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

Welcome to Episode 61 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 an issue which, after so many years of church history and Christian social activism, should have been completely resolved and we should never have to talk about it anymore: the issue of slavery, whether it is lawful and Biblical or unlawful and un-Biblical, and how much of it is Biblical, and what the Biblical principles for slavery are.

The issue of Biblical slavery has return to prominence in the last decade, especially in Christian circles. Just about 40 years ago, of course, no one in the churches seriously talked about slavery, nor dared to address the Biblical accounts of slavery. For about 100 years after the victory of the North in the War Between the States, the common consensus in the society – and also in the church – was that slavery was a thing of the past, and whatever the Bible may say about slavery is to be left in the past, and in our brave new world there is no slavery. Thus, the majority of pastors and theologians have been misled to believe that whatever the Bible says about slavery must not be relevant to our world today. Slavery is simply gone, forever, and no need to exegete the Bible to find what the Bible says about it, and whether it is all gone, or may be some of it is not, or may be even that some of it may be good and Biblical and beneficial to both the society and the individuals involved in it. It’s just gone, period.

The 20th century, however – and especially the early second half of it, the era of the civil rights movement and the beginning of the War on Drugs – was also the time when a new and disturbing reality started gradually dawning on more and more people in the US: that slavery had not disappeared from the land, it had only been redefined. The War on Drugs mainly – but other government campaigns also – gradually criminalized a significant part of the everyday life in America. Prisons were delegated to private corporations who make money off of every inmate both from the government, and from slave labor into which inmates are forced one way or another. This created corporate interests – and therefore also lobbyist interests – in making prison the court solution to any and every crime or violation in the nation, from jaywalking and incorrectly filled out tax return form to armed robbery and murder. Judges are bribed to sentence to prison as many people as they can, and prison corporations have lobbied different levels of government to increase the number of people sent to prison in order to maintain their profits. This led, in the final account, to the US becoming the nation with the highest number of prison inmates per capita in the world, and also the nation with the longest average sentences for even minor infractions. This eagerness of the different levels of government to keep people in prison for as long as they can, and the complicity of the courts with such executive policies have created in many people the correct impression that the bureaucrats are restoring the slavery, but under a different name and different apparent purposes.

This is itself, while not conclusive, is still powerful evidence that slavery, in the final account, is an inescapable reality in our world. You can’t eradicate it; all you can do is change it from one form to another, or make it serve different interests. Private slavery may have been abolished, but only to be replaced by government slavery, in a form that profits no one except government bureaucrats and private cronies. (Those prisons are businesses worth billions of tax dollars, keep that in mind.) So far all the political regimes that claim to have abolished slavery have only replaced it with government slavery; and this fact has been very obvious in the 20th century when totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, Communist China and Cambodia, etc., have extensively used government slavery for their government projects, all the while claiming they have abolished slavery.

This, of course, should have been expected, given that, as I said earlier, slavery is an inescapable reality in the world before the final judgment. This shouldn’t be news to anyone given that both Christian and non-Christian theologians and philosophers have said it many times. For non-Christian thinkers, slavery is inescapable because it is inextricably, metaphysically woven into the very nature of man. The two greatest names of Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle, believed that some people are born to be masters and others are born to be slaves. Since slavery is part of the very nature of some people, they will inevitably be slaves. Such views were common in all caste societies of the antiquity – and as late as the 20th century, as a matter of fact – and especially in that epitome of a caste society, India, where being a member of a certain caste made you inescapably confined to specific social position, which for some castes boiled down to slavery or being completely socially disenfranchised. This view of the metaphysical roots of slavery was revived in Christian Europe in the 16th and the 17th centuries, and continued well into the 19th century, this time in respect to racial characteristics; a number of non-Christian and even some Christian thinkers fell captive to the metaphysical idea that certain genetic traits – specifically the quantity of melanin in the skin – are the decisive factor as to whether a person was born to be a slave or not. Such ideas – the so-called “Curse of Ham” – of course, didn’t come from Christianity; the original ideology of the “Curse of Ham” was developed as early as in AD 10th century by Judaist rabbis in service of the Muslim Caliphs to justify the growing slave trade with black African slaves. Such trade was disturbing to the religious feelings of the Caliphs, given that in his last sermon Mohammed is reported to have given a strong statement against racism:

There is no superiority for an Arab over a non-Arab, nor for a non-Arab over an Arab. Neither is the white superior over the black, nor is the black superior over the white – except by piety.

The rabbis of the large Jewish diaspora, however, profiting from the trade with black slaves, created the myth of the Curse of Ham in order to give a religious sanction to the slave trade on racial grounds. Over the next several centuries, the myth was established in the minds of most Muslims, even though a minority of Muslim scholars opposed it as inconsistent with the teachings of Islam.

