peter 2 – “Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake.”

When things go beyond what Scripture tells us, when the governing rulers tell us to do things that are not against what Scripture tells us to do but are beyond what Scripture allows them to do, it is for the Lord’s sake, for our own witness in earth and our own good name insofar as we bear God’s name that we obey them. That includes even the exploitative taxes.

Even the ones that are going to fund abortions?

As awful as it is, yes, because there’s quite a few people who are happy to pay the taxes that go to fund endless foreign wars, like we covered last episode. Honestly, we should try and remove all of those because they’re bad. We’re blessed enough in America to live under a form of government where we can actually – what’s the word in the First Amendment? We can peaceably gather to…something.

Petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Yes. We’re blessed enough to live in a form of government where we actually have a voice like that. A lot of times people compress that down to just the simple act of voting every couple years. It’s more than that, and we should take every opportunity to work within the system that we’ve been placed under by God’s good providence.

Amen. That’s an excellent summary, Bryan. Thank you.

My grandfather taught government and civics classes and he used to say, “If you’re not involved in your local government in a republican form of government, other people are taking your money and you’re not deciding what’s going to happen with it, so that’s on you. Get involved.”

Let me add something to what you both said with regard to money spent on abortion, because I can imagine that really upsetting some people we know, but that was sort of the point when the Pharisees came to Jesus.

Who is this guy they’re paying taxes to? He claims to be the son of God. Within 40 years he’s going to start killing Christians. He’s already oppressively ruling over God’s people. Tiberius and those who followed him were serial adulterers, sodomites, very wicked people who practiced socialism as a matter of course, and engaged in imperialistic wars of conquest. The money would be going to horrible things, including the public sacrifices to foreign gods.

Jesus knew all of that, and here’s the marvelous thing for us. Jesus said, “Since he has handed you his bill, pay the bill, and that frees you from what he does with the money.”

This has wider applications that are incredible and important. You go to the store to buy some bread and you pay the money, and what’s that shop owner going to do with that money? He might go buy pornography. He might fund his daughter’s abortion. He might give it to the Democratic Party. You just go down the list of things he could do.

“I need to know where the money is going to go before I can do business with him!”

No, you don’t. This is the ‘meat offered to idols’ thing. Don’t ask. This is an economic transaction. You are not enabling him. You are trading for something that you value more than your money. He has a product that you value, so from your perspective you’re getting the better deal here, and you’re making a free exchange.

What Jesus is saying is if this is true in the case of the civil government it’s true in all kinds of those exchanges. You’re not responsible to track down where the money goes. He’s providing a service, he’s presented a bill, pay the bill. You don’t like the service? You don’t like the bill? Then see what you can do to get a new service guy here. Go to a new market, or in this case can you alter the government?

In that day there wasn’t much they could do to alter the government, but as Bryan has said very eloquently, we still have the option of doing that to some degree, especially at the local level.

So I think the question has to be, “You’re upset about paying taxes? Well, you probably should be. That’s good. It means you’re breathing and you can think. A lot of Americans, you’re not sure.” But then the question is so what are you doing to put something in its place? How much are you trying to back away from using the government’s services? How much are you trying to put something alternative in its way? How much are you paying with your tithe and offerings to create institutions that will do some of these things? And how much are you involved in the political system to try to vote some of these people out of office and to change the laws? And how many people did you try to win to Christ this week?

As I said earlier, if all we’re thinking is political solutions, we’re not thinking like Christians. We need godly people full of the Spirit of God who will vote differently because it’s obvious they ought to, because that’s what the law says – the law that the Spirit has now written in their hearts.

That now kind of brings us back to this whole thing that we’re supposed to be talking about. Anyway, thank you for your question. I hope we answered it without being offensive. Again, I thought Bryan’s answer was absolutely superb. I thought he nailed it there.

Yeah. You can send us that extensive discussion on footnotes and citations if you want to. We’d read it.

Emily, there’s an article on “Render to Caesar” that I wrote for The Chalcedon Foundation, Faith for All of Life, that we can probably find a link to. You can try my name and that title, “Render to Caesar,” and if you can’t find it, I can probably find it for you.

I might have it in my high school papers that I saved.

You actually might, but it probably already exists online.

