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

Welcome to Episode 23 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 charity. No, not welfare in the modern form of giving money to the poor, although a part of what we will be talking about will have to do with giving money to the poor. We will be talking about charity in the context of the Biblical Covenant; charity that builds the Kingdom of God and expands it beyond its present boundaries. Charity that honors God as King and is based on His Gospel of the Kingdom.

Before I start, I will say that most of the material in this podcast has already been published before in an article titled “Charity: The Covenantal Way,” in Faith for All Life of March/April 2013. Faith for All Life is a bi-monthly magazine published by Chalcedon Foundation, which was founded and run for decades by R.J. Rushdoony. It is now run by his son, Mark Rushdoony, who faithfully continues the legacy of his father. Faith for All Life is worth subscribing to, and Chalcedon is one of the few true and faithful legitimate ministries which deserve your support.

Every time we talk about Biblical charity, we need to understand that we today in America – and in most cultures around the world – do not really know what poverty is. Our so-called “poverty line” today would be immeasurably high in the eyes of the vast majority of the people in history. During most of human history, the average family survived on the equivalent of today’s $2 per day – a couple of pounds of bread or potatoes, very rarely meat, a shabby dwelling, and one set of clothes. Poverty meant something way below that: it meant the total lack of food, the inability to supply the body with enough calories to go to work the next day. Such poverty was still present in certain places in the world just 60 years ago, and was endemic 100 and more years ago. It was only in the last 150 years in the West, and only in the last 60 years everywhere that poverty started to be redefined to mean something else but poverty. In the US, only a very small portion of the population really knows what poverty is – the homeless – and even among them, it is not clear to what extent it is a self-conscious choice, and to what extent it is really unfortunate circumstances.

The Biblical definition for poverty – for a person who qualified for a charity loan, that is, a loan at no interest and only a symbolic collateral – is in Exodus 22:25-27, and that definition draws a very low poverty line: The person has only his cloak and it serves him as a covering during the night. Apparently, anything above that would be considered sufficient assets to disqualify a person from being poor. Leviticus 25:39 describes a poor person as someone who has to sell himself in slavery. So poverty in the Bible – and throughout much of history – used to be a really desperate condition, and poor were those people who today don’t even exist anymore. In fact, even today’s homeless beggars have much more to eat – out of the general abundance of the society – than most of the average folks hundreds of years ago.

Thus, we don’t really have poor people today – not in the Biblical sense. Don’t get me wrong, I am not having nostalgic dreams about the past and its levels of poverty. To the contrary, I like it when poverty is either eradicated or its definition is changed to denote something much better. And indeed, the definition of poverty today has been changed to mean not the lack of nourishment but the lack of prospective growth. The inhabitants of even the poorest neighborhoods in America have their basic needs covered; it’s the hope for improvement that is gone, and thus they are considered “poor.” And this is a good thing; this change of definitions, from “lack of food” to “lack of hope for improvement” is the product of the postmillennialism of the early colonists in America. Ronald Wright nailed it when he said, “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” In the final account, we consider “poor” not those who lack basic sustenance but those who do not consider themselves temporarily embarrassed millionaires – because this is the product of the victorious, optimistic eschatology of America’s founding generations. And thus, socialism was able to get a foothold here only when that victorious eschatology was replaced with premillennialism and amillennialism in the church.

Either way, changed definitions or not, poor will always exist among us, Jesus said in Matt. 26:11; Mark 14:7, and John 12:8, and “you can give to them whenever you want,” He added. Not when the government forces you, but whenever you want – establishing the voluntary nature of charity over against the pagan principle of forced charity. The question is then, When should we want to give? Or, How should we give? What is our giving supposed to be? What purposes is it supposed to serve? Obviously, we are to be free from government interference in our giving or not giving, but when and how are we supposed to be giving? When and how are supposed to be taking care of the needs of the poor?

The answers to this question must take us beyond the specific topic of giving. They must take us to a larger picture, and that is, What does covenant activity consist of? We already talked about covenant thinking, and we saw that covenant thinking is always ethical/judicial, that is, it is always concerned with issues of good and evil. But what about the practical living out of the covenant? For this we need to return to the first practical actions that Adam was commanded to do in the Garden, for they reveal to us the two major principles of covenantal action.

These two principles of covenant action we can see in Genesis 2:15: “And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.” The words “dress it” and “keep it” seem to be problematic words for translators for there are apparently no two versions that agree in translation. Some say “work it and keep it,” others “cultivate and keep it,” others “work it and guard it,” etc. It is important to us, though, to know what they mean, for these words seem to be the beginning of all covenant practical action, and certainly God has placed in them meaning that would be strategic for our understanding of how to apply the covenant.

The first word, “work,” or “cultivate,” is the Hebrew word abad, which means “serve.” Or, rather, this is the main meaning of the word, but it is used to mean other things as well. “Work” or “cultivate” is the second most common meaning. Gen 3:23, after the fall, God sent out the man from Eden to cultivate – abad – the ground. Cain was a tiller – obed – of the ground (Gen. 4:2, 12). After the sin and the banishment of Cain in Genesis 4, the word assumes the meaning of “serve” through the book of Genesis, and eventually means “forced slave labor” in Genesis 49 and Exodus 1. God then appears in the picture in Exodus 3, for the first time in a specific redemptive promise, and suddenly, the meaning of the word is changed – in Exodus 3:12 – to “worship.” From there, through Exodus 20 (the Ten Commandments), the word is used simultaneously for slavery to Pharaoh and worship to God: as if two abads – slavery and worship – are at war against each other. The war is won for worship over slavery, and then, in a culmination, the meaning of the word is restored to “work,” “cultivate,” in the Fourth Commandment: “Six days shall thou abad.” The word is used twice in the Decalogue: “no abad” to foreign gods, “yes abad” for six days.

But the real overall culmination of the use of the word abad is in the New Testament, in John 5:17: “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” The text is in Greek, but since the context has to do with the Sabbath and the Fourth Commandment, Jesus would have used the same word, abad. And the context also shows what Jesus considers real work, real abad: He had just healed a person. That is, He had just restored a man to a state of productivity and growth. The “cultivate” meaning of the word in Genesis 2-4, the “work” meaning of the word in the Decalogue, and the meaning of the word “work” in Jesus’s statement about His Father and Himself, all point to the same goal: growth and expansion. This is the first principle of covenantal action.