Christian Europe did not adopt that myth for a long time – there were no ideologies of metaphysical origin of slavery in the Christian world. As I pointed out in my lecture on Prester John of many years ago, the Christian world believed in the existence of a powerful Christian leader somewhere outside Europe, who ruled over an established and successful Christian empire. He was universally believed to be black-skinned, and for this reason the Christian rulers of Ethiopia were confused for Prester John by Europeans. (Vasco da Gama’s youngest son, Christobal da Gama, died a heroic death defending the Queen of Ethiopia, believing her to be the Queen-Mother of Prester John). It was only when slavery was restored in the American colonies of the European powers that the rabbinic myth of the Curse of Ham was introduced through Arabic writings into Europe and used for the same purpose, to provide a religious justification of slavery. The myth persisted well into the 20thcentury, and even after the official end of slavery was used from the pulpits in the American South to justify the segregation and the Jim Crow laws.

In the Christian worldview, slavery is an inescapable reality but not for metaphysical reasons. There is nothing in the created nature of man that necessitates slavery: men are born free and, all things being equal, should remain free throughout their lives, not being subject to other men. All things, unfortunately, are not equal, and they are certainly not equal when we compare man’s created nature to his nature after the fall. After the fall, man’s nature changed ethically (perhaps there was also a metaphysical change but it is not a factor), and man is now a slave to sin. This spiritual slavery to sin predicated the entrance of legal and physical slavery in the world. The Curse brought death, but also brought all the smaller manifestations of death – and the subjugation of men to other men was one of these smaller manifestations. Slavery, therefore, is an inescapable reality, not because it is metaphysically programmed in the nature of man but because it is one of the consequences that came with the Curse. Even the submission of the woman to the man, which today some try to portray as part of the original purpose of God, was given as a curse after the Fall. When Paul said in 1 Cor. 14:34 that he Law said that the women must be in submission, there is only one verse in the Law that he could be quoting from, and that is the Curse in Gen. 3:16; there is no other verse in the Law that commands women to be subject to their men. If the most basic form of submission – that in the family, between a husband and a wife – came as the result of the Fall, then all slavery is the result of sin: both as active disobedience against God and as judgment from God upon mankind.

This difference is important to remember, and therefore I will repeat it: Both Christianity and paganism view slavery as inevitable, but for different reasons. For paganism (and its modern form, secularism) it is inevitable on metaphysical grounds: slavery is embedded in the nature of man, and some men are born to be masters, while others are born to be slaves, whether because of their immutable internal nature, or because of their skin color, etc. For Christianity, slavery in the world today is inevitable on ethical/judicial (that is, covenantal) grounds: slavery is the result of sin, whether as active disobedience to God or as judgment from God for disobedience. This difference is important to emphasize today for two reasons. First, because it is another direct application of the difference between the Biblical worldview (which is covenantal, that is, ethical/judicial) and the pagan worldviews (and they are usually metaphysical). The second reason it is important to emphasize is that, believe it or not, we have Christians today – and even Reformed Christians, who, of all men, should know better – who claim that the race-based slavery in the American South prior to the War Between the States of 1861-1865 was a Biblical slavery.

While it is to be expected that there would be today remnants of white supremacists who would still defend the southern slavery, it is ludicrous that professing Christians who have read their Bibles, have listened to sermons in church, and know the history of Christianity in the last 300 years, would have such beliefs. I mean, of all things, is it possible that there are people today who would profess Christ and still believe that enslaving other human beings and keeping them in permanent bondage would be a Biblical policy? And that based on the color of a person’s skin? We are not talking here about the Roman Empire where the whole culture was grandfathered in it from its pagan times. (Although, even in the Empire, Christians eventually brought about the abolition of slavery.) We are talking about modern Christians, who have behind them 2,000 years of church history and preaching. Is it possible that Christians can be so deceived?

Much of it, of course, can be ascribed to a knee-jerk response very typical of American Christians and conservatives in general in the last 20 years. That knee-jerk response is manifested in the fact that every time the leftist end of the spectrum adopts certain rhetoric – temporarily, for tactical purposes – Christians and conservatives automatically assume that it must be a leftist policy, and therefore the opposite is adopted as a Christian or conservative belief and policy. For example, in the last 10 years, socialists in America have temporarily adopted immigration amnesty in their platform in order to win some minorities; conservatives then have mindlessly concluded that closed borders must be a Christian and conservative policy, and have rooted for immigration restrictions. (The truth is, all the immigration restriction laws have been proposed and passed by leftists, and conservatives in the past have always been for amnesty and open borders. And of course, since open borders reduces the power of the state, it can’t be a leftist policy.) Another example is the attitude to police: since in the last several years a few leftist radicals have used anti-police rhetoric, Christians and conservatives have mindlessly concluded that police must be a Christian and a conservative thing, and therefore have supported the expansion of the police state like never before. (The truth is, historically, it was the political Left that created the first police forces in the US, and it is the political Left that has controlled the police unions up to today. Read my article on “Capitalizing on the Stupidity of the Conservative Voter.”) And the same knee-jerk response is the factor behind legitimizing the southern slavery among some church-goers in America: since some leftists today use the southern slavery in their rhetoric, therefore, some Christians (and even pastors!) conclude, southern slavery must have been good and Biblical. Imagine the stupidity behind this knee-jerk response: If tomorrow leftists decide to turn around and condemn abortion and sodomy, these same church-goers may decide that abortion and sodomy are good Christian and conservative policies. (Actually, some atheists in the mid-20th century did blame homosexuality on the Christian sexual morality, believe it or not.)