We’re talking about prophecy, so Emily, begin the lead-in. I assume you have something.

We actually had another point, but for the sake of time we’ll maybe punt that to next week. Bryan found a great quote, so teaser for next week when Bryan is going to read us an awesome quote.

We’re talking about the Ten Commandments again and how they still apply, but they are Old Testament. Why does the Old Testament apply to now? It’s actually kind of a new thing in Christian history that we should think that it doesn’t, so let’s dig into how that idea sort of came about and became the prevailing Evangelical view.

That’s a very tall order, isn’t it.

There have been a number of times in church history where theologians or would-be theologians have gotten the idea that the Old Testament doesn’t belong because, from a Gnostic point of view – I’m stealing your thunder, Bryan, on Gnosticism – from a Gnostic point of view the law seems so unspiritual. I mean we’re talking about property and sex and work and marriage and having children. I mean this is about as materialistic as you can get.

There have been various sects within or near-unto Christianity who have tried to reject the Old Testament in total because of that. That was another God, even. The word ‘demiurge’ borrowed from Plato comes up a few times. The demiurge created the physical world, and he’s the mean nasty God of the Old Testament who deals in matter and hair and filth and mud and all that, but the New Testament God is full of light and life and came in Jesus and the Holy Spirit. He’s only concerned about matters of the heart.

So in a sense it’s not brand new, but in the 1840s or so there was a new movement in prophecy that had a profound effect in church history, both in Europe and England and America. But in order to explain this we need to back up a step and just throw out some terms that Christians may or may not know.

In my generation, 1970s, everybody knew something about prophecy, specifically that Jesus was coming within the next 10 years. 1981 was the original date, then ’88, then 2000 because we were running out of places to put him, but ya know.

It was ’88 and then ’89 because of the sequel.

Yes, 89 reasons that Jesus is coming in 1989, after the 88 reasons he was coming in ’88.

There’s a few words we need to know. The first one is millennium. Just as a good English word, we know that a millennium is 1,000 years, but in talking about Bible prophecy it generally has reference to Revelation 20 where John sees an angel come down from heaven, grab hold of Satan, bind him with a chain, throw him in the bottomless pit, and seal him up so he cannot deceive the nations for 1,000 years. At the end of that 1,000 years he’s released, starts a little rebellion and doesn’t get very far, and God intervenes and the last judgment occurs.

Since the beginning of church history, the church is puzzled as to what exactly is going on there and how it fits into the total vision of Revelation. Is this something that follows the return of Jesus and the resurrection of the church? Is it something that is conterminous with the church age? It began with the coming of Christ and will end?

Originally it could have been literal, so you could expect Jesus to come back around the year 1,000 or so, or now a more figurative length of time. Or is it some Golden Age in the church’s future history where Satan will be cowed and crushed to the point that he’s not really doing a whole lot, and the gospel is having a great deal of success?

It’s not my intention to go into all of these options in any detail at this point, except to say that obviously these are very different takes on what is going on here.

One that has been popular on and off throughout church history is the idea that this is a future literal 1,000-year period that Jesus will establish by his return, during which all of the wonderful promises that God made through the prophets to Israel will be fulfilled. The wolf lies down with the lamb, the nations beat their swords into plowshares, nations flow to Jerusalem to be instructed, God reigns over all the earth in peace. All of that is going to happen very literally after Jesus comes, so Jesus’ coming is before the millennium.

Would you say pre-millennium?

Pre-millennial, yes. Now, pre-millennialism in various forms has been around for a long time. It goes back to at least the second century, and some people would argue even earlier, but in the 1940s and particularly in America after that for the next 120-130 years it underwent a transformation, and that transformation really got a hold of the American consciousness, and these are the tweaks.

First, in this new form of pre-millennialism there was a heavy emphasis upon literal interpretation. That always had kind of been implied in the system, but now it became very forefront. Over against the liberalism that was developing in Germany, the higher criticism and all of that, here were believers, and they can be commended for this, they wanted to not play games with the text of Scripture.

If the Bible says Israel, it means Israel. If it says 1,000 years, it means 1,000 years. If it says the temple, it means the temple, not the church. If it says sacrifices, it means blood sacrifices, not the effects of the gospel. So bless their hearts – in an attempt to be faithful to Scripture, sometimes they introduced a hermeneutic that wasn’t the one the church was used to hearing.

