Axe to the Root with Bojidar Marinov | Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Network

Welcome to Episode 27 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 20 minutes we will be talking about Biblical punishment for certain crimes. Not for all crimes, although, I know, a thorough study of Biblical punishments will have to include a comprehensive study of the Biblical justice and its practical measures in the society and in the courts – I need to emphasize this, in the society and in the courts, for Biblical justice is not always through the courts, it always starts from the individuals and the family. We will focus on a limited segment of crimes, those that have to do with destruction of economic value in one way or another. We will show how our modern pagan, barbaric civil government deals with these crimes – if it deals at all – and we will see what Biblical justice for such crimes is. We will certainly not be able to cover all of it for the short time of 20 minutes, but at least, on this issue we have a good deal of literature where we can go and learn what the Biblical view on it is. So, for those of you who have never been exposed to concrete Biblical solutions to issues of justice, let this episode serve only as an appetizer, and open your mind to further education in Biblical justice and righteousness. And hopefully, to practical solutions in your particular area of influence and work and political participation.

A question was raised by a couple of listeners about a previous episode of Axe to the Root, the one about the prison-industrial complex. They got the impression that what I am advocating, ultimately, is the abolition of the prison system – just as I am advocating for the abolition of police and other executive functions of the civil government. That impression is perfectly correct. The Law of God mandates no prison system, and in fact, the very nature of civil government as commanded by God forbids the existence of such an institution. Israel had no jails and no prisons, even as as the Kingdom of Judah in Jeremiah’s time, for all the idolatrous and pagan practices and injustice introduced by Israel’s leaders, she still had no jails nor prisons. We know it because when the government needed to stop Jeremiah from preaching, they had no place to lock him up so they had to throw him in an unused water cistern (Jer. 38). Prisons and jails were a pagan practice, and they were completely contrary to God’s system of justice and social order. As a matter of fact, originally, the American colonies and the early Republic had no prisons nor jails; the introduction of prisons and jails came later, as the secular humanism of the Enlightenment took over the civil government in the United States. Modern Christians and conservatives in general who support the existence of a prison system are at best schizophrenic, not to mention perhaps hypocritical and evil; there is nothing remotely Christian or conservative in the existence of prisons and jails.

The question of a few of my listeners, then, was, “How do we deal with some crimes, then?” Obviously, we know that certain crimes should not be punished with prison but they should get the death penalty: murder, rape, kidnapping. But what about theft? What about injury, like getting in a brawl and knocking off someone’s tooth or other permanent or temporary injuries? What about destruction of property or damages to property and body due to carelessness or criminal negligence? What about all these cases where the crime is serious but as grave as to require the death penalty? We can’t declare the same penalty – death – to all the crimes, that would be a violation of the Biblical principle that the punishment should fit the crime; otherwise, if every crime meets the same penalty, a simple thief would be encouraged to turn into a murderer if that helps him to not get caught, for the change from a lesser to a greater crime won’t change his verdict in court. So, if there are no prisons, how do we deal with these lesser crimes?

One listener even suggested that I advocate the Shariah solution to theft, cutting off the right hand of the thief; he couldn’t see a third way between the injustice of prison time and the injustice of mutilation. So, her conclusion was, unless we want to fall into the barbarity of Islam, we should accept the supposedly “civilized” solution of “removing the thief from the society for the purpose of correction.”

This is, of course, the central mantra of the modern humanistic social order in respect to prisons: They serve the double purpose of removing the criminal from the society and his moral correction. The assumption, of course is, that a thief should be removed from the society – just like a murderer – and then put in a society of other thieves, and murderers, as well, in order to be corrected. This is the self-claim to divinity of the modern state: it claims it can achieve moral correction of men by controlling their environment; and then, of course, to make it even more absurd, that environment is not the environment of morally upright men engaged in productive activity, but the environment of proven criminals forced to live an unproductive, purposeless, useless lives. Surely, the state must be that powerful god walking on earth who can perform miracles with the souls of men. But then, we are not surprised that modern governments have that idea about themselves, right? After all, it is not just the prison system; everything modern governments do is the product of the same self-deification: government schools, police, welfare, economic regulations, zoning laws, etc., they are all based on the idea that the government is a god walking on earth, and therefore can do everything God in the Bible claims He does. It’s just modern government do it better, of course.

It should be obvious, of course, that removing a thief from the productive life of the society, and from the company of upright men, and placing him in the company of other criminals, in a state or purposelessness, won’t achieve anything – only blind worshipers of the state can imagine such policy would produce of moral “correction” of any sort whatsoever; except for making a murder out of a thief, perhaps. It should be even more obvious, even before we know the solution to such crimes yet, that the society is left in an even worse condition when a thief is thrown in prison. Even if we imagine that there are no corporate interests in the prison system; even if we ignore the known fact that private companies profit from incarceration; even if imagine that there is no economic benefit for anyone – and therefore there is no political pressure for higher levels of incarceration – it is still obvious that even if we take the prison system at its imaginary perfect and most idealistic state, one of the parties of the crime is always worse off: the victim of the crime. Under the mercies of the pagan justice system, the victim first suffers being robbed by the thief; then when the thief is sentenced to prison, the victim suffers again in being robbed by the greater thief – the government – to provide support for the prison system in which the government keeps the thief. In the end, society as a whole loses, the victim loses, the criminal is not given the chance to be restored in the society; the only class of people who gain are the government bureaucrats and the private companies who get paid per inmate.

There is a reason for it, of course. Under the pagan worldview, and under the pagan theory of crime and justice, the real victim of crime is the state, not the private victim. Thus, the state is the one prosecuting the thief – even if the thief has committed his crime against a private victim – and it is the state that requires satisfaction to itself, the private victim be damned. Every pagan worldview is inevitably collectivist and by default denies the legal reality or even the moral existence of the individual – even if it pays a lip service to it. Thus, we should not be surprised that in a pagan legal system, the individual victim eventually takes a double hit, while the individual criminal is locked up and not allowed to learn and follow more moral and productive ways. It is only the government that profits from the crime, simply because it is the government that is the only acting agent in the society. The government is god.

What is, then, the Biblical view and therefore the Biblical solution to such crimes?

The first thing we need to lay down about Biblical justice is that in any crime, the civil government is not a party. In fact, the Law of God doesn’t recognize such an entity at all. Civil government, as an institution, is limited to the person of the judge in the court, who is also the ruler mentioned in Romans 13. It is not acknowledged in the Bible as a collective entity which has legal or social personality or existence outside the personality or existence of the judge. You will not find in the Bible any mention of the “government” as a collective entity as you find mention of the church (Matt. 18:17) or the family (Eph. 3:15). The government is only in the person of the judge – or of the king, as the supreme judge, not as executive power.

Thus, in the Biblical Law, there can be no such thing as a crime against the government; the crimes are always individuals against individuals. On one side of the line is the criminal, no matter what organization he is part of, and on the other side is the victim. The case is brought against the criminal by the victim, and it is the victim who needs to receive satisfaction.

But what is that satisfaction when it comes to lesser crimes like theft or criminal negligence or injury? Obviously, it can’t be prison, for, as we already saw, it is only an additional burden, a second robbing of the victim. It doesn’t right any wrongs, it is doubling the wrong, by adding the state to the number of criminals. It is an action in the wrong direction. The Biblical direction, instead, is in compensating the victim, first, and then, second, inflicting on the criminal the same punishment he wanted to inflict on his victim. The victim, thus, is restored, and the criminal, by being punished, discouraged from future crimes.

Thus, the general Biblical punishment for the crime of theft is double, or 200% restitution: Exodus 22:7and other verses point to it. A man, for example, steals a car and later is caught, taken to court, and convicted on the words of at least two or three witnesses, once convicted, the punishment is not prison, nor payment to the state. The punishment is payment to the victim to the value of two such cars as the stolen one. The victim is then compensated, both for the lost car and for the psychological inconvenience and perhaps also the cost for investigation. The criminal is worse off than before, by the same degree of loss he wanted to inflict on another, following the Biblical principle of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” But even more than just punishment or restitution: there is true restoration: the victim is restored to wealth, and the criminal is restored to his full status in the society. Once he has paid double for his crime, he is again a free person, and he can start h is life over, without any previous criminal guilt. The Law of God, thus, is concerned with restoration more than anything else; punishment – except for certain crimes which allow for no restoration, as murder or rape or kidnapping – has the secondary and final purpose to restore the criminal back to a state of integrity and freedom. “Go and sin no more.”

The problem modern readers of the Law of God would see here is this: What if the criminal has spent the stolen money and has no assets to be confiscated for restitution?