Thus, having today people who with the same mouths profess Christ and yet try to justify southern slavery as being “Biblical,” it is necessary for us today to have a clear view of what Biblical slavery is and how it works, and compare it to what pagan slavery is and how it works. It is clear to all that slavery is an inescapable concept. What is not clear to all is that while it is an inescapable concept and that there are forms of slavery that are Biblical and righteous, there are also pagan counterfeits of Biblical slavery, forms that are contrary to the Bible, idolatrous, and unjust.

You need to keep in mind that when I talk about slavery, I take the word in its dictionary definition: the legal state or condition of a person in which he is owned and directly controlled by another person; where his life, liberty, and possessions are entirely at the disposal of another person. This definition would exclude some modern highly ideologized and made-up definitions of slavery which include other forms of necessity. For example, the modern Marxist view of hired labor as a form of slavery is clearly stretching it too far: while there is a necessity on the hired worker to work in order to survive, there is no direct personal control over his life and liberty by any specific employer. Another example would be the concubinage of which I talked in a previous episode of Axe to the Root: While a concubine was in a less privileged condition than a wife of full rights, she was still free to leave that dependence if the terms of the contract – her sustenance, shelter, clothes, and marital relations – were not provided for her. (Thus, the atheist fantasies of sexual slavery condoned by the Bible are refuted.) We only consider slavery that form of dependence where the enslaved person is made incapable – by law or by force – to leave the dependence and make his own decisions about his own life, liberty, and property.

So now that we know that the Bible does speak of slavery, and that there are righteous forms of slavery, what are they? There are three of them, and they all have to do with ethical/judicial problems.

The first and the mildest form of slavery in the Bible is charitable slavery, or what we call today “indentured servitude.” That servitude applied to buying other members of the covenant community as slaves. Slavery was the result of sin, and the Law acknowledged that there may be instances of sin in the covenant community; not necessarily crime (and we will talk about slavery for crime) but sin, which will lead to the necessity of selling oneself as a slave. The Law didn’t give too much information about the reasons for such selling, except that a Hebrew could be sold in slavery for his debts – or, in another explanation, for being too poor to afford surviving on his own. Ex. 21:2 and Deut. 15:12 regulate that kind of slavery without mentioning why a Hebrew would be sold in servitude; the only regulation is that such slavery can not continue for more than 7 years, until the next sabbath year. Lev. 25:35-46 gives a more detailed description and instructions of the causes and the rules for such slavery: apparently, such form of slavery is allowed in the case when the person has fallen in poverty, has taken charity loans which he hasn’t been able to repay, and the only way for him to repay is to be sold in slavery and work for his debts. While the Bible acknowledges that a person can fall into poverty because of his own sin and foolishness, this is still not a crime, and the passage in Leviticus 25 specifically instructs the master to not treat him as a slave.

The purpose of such slavery, obviously, is charity towards other members of the covenant community, not so much economics. Taking as a slave a person who has proven incapable of taking care of himself would mean that the master has only acquired another dependent, no different than any of his children. (Remember, Paul said in Gal. 4:1 that an underage heir is no different than a slave.) The only difference is that while the children are still expected to become economically productive when they grow up, this type of a slave may have already proven to be incapable of becoming economically productive beyond his need of sustenance. There is no guarantee that his servitude will really pay for the accumulated debts; in fact the texts mentioning this type of slavery specifically instruct the master to not worry whether the Hebrew slave has really produced enough economic value to cover the costs. The instruction is that at the end of the seven-year period, he is to let him go free and even furnish him with enough to start his life anew. All the texts also allow the slave to ask to be added to the household as a permanent slave – that is, as a permanent dependent, and that means, as a permanent expense. It is important to understand here that the slave in such charitable slavery is specifically protected; he is not to be treated as a slave – that is, he cannot be beaten in order to force him to work – but as a member of the household. Normally such slaves did not inherit anything from the household, except their right to be provided for their basic sustenance, but in exceptional cases the master could decide to leave a slave some or all of his estate. (See, for example, the childless Abraham contemplating leaving his estate to his servant Eliezer, in Gen. 15:2.)

The other form of slavery reserved for Hebrew slaves was restitutional slavery, that is, slavery for criminals. Notice, it wasn’t punitive slavery nor correctional slavery, like the modern prisons. While it is true that such slavery may serve as punishment or even as a teaching experience for the correction of criminals, the focus of the Bible has always been the victim: the victim must be made whole first, and then everything else. Ex. 22:3 speaks of such slavery: the text says of a thief, “He shall surely make restitution; if he owns nothing, then he shall be sold for his theft.” Thus, if a thief is convicted and he has no money to repay the double restitution, he would be sold in slavery to a private employer, and the money will be used to repay the victim. The thief himself will work as a slave for his master until he repays the money originally paid, plus the applicable interest.