Secondly, because of this, this system made a hard and fast distinction between Israel as the old covenant people of God, and the church as the new covenant people of God, to the extent that, in some extreme cases, the leaders of this system actually said, “God’s plan was this thing with Israel and this political kingdom ruled over by a Messiah over the whole world, where peace is enforced, but when the Jews rejected Jesus he went to Plan B, and that was the cross. So all of the prophecies of the Old Testament which pointed toward this kingdom of Messiah stopped. Everything went on hold and God did something that the prophets didn’t foresee.”

They used the word ‘parenthesis’ in history. God introduced the church, which is composed mostly of Gentiles, that has no roots in the Old Testament. God just plopped in this new thing and it’s going to run its course. It’s going to bear witness to the world. It’s largely going to fail, and then when that’s done, God will remove his church and the Holy Spirit and go back to the original plan for 7 years, which happened to be 7 years of great tribulation.

We see the rise of the anti-Christ, World War 3, and pouring out of the wrath of God, which is all climaxed by the Battle of Armageddon when Jesus returns visibly in glory, puts down the anti-Christ, and finally establishes his kingdom.

So quick question. We’re talking about a hermeneutic that came out in the mid-19th century. World Wars 1 and 2 hadn’t happened yet, so did they expect a world war? Was there talk when World War 1 came about that this was the tribulation?

Absolutely, yes. In fact, for another article I was writing I looked to see in how many decades of American history has someone said, “This is the end”? It was every single one except for the 1950s. The 1950s was the Cold War, so it was implied because Russia was Gog and Magog and ready to invade Israel, because in ’48 we get Israel reborn as a nation, so they were willing to give it a little bit of time for that decade.

What does all this have to do with the Ten Commandments? What happens now is that Israel and the old covenant and the law and the ceremonies and the promises and the prophecies are all wrapped together in one ball that don’t apply right now.

Now, God being God is going to be faithful and he’s going to do all the things he said he did, but he’s biding his time while the church preaches the gospel about Jesus and his death, which is not going to be terribly successful, but it will reach all nations. When it does, then that’s done and Jesus can come back, take his church out of the world – the so-called rapture, pre-tribulation rapture, whatever you want to call it – and then go back to Israel, and then the final moments of that plan can unfold. Israel will suffer great judgment and persecution, but in the end turn to Christ just as Jesus returns to institute his millennial reign, and all of the prophecies come true.

It’s not my intention to discuss prophecy or hermeneutics, but simply to point out that this was a new way of looking at Scripture, and in fact most of the people who taught it said this is a new way of looking at Scripture. The idea of a pre-tribulation rapture was a brand-new idea that’s in the Bible but had been forgotten almost immediately, and they were recovering something that had been in the Bible and had been lost. They weren’t bothered by the fact that you could read back through the Reformation and the Middle Ages and not find it, because the apostasy had begun so early. But now it was being recovered, so that was okay, which meant that for a very long time the church had been very messed up in its hermeneutics and its understanding of the law.

The leaders of this movement, a lot of these guys are very godly men. They just were very mistaken about a couple things, and then those things kind of mushroomed or snowballed into other things. They looked at the Ten Commandments and they said, “But that’s law. The gospel is grace. You can’t have law and grace. The law says ‘Do and live.’ Grace says, ‘Believe and live.’ There’s no way to reconcile those, and they’re not supposed to be, so the Ten Commandments belonged to Israel in the old covenant, and they will belong to Israel when Jesus comes back and asserts his reign, but they don’t belong to us except insofar as the New Testament may restate them, but even there they’re not there as law because we’re not under law.”

It’s the familiar phrase you’ve heard. We’re not under law, we’re under grace. That’s taken from Romans 6, but it’s taken out of context. Paul immediately turns around and says, “Shall we sin because we’re not under the law but under grace? Shall we break God’s law because we’re not under law? No, that’s not what I’m saying.”

Jesus said, “I came not to abolish the law and the prophets.”

But to fulfill them, to put them into full force.

This is what the American church has been facing, and there are a couple things that have sold it. One has obviously been the theatrical – what is the word when something is big and exciting…

Sensationalizing.

Monumental.