The answer to this is in Exodus 22:3: “If he owns nothing, he shall be sold for his theft.”

The Law of God prohibits permanent, chattel slavery. The slavery of the antiquity would have fallen under the prohibition of kidnapping – after all, a person can’t be made a slave unless he is deprived of his liberty, which is the definition for kidnapping. But the Law mandated a different kind of slavery or servitude: slavery for meeting economic obligations. A man could be sold in slavery for not repaying his debt: for members of Israel, such slavery was to be limited to 7 years (which was an incentive for foreign slaves to become believers and be circumcised). But there was a slavery which was not limited in time, and that was the slavery for restitution: if a criminal had to repay a debt incurred on him by the court, for his crimes. So, if a criminal has no assets to pay double restitution (possibly because he has spent them, or perhaps because he has hidden the stolen goods), he should be offered for sale as a slave, for the outstanding amount. If a business owner is willing to take him and pay for it, the proceeds must go to the victim, and the criminal himself is forced to work for his payment at a negotiated wage, until he repays his new owner.

Such a solution is difficult for modern readers to comprehend – after all, we are done with slavery, aren’t we? Slavery is a thing of the past, isn’t it? How can we ever call for the restoration of slavery; we can’t allow slavery to raise its ugly head again, right?

Wrong. Slavery has never left our civilization. What we abolished in the past was private, economic slavery; the slavery of one individual to another for economic purposes. In most cases in history, whether chattel slavery or indentured servitude were private, as part of private economic transactions and undertakings. That slavery is gone, but only to be replaced with government slavery; that is, slavery to the civil government, in many more uneconomic forms, as part not of economic activity and productivity, but as part of executive policies. That slavery today is called . . . prison. Those today who argue against the restoration of Biblical slavery to make restitution to the victims, are the same who support government slavery where restitution is paid to the state and its cronies. Slavery, thus, has not departed from our civilization; it has only adopted a different form, following our modern deification of the state as the ultimate victim of all crime.

Thus, the Biblical solution to theft really doesn’t call for a restoration of slavery; it calls for the abandonment of the statist idolatry; slavery is still here, and still the same. The Law of God mandates that we change the God of our justice system.

Some may claim that there is a special kind of restitution in the Bible, namely four-fold and five-fold, as in Exodus 22:1, “If a man steals an ox or a sheep and slaughters it or sells it, he shall pay five oxen for the ox and four sheep for the sheep.” While it may be tempting to decide that this is the general principle, it is not supported by other verses in the Bible. This verse rather establishes a special kind of protection of sheep and oxen, and such protection is more ceremonial than ethical/judicial. God threatened special sanctions for the theft of these animals because they were symbolic in the Temple worship; sheep and oxen signified certain realities. Such a law, then, would be one of the “shadows” of the Old Testament economy, and should be taken to be a permanent part of the Law in the NT.

Another kind of restitution, though, is more important to us: the one-fifth, or 120%, restitution. Leviticus 6:1-6 and Numbers 5:6-7 speak about it; both passages connect the one-fifth restitution to a voluntary confession of crime. In other words, if the criminal didn’t wait to be caught by the investigators and drawn to court, he could lower his liability by confessing the crime and agreeing to do a 120% restitution. (As a side note, the requirement for two or three witnesses precluded any conviction based on self-incrimination or confession; thus the Bible protected suspects from torture or other means to forced self-incrimination.) The crime was committed so he was still liable to pay penalty. But he was rewarded with a lower penalty for taking the step of saving the society the expenses for investigation and court procedures. The victim was compensated fully, plus 20%, and both were restored to full status in the society.

Another category of crimes that required restitution were body injury and specifically mutilation. The exegesis of this part is rather lengthy for a short episode, but Gary North has developed it in his economic commentary on the case laws of Exodus 21-40, previously titled Tools of Dominion. To make a concise summary of his conclusions, the Law of God provided two options when a bodily injury was inflicted: one was a corresponding bodily injury on the criminal, the other was an economic payment which would satisfy both the victim for his economic loss in both medical treatment and in lost productivity (remember, a one-eyed or one-armed man is less economically productive than a man whose eyes and arms are in place). Despite the prominence of the principle “eye for eye” in the Law, we have not a single example in the Bible of meeting out the physical punishment; apparently, in all cases, the victim preferred the economic payment. Such payment was also due when the injury or even death (the payment was made to the family) were not intentional. Restitution was also owed when a slave was killed (Deut. 21:32, for example). This has been a propaganda point for many atheists (“look, the Bible considers the slaves less than human!”) but this law had again a very firm foundation in the principle of restitution and restoration. It had nothing to do with the human value of the slave, it had to do with the Biblical concept of slavery. The slave could be a slave only if he was repaying some form of debt, and therefore the mere execution of the murderer would have left him without restitution. The amount of payment was not small, and thus, the murderer risked to be turned into a slave himself, and himself experience the hardship of servitude.

This economic restitution for injury was designed, obviously, to keep the society productive. While the proper principled response to bodily injury should be a corresponding bodily injury, the society can’t profit from it. Thus, God allows for redemption to be made, a payment to make it all good, and at least to a certain extent restore the functionality of the society without a loss of productivity.

And the last main category of crimes that required restitution was the intentional or unintentional destruction of property. When a person destroyed the crops of his neighbor by starting a fire on his own property, he was supposed to restore to his neighbor the corresponding amount from his best crops. If he took his neighbor’s goods under his stewardship, he was liable for the loss of these goods – and, if criminal negligence could be proven, he was liable to a double payment, as in the case of theft. If he allowed his ox to roam freely and injure another person’s ox, he was to pay the price for it. Etc., etc.

Restitution was also owed for certain infractions against the Temple as well, like failure to keep one’s oaths. I am not sure if that today would translate in certain restitution to the institutional church – my instinct tells me it shouldn’t, for the church is not an heir of the Temple but of the synagogue. But this is an issue for another topic and another episode whatsoever.

These three categories of crimes and violations are a significant part of all crimes that would be committed in any society. Murder and kidnapping would be minimal in any society that follows the Law of God (because of the death penalty attached). While we can’t expect that crime can be completely exterminated in any society, we can safely predict that in a righteous and just society it could be brought down to manageable levels, and to the majority of crimes being lesser, economic crimes. Many of these crimes, of course, would be violations that are rather unintentional; still damaging to health and destructive to property, perhaps, but not grave enough to warrant capital punishment. Since such crimes wouldn’t have a permanently destructive effect on the society, God’s system of justice in His Law provided for true restoration in the form of restitution to the victim. And, at the same time, true restoration for the criminal, for after making his restitution, he would be a free man again, free of any guilt before the society. (Although, he could still have guilt before God.) Social peace would be preserved, and the state wouldn’t be able to accumulate the wealth to become large and tyrannical and self-deifying. The victims, and the true covenant representatives of God in the court trials, would have bean satisfied, and God, the ultimate victim of all crime, would have been satisfied. And He would pour His blessings on such a society which keeps His standards for justice.

Thus, our modern system of prison punishment for theft and other lesser crimes is not only un-Biblical, it is very self-consciously idolatrous. Those pastors and church-goers who support its existence – just like those who support the existence of executive government and of police – are no different than those who twist the concept marriage to include “sodomite marriage.” It is all idolatry, designed to opposed the Gospel and the Law of God.

Throughout the United States, individual judges here and there have seen the injustice in the current system and have tried a supposedly “novel” approach: restitution. Quite a few petty criminals have also offered to make restitution instead of being sent to jail. But in most places, the justice system is in stark rebellion against the Law of God. In a recent case in Louisiana, a homeless man entered a bank with a fake gun in his hands and demanded all the money in the cash register. There wasn’t much money, and he walked out with $150. An hour later he regretted it and returned to the bank, offering back the money. The bank manager – the true victim – took it back and refused to file a complaint. The local cops, though, took the man to court, and the judge sentenced him to 20 years in prison. The Biblical penalty would be restitution of $150 plus 20%. In the final account, the bank lost, and the homeless man lost, while government cronies will receive tax money by having that man in their prisons, for 20 years. Justice was defeated in that case.

Justice should be preached from our pulpits today. And the Biblical principle of restitution and restoration should be an integral part of our preaching. Where the churches fail to preach that, and fail to speak prophetically to the state, encouraging and leading their flocks to restore justice in the land, Gods will eventually intervene to restore it. And He is not to be mocked, and His intervention won’t be polite and nice.

For reading this week, I will assign Gary North’s economic commentary on the case laws of Exodus 21-40, formerly known as Tools of Dominion. It is a rather fat book, but you can read it one bit at a time. Pay attention to the principle of restitution, and to the concept of restoration in Biblical Law. A return to these principles will be our key to restoring justice in the land. Nothing else will suffice.