The second word, translated as “keep” or “guard” – shamar – is not as spectacular as abad, and is mostly a military term, meaning “guard, watch.” As in the name of the capital of the Northern Kingdom, Samaria, that is, a watch, or keep, or outpost of Yahweh. It is also used with the meaning of pasturing flocks (as in keeping the flock together), or of gatekeepers, or of watching or observing, etc. The etymology of the word comes properly from “hedge around with spikes or horns.” It presupposes a boundary protected against violations and incursions. The culmination of the use of the word shamar in the New Testament is in John 21:15-17 where Jesus commands Peter three times to tend His sheep. The Hebrew/Aramaic word He would have used for tending sheep would have been shamar.

The two words, then, abad and shamar, stand for the two principles of covenantal action of work and community, or expand and consolidate. Man had the Garden, the starting point, the initial capital of his expansion over the earth. His task was to work and expand the economy of the Garden outside the Garden. The Garden was also his community. He was supposed to protect it against capital destruction and depletion, and in the future, as he expanded, to protect his new conquests from returning to their chaotic and non-economic state. All covenant practice boils down to these two principles. Every single covenant practical covenant action follows one of these two principles: work and community.

There are, thus, two main groups of charity activities in the Bible, corresponding to the two main principles of work and community.

Under the first principle, work, poor and needy people were given the opportunity to participate in the productive life of the community by contributing services to the limit of their abilities – services that normally, under the regular market practices, won’t have the marginal value to make economic sense. Yes, I know, some listeners would object that in a Biblical, free, prosperous economy, where there is no additional cost on labor imposed by government regulations, every labor will make economic sense. While this is the belief of some libertarians, it is not exactly true: hiring labor does have certain expenses that are market expenses and are not incurred by government intervention or other disturbances on the market. The law of marginal utility also dictates that more workers on a particular job doesn’t always translate into more efficiency. (Think about unloading a truck with bricks: 10 workers would be better than 1 worker, but 10,000 workers would be much worse than 1 worker.) So, we expect Jesus’s words that there will always be poor among us to be true, and that there will always be people whose labor’s marginal value will be a bit lower than the expenses of hiring them. So, what do we do with these people who are, for one reason or another, useless from an economic perspective?

The Biblical answer, under the principle of work, is, teach them to be useful and productive. But most of the time teaching itself is not a productive work – that is, the results are not immediately visible, they only come after some time. So the poor and the needy need to be employed in a work that does not yield positive economic results right away. The two main Biblical solutions under that heading are gleaning and indentured servitude.

The right of the poor to gleaning was established by the commandments in Lev. 19:9-10 and Deut. 24:19-22. The text in Leviticus commanded that a landowner specifically refrains from harvesting the corners of his field and vineyard. The text in Deuteronomy added the stipulation that the owner doesn’t go through the field or the vineyard a second time to pick up the fallen or forgotten sheaves or grapes, nor beat his olive tree a second time. All that was dropped or forgotten, plus the corners, was to be left to the poor and the needy. Sometimes the poor and the needy would even directly follow the reapers and the pickers to pick what was left, as in Ruth chapter 2. In addition, even before harvest, anyone was allowed to enter a field or a vineyard and satisfy his hunger from the fruit of that field, without picking for commercial use (Deut. 23:24-25); the poor would have been most likely to take advantage of that law. The laws for gleaning were directed not to the civil government to enforce but to the private landowners. In his commentary on the passage in Deuteronomy 24, Rushdoony said, “A community without charity is quickly dead.” Landowners were supposed to know this truth.

Gleaning was a hard and uneconomic work. The amount of work put into it was far more than the expected results. There really was no economic reason for any landowner to glean his own fields or vineyards – especially in the time of harvest, when every hour counted. (There’s a very short window of time within which the harvest must be done.) Thus, the only real reason for a landowner to glean his own fields and vineyards was if he specifically wanted to spend resources to deprive the poor of their sustenance. God forbade such malice.

Gleaning was also open to all. There was no limitation as to who could glean: strangers could also participate, whether they lived in Israel or not. In a sense, the whole world was invited to glean on the fields of Israel – which was the point of the Syro-Phoenician woman in Mark 7:28, “even the dogs under the table feed on the children’s crumbs.” The poor of Israel and of all the world were invited to take advantage of Israel’s abundance, work hard for their sustenance, and through work, learn to be productive, demonstrate character, and get out of poverty. Just like Ruth.

What was limited to the covenant people was the combination of charity loans and indentured servitude. A man and his family could fall on hard times, for one reason or another. It might have been because of his character and lack of wisdom. It might have been because of unfortunate circumstances. For one reason or another, he could down to having only his cloak for his covering at night – and that cloak was his only movable property which he can offer as a collateral for a loan. No matter what the circumstances were that led to his poverty, as long as he was a faithful member of the covenant of God, he was entitled to a charity loan from his wealthier neighbors. Deuteronomy 15:7-8expressly commands his wealthier neighbors to extend charity loans to him, for his sustenance. They were not allowed to profit from these loans: no interest on charity loans, no keeping of the collateral overnight (it’s his only covering), and only a limited period of validity, until the Sabbath year, after which all outstanding loans are forgiven. And the neighbors were not allowed to refuse to extend a charity loan close to the end of the period; Deut. 15:9 calls such a thought “wicked,” using the same word, belial, as Paul uses in 2 Cor. 6:15, “What agreement can there be between Christ and Belial?”

Creditors were not allowed to profit from charity loans, but the poor still had to work to pay them back. A poor person who didn’t make his loan payments could be taken into slavery. That slavery, of course, was limited to six years, but it meant work. After the sixth year, the master was commanded to free his Hebrew slave and give him enough starting capital to set him on the road to independent productivity. This, again, mean that the poor person was expected to grow above his previous state of dependency and poverty.

So, as far as the principle of work was concerned, the wealthy were not allowed to grow or profit off the backs of the poor people. (And poor meant poor, not hired workers who received wages.) On the other hand, the poor were not left without responsibility: they had to work to pay back the loan. Or, in case they were not making their payments, they could be sold in servitude. Both the loan and the servitude were limited in time, but both required work. And the ultimate goal was growth out of poverty, out of dependency, into dominion and independence.