Yeah, those things – of prophecy. When you can say, “Oh look, this is prophecy being fulfilled. Oh, there’s another prophecy. Oh look, could it be the anti-Christ? Could he be the anti-Christ? Could we be standing on the verge of Armageddon?”

As long as you can keep pulling out of the headlines and filling people’s curiosity – and we are a very curious people – you keep pulling people along and they may not stop and say, “Wait, but your assumptions here are rooted in a hermeneutic and a view of the covenant that carries with it some baggage, and some of that baggage is questionable and some of it’s just filthy dirty laundry.”

You’re saying basically that the church does not have any sort of law. What does it have then? It has the words of Jesus. Is that law? Maybe, maybe not, not sure. Mostly it has the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit will internalize these things so that they come not as commandments from the outside, but as the work of God in your heart.

Now, there’s some truth there, but the big piece that’s missing is, “And how do you know what the Holy Spirit is writing in your heart?” Can we say? Can we put it in words? Can we make a list of things that the Holy Spirit is in fact working in your heart? Or are we left to the whim of the moment and say, “Well, I’m not sure what to do, but the Holy Spirit I’m sure will tell me, and I get it now. This is what I should do.”

“Yeah, could you write that down for us so we can learn and profit? Has God written it down someplace, or are we stuck with the moment-by-moment leading of the Holy Spirit because we’re not under law, we’re under grace?”

Or of course under the most extreme form, “I’ve been born again. I don’t really sin, to speak of, because I’m a Christian.”

The moment-by-moment leading is basically what the Mennonites do. Their worship services are, “We’re all going to sit until someone feels they need to say something.”

It could be Mennonites or Quakers or both. I’m not as familiar with the Mennonites.

I think that’s a Quaker thing.

Is it just a Quaker thing?

They’re all kind of Anabaptist, right? Inner light is an Anabaptist common theme, kind of uniting all the different branches.

I thought for sure it was Mennonites specifically, but I could be entirely wrong about which group it is.

So if we haven’t got our knowledge of church history down, please forgive us. What you’re describing is certainly Quaker, but then the Quakers don’t consider themselves Anabaptist.

Here’s the danger. “You’re not using the right terminology.” Okay, we may be guilty of that, but what we’re describing is true enough, because most of us have had contact in various kinds of departments and sections of the church where we run into this.

Our school was sponsoring a pro-life rally at the state capital a number of years ago, and one of our young men, a high school senior, was just calling pastors and saying, “Would you like to come? I’d like to get some of your people here. If you’ve got a Christian youth group or Christian school would you like to come?” and he called a Mennonite pastor, and I’m sure the Mennonite pastor was a godly man and meant well and all that, but he balked at the idea.

“Are you saying that the church should get involved in matters of civil government? You don’t mean that, do you?”

“Yeah,” because he had never run into this before. “Isn’t it obvious?” but no, to some people it’s not obvious because of either this particular hermeneutic or one very like to it, because there are fellow travelers or other people who may not be this sort of pre-millennial thinkers but still have this same – “Law is bad. Law commands. Law says ‘do this and live.’ We aren’t under law, we’re under grace, and therefore what we’re concerned about is showing people Jesus and letting that produce a change in their life.”

The thing is, that’s very close to the truth, except that God constantly in the New Testament keeps showing us his Word and saying, “And you want to know what that looks like? You want to know the standard by which the Holy Spirit is operating? You want to know what he writes in your heart? It’s the law of God, and it’s the same law because it’s the same God.”

One thing that we’ve tried to do in this series is to show how each of the commandments is rooted in the triune nature, the ontological nature of God himself. These are not arbitrary things that God just picked out as, “Well, this would be fun. How about painting themselves blue? Nah, that’s not good, but the adultery thing is really good.”

No, these are things that grew out of who God is, and God can’t rewrite them or stuff them in a corner someplace, or pass over them for a few generations. This is who he is.

And the Psalmist is constantly telling us, “Your law is so good, Lord. Your law is so good, and it’s delightful and it’s pleasant and it’s good.”

“Oh, how I love thy law. It is my meditation all the day.”

“Your law is perfect, converting the soul.”

