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

Welcome to Episode 17 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will be talking about Oliver Cromwell, one of the most unique figures in the history of England, one of the greatest Christian and Reformed statesmen the world has ever known, a man of enormous spiritual gifts and yet of incredible humility, a man who could make all powerful crowned heads in Europe tremble at the mention of his name, and yet his most vehement critics – men of no earthly means or power – could eat at his table without any fear of reprisal or persecution. A man who was instrumental in sentencing a king to death, was powerful enough to become king himself, was offered to become king, and refused as a matter of principle.

I should add, as a prelude to our specific topic of interest today, he was a man who, more than any other man in his time, understood liberty and defended liberty, albeit imperfectly. A man of strong convictions, he was also a man of sober assessment where the boundaries of legitimate use of power laid, and where self-government was the rule. There has never been a man of such absolute power in the history of England – and yet, there has never been a man so reluctant to use that power where it was not necessary to use it.

As a short biographical info, I will mention that Oliver Cromwell was born in a family that had some history of mercenary service, participation in government corruption, but also public service. The family line came from the Welsh mercenary and adventurer Morgan ap William through his son, Richard Williams, born exactly a century before Oliver Cromwell. Richard Williams became a protege of the powerful minister of Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell, married his elder sister Katherine, and then, as part of the Cromwell family, participated in the corrupt government scheme of the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII. Richard’s son, Henry Williams, continued the tradition of participating in government corruption, and eventually became the largest landowner in Huntigdonshire. The wealth then was dissipated in different ways, and Robert Cromwell (Oliver’s father), was a man of modest means. He also changed his name from Williams to Cromwell.

Thus, Oliver Cromwell was not born into the Puritan faith, not did he inherit it from his fathers. Indeed, East England, where he was born, had a high concentration of Puritan congregations, and Oliver did have at least one teacher who was committed to teach him the Reformed faith. But the early years of Oliver show anything but a young man committed to any faith. To the contrary, he was inclined to sin, dissolution, and profligacy. He was sent by his father to Sydney Sussex College in Cambridge but left after the death of his father. The attempts of his richer relatives to get him to study were apparently unsuccessful, and he returned to his home to take care of his mother and his seven unwed sisters. He was 20 at the time. The next year he married Elizabeth Bourchier (BOW-shir), the daughter of a London-based Puritan merchant. The marriage provided connections to the industrial and merchant class in London, which at the time was almost entirely Puritan and Presbyterian, but in addition to it, it gave Oliver a wife who remained faithful, frugal, and level-headed even when she was declared the “Protectress of England.” Their marriage was happy, and undoubtedly, it was to her credit that the young Oliver embraced the Reformed faith with such ardor, and committed his whole life to it.

His marriage not only directed his mind and heart towards God, it also unleashed his energy towards productive service, both to his family and his community. Cromwell quickly proved that he was endowed with spiritual gifts that few of the men around him possessed. In his early 20s, while working to provide for his huge family (mother, seven unwed sisters, and a wife), he entered local politics with enthusiasm and quickly earned himself the fame of a man who doesn’t compromise on his principles. (Whether at that time all his principles were right and correct is a different issue.) For a young man, he was perhaps unusually active, he got in disputes with the local elites, and eventually was even called before the King’s Privy Council to be chastised. After these disputes, in 1631, he moved to another place, and his economic position deteriorated even more – from a member of the gentry he was now as low as a free peasant who had to till the earth to survive. For someone who, just three years earlier, was a member of Parliament, having to sell eggs and wool to earn a scanty living was a serious setback. Cromwell – now an ardent Puritan – took it without complaint, as God’s providence. He was then 31 years old. He had to struggle for 5 years before his situation improved, and then for another 5 years before he was restored in the social status of the gentry – which at the time, was important for his political aspirations and purposes. By the age of 41, he was a mature man, experienced in economic hardship and survival, responsible care for a large family, but also in political action and controversies. Apparently, also, this was the period that trained his body and mind for his future career of the greatest and most successful military commander England has ever known.

That career started in 1640, when he was 41, when King Charles I summoned another Parliament to vote on his demand for funds. The young man wasn’t there anymore; Cromwell was now a man of influence among a group of aristocrats of Puritan faith. And he wasn’t shy: He was one of the first speakers, and his first speech was a call to the King, as a condition for support from the parliament, to free from prison the Puritan preacher John Lilburne. The King dissolved the Parliament in three weeks, for which reason it was called the Short Parliament. This didn’t solve his problem with funds, so he had to call it again. And this started his downfall.

In 1642 the conflict between the King and the Parliament became a military conflict. Naturally, the majority of the trained soldiers of England – most of them aristocrats – sided with the King. The Parliament had to assemble and train its own army, comprised entirely of people who were commoners and amateurs.

And here’s where the real spiritual gifts of Oliver Cromwell were manifested and applied in practice. In fact, we can’t understand his consequent influence and total dominance of the politics of the Commonwealth unless we understand his almost supernatural ability to train and lead people into battle. All his contemporaries – whether critics or friends – agree that if any man was born for that specific time, to train a new army for the specific demands of the time, it was Oliver Cromwell. In 1642 (at the age of 43), he had no military experience whatsoever. By 1645, he had assembled his own cavalry unit, and had led it in several important but indecisive battles. In early 1645, Cromwell initiated military reforms which led to his New Model Army: an army of peasants and city workers (Roundheads, as opposed to the aristocratic Cavaliers), admitted only on the basis of their Protestant faith and their willingness to undergo severe training and obey the strictest discipline. In the words of Cromwell himself, “I would rather have a plain, russet-coated Captain, that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than what you call a Gentleman and is nothing else.” Several Puritan commanders took part in the training of this new army but Cromwell was the main influence behind it, and he specifically trained the elite of it: the cavalry troops. So strict was their training and discipline that Cromwell’s cavalry men could ride and charge in a close formation, knee to knee, without breaking ranks; and when in combat, they could reassemble their lines at command within the matter of seconds, whether for the purpose of pursuit, regrouping, or orderly retreat. Before him, such maneuvers were only possible for well-trained infantry; Cromwell combined the pack formation of the infantry with the mobility of the cavalry, creating troops that, for all practical purposes, were the fighting equivalent of modern tanks. Without their unwavering faith and their steel-quality discipline, these amateur farm boys and city boys wouldn’t be able to perform so well on the battle field.

The results came within weeks. Between 1642 and 1645, most of the battles between the King’s army and the Parliamentary forces were indecisive. In the summer of 1645, only a few months after Cromwell introduced his reforms, his Roundheads reduced to nothing the King’s veteran troop at the Battle of Naseby. Within the next several months, all the royalist strongholds in the west of England and in Wales were taken, and the King surrendered to the Scots within a few months. The Battle of Naseby was the beginning of a life-long string of only victories; after it, Cromwell would never lose a battle again, till the end of his life – so much as his enemies would start the rumor that he had sold his soul to the devil for military invincibility.

Thus ended the First English Civil War, in which the Calvinist forces in Britain – of all denominations – fought against King Charles I and defeated him. It was a victory for the Reformation – but not just a religious victory. Unlike our modern pietist churchmen, Reformation at the time meant much more than TULIP and individualist navel-gazing with the purpose of making sure we are saved. In the words of Martin Bucer, “Reformation means the complete Christianization of all of life.” The war against the King’s power was a war for self-government, liberty, a war against government regulations and taxes, against corruption and cronyism, etc. The English Puritans saw every activity of man – individual and corporate – as theological, and therefore they saw it mandatory to resist those governmental practices which followed from a pagan ideology of government.

This English Civil War could have been the last, and England could have transitioned to a Reformed Commonwealth, and remained so till our own day. The King was defeated, the Cavaliers were dispersed, the Parliamentary Army was triumphant, and the majority of the population of England was jubilant, for the initial expectations about peace under the rule of a Reformed Parliament were very optimistic. The few remaining royalist strongholds were subdued and they accepted the inevitable. But the peace was short-lived. Cromwell had to fight another civil war, and then another, and then continue fighting political battles which eventually destroyed the reputation of the Reformed leadership of England, and led to the restoration of the monarchy – and with it, to a collapse of the Reformed faith in England. Cromwell won them all; but the future was lost for Calvinism in England.

The reason he had to fight those wars was the foolishness and the perfidy of Presbyterians – English and Scottish – who at the time were more devoted to their narrow denominational interests than to the success and the flourishing of the Reformed faith in Britain. Yes, folks, I have to say it, with a heavy heart: The Second and the Third English Civil Wars, and subsequent demise of the Reformed faith in England are a huge black mark on the historical reputation of Presbyterians. There is no excuse for their conduct in those years. Their children did repair that reputation in the American Revolution. But that early generation of Presbyterians is still guilty.

But let’s get into the details of that history, and through that, let’s try to understand the views of Christian commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell, what he fought for, the liberty he believed in and defended, and how his views were far ahead of his time.

The political system at the time of the Long Parliament was such as most of the members of Parliament were not elected as today, by popular vote but by a complex system of patronage and nepotism. The members still formally “represented” their districts or counties as polities but they didn’t have to be approved by the majority of the population. In this system, under different historical circumstances, a significant share of the members of the Long Parliament were Presbyterians, a share which did not represent the real percentage of Presbyterians among the population. Presbyterians were well represented only among that upper middle class of the gentry and the aristocracy which, under the earlier laws, had political franchise. On the other hand, the new powerful institution created by Cromwell under the new military reforms – his New Model Army – was more broadly democratic in its recruiting, and therefore had a higher number of Independents. Thus, from the very beginning the Presbyterian group in Parliament harbored suspicions and distrust of the Army which they saw as a hotbed of Puritans and Independents.

Presbyterians in Parliament started negotiating with King Charles behind the back of the other Reformed groups even as early as 1643, while the First Civil War was still going on and Reformed Christians were still dying on the battlefields protecting the Parliament against the King’s armies. The purpose of those negotiations was narrowly denominational: to get Charles to agree to change the establishment of the Church of England from Episcopal to Presbyterian. I mentioned foolishness and perfidy. Foolishness, because given their previous experience with Charles, they should have known that there was not a single reason to expect that he would keep his word any longer than it suited him – certainly not for a group which was in the tiny minority and had no social power. All their power at the time came from the military power of Cromwell’s army which protected them from the King. Perfidy, because these negotiations were happening behind the back of the other Reformed groups. The Presbyterian faction, not having any social support and power of their own, were trying to play the two main powers, the Parliamentary Army and the King, in order to promote the Presbyterian agenda. There were opinions – well-founded, given the course of events during the first three years of the Civil War – that Presbyterian commanders were conducting their campaigns half-heartedly, not wanting to reach victory but only to bring Charles to the bargaining table.

The King being held in custody after the First Civil War, the Presbyterians continued negotiating with him about the establishment of the Presbyterian denomination as state religion of England – which would have meant the disenfranchisement and ultimately persecution of all the Reformed non-Presbyterian denominations and groups who had fought for the Parliament. This, of course, earned the disapproval and discontent of the majority of the Protestant population of England, and especially in London. Cromwell and his generals had to suppress a mutiny among their own troops who believed they were defrauded to fight to protect a Parliament which now wanted to take away their liberties. Cromwell was being faithful to his oaths, and he was trying to prevent a fratricidal war between the Reformed factions, caused by the betrayal of Presbyterian politicians. But the war couldn’t be averted. Encouraged by the negotiations between the King and the Presbyterians, Royalists in England and Wales revolted against the Parliamentarian rule. They were joined by a group of Scottish Presbyterian royalists; the Scottish Kirk refused to bless the revolt but it also refused to excommunicate the participants, which only encouraged them. Cromwell’s Army was now fighting on three fronts: Against English royalists, against Scottish Presbyterians, and, politically, against its own Parliament.

Despite being heavily outnumbered (the insurrectionists also brought in mercenaries from the  Continent), Cromwell and his generals defeated all their military opponents, and that within less than a year. In the course of the war, though, the Army leaders became convinced that as long as Charles was alive, he would plot against the Parliament and would use lies, false promises, and manipulations to set the different Reformed groups against each other. The conclusion was obvious: the King had to be taken to court for his treason against England. He was, and on January 30, 1649, he was executed in London. England was proclaimed a Commonwealth, that is, a Republic, under the rule of the Parliament. Still no charges were brought against those Presbyterians in Parliament who conspired with Charles.