But growth is not everything in the Covenant of God. Community is the other principle of covenant action. In the principle of work the people were divided in terms of wealth, and those in poverty were placed in a lower position – gleaning, debt, slavery – with the purpose of encouraging them and training them to grow out of their dependence. But in the principle of community all the inequalities between the members of the community had to be erased and even the poorest and destitute members of the community had to be given the opportunity to be equal to everyone else, and thus, their loyalty to their community be strengthened. The lines were to be drawn not between the individuals within the community but between the community and the world outside; just as Adam was commanded to protect, shamar, the Garden, thus, the community action was meant to consolidate the community and thus protect its integrity and health.

Applied to charity, this principle worked out in the form of community feasts. The community feasts were supposed to include everyone living in the community – poor and rich, adults and children, homeborn and strangers living in the community. There was to be no difference in the feast. There was to be no separate feast for the rich and famous and influential oligarchy of the community. There were to be no elitist cocktail parties. The poor – even if they had nothing to contribute – were to be part of the feast.

The third year’s tithe of all the crops was supposed to be such a community feast and a charity event. Deut. 14:22-29 establishes such a feast of the tithe each year, and then every third year, the tithe had to be deposited in the town for the stranger, the orphan, and the widow. Deut. 26:12-15 repeats the same commandment and adds a special prayer of devotion and a prayer for blessing, with the blessing centered around the fact that the third year’s tithe was given to the Levite, the alien, the orphan, and the widow. The end of the harvest was a celebration, a feast, and the poor were to benefit from that community feast in two ways: first, by participating in the feast, and second, by being able to freely feed on every third year’s tithe, deposited in the town.

The New Testament continues the same tradition in the church. First of all, the early church was an agape feast, not a pews/pulpit setting. The Supper was the center of the service, and it was where all the members of the church, freemen and slaves, poor and rich, women and men and children, etc., were to be equal and full-fledged members of the community. Paul’s criticism against the Corinthian church in 1 Cor. 11:17-34 makes no sense in the modern church service. (Can you imagine anyone getting drunk or full with the amount of food at the modern ritual that passes for the Lord’s Supper?) It only makes sense if the center of the early church’s service was the community feast. For that community feast to remain a community feast, they had to wait for each other instead of a few who have come earlier fill their stomachs. Given that most of the time it was the poor and the slaves who couldn’t make it earlier, Paul’s rebuke was in fact a restoration of the principle of the Law that the poor were to be invited to celebrate with the wealthy. In the same way, James’s admonitions in James 2:1-7, making the poor sit on the floor or farther away, while the rich were given an honorable place, only makes sense in a community feast around a table. The poor sitting on the floor is the same symbolism as that of dogs who eat the crumbs under the table. Again, in the context of the church service being a community feast, James’s point is the same; the poor must be allowed the same honor as the rich around the table, so that no one feels useless in the covenant community. The way to protect the borders of the community was by consolidating the community, rich and poor. That was done by the charity of the community feasts.

Between these two principles, the covenant community’s poor were to be taken care of, both through work and growth, and through community cohesion. They were to be taught to prosper, and they were to be protected as members of the community. Their inferior economic status was to be both acknowledged – through gleaning, loans, and servitude – and their full membership was also to be honored, in the community feasts and their share of the abundance God has given. In all this, the covenant community’s life depended on how they treated their poor. And what applied to Israel, applies today to the church.

And how these two principles should work in the modern church is a topic which we will leave for another podcast in the future.

The book I will assign for reading today is Bringing in the Sheaves: Transforming Poverty into Productivity, by George Grant. A short book but very important, explaining charity from the perspective of the Law of God.

And, as always, I will dare bring to your attention the mission field that I have always had on my heart: Bulgaria, and Eastern Europe in general. After a generation of Communism, the culture there I still plagued by economic legacy which destroys productivity. Part of our mission has been to preach and teach the Biblical principles for both economic action and covenantal charity. We have translated quite a few books on these topics. We already have fruit, but we still need to do more. In order to build the intellectual foundation fort the future Christian civilization, we need to out-publish the competition. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. It is a good cause, and the ministry has proven it can win against all odds. God bless you.

Welcome to Episode 22 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 sales, and the job of a salesman. We are not going to be talking about it from your typical, so-called “business” perspective; there will be no technical advice here as to how to make more sales. We want to be covenantal and comprehensive in our approach. We will attempt to apply to it a Biblical covenantal analysis, that is, find the place of salesmanship in the larger picture of the Covenant of God, find the ethical principles for doing sales, and then also, find the judicial limitations to the profession of a salesman. It is going to be a serious challenge, for this topic is enormous, and 20 minutes are barely enough to start even scratching the surface. But stay with me, we will give it a shot, and if there’s a need for more, we will cover it in a future podcast.

I must say at the very beginning, shame on me. For very many years of my productive life I have been in sales. I used to be a sales rep and then district field manager for Procter & Gamble, then the same for Reckitt Benckiser. Then I was sales consultant for a technology company. Then show room manager for a plumbing supply company. Then a financial advisor, which is for the most part a sales job. For 16 years, I was in sales in one form or another. I can’t say I was the best salesman of all, let’s say I was above average. But shame on me because all these years I have been a theonomic Christian, and I never thought of applying my faith to the specific job of a salesman. I just followed the guidelines of the specific companies I was working for but I never did anything to vet those guidelines against the standard of the Law of God and try to bring redemption where it was needed. It was only recently that I started thinking about applying the principles of the Covenant of God to sales, mainly watching two good friends in their work. One is my real estate agent in Houston, Jay Anderson; and yes, I know, real estate is not exactly sales, but it still involves the same principles. In case you need a realtor in Houston, Jay is your man. The other friend is Manny Garza, a salesman for Honda in McAllen TX, whom I have only observed from a distance, through his FB posts. Both these men – solid Christian men, committed and productive – made me start thinking of how to apply the Gospel to sales. So, Jay, Manny, if you guys are listening to this, you are the inspiration for this episode, and I devote it to you.

