Israel's Theocratic Republic

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, and today we’re talking about Israel’s theocratic republic. We’ve talked a little bit about the justice system in the Old Testament, so we’ll now put that in the larger context of how the government was supposed to function in Israel.

That word ‘theocratic’ – why are we going to use that word, Greg?

It’s original meaning is ‘the rule of God,’ which is kind of what Israel had. In fact, in any kind of civil sense Israel is the only nation that’s ever been a theocracy. Now, on another level the Church is a theocracy; in fact, the whole universe is a theocracy, and I assume we’ll get to that in time.

As you look back over the history of the world, we actually see lots of civilizations, societies, and city- states that claim to be manifestations of the rule of God on earth. This was standard in the fertile crescent, Mesopotamia, and in the Greek city-states and Rome and Egypt. As Christians, we discount those simply because they were lying. They weren’t in touch with God. They were in touch with demons, but they did claim to be theocracies.

The difference was that in Israel, except for the brief time when Moses was alive, there was no one person designated the spokesman for God who had an immediate and direct pipeline to God, who could at any point say, “Well, no, because God says…” except insofar as they refer to the written word of God.

Israel was governed by written laws that came from God, and God manifested his glory in the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle, but after Moses’ death God was not really in the habit very often of talking. He’d said what he needed to say for the time, and though he would reveal himself with regard to specific incidents and means through his prophets, the civil government of Israel did not have a divine spokesman. They didn’t have a divine Pharaoh on the throne or a divine Caesar. They did not have a city-state whose institutions spoke for God. They did not have an oracle they could consult on every little detail just because they were curious.

They set the pattern for the Western world of a civil government ruled by written laws, run by ordinary men who had no claim to inspiration, let alone divinity. They were judges. It was Bob down the street, and Sam on the next block, and Ed over there a few neighborhoods over – or more likely Malachi and Zebulun and whatever the Hebrew equivalents would be – but they were just these guys. Godly men and honest was the standard, but they weren’t in the pagan sense full of God.

In the Christian sense they were Spirit-filled in that they were supposed to be born again, men who feared God, had the fear of God in them, who were honest and reflected the work of God’s Spirit in their hearts, but none of this continuity of being nonsense whereby God manifested himself in them in a way he did not in other believers. Administratively they were simply the guys who had some experience and wisdom and honesty and were asked to help settle some things in terms of the written law that everybody was supposed to know. If they didn’t, well, there was a problem.

So question. You mentioned a moment ago that this rule by the written word set the example for the West. A lot of people will pin that on the Code of Hammurabi rather than the law that Moses transcribed. Do you have thoughts about that?

Yeah. They’re wrong. This is why timelines and chronology are so terribly important in the study of history. The secular timeline that we’re familiar with makes Egypt’s history a whole lot longer than it should be, and ties all the histories of the Middle East to it, so pushes Hammurabi and his work further and further back before the time of Moses. So people can come to the Code of Hammurabi and say, “Oh, look at this. This sounds like some things that Moses would later write.” But when we reconstruct the chronology of the ancient world based on scripture, it turns out that Hammurabi came after Moses, so there likely is a connection, and it might bypass Moses.

Some of these things that Moses wrote or that God gave him at Sinai may have been well-known before then. Not everything that God said to his people or said to the patriarchs got written in scripture immediately. We regularly run into things like the tithe or the uncleanness laws.

Or the lamb and Abel.

Yeah, things that are just mentioned in passing as if, “Well, everybody knows this,” and yet we don’t know when or how God originally told them, so there may be a huge background of material that the ancient world knew and treated as they would, or it may be that Moses was a lot better-known than the pagan world wanted to admit, and that Hammurabi had in fact read Moses. Some similarities are pretty strong, and some of them are horribly not even remotely close.

What’s the phrase – if an ox gores someone in the street there is no remedy? I think there is a remedy for that.

The Mosaic law certainly had a remedy and that’s worth mentioning, all of this, because what we’re looking at here is the old question, “By what standard?” If you want to have a civil government, by what standard is it going to rule? Are we going to appeal to tradition? To the voice of the gods? To the voice of our fathers? To the latest studies and surveys? To our hearts? To our consciences? What is the standard that a civil government should adopt? And once we’ve picked that standard, why did we and why did we let them?

There’s a lot of why’s going on here that both the world and the Church have sort of done a hocus-pocus with and said, “Well, it’s just obvious. Moving on now.” The obvious thing is that if God has not spoken, nothing’s obvious. If God will not tell us the nature of right and wrong, then we’ve got a real problem.

It’s a civil issue, but it’s also of course a personal one and a salvation issue. How do I know I need to be saved if I don’t know right from wrong? How does a senator or judge, making or judging in terms of the law, know that what he’s doing is right if God hasn’t at least at some point in the background set the standard from which other judges and legislatures have made application?