But this was not the end of the Civil Wars. Charles I was dead, but his son, Charles II, was now conspiring. He offered a Presbyterian establishment to the Scottish Covenanters, and in 1649, just a few months after the end of the Second Civil War, Scotland’s leaders pledged loyalty to Charles II as their king. In this, they were in violation of their oaths for a Commonwealth between England and Scotland. The reason: The English Independents didn’t want to allow the sort of narrow denominational establishment that the Scottish Kirk leaders and the English Presbyterian politicians demanded. The resistance against this narrow denominationalism was so strong in England that Cromwell’s close friend, the poet and writer John Milton (author of Paradise Lost), wrote the following poem expressing his, and other people’s, disappointment of the treachery of the Presbyterians, calling them the “new forcers of conscience”:

By this time, Cromwell had emerged as the undisputed leader of all Parliamentary forces. His formal superior, Lord Fairfax, withdrew from command, unwilling to participate in a campaign against Protestant Scotland. Cromwell had no choice. He decided not to wait until the combined forces of Scots and Royalists invade, and landed south of Edinburgh with only half of his army, with minimal provisions. The English were outnumbered 2 or 3 to 1 and the Scots were led by the most illustrious commander in Britain at the time, David Leslie who had served for several European nations and had fought with distinction on the battlefields of Germany and Russia. And yet, on September 3, 1650, at Dunbar in Scotland, Cromwell achieved his greatest victory ever. Severely outnumbered, without supplies and without artillery, cut off from his route for retreat, he was able to smash the Scottish army so that even preachers throughout Scotland acknowledged from the pulpits that Dunbar was God’s judgment on Scotland for her whoring with Charles II. At the cost of only 20 English killed, the Scots lost close to 3,000, and between 6 and 10,000 were taken prisoners – almost as many as the whole English army!

It is because of this victory that some modern so-called “covenanters” like to refer to Cromwell as a “tyrant.” But there is no ground for such a sentiment. Cromwell was now the master of Scotland, as he was the master of England – and yet, he ordered no reprisals, no persecutions, no executions. The churches of Scotland were left unmolested; the political elite of Scotland was allowed to continue maintaining the social order. Not for a second did Cromwell allow any bitterness against brothers in the Reformed faith control his actions; he sincerely believed they were simply deceived, and he acted like it. And while Cromwell the alleged “tyrant” made sure no one was persecuted, Charles II, for whose crown so many Scots died, made sure, right after his ascent to the throne many years later, that death sentences were issued on many religious and political leaders of Scotland, and he also tried to enforce religious conformity on Scotland. As I said earlier, the stupidity of that generation of English and Scottish Presbyterians is mind-boggling; it hard to explain such perfidy in dealing with brothers in the faith, and foolishness in fraternizing with the enemy.

For the rest of Cromwell’s life, the battlefields were quiet, but he had to act in the political arena – against Presbyterians, again, who wanted to force the conscience of others. He was a military dictator – euphemistically called Lord Protector – but we need to understand that there is a difference between a military dictator and a military dictator. After all, in our times, we had military dictators as Pinochet in Chile or Kenan Evren in Turkey, who used their absolute power to prevent a takeover by even worse dictatorial regimes or to restore order after political and social turmoil. Cromwell did use his power several times against the Parliament; always to prevent passing of laws that would bring more tyranny and destroy freedom of conscience. On the other hand, he had tolerance for critics and dissenters unusual for any powerful person at the time. Cromwell eased the laws for admission of Jews and Muslims in England, ignored the reports of secret Roman Catholic services in private homes in London, and restrained courts and governors who were a little too anxious to persecute dissenting religious groups like the Quakers. George Fax, the founder of the Quakers, who was a vehement critic of Cromwell’s regime, was even invited to Cromwell’s table a few times and was allowed to preach and prophesy on the most powerful man in England, and perhaps Europe as well. Cromwell also organized a nationwide fund-raising for the persecuted Waldensians in Savoy – a Charismatic group which in his time had a broadly Protestant/Evangelical confession. And he also intervened diplomatically to end their persecution. The only spot on his reputation of tolerance were his actions against the Irish Catholics, especially in the siege of Drogheda (DROidah). But even there, the case could be made that those actions were only directed against combatants. (I don’t want to defend him here, I personally believe that Cromwell’s actions are indefensible, but some historians show evidence to the contrary.) All in all, Cromwell seems to have been willing to use his absolute power only against other men in power, men who would be tyrants over other men’s purses and consciences. Towards the common people of England and towards his Presbyterian brethren, despite their treachery, by the standards of the time, he was the most lenient powerful man of his time.

So what were the differences between Cromwell and the English and the Scottish Presbyterians? What made the Presbyterians so committed to ignore their shared faith with the Cromwell and the Independents and conspire with crowned heads known for their profligacy, debauchery, and tyrannical inclinations?

Cromwell was a Puritan, an Independent – a position closer to the Congregational form of church government, except that in Cromwell’s time it was even more radical in favor of a less structured church hierarchy. Now, I need to mention here that my personal beliefs are closer to Presbyterianism – as long as it is true Presbyterianism, not like what we have today. (I have explained the problems with it in my article on ChristendomRestored.com, “Modern Presbyterianism and the Destruction of the Principle of Plurality of Elders.”) I believe in plurality of elders but I also think higher courts are necessary with the purpose of keeping checks on local sessions and elders who are eager to overstep their boundaries. But as biased as I am in favor of Presbyterianism, Cromwell’s views on civil government were much closer to the Bible than were the views of the Presbyterians of his time. Both groups – Independents and Presbyterians – advocated establishmentarianism; both groups believed that the civil government must be subject to the Moral Law of God, and therefore was to be preached to, prophesied to, and instructed in the way of righteousness by the church. Both groups believed that the civil government was an institution under God, not independent from religion. Both groups believed that the Gospel is not limited to the heart of man only but included man’s society and its institutions, as well as man’s economic activities.

But there was also a significant difference, and it was not in the extent of the power of the Gospel but in the limits on the different levels of government. The Presbyterian view of civil government was not based on the Reformed faith; it was a leftover from the Roman Catholic view of government: that civil government is allowed to apply its power in matter of personal conscience and self-government. True, they believed that the King must be restrained by the Law, as Samuel Rutherford wrote; but in their view, the Law placed very few restrictions on the King when it comes to personal consciences. Thus, if the King could be persuaded to establish the “correct” form of worship throughout the land – a Presbyterian polity – he would have a divine mandate to control and regulate church gatherings to conform to that polity. Thought Presbyterians of the time didn’t realize it, this was not a Biblical mandate, this came straight from the pagan views of the King as a priest. The irony of the situation that that same establishmentarianism had been used before against the, and was used during the Restoration against them again, and yet, they rooted for it when they were in power.

Cromwell, on the other hand, understood the difference between power and authority, and therefore the limits of lawful use of power by the different institutions of government. Having an absolute power concentrated in his hands, he was reluctant to use to its full extent. He saw civil government as a limited government, a sphere of government, not the government. Other governments were just as authoritative in their own spheres, and therefore immune to intervention. Self-government was to be one of them, but he also advocated for church governments to be separated from the civil government and therefore protected against trespassing from the government. His reluctance, in his years as Lord Protector, to persecute Roman Catholics who in all else remained loyal to the social order and the laws, was based on his understanding that as long as the civil laws were obeyed, the religion of a person was a matter of personal conscience, and therefore immune to government intervention. He also made steps to protect private business from government intervention; this, in itself, was not new, Protestant Netherlands had had such laws for 80 years before that, but in the context of England – still a land of feudal duties – it was a revolutionary step to declare business free of intervention. Cromwell did believe that the same moral law applied to both the individual and the state – but he also knew that the spheres of jurisdiction were to be different between the self-governing individual, the church, and the state.

Presbyterian establishmentarianism, therefore, was close to a religious, narrowly denominational totalitarian state: The government was supposed to be the father of its immature, wayward children; it was supposed to establish and subsidy the churches; and it was supposed to mandate attendance and faith, to goad people into worshiping God, even if there was no real faith in them – which, Biblically, would be an abomination, and such abomination would be presupposed in such establishmentarianism, and even imposed by law. It was a “natural law” worship of power: If there is some power in the society, it was to be used to its maximum extent to enforce uniformity of faith and creed.

Cromwell’s view was a general Christian establishment in which the government had a limited role, in which role it was supposed to follow the specific instructions given to it in the Law of God. Power was not to be used unless necessary; and even then, the civil government had boundaries and it couldn’t cross those boundaries, even if it looked like it could fix a situation. God had put a yoke around the necks of kings and rulers, and Cromwell used his power only to stop other rulers from transgressing their boundaries. He mainly used his power as an interposing magistrate to protect the people of England from the tyrannies of the King and the Presbyterian elite. As to the individual ordinary people of England, he protected them.

It was for this reason the Presbyterians were so eager and willing to conspire first with King Charles, and then with his son. Faith and creed be damned, the two parties had a common view of government, opposed to Cromwell’s view. All they needed to do it meet in the middle and create a new form of despotism based on Presbyterian establishmentarianism. Cromwell and his army were the obstacle before such totalitarian state. No wonder he is not fondly remembered by them. On the surface the religious faith was the same. When it came to applied theology and social views, Presbyterians were old priests writ large, following the same old Romanist view of government. Cromwell was far ahead of his time in understanding what social views his Reformed faith demanded – and he fought for the liberty it demanded.

When Cromwell died, they could now have their king. But he didn’t need them anymore. For another generation the Reformed faith in England would be persecuted – undoubtedly, as a judgment from God on a generation of Reformed believers who wanted a king. Only in the Glorious Revolution in 1689 Cromwell’s view prevailed. England became a broad Christian establishment of constitutional liberties and restraint upon government. Not perfect, but close. And a century later, America would continue on the same road.

While the situation in our day is not perfectly similar to that in 17th century England, we have a number of Christians today who do not understand the law of God, do not care for the Law of God, and yet still advocate one or another action of the civil government. Most of their ideology of government is not Biblical – it comes from the modern popular theories, which are all children of the Enlightenment and its neopaganism. Paganism in all its forms leads to tyranny. In the final account, our participation as Christians in the political arena without a clear understanding of the boundaries on civil government, will lead not to more righteousness, nor to more religious liberty. It will only lead to more tyranny. The Law of God must be at the foundation of our political involvement, and we must reject the temptation to expect the civil government to solve problems which are Biblically given to the family and the church. Like the Presbyterians of Cromwell’s time, we may find ourselves in alliance with the enemies of God, and eventually undermine our own efforts. In this, Cromwell should be a good example of a man who knew the limits of government. A man ahead of his time, but also a man underestimated in our own time, his views of government, and his actions in preventing tyranny may once again be a good school for us, in our own times of creeping tyranny.

The book I will recommend today is a short biography of Cromwell: The Protector: A Vindication, by Merle D’Aubigne. While there are some more comprehensive biographies of Cromwell, D’Aubigne’s strong commitment to reading history in terms only of the providence of God and the move of His Spirit is a good example of how a Christian should view history. R.J. Rushdoony, in his Systematic Theology, reserves very high praise for D’Aubigne’s philosophy of history and his view of the providence of God. You will see it in this book.

And once again, I want to mention the mission field where my heart is: Bulgaria. We have been working for over 20 years now to bring to that mission field the comprehensive Gospel of Christ, and the Law of God which would reform the very idea of government in the hearts and the minds of Bulgaria. We have had success so far, by God’s grace. The more we publish, the more success we will have. I was asked recently, how much does an average book cost to produce in Bulgaria. My answer: $3 production cost per copy. Which means, a regular gift of $10 a month will help place on the market three copies per month of sound Reformed theology, applied to all of life. When we have the critical mass of books, the civilization will be changed. BulgarianReformation.com, donate. God bless you all.

Welcome to Episode 16 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will be talking about the Sabbath, the Fourth Commandment, the real Biblical meaning of the Fourth Commandment, and about the attempts of modern Pharisees to keep the Fourth Commandment in ways contrary to its very meaning and purpose. We will look at the greater covenantal frame of the Ten Commandments, at the ways any Commandment can be twisted so as to go against that frame, we will look at the impossibility of keeping the Fourth Commandment in its literal meaning today, and then at the reason for that impossibility: God’s emphasis on the ethical/judicial meaning of the Commandment, over its literal and ritual meaning. At the end, we will look at the real covenantal meaning of the Fourth Commandment – a meaning that has been either omitted or deliberately avoided by modern churchmen, because it has required actions of positive and active mercy and liberty, which the prevailing anti-Christian culture finds offensive.