And again, help me deliver the message of this justice to Eastern Europe, where such justice has been denied for much longer than in the US. Visit BulgarianReformation.com. Subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. There’s a world to be conquered; and some battlefields are ripe for victory, at a very low cost. God bless you all.

Welcome to Episode 26 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 20 minutes we will be talking about ancient history. You know, Egypt, Sumer, Babylon, the Hittite Empire, Crete, Troy, and, not to forget, Israel. That ancient history that is, lamentably, so far away from us and so hidden from our view in many respects – although, we shouldn’t be surprised that it is so hidden given that we today discover important things that have happened just 50 years ago and yet are just as well-forgotten by most of us. Let alone things that happened 3,000 years ago. And yet, that history is so important to us today. And since it is so important to us today, it is so hotly contested between different gangs of historians; and of course, so hotly contested between the united gang of all academic historians and the Biblical record. Three quarters of the Bible is either history or prophecies about that specific period of time that is today below our time horizon. Therefore, the credibility and the reputation of the Bible as the Word of God is directly related to its truthful representation of that ancient history, of which we know so little – I mean, so little from sources outside the Bible. And most of those sources are just fragmented pieces with vague testimonies in languages that are long dead, and translators seldom agree on their true interpretation. If you are a Christian, this situation is just fine with you: that’s what you expect, after all, that God would preserve His own Word throughout His own history which He controls absolutely with His own hand, while He will make sure to destroy all the words of mere men – except where He is pleased to leave bits and pieces of them, some for support of His Word, some simply for entertainment, to laugh at the feeble presumption of men.

The deal is much tougher, of course, if you are an academic historian and your tenure and very survival in the academic world depends on how zealously vociferous you are against the Bible and its truthfulness. By the standards of the modern academic world, you are supposed to do everything you can to re-interpret the evidence of historical data to speak against the Bible’s account of ancient history. That isn’t an easy task, given that all you have outside the Bible are small bits and pieces, most of which have no relation to each other. To construct anything comparable to the Bible in consistency and believability, and yet opposed to the Bible, you have a gigantic task ahead of you. Imagine if you have small pieces from different artifacts: a ceramic amphora handle, a small piece of papirus, a metalornament, a piece of charcoal, and a stone ax, and you are asked to use these pieced to construct a marble vase to compete against another marble vase which has been preserved entire and has been in plain view of everyone for thousands of years. What can you do with such an impossible task? Well, the answer of the modern academy is to use all these different pieces to put together some form of a monster, and then make everyone’s tenure and reputation dependent on calling it a “marble vase.” Once they have a critical number of so-called “historians” who value tenure more than integrity and logic, they now have their monster called a “marble vase.”

That’s how we have today our textbooks of ancient history that have no mention of the Bible as the only remaining unbroken consistent record of ancient history. And that’s why modern interpretations of ancient history have no place for the Bible in them. And that’s why so often we as Christians get the following retort: “The Bible can’t be true because God didn’t give Moses the Law on the mountain. Moses just copied or compiled the Law following previous patterns, like the Code of Hammurabi, written 500 years prior. The heathen nations had their law codes centuries before the Exodus; they didn’t need the God of the Bible to know how to make laws and how to apply them.” Many theologians have adopted the same interpretation of ancient history – and no, I am not talking about liberal theologians. I am talking about supposedly conservative, and even Reformed theologians, like Meredith Kline of the Westminster Seminary West, who wrote a whole book defending the idea that the Law of God given to Moses was “patterned” after the ancient treaties in the Middle East.

In order to deal with this argument, and in order to restore the real Biblical view on these matters, we will have to delve into ancient history. We won’t be able to cover it all, but I will attempt to cover enough to prepare you for further studies, in case you decide they are important. I will only say that history is rather overrated among many Christians today – take this from someone who has wasted much of his life studying in excruciating detail at least two historical periods, pre-Classical and Classical Greece and Rome, and WWII. While some knowledge of history is important, keep in mind that God is not a peddler of antiques; His truth doesn’t depend on whether we have found the Ark on Mount Ararat, or whether we have dug out Jehu’s latrine. Some of it, though, may be beneficial for limited purposes, and therefore, we will look into it here.

In the modern academic version of the events, the Exodus – and therefore the giving of the Law – happened in the middle of the 13th century BC, during the 19th Egyptian dynasty, which had two rulers known to us from Egyptian sources by the name Ramesses. Ramesses I, the founder of the dynasty who ruled for only two years, and then his grandson, Ramesses II, or the Great, a powerful ruler who ruled for 66 years and fought many wars of conquest on all the borders of his kingdom, mainly in Asia. The connection is made with the name of one of the storage cities in Exodus 1:11, Raamses. Since Ramesses II was a powerful king, and since there are no records of any significant catastrophe – natural disaster or military defeat – during his reign, the conclusion of the historians is that the Exodus must not have been as described in the Bible, and was rather a small local event, exaggerated in later Hebrew folk tales.

There is a problem with placing the Exodus in the 13th century, though, and that problem is in the Bible. 1 Kings 6:1 specifically declares the date of the Exodus to be 480 years before Solomon began building the Temple. There is no disagreement among scholars as to the dates of Solomon’s reign: It lasted for 40 years, from 970 to 930 BC. Since Solomon already had the material for the Temple from his father David, the construction must have started almost immediately after he became a king, a little after 970 BC. Roll back 480 years, and we have the Biblical date for the Exodus at about 1450 BC, or about 2 centuries before the date given by modern historians. In his Annals of the World, Bishop James Ussher dates the Exodus in 1491 BC, and the beginning of the Temple in 1012 BC, that is, 40 years earlier than the modern agreed dates for Solomon’s reign. Either 1450 or 1490 BC are a date that is a little too early for modern historians, however. None of them is willing to accept that the Bible is a reliable testimony when it says that the Exodus happened 480 years before Solomon.

Why? What is the problem with placing the Exodus in the 15th century BC?

For secular historians, the problem is that according to the academia-accepted chronology of Egypt, the 15th century is the century of an even more powerful dynasty, the 18th dynasty. And the pharaoh who ruled over most of the 15th century was Thutmose III, son and co-ruler with his mother, the most powerful Queen of Egypt, Hatshepsut. This dynasty saw no natural disasters nor military defeats either, and, in addition to it, its reign extended deep into Asia: Under Thutmose III, Egypt controlled not only Canaan but also Syria, and the Egyptian army even crossed the Euphrates River twice in its campaigns. Obviously, it wouldn’t make sense for Israel to cross the Red Sea to go to Canaan, for Canaan was an Egyptian territory throughout the 15th century BC; and the Pentateuch doesn’t record any Egyptian presence in Canaan in the Exodus or post-Exodus period. So, it can’t be the 15th century.

The difficulties this date poses for us, Christians, should be obvious, then. First, we have the textual problem: The 13th century date disproves the specific number in 1 Kings 6:1: 480 years between the Exodus and the Temple. Second, we have the apologetical problem: Moses just parroted laws that have been in existence for hundreds of years, without any reference to the God of the Bible. Third, the problem with the historical narrative: There is simply not enough time for all the events described between Exodus 1 and 1 Kings 6 to have really happened – specifically the books of Joshua and Judges. So, how do we answer these arguments?

The answer has been given by two scholars, the Seventh-Day Adventist Donovan Courville and the secular Jew Immanuel Velikovsky. Both pointed to the underlying problem among all historians: all modern histories and chronologies of ancient history rotate around the accepted Egyptian chronology. The problem is, Egyptian chronology, as it is accepted today, and as it dominates all textbooks of ancient history, is unreliable. In fact, it can not be possibly true, even if it is taken on its own, without comparing it to the Bible or to anything else. The measuring rod secular historians use about dates and times in ancient history is crooked. It shows nothing of value. It is arbitrary. It depends on the personal whim of the historian to decide how to use it. But also, in general, it is false.

Believe it or not, just as with the supposed chronology of evolution, modern Egyptian chronology comes not from any scientific discoveries or measurements but from fragments from the work Aegyptiaca of a writer who lived in the 2nd or 3rd century BC – long after all the events in Egyptian history were forgotten – by the name Manetho. Manetho was an Egyptian priest of the old dying religion – the same religion of the Egyptian magicians, whose staffs were consumed by the staff of Moses. In his time, his old religion of the sun-god Ra faced severe competition on several fronts. The Hellenization of the Middle East after the conquests of Alexander the Great made the Greek gods appear much more attractive – pagans have always judged the power of their gods by the military successes of their worshipers. Egypt was under the Greek dynasty of the Ptolemies, and Manetho himself wrote in Greek. Zoroastrianism was making its inroads from Persia. Different mystery cults were capturing the minds of many of the intelligentsia. And last, but not least, the religion of the Hebrews with its one and jealous Creator God was spreading everywhere: Jews in Alexandria accounted for more than a quarter of the population of the city; and through birthrates and proselytizing, were gaining strength everywhere in the Mediterranean.