So Jesus says, “If you love me, keep my commandments.” There’s nothing in the New Testament that undercuts the Old in that way. Are the ceremonies and the shadows and the types God? Yes, that’s never been a point of disagreement. Are we always clear as to what is a type and what’s a shadow? Not always, and that can stand some discussion.

In individual applications – restitution, that has gospel connotations, but it also seems very practical. We can talk about that. But don’t cheat on your wife, that’s pretty fundamental. What are we arguing here? “This is a horrible law. It says I can’t cheat on my wife.” Presumably nobody is really thinking that.

I think part of the problem honestly is there’s such an ignorance of what the Ten Commandments actually say. If you turn to someone, “Okay, you’re opposed to the Ten Commandments. Which ones do you want to get rid of? You want to murder your boss, cheat on your wife, steal your neighbor’s car?”

“No, no, all those are good.”

“What’s the problem then?”

“Well, it’s just they’re law.”

Yeah, God being God speaks with authority. He’s got laws. The problem, of course, is that we can’t keep them, and Jesus kept them in our place and bore the penalty of our breaking them, not so we can go on and live by mysticism or live in a vacuum or live as amoral creatures, but so that we might obey and serve him. The things that the flesh could not do, he fulfills in us by his Spirit. That’s what we’re talking about here.

You know, there has been a change in this sort of pre-millennialism over the last 20-30 years or so, more and more. For instance, our friend John MacArthur says this. This is in Faith Works.

But grace and law operate in every dispensation. Grace is, and always has been, the only means of eternal salvation. The whole point of Romans 4 is that Abraham, David, and all the Old Testament saints were justified by grace through faith, not because they kept the law. Did the apostle Paul believe we can nullify the law in this age of pure grace? Paul’s reply to that question was unequivocal: “May it never be! On the contrary, we establish the Law.”

So there’s a shift that’s trying to lessen the perceived opposition or antagonism between grace and law, and John MacArthur’s books, The Gospel According to Jesus and Faith Works, which is the follow-up book following the same idea in the book of Acts, are good sources.

Interestingly enough, in his footnotes, or actually I think he has endnotes, I’m sorry, and appendixes he quotes the Reformers. He quotes Calvinists. This is the tradition that has championed the permanence of God’s moral law in the church, in covenant life, and in society.

So as we talk about the Ten Commandments, we’re not legalists. We’re not for a moment suggesting that if you do these things you can live autonomously by your own good works. But what we are saying is God does have standards. That’s kind of the point of all this.

If God didn’t have standards he would just say, “I don’t care how you live. Just come on into heaven and we’ll have a great time,” but his standards sent his son to the cross. He died because we broke these commandments. They don’t stop being important, then. They achieve a new importance because of the very things that required Jesus’ death, and they are now the very things his Holy Spirit writes in our heart.

That gives us reason to pause and meditate and to have some kind of thing that we can hold up and say, “You want to talk morality? You want to talk social justice? You want to talk right and wrong? You want to talk love? We have an outline. It’s got 10 points in it – actually 5 and 5. They’re overlapping and inter-related. We can talk about this with words that go back 6,000 years. What do you have?”

I’m reminded in this context of a story told about Dwight L. Moody. He was at a banquet or some such thing, and some guy comes up to him and says, “Mr. Moody, I disapprove of your methods of evangelism,” and Moody says, “So do I. Please share with me yours.”

I think this is what we need to say. Do we understand all the implications and applications of the Ten Commandments? No, because the church has been very poor in working them out. But does somebody out there have something better and would they care to share it as a list? A short list, a list that gets to the point. Hey, we can break these down into two. Love God and love your neighbor.

Champions of natural law or positive law or the voice of the majority or whatever – “All the world needs now is love, sweet love” – tell us how that works. Tell us what decisions that’s going to lead you to and how you, in specific instances, can distinguish right from wrong. And if you don’t have a list, if you don’t have an objective standard, if you don’t have a written absolute, why are we even having this conversation.

You can address those emails to [email protected].

I also wanted to add something. Obviously, I’ve listened to you teach for a while and you’ve said this before, so I’m like 99% certain you have it in mind. The keeping of the law in the Christian life is by no means the basis upon which God accepts us, because even now with the Holy Spirit in us, our works are still really just filthy rags.