Obviously, then, this kind of slavery is not limited by the seven-year rule as is charitable slavery. If the sum that needs to be paid is large, and if the thief doesn’t have the skills to make his labor more valuable, he may remain in slavery for life – he, of course, would be encouraged to improve his skills in order to be able to acquire his freedom as early as possible. But there is no law that necessitates that he be freed before he has paid everything he owes. He has no protection as the poor man has in Lev. 25:43; his master can rule over him with severity, that is, he can use corporal punishment on him to force him to work, if the slave refuses. (Remember, he is a criminal who has to pay restitution.) There is only one protection for him, and that is that in those beatings, the master is not allowed to kill him nor inflict permanent damage on him. Exodus 21:20-21 protect all slaves against deliberate murderous actions by their masters; and vv. 26-27 declare that any permanent damage on the body of the slave – whether a destroyed eye or a knocked-out tooth – automatically result in freedom for the slave, no matter what. Thus, a criminal sold as a slave still has some protection against death and permanent damage, but no protection against severity and beatings – except for his willingness to comply and work and be a valuable asset for his master.

We should add here that this particular type of slavery should also include people who have accumulated too many loans – business or consumer – and have defaulted on them. While it is true that such activity is not necessarily criminal (although, we could argue that it borders fraud), consumer and business debt can’t be considered in the same category as charitable loans for poor people. The seven-year rule, therefore, can’t be said to work in this case, and thus, such people should be considered liable to be sold in slavery as criminals who have stolen and can’t repay. It is hardly justice to put a poor person who has nothing in the same category as a loan millionaire who lived luxuriously at the expense of his creditors.

The third type of lawful slavery in the Law of God is evangelistic slavery. This type of slavery is reserved for non-Hebrew slaves and is described in Lev. 25:44-46. The text allows the Israelites to purchase permanent slaves from the pagan nations around them, as well as from the foreigners who sojourn in Israel – and “sojourn” in this case means that they continue living as strangers, that is, separate from the covenant community. The text, of course, doesn’t condone kidnapping Gentiles or sojourning strangers; given that kidnapping is a capital crime and that the same Law protects the strangers as the homeborn, that would be a major contradiction in the Law. But it does allow Hebrews to buy slaves from foreign slave owners, and it does allow them to permanently enslave strangers who live in the land; not by kidnapping them but for the same reasons as enslaving Hebrews – debt or poverty.

It is this type of slavery that is used by the modern defenders of the Old South to justify southern slavery. The argument goes that since the black slaves were purchased from the pagan lands of Africa, and since the black slaves were themselves “strangers” to America, therefore the Law of God must permit the permanent enslavement of blacks, and therefore the southern slavery was Biblical. The problem is, such application of this law to southern slavery is twisting the meaning of the Biblical text, and in fact is based on pagan presuppositions.

In the first place, one thing should be obvious: the definition of “stranger” is not genetic. Paul’s statement in Rom. 9:6 applies here: “They are not all Israel who are from Israel.” Translated: Your birthplace and your genetic origin do not determine what nation you belong to. Your faith and your covenantal commitment does. Paul’s point was that those born Jews who don’t believe in Christ do not belong to Israel; they are like natural branches that are cut off from their parent tree (Rom. 11:16-24). Their genetic origin doesn’t give them any special rights of belonging to Israel. (Although, it does give them privileges of being exposed to the teaching of the law from an early age – but these privileges only turn into a liability later in life, when they reject Christ.) In the same way, a person born to a foreign nation doesn’t necessarily belong to that foreign nation; if he believes in the God of Israel and has become a member of His covenant, he is now part of Israel and not a stranger. The Old Testament is full of such examples: Rahab the Canaanite, Ruth the Moabite, Caleb the Kenizzite, Obed-Edom the Philistine, the diverse multitude that came out of Egypt with Israel, etc. Being an Israelite has never been by race but always by grace, yes, even under the Old Covenant.

This law, therefore, did not apply to those strangers who have become Israelites by adopting the faith and by being adopted in Israel. It would be absurd to believe that the family of Caleb, because they were genetically strangers to Israel (Kenizzites are mentioned in Gen. 15:19 as one of the pagan nations whose land God would give to Abraham and his descendants), therefore this law applied to them, and the rest of Israel could buy members of Caleb’s family as permanent slaves. As a whole, it would be absurd to believe that under the Old Covenant, believers can enslave other believers permanently, except for charity purposes: such an idea would be in total violation of everything God’s Covenant stands for.

The strangers, therefore, are religious strangers: members of other religions, not people of different genetic stock. Skin color would have nothing to do with this law. The Law allowed Israelites to buy permanent Gentile slaves from Gentile nations, and the Law allowed Israelites to buy as permanent slaves Gentiles living in the land. The permanent slavery applied to unbelievers – because under “strangers,” the Law had in mind unbelievers, or believers in other religions.