The first question I had to deal with when I started this study was this: Is the salesman even necessary in an economy? We use to joke with each other back when I was a salesman that we probably won’t see each other in heaven, for heaven doesn’t need salesmen. Because what really is the job of a salesman – at least what the public perceives of it? It is to convince the prospective buyer that he has a need that the buyer doesn’t really have. Obviously, if the need was real, the buyer would have been aware of it and would have bought the thing without the salesman. In a smooth economy, it is perceived by many people – and many economists, too – it is the real needs, the real demand that will drive the economy. Producers will simply respond to the demand, and thus everyone will be happy, and there will be no waste of resources for producing more than what is needed. And if nothing is produced more than it is needed, then there is no need for salesmen to try to sell the surplus. Marx believed that this surplus of capitalist production will bring about the demise of capitalism: when capitalists produce more than is needed and can’t sell it, the capitalist world will enter an economic crisis, he thought. Communism was then supposed to be “rational,” that is, only producing what is needed, so that the economy was rationalized based on needs. In fact, one of the many slogans that I grew up with as a child in a Communist country was exactly that: “We don’t sell goods, we satisfy needs.” I still remember that slogan painted on the side of a vast apartment complex in Varna, Bulgaria. So if we don’t sell goods, we need no salesmen. We only need to know what the customers need, and produce it. And there we have a smoothly running economy.

The only problem with this is that “real needs” have no real material measurement. Just like the perceptions created by the salesman, the “real needs” of the buyer are also perceptions, conditioned many different factors in the society around him. Even if there were no salesmen around, the very society would be the salesman, creating in every individual the perception of what his “real needs” are. What do the “real needs” of a person include? Different kinds of food? A walk-in-closet full of clothes and shoes? A two-story family house? Air-conditioning? Just a hundred years ago these were not needs, these were luxuries. How did they change from luxuries to needs? Did people one hundred years ago “demand” all these luxuries and thus prompted the economy to supply it? How many consumers 100 years ago even knew that air-conditioning, or computers, or cell phones, were even possible, let alone perceive them as “needs”? If the economy was really driven by needs, as socialist economists say, then mankind would have never progressed beyond the level of bare subsistence.

And the Bible clearly shows that economy is not driven by needs. God commanded Adam and Eve to take dominion over the earth even as they felt no need and had no need of anything. They had their basic and perceived needs completely covered; there was enough food in the Garden, and there was no need for shelter or clothing. And yet, they were supposed to expand the economic order of the Garden to the whole earth. Their needs didn’t drive that expansion. There was something greater than simply perceived needs. The Dominion Covenant was not driven by man’s need; it was driven by God’s command to higher productivity, irrespective of the perceived needs of man.

The truth is, the economy is driven not by needs and demand, it is driven by productivity and supply. The active part in the economy are its producers and entrepreneurs; they not only produce to satisfy the current perceived needs of the consumers, they also innovate and produce more than that: to open the eyes of the consumers for more opportunities for them to make their lives and work more productive, more efficient, easier, more pleasurable, healthier, etc. Mankind has never “needed” these things to survive. But without these things, mankind has been less than a conqueror over the earth, and has lived life in subjection to the environment rather than a master over God’s creation. But once these new things are on the market, and the consumers are informed about the new possibilities to make their lives more productive and victorious and pleasurable and easy, they become “needs.” We just need a family house. We need two or three cars. We need air-conditioning. We need a new grill in the backyard. Etc.

Obviously, then, needs are not a material given. They are psychological perceptions. True, there are real material goods behind these perceptions. But the perceptions themselves are conditioned, they are never “real” or “natural.”

Given these facts about economy and economic growth, it is obvious that a significant part of the work of an entrepreneur or producer would be to convince his prospective customers that they “need” his product. This process of persuasion is not unnatural; it is not some sort of swindling people of their money for something of no value. Well, in certain cases it may be swindling; but it doesn’t have to be so by nature. By nature, and by its economic purpose, such persuasion is simply delivering new information to the consumers about the new possibilities before them. An automobile is better than a horse and buggy, but a society who’s never seen an automobile will have no idea what to expect of it, and how and why it is better than a horse and a buggy. Even today, when everyone knows what an automobile is, there is such variety of vehicles with many different characteristics that the producers still have to educate the consumers about what best fits their specific situations. The economy is always driven by the producers, not by the consumers; the producers are the active part in it, and it is the producers who educate the consumers what they can ask for, and what their “real needs” are supposed to be.

Thus, it should be clear what the proper place of a salesman is in the Dominion Covenant of God, and therefore in a healthy economy. A salesman is supposed be an educator. More than that, he is supposed to be an evangelist of a sort – in a relative way, as someone who brings some “good news” to other people, not in the Biblical sense of preaching eternal salvation; although, one can say that making a high quality product at the right price is a sort of temporal salvation. Try to survive without an AC in Texas during the summer, and you’ll consider an air-conditioner a real salvation. The job of the salesman must be to make that connection between what is materially possible – and materially invented and produced – and the ideal perceptions of the customers who may not even know what is possible. His job is to focus on his product, then, not on the perceived “needs” of his customers. They may not even know what they need, after all. If a subsistence farmer thinks he needs a new hoe, a good salesman will try to bring him to realize he needs a tractor, or something else that would increase his productivity way beyond that of a new hoe. As we know, the entrepreneur is expected to foresee the future and what consumers will need in the future; his salesman is expected to bring those consumers into that future, where their life and work will be easier, more productive, and more pleasurable.

The salesman, then, not only has a legitimate role in a healthy economy, his role is indispensable. In fact, for an economy to be functioning, all of us need to be salesmen in one sense or another. No matter what we do, we are always selling some product or service. Even when we are looking for a job, we are looking to sell our services to someone who needs them for his business. In any economy, no one is only a buyer; everyone is both a buyer and a seller. Everyone has to sell something before he buys something. The economy is driven by those who sell – and thus, the salesman has a central place in it.

(As a side note, the only way to be a buyer without being a seller is to have the power to force others to sell you their products and services for a commodity of no real value. That is, if you are the government. When a net buyer dominates the economy, the economy suffers.)