Let me start with a disclaimer: I will be arguing here against the technical, literal application of one part of the Fourth Commandment. But despite of what some may imagine, nothing of what I say here is against Sunday church gatherings or against setting one day out of seven for literal rest from work. Nothing of what I say here condemns anyone who has chosen – as a matter of his personal choice – to diligently attend a church every Sunday. Nothing of what I say here condemns any denomination or church that has chosen to perform certain ritual motions on Sunday as a matter of liturgical expediency – as long as, of course, those ritual motions are not openly idolatrous, like worship of Mary, or honor services of agents of the pagan government, like police, or preaching of anti-Biblical ideologies. My purpose here is not to replace one kind of Pharisaical legalism with another kind of Pharisaical legalism; my purpose here is oppose the “forcers of conscience” (a phrase I borrowed from the great Puritan author John Milton), those who take their own private interpretation of the Fourth Commandment, despise the Christian liberty established in the New Testament interpretation of it, and try to bind the conscience and the bodies of the people of God by chains that Christ specifically rejected. And in doing so, they ignore the heavier matters of the Fourth Commandment, the ethical/judicial meaning of it, that is, the righteousness and justice that follow from it, in the larger context of God’s Covenant. I am arguing here for Christian liberty and Christian duty: liberty under the Law, and duty under the Law. And the Law is the totality of the Word of God, Old and New Covenant, one Word of God.

When we discuss the Ten Commandments, of course, we need to have one important thing in mind: The Ten Commandments are only maidservants to a larger covenantal context; they are not the larger context themselves. When Jesus was asked which the greatest commandment was (Matt. 22; Mark 12; Luke 10), His answer didn’t include any individual commandment of the Ten, nor the Ten as a whole. His answer went above and beyond the Ten Commandments, to a commandment that won’t normally be noticed if one does a simply cursory reading of the Law, because the commandment is not even mentioned in the first four books of Moses. It is only mentioned in the last book, Deuteronomy, and there is it repeated multiple times in different versions (4:29; 10:12; 11:1; 13:3; 19:9; 30:6, to mention a few). The Commandments was, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and with all your mind.” (Mark and Luke add, “and with all your strength.”) The Ten Commandments, therefore, are only a lower order of commandments: which is not to say that they are less important or dispensable but only that they are an extension, a development or application of that greater commandment. (In fact, of the two greater commandments, “Love God” and “Love your neighbor.”) This subordinate character of the Ten Commandments is very important, for it tells us that the Ten would have no meaning nor make any sense whatsoever unless they are read, interpreted, and obeyed within the larger frame of the greatest commandment. It also tells us that when interpreted outside that frame, the Ten Commandments can easily be twisted into something they were never meant to be. I like to give the example with telling your son to wash the dishes. The command to wash the dishes presupposes several smaller commands – put water and soap on the dishes, rinse the dishes, dry the dishes, etc., – but it is possible to obey all these smaller commands to the tee and yet not have the dishes washed. (And we know kids can be specialists in faking obedience by doing the details of the smaller things while leaving job unfinished.) Take for example, the Sixth Commandment: if we just interpret it literally and try to obey it literally, isolated from the rest of the covenant, we shouldn’t have death penalty, for the word for “murder” is no different from the word for innocent manslaying. Jesus also gives examples, in Matt. 23, of literal interpretation of commandments which is isolated from the larger context of the covenant and thus eventually contradicting the covenant. We need to be careful, therefore, when we read any of the Ten Commandments individually and isolated from the larger context, for we are running the risk of concocting a system of fake obedience to the Law which in itself is a violation of the Law. And the Fourth Commandment is no exception to this rule.

In the light of this, there are two myths preached in some modern churches concerning the Sabbath and the Fourth Commandment, which myths are based on an interpretation which is, in the final account, contrary to the covenant of God.

First, the myth that the Sabbath is a “day of worship.” R.J. Rushdoony dealt with this myth in his book, Institutes of Biblical Law, chapter 4, so here I will give my short refutation of it. Nowhere does the Bible declare the Sabbath to be a “day of worship.” It is a day of rest; and that’s the very meaning of the word “shabath”: rest. The pattern work/worship does not exist in the Bible; the pattern in the Bible is work/rest. The first version of the Fourth Commandment, in Exodus 20:8-11, specifically ties the Sabbath day to the Creation week:

For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.

To imagine that this verse speaks of a work/worship pattern is to imagine that on the seventh day, God worshipped. Aside from the fact that there is no way for God to worship (that is, bow down), we have at least an indirect testimony that on the day of rest, God wasn’t even around in the Garden in order to be worshiped. If Adam and Eve committed their sin on a seventh day – as is the belief of many commentators – God only returned to them at the end of the day. They were supposed to rest, not to worship.

The Law of God had provisions for enforcing the Sabbath, and not a single one of these provisions had anything to do with ritual worship. They all had to do with rest vs. work. There was no mandatory ritual attendance, and there were no penalties for not attending. Ritual worship continued during the week, and there is no indication whatsoever that that ritual worship was in any way related to the rest on the Sabbath. In fact, worship was much more than the ritual worship, it was the whole life of the covenant man and the covenant community, as we see mention of worship outside the Temple and outside the Levitical system.

Not only was not ritual worship related to rest, it was itself work, not rest. As strange as this may sound to modern churchian years, this concept of worship as work is very clearly taught in the Bible. There was a whole tribe set aside to conduct ritual worship, and that tribe was specifically denied any inheritance in Israel – the Levites. Their inheritance were the tithes and offerings from the rest of the tribes; that was their payment for their work. Jesus specifically declares that the ritual worship in the Temple was work, not rest, and He called it a desecration of the Sabbath in Matt. 12:5: “Have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent?” His opponents didn’t object to this: obviously, it was a common interpretation that priestly work in the Temple is breaking the Sabbath, but it didn’t incur any guilt. But the Law mentions nothing specific about priests breaking the Sabbath and being innocent. The only logical conclusion, therefore, is that the regular duty of the priests – ritual worship – was considered work, not rest, and therefore was technically a violation of the Sabbath. The fact that the priests were still innocent was a fact of serious significance for the New Covenant where all believers are now priests; but we will tackle this later.

Since worship was clearly work, not rest, the pattern work/worship is actually work/work, and is not the Biblical pattern given in the Fourth Commandment. Ritual worship – including modern churchian ritual worship – is work, not rest, and as such, is a violation of the Sabbath, had the Sabbath been applied today as literally as it was in the OT times. Those who sigh in abandon how great and holy is to worship on the Lord’s Day have actually bought into a non-Biblical idea. The Sabbath was rest, rituals are work. The only thing that keeps us innocent is not our worship on Sunday – which has no special place or magical significance as worship at all – but the fact that we are now priests, and something greater than the Temple is here. This alone should make every Christian understand the concept of Christian liberty, as over against modern Pharisaism.

The second myth is that it is possible today to keep the Sabbath in the literal way it was commanded in the Law of God.

First of all, even if it was possible, no one is really keeping it, not even self-proclaimed sabbatarians. The key here is the light switch on Sunday morning. I have talked hundreds of times to people who claim to be sabbatarians who are quick to hurl accusations against anyone who works on Sunday or misses a church service on Sunday, and I have always asked the question: “When you wake up Sunday morning, to you flip that light switch on the wall?” They all say they do. And they all refuse to acknowledge what that means: On Sunday, there are people out there working for profit, in power stations, power grid control rooms, water supply companies, Internet suppliers, telephone companies, traffic and air control towers, on board of ocean ships, jetliners, and railroad engines, etc., etc., etc. And our modern alleged “sabbatarians” have no problem using the services of all these people, using the electricity, gas, water, phone services and internet services produced by these people. And then they turn around and condemn those same people for their work on Sunday; while they consider themselves holy because they are not like those people who work on Sunday and whose services provide for their comfort on Sunday.

I have asked this question hundreds of times, and I have never seen a single “sabbatarian” even stop to consider the contradiction in his own position. Not a single one said, “This is true, I have been inconsistent, I need to stop using these services on Sunday, because I am taking advantage of work I condemn by my own theology, and with my money I encourage people to work on Sunday.” To the contrary, sabbatarians either ignore the question, or give such ridiculously inept explanations that I have been quite tempted at times to doubt these people’s sanity. Most of the time they come up with the excuse that hospitals need electricity and water and gas on Sunday, and this is a “work of necessity or mercy,” and therefore there is no problem to use that electricity. But wait, you and your church (using massive amounts of energy for air-conditioning on Sunday) are not a hospital; there is nothing in your situation that calls for a work of necessity and mercy. Just because someone else needs help doesn’t mean you are entitled to the same help without any need. Christians in history went without air-conditioning or running water for centuries; your “necessity” is a false necessity, you are simply being a spoiled American, not a person in a situation of necessity. Others come up with the bizarre rule that if there is no exchange of money on Sunday, it is not a violation of the Sabbath, and therefore it is OK to purchase services from people violating the Sabbath if the payment is the next day. I mean, how much more Pharisaical can we get? The Law of God says nothing whatsoever about the time of payment as a condition for violating the Sabbath; it is a completely man-made rule. And obviously, if applied consistently, it would justify any work on Sunday – provided the payment is on the next day. Seriously, is the commandment about work, or is it about the time of payment?

But modern sabbatarians continue using the services of people who work on Sunday, making up lame excuses either for themselves or for the people who violate the Sabbath (as per their definition) to provide for their comfortable, spoiled lives. At the same time, they accuse of “violation of the Sabbath” the fact that restaurants open on Sunday, and heap condemnations on Christians who go to restaurant after church. When I point to them that restaurants are a work of necessity and mercy because they also provide for travelers in town who have no place to go to to get food, suddenly this argument of necessity is not valid, and there is no excuse for restaurants to stay open on Sunday, nor for Christians to use them. If there is a modern example of Jesus’s words in Matt. 23:4 and Luke 11:46, it is modern sabbatarians: “They tie up heavy burdens and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are unwilling to move them with so much as a finger.” Very obviously, modern sabbatarians know perfectly well that the direct, literal keeping of the Sabbath is impossible today, and they themselves don’t even try to keep it, but they use it to send other people on guilt-trips.

Keeping the Sabbath today is impossible for another reason too: The modern pattern of week cycles independent of annual cycles is not the system described in the Law of God. (Rushdoony explained that as well in Chapter 4 of his Institutes, and quotes Curtis Clair Ewing.) It is impossible for the modern pattern to have been active then because certain days of certain months were set aside for doing work, and under the modern system, they would have fallen on a Sabbath day one year in seven. (See Exodus 12:3, 5, 6, 24; Lev. 23:15). Also, specific days of specific months are declared Sabbaths in the Law – if these are simply weekdays kept as Sabbaths, this would violate one part of the Fourth Commandment: “six days you shall work.” In the Law of God, the weeks were tied to the year; the year started on the first day of the week, and the sabbaths were fixed on the same dates every year. The year of 365 days was split in 52 fixed weeks plus one extra day. The extra day was an extra sabbath added after the 7thSabbath after Passover (Lev. 23:15-21), making Pentecost be a two-day, 48-hours Sabbath (the 49th and the 50thday after the Passover Sabbath). The Hebrew calendar was strictly a solar calendar, not a solar-lunar calendar, and the week cycle was tied to the year cycle, not independent of it.

Thus, keeping the Sabbath according to the modern calendar (which has the additional problem of leap years as well) has nothing to do with keeping the Sabbath according to the Law of God. At best, it is simply taking a tradition much more recent than the Law of God as given to Moses, and arbitrarily assigning some ritualistic/magical quality to certain days according to that tradition.

From an economic standpoint – which means, from the standpoint of the Dominion Covenant as a greater context for the Ten Commandments – the theological excuse of “works of necessity and mercy,” while helpful at times, is not exactly Biblical. (And it’s not even helpful most of the time – why would modern sabbatarians want the restaurants and the hotels closed on Sundays when every city has some number of travelers residing in it during the weekend? Do they expect travelers to go around begging for food and shelter on Sunday?) While necessity and mercy were involved as motives in Jesus’s multiple cases of healing on the Sabbath, his examples given in reply to the Pharisees were not all cases of necessity and mercy. More important, His defense of His disciples for their violation of the Sabbath in Matt. 12:1-7 (remember, His disciples were picking grain) didn’t resort to the argument of works of necessity and mercy. Jesus went much farther than that, showing examples of violation of the Law – or of its literal reading – in the OT, and showing why those are to become the norm in the NT (“something greater than the Temple is here.”) This specific verse is one of the two avoided like the plague by modern sabbatarians, because it does show a very clear discontinuity which establishes – let me repeat and emphasize – that such violations of the Sabbath will become the norm in the NT. “Something greater than the Temple is here.” And, judging from the whole context of the NT, that “something greater” is to remain here, with us until the end of the age.