If all we can say is, “Well, that’s the way we’ve always done it,” that’s not terribly helpful. We can try to live with that, but the history of the West has shown it doesn’t work very well. Sooner or later, we get tired of that and we want something that we think is more efficient, more trendy, more ‘what’s happening now,’ more loving. But constant cultural change keeps producing constant legal change, and we no longer know what our courts should be doing, except they’re probably doing wrong and evil things now. They need to be more hip like I am. You can’t even say hip anymore. That’s like the ‘60s.

You need to be more up-to-date and progressive. That’s the word.

Progressive, that’s the word. We need to be more progressive.

The question of course then immediately is why is progressive better than regressive? Why is evolution better than de-evolution? Why is going forward better than going backward? Why is change better than conservation of the old ways?

I remember a line from G.K. Chesterton where an atheist had written to him and said, “I don’t think there’s good and evil. I think it’s all just part of the upward motion of the earth or upward progression of the universe,” and he said, “Well, if there’s no difference between good and evil, why should there be any difference between up and down?”

Yeah, how do you measure this change? In what sense is it better today than it was yesterday, or it was a few hundred years ago?

We keep holding on to elements of what was before. We borrow last year’s capital and use it as a foundation for our revolutions, never asking, “Wait a minute. If the foundations be destroyed, what will the righteous do? How do we move forward? What is forward and why is forward better? And why do we care about moving forward anyhow? And why should I love you and why should you love me, if there is not an absolute standard?”

There’s an old book that discusses the history of the Illuminati – yes, I’m doing some stuff with conspiracy theory right now for my novel, and I was looking for quotes. This is John Robinson’s Proofs of a Conspiracy. I’ve had it for ages and I’ve never read it, but as I was looking through, the man is still somewhat humanistic in his thinking and moralistic, but he does get to the point of saying in the end, “These people, these conspirators, these philosophers, these sons of the French revolution – they keep talking about better, but by what standard are they measuring better? It seems to me that all they want is to have their own lusts satisfied. Why is that better? Or why is it worse, for that matter, if there is no God?” which is their first point of departure. “There’s no God so we can do better.”

“If there’s no God, what do you mean, better?”

Anyway, we’re kind of out here on a limb. Let’s walk it back and talk a little bit about the nature of the theocracy. To keep myself on track I’m going to read a little bit, and then we can talk about whatever you like.

Looking at Israel, Israel was a confederation of 12 tribes that were united religiously by their covenant with Yahweh, and by religion I mean not simply the externals of worship, but I mean basic commitment of life – their worldview, their ultimate commitments – liturgically (formal worship) by their system of worship centered on the tabernacle, politically by their court systems and laws.

Her civil magistrates were chosen by the people. God didn’t prescribe the means of election. The magistrates were to be able honest men who knew God’s law. Scripture does give us one example of a woman serving as a judge – a high court judge at that, Deborah.

The magistrates were to enforce God’s civil laws and lead by moral example. Israel’s judicial system consisted of graduated courts serving families of 10, 50, 100, and 1,000. In our terms this would be something like a judge for each neighborhood, for each larger collection of neighborhoods, for each quarter of a town, or for each town and city. Judges could remand difficult cases to superior courts, and probably appeals by contending parties were possible as well.

At the top of the judicial pyramid was a single judge who dealt only with the most difficult cases, originally Moses, later Joshua and the judges we encounter in the book that has that name. The high judge was also usually a military commander for the nation, although not always.

I’ll stop there, except to throw this out – Israel had no standing legislature. They had the Ten Commandments and had the case laws.

I think that of the many possible main points here, at least one of them is it would be kind of hard to look at Israel and say this is a nation by any of our modern standards of nationhood. Even in a war, the military commander could say, “Come and fight with us,” and if several tribes said, “No, we’re sitting this one out,” that kind of was that. God could step in and settle it, but normally that was just, “Okay, well, you didn’t help out God’s people.”

“We didn’t think we were required,” “We were too far away,” “We didn’t trust your leadership.”

“Okay, we’ll see what God says about that,” but that was it.

We’re not told how the civil government was provided for in terms of a taxation system. Later on we’re told that any tax that exceeded 10%, the Lord’s tithe, was obviously tyrannical, but we’re not told how these local judges were paid. Maybe they just got end-of-the-year gifts or stipends or something. There’s so much here that we’re not told, so it’s nothing like a complete plan for civil government. It is a broad outline. It sets some general ideas.

So possibly a second main point is no standing legislature. When our country was founded, we were concerned about a standing army, with good reason. Far more dangerous in many ways is the standing legislature, because what does the legislature do?