This important place of the salesman – and of the concept of sales as an occupation and a calling – in the Dominion Covenant gives us not only the necessity of the salesman but also the scope of his work; as we said, it is to be an educator, a sort of evangelist. But this also leads us to the ethical boundaries for the work of a salesman. It should be obvious: any job, any calling that are legitimate within the framework of the Dominion Covenant need to abide by the ethical standards of that covenant. They don’t need to be civil laws enforced by the state – the vast majority of the commandments in the Law of God are laws for self-government, and only a very tiny portion is supposed to be civil laws enforced by the courts. So, like any other legitimate occupation and calling, the salesman has a covenantal purpose, and the purpose justifies the means, but the purpose and the means must be God’s purpose and God’s means. A salesman, obviously, is not supposed to be centered on the perceived needs of his customers but on his product – the perceived needs are just a temporary thing, the product and its usefulness are the real economic factor. But a product or a service are a real economic factor only to the extent they really contribute to the wealth of their customers.

The two ethical principles regulating the work of a salesman, then are, first, does the product in general increase the wealth of customers, and second, does the particular customer benefit from the product.

So the first is the nature of the product itself. It’s the moral duty of a salesman to assess the nature of his product and whether that product is really beneficial. You may have heard certain people who have amazing gifts of persuasion brag, “I can sell anything to anyone!” Perhaps you can, but from the perspective of the Dominion Covenant, ethically, you may not. As a salesman, as the most active person on the market, you are under a moral duty to vet the products and refuse to sell what is obviously harmful and destructive to your buyers. A godly salesman, then, will carefully assess the place of his product in the Dominion Covenant, and will stay away from products that are specifically designed to decrease the wealth of the society rather increase it. There aren’t many products and services offered today that are in themselves harmful, but there are a few, and very often it is for these products that there is a large demand for skillful salesmen, and many young men are attracted by the opportunities. One example would be selling credit card debt, as well other types of consumer debt that is not backed by present assets and is not predicated on some increase in productivity (which would be business debt). The only premise for consumer debt is greed – increasing present consumption beyond one’s present means. (Although, there may be a precious few cases where it is a necessity, but they have to do with charitable debt, and the Bible regulates that kind of debt.) Another concrete example would be hard narcotics for recreational use. While we should be against government regulation of those – for the obvious reason that the Law of God doesn’t allow the government to control what individuals put in their bodies – prospective salesmen should be aware of the destructive nature of these. Another example would be different Ponzi schemes and other similar frauds: they do not increase the wealth in the society.

The list can become longer given the complex nature of our modern economy, and of the society as a whole. A salesman needs to make sure his employer is not exaggerating the qualities of his products in order to gain more customers or to drive up the prices. He should also decline to withhold information about the products that would be critical to the decision-making process of his customers.

But it doesn’t stop there. Salesmanship today is employed in different non-economic activities as well, especially political campaigns. A recent article written by Paul H. Jossey, an employee for a political action council (PAC), titled “How We Killed the Tea Party,” he explains how salesmanship has been used to defraud millions of conservative and libertarian donors of their money through political donations. Many of these PACs absorb, for their operational expenditures, more than 90% of the donated money. Jossey himself, after witnessing this megafraud for hundreds of millions of dollars, decided to quit and start his own firm, where he is open and transparent and redirects the money to its designated purpose. This is what an ethical salesman is supposed to do when he finds out his skills have been used to commit fraud – even if he himself is not directly responsible for the fraud.

The salesman, then, is supposed to be one of the lines of defense of the society against its dissolution of capital. Being a middleman, right in the middle between his product and the society, being informed about his product and its effects on the economy and the individual wealth of its buyers, he is in the unique position to provide the moral corrective for those producers and entrepreneurs whose goals is enrich themselves without providing a valuable product or service in exchange. Such a position is a position of responsibility – as is always the position of those who are middlemen of one kind or another.

The second ethical demand to a salesman is to understand the specific situation of his customers and whether his product benefits them in their specific situation.

Now, in all cases where the product is not a destructive product per se, it’s the right of the customer to want to buy it, even if, as far as the seller can tell, the product is not going to serve the customer in his specific situation. Thus, if a rich person wants to buy an expensive product that doesn’t practically serve his situation, but he wants to buy it for other than economic reasons, a salesman has nothing to say. But in most cases a salesman must be aware not only of the usefulness of his product but also of the usefulness of his product in the specific situation of the customer. The principle here should return us to the Dominion Covenant: A salesman is not morally free to sell when he can see that there will be net increase in the wealth of his consumers.

The best concrete – and rather extreme – modern example would be supplying light bulbs to nomadic cultures who live in tents. Perhaps a salesman can make quick buck by selling his supply of light bulbs on a sales pitch that would exploit the naïveté of a backward culture. He may even tell his buyers the truth: that the light bulbs produce light at night but they need the infrastructure of a modern civilization, like power stations, power grid, or at least local generators. In their backwardness, they may not be able to understand all that is needed. Their only focus may be on the promise that this little shiny thing produces light at night. May be they think of it as magic, and are willing to part with their hard-earned savings for such magic. Should a salesman of light bulbs take advantage of them and sell to them, even if he had done his technical part of explaining everything to them? Not at all. Even if his product is legitimate and indeed increases the wealth of those who buy it – in the right circumstances and the right infrastructure – it would be useless to tent dweller who have never seen a power grid or a generator. The salesman should re-direct them to a salesman of oil lamps or kerosene lamps, as well as a supplier of oil or kerosene.

Again, in our modern complex economy, with many different kinds of commodities and services, such moral principle becomes even more important. While the issue of infrastructure is usually a minor issue in the US, our economy and policies create a moral demand to salesmen to try to assess – as much as it is possible, and in certain situations – the means of their customers, and whether the service or the good will serve them within their means. As an owner of rental houses, I have made the mistake of leasing a house to a family which obviously couldn’t afford the rent I was asking; they could only afford to pay less than two-thirds of what I was asking. In the final account, the family went near bankruptcy, and I had to forgo two-months rent in order to avoid seeing the family with three children being financially destroyed. I should have refrained from selling to them, I should have re-directed them to a lower-rent option. Mortgage sellers usually try to get people signed up without making much of an effort to assess their situation. Car dealerships are quick to sell expensive cards to young people in the beginning of their careers, when the young person should be advised to buy a lower-cost vehicle and save his money for the future. In all these situations, selling doesn’t increase the net wealth of the buyer; it only takes advantage of his greed to make him more dependent, less productive, and in the final account, increases the discrepancies in the economy.