But what was the covenant purpose of this law? Was it that the Israelites develop a grand slave society of permanently enslaved strangers, similar to the American South before the War Between the States? Was it that Israel developed a genetically segregated society where all Israelites were slave owners and all strangers were slaves, or that a certain genetic stock is always considered lower caste and always being slaves, as in the American South? We don’t see such development in Israel in the generations after the law was given. There is no permanent slave class of foreigners who are transferred and sold down the generations? Why is this, if the Law allowed the Israelites to buy permanent foreign slaves? The slave markets were extensive in the antiquity, and certainly a permanent foreign slave would be a much more attractive investment than a Hebrew slave who was protected in more ways than a foreign slave. Why didn’t Israel develop the slave society of Rome or of the American South, despite Lev. 25:44-46?

The answer to this is that the covenantal purpose of this law was never the slavery itself, but evangelism. I have talked in many other places about the evangelistic function of the Law of God, that Moses, in the Law, preached the Gospel not only to the Jews but to the whole world as well. The Law contain numerous references to strangers coming to Israel and adopting the faith of Israel. Solomon’s prayer about the Temple of God was that strangers would travel to Israel just to see the Temple and would confess the God of Israel when they see the Temple. The Law also contained provisions that foreign slaves who had fled from their foreign masters were to be protected within the borders of Israel, never returned to their masters, and treated as free people, and that without any requirement of changing their religion (Deut. 23:15-16; the expectation was that a slave who found refuge and freedom in Israel would eventually adopt the faith of the nation whose law allowed for that refuge and freedom). Women and children of foreign nations were protected in times of war and were to be adopted into Israel’s families. And anytime a pagan slave could be saved from his pagan masters, Israel should use that opportunity to save a soul from paganism and hell, into the family of God.

And here we are forced into a quandary. Imagine a Hebrew family buys a foreign slave. If he remains pagan his whole life, and show no interest whatsoever in the God of Israel, he is to remain slave all his life. But what if he converts, believes, and shows, by all his actions and speech, that he is now a member of the Covenant of God? He is now a brother in Christ, a member of the Hebrew nation. Would the laws for unbelievers still apply to him? Should he be treated as if there has never been any conversion? If the laws for unbelievers apply to strangers even after they have converted, would Caleb be treated as a stranger and not as a Prince of Judah?

Such a concept, that the conversion of a pagan slave to Christ brings no changes in his legal standing before God and the nation of Israel, is utterly ridiculous. It contradicts everything the Covenant of God stands for, and it contradicts the very concept of evangelism in the Bible. If man shall live by faith alone, if the covenant community is defined by faith and profession of faith, if the worldview and the religion we espouse are a creedal worldview and a creedal religion – as opposed to metaphysical rationalism or occult, magical irrationalism – then the conversion of a man should make all the difference in the world as what his legal standing ion the society would be. Anyone who claims the opposite is not a Christian and has zero knowledge of the essence of Christianity, and I don’t care how well he know his TULIP or how many seminary degrees he has accumulated.

Pagan slaves were supposed to be bought with this one purpose in mind: so that they convert. They had a choice: they could remain indifferent to the faith and stay slaves their whole lives. But if they converted, the law for slavery of a Hebrew brother now applied. They were to be given 7 years in slavery with the purpose of repaying their masters as much as they could for saving them from their previous, pagan masters. After 7 years, the convert was supposed to go out free and take his rightful place as a member of the nation of Israel. He was a son of Abraham now, by faith. He was the Old Testament shadow of billions of Gentiles who in the New Covenant would be purchased by Christ from their satanic master and released as free men in His Kingdom.

But this was not what southern slavery was. Southern slavery was not evangelistic slavery. Its purpose was not to evangelize the African blacks and then release them as free members of the society. Blacks were evangelized alright, and they were made to listen to sermons and even have their own black preachers; in fact, so successful was such evangelism, that black culture in the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century committed to its Christian roots more than white culture, which was experimenting with occultism, atheism, socialism, and many other anti-Biblical ideologies and practices. However, the slave masters of the South did not evangelize blacks because they cared for their souls but because Christianity was expected to make the slaves more obedient to their masters. That is, it was not the Biblical principle of using slavery in service of Christianity, it was the pagan principle of using Christianity in the service of slavery. (No different than Fabian socialism which uses Christianity in service of socialism.) For generations, Christianized blacks, despite their profession of faith, were considered mere property and sold and re-sold as cattle. Christian families were broken apart; in direct violation of Christ’s command in Matt. 19:6 and Mark 10:9.