Come up with new laws.

New laws as long as they’re in session, every time they’re in session, because that’s what we pay them for, right?

My pet peeve about the legislature – it’s not my only pet peeve, but it’s a big one – is that they all live in D.C. It’s like you should have to live in the state that you’re representing, that’s going to be affected by what you’re doing.

Yeah, and Israel didn’t have one. They had a synod of elders who could on special occasions, I assume, make up specific laws about specific things, and the elders of a city presumably could make laws like, “We close the gates at 7 pm. We need to refurbish the communal well, so we need a buck from everybody in the city.”

Again, we’re not told specifically, but the responsibilities that the Old Testament lays upon the civil government were exceedingly slight, the only real exception being during war, and there was no provision for any kind of war of aggression. Wars were to be defensive. Now, sometimes a defensive war might lead the army outside the boundaries of Israel if they were attacked and had to retaliate, but even then there was no provision for a universal draft.

The leaders had the moral authority to say, “God’s people are under attack. You need to come and help us,” but then there were also some very explicit exceptions. If you’re engaged and haven’t taken a wife, you’re excused. If you planted a vineyard and haven’t eaten the fruit, you’re excused. If you built a house and haven’t dedicated it, you’re excused. If you’re simply afraid, you may go home.

Since the war had to be sanctioned by the priesthood, then in theory conscientious objection was a thing. “We believe this is an immoral war, so we’re leaving or we’re not even going to show up. Where are the priests to sanction this? Where is the priestly voice here? You’re calling those guys priests – they and their golden calves? Maybe not.”

One author has written that this is the closest thing to Libertarian sort of government the world has ever seen. An awful lot depended upon self-government, upon the ability of people to rule themselves in terms of a law that was universally recognized, or at least supposed to be universally recognized.

Bryan is looking gleeful.

And rightly so. We’ve used the word Libertarian in a lot of senses and here’s a good one, where you say, you know, there’s a government there but it’s very thin and light and has little to do. It punishes bad guys when they’re convicted of criminal acts, upon the testimony of two or three witnesses to an overt act, in open court, and there is a possibility of appeal.

Short of that, the leaders mostly lead by example and by reminding people, “Hey, that’s rude. Stop that. Don’t harass the widow. We might have to call you before the elders,” and that kind of thing, more or less the way the church elders today do their job – not by constantly staring in people’s windows or eavesdropping or bugging their homes, but simply engaging in instruction and example.

In cases of clear overt actions that violate a public civil law, then and only then intervening with the required amount of evidence. Circumstantial evidence did count. We see a couple of examples where circumstantial evidence does substitute for direct eyewitness testimony.

I’ve heard this paraphrased as two or three lines of independent testimony. Is that fair enough?

Yeah, I think so.

I have two friends. Both of them were DA’s in their time. One of them now is an appeals court judge. I asked them once upon a time when they were still lawyers, “What do you think of circumstantial evidence as opposed to eyewitness evidence?” and they both said, “Oh, we’d rather try a case on circumstantial evidence any day,” because people forget, they change their mind, their stories evolve, they elaborate. The evidence is what the evidence is.

People sometimes don’t understand the nature of circumstantial evidence. For instance, if you are on some remote mountaintop outside a cabin coming to visit your friend, you hear a gunshot from within, you come to the door, it’s locked, as are the windows, you break down the door, and there you see a man lying dead and his wife standing over him with a gun in hand still smoking, what you have is circumstantial evidence.

It’s not eyewitness testimony because you didn’t see her pull the trigger. You have, “Well, it’s the top of a mountain. There’s no one else here. There was no other way in or out. We heard the gun go off. She’s still holding…” – it’s still circumstantial. That is, the circumstances compel a reasonable conclusion.

There are two instances of this in scripture where this shows up, and they both involve confession. In Joshua, when Achan confesses to having stolen from the ruins of Jericho, the result was that Israel lost the battle of Ai. Joshua hears his testimony, hears his confession, but still sends men off to his tent to collect the circumstantial evidence, which is to say the loot he took from Jericho hidden under his tent. The two together – the personal testimony and the evidence – are required. A lot of people confess to things they never did, so even with a confession you need the other.

There was a similar case in the days of David. He has been on the run from Saul, but Saul is killed on the battlefield and a young man, an Amalekite, shows up at David’s camp and says, “I killed Saul. I mean, it was a mercy killing. The Philistines had already shot him. He was suffering, he was in pain, he was dying, he asked me to do it,” all the things we use for mercy killings these days.

“So knowing that he was your enemy and he couldn’t live and wanted to die, and he was going to be mistreated if I didn’t intervene, I stood on him and killed him, and here’s the evidence,” and he presents the trophies from Saul’s body.