The emphasis on the phrase “necessity and mercy” is rather based on the need for a religiously sounding excuse. A better and more comprehensive term would be an economic term: works of maintenance and damage control. Jesus’s examples in response to the Pharisees were given in this context: taking one’s ox to the water on the Sabbath (maintenance) and pulling a child or an ox out of a pit (damage control). While the concept of mercy can be applied to the child, there is no necessity nor mercy involved in spending one’s Sabbath pulling an animal out of a pit – work that can be done the next day. Neither was there any necessity nor mercy involved in allowing the disciples to pick grain on the Sabbath – clearly forbidden in the Law. None of them were starving while they were with Jesus – Luke 22:35 says they didn’t lack anything while being with Him. The rule for work allowed on the Sabbath, therefore, was not necessity or mercy but preventing a capital loss. Work for the purpose of preventing a capital loss was allowed: if the animals go thirsty for one day, they will lose weight or will be less capable of work on the first day of the week. The same will happen if an animal is left in the pit and pulled out the next day: the next day will be lost to work, and the animal will probably be exhausted. Defense of the cities against enemies was allowed on the Sabbath: again, to prevent capital loss. It goes without saying that sailors could work on the Sabbath without incurring guilt, because a ship can’t be just left drifting in the middle of the sea. The same would apply to merchants and travelers: In situations where the literal keeping of the Sabbath would involve loss of capital, they were allowed to continue moving until they are out of danger. Etc., etc.

Some will think that reducing it down to loss of capital is rather profane. But remember, we are talking about the larger context of the Dominion Covenant. The Ten Commandments were not given with the purpose of destroying the economic base of human society; they were given with the purpose of enabling man to fulfill the Dominion Covenant. Loss of capital on the Sabbath day would have meant a zero growth world, if what man produces during the week is destroyed on the Sabbath day.

But in the last 300 years – under the influence of the Christian worldview developed in the Reformation – the economy of the world has moved more and more to a state where most of the economic activities, if interrupted on Sunday for 24 hours, would lead to a net loss of capital. This is not merely about hospitals and road assistance and rescue teams. It is not even merely about restaurants and hotels open on Sunday to serve travelers or people who have no ability to prepare their own food. We are speaking here of the mainframes of the modern economy, those without which the modern economy would return to a more primitive state of less capitalization, less productivity, and therefore may lead to suffering and starvation. Thermal and nuclear power stations can’t stop production one day every week. Cement plants, fertilizer plants, metallurgical plants, industrial laboratories, transportation systems – air, ground, and sea – power grids, mines and oil rigs, chemical plants, gas and oil storage facilities, industrial establishments of every kind – all these mainframes of our modern highly technological economy are not usually visible to the majority of people, and the importance of their uninterrupted production is seldom understood by most people. But the reason we can have nice things today at such low prices is exactly because these facilities continue working without interruption. Many of them have reactors working either at high temperatures, or under high pressures, or using highly toxic or radioactive reactions. For many of them, stopping the reactor and starting it again costs as much as the revenues from a month’s or even a year’s production; doing it every week will guarantee the economic failure of the plant. The very economics of these plants was predicated on uninterrupted production for at least a decade. I have worked as a Trade Manager of a fertilizer plant: Some of the reactors – as big as ten-story buildings – had to have a constant supply of raw material and continuous production, for stopping the production requires two months of clean up from the toxic residue. Metallurgical plants can’t stand a decrease of temperature to non-production levels for this will mean cracking of the concrete base and skeleton for many of them. Etc., etc., etc. Modern sabbatarians are usually clueless of these workings of our modern economy; the truth is, more than half of the jobs around the world today are in businesses that cannot afford to stop work one day out of seven. And modern sabbatarians just continue using these products while accusing those who produce them in “breaking the Fourth Commandment.”

Such development of the world’s economy, though, must be expected: God promises growth of the Gospel, and with it, growth of the economic blessings of the Gospel, which will inevitably lead to economic activity in larger volumes and greater efficiency, which means technology. The technological developments of the last 300 years are the product of Christianity and its worldview applied in practice, as many authors have pointed out. In the final account, if sabbatarians wish to consistently maintain their position, they will have to abandon the world and live as hermits, for living in the modern world is impossible without taking advantage of something which involves working on the Sabbath.

Thus, from the perspective of the Dominion Covenant, the literal reading of the Sabbath is not only impossible to obey, it will be increasingly so. Jesus’s words that “here is something greater than the Temple” laid the foundation for it; the Christian worldview applied to economics and technology built on that foundation. So, expect more and more of this alleged “violation of the Sabbath” to happen, every day, more and more.

But violation of the Sabbath it isn’t. For the real meaning of the Sabbath, as Jesus shows, transcends the literal command to cease economic activity one day out of seven; and in fact, the real NT meaning of the Sabbath rejects the specific sundry judicial application of it. We saw so far why the literal meaning of the Fourth Commandment can’t be kept today. But then, why is this Commandment in the Law, one of the Ten Commandments?

The answer lies in this most profound, and yet utterly ignored today, theological statement of Jesus in Mark 2:27, given in the same occasion when His disciples were accused of violating the Sabbath by picking grain. Jesus ended His answer with the words, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” And then, to top it off, “So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”

Let’s stop here and consider. Jesus’s disciples were doing something for which, in the days of Moses, a man was executed – gathering resources on the Sabbath. Jesus didn’t defend His disciples by saying that what they were doing was legal. He in fact agreed with their accusers by using examples in the OT of other violators of the Sabbath and of the Temple regulations. His answer? “That’s OK, I am changing the understanding of the Sabbath: I didn’t make man for it, I made the Sabbath for man.” The very commandment was designed to point at man and his needs, acknowledge the needs of man in his state of helplessness and distress and constant toil, and give him rest. The strict judicial rules for keeping the Sabbath in Israel were temporary, and were understood as temporary even in the Old Testament. That this is true, we can judge from the reaction of Nehemiah to the violation of the Sabbath by many in Israel, including some from the nobility; instead of declaring death penalty against the violators, Nehemiah only reprimanded them. The Sabbath day was still in force as a special sign of Israel as a redemptive/ceremonial community, but Nehemiah was somehow aware that the strict penalties of the Law were not to be applied. Why? Because Nehemiah probably understood the great theological statement of Jesus: “The Sabbath was made for man.”

In the first of my three lectures on immigration, “Immigration and the Sabbath” (somewhere on Youtube), I have explained this meaning of the Sabbath. In short, Moses took his liberty to change the direct text of the Fourth Commandment as given from Mount Sinai. While the first version (spoken directly by God), said, “For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy,” the second version, spoken by Moses to the children, on the east side of the river Jordan, right before the conquest, replaced these words with the words, “You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out of there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to observe the sabbath day.” Combining the two, we see that God’s rest on the seventh day was meant not to place additional burdens on man but to liberate man. Not to make man work for 6 days and then work for another day to please God with rituals and ceremonies. The purpose of God’s rest was to make everyone experience rest at the end of a week of hard work. As the Hebrews were entering the Land, and as they were about to become a nation of masters who would themselves control wealth and hire workers and own slaves, Moses was reminding them that the Sabbath regulations are not in the ritual but in the Remember Clause: Remember you were a slave, remember you were a foreigner, remember Egypt where you were beaten and forced to work, remember the exodus, the wilderness, the covenant God made with your fathers. And, as you remember all these things, remember that there is to be no oppression of men under your rule. Everyone, to the lowest pagan slave, is entitled to have his day of rest, a day when he will stay still and God will be the one working for him – in healing, sanctification, and even in washing his feet. The Sabbath was a commandment to justice and liberty, not a commandment to blind submission to ceremonial rules. Its focus were the weakest members of the society – the slave, the stranger, the widow, the orphan. Its focus was every man, for God wanted to work on that day for every man, while man stood still and accepted God’s service. And no, it wasn’t God serving man as his subordinate. It was God who was declaring that in the final account, all man’s work will be considered nothing, and only God’s work will remain. It was an evangelistic message.

And therefore, all the activities allowed on that day were the activities of evangelism. The priests profaned the Sabbath: not because God needed ceremonial service from human hands but because these ceremonies were His way to bring the Gospel to the pagan world, through shadows and parables and ceremonies. That’s why David was allowed to eat of the consecrated bread: He was the real preacher of the Gospel at the time, alone of all Israel. The priests were afraid to challenge Saul’s fascist statist order. The population was either subdued or joyfully participated in Saul’s totalitarian state. David was alone, and he was alone in declaring the will of God. He was a prophet and an evangelist, and the bread belonged to him by the virtue of his office and ministry.

It was for this reason that in the NT Jesus made sure that most of His recorded healings took place on a Sabbath day. There are case after case in the Gospels, of Pharisees outraged at this violation of the Sabbath. And yet, a violation it wasn’t; the Sabbath was made for man, and besides, the healings were part of His evangelism. The Sabbath was the day when God comes to man, not in man’s puny efforts to please God in the church, but in God’s work in man, for man, for the Sabbath was made for man.

Well, then, how this translates to our NT keeping of the Sabbath?

We are all priests now. And Jesus – the one greater than the Temple – is with us always, until the end of the age. The Sabbath is a constant reality today, for us. Our whole life is now a life of evangelism. We don’t offer sacrifices once a new moon anymore; our whole lives are supposed to be a living sacrifice to God, and therefore an evangelistic enterprise. From a Biblical perspective, we already live in God’s continuing Sabbath in history, the prelude to our final Sabbath. The keeping of one day our of seven is good for polity purposes (to borrow a phrase from Calvin), but its significance doesn’t go beyond the expediency of polity. In reality, covenantally, we are supposed to keep the Sabbath every single day, in resting from our own works and letting God work in us and through us. Every single day, without distinction, we are supposed to free the captives and the slaves, and to save those led to slaughter. Every single day, we are supposed to preach the righteousness and justice (emphasis on justice) of the Gospel. There is no special day in the week for worship and rest and evangelism; the special day has been one Sabbath-rest for the people of God (Heb. 4:9), and that day is today.

Everything else may be good and useful and expedient policy, but it is not a religious obligation.

I will end with the words of John Calvin from his catechism, quoted by R.J. Rushdoony in chapter 4 of his Institutes:

What do you mean by spiritual rest?

When we keep holiday from our own works, that God may perform His own work in us.

Is it sufficient to do so on the seventh day?

Nay, continually. After we have once begun, we must continue during the whole course of our life.

Why then, is a certain day appointed to figure it?

There is no necessity that the reality should agree with the figure in every respect, etc.

The Sabbath was made for man. And after the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the covenant man was placed in a continual Sabbath. The only way of keeping that Sabbath is not by forcing a religious obligation for one day of seven – which Jesus Himself annulled as not applicable to the royal priesthood – but in becoming a true royal priesthood for the King of Kings.

The book I will recommend this week is Israel’s Calendar and the True Sabbath, by Curtis Clair Ewing. Ewing has many positions with which I do not agree, but this is a study worthy of consideration, especially in terms of some modern myths concerning the Sabbath. Read the book with discernment.

And, as I always do at the end of my podcasts, I would like to focus your attention on my real work: The mission field in Eastern Europe. God’s true Sabbath, the spiritual rest of justice and righteousness, has been ignored for centuries in Eastern Europe. Now is a good time to restore it: Through preaching and teaching, and publishing sound Christian literature. Building that intellectual foundation is what we have been working on for many years. These books that were translated need to be placed in the hands of the people. We need help for publishing. Consider visiting BulgarianReformation.com. Click on donate, and help us continue building. God bless you all.

Welcome to Episode 15 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will be talking some deep theology, and specifically, the theology of grace. It won’t be the shallow fables on God’s grace you typically hear from your so-called “Reformed” pastors and seminary professors; milk food that appeals to your emotions and only urges to “believe the Gospel more.” We will go into areas your so-called “Reformed” pastors seldom go into, mainly because they were not trained to apply their armchair theology to a comprehensive worldview, or may be because they are cautious to not appear too radical. 501(c)3, y’know. We will look at the doctrine of grace in a more comprehensive manner, not just how it applied to the salvation of your little soul, but also how it applied beyond that . . . and especially, how your understanding of grace affects your view of history, of the victory of the Gospel in history, and of the nature of the Great Commission.