Manetho’s solution to preserving the appeal of his religion was to prove it was the most ancient of all religions by showing that Egypt was the most ancient of all cultures – thus, he set out to compile a list of all rulers of Egypt back to the very beginning. He took all the existing historical records of rulers of Egypt at the time, and made a list of 26 dynasties, stretching more than 3,000 years back from his own time. He made those dynasties all follow one after another, and made every ruler follow the previous ruler, adding up their years to come to a total number of years for the history of Egypt. Thus was Egyptian chronology born, more than 3 centuries after the death of the last truly Egyptian Pharaoh. And this is the chronology that became the foundation for modern Egyptian chronology that historians oppose to the Bible.

There is a problem with it, however. In fact, several problems. The first is that the ancient Egyptians didn’t have the same view of time and therefore the same counting of time as we have today. They didn’t count years from a starting date. They didn’t see succession of rulers in the same way as we do. They could also have several rulers ruling at the same time – for example, Thutmose II ruled as co-regent with his mother, Hatshepsut. They mentioned there was an overlap but they never said how many years of overlap there were. Thus, the first year of Thutmose III was not the last year of his mother’s rule. This happened many times in Egypt’s history.

Second, in several periods of Egypt’s history, two or more dynasties ruled at the same time from different locations; the country was divided politically. Manetho ordered all the dynasties one after another. The truth is, several of them ruled at the same time.

Third, some of the dynasties were dynasties not of political kings but of priests of Ra, and ruled after the final conquest of Egypt by the Persian Empire in 525 BC. Thus, while Manetho tried to fit them into the period before 525, they really belong to a much later date.

Fourth, the rulers of Egypt had not one but several names. It was not unusual for a ruler to use one name to refer to himself on the inscriptions of stone in Egypt, and another name in his foreign policy. And this would often be the case with a whole dynasty. Eventually, in Manetho’s list, several dynasties were simply written down twice, once under their internal names, and then under the names they were known by the surrounding nations.

These and other problems with Manetho’s list, when added up, would produce a much shorter history of Egypt. Obviously, if rules overlap, this will shorten the time period. If dynasties rule at the same time, this will also shorten the time period. The same will happen if priestly, non-political dynasties are introduced and when dynasties are repeated.

And this completely unreliable chronology was taken for granted by the modern academia, despite its obvious flaws.

Courville and Velikovsky pointed to these flaws, and set out to produce a revised chronology of Egypt. They were ostracized by the academic community, of course, in the same way creationists are ostracized today, despite their superior arguments – or because of their superior arguments. When they were done, the chronology of Egypt looked like this: The beginning of Egypt was rolled forward by about 1,200 years, to about the time of the patriarchs. When Abraham was in Egypt, he was dealing with the rulers of Old Kingdom which was still a very crude and primitive form of state, still having some remembrance of the true God. The period of Israel in Egypt was a period of three dynasties ruling at the same time, not of one centralized monarchy. (One of the dynasties may have been priestly, not political.) Egypt had Upper and Lower Egypt at the time, and since Israel was in the Delta, the Pharaoh of the Exodus was a ruler of Lower Egypt.

The Exodus happened in the 16th or the 15th century BC, and it was a disaster for Egypt. Interestingly enough, we have an extra-Biblical confirmation for such disaster: the so-called Ipuwer Papirus, which describes the same plagues on Egypt as those in the Exodus. Historians have ignored it, because it pre-dates the Hyksos invasion: a long period of foreign occupation of Egypt by Semitic peoples, and in their version, the Exodus was much later. But in the revised chronology, the Hyksos invasion followed the Exodus, and the Hyksos took over Egypt without a fight. Remember, the army and the Pharaoh were on the bottom of the Red Sea. Are these Hyksos invaders mentioned in the Bible? Of course. The Hyksos of the Egyptian inscriptions were the Amalekites who met Israel immediately after they left Egypt, in Exodus 17, before Israel came to Sinai. We know Amalek became the first of the nations, but then it met destruction, because that’s what Balaam prophesied in Numbers 24. Indeed, the first, because for a while they ruled over Egypt, and remained there until Saul defeated their last stronghold on the eastern border of Egypt (1 Sam. 15:7). The Amalekites were the Hyksos.

This led both Courville and Velikovsky to revise another portion of secular chronology: The reign of Solomon. Under the revised chronology, the reign of Solomon coincided with the reign of that powerful dynasty we talked about, that of the Thutmoses (father and son) and their daughter and sister, Hatshepsut. Courville came to the conclusion that the father, Thutmose II, was Solomon’s father-in-law. Velikovsky, comparing Egyptian inscriptions with the Biblical record, came to an even more scandalous conclusion, that the Queen of Sheba – also the Queen of the South, according to Jesus – was in fact the Queen of Egypt, Hatshepsut. Velikovsky ‘s claims are not so incredible, though; he produces a wealth of evidence from Egyptian inscriptions and papyri about a trip Hatshepsut made north to a Semitic nation where she learned the wisdom of the gods. In the same way, comparing Egyptian inscriptions with the Biblical texts, and also with other extra-Biblical sources, like Herodotus and Josephus, Velikovsky came to the conclusion that Rameses II, the mighty ruler of the 19th Dynasty, is in fact the Pharaoh Necho who fought against King Josiah and mortally wounded him. Etc., etc.

Reconstructing Egyptian chronology, thus, leads us to see that secular historians have stretched ancient history beyond the historical evidence, inventing a gap of between 400 and 700 years at least. No wonder their history do not fit the Biblical narrative: they have made it up, from thin air. This gap has affected the history of other places as well. For example, anyone who knows the history of Rome knows about the gap of 400 years between the fall of Troy (in 1143 BC, supposedly) and the establishment of Rome in 753 BC. Romans considered themselves direct descendants of Trojans, and such gap would be inexplicable if they were. But the fall of Troy was dated relatively to the established Egyptian chronology, while the founding of Rome is known from Roman sources. Under the reconstructed chronology, the two get closer to each other: Troy fell in the 9th century, a generation or two before the founding of Rome.

And what about the Code of Hammurabi? Was it earlier than the Law of Moses? Not at all. The Code of Hammurabi, under the reconstructed chronology, would fall in the late 15th century, a generation or two after Moses. Moses didn’t copy from pagan sources, far from it. To the contrary, Moses was the first lawgiver, as Eusebius declares in his history, and all the other nations learned law from Moses. The world had no law, nor any legal structure, nor any concept of courts and judges and justice, before Moses came down from the mountain with the two tables in his hands. In Egypt of Joseph, no laws nor legal structure were mentioned. A man could be thrown in jail at the whim of a ruler. He could be released from jail at the whim of a ruler. He could be executed at the whim of a ruler, or he could be exalted at the whim of a ruler. No formal code of laws restrained a ruler from doing anything he wanted, to anyone. No system of laws was there to regulate personal or institutional relations. There were no courts, and no judges anywhere. If the Hebrews wanted to settle in Egypt, they had to ask Pharaoh for permission. If they wanted to pass through Edom, they had to ask the king for permission. In the time of Abraham, the king could come and take Sarah because he liked her. There was no higher law to which Sarah or Abraham could refer to protect her.

And it is here where the most important part of our history lesson comes. All the details of ancient history, all the Egypt’s dynasties, all the battles and the expeditions and the city-states and the religions of the ancient world are without much importance to a covenantal study of history. What is more important for us to know is this:

The world after the flood quickly degenerated into barbarism, darkness, and tyranny. Nimrod was the first human tyrant after the Flood, but he was not the only one. Until Mount Sinai, the concept of formal transcendent law was unknown to the world. There were societies, but there were no civilizations in the modern sense of the word; because there was no concept of Law at all. The light to the world came on that Mountain, where God first revealed His Law. And it was then copied – or at least imperfectly imitated, by other nations.

Contrary to modern historians, the emergence of civilizations didn’t happen until after the 10thcentury. More specifically, until after the reign of Solomon. The light that Moses brought down from Sinai became a beacon for the world. 1 Kings 10:23-24 speaks of Solomon that he “became greater than all the kings of the earth in riches and in wisdom. All the earth was seeking the presence of Solomon, to hear his wisdom which God had put in his heart.” All the earth. It is of that time that we have civilized activity and formal laws appearing in places not only in the Middle East, but as far as China or the Americas. In the final account, what happened on Mount Sinai and in the Exodus was a global event, which through Solomon created civilization in the world. But of this we will speak in more detail in another episode.