There’s nothing about this that is a meritorious keeping, and that’s one I think that – from what I’ve read of him, anyway – John MacArthur doesn’t emphasize enough, is that it comes across as – he never says meritorious, but it comes across like a keeping yourself in by this particular means.

There are all kinds of dangers. For every truth, there are a dozen ways we can slide down the hill. I’m thinking more of things within the semi-Reformed tradition where they say, “Yeah, so you want to be really spiritual and you want a lot of God’s blessings? Keep those commandments.”

No, that’s not what we’re saying. Jesus kept them all. God with him freely gives us all things. First of all, there’s nothing to merit, because we’ve already got everything. And secondly, they don’t merit because, as you said, they’re filthy and polluted. As Luther said, even our good works are mortal sins unless forgiven by the blood of Christ.

Peter writes, “Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ…” I used to be confused as to why the sprinkling went there. It’s because our good works have to be sprinkled with his blood or they’re not acceptable.

This is an illustration I’ve used in school, and you can tell me what you think. When my girls were really little, I wanted to get them a bicycle. I didn’t because they weren’t ready for it yet. As soon as they were ready, I got them a bike.

Did they have to earn the bicycle? Was I watching like a hawk to make sure they were good enough and moral enough and obedient enough before I would spend all this money on them and give them this blessing? No, they just had to be ready.

There’s some blessings God does not hand to us right now because we’re not spiritually ready. We have to grow up to the point where we can actually use them, but we don’t have to earn them. We just have to grow to the point where they actually would do us any good.

Right, because is growth meritorious? A child growing is just part of your nature. It’s just something that happens.

Both in the natural sense and in the covenantal sense it is the organic work of the Holy Spirit. The child grows because the Spirit’s breath of life is in him or her, and as you say, it’s just going to happen because that’s how God works things. In the Christian life, the Holy Spirit keeps working in us through many dangerous toils and snares. Again, it’s most certainly not meritorious.

I can think of two examples in my life that embarrass me because I have to say this, but one was getting married. I wasn’t ready to get married. I sure should have been, but getting married was spiritually probably the most important thing that’s ever happened to me, a tremendous blessing.

Did I earn it? No. I wasn’t that impressive to my wife. Honey, I know this. In part she felt sorry for me. She thought someone needed to look after me, and I’m sure she was right, but I didn’t by my virtue earn this thing.

The other was becoming an elder in God’s church. God kind of snuck that one up on me, and part of it honestly 1) was ignorance and 2) it was pride. I wanted to be able to teach God’s Word, and then I found out that that’s not really what elders do. Elders solve a lot of problems, usually from people who don’t want their problem solved. But it made me grow. It forced growth. It forced the blessing of growth, but I sure didn’t do anything to earn that office, nor do I always want the office, but God keeps pushing and molding.

The blessings are not always happiness and butterflies and rainbows. Sometimes they’re very hard things. You want the blessing of being trim and fit? Look at diet and exercise. Do they merit it? No, but they’re part of the process God usually uses to get you there.

I feel attacked.

[laughing] I was attacking myself, actually. I have friends who point out for me, “You need to exercise more.” I’m sure I do, but you know what? I’ve got other things on the table right now.

I was noticing when Solomon asks the Lord for wisdom, we usually use the word ‘wisdom’ and that’s what I Chronicles says when it’s telling the story.

II Chronicles, actually.

Where’s the other place the story is told then? I Kings? In I Kings he asks the Lord for discernment between good and evil. In other words, knowledge – the knowledge of good and evil – which when Adam and Eve reached for before God gave it to them, it became a curse to them.

There’s a whole discussion there of what does it mean to know good and evil. You can know good and evil by refusing the evil and choosing the good, or you can know good and evil by embracing the evil.

“Mom and Dad, I’m sorry, I have to find out about drugs myself because I won’t know it until I do it.”

No, there’s an authoritative source from the outside that can tell you exactly the dangers, and you don’t have to do the thing. You don’t have to participate in any evil to know the evil, as Lewis says in a very similar context. “It is waking that understands sleeping, not sleeping that understands waking.”

That argument is typically only used for things that people want to do. It’s never, “Mom, I need to understand what cyanide tastes like.”

“I need to understand what hard work is like.”

“I need to understand what it feels like to help the poor.”

Or to share the gospel.

Or eat vegetables.