David says, “Huh, really? Kill him. How were you not afraid to stretch forth your hand against the Lord’s anointed?”

Speaking of confessing to things you haven’t done, by the way.

Yeah, and David’s own response seems to suggest that he didn’t believe him, because he says, “Your blood be upon your own head because you have testified saying, ‘I’ve killed the Lord’s anointed.’”

David was probably smart enough to realize this guy didn’t have the guts to do that sort of thing, but testimony, evidence. He wanted to be blamed for it. Okay! He just didn’t think that was the blame he was going to get.

Even back to the other case where they go to his tent and find the loot that he had taken, we can look at the other case law regarding man-stealing, where it’s not just the person who sold him, but the one who was found in possession of him that shall be put to death. So possession is also something worth punishing.

Yes. If it can be shown that you knew that you shouldn’t be doing this.

On the other hand, there’s a line here that people will still find offensive, but I think it’s further to the right than most people would acknowledge or understand. You could live in Israel and be pagan. There was nothing that compelled you to enter into covenant with Yahweh, to become circumcised. You could not work on the Sabbath day, but you didn’t have to go to synagogue or whatever the equivalent might have been in those days. You were not allowed to worship idols, which was normally an out-of-doors public act, or sacrifice, which was definitely an out-of-doors public act.

A little bit messy, that one.

Yeah. Those were the main two things. There was also the rule against witchcraft, but witchcraft in those days usually meant using potions or poisons to kill people, which is still illegal today.

Cool motive, still murder.

Exactly. The exact mechanism isn’t terribly important.

But beyond this, no magistrate was ever authorized to pry into people’s personal beliefs. “You left Phoenicia, but are you harboring in your heart a love for Baal? You are? We must kill you now.” That didn’t happen.

Some people have misread this as, “Well, that means you had permission to practice your idolatry in private.” No, you didn’t have permission, you just probably could get away with it, which is not at all the same thing.

Yeah, saying that the government doesn’t have the right to come snooping around is not the same thing as saying you have the right to do something wrong.

Exactly, but as I said earlier there was no provision for bugging, eavesdropping, wiretapping, or whatever the equivalent would have been in that culture, given the limits of their technology.

There’s also almost a proto-fourth amendment there, where your place of residence is secure from random search and seizure.

That’s the second amendment, too.

Last week we saw that if you got into debt to somebody and you had to give them a pledge that they would collect every day and then return every night, when they come to collect the pledge they can’t just march in and say, “Hey, give it to me. I’m on a schedule here. You’re late.” They had to wait until you brought it out to them, despite the fact that they had a legal claim on that pledge. They could not enter your home.

It would be fun to write a paper or little book on the biblical precedents for our 10 amendments. I think you could do a pretty good job of proving all of them in some measure or complete measure are reflection of biblical law.

The Bible doesn’t particularly use the language of rights, and there’s a slight danger or sometimes a big danger with using that language. The Bible prefers words like liberty and law, permission and authority. What does the State have the authority to do? There’s an awful lot it plain didn’t have the authority to do in Israel, even though the magistrates worked for God. They couldn’t go barging into a house and say, “We have heard rumors that you have idols here. We will now look around for them.” No, that was completely illegal.

And some of the other things that generally people didn’t do in open, like adultery or homosexual acts or bestiality – there was no permission in Israel to do these things, absolutely not, but neither was there permission for the State to go looking in windows to see if they could find evidence of these things. The accusation was to be brought by witnesses to the act, whether it was homosexuality or witchcraft.

The fact that someone stood up in the town square and said, “I’m a homosexual,” or “I’m a witch,” legally was irrelevant. That’s an interesting claim and you might get in trouble for inciting a riot or just being rude, but it’s not a criminal offense and such. You can say that all you want. A lot of people say a lot of things to get attention or to stir up trouble or even to get themselves killed sometimes.

Again, your testimony by itself – “Hey, I just spent three hours worshiping Satan…”

“You got it on camera? You got a witness or two or something?”

“No, I forgot to get a witness.”

“Then get out of here. We don’t need to hear this.”

I’m so glad you brought this up because I’ve been waiting to use a Satan worship meme for weeks and weeks, so teaser for the memes for this week.

I cannot even imagine what a Satan worshiping meme might look like, but I’m looking forward to this.

I’m afraid.

Again, we’re seeing the severe limitations the Bible puts on civil government. The Bible does not trust civil government a great deal. In establishing it as an institution with the sword directed against lawbreakers and foreign invaders, it also gives it a very small job description of what it can do and not do. It does not provide a great source of revenue for it to do much else, even if it could in theory get away with it.