This week I will assign for reading a book and an article. The book is Immanuel Velikovsky’s Ages in Chaos. You can, of course, read all of his books, but this book is central, together with another one of his books, Ramses II and His Time. The article I will assign is “The Shadow of Christ in the Legal Revolutions in Greece and Rome,” by Bojidar Marinov. You can find it on my website, Christendom Restored. It is time for us all to shake off the pagan understanding of history and adopt a Biblical one.

And meanwhile, don’t forget my permanent appeal for help for my mission field. Eastern Europe needs a supply of books, translated and published in the local languages. We have done a lot in Bulgaria, and more is needed. Meanwhile, there are translation efforts underway in other places in Eastern Europe as well, and I will share with you about them in future episodes. For now, please, visit BulgarianReformation. Com, subscribe to the newsletter, and donate.

Welcome to Episode 25 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 20 minutes we will be talking about Millennials. Y’know, that generation born in the 1980s and the 1990s, who came of age – although, perhaps, not of maturity, as per their critics – in the first decade of the 21st century. (Whence the designation millennials, although, in other places of the world the word comes from a different origin, like mileuristas in Spain, referring to the 1,000 euro government welfare to those who are young and permanently unemployed.) It’s that generation that is also known for its hipster style, conspicuous with its majestic manly beards and lumberjack shirts on men whose practical experience in life seldom goes beyond mastery of little electronic gadgets. A generation that knows little about and cares even less for the gigantic conflicts of the previous century; and as a result, is so eager to repeat many of the mistakes of that century. A generation that is so irreverent to and cynical about the good old traditional collective symbols of the previous generations, and yet eager and zealous to devote itself to causes that to previous generations would seem petty and insignificant.

Actually, no. We are not going to be talking about the millennials. We will be talking about their critics instead. We will be talking about the tens and the hundreds of commentators, psychologists, media pundits, preachers, professors, pastors, politicians, etc., most if not all of them of the baby-boomer generation (in their 60s now) who just love to lambast this younger generation.

Let’s look at just a few headlines of the last few years:

Breitbart, February 15, 2015: “Millennials are the worst generation.”

Inquisitr and Washington Post in March 2015: “American Millennials Are Useless.”

Alternet in September, 2013: “Millennials are the screwed generation.”

Huffington Post in October 2014: “Millennials are messed up.”

National Post in July 2016: “This generation is well and truly garbage.”

Etc., etc., etc.

To the millennials’ credit, some of these criticisms come from millennials themselves; in fact, being the best educated generation in America’s history, their own criticism against their own generation is about the most intelligent self-criticism one can read. The millennial generation is not the self-righteous hippie generation of 50 years back. Remember the hippies? Remember their aversion to any human being that was over 40-year-old? Carlos Castaneda was 43 when he wrote his first hippie bestseller, The Teachings of Don Juan, and till the end of his career as an author he carefully maintained the image of a young man in his early 30s; if his public image reflected his true self – a middle-aged man with a successful but mediocre academic career – his market chances among his target audience, the hippies, would have been reduced to nothing. Hippies adored themselves, and they thought they were smart enough and wise enough to change the world and right all the wrongs in it without the wisdom of ages past. To compare, millennials have no such prejudices concerning age. What lurks behind the millions of selfies, is not a self-righteous, self-adoring self-confidence but rather a tacit agreement that they lack wisdom or even the self-discipline to acquire that wisdom, and a willingness to sober self-assessment. The two politicians most successful among the younger generation – Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders – are both over 70. (I was personally present when Ron Paul had his rally at the University of California, Davis. Nothing compares to the sight of 3,000 California youth taking in every word of a 70+ year old, conservative, Christian physician from Texas.) Millennials don’t seem to need critics; they are quite self-conscious of their shortcomings and can criticize themselves quite well, and they are doing it quite well. Whether that criticism can and will lead to their correction is a different issue whatsoever.

What is more important to us here is the other criticism, the one they get from the older generation, criticism coming from the same self-righteous generation which grew up in the 60s and the 70s, which wouldn’t take any criticism from their parents back then. That criticism is important to us for several reasons:

First, because it shows a conflict between two generations, and such conflict, Biblically, is always an indicator of a covenantal problem in the society. And, getting ahead of ourselves, that covenantal problem is almost always with the older generation, not with the youngsters.

Second, because such criticism can teach us something about the Biblical principle of “take the beam out of your own eye first.”

And, third, because both the criticism and the unique historical position and characteristics of the millennial generation can give us a hint as to their purpose in the plan of God. Remember what we talked about in a previous podcast, “Principles for Voting,” and the Biblical principle of “serving the purpose of God to one’s own generation.” Knowing this principle, and trying to discern the times based on it, may help us – and the millennials – grow closer to being true men of Issachar, knowing the times and knowing what Israel should do.

Any criticism against a younger generation by its seniors is a déjà-vu for me. I am myself a member of such a generation – a worthless, screwed, useless, the worst generation of all history. Not many here in the West know about this generation – only those who were born in the late 1960s and the early 1970s in Eastern Europe. We never dressed right; even worse, we let the decadent capitalist West influence our clothes and hairstyles. We never listened to the right music: waltz and marches and classic, you know; our tastes went from the movie Hair through Deep Purple to Pink Floyd’s The Wall. To add insult to the injury, all these were smuggled in illegally. We made fun of age-old traditions and we despised solemn ceremonies like the flag or the national anthem. We didn’t like the 9 to 5 jobs in the Communist plants and we didn’t attend the meetings of the Communist Youth League. We sassed cops and did pranks on our teachers. We were violent, lazy, devoid of any good taste, cynical, and we snapped back every time someone tried to upbraid us. We were the worst, the most useless, worthless, and screwed generation Eastern Europe has ever seen. So serious was the problem with the younger generation – that is, us – that in the 1980s most Communist countries created special government committees for working with the youth, and eventually, these committees were raised to the level of government ministries (Federal departments in the US). I remember clearly one of my high school administrators – a career Party apparatchik – telling us in the mid-80s, “Your generation needs to be sent to war, to learn some manners.”

Well, he got his war, but not in the way he expected. It was our generation – the worst, the most worthless, etc. – which in 1989 was on the streets protesting and bringing down the Communist regime. No need to explain, just watch some of those videos of 1989 in Eastern Europe. (Or find the video clip for the song Wind of Change by the German rock group Scorpions.) And in the following two decades, it was our generation that had to overcome the inertia and the stupor of the older generations and rebuild the economies of Eastern Europe, learning to be entrepreneurial and future-oriented, while dealing with the remains of the Communist past. And if Eastern Europe got to where it is today, relatively peacefully, it is because of that worst and most worthless generation, which came of age – physically, but especially socially and politically – in 1989.

Had I lived longer, the déjà-vu experience would have been even stronger. Conflict and distrust between generations seem to be characteristic to most eras in history. From Homer to our own times, most generations in history have seen parents complaining and distrustful of their own children, and we have seen children distrustful and resentful of their own parents. The same complaint leveled against the millennials in our own day, or against the young generation in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, has been repeated thousands of times in other periods of history, in other places and in other cultures. So prevalent is it that it is accepted for normative by most people today; it is taken for granted, as something that is normal and should be expected by default. Conflict between generations is a given.

But is it, indeed? Where does it come from, and what causes it? The Bible describes the same conflict in Micah 7:6:

For son treats father contemptuously,

Jesus then quotes the same words in Matt. 10:35 and Luke 12:53. Prophet Micah speaks these words as God’s judgment on His rebellious people; Jesus repeats them, and says that this is what He has come for: to create such conflict. He was speaking as God’s appointed agent of His judgment. To His Jewish listeners, this was a declaration of curse on their nation. He wasn’t bringing peace; he was bringing God’s war. And conflict of generations was one of the signs.

This concept is even more strongly expressed in Malachi where God directly declares that there is a direct relationship between His curse and the conflict of generations. In the last verse of the Old Testament, God declares:

He will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, so that I will not come and smite the land with a curse.

The modern patriarchal interpretations that say that this means that the fathers will exercise their role as family leaders over their sons are not supported by Biblical symbolism and etymology. The heart was the depository of faith, or trust: “if you believe in your heart,” etc. What this verse is saying, therefore, is that a blessed society is the society where there is mutual trust between generations – not more control or more power, and certainly not more distrust.