Let me start with a personal disclaimer. I don’t like it when preachers, theologians, and seminary professors describe the Reformed doctrines as “doctrines of grace.” Not that I don’t believe in God’s grace; in fact, as you will learn in a few minutes, I have a very detailed theology about God’s grace and its practical applications in our life, individual and social. Not that the description is technically incorrect; to the contrary, by logical necessity, God’s grace is a major element of the Reformed doctrines, and it follows from the foundational truths of the Gospel. The description is technically correct, granted, but it has a skewed focus and emphasis. It is focused on man and his needs, not on God and His nature. When we make grace the center of our doctrines, we make God subservient to man and man’s needs. Man becomes the center of our preaching, and God is simply a serving spirit to cater to man’s salvation. When we make man the center of our preaching, our gospel becomes a very small gospel, limited to a few propositions about the individual salvation of man. Our gospel, then, is not comprehensive, it is shrunk and truncated, and our preachers end up calling us to gaze at our navels, treating us as immature children. In my sermon on “How Big Is the Gospel?” (somewhere on Sermon Audio) I have covered this problem of our pulpits and our churches as a whole, and I will talk about this problem of spiritualized navel-gazing in a future podcast.

For now, I would like to point out that the true description of the Reformed doctrine – and of the Gospel, for that matter – is that it is the doctrine of the Sovereignty of God. In the final account, it is the Sovereignty of God that is the foundation for everything else, and God’s grace is only one effect of the Sovereignty of God – one of many. Granted, it is a very important effect for man – man, after all, desperately needs that grace in order to survive – but whether God gives that grace or not, whether God decides to withhold some of this grace in particular circumstances or for particular purposes (as God withheld some from Paul in 2 Cor. 12:7-9), the Sovereignty of God continues to be the only constant in the universe. Our focus must be on God, His nature, and His purpose for His world and for each individual person in it. When our focus is on man and his need for salvation, we fail to see the greater picture of the Kingdom of God – or, which is worse, we reduce the Kingdom of God to a small realm of individual salvation and personal morality, and we become only peripheral onlookers. Those who insist on defining the Reformed doctrines as “doctrines of grace” are those who insist on truncating the Gospel to a few propositions about the salvation of man – and this is not Reformed. As Reformed Christians, our focus must be on the Sovereignty of God, in every area of life, not just in the area of personal salvation.

With this qualification, we can continue to our topic this week, and that is, the sovereign grace of God in the salvation of the world: what is it, how it operates, and why our view of the nature of that grace is important to how we preach the Gospel, what Gospel exactly we preach, and how we approach the application of that Gospel to the practical life of man and his society. I am also going to offer another qualification: For the sake of saving time, I am not going to discuss here the basic definition of the concept of grace. I expect my listeners to understand it; after all, if you are a Christian, you don’t need to be told what God’s grace to you the sinner is, and what the role of God’s grace is in your salvation.

However, when we discuss grace at the level of individual salvation – the level at which all so-called “Reformed” seminary professors and pastors discuss it these days – we need to understand that the simple term “grace” is insufficient to describe the working of God’s Spirit with individual people. On one hand, we have the grace we all as Christians are aware of, God’s grace in salvation. Obviously, because of the original sin, and because of the individual specific sins of each one of us, we are all transgressors of the Law of God and therefore deserving eternal damnation. So to those elected to salvation, God has given His grace in justifying them on account of the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ, and in actively sanctifying them through changing their hearts and writing His Law on them. We know who we are by our profession of faith and our growth in active covenantal – that is, ethical/judicial – obedience to God’s Law. (We know that there are many whose “obedience” is anything but ethical/judicial – they may have just rational agreement with certain truths, or they may have a favorite set of ritual/liturgical motions, but none of these is active obedience, unless there is ethical/judicial sanctification.) God gives His salvific grace to His elect – that is, grace not only sufficient to their salvation, but also being salvation itself. He is the Savior of all who believe, and He is the Savior because he has shown grace to them – actively, sovereignly, not on account of anything they have done or will do, but only on account of His good will towards them.

But that’s not all about grace. The Bible says that God is the Savior of all who believe, but not only of them. In Titus 2:11 Paul says that “the grace of God has appeared that brings salvation to all men.” In fact, the Greek word for “bringing salvation” is not even a verb, it is an adjective and means simply “saving”; the text literally reads, “Has appeared the Grace of God saving to all men.” Some modern commentators, falling into hyper-Calvinism, try to read in it only “all elect men,” but the truth is, there is another statement by Paul that is even stronger and speaks of some form of salvation outside the group of those who believe, 1 Tim. 4:10: “For it is for this we labor and strive, because we have fixed our hope on the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of believers.” There is no linguistic doubt about the meaning of the word “especially” in Greek (μάλιστα), and there is no doubt concerning the meaning of Paul’s statement: God is a Savior of all men, and “all men” here can’t be taken to mean only those who believe, because then a clause is added, “especially,” which applies only to those who believe. Thus, the Bible does speak of some sort of salvation which applies to all men, but then, there is salvation that is “special,” μάλιστα, only for believers. Obviously, if we only apply the words “salvation” and “grace” only to the elect, to those who believe, we will be contradicting clear Biblical verses. So we are forced to accept the Biblical testimony that there is salvation of sort and grace of sort for those who don’t believe. Our job now is to figure out – again, from the Biblical testimony – what this other “salvation” of sorts, what this other grace is.

Based on this obvious difference, Reformed theologians have come up with the term “special grace” which applies to the salvation of the elect. Special, as from the word “especially” in 1 Tim. 4:10. That grace, as we saw, is a full, complete grace. It’s not just temporary favors. It is eternal and comprehensive; it takes the whole man and restores him into the fellowship of God, into the Covenant of God, and into eternal life. It is redemptive and restorative not only in the passive sense, as taking him out of the pit, it is redemptive and restorative also in the active sense, that it restores the moral rightness of his heart and makes him actively desire to do good and be capable of doing good.

The other kind of grace, which God gives to those who don’t believe, theologians call “common grace.” To put it simply, it is not a redemptive, it is a restraining grace. On one hand, God restrains Himself from visiting upon them their iniquity. Clearly, if He acted according to His holiness without such grace, He would have killed them and sent them to hell before they were even born. All descendants of Adam and Eve deserve immediate death by the very nature of their covenant belonging to Adam’s line. But God restrains His own hand and let’s them live for a while, breathe, eat, enjoy life, experience love and joy. He even gives them knowledge and understanding, entrepreneurial spirit, art and literature skill and inspiration, economic, political, and military success – using them, of course, for His own purposes. Thus we have non-Christian innovators, entrepreneurs, scientists, writers, etc. On the other hand He restrains them from going to the logical end of their own rebellion against Him. If the unbelievers do not fall immediately to the bottom of their depravity, this is not because of some mythical “natural law” they supposedly acknowledge and obey – there is no such thing as “natural law” – it is because God sovereignly restrains their hands from doing the perfect evil their hearts would naturally incline them to. There is no redemption in common grace; there is only restraint and preservation for the day of judgment. In His common grace, God restrains them and restrains Himself. In the final day, though, He will remove that restraint of common grace and will judge the unbelievers without any grace whatsoever.

So far so good, as long as we are talking about the individual salvation of man. As I have pointed to many times, this is all modern so-called “Reformed” preachers talk about. We have preachers today who have specialized in producing long and teary sermons of personal individual self-examination, making man and his salvation to be the center of God’s plan. This, is, of course, because of the false reading of the two most misused and abused verses in the history of modern Christianity: John 3:16-17. These verses are always quoted with a focus on individual salvation, as if everything God wanted to say in them has to do only with individual souls. The truth is, though, when we read the very text of these verses, it becomes clear that the individual salvation of man is only a means to a greater goal. Here’s the Biblical text:

For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.

The obvious frame is the salvation of the world. The individual souls are only a means to that end, within that greater frame. There is no focus there on individual souls. There’s a Kingdom to be re-conquered and restored. 1 Cor. 15:1-28 speaks of what the Gospel is; and starting with the sacrifice of Christ, the description ends with “all things being subjected to Him.” That is, the focus of Christ’s work is the salvation of the world, which means not only what’s inside the church and the individuals souls, but what is outside the church and outside the individual souls. There are nations to be converted and discipled, according to the Great Commission in Matt. 28:18-20, and nations are cultural and judicial entities; that is, their laws, institutions, their very cultural fabric and worldview need to be converted, and they must be made to worship Christ in everything they do, judicially, economically, politically, educationally, etc.

Christian Reconstructionists, from R.J. Rushdoony and Gary North and Greg Bahnsen to the lowest of us, have been talking and preaching and teaching this comprehensive meaning of the Gospel; some of our opponents have also mentioned that there may be, perhaps, some cultural aspect of the Gospel. Of course, everyone acknowledges that there was – at least in the beginning – a covenant for dominion, something we call the Dominion Mandate, or the Cultural Mandate. The question many times is, to what extent is that Dominion Covenant still in force today. We believe it is fully in force; our more pietistic opponents believe that it is only partially in force. But behind that very important difference, there is a more important, theological difference, which has to do with God’s grace in the Dominion Covenant. And this more important theological question is this: Which order of grace – common or special – governs the world outside the church and the individual soul of man? Yes, we know that God sustains His elect through special grace, and He sustains the reprobates through His common grace. But what about the world? When God looks at the world outside the church and the souls of men, when He looks at the creation, or at the societies of man, or at the social institutions, or scientific endeavors, technological discoveries, at art and music and literature, at the total of our civilization today, does God look at it as something that just needs to be maintained and restrained (common grace), or does He look at it as something to be redeemed and saved (special grace)?

I hope there is no need to explain to my listeners what the importance of this question is. Every Christian should be able to understand the difference between redemption and non-redemption. And every Christian should be able to understand that without special grace, there is no redemption; redemption is not a common thing which God just grants outside the sacrifice of Christ. And every Christian should ask himself the question: Is history and the world after the Cross being redeemed by the work of Christ on that Cross? Or has God abandoned history and the world to whatever His enemies want to do with them, only marginally restraining them from collapsing into chaos? The answer to the question of sovereign common grace or sovereign special grace will give us the answer to the questions: How big is our Gospel? How comprehensive must our preaching be? How far do Christ’s blessings go to dispel the darkness and challenge the Curse? And, following from these questions, How does history operate in the world after the Cross? What is the Biblical philosophy of history? Does history manifest the power of the Gospel, or is the power of the Gospel irrelevant to history and therefore hidden and invisible?

The view of the seminarian establishment in the US – the supposedly “Reformed” one – is that the sovereign order governing the world, history, and human society, is the common grace order. This view was summarized in 1979 by Meredith Kline. At the time, Meredith Kline was a professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary; later he took a teaching position at Westminster West. Kline had an impressive career as a professor and an author, and most of his career was devoted to creating a concept of the covenant that established common grace as the ruling grace of history, and God’s special grace as limited and constrained to the individual heart of man and perhaps the church. He had some original work on the structure of God’s Covenant, but even there, his commitment to the concept of sovereign common grace was so deep that he almost made the covenant found in the Five Books of Moses derivative from the suzerain-vassal treaties in the ancient Middle East. Biblically, of course, God’s covenant drew on no human common grace treaties. According to the Westminster Confession, the Covenant on Mt. Sinai was part of God’s Covenant of Grace, meaning God’s covenant of salvation, meaning God’s special grace. While some of Kline’s insights into the details of the covenant structure were helpful, his overall work dragged the Reformed world towards dualism and truncating the saving grace of the Gospel. Kline was a very strong believer in sovereign common grace, not in sovereign special grace, as we will see in a moment.

His article of 1979, “Comments on an Old-New Error,” was designed to attack Christian Reconstruction and specifically Greg Bahnsen, for their postmillennialism and theonomy. Since Kline’s days’ anti-Theonomy has been a shape-shifter, always changing its arguments, at times rejecting the validity of the Law of God today, at times accepting some limited validity and applicability to our society today. But Kline was adamant and consistent: There could be no validity or applicability of the Law of God, as delivered to Moses, to our world today. He was consistent because he had a fundamental theological commitment: to sovereign common grace. In his article, when he got down to the fundamental theological difference between anti-theonomy and theonomy, he said the following:

The insuperable theological objection to any and every such chiliastic construction is that it entails the assumption of a premature eclipse of the order of common grace.

The “insuperable” theological objection, you see. The sovereignty of common grace over special grace – which also means the sovereignty of commonness over redemption – was such an important part of Kline’s theology, he fantasized that it was an “insuperable theological objection” to Christian Reconstruction. Kline’s theology didn’t allow for a sovereignty of Christ’s work over all. For him, the common grace God gave to mankind was the original grace, starting from the Garden, and it was only “formalized” after the Flood. That much he said in the same paragraph:

That order was formalized in the post-diluvian world by the divine covenant of Genesis 9 and by the terms of that covenant it is in force as long as the earth endures, that is, until the cosmic re-creation at the consummation (cf. 2 Pet, 3: 7, 11-13).