When Israel asks for a king, Samuel’s first warning is, “He’s going to up the income stream left and right. He’s going to tax you more than 10%. He’s going to do imminent domain laws, military draft, industrial draft. He’s going to do all this stuff, not because it’s the nature of kingship as such, but because of the way you want a king. You want a king in place of God. Well, you want a king in place of God? Guess what. He’s going to act like a god. If you just wanted a Chief Executive Officer and you wanted a dynasty of something, God actually promised that.”

That is what he promised.

Yeah, God had told Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that kings would come out of their loins, and the law had provided for the existence of a king, and it gave very specific things. He’s got to be one of the covenant people. He can’t multiply to himself gold, offensive weapons (horses), or form national treaties (many wives).

He has to be literate because he has to be able to read the Word of God and write it out and then read it, presumptively to act upon it, all the days of his life – a very ordinary kind of king. And even when Samuel and God consent to the whole thing with Saul, they still write a covenant document to place that kingship under law. It’s a constitutional monarchy.

So God doesn’t exactly stand up and say, “Here is the only kind of civil format you may have,” but he draws kind of a broad circle and says, “Okay, there’s the circle. Make something work.” He doesn’t specify how elections are to happen. Presumably somebody voted, but you know what? The Bible never mentions voting, period.

Probably patriarchs, heads of families, but we’re not told because obviously those are minor details compared with the basic reality of people knowing and honoring the law of God from their hearts. When you have that, the details aren’t going to matter that much. When you don’t have that, all the details in the world aren’t going to fix it.

You can’t go around forcing the American Constitution on the world, saying “If you only had this, you’d have a great nation.” That was tried in South America, Mexico, and even Russia at one point.

And Africa.

It just doesn’t work because we have a different moral and religious history than the rest of the world, and it’s ceasing to work in our nation now.

The Bible’s solutions are never political, and yet we need politics. In these dark days we keep hearing, “Put not your confidence in princes.” It’s a good reminder. The Bible has things to say about civil government, but it never ever suggests that that’s the way of salvation, and that if we only had the right rulers and the right laws it would fix everything.

What we need is a new people. What we need is Christ enthroned in the hearts of a people. We need the coming of the kingdom of God.

Can we get that to happen if we just vote hard enough?

If we vote hard enough, yeah. Educate voters and cover all the conspiracies against America and against Christianity. When people realize all that, then they’ll vote right and then the New Age will dawn.

I think it’s Bob Murphy who says it, but he basically asks the question – people on both sides say, “You need to get out there and vote. If you don’t vote, you hate your country,” and all this kind of stuff. The question is basically, “Do you think that the quality of the election output is increased by encouraging people who don’t look into any of the candidates and just vote the party line?” More people voting doesn’t mean that democracy is better now.

I always feel a little bit proud of myself when I skip over certain races like, “Oh, I didn’t actually do any research on that one. I’m not going to vote. That’s doing my civic duty!”

It’s interesting. I do that, but pride is not exactly what I feel at that point. It’s more of, “Eh, I don’t have time for that one.” It’s not enough to vote. It’s not enough to vote the party line.

This is a discussion probably for another time. I’m just going to throw this out and maybe you two will have reactions to it. The Bible does tell us that we should want and choose men who fear God and who are honest. What if we pretty well know that none of the candidates on the ballot really meet those most basic qualifications?

I think the answer depends on what you expect out of the outcome. If you really expect that we are the people of God and that we really deserve to have godly rulers, then probably you shouldn’t vote for anybody and wait for the next election to get a better slate of candidates. If you realize we’re under the judgment of God, and God is giving us a chance to pick maybe, possibly, not for sure a lesser form of judgment, then maybe it’s okay to vote the lesser of two evils.

The assumption that we are under God’s blessing and that we have the ability to follow through with obedience when we haven’t been obeying God in every major area for a couple hundred years is presumption in the extreme, and it’s a sort of legalism. If I just dot all my i’s and cross all my t’s, then God will be required to bless me and my nation. No, he won’t actually at all. Obedience and covenant faithfulness is a lot bigger than that, and it begins with the gospel, and in fact never departs from the gospel.

If you’re not walking with Jesus in the day-to-day relationship, if he’s not your Lord and Savior all the time, then all of your vaunted political activities – God’s going to use them, but he may not in the least use them in the way you think he is. He most likely will give us exactly what we deserve, although because he’s so gracious sometimes he doesn’t, and that’s what’s really amazing.

Why is everybody in the American system a little version of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin right now? We deserve it, but God is merciful.

Even in our greatest moments, why don’t we deserve that in the first place?

Exactly. One thing we’ve already talked about and I’ll just mention in passing as we kind of move on – two things, actually. One we’ve talked about. Israel didn’t have a prison system, and when people hear the nature of the system of punishment they generally are revolted.