It is, of course, not always possible to convince a person that certain desires of his heart are detrimental to his wealth and future. As I said earlier, a salesman is supposed to be an evangelist. But an evangelist is only a bringer of good news, and where he does mission work, he needs to make sure that the good news are not twisted or misapplied in the local context of his listeners – or their final state will be much worse than before they heard his message. (See Jesus’s rebuke of the Pharisees in Matt. 23:15, as well as his parable of the clean house in Matt. 12:45. Good news misapplied, or not develop to their practical application in the specific context, can lead to results worse than the starting condition.) Among many signs in our times of the abdication of the American church from her task of teaching the nations is that modern salesmen have long ceased imitating evangelists in their work, and instead have turned to psychological manipulation of their prospective buyers. Sales is not a work of good news anymore; it is rather a voodoo-doll practice, where certain occult rituals (they call them “sales practice”) are supposed to elicit certain automatic responses in the prospective buyers, often leading to placing the buyer in a worse condition than before. And unfortunately, many evangelists in the church – and pastors, and ministry leaders, and missionaries – have adopted the pagan practices of modern salesmen. And one of the signs of a revival in the church will be that the ministry of evangelist is restored in its Biblical glory, and the salesmen of the world will learn from the evangelists how to do their sales in accordance with the Covenant of God and His Law.

Our time doesn’t allow us to go into other areas of the covenantal nature and ethical/judicial principles for the job of a salesman; God willing, we will try to cover them in a future episode. The book I will assign this week is The Innovator’s Solution by Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor. While the authors are not explicitly based on Biblical presuppositions, the underlying motive in the book is that the innovator is the real engine of the economy, and that his business will grow only when established on an ethical/judicial foundation, that is, obeying certain moral principles. Especially making the correct choice between growth and profit.

And again, I would like to turn your attention to our mission in Bulgaria. I love doing these episodes of Axe to the Root, and I love my American brothers and sisters, and I am eager to minister to the church in whatever capacity God calls me. But my heart is out there, on the mission field, where I have worked hard to establish consistent growth in our mission in Bulgaria. I need your help to continue supplying the right books to the Bulgarian market. Visit BulgarianReformation.com. Subscribe to the newsletter. Pray with us and for us. And donate. God bless you all.

Welcome to Episode 21 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 modern ministries. Or, rather, we will be talking about that very typically American system which I call by the name “ministry-industrial complex,” that is, a conglomerate of churchian celebrity figures, denominations, churches, Christian colleges, radio and TV shows, publishing houses, conferences, lawyers’ organizations, lobbyist organizations, mission boards, and others; the purpose of this ministry-industrial complex being to tap into the market of “donations,” that is, the market of millions of American Christians who are hungry and thirsty for qualified Biblical teaching and practical example for Christian action and victory, and are willing to pay for it, if it can be found in the American church. So, there’s a market, with money waiting to be donated, and the ministry-industrial complex is there to offer a product – a product, though, which doesn’t live up to the needs of the church, and certainly is not worth the money poured into it. In a previous episode, I covered the phenomenon of the Denethor ministries – ministries which absorb hundreds of millions of dollars every year only to preach defeat and, surprise, surprise, get defeat for the church in America. Many of these ministries – especially many lawyers’ guilds like NRA, HSLDA, ADF, and others – in fact thrive on maintaining problems unsolved, and in many cases their public initiatives are directed towards creating more legal problems so that the lawyers can keep solving them. (We will talk about this strategy in a future podcast.) Many of these ministries have nothing new to say, and nothing specific to offer, and for most of them it is unclear if the Church would lose anything if they were shut down.

Of course, there are a few churches and ministries that are legitimate, and there are a few out there that are doing really a good job of preaching and caring more for their flocks and for the church than they care for their leaders and celebrities. And indeed, the teaching ministry is a legitimate part of Christendom. But the Biblical standard for the New Testament is not that teachers would multiply but the other way around: that ordinary Christians will be more and more knowledgeable and understanding to the point where there would be no need for teachers. This is in fact the very definition of the New Covenant in Jeremiah 31:33-34:

But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD, I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them.

The same principle is repeated in the New Testament, by the author of Hebrews who criticizes his readers that they still need someone to teach them:

For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God, and you have come to need milk and not solid food (Heb. 5:12).

We have the same situation today, with one significant and fundamental difference: In our day, it is the churches and the ministries who are deliberately keeping their listeners immature and ignorant – and that under the pretense that they are teaching them and ministering to them. It is only with an immature and ignorant audience that the modern ministry-industrial complex can continue tapping into the donations stream – after all, a wise and understanding people will be much more discerning and more critical of the quality of teaching and preaching, and would be less willing to spend their money on lousy preachers. And, a wise and understanding people do not fall for celebrity worship. Remember, in the days of the Reformers, Romanist theologians claimed that images in the churches were needed because the majority of church members were uneducated and ignorant. The Reformers replied that it was exactly the images in the churches that kept Christians uneducated and ignorant. In the same way, today, the ministry-industrial complex exists on the claim that Christians are uneducated and therefore we need all these ministries and churches and celebrities. The truth is, it is the ministry-industrial complex which keeps American Christians uneducated and ignorant. It is, in fact, our modern Protestant version of the idolatrous images in the Romanist churches.

The topic of the ministry-industrial complex can easily take a whole series of podcasts. Much of the way this complex operates is reminiscent of the way Communist propaganda operated: after all, when there is no real product of no real value provided, the only thing that can keep the machine running is propaganda. I have been told multiple times by people involved in different ministries that “perception is everything.” Some of them were simply cynical opportunists. But a few were well-meaning servants of God who had legitimate ministries and rendered real service to the body of Christ. This fact, that even well-meaning ministers considered perception to be “everything,” thus justifying the propaganda element of it, is indicative of how deep root such corrupt mentality has taken in the American Christian culture. To translate it into real terms, when American Christians concede that “perception is everything,” they are begging to be swindled and lied to. Such culture of gullibility and naïveté is the perfect fertile soil for a crop of scoundrels, and the American church has been reaping the fruit of it for decades now. And despite the proven failure of such culture to produce growth, it has continued watering it with billions of dollars.