As a matter of fact, southern slavery not only was not Biblical slavery, it was the epitome of paganism in the Western world, a form of idolatry that hadn’t raised its ugly head since the time of the pagan Roman Empire. It was everything Rome wanted to be but failed, lacking the technology and the manpower. That slavery was not charitable: it’s purpose was not to create free, responsible, and independent men. It was not restitutional: far from enslaving criminals to make restitution to victims, it was the other way around: a culture of criminals was keeping in slavery people who were kidnapped by other criminals, and sold like cattle. And it was certainly not evangelistic. It was the ultimate expression of the pagan concept of slavery: men were enslaved as a group, as a race, because they were considered metaphysically and genetically inferior to normal human beings. And because they were considered metaphysically fit to be only slaves and nothing else, this was the rationale behind keeping slavery permanent. Wherever we see paganism and idolatry, we also see chattel slavery, the eternal subjugation of one class of people to an elite, whether that elite is Party apparatchiks, or government bureaucrats and their armed henchmen in blue, or a priestocratic elite as in the Aztec and the Inca empires and Tibet, or aristocratic plantation owners. Chattel slavery, that is, slavery without redemption, is exactly the religion of Satan, and nothing else.

Yes, slavery is inescapable in the world before the final judgment. With the growth of the Kingdom of God, it will inevitably retreat, until only small traces of it remain; slavery is the result of sin, and the conquest of sin will lead to the extinction of slavery. Meanwhile, however, God in His Law prescribes certain forms of slavery which take account of the sin of man and his society, and yet, at the same time, lead man and his society to overcome sin and thus to restore freedom (because the Law of God is the perfect law of liberty, according to James 1:25). These forms of slavery are: first, charitable slavery, designed to help improvident men learn work and responsibility and put them back on their feet; and if they can’t then provide for their survival under other people’s guidance. Second, restitutional slavery, designed to deal with non-capital crime, to restore the victim and, hopefully, teach the thief a lesson. And, third, evangelistic slavery, designed to rescue the weakest members of pagan societies, those who have become victims of pagan slavery, and give them the chance to become children of God, free and independent. All these three forms are temporary, and have a redemptive purpose. Pagan slavery is chattel slavery; its purpose is only to keep a certain class of people in subjugation while maintaining another class in a position of power. It has no ethical/judicial purpose; it is pure worship of power, in favor of the powerful of the day. Southern slavery, despite the attempts of some Christians and to whitewash it, was a pagan slavery of the worst possible kind. We are under obligation to declare this openly, as part of our preaching of justice in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The book I will assign this week is Gary North’s economic commentary on the case laws of Exodus 21-40, previous title, Tools of Dominion. No other book in the history of Christendom ash a better and more consistent and detailed treatment of the Biblical view of slavery. He also comments on southern slavery and on the covenantal reasons for the War Between the States, and the reasons for the defeat of the South. These reasons were not military but spiritual. The South had to lose, for it had become a pagan society worse even than the secularist North. Read Gary North’s book. It will open your eyes to how the Bible approaches this and many other ethical/judicial issues.

Also, when you consider giving for worthy causes, remember to pray and donate to Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization devoted to building an intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe through translation and publishing of books that apply the Gospel to every area of life. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to the newsletter, get familiar with our work there, and donate. God bless you all.

Welcome to Episode 60 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 how a nation acts when it is optimistic and believes in life and the future; and, conversely how a nation acts when it is pessimistic about the future and it worships death. There will be some sound Biblical theology in our talk, and there will be some specific application of that theology to the most recent developments in American political and legislative life. Specifically, to President Trump’s repeal of the DACA Program, or, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program. Of course, Trump’s actions won’t be in focus here; covenantal thinking rejects the notion that any politician or legislative attempt have any strategic significance for the Kingdom of God. After all, all human legislation only follows the hearts of the people. Therefore the strategic significance lies with the hearts of the people in the nation, and in this case, specifically with the hearts of the millions of so-called “conservatives” and church-goers in America.

For those inside and outside the United States who don’t know what DACA is, in short: The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program is an immigration policy which gives immigration authorities discretion to not prosecute illegal immigrants who were brought to the US as minors by their parents. Now, the program has received a lot of criticism by conservatives, and most of it has been based on myths about the program – because, as we all know, American conservatives are just as irrational and schizophrenic as American leftists, and they eagerly believe every myth their news sources throw at them. So let me first dispel some of these myths. First, the program did not give money or welfare to illegal immigrants; it only deferred action on their deportation; in fact, if anything, more than 95% of the adult participants in the program are employed. Second, the program has nothing to do with amnesty; amnesty is a pardon for a violation. But minors brought to the US by their parents have not committed a violation; they have acted under compulsion. And the US Penal Code chapter 8 point 5(e) declares that acting under compulsion constitutes a defense against legal liability. Thus, those conservatives that scream that we are a nation of laws need to take seriously those laws and acknowledge that minors brought to the states by their parents are not legally liable. Therefore DACA can’t be related to amnesty. Third, the program doesn’t demonstrate that the Democrats want open borders. To the contrary, the program was part of a larger effort, the deportation of millions of illegal immigrants, more than ever before. Yes, the Obama administration effectively deported more immigrants than all previous administrations together, proving once again that immigration restrictions – contrary to the babbling of brain-washed conservatives – are actually a leftist ideology and policy. Fourth, the program is not an additional expense; in fact, the real purpose of its introduction was a decrease of spending. Deportations are expensive, and millions of them made the immigration act the most expensive single federal law in the US for the last one decade, costing the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars over the course of just a few years. The purpose of DACA was to lighten the financial burden on the several departments and the court system, which it did. With 850,000 DACA recipients and an average cost of $11,000 per deportation (only the direct, official cost; who knows what the real total cost is), this is a reduce of spending of about $10 billion. Given that close to 95% of the recipients of DACA are employed, we don’t even know what the cost to the economy would be by such an abrupt removal of close to a million of trained and experienced workers. (By the way, why are we so eager to give to other countries workers whose training and education we paid for? Isn’t that stupid?) And, fifth, DACA is not a path to citizenship. It only grants work permitsbut leaves the immigration status of the person undecided, and therefore can’t be used to grant citizenship. Citizenship is not granted to non-immigrant work-permit holders. These people’s legal status will remain unclear for the rest of their lives. They will be allowed to work, and they will also be taxed like everyone else, but they will never be represented. They will be the true modern example of taxation without representation. All these are legal facts. Anyone who doesn’t acknowledge them but simply parrots media mythologies, doesn’t really understand the situation, and doesn’t really believe in laws, his screams to the contrary notwithstanding.