First of all, restitution. Some people will say, “Yay,” particularly if they’ve been robbed from. But others, as we’ve seen, will say, “Well, that’s not fair.” Yeah, like putting people in prison – that really helps everybody, doesn’t it.

Whipping. “Oh no! That’s brutal,” and putting people in jail for 20 years, where they can be homosexually raped, abused, terrorized – that’s so much more humane? Better yet, “We’ll rehabilitate them!” See previous podcast on that one. Yeah, whipping hurts, then it’s over. It’s over in a day and you’re back with your family, in your job, and probably you won’t want to do that anymore.

And there’s a limit to how much you can be whipped.

There is a limit.

Execution – again, we’ve rejected the death penalty out of hand because it’s cruel and unusual.

I think it’s interesting how the death penalty is also decentralized in Israel’s law. You have the avenger of blood – the person who is responsible. Nobody else can say they’re going to take vengeance. There’s one specific person whose job it is, and maybe they’re allowed to hire help. I don’t know, but there’s someone responsible.

But those were for cases that were not clearly what we would call first-degree murder cases, where an appeal could be made – “No, it was an accident.” Where there was actually a crowd standing around, two or three witnesses, they saw the thing, they saw it unfold, they could describe the wrath, the anger, or enough evidence to show premeditation – that didn’t go through the avenger of blood, that would go through the court system.

Speaking of decentralization, if you were going to be a witness in such a thing, you had to throw the first stone. Now, maybe we don’t want to use stoning, but be the first to throw the switch or have a series of switches and the witnesses throw the first few and the judge throws the last one.

There are things you could do here that would be consistent with if you’re going to bear witness against someone’s life, you’re all in. You can’t just say it and walk away and let other people do your dirty work. You have to be personally involved, as does the court, as does the judge. The judge can’t just sign a paper and go off and fish. He needs to be there and see this happen, and it needs to be open and public. Again, it can’t be pushed away into some dark corner where we’re sure that everything happened quietly and civilly. Torture was right out in Israel. No torture allowed under any circumstances.

The other thing that people will balk at is penal service, but again we have prison service. People are in prison doing nothing in particular except being terrorized or being terrorizers and we’re okay with that. But having someone live and work with a family for X number of years in a productive way to regain capital and pay back a debt – that sounds too much like slavery.

Look at the prison system. That’s slavery. It really is. You put a person in a place he doesn’t want to be, and keep him there and make him to live in a particular way he doesn’t want to do. That’s what we call slavery, but we’re okay with it because we’re used to it and because we don’t call it that anymore, but the 14th amendment is very specific. It forbade involuntary servitude, except in cases of civil punishment – in other words, prisons. So the 14th amendment did not undo portions of the 13th. The 13th ended slavery, the 14th granted civil rights, and so on. Between the two there was still this recognition.

We have slavery, we just don’t call it that. In America we have learned to respond to word triggers. You call it this, it’s okay. You call it that, and all hell breaks loose. Lewis says something like that in That Hideous Strength. We must not experiment on children, but give them a free education in an experimental school and it’s alright and great, and so on.

Then the last thing is charity. The civil laws in Israel provide for charity, but they don’t force it. It’s sort of, “Here’s what you should be doing, and if you’re not doing it, your neighbors are going to notice and your church elders may have words with you,” but there’s no clear civil punishment nor extensive civil legislation.

For instance, there were the gleaning laws. This applied obviously to when there was agriculture going on. You’ve got a field. You harvest the stuff but don’t try to get it all. Don’t go back and get what you forgot. Leave it so the poor can come in and work and pay their way through life, rather than simply take free handouts.

On the other hand, there was the third-year tithe. Every third year the whole tithe went locally to people you knew who were poor, and it was free. Now if you’re just down on your luck, as it were, that can capitalize you to start a business to get back on your feet. On the other hand, if you really can’t work then you’re going to have to figure out how to spread that out over the next couple years and be a wise administrator of these funds you’ve been entrusted with, because it’s not going to be there every single day. You have to learn to be frugal with that.

Then the law encouraged non-interest loans for poor people, which would be canceled at the end of sixth year on the sabbath year, so there were lots of things the Bible did to encourage care for the poor, but it didn’t mandate that the civil government had to go around and check that people were doing it. God simply said, “And if you don’t, I’ll make sure that your wives become widows and your children become orphans, because this is the way the system works.” It was more of a religious commitment than a political imposition.

I’m sure there are things we’ve left out and things we could talk about, but in broad strokes that’s Israel’s theocracy. As I said at the beginning, it’s awfully libertarian compared to anything the world has ever known. It’s very limited in what it requires, and yet from the late ‘70s on, since the rise of the Religious Right and the death of the Religious Right, there was this great fear that Christian conservatives were going to take over the country, turn it into a theocracy, and kill all of their opposition.