We will talk in another post in the future about Meredith Kline’s stunning theological blindness on this particular passage: Seriously, God had just given, in the Flood, the greatest example of the subjection of common grace to special grace as the ruling order of history. And yet, Kline claims that the covenant after the Flood – made with the special elect who were given a special salvation from the curse on mankind – was a “formalization” of the order of common grace as the ruling order? But this we will leave this for another time.

What is more important is that this sovereignty of common grace over history led him to deny any covenantal foundations, or manifestations, or progress in history. He continued in the same paragraph, in his attempt at refuting the philosophy of history of Christian Reconstruction:

A basic and essential structure of that common grace order is the institution of the common state. This civil institution, unlike the nation Israel, which was separated unto a distinctive institutional identity as a holy, redemptive, theocratic kingdom, is not a holy but rather common institution, with its citizenry a mixture of both the holy and the non-holy. It does not, as did the Israelite kingdom, possess special guarantees of a material prosperity unfailingly equal to the measure of its obedience to the law of God nor does it enjoy the promise of an ultimate perfecting of its beatitude. Its prospect is that of eventual termination rather than consummation. And meanwhile it must run its course within the uncertainties of the mutually conditioning principles of common grace and common curse, prosperity and adversity being experienced in a manner largely unpredictable because of the inscrutable sovereignty of the divine will that dispenses them in mysterious wisdom.

Translated into a human language, what Kline is saying here is this: There is absolutely no discernible cultural, political, economic, judicial, financial, institutional, or any other difference between a nation that is obedient to God and His Law and a nation that is in direct rebellion against God and His Law. More than that, since he acknowledges that God is the one moving history, Kline is declaring that God does absolutely nothing to exhibit in history, on earth, in the life of nations and cultures, the superiority of His Gospel over false religions. If a person is dropped in a nation without knowing which one it is, he would never be able to tell if that nation is obedient to God or not from its level of justice and righteousness, from its economic prosperity, from its levels of technological progress. A nation obedient to God can be as low as any pagan nation in terms of safety and abundance; a nation rebellious against God can rise to be long-term prosperous and safe and just. Whatever God does to a nation has nothing to do with the nation’s covenant standing before God. When God directs history, He does it through a different covenant than that in Christ. That covenant is ethically neutral, because it has no stipulations nor any ethical demands to man. God acts in it entirely separately from any ethical system.

You know how modern Pelagians and semi-Pelagians – that is, Arminians – like to argue that God is still sovereign but He has chosen to lay aside His own sovereignty when it comes to the salvation of man. Well, here, Kline argues that when it comes to history and the world, God has laid aside His own ethical nature and has chosen to deal with the world in an ethically neutral way, not taking in account man’s obedience or disobedience, and not making history manifest the holiness of God’s character.

Kline’s elevation of common grace to the pedestal of sovereign grace in history has had some deep consequences. It has laid the foundation for the restoration of the rhetoric of the “two-kingdoms” by modern antinomian and amillennial theologians. The “two kingdoms” rhetoric is entirely predicated on the idea that God has restricted the redemption of Jesus Christ (special grace) to individuals and the church, while He rules the world through the non-redemptive, ethically-neutral order of common grace. David Van Drunen of Westminster Seminary in Escondido, CA, in his book, Living in God’s Two Kingdoms, uses this specific point of sovereign common grace in history to reject the idea of redemption in history and of society. After declaring that he believes that Christians should work out the implications of their faith in the society, he specifically says that they should do it without any expectations for any redemptive fruit of their efforts. Here’s the quote from his book:

A Christian, therefore, does not have [emphasis in the original] to adopt a redemptive vision of culture in order to affirm these important truths. A biblical two kingdoms doctrine provides another compelling way to do so. According to this doctrine, God is not redeeming [emphasis in the original] the cultural activities and institutions of this world, but is preserving them through the covenant He made with all living creatures through Noah in Genesis 8:20-9:17.

We need to understand this very important point: When common grace is taken as the sovereign grace in history, John 3:16-17 is turned on its head. There is no redemption for the world. There is no salvation for the world. These men claim to be Reformed, and therefore they are supposed to believe that man’s depravity is total, and therefore the Curse has affected everything man does – including his social institutions. And then they turn around and say that God has made a covenant to preserve the Curse??? What other conclusion can one take out of this but that God has committed Himself in a covenant to preserve depravity and the Curse on the earth, and not let the power of the Gospel bring redemption to the society and its institutions? The only alternative to such conclusion is that the world is ethically neutral, and God makes ethically-neutral covenants – and yet, in the same paragraph Van Drunen energetically denies the charge that he believes in an ethically-neutral world! So, which one is it? Is the world ethically-neutral or is God in a covenant to preserve the Curse?

The sovereign common grace position is hopelessly schizophrenic, of course, but it is the only position that can gives any foundation for a theological resistance to Christian Reconstruction – that is, theonomy and postmillennialism. And this is why such schizophrenic dualism is supported by the modern seminaries. It is self-contradictory, but then again, it is the last line of defense against a comprehensive Gospel of comprehensive redemption and victory of the Gospel in history.

There is a small group who also believes in a sort of a two kingdoms doctrine, and therefore in sovereign common grace and limited special grace: the so-called “covenanters.” In their view, the two kingdoms of God are the kingdom of power (which is the order of common grace), and the kingdom of grace (which is the order of special grace). This view follows from the Aristotelian natural-law tradition of the Romanist scholasticists and it was uncritically adopted by some early Presbyterian and Puritan writers, for which reason the modern “covenanters” prefer to call it the “historical two kingdoms doctrine.” It differs, in their view, from the other two-kingdoms doctrine in that it is optimistic and postmillennial – that is, they do believe in redemption for society, for the world outside the individual soul of man and outside the church. This, of course, is even more schizophrenic that Kline’s doctrine, for it presupposes redemption under common grace, outside the special grace of God, and therefore outside the special work of the Redeemer on the Cross. If human institutions are under God’s common grace and are being redeemed without an atonement, then the next logical step is for unrepentant individuals to get redemption without an atonement. The only logical conclusions from this – if they cared to go to its logical end – is soteriological universalism (God saves all) or statism (the state without Christ is an agent of God’s redeeming grace). The small group existing today have not gone to these logical conclusions, but over the last 2 centuries we have seen one group after another, originally heirs of the old Reformed churches in England and Scotland, fall either into universalism or socialism. They have just followed the logic of their own position.

I have been asked many times to explain the position of Christian Reconstruction on the issue of common grace vs. special grace. R.J. Rushdoony didn’t specifically develop a doctrine on the issue, but Gary North had a book devoted to it: Dominion and Common Grace. Since Gary North published his book, new developments have arisen that require and even more careful examination of the issue, which we will do, in the future. The doctrine of how God deals with the world outside the individual soul of man – is it redemptively, or is it neutrally – is a very important theological question, and it is at the foundation of our understanding of preaching the Gospel and of our theology of social action. If we say that the Reformed doctrines are doctrines of grace (tentatively, as I said in the beginning), then understanding the working of the grace of God is crucial to our understanding of the working of the redemption of the Gospel.

I will start with this: The ruling order in history is God’s special grace. From before the beginning of the world, to eternity, there is not a single moment of history and a single square inch of the universe that is not ruled by, shaped by, governed, and controlled by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the Cross. There is no covenant God has ever made that was not based on or not predicated on the blood of Christ. Covenant without blood is not a real covenant, and no blood is worth before Him but the blood of His own Son alone. God has not covenanted to preserve the curse, and God has not covenanted to maintain institutions that do not explicitly, by constitutional commitment, serve Him and Him alone. Every plant that God didn’t plant will be uprooted (Matt. 15:13), and the pagan cultures and institutions of the world were not planted by God.

The creation was not an act of common grace. The world was not originally created to host enemies of God; it was created “very good.” This is why Peter in his sermon in Acts 2 could speak of the last day as “the restoration of all things,” pointing back to the world before the Fall. The Day of Judgment, the triumph of special grace and the destruction of common grace for the world, is the full restoration of the original creation. Thus, the original creation was special grace, it was only meant for the covenanted people of God. Thus, special grace is not some side aberration in history, not limited and restricted to individuals and the church, God created the world in an act of special grace, for His special people, and He runs everything through the order of salvation, based on the atonement of Jesus Christ. Remember, the Book was written before the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8; 17:8). Special grace was active in the very creation, not introduced later.

Common grace was introduced later, after the Fall, as an exception within the order of salvation. When God destroyed the world in the Flood, He showed that outside His salvation, nothing in the world – humans, their civilization, their institutions, their culture, art, technology – has any meaning to His plan. He could destroy the wicked and all their achievements and institutions and cultures, and He wouldn’t care. He did the same to Sodom and Gomorrah: His only rule was that if there were any covenant people in these cultures, He would spare the cultures; if not, they were to be destroyed. That is, special grace ruled over common grace. He did the same to Israel throughout her history: when Israel abandoned God’s order of special grace, God saw no point in preserving Israel as a culture, except for His specific plan of introducing the Savior. The less special grace there is in a culture, the less common grace. The more special grace, the more common grace.

Common grace, therefore, in the words of James Jordan, is like crumbs under the table of special grace; or like overflow from the cup of special grace. Whether we are aware of it or not, whether we admit it or not, the Gospel rules the world, and through the Gospel, Christians rule the world. The more we preach the Gospel, and the more people in a culture convert to Christ and start acting as Christians, according to their new faith, the more that culture is going to experience also increased common grace: more political stability and liberty, more economic prosperity, more technological advance and scientific breakthroughs, higher IQ, lower crime and poverty. A culture that experiences a growth of conversions will inevitably eventually become different that cultures who don’t have such Gospel growth. The special grace is not limited to the church, it rules over the society, and therefore the atonement and redemption rule over the society. As Jesus said, “All authority has been given to Me, in heaven and on earth.” All authority now is in the hands of the Lord, and He is not an ethically-neutral lord, He is the Redeemer, and there is no separation between His power and His grace, nor between His rule and His redemption. Whatever He rules over is not preserved; it is judged. And it is judged in history, either to redemption or to destruction.

With the order of salvation – not the order of ethically-neutral preservation – being the governing order of the world, we can understand history, and we can make sense of history. History is governed not by ideas, nor by impersonal material factors, nor even by some mysterious occult will of God separate from His Gospel. History is governed by the faith of the faithful. This in itself is a revolutionary idea, and that’s why I have called R.J. Rushdoony’s book, The Foundations of Social Order, the most unique book written in the history of Christendom. In it, Rushdoony developed the historical implications of the doctrine of sovereign special grace. History is nothing more than the perfection of the creeds over time; it is creedally determined. Thus, we have the Western civilization: not a common development, not based on some “natural law” or common ideology between Christians and non-Christians, but a direct fruit of the creedal faithfulness of Christians in their confessing their faith and working it out in practice. Were all of the people in the West saved? Absolutely not. Was there a lot of common grace? Of course. But that common grace came only because there was a lot of special grace. Even atheists in the West eventually became more moral and prosperous and intelligent – because they lived in a civilization shaped by the worldview informed by the Creeds. Rushdoony’s book is a superb study into the true origins of the Western civilization.

But the most important conclusion from this view of sovereign special grace is this: The world around us is not going to hell. It is a ripe fruit for salvation and redemption. Paul told us in Romans 8:20-21:

For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

And that creation includes everything, even the human institutions and laws. God is not preserving the creation in its cursed state, Kline and the modern seminarians notwithstanding. God is revealing us as His sons, and through us is redeeming His creation, in history, on earth, until He Himself comes down to complete the process in the last day.

The book I will assign for reading this week is Gary North’s Dominion and Common Grace. Much better than I did here, Dr. North explains the significance of the issue between common grace and special grace, and shows how our understanding of it informs our preaching of the Gospel and our Christian action in the world today.

And I will dare return your attention back to my mission in Bulgaria. I am a missionary. My heart is out there on the mission field, where there is my small chunk of the creation to redeem – Bulgaria. And, if you want a larger vision, Eastern Europe. It’s a ripe field. I have a tried method, and a proven record – flood the market with good, Christian, covenantal, practically applied literature. It has worked. I need your help to make it work even more. Visit Bulgarian Reformation.com and donate. God bless you all.

Welcome to Episode 14 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will be talking about police, standing armies, pagan law enforcement, Biblical law enforcement, and how Christians of our day have been duped into supporting wholeheartedly a social order and its institutions which are blatantly opposed to the Biblical social order and to the Biblical concept of social order. As a result, we as Christians have allowed not only the perversion of justice but also open institutional idolatry in the land; and in many cases, we have willingly joined that idolatry in sincere adoration of its gods.