But our purpose here is not to explain the technical characteristics of DACA or to defend it against myths and misconceptions. The Axe to the Root Podcast is about giving a Biblical, covenantal analysis of situations like this, and smash to pieces the idols of the culture that make Americans adopt and support anti-Biblical ideologies and practices. And we want to talk here about the covenantal, that is, ethical/judicial nature of this case. We want to see what the Bible says specifically about this case.

But does the Bible speak specifically on the case of DACA? I mean, we know it speaks on the issue of immigration, and I have three lectures on immigration plus a Q&A session on Reconstructionist Radio. But that is general on immigration. Is there anything specific about DACA, that is, about minors who were brought to our country by their parents, and are left in a position where they don’t have legal status in any country whatsoever, whether it was the country of their parents or the US?

The Bible actually speaks on the issue of foreign children. Not in the technical legal lingo of modern secularist America, but in the language of God’s Covenant. And what it says is very important to us as American Christians today. And, given our practices on this issue, and given our general presuppositions that are behind those practices, the overall worldview that controls our policies today, what the Bible says is very condemning of us American Christians.

Before we start our analysis, we need to look at DACA and the case it covers for it really is: It has to do with children. It has to do with children born to foreigners, that is, by birth belonging to a foreign nation, but delivered by their parents to serve the United States, to adopt its culture, and contribute to its society, and that without the hope of ever becoming citizens, given the existing laws. It doesn’t have to do with adults who have broken some law – now, I believe that the immigration laws are both un-Biblical and unconstitutional – but whatever you may believe about these laws, we are not talking about adults here. We are talking about children. Specifically, about children belonging to another nation but brought to the US to serve the American society.

The best place to start our analysis is Deuteronomy 28. (Could there be a better place to start than God’s covenant blessings and judgments?) There is a very specific text there about sons and daughters. It says the following:

Your sons and your daughters shall be given to another people, while your eyes look on and yearn for them continually; but there will be nothing you can do (Deut. 28:32).

This is in the second section of Deut. 32, the section with God’s promised curses for disobedience. The text is clear. For a nation, it is a curse to lose its sons and daughters to another nation. Moses here, of course, speaks to the families of Israel, but he is also speaking of the whole nation; by threatening them with the curse of their children taken away in captivity, he is threatening them with the destruction of their future. After all, if our house is on fire, what’s the first thing we try to save out of the flames? Isn’t it our children before everything else? Why the children? Because they define our future. And, as we postmillennialists have said so many times, your eschatology, your concept of the future defines everything you do today. (As Gary DeMar remarked once, it is not true that the present determines the future; the truth is, the future determines the present.) It is bad enough when a family grows old and they never had children, that is, never had future; witness the troubles of Sarah, Abraham’s wife. It must be even worse when they had children, and there was a promise of a glorious future, and those children were taken away from them. This, in fact, was the ultimate test of faith for the father of all who believe: surrender your future and your hopes to God. And this was the topic of a whole book in the Bible, the book of Job, where a man’s faith was tested by taking away his children. Obviously, there is something in losing one’s children that makes it worse than even death; after all, Job and Abraham were not tested through death threats, but by taking away their children. To have never had children, or to have had them but see them taken away, must be a terrible ordeal. But stop and consider this: How much more terrible would it be to not only see them taken away, but also given to your enemies, to become their servants and their future?

In case someone didn’t get the message, Moses repeated the same curse just a few verses down. In verse 41, he says it again:

You shall have sons and daughters but they will not be yours, for they will go into captivity.