No, that was never really on anybody’s agenda. Mostly it was scale down civil government, stop abortion, maybe toughen up some drug laws, and take a second look at capital punishment for murderers. Compel Christianity? No.

Can’t do that. It doesn’t work.

Yeah. Teach it as the religion of the land? No. Maybe allow creation to be taught as an alternative hypothesis in public schools? More likely just get rid of the public schools and throw it back on the free market.

See also Episode 50.

For our audience, I never know what Emily is going to post as a meme until I see it, so I’m always excited to look.

That also means he’s not responsible for it. If you’re going to be mad at it, be mad at me.

And some of them I look at and – there’s one that you’re still going to have to explain to me that I don’t understand, but we’ll talk about that later – but I did appreciate one of the last ones you put up, where the evangelical church is embodied in someone who I don’t recognize but probably should, and he turns and shoots something that’s labeled “God’s law” or something like that, and then turns and says, “I don’t understand why…” – what was it?

“What’s wrong with America” or something. What he shot was God’s law as the moral authority or the standard of morality in America, and then he turns to the camera and says, “I can’t imagine what’s wrong with America,” or something like that.

I would like to jump off of that and say that what we’ve been talking about – it’s easy to look at the pagan world, look at unbelievers, look at humanists and say they reject God’s law and they get what they deserve, but the truth is that the Church for a long time has been doing the same thing.

We acknowledge God’s authority over our private lives and our consciences, at least to some extent, but when we look at the world beyond us, we in good American fashion say, “Well, they never voted for God so they really shouldn’t have to obey him, nor should we force our religion on them,” without clearly understanding that every law code is the formulization of a religion. It’s religion brought down to legal terms. Every law code says, “There’s a God behind this that says thou shalt and thou shalt not.”

As Christians look at the Bible, they for a long time now have been afraid generally of imposing it on other people because, again, the first amendment. “These people aren’t Christians. We can’t force them to act like Christians” – forgetting that God does own the world, that Jesus does have all power in heaven and earth. But then secondly, and far worse, is we look at ourselves and say, “Yeah, law? That’s an Old Testament thing. All those weird quirky laws about restitution and penal service and two or three witnesses – maybe that’s interesting…

Stoning people.

Stoning people, yeah. “What’s all that about? That’s old-fashioned and kind of cruel and barbaric Whatever it may have been once, it might have been okay for those people, although we don’t understand what God was up to. God obviously has grown up and gotten nicer and clearer and cleaner and more direct, and what he wants is to have his Spirit in our heart, leading us to do the loving thing.”

Which leaves us with a question of, in general, how should we treat murderers, child molesters, and pedophiles? Does God have a solution? Are these things even wrong as far as God is concerned? And if they’re wrong, then surely hasn’t God told us how wrong they are? I mean do they deserve a swat, a slap on the wrist, a fine? How do we know what God thinks of them and with which severity we may properly respond, without ourselves becoming wicked, sinful, tyrannical? And where exactly are we going to find this?

On the one hand, it would certainly be a mistake to take the Old Testament case laws, Book of the Covenant and all that, and cut and paste it into the civil laws of modern nations, if only for the reason that so many of the case laws are tied in with the tabernacle, the priesthood, the land, and that whole redemptive economy, and yet, on the other hand, Jesus and Paul both quoted from the case laws.

Jesus quotes from the laws against juvenile delinquency. “He who curseth father or mother, let him die the death.” Paul picks the obscure one. “Don’t muzzle the ox that treads the corn,” and applies it to paying pastors in the church. So obviously there is a use for these things. Now, the church has not done a whole lot in trying to figure it out.

Well, not lately.

Not lately. The Puritans worked on it some, and the Westminster Standard, if you read the proof texts, did take them seriously as far as the general equity of them. That is, what was God getting at? What was not redemptively qualified by time and place? So there are parts where we can start. Some of the confessions of the Reformation do make use of the Old Testament in showing us what civil justice would look like. We could at least start there and begin to build.

Rather than enshrine American tradition as, “Well, obviously America is the chief pinnacle of God’s workings with men, and if it’s not in the American Constitution it’s not Christian,” well, maybe not. Maybe the Bible doesn’t mention America. That bothers Christians a lot, that America is not in Bible prophecy. I’ve actually seen attempts to put America in Bible prophecy.

I think you’ve made everyone from my last church mad.

Okay.

Tell them to email us.

They’re not listening.

This was obscure, but I’ll throw it out as an example. Pat Robertson was doing a panel discussion with someone who apparently been reading Barry Fell’s books on America B.C. and so on, that argued for an earlier European presence in America before Columbus. In the book it suggests that, for instance, the Phoenicians and others had come to America and settled there.