The question we need to deal with – in this episode and in future episodes – is this: How is it possible? We have a system that claims to rally the troops for battle and only delivers defeat; a system that claims to educate its listeners and yet never raises them above a certain level of basic elementary things. How is it possible that such system is still functioning? How is it possible that such system still has customers who spend their money on it – and we are talking about hundreds of thousands of people spending billions of dollars? What is there in the propaganda of that system that makes its customers return over and over again for nothing? Just simple basic common sense would be enough to make anyone take their business away from any vendor whose product doesn’t live up to the price. How did millions of Christians in the US end up so devoid of common sense as to see the failure of their beloved ministries to deliver on their promises and yet continue supporting them?

The general answer to this must return us to a previous episode of Axe to the Root podcast where we talked about covenantal thinking and maturity. Covenantal thinking and maturity, as we saw, have to do with the ability to judge everything, to discern between good and evil in every situation. Thus, the goal of propaganda is to destroy in its listeners the ability to judge, to discern between good and evil. To make the listeners uncritical to the real world around them. (The word “criticism” comes from the Greek word krino, meaning “to judge, separate.”) There are many tactical ways to achieve this strategic task of making the listeners uncritical – fragmented reality, false appeal to authority, relativistic ethics, group identity, scare tactics, and others – and all of them were used by Communist and Nazi propaganda in the last century; and I must say, they are all used by the ministry-industrial complex in the US today. We will talk in future episodes in more detail about each one of these, but in this episode I would like to focus on one specifically: Re-enacting old battles.

If there a characteristic of true Covenant Theology that separates it from all the other theologies – within or without orthodox Christianity – it is its focus on the future. I have written and spoken before about this characteristic, so to make it short here, true Covenant Theology sees the future in history as better than the past. Not just the future beyond history, but the future in history. And future not just in some spiritualized sense, but future as in the total of history, mankind and its societies, and its economic and intellectual and ethical and judicial and scientific and technological, and other development. And all this as the consequence, but also as an integral part of the growth of the Gospel. This optimism of the future in history is inherent in the very promise of the New Covenant (see, for example, Isaiah 9:7, “Of the increase of His government and peace there shall be no end.”); it is also inherent in the very nature of the Gospel and of Christ’s rule in the New Covenant (see, for example, 1 Cor. 15:20-28). A covenant Christian, then – when he is true to the Bible – believes Paul’s promise in 1 Cor. 3:22, that “the present and the future” belong to Christians, and therefore follows Paul’s prescription in Phil. 3:13 to “forget what lies behind.” Since the future in its comprehensive entirety – not just in a narrowly spiritualized sense – is expected to be brighter than the past, a covenant Christian pays really close attention to the present, and strives to be faithful to discern good and evil in the present reality. Naturally so, for his actions in the present are what will build that better future. Not that his salvation depends on it – salvation depends entirely on the grace of God – but that he is committed to strive for that prize Paul talks about in 1 Cor. 9:24. God will eventually build that better future in history, with or without any specific individual, it is our duty to strive to be those through whom He builds it. But we will leave the talk about how Christianity invented the concept of the future to another podcast.

Paganism, as well as the non-covenant theologies within the Christian camp, have no such promise for the future. (As a side note, this is the reason for the modern prevalence of pessimistic eschatologies: the loss of covenantal understanding.) Since the future, then, brings no hope to such ideologies, their only anchor of hope is in the past. The past becomes the center of attention, an object of study, emotional longing and nostalgic feelings, it even becomes an object of ritualized veneration. Even Communism, with it pretended atheism and rationalism, was highly liturgical about the past; it had its rituals, and don’t you dare not participate in those rituals, and don’t you dare fail to stand for the anthem, or for The Internationale, and don’t you dare fail to honor the memory of the heroes who shed their blood for the ideals of Marx and Engels and Lenin. Communism thus had a pantheon (or a pandemonium, rather) of heroes in the past, and where there were none, it made them up. It built their monuments, it made up stories about them, it indoctrinated schoolchildren to honor their memory. Any pagan religion, not having a Gospel message for the future, is forced to keep its followers by making myths about the past. When people talk to you about the “power of the myths,” this is it: the power to snatch present and future away from you and immerse you entirely in the past.

This focus on the past has a bonus feature as well, or rather, the main feature of it, which is that it dulls or even destroys the ability of men to make sounds judgments in the present in respect to their expectations of the future. A person who is romantically and nostalgically attached to the past and longs for the past, only belongs to a reality but doesn’t participate in it practically. He is passive, and he has no interest in proactively seeking justice or even learning how justice is applied to the present world. And it is this feature of the past-orientation that is used by the modern ministry-industrial complex.

The world of our modern churches and ministries in America is almost entirely dominated by re-enacting theological and intellectual battles of the past. Just look at the Reformed churches and ministries who today are a very insignificant portion of the American population. (Remember, just a hundred years ago the Presbyterian church was the dominant cultural influence in the America.) 99%+ of the efforts of pulpits, seminaries, ministries, preachers, conferences, are spent rehashing over and over again the same theological concepts that we have been perfecting for 400 years now. Any Reformed group on Facebook I go to, whether pubs or societies or study groups; any blog of a seminarian professor I read, any church sermon I listen to, repeat ad nauseam the same ideas about TULIP, soteriology, sovereign grace. Popular preachers and conference speakers all compete with each other who will come up with the fanciest of the fanciest verbal repetitions of the same obvious truths that we should have left behind long ago, according to Hebrews 6:1. One designs this beautiful rhetoric about how our salvation depends entirely on God. Then another one comes and aces him with some even more beautiful and impressive phrase about the same thing. Then another paints an even better picture of the same thing and trumps the first two, and even Calvin and Luther and Paul himself with his literary skills. The audience learns nothing new; it’s all the same truth that we should have learned from the Reformers, and should have moved on. Then we are told in one sermon that we are miserable sinners before God. Then a conference speaker says the same and more, that we need to go deep in ourselves to find where that sin is, in daily self-examination and navel-gazing. Then a seminary professor writes a blog article and even a book to tell us how we can’t even begin to consider ourselves saved unless we have completely lost our mind in total contemplation of our moral misery. And yet, it’s the same thing, over and over again, which we should have learned long ago and moved on from it.