A curse repeated twice is not to be ignored without heavy consequences. But then he upped the ante. Children are again mentioned, but this time not as being taken in captivity, but as being dead. No, not just dead as in killed, but in a form that is the worst of the worst. A whole section, several verses (53 through 57), is devoted to a detailed gory presentation of Israel eating her own children because of starvation. It’s not just about losing their children to the enemy – where the children will still have some future, like Daniel and his friends – it is about Israel so devastated by judgment that the parents would willingly destroy their own future by eating their own children.

Behind this repetition of a threat – to lose their children to the enemy – and the detailed description of a picture worthy of a horror movie or heavy metal lyrics (although, having listened to hundreds of heavy metal songs, I can’t remember anything as bloody as Deut. 28:53-57), behind all this, there is a principle: in a covenantal worldview, children are an enormous asset, and losing them to another nation is a curse. A curse so terrible and so significant, that it deserved being mentioned three times in the list of curses in Deuteronomy 28.

At the other end of the line, conversely, acquiring the children of another is considered a blessing. Gal. 4:27 quotes Is. 54:1-4,

Shout for joy, O barren one, you who have borne no child; Break forth into joyful shouting and cry aloud, you who have not travailed; For the sons of the desolate one will be more numerous Than the sons of the married woman.

Ps. 113:9 repeats the same promise. Whence would these children come from to a barren woman? It should be obvious: the children of the married woman will be given to her, for the antithesis is between the barren woman and the married woman. The barren woman is told to rejoice, for the children of another will be hers. This was, in fact, also a promise of the Gospel; New Covenant evangelism is supposed to be a massive transfer of children from the pagan nations to the Church of God. It is for this reason Paul and other authors in the New Testament insist to call their readers “my children” (see John 13:33; 1 Cor. 4:14; 2 Cor. 6:13; Gal. 4:19; 1 John 2:1; 3 John 4, and many others). The growth of the church in the New Testament era is nothing less than a massive collection of spoils; the pagan world is robbed of its children, who become children of God. Such robbing was imaged as a shadow in the Old Testament as well, in the laws of warfare in Deut. 20 (see. v. 14), women and children were supposed to be spared and taken as “booty.” Now, what was to be done with the children? Use them as slaves? Build a government slave army of captive children, like in Babylon and Persia? No. Israel didn’t have such centralized government. Captive women were to be taken as wives and incorporated into Israel’s families, as is clear by the next chapter in Deuteronomy (21:11-14); the text specifically forbids treating women in captivity as slaves. This should lead us to the conclusion that captive children were to be adopted as children and incorporated into Israel’s families. They were to become an inheritance of Israel and part of her future. And this was another shadow of the glorious future of the New Testament church which would rob the pagan world of its future, and would appropriate that future for itself. “All things belong to you,” Paul said in 1 Cor. 3:21-22, including the future.

God’s laws of warfare to Israel were not an encouragement for Israel to aggressively attack other nations and steal their children, of course; kidnapping was a capital crime. The nations around Israel, however, were busy attacking others and stealing and kidnapping each other’s children as well, as a form of perverse blessing they were trying to earn for themselves. Joseph’s brothers sold him to traders while he was still a child; In Ex. 10:10, Pharaoh was outraged that Moses and Aaron wanted to leave with their little children; so outraged, in fact, that he exclaims, “Take heed, for evil is in your mind!”, an exclamation he uses only in regard to children, and nothing else. He got his reward later, of course, when all the first-born in Egypt were slain. The policy of subjugating conquered nations by kidnapping their children to be assimilated we can get from the Book of Daniel; and from historical sources. The practice remained common among pagan cultures till very late in history. Gypsies were still known to steal children by the end of the 19th century; and missionaries in New Guinea reported to have solved the problem with the constant inter-tribal wars and cannibalism by turning that custom into the custom of “peace children”: mutual exchange of infants between several tribes in an area with the purpose of preventing them from wars.

The New Testament church took this principle very seriously. It was in Christendom that for the first time, orphanages were organized, both by the church and by private philanthropists. The purpose was clear: to preserve the children of the society a future productive members of that society, instead of losing them to physical or spiritual death. But even before there were orphanages, in the dark ages of Roman persecution, Christians literally snatched the children of pagans from the jaws of death. In the Roman empire, there were designated dumping grounds where the undesired infants were thrown to die of exposure. They were the Roman equivalent to the modern abortion mills Christians started visiting those hellish places (by the way, the Hebrew word for “hell,” gehinnom, comes from the name of the valley in Jerusalem where the Kings of Israel used to throw children in the fire as a sacrifice), and by visiting those hellish places, Christians started rescuing as many babies as they could. The practice was so successful in growing the church that some regional governors forbade Christians from saving babies from the heaps. Christians, however, continued, until the very practice of abortion was abolished.

The general Biblical principle in this regard should be clear to all who know their Bibles and use the name of Christ: For a nation, it is a curse to lose its children to another nation, for whatever reason they have to do it, military defeat or economic disaster. Conversely, for a nation to be given the children of another nation for free, without even having to go to war, is one of the greatest blessings God would bestow. It means that God is still interested in that nation’s future, and wants to invest in