Pat Robertson latched onto that and said, “Oh, so in other words, in that time when Ezekiel’s writing, what would become America was actually Phoenician colonies,” and he goes down the list of nations listed in Ezekiel during the invasion of Gog and Magog. He said, “So that’s how America appears in prophecy. The only way to define it was in terms of the civilizations who already had colonies in the New World, so when Gog and Magog invade Israel, and the young lions of these nations say, ‘What are you doing?’ that’s really America stepping in and saying, “Why are you invading Israel?’”

Oh my. No.

That probably was not even worth the discussion, but no, it’s not remotely.

When I do timelines, and you may remember this when you were in my class, I don’t stop at America. I don’t stop in the 20th century. I keep running the timeline as far to the edge of the board as I can, and then usually go “…” because it matters. If the timeline stops with us, then that gives the impression that America is the climax and the fulfillment of all that God’s been doing in the history of the world.

When you draw it on into the distant future and you see the possibility of thousands of years lying ahead of us and realize that America’s only been here for a couple hundred, then suddenly America doesn’t look like as big a deal anymore. America will be what God wants it to be, and our side of that is the wicked will be turned to hell and all the nations that forget God. We have choices to make as a people, and God’s plan doesn’t rest on them.

Thank God for that. I don’t want any of God’s purposes resting on human hands. We don’t do a very good job.

That is all the time we have for tonight, so let’s do some rapid-fire recommendations, if you have them.

I can ask a question in lieu of recommendations. I’m a little behind, but I’m very close to finishing my reading the Bible in a year plan for the first time in my life, and the problem that I encountered pretty early on is I was trying to stay on schedule, which is pretty accelerated. You could read the Bible in faster than a year, for sure, but it was faster than I was used to going and I found that I could not stay on schedule and take all the notes that I wanted to take.

Oh, you’re not talking about just reading. You’re talking about studying. That’s a big difference.

Okay, that was my question. How do you do both?

I wouldn’t try to study the whole Bible in a year, for one.

I was going to say if you want to do two things concurrently, I think the best method would be you do the ‘read the Bible in a year’ and then you have the first year of a 5-year Bible study plan next to it that’s happening at the same time.

Yeah, I would agree. I read generally two chapters or more, depending, from the Bible every day but Sunday, which is weird, but I generally get through the Bible once in a year, but I’m reading. Now, it helps that I’ve been reading the Bible now for a long time. I started when I was 16, and most years, except for the first few years of my marriage when I was reinventing my life, I did that.

That does happen.

Yeah. My wife set a very Godly example for me because she’d get up in the morning and read her Bible. I was used to reading in the evening, and when I got married I found out that I was tired and sleepy and didn’t do it, so I started imitating her, so that began to get me up in the morning.

Setting a schedule is good. Doing things regularly is good. God has made us creatures of habit and we should build on that and use it, but as far as Bible study is concerned I think Bryan is right, setting a plan. Five years sounds imminently reasonable for your first time through.

I would do maybe 15 minutes in the morning, and then immediately after supper or sometime when you’re not mentally dead yet you set aside 15 minutes and you’re going to go a chapter at a time or half a chapter at a time. Try something like that.

That’s a good thing. We all collectively recommend Bible reading and Bible study.

That’s two different things.

That’s two different things, connected by a third thing which is called prayer, where we ask God first to keep us alert, awake, and focused, and then to show us what we need to know from this particular passage and how it relates to other passages.

A third thing that I think will come out of Bryan’s recommendation eventually is as your reading goes ahead of your studying, you’re going to start encountering other passages that will reflect back on what you’re studying, so your reading and your studying will begin cross-illuminating one another. You’ll say, “I’m in Proverbs. Why does Acts suddenly seem so relevant?” because we tend to think that some books are more connected to some books than others. There’s some truth to that, but it’s all the Word of God.

Sometimes we do need to say, “Why should you read Romans and Ecclesiastes at the same time?” That one I can probably actually answer. Ezekiel and Isaiah – that one’s easy.

These are our recommendations, and although they don’t come directly from God, we think he may approve.

Thank you, guys, so much. This has been a great discussion. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. I had forgotten to say that for several episodes in a row and was called out. I felt terrible because I hadn’t realized that I had stopped saying it. I was always grateful to David in my heart.

[laughing]

What’s funny?

I’m sorry. I’ll explain it later.

All right. Thank you also to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in. If you have thoughts or questions or comments about anything we’ve said, just send us your notes. Our email is [email protected].

You can visit our website if you’d like to join our financial supporters with a recurring monthly gift, that’s anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion. Thanks so much. Hope to see you next week.