And what about baptism, paedo vs. credo? You wouldn’t guess that half a dozen verses in the Bible on baptism would translate into about a fifth of all modern Christian discourse, on both sides of the debate. Everything seems to boil down to whether we baptize babies or only adults. I made an effort some time ago to put together as many sermons and articles on baptism I could find on the Internet. I tell you, there are thousands of them! Arguing about baptism has become such a habit to many people that some time ago, when I was raising a judicial issue about the Law of God, a Reformed Baptist apologist who tried to argue with me automatically switched to arguing with me about baptism. He was so disappointed when I told him I find the argument about baptism irrelevant to our discussion.

And what about the countless debates over the same issues, over and over again – apologetics, Calvinism vs. Arminianism, paedo vs. credo, Muslim vs. Christian, atheist vs. Christian. With a very few precious exceptions, nothing new really comes out of these debates; the arguments used on both sides have been used and reused for hundreds of years. We are repeating the same things, over and over again, the same things from previous generations, and we are addicted to hearing the same things over and over again, and chewing on the same food over and over again.

Unfortunately, otherwise legitimate ministries also fall victim to the same mentality. R.C. Sproul’s Ligonier Ministries, for example, started well back in the 1970s, when the Reformed doctrines of the Sovereignty of God were lost in the church and there was a need to restore their popularity. Ligonier did a good job in popularizing Calvinism, but then never developed above the original basic message from back in the 70s. It never developed its ethical and judicial applications to our modern society, it never brought its listeners to a higher level of maturity to judge everything and discern between good and evil in everything. A Ligonier conference some 40 years after its founding was titled, “Tough Questions Christians Face?” And what were these tough questions? ‘Did Jesus Have to die?” Or, “Do Our Unrepentant Loved Ones Go to Hell?” After 40 years of teaching Calvinism, Ligonier’s listeners still have these questions for “tough”? I wrote an article back then about it, the next year Ligonier had another conference, this time the real tough questions . . . and they were the same questions.

What is lacking is a practical concern with justice and righteousness in our own era, and focus on the specific will of God for our own generation. What is lacking is a comprehensive practical ideology for action in the public arena. When churches, ministries, or lobbyist organizations sometimes get active about some issues of public policy, it is almost exclusively something related to sexual matters: like sex education in schools, or legalization of sodomy, or the use of bathrooms. And even there, they always seek solution within the existing pagan political paradigms, not in the Bible. On the vast world of problems of perverted justice, pagan state policies, government theft, indoctrination, foreign wars, the ministry-industrial complex has little to nothing to say.

This lack of comprehensive message even creates psychological problems among young and active people. Recently, a fundamentalist radio celebrity who passes for “Reformed” in some fundamentalist circles ranted on his show about “cage-stage Calvinists.” Listening to his rants I couldn’t help but notice that he was protesting a wee too much. He himself is part of that same ministry-industrial complex that has created the problem in the very beginning – by preaching the powerful message of the Sovereignty of God while neglecting its powerful practical applications to justice and righteousness. The man has spent 30+ years of his life repeating the same old stuff, giving to his listeners the same old milk. The only application of Calvinism his listeners know is that fundamentalist, hyper-spiritualized talk about pure theology, some apologetics, and abstract moralisms. When they apply their energy to such a small and abstract field of application, the result is exactly cage-stage Calvinism, against which he protests. I have never seen a cage-stage Calvinist on the mission field in Bulgaria. The reason is obvious: we never preached Calvinism without also preaching the ethical/judicial applications of the Sovereignty of God to every area of life, in our present situation, and we never had a pessimistic (amillennial or premillennial) eschatology. Our mission is theonomic and postmillennial, and theonomy and postmillennialism give a broad enough field for activity in the world around us, so energy is not wasted on petty arguments within the church. That cage-stage Calvinism is endemic to certain circles in the US is only a symptom of the broader problem with the ministry-industrial complex we are talking about here.

Although, I must say, the same problem is beginning to appear in theonomic and postmillennial circles in the US as well. Now that Christian Reconstruction has some history behind it, I can see the temptation among many young people to recreate the battles and the debates of 40 years ago – especially in the field of apologetics. And I had to tell many young people who aspired to become as great of apologists as Greg Bahnsen was that our job is to step on his shoulders and apply the Law of God to our own times, not recreate his wit in debates.

Pure theology and apologetics, of course, are a good thing, and useful to a Biblical student . . . but only when used as a tool to apply them to the ethical and judicial battles of today. But the product that comes out of the modern ministries and churches is rarely concerned with the ethical and judicial battles of today. They are not even concerned with the ethical and judicial battles of times past – in fact, many of the modern ministries discard them completely. Michael Horton and others of Westminster West, for example, like to repeat Calvin’s theological statements, but consider Calvin’s legal efforts in changing the laws of Geneva irrelevant to his Reformed faith. Joel Beeke of Banner of Truth publishes the abstract theological writings of the Puritans but never mentions their political struggles against tyranny, and for building a Christian Commonwealth. And these are not alone; there are many more such examples of ministers who ignore historical examples of application. Somehow the theology of times past is so important, but the practical applications of it are not worth mentioning.

Modern ministries are concerned only with the intellectual and theological battles of times past. But on these battles nothing new can be said. No new arguments can be brought about them. All the books that could be written on issues like the sacraments or salvation or the deep symbolic meaning of the preacher’s collar have already been published. But modern ministries keep repeating them. Because keeping a steady focus on the past keeps the listeners from discerning between good and evil in the present, and prevents a focus on the future. And this is what keeps the checks coming.

And the solution to it is obvious: defund them. Quit sending your checks to ministries who only babble on abstract theological issues and re-enact battles from the past. Re-direct your giving to ministries who have and preach and teach a comprehensive Biblical worldview, with ethical and judicial applications to the present, and an optimistic view of the future in history.

The book I will assign this week is again Herbert Schlossberg’s Idols for Destruction. If you haven’t read it yet, read it. If you have read it, read it again, with special attention on the first chapter, “Idols of History.”

And visit BulgarianReformation.com. Our mission in Bulgaria doesn’t re-enact battles from the past, and doesn’t rely on repeating abstract theological truths. We have been focused from the very beginning on addressing the culture, and on providing real Biblical answers to real problems – in every area of life. Go to Bulgarian Reformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. It’s a true ministry, deserving of your support.