I have to start here with pointing to a historical blind spot of many American Christians in the last couple of decades, a blind spot that has been carefully nurtured and developed by the enemies of God through propaganda and political action: The belief that modern liberalism in America and the destruction of the old Christian social order started in the 1960s. America, the majority of Christians believe, started on a downward spiral with the sexual revolution and the hippie movement and the post-modernism of the flower generation. Before that, the nation was supposedly decent and Christian nation, and everything was nice and good. Many Christians, therefore, instinctively side with the conservative side of the political spectrum, because they see that our society has been changed radically; they want a return to an earlier society, earlier times that were less radical and more “traditional,” which would mean “Christian.” And the conservative side of the spectrum points to that time before the 1960s – preferably the 1950s, when men were men, women were women, crime and debauchery were kept off the streets, public schools allowed prayers, judges and politicians paid lip service to Christian values, everyone respected authority, and the economy was prosperous beyond anything the world had seen up to that time. This is the real motive behind modern conservatism, and many Christians imagine that it is a Christian motive – after all, it was the world before the hippies and the sodomites appeared, right?

There is only one problem in this motive: It is based on a fallacious view of history. America of the 1950s was not a Christian society, nor a Christian social order; and it had nothing to do with the original America of the Founders – nor even with the Constitutional order established in 1789. America of the 1950s was just as radically leftist as America of the 1960s, and, as a matter of fact, as America of today. It was not a conservative nor a Constitutional nor a Christian social order in any meaning of these words. If anything, there was even less Christianity around than there is today; the only traces of Christianity could be found in the personal work ethic and beliefs of many individuals and perhaps in some pulpits. But as social order, civil government, legal structure, principles of government and economics, taxation, justice, liberty, America of the 1950s was very deliberately anti-Christian and anti-Biblical.

The real Marxist, anti-Christian revolution in America happened not in the 1960s, it happened much earlier, in the first half of the 20th century, under Presidents that are today hailed as some sort of heroes, like Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Woodrow Wilson, and yes, even Calvin Coolidge, for all the right and good ideological views he had. The radical Left took over America much earlier than the 1960s; and when it took it, the churches remained silent. The revolution of the 1960s was not a leftist revolution against a Christian social order; it was, as Robert Nisbet points out in an article for the Encounter Magazine in 1972, titled “Radicalism as Therapy,” an in-house struggle between the Old Radical Left of the rationalists vs. the New Radical Left of the mysticists. Both sides were – and still are – anti-Christian to the core. Both sides worked hard – and continue to do so – to co-opt gullible Christians to their respective sides, using rhetoric that would attract specific layers within the churchian circles. In the final account, today, the Old Radical Left calls itself “conservative,” has the Republican Party as its political arm, and has managed to put in its hip-pocket the “conservative” share of the church-goers in America; on the other side, the New Radical Left calls itself “liberal,” has the Democrat Party as its political arm, and has managed to put in its hip pocket the “liberal” share of the church-goers in America. In the final account, the church in America has become a tool in the hands of the Left – in both of its varieties – and celebrity preachers on both sides of the fence build their careers on either dulling the resistance against the Left in general (by calling for cultural non-involvement and retreat), or actively recruiting useful idiots by endorsing radical leftist candidates, Old and New Left, Republican and Democrat, and calling their followers to vote for them.

Knowing this historical and ideological context is important to our understanding of how far American Christians have gone in their idolatry on many issues – including police. Most of the modern political and social and economic practices considered “conservative” and eagerly defended and supported by modern Christians were in fact introduced by this Old Radical Left. Some of these practices are more obviously leftist: Social Security, the IRS and Federal taxes, government regulatory agencies, government schools and the National Education Agency, the ban on prayer in schools and the separation of civil government from morality, etc., etc. Others, though, are not so obviously leftist and radical and seem quite “conservative” and even “Christian” to many Christians, to the point that Christian celebrities concoct systems of interpretation to try to fit these practices into the Bible. I have mentioned before that such are the laws restricting and controlling immigration (listen to my three lectures on immigration to see why such government control is pagan and anti-Christian), but there are many more: foreign wars and empire and standing armies, the prison system, the War on Drugs and regulation and control of substances and non-criminal behavior, the propaganda concept of “respect to authority” (which was rejected and fought against by earlier generations of Americans), the Pledge of Allegiance, the political centralism of Washington DC, and many others that today pass for “conservative” policies and practices but were in fact introduced by radical leftists.

And among these radical leftist practices is the introduction of a standing army with executive privilege with the purpose of controlling the population – allegedly to prevent crime – enforcing government policies, collecting revenue in taxation and fines, and bossing around innocent people. That is, police. That’s right, folks, the creation of police in the US and the West was an initiative of radical leftist politicians; and therefore those Christians who support the police are only supporting the destruction of the Christian social order of our ancestors. But let’s start from the beginning: from the Word of God and what it presents as a Biblical social order.

I will here quote directly from an article I wrote about a year and a half ago, on the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner; the title of the article is “Brown, Garner, and the Application of Biblical Law to Homicide and Murder.” In it, I started with the Biblical view of what a law-enforcement a righteous society should have. Quote:

The Bible doesn’t allow for the creation of a government’s specialized standing army for any purposes, whether for permanent warfare against foreign nations or for “maintaining order” at home. Aggressive wars were forbidden as a government policy, and kings were forbidden from maintaining specialized offensive forces (Deut. 17:16; see also 1 Sam. 8:11-12). Also, there was no provision for a centralized executive power in the land which would determine what “order” was and enforce it. The executive function of government was left to the families and local communities to maintain and enforce, and therefore any “order” in the society was to be voluntary and based on private action and transactions. The function of the civil government was limited to the judiciary, local courts with appellate courts above them, with either the King or the High Priest acting as Supreme Court at the top of the judiciary pyramid. Prevention of crime was not delegated to the government; the Bible recognizes that crime is a moral issue first and foremost, and therefore there would be no institutional solution to its prevention. Prevention therefore was left to moral instruction in the family and in the church, and ultimately, since only God could read the heart of a person, to God Himself. Human courts were only allowed to act when crime was committed and the guilt of the perpetrator could be reliably establish by the word of witnesses (Deut. 19:15).

In such a system, a law-enforcing agency is not executive (enforcing rules and regulations) but judicial (carrying out orders of the courts), similar to the US Marshals Service. It doesn’t “maintain order,” arbitrarily deciding on the spot what “order” is; it only executes court orders following court verdicts or decisions. Thus, the concept of “power of arrest” doesn’t exist as an executive privilege; and neither does the multitude of artificial and arbitrarily made up “crimes” related to the “power of arrest,” like “resisting arrest,” “obstructing government administration,” etc. (Ever thought about the idiocy of a crime like “resisting arrest,” when the “criminal” is not guilty of anything else but resisting unlawful arrest?) Thus, the category of “suspect” doesn’t exist in the legal language, and therefore all the rights related to it that the cops have don’t exist. How does a police officer know who is a suspect and who isn’t? The Bible doesn’t allow for such arbitrary legal power given to a special class of people. Without such arbitrary power of arrest and designating “suspects,” thousands of innocent lives would have been spared in the US, who were murdered in cold blood by police officers.

The only time when a person can be legally apprehended and detained is when caught in the very act of the crime, to prevent him from committing a crime, and to make sure he is taken to court. Outside direct prevention of crime on the spot, the only action should be through the courts. Christian Europe after 12th century, until the rise of the modern socialist state in the 20th century, specifically forbade actions against criminals that were not in direct self-defense or following a court decision. The legal category of “suspect,” used today to justify police action, did not exist: a person was either caught in the act, or sentenced on the basis of testimonies, or considered innocent. [end of quote]

This distinction between an executive government and a judiciary government is very important for our understanding of the Biblical view of government. To understand how important it is, I need to return you back to my podcast on the war against self-government. The Biblical social order is based on self-government. Thus, a self-governing man, a man who is obedient to the Law of God, has no other head above himself but Christ (“The head of every man is Christ,” 1 Cor. 11:3). No government should be given the legal power to control non-criminal individuals: Romans 13, the passage so widely misused and abused by modern statists in the pulpits, specifically says that rulers should have authority – or being “terror” – only over evil, not over good. And the difference between a judiciary government and an executive government is exactly that: a judiciary is passive, and it is only activated when there is a crime committed. It only has power over those who have committed crimes. On the other hand, an executive government by definition is a government with its own life, goals, purposes, and its own ideas of order. And since non-criminal individuals also have their own lives, goals, purposes, and order, an executive government by definition must end up controlling non-criminal individuals.

And more than that. Since in the Bible God leaves the executive decisions in the society to individuals and families, any government that appropriates executive functions for itself must by definition wage a war against individuals and families, and appropriate for itself the authority to be a surrogate family to the society. We have to understand: The war against the family today is a war by the executive government against its rival, the family. This war – a Satanic attempt to substitute the state for the family – is at the very foundation of the concept of executive government. When the French Enlightenment thinker Montesquieu laid out his views for division of powers within the government – legislative, executive, judiciary – his purpose was not to limit government, it was to expand government so that it takes over the executive decisions from the family. (I have explained it in a lecture I delivered many years ago to a Worldview Superconference organized by American Vision: “Europe as a Mirror to America.”) A judiciary government is passive, and only has control over criminals. An executive government competes against the family for control over the executive decisions in the society – and therefore, an executive government will always consider the family – and especially the Christian family – its arch-enemy.

The difference in clear in the Bible, in 1 Samuel chapter 8. The people already had a government – a vertical system of judiciaries, of appellate courts designed by God to maintain justice. When they wanted a king, they wanted an executive government, as in the pagan nations around them. But in the pagan nations around them, there were no laws; everything happened by permission of the king. In my article, “Torah vs. Anomia: Rule of Law vs. Rule by Permit,” I have shown the difference in respect to immigration. In order to immigrate to Egypt or to pass through Edom, one had to have a permission by the King. There were no laws, just personal whims of an executive authority. In Israel, there was no government institution to give permits for immigration and passage, and thus anyone was free to pass or settle, as long as they didn’t commit a crime. Immigration is only one example of many. In everything, Israel was a free land, and there was no king to ask for permission, and no government to issue permits, licenses, visas, and other executive orders.

Why is this important to know in our talk about police? Because police, by its very ideology, design, and nature, is an executive institution. Many Christians today think of modern police as the Sheriffs of old. It isn’t; it is radically different. The Sheriffs of 100 years ago were only an arm of the judiciary: they were only serving warrants, and they had no executive authority. When one looks at the photos of Texas sheriffs of 100 years ago, not a single one of them is in uniform, and they were all armed as much as the average guy on the street. Modern police is not an institution of justice on criminals, it is an institution for control over non-criminals, to make sure that the executive government doesn’t meet any competition from individuals and their families. It is a pagan, Satanic institution by its very inception, and therefore any pastor who tries to justify it by using Romans 13 is only preaching idolatry similar to that of the people of Israel in 1 Samuel 8: He has rejected God from being King.

Thus, when Christianity became dominant in Europe, one of the most important legal and political consequences were that it destroyed the concept of an executive government. And with it, it destroyed the legal authority of the military castes.

You see, every pagan society by necessity eventually ends up being run by a caste of men in uniforms, by a professional standing army which has in its hands both the executive power to force the population to do its bidding, and the legislative power to define the laws of the land and thus legitimize its own use of that power. It is inevitable for a pagan society; there is no escape from a military dictatorship when God is not King of a culture. That military caste may be a specific ethnicity within the Empire – as it was with the empires of the Aztecs, the Incas, the Mongols, or the Ottoman Empire. It may be a special class of citizens, as in the Greek city-states, and especially in Sparta. It may be the Roman legions and specifically their elite troops, the Praetorian Guard, which killed and made emperors throughout the whole history of the Empire and later of Byzantium. It may be an official caste based on genetic origin, like the Kshatriyas in India. It may be a nobility of the sword as in China or in Japan. In all these cases, when God is rejected from being a King, the empires of man try to establish an executive government where they control the destiny and the decisions of millions of individuals for the purposes of the rulers. And this requires a standing army; not a standing army for defense of the borders, but a standing army for oppression and control of their own people.