America has rich historical evidence for the relation between blessedness and generational trust, especially in its formative decades between 1750 and 1850. Reading about those years, we seldom stop to think that many of the actors on the historical scene at the time were very young men, by the standards of today. The majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were in their 20s or early 30s in 1776. Among those who fought for the new Republic, some made reputation while still being teenagers. John Paul Jones was third mate at the age of 16, first mate at 19, ship captain at 20. David Farragut, born in 1801, fought in the War of 1812 and became a ship captain at 12. And these were only the most conspicuous of all. The society at the time had scores of young men in their teens and early twenties who fought, ran businesses, and made geographical or scientific explorations.

As amazing as the spirit and the skill of these young men are, even more amazing is the level of trust they were granted by their senior in the society at the time. Benjamin Franklin, himself over 70-years-old in 1776, shows not a single sign of distrust or disrespect to his co-signers of the Declaration, some of whom were one-third of his age at the time. And he was not alone; there are no hints in the society at the time of any generational gap. If we didn’t know the real age of the participants, we could conclude from their writings and letters that they were all of approximately the same age; a 15-year-old boy commanded the same trust and respect as a 55-year-old man. Whatever the younger generation’s strengths or faults were, this trust and respect by its seniors are an amazing testimony to us today.

And it wasn’t just one generation. It was a long sequence of such generations, starting from the first centuries of Christendom. In Rome and Greece, young people were ridiculed and often exploited, economically and even sexually. (Mark, for example, Cicero’s attitude of disdain for Augustus on account of of his young age.) Fathers were expected to keep strict control over their sons and even execute them for disobedience. But Christianity changed the attitude to youth completely, making children equal to adults, and training them and trusting them as adults. Sometimes this trust went too far – as in the Children’s Crusade of the 13th century, when thousands of children were allowed by their parents to go on a crusade against the Muslims. Again, the whole undertaking was foolish, but still, the amount of trust these parents had towards their children is amazing. Such examples are prevalent in every century of Christendom; patriarchalism certainly wasn’t the norm. Everywhere, sons were leaving the home at a very early age, and trust between generations was normative. Anyone who grew up in the 60s and the 70s knows how much freedom kids had at the time to play and explore their world. Ironically, this long chain of generations that trusted each other was only broken 50 years ago with the generation that first distrusted their own parents, and now distrusts their own children.

Similar trust in children we see in the Bible. Not to take much time, I will only mention Jesse sending his youngest son David to take care of the flocks away from home. The boy had to fight bears and lions and survive, and keep his flocks intact. Again, whether it was a wise or a foolish decision, Jesse’s trust in the boy David is astounding to the modern mind. The book of Proverbs was written not to a son who stays home under his parents’ control but to a son who leaves his parents’ home and is expected to survive and thrive, spiritually and economically, in the world, on his own, in obedience to Genesis 2:24. To this we should add the example of Jesus’s parents who had trusted the boy to be on his own in the big city, to the point that they discovered his absence from the group only a few days later. And the greater society held the same respect and trust to young men, too. In Rome or Athens, a young boy left by his parents ran the high risk of being abused, or even kidnapped and sold in slavery. In Jerusalem – even the Jerusalem of the corrupt government of the Pharisees – he could command the time and attention of their finest scholars.

Trust and respect to the younger generation, therefore, is a sign of blessedness, and a sign of God’s favor on a society. Distrust, on the other hand, is a sign of God’s curse. And while it is often a temptation for the older generation to blame the younger generation for their real or imaginary faults, the reality is the sin and blame always lie with the older generation. The Luke 12:48 principle – to whom much is given, much shall be required of him – so well forgotten in our modern American culture, applies to parents and children as well: Parents carry the responsibility for any conflict of generations and any distrust.

Having said this, let’s return to our topic at hand: the millennials, and their unquestionable unique position as the worst and the most worthless generation in history. We don’t know yet, of course, if they are the worst and the most worthless – just as no one could tell for sure in 1988 whether my generation was to be the worst and the most worthless generation Eastern Europe had seen. No one knows what the future holds for this generation, and no one knows how short time we are from another historical cataclysm, in which the hidden and unseen qualities of the millennial generation will be revealed. Perhaps it won’t be a cataclysm, but a slow, painful recovery from the mess left by previous generations. We don’t know. We all know for sure that God has a unique and individual purpose for every generation, and we all know God prepares every generation – intellectually, physically, spiritually – to fulfill that purpose and meet the challenges related to it. What that purpose would be, we still can’t tell.

But we can surely tell one thing: the widespread distrust towards millennials by the older generation clearly speak – if the Bible is our standard for covenantal thinking – that there is curse on the older generation. If the older generation is the first generation in American history to wholesale despise, distrust, and dismiss their own children and grandchildren, then the threat of Malachi 4:6 has been activated, and the curse is on the older generation.

And indeed, none of the critics and the accusers of the millennial generation seems to be aware of the gigantic beam they have in their own eyes, before they start making assessments. The older generation has an enormous debt on its books, a debt that can not be easily forgotten or forgiven. It is a debt so great that it automatically annuls any and every attempt by that older generation to moralize on anyone, whether its parents or its children. I wish had the time to expound in more detail the nature of that debt, but we will only mention its main parts.

One part of this debt is the political debt. The baby-boomers and the generation X-ers sat peacefully and passively while the power grab in American history happened, and liberties were destroyed in America at unprecedented rate. The older generation waved the stars and stripes, sang about the “land of the free,” shot fireworks on Fourth of July, and yet, as the Federal government trespassed more and more boundaries, it did nothing, busy watching its ball games. Even as the police state grew and cops were given the power to arrest or kill people on the street at a mere suspicion, the older generation only “backed the blue,” instead of shooting the blue, as their forefathers did 200 years prior. Eminent domain expanded, the prison-industrial complex expanded, taxes grew, the Federal Reserve destroyed the dollar, government schools became a taxing authority, the older generation watched silently. The political environment it left to its children today is a country where the individual is more and more under the control of an all-powerful government, in all he does, thinks, and says. The complaints that the millennials are much more socialistic are hypocritical; the deep legacy of socialism in our country was promoted, encouraged, and imposed with the tacit approval of the complainers themselves.

Another part of that debt is the economic debt. It is easy to blast the millennials for their lack of skill or inability to find a permanent job, or for their lack of focus and jumping from job to job. It much harder to openly admit that the generation of their parents has lived its life subsidized by the productivity of previous generations, and borrowing against the productivity of their children. The close to $20 trillion Federal debt, plus another $5 trillion state debt, plus another $5 trillion of county and other local agencies debt, not to mention the massive $220 trillion in unfunded Social Security liabilities – all this was not created by the millennials. It was created by the same older generation which just loves to criticize them. Economically, greed is defined as a desire for increased revenue without increased productivity; the last 4 decades saw an increase in revenue that far outpaced the increased in productivity. And millennials are expected to foot the bill – to fund the retirement of their parents while getting nothing out of it. For all practical purposes, the previous generation has been way more lazy and self-indulgent. Any criticism is hypocritical.

And finally, the criminal debt. Yes, you heard me well, I said, the criminal debt. To be more precise, the mass murder that was visited upon the millennial generation. In the worst of the worst wars of the previous century, in the two most affected countries – the Soviet Union and Germany – the total death toll among the population was about 13 to 15%. That in a time of total and mass warfare, indiscriminate bombing of civilian centers, and fighting in big cities with large density of the population. In the wars of Genghis Khan, close to 18% of the population of Asia was killed. About 30% of the Jewish population of the Roman Empire died in the internecine wars between AD 65 and AD 70. But those were wars. Hold fast to your seats now. Between 1973 and 2000 – the time period when the millennial generation was born – there were 35 abortions to every 100 live births. (Just for the record, they are down to less than 20 per 100 today.) 25%, one in every four millennials was taken by his parents to the abortion mill and slaughtered on the altar of convenience. The moral importance of this atrocity can’t be overestimated; when you get on the street, to every three millennials you see, there is one who was murdered by that old generation and has never had the opportunity to live and study and work and enjoy life. In peace time. Never before has a generation lost so many of its own in peace time, to violent death. Even the Phoenicians, with their child sacrifices, didn’t murder so many of their own children. Never before has a generation been so unrelentingly persecuted and slaughtered by their own parents. All in the name of convenience. And then, we blame the millennials for wanting too much convenience.

No criticism of the millennials can be effective unless the older generation addresses this debt. Every article that criticizes youngsters while giving a free pass to the older generation should be laughed off and ignored. Any criticism should start first with repentance. That is the only way curse is lifted from a nation: repentance. And for once, the older generation must lead the way.

As for me personally, I have great expectations of the millennial generation. A generation that has been targeted so viciously for extinction by the enemy, must be a generation of strategic purpose in God’s plan for history. We just have to wait and see.