We are running out of time so we will stop there and do some rapid-fire recommendations.

I have a recommendation. It is a hymn. It is in the Trinity Hymnal, both the blue version and the red version. I don’t remember what number it is, so don’t ask me. It’s also in the Lutheran hymnal, by the way. The title is “The Law of God is Good and Wise.”

Our church sings that a lot.

It’s a great hymn, and it’s one of those hymns that manages to teach a lot. It sounds very didactic, but it’s also wonderfully comforting at the same time. It’s a wonderful one for kids to know about what the law does and doesn’t do.

My recommendation is C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, which is one that I read – I don’t think they were consecutive years, they may have been – at Cornerstone. By far I think my favorite one of the three is That Hideous Strength, but the other two are also very good.

It’s a philologist who was very much inspired by another famous author/philologist that Lewis was friends with named John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.

I might have heard of him.

Maybe. It’s interesting because it’s kind of a vehicle for philosophical debate and metaphysics. One of my favorite metaphors from it is from Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in the trilogy, where he’s talking to the Eldilla, who are these vaguely angelic – I think maybe explicitly angelic; it’s been a while since I read it – beings, and there’s this wonderful explanation.

“It’s so weird. I see you just moving through solid objects like you’re wisps, like you’re nothing,” and he goes, “Well, actually it’s the other way around. I’m extremely solid because I’m heavenly, and everything else that is not me is very wispy, and it’s very easy for me to move through.”

It’s fantastic. The third book is my favorite for lots of sociological rejection reasons. So that’s my recommendation.

The protagonist – I can’t say hero – is a sociologist, so you’ve got that going.

I’m going to recommend three books all at once, for those who care about Bible prophecy and eschatology. If you don’t care, don’t read these books. There honestly are better things probably for you to read about, except insofar as understanding prophecy and eschatology is going to help you fine-tune your hermeneutic, how you understand the Bible.

The oldest of the three is by J. Marcellus Kik, An Eschatology of Victory. Originally he wrote it as two books, which were called Matthew 24 and Revelation 20, which oddly enough were about Matthew 24 and Revelation 20.

Imagine that.

You get what it says on the tin.

But later after his death they were combined into one book with some of his sermons and lectures, really short ones, up front. They cover much of the same material. Eschatology of Victory is the idea that the kingdom of God wins in history, as well as in eternity, and this is some of the exegetical evidence for that, followed then by a later book by David Chilton, Paradise Restored: A Biblical Theology of Dominion, for those of you who like biblical theology.

He starts in Eden. He starts with garden imagery and works his way up to the place where Kik’s book ends up, so he provides background and context. Kik’s handling of Matthew 24 and Revelation 20 may seem to just come out of nowhere. “You’re talking symbolism and such. Where does this come from? This sounds liberal!” David Chilton’s book shows, “No, it’s been in the working the whole time. You can trace this kind of thinking all the way through the Bible,” so he provides you with that.

The third one, which I recommend with caution but I think it’s important, is Gary North’s book, Millennialism and Social Theory. He doesn’t do the exegesis, so don’t read his first unless you already are well-rounded in eschatology and prophecy, but he looks at the options in eschatology, of how to take the millennium and all of that, and shows the sociological implications. “If you believe A, then you’re probably going to think B, and that means you’re going to do C.”

He shows that each theological approach to the millennium does bear its own sort of ecclesiastical and cultural fruit. “Churches that believe this are going to do this. Churches that believe this are more likely to do this. Churches who don’t believe either of those are probably going to do this.”

It helps to answer the question, “But does it really matter, as long as we believe Jesus is coming back?” or “Can’t I just be a pan-millennialist and believe it will all pan out in the end?” Well, you can, but the things that are written are written for our learning, that we may do all the words of this law. God put this stuff in there.

It’s not the most important thing. That’s something we started with earlier. Not everything in the Bible is equally important, not all of it is equally urgent, more to the point, but if this is something you want a better understanding on, these three books I think will help you. And you can always look at their extensive bibliographies and find other good books as well.

Thank you guys so much. This has been a really fun recording. Thanks also for listening, you listeners out there. We appreciate you. Send us an email at [email protected].

Thanks also to our financial supporters. If you’d like to join their number, you can go to our website at anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion. Follow us on Goodreads. See you next week.