Christian Europe, of course, was not perfectly Biblical, so it inherited the concept of professional soldiers and a standing army from the pagan Roman past. What it changed, though, was the legal status of that class. In Rome – as in all pagan societies – the power of the sword coincided with the power of the law. In Europe, the church changed this. The men in power were gradually stripped of their authority to make laws. The legislative process was decentralized and taken away from them. It was given to the church and to the local non-military elders. The nobility of the sword made laws for themselves. The law of the land was left in the hands of non-military, non-aristocratic bodies – like the church, the local village councils, or the provincial parliaments. The rule of the rulers was limited to their judicial functions as courts of justice; and where they tried to act as legislative or executive power, local Parliaments kept to themselves the right to annul the king’s decrees. (I talk about the function of the Parlement of Paris to annul the decrees of the King of France in my lecture, “Europe as a Mirror of America.”) A great part of that transformation was accomplished by a grass roots movement in the church which is virtually unknown today, but historically, it was the longest lasting and the most powerful grass-roots movement Christendom has ever seen: The Peace and Truce of God Movement. It started in the 10th century and it continued for 400 years, influencing the legal and the governmental practices of all of Europe, and creating a completely new and unique concept of relationship between rulers and ruled. You all are familiar with the Lesser Magistrate Doctrine that Pastor Matt Trewhella has been preaching to churches and local magistrates. The Peace and Truce of God Movement was the ideological and historical prerequisite to that doctrine. The Magdeburg Declaration couldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for the transformation of the European society by the Peace and Truce of God. And an important part of that transformation was that making laws was taken away from the men with weapons and the power to employ violence.

More than that, the legal authority for the use of violence was now separated from the official status of a person. Might didn’t make right anymore. Just being a ruler or being a knight or a member of the aristocracy didn’t create executive privilege; the common folk were not only allowed to have weapons (unlike in the Roman Empire and other pagan cultures), they were encouraged to train and to use them against rulers who used their power illegally. The story of Robin Hood is such a story but there are many more of that period. Christendom created the code of chivalry, and we can’t grasp the covenantal meaning of chivalry unless we understand this separation between might and right. At the very bottom of chivalry was the moral dilemma of the noble knight who is powerful physically and militarily but is restrained morally in his legitimate use of his power. So the chivalric literature almost always revolved around the quest for moral causes that would make the use of that power morally legitimate. Pagan heroes had no such qualms: if they had power, they used it any time they wanted, for their own purposes. Christian knights couldn’t. The new civilization that was emerging based on the Word of God couldn’t allow for powerful men having control over the lives and destinies of non-criminal people. Even if for a while some old pagan traits remained, the Reformation destroyed them in the 16th and the 17th centuries. By the end of the 18thcentury, Europe was a continent of decentralized powers, and executive power in the hands of the local communities, not in the hands of kings.

Naturally, the concept of modern police was born in the revived paganism of the Enlightenment. For the Enlightenment thinkers, it was clear that in order to push God out of the universe, a bare-bones atheism wouldn’t be enough. The all-powerful, all-knowing, and omnipresent God would have to be matched by the all-powerful, all-knowing, and omnipresent man. And even that won’t be enough – for the real power of God in history is not visible in His being – which is invisible – but in His works. Thus, for the new pagans to be able to establish their order, the redeeming God had to be matched by the redeeming man. God’s redemption of His universe was the real offense, and man could only better God by offering a better redemption to the universe in general and to man’s society in particular. This is a topic for another podcast, but we need to understand here: the real strategy of the Enlightenment was not to simply separate man from God; that wouldn’t work after centuries of Christendom. The real strategy and the real appeal of the Enlightenment was: We can create a better world without God. We have a better redemption.

All the humanist institutions created by the Enlightenment had exactly this ideology in their foundation: Man’s redemption of himself without God. And since the individual man is powerless to redeem himself, it is, in the final account, the state’s redemption of man without God. Just keeping the state limited to judging crimes under the Law of God won’t suffice. The state had to create its own ethics, its own legislation. But more than that; it had to create its own transcendent purpose for man and his society – and thus become an executive state, a heavenly father of a sort. And since there is still the problem of crime, the state had to mimic God in preventing crime. Not just judging crime, but preventing it, reading the hearts of men, conditioning the hearts of men, and redeeming the hearts of men to make them into good men. Like God does. The government schools, the prisons, the regulatory agencies, the different administrations, the government’s economic planning boards, the central banks – they were all meant to be hands of the redemption of the humanist state.

And the police, too. The thinkers of the Enlightenment believed that there was nothing spiritual about the society and the hearts of men – they were all subject to similar mechanistic laws as those that Isaac Newton discovered about the physical universe. A ruling elite, therefore, which wants to rival God in terms of redemption must discover these social laws and then use them just as an engineer uses the laws of nature. Crime, then, is not a moral failure, it is bad social engineering. If we have a trained class of social engineers who can discover the social laws that govern crime, and work to change the conditions so that crime is prevented.

And this class of elite social engineers who can discover the social laws of crime and prevent crime – thus creating humanistic redemption without God – is the police. This was the ideological beginning and foundation of modern police. Police couldn’t exist nor appear in a society where the government is obedient to God and stays within its prescribed limits of a judiciary. Modern police can only appear in the context of a messianic government – a government that tries to supplant God by playing god and redeemer on earth.

The first professional police in Europe was created in Revolutionary France under the Jacobin dictatorship. During the Revolutionary terror in France, English observers severely criticized this aspect of the French Revolution. After the defeat of Napoleon, however, most European nations – including England – adopted the concept. By 1830, they all had their own professional police forces, and started using them to suppress dissent and discontent. Police became a regular sight in the European empires which were growing more and more humanistic and anti-Christian. The old pagan concept of executive government was restored, and with it, the old pagan concept of a military caste with special executive privileges was restored.

The United States, where the old Christian culture and worldview survived the longest, remained an exception. The Founding Fathers not only didn’t envision professional police forces, they made it clear they detested any concept of a standing army, let alone a standing army on US soil. America didn’t have police in its founding, and for another 100 years, most of America didn’t have professional police. Alexis de Tocqueville, coming from humanist Europe which in his time was already a police state, mentions his surprise that America had no professional police. Contrary to the pagan claims that without police, crime will be rampant, de Tocqueville also points out that “hardly a crime remains unsolved and unpunished.” America without professional police was a country of less crime and more justice – because the solution to crime and justice was the Biblical solution, not the humanist solution.

And naturally, the first professional police in America appeared exactly where the government was the farthest away from Christianity and the closest possible to the newly restored European paganism: In NYC, under the rule of the corrupt Democrat administration of Tammany Hall, in the 1840s. Up to that time, big cities had their own voluntary citizens’ patrols, but no city government had its own standing army. The Tammany Hall bosses started it first, and then, other corrupt city governments followed suit. For the first 60 years of the existence of professional police in NYC, it did next to nothing in fighting crime – in fact, if anything, crime skyrocketed while the city was expanding its standing army. For over 60 years, the NYPD was busy almost entirely with collecting revenue for the city government – mainly from illegal brothels and game houses. In the South, professional police was created for the purpose of hunting runaway slaves; other than that, the South had no police forces. In rural areas and on the frontier, the Sheriffs, as I said before, were only agents of the courts, serving warrants and authorizing executors of court verdicts. They only assumed executive functions in cases of emergency – as in Texas during the Mexican Socialist revolution, when Texas towns had to be defended against gangs.

The real expansion of police and the creation of the modern standing army came in the first half of the 20thcentury, with the Prohibition. Both the Federal government and the states started hiring more police, creating more and more departments and sub-departments. Since the government was now in the business of morally redeeming people, it needed that elite class of warriors to keep the population in subjection. The end of the Prohibition didn’t roll back the swollen ranks of police, though. Very soon, new prohibitions were made by both the Federal government and the states, and police kept growing. And of course, the ultimate excuse for the complete destruction of the Constitutional liberties of Americans came with the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs was from its conception a radical leftist experiment in humanistic redemption of society – an attempt of Washington DC to replace God as the ruling religious principle in America. And this replacing God needed replacing His power with the power of the state. Thus the concept of modern police was finally embodied in our laws and social practices.

Contrary to the self-delusions of the majority of Christians, there was nothing Christian, nothing conservative, and nothing constitutional about the emergence of police in the US and in the West in general. Police was from the very beginning conceived as a counterfeit government, designed to destroy the social order inherited from Christendom; its purpose was the subjection of the non-criminal population to the state, so that the humanist state can emerge as an executive ruler, as a god and redeemer walking on earth. And for the last 100+ years, this nature and purpose of police have become more and more obvious in the fact that there has been no righteous cause that American police has ever joined. Despite the delusions of many conservatives and Christians, police in America is heavily controlled by the Democrat Party and serves its agenda. Police unions, from the lowest levels to the National Fraternity Order of Police, contribute 100% to Democrat PACs. Even David Clarke, so adored by FOX News, is a 100% Democrat with deep ties in the Democrat Party. Local PDs and Sheriffs have increasingly joined the Federal government’s war on the Second Amendment; those who claim they are pro-2nd Amendment and anti-Washington DC, still line up for Federal handouts of military equipment. They all continue obeying Federal laws and fighting the federal war on drugs – even where there are no local statutes to enforce. And local Sheriffs in America just love stealing money from their own constituents through the Federal program for asset forfeiture. (Last year, local cops in America stole twice as much money from American citizens as private criminals.)

The wickedness of police is obvious not only in these obviously criminal actions but also in the increasing aggressiveness of police against individual citizens, and against street preachers. It is also obvious that for all these years after Roe v. Wade, American cops have firmly taken the side of the abortion industry; for all these years we know of only one single police officer who has openly taken the side of the unborn – Chet Galagher – and he was promptly fired. In the early years of the pro-life movement, police in several American cities used their power to torture rescuers on the street, break their bones with nunchucks, and even kick pregnant mothers until their babies died. Yes, folks, these things were recorded in a documentary by Operation Rescue, The Brutal Truth. The documentary is on Youtube. In not a single instance has any police chief or Sheriff used their legal authority to take the side of the unborn and close abortion clinics in their jurisdiction. A couple of years ago Sheriff David Clarke, for example, used FOX News to say that “If black lives mattered, they would be protesting before abortion clinics.” What he hypocritically omitted was the fact that as a Sheriff, he has the power to ignore Roe v. Wade and close abortion clinics in his County. He not only has never done it, in his early career he has been among the cops who have attacked rescuers on the street, breaking up their protests.

Thus, there is not a single righteous cause ever joined by the American police. But it should be expected, given that police was created for that very purpose – to support wickedness, not righteousness. It is not a Biblical government, it is a counterfeit government, a pagan mockery of God’s government, and a pagan institution to subjugate the population. It is as much a Biblical authority as two sodomites are a Biblical family.

Churchian leaders, therefore, who use Romans 13 to call for obedience to the police are no different than those who call for legalization of sodomite marriage. Such churchian leaders are idolaters, and they are contributing to the destruction of the social order of Christendom. The Biblical government is not a government of executive decree; an executive government is a counterfeit government. When our own churchian leaders legitimize a counterfeit government institution like the police, there is no reason to not legitimize counterfeit government money, counterfeit education like the public schools, a counterfeit family of two sodomites, etc. They are all parts of the same assault on the Christian social order. And for Christians to be able to restore the rule of God in every area of their society, all these must be opposed and abolished – yes, including professional police. As long as professional police remains in our society, no matter how much we strive politically to elect the right candidates, no matter how much we work for the moral restoration of the American society, Christian liberty and justice will be endangered and eventually lost.

Therefore, from a Biblical perspective, just like government schools, the Federal Reserve, all the government regulatory agencies, welfare and Social Security, etc., the standing army of police must be abolished. It is not a true government, and it has never been meant as a true government – it is simply an occupation army enforcing the will of a pagan, wicked government. Supporting it, and using Romans 13 to call for obedience to it is to commit the same sin as the people of Israel in 1 Samuel 8: They have rejected God from being their King.

The reading I will assign this week is not a book but a paper by the Constitutional scholar and founder of Prison Crisis Project, Roger Roots. The title of the paper is “Are Cops Constitutional?”, and it can be easily found online. Dr. Roots examines the views of the Founding Fathers and the Framers of the Constitution concerning standing armies and professional police, and shows that modern police is not only completely unconstitutional but is also at odds with the views of the Founders concerning the proper balance between the individual and the government.

I have seen where giving more power to professional police leads, in Eastern Europe. And, as Eastern Europe recovers from this devastation, my call to my American friends is: Do not let this happen, or you will see one day your beloved local cops rounding up your children and loading them on the cattle cars to the camps. And fighting against this counterfeit government at home, help me also fight against it in Eastern Europe by donating to BulgarianReformation.com. God’s Law is the foundation of all liberty, and God’s Law establishes individual self-government as the basic government in society. We better start acting like it.