The book I will assign for reading this week is Eastern European Youth Cultures in a Global Context, a collection of essays edited by Matthias Schwartz and Heike Winkel. History seldom repeats itself – no wonder, since God is moving it forward, not repeating it – but lessons of times past can be of great use for tomorrow. And Eastern European history in the second half of the 20th century has some valuable lessons to teach.

The same Eastern Europe where my heart is, and where I want to see the Kingdom of Christ take root and expand, until it replaces the current secular humanist civilization. Which is the point of my mission work in Bulgaria, of which I have told you many times. I still need your help for a work that is a proven success. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. Help me put Kingdom-building books in the hands of the people who would build. God bless you.

The post Bashing Millennials appeared first on Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Podcast Network.

Welcome to Episode 24 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 20 minutes we will be talking about police and the Second Amendment. We will cover that cherished delusion of the majority of conservatives that police is good because cops are somehow “conservative” and are somehow “pro-Second Amendment.” We will see what the real meaning of the Second Amendment is, and we will see how we can tell a true pro-Second Amendment Sheriff from a socialist propagandist who uses pseudo-conservative rhetoric to endear himself to a specific voting block.

My previous episode on police, “Should We Have Police?”, produced certain negative reactions from people who consider themselves “conservatives.” Obviously, given that I dared touch one of the idols of modern American conservatism, the men in uniforms. And I didn’t just point to cases of police brutality, which are easier to ignore with the favorite phrase, “a few bad apples,” I presented a principled position why, from a Christian and traditional perspective (which is the professed perspective of American conservatism), police should be abolished. Even worse than that, I presented evidence that from the beginning, police was created as a socialist and progressivist experiment in social engineering, to control and subjugate what once was a free people. That must have made some people mad, for I am not just pointing to individual cases of injustice, I am pointing to the principle of injustice behind the existence of police. Thus, the supposed “conservatives” who worship cops and are eager to defend their crimes every time are now faced with a principled position that police as an institution is neither conservative nor just. And that, as a principle, defending police makes you a socialist just as much as defending government welfare, or government schools, or the FEMA camps, or government regulations, etc. For any clearly thinking person out there, defending police as a principle and being a conservative is a case of schizophrenia much more unresolvable than anything the liberal side of the spectrum can offer.

This is to be expected, of course, given that despite their rhetoric against big government, American conservatives are really not against big government, and certainly not against socialism. They just have their own version of statism and their own version of socialism. As has been said many times, American conservatives and American liberals are both statist and socialist, except that liberals envision the state as a caring mother in an apron, while conservatives envision it as a stern father in a uniform. Both want the state to control individuals; and both want to give the state all the power to enforce their preferred version of socialism. And both have their own inconsistencies and schizophrenias and self-contradictions. While conservatives like to call out the liberal schizophrenia, the conservative schizophrenia is just as bad, if not worse, and I have talked about it in other places. From their view on immigration to their view on police, conservatives most of the time speak and act contrary to their professed principles, and seldom even stop to think whether their positions make sense at all, given their own ideology.

Intellectual schizophrenia, following the epistemology of Van Til, is always the fruit of idolatry. In his books, Van Til directed our attention to the fact that sin and unbelief produce not only practical immorality but also intellectual debility; he called it the “noetic (having to do with the mind) effect of sin.” Intellectual consistency and honesty can only come from a thoroughly Biblical Trinitarian worldview. Thus, people whose minds operate in a regime of permanent schizophrenia are people whose hearts operate in a regime of permanent idolatry. I don’t have to go into exposing the idolatry of modern conservatism in this podcast, but we will do it in future podcasts.

Knowing that I have to deal with idolatry, and that idolatry is irrational, I knew that trying to reason with detractors based on principle would not be productive, so I tried with a simple question with an obvious answer: “If the Federal government announces a gun ban and confiscation of all privately-owned guns, who do you think is most likely to knock on your door to confiscate your guns: a Washington DC politician, a local member of the Democrat Party, or your local cops?”

The answer I got from all those with whom I tried to reason was this: “Our cops are different.” Yes, folks, just like “Our schools are different.” If we gather all the claims by all the Christian parents who send their kids to government schools, we will find that 99% – if not more – of all the schools in the US are different. In the same way, I bet, 99% of all the cops in the US are different, based on testimonies of defenders of police. And hardly anyone knows where those few cops are who would enforce a gun confiscation is ordered from Washington DC.

One of my correspondents referred to David Clarke, Sheriff of Milwaukee County. Clarke, who is a 100% Democrat, with deep ties within the Democrat Party, has become a conservative celebrity propped by FOX News, mainly because of his image of a tough man in a uniform – exactly the kind of image the Republican Party statists worship. He has learned to use the rhetoric of conservative idolatry, from bashing Obama, through paying lip service to the Constitution, down to talking about the Second Amendment. He even sort of passes for anti-abortion – at least, he has made a few PR statements to suggest he is. FOX News and other conservative media have dubbed him the “rebel Sheriff,” for his ostensible opposition to Obama’s Federal government and its agenda.

So, Sheriff David Clarke, my correspondent said, is a pro-Second Amendment Sheriff. We need police, because such Sheriffs as him is will protect us from the Federal government’s gun grab, when needed.

Now, if we needed to make a personal assessment of David Clarke, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that should the time come, he would put his money where his mouth is. For one, He certainly hasn’t done it when it comes to abortion: No abortion clinics have been closed in his county. Clarke has repeatedly said in respect to protests against police murders that, “If black lives mattered, they would be protesting in front of abortion clinics.” The fact that he, a man in uniform, a man of power vested in him to fight crime and injustice, relegates the resistance against murder to groups and people of no official authority or power, already shows he is a coward: in the perfect case where he could make a stand against the Federal government and protect justice against a wicked, statist agenda, he cops out and asks other people to do it for him. Right there, it is obvious that David Clarke has no guts nor intention to stand up for his principles – if he even has principles to start with – to the Federal government when needed, his militant rhetoric to the contrary. And second, David Clarke is just one of the thousands of sheriffs and police chiefs around the country who have lined up at the Federal government’s shop for military equipment worth millions of dollars, from helmets and automatic rifles to armored vehicles. Who is he going to war against? Hardly against his benefactor, the Federal government. More likely against his own constituency. Why else does he need to be better armed than the population in his county? Clarke is obviously already compromised, and relying on him and others like him to oppose the Federal government is, at best, foolish.

Leaving aside David Clarke’s personal integrity – or the personal integrity of thousands of Sheriffs and police chiefs with the same macho rhetoric and heroic self-image – the more strategic question before us is this: Are they really pro-Second Amendment? Let’s assume that they are honest; let’s accept their rhetoric at prima vista, not digging deeper in their personal reliability and honesty; are we to assume from the claims of these Sheriffs who claim to be pro-Second Amendment, that they are really pro-Second Amendment?

In order to answer this question, we need to go back to the real meaning of the Second Amendment. What was the historical context of the Amendment and of the Bill of Rights in general? What particular philosophical and ideological terms were at the foundation of the Second Amendment and the Bill of Rights in general? Who were the people who were granted the rights? Who was the “antagonist,” the entity against which the rights were to be exercised? All these questions are very important, and all these have been answered incorrectly by modern liberals in their gun-grabbing attempts. But the real problem is, conservatives have been just as bad in interpreting the Second Amendment – and it is their failure to read it for what it is is what led to our present loss of individual rights. Yes, folks, it is not the liberals, it is the conservatives’ failure that our rights have been taken away little by little. Had conservatives been consistent and faithful to the real meaning of the Amendment, we wouldn’t be here today.

Any serious analysis of it needs to start not with the specific notion of gun ownership or liberty but with the philosophical and ideological distinction, very popular at the time, popularized by John Locke, namely, the distinction between state and government. While we don’t have too much time to delve into the political philosophy of John Locke, one very important characteristic of this philosophy is relevant to us today: namely, that individuals by nature tend to organize in states. Now, “state” at the time meant not the separate institution that controlled the society judicially – that institution was the “government.” State was any politically organized community – that is, a community under a uniform law. (Uniform as in accepted as valid and binding by all or most members of the community.) Thus, any town, any county where a uniform law acted to regulate relationships between individuals, was a “state.” A “state” could be a neighborhood, but it could be a whole nation. Either way, “state” denoted the community, and it included ALL the people in it.

Now, while every group of individuals who organized politically was a “state,” not every state had a government. A government was an extra, something that some states might choose to have but some might not to. A great number of townships and counties in America at the time had no governments; they all relied simply on citizens’ courts when a crime had to be investigated and prosecuted. Meanwhile, all the other social functions were performed by private citizens or corporations. People could organize in states, they didn’t have to have a ruling elite to govern them. The difference between government and state was deeply embedded in the political thought at the time.

This difference is clearly visible in the Bill of Rights. The real antagonist, the real target of the Bill of Rights was the government. The First Amendment made it clear that the one who was targeted was the government, and it is the government that the people had the right to petition to redress those grievances. These were not grievances inflicted by other entities; for other entities – like criminals, other individuals, corporations – there were courts where the people could go to. It was the government, with its superior power, that could grow more powerful than the courts and therefore had to be restrained by the Bill of Rights. The government was the enemy. Any agent of the government was the enemy.

On the other hand, the state was not the enemy. The state was perceived to be the whole population organized in the same polity. Thus, the Second Amendment specifically establishes the state as separate from the government:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State . . .

Notice, while the First Amendment mentions the Government as a possible source of troubles and grievances, the Second establishes the necessity of the security of a free State. Obviously, state and government are not the same, for it wouldn’t make sense to first try to restrain the government and then try to make it “free.” Not to mention, make it “free” by establishing that the people – as separate from the government – have the right have their own militia (not a professional army) and have their guns.

A free State, therefore, was a community that could stand its ground against a government, foreign or domestic. To do that, it had the right to have its own organized armed forces, different and opposed to the government, and its own private guns. At the giving end of these guns was to be the free state, that is, the community and its regulated armed forces. Regulated, that is, by the community itself. On the receiving end of these guns was to be the government, and only the government. The government had its unique and reserved place in the cross hairs of the Second Amendment. And if the Amendment was to be taken seriously, the government – in all its levels in the US – should have stayed there forever. And it was taken seriously, for a while.

It is right here where we see the first instance of deviation of modern conservatives, and especially of modern Sheriffs and police chiefs, from the real meaning of the Second Amendment. In news after news that I read about the so-called “Second Amendment Sheriffs,” I see the same fallacy repeated: that the people have the right to own guns to protect themselves against criminals – meaning private criminals. This fallacy is repeated so many times not only by Sheriffs but also by pundits in FOX News that many conservatives have accepted it for real.

But the Bill of Rights was not written to establish our rights against private criminals. Such a thought never even occurred to the Founding Fathers; there was not a single bit of an idea in their view of government that would make them think or say that the people needed a Bill of Rights against private criminals. A private criminal breaking into a house had forfeited his life and no one had a need for a special law – let alone a whole Bill of Rights – to shoot a criminal. If there was a court warrant or a court verdict on a criminal, he was an open game for anyone, government agents or private citizens. There was absolutely no need to legally establish the right of defense against private criminals, the thought would sound ridiculous to the early colonists. The target was the government, and only the government, as over against the free state, that is, a community free of government intervention.

It is a distortion of the Bill of Rights and of justice, therefore, when modern Sheriffs declare that they are pro-Second Amendment because they want the people to have arms to protect their homes against criminals. It is not only an abandonment of the true meaning of the Second Amendment, it is also a deliberate obfuscation to disinform the people about their rights. Since the target has been moved from the government to private criminals, the balance of firepower that is the real meaning of the Second Amendment has been shifted from the government to private criminals. And as a result, more and more legislation has been enacted to curb the freedom of owning guns – obviously, no one needs heavier guns if the criminals don’t have them either. Meanwhile, since the government is now freed from being in the cross hairs, these same supposedly Second-Amendment Sheriffs have used Federal funds to accumulate weaponry far superior to that of their constituency. Thus, their babble about being pro-Second Amendment is a lie. Any Sheriff who claims to be a Second-Amendment Sheriff but takes from the Federal government military-grade weaponry which his constituents can’t have legally, is a liar. And also, a future tyrant, or at least, an agent of tyrants.

Why do they lie? Because they know not only what entity is in the cross hairs of the Second Amendment. The Sheriffs also know who specifically is supposed to be shot by the guns protected by the Second Amendment.

It is important to understand the historical context of the time. Just a few years earlier, the colonies rebelled against the British government. The immediate occasion for the beginning of the hostilities in 1775 was nothing else but the attempt of the British authorities to seize guns, gunpowder, and ammunition from several communities. The colonists rightly saw this as a tyrannical act against the existence of a free state, and responded by putting the government in their cross hairs. Without this attempt of the authorities to seize the guns, we can imagine that there would hardly be any occasion for a full-scale rebellion, and the needed changes would have been instituted by legislative action. England lost the colonies because the English government wanted their guns. This made the government the target.

But who was the direct target? It wasn’t the government in London. The American colonists didn’t try to attack London; Britain, actually, wasn’t considered an enemy country or territory by the colonists. British non-military individuals traveled between Britain and the Colonies and were not disturbed by any hostilities. During the Revolutionary War, some of the Founding Fathers referred to the British system of government as a “republic,” and pointed to the English Common Law as the best legal example for the colonies.

The direct target were the British troops. That is, the men in uniforms, with government-issued weapons, who had the power to arrest colonists and seize their weapons, and to enforce the British laws. The people needed guns not to wage global wars against distant potentates. The guns were needed to shoot the men in uniforms right in front of their houses.

Fast forward to today. And listen carefully to the following question: Do we have today, in our society, men in uniforms who serve the government, against a free state? Men who have the executive power to enter our houses or arrest us on the streets, and seize our belongings? Men like those red coats back then?

Now listen even more carefully: The Second Amendment was written with the red coats in its cross hairs. Now, let me say it: Today, the Second Amendment, if applied correctly, should have in its cross hairs the men who represent the red coats today. The men who are in uniforms, have government-issued guns, and have the executive powers to arrest us, enter our homes, and seize our belongings.

Thus, this is what the Second Amendment was written for: To establish the right of the people, for the existence of a free state, to shoot cops who overstep their boundaries. And no, no the boundaries established by the state – for these are arbitrary boundaries. Not the boundaries of the technicalities of the police protocols – these are even more arbitrary, and are specifically written to make cops more tyrannical. But the boundaries that establish the existence of a free state: a state free of government intervention. Thus, the Second Amendment was written to prevent the existence of police as we have it today – for there is not a single police department or Sheriff’s office in America today that doesn’t use its powers to steal and harass and murder people. The Second Amendment established the right of Americans to shoot at police in defense of their Lives, Liberty, and Property. Thus, they all should be in the cross hairs of the Second Amendment, if America is to return to her real historical legacy.

I have not heard any Sheriff in America who claims to be pro-Second Amendment, say such a thing. And without proclaiming that the Second Amendment is for shooting cops, there is no real understanding of it.

Thus, next time a Sheriff claims he is pro-Second Amendment, ask him if he believes that the  Amendment allows the American people to shoot cops who try to exercise tyrannical power. If he says no, or if he is unwilling to answer, he is a liar. My bet is, 100% of them are liars. And if I am wrong, I will be very glad.

So far, though, I am proven right. Even David Clarke, after with all his macho self-promotion as a Second-Amendment Sheriff, said in an interview: Police are always in charge. If police says you go to jail, you go to jail. If police says get out of the road, you get out of the road. And you complain later. Etc. But the Second Amendment says, No. Police are not in charge. If police says you go to jail without a warrant, the people are in charge and the cops should be shot, until they learn to never cross the border of a free state without a warrant. Just like those red coats more than 240 years ago. David Clarke is a liar. He is not pro-Second Amendment. And neither are all these Sheriffs who wouldn’t read the Amendment for what it really means.

The book I will assign this week is a history of one of the most important battles on American soil; the last battle of a really free state against the rightful target of the Second Amendment: The battle of Athens TN in 1946. The book is titled, August 1, 1946. The battle of Athens, Tennessee, and is written by C. Stephen Byrum. It is an expensive book, and out of print, but it is worth being in the library of anyone who cares about liberty.

And on the mission front, I have a request for you. We are starting a project in Bulgaria, of setting a few libraries for homeschool materials in a few cities in the country. Since Bulgaria still doesn’t have any Christian homeschool materials in Bulgarian, and there are some good materials in English which can be used by some parents in Bulgaria – helping others as well – we want to make those available at zero price for homeschoolers to rent. Hoping, of course, that eventually some of them will either be led to translate them, or write a Bulgarian version of them. The project will require certain capital for purchasing the materials – not much, but more than Bulgarian families can afford. So, my request is this: go to BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to the newsletter, and donate. The Second Amendment is important, but much more important is preparing Christian children for the future. And in Bulgaria, God has grown the homeschool movement from one to several hundred families within 20 years. It’s a battleground of proven victory record for the Kingdom of God, and your help will go a very long way. God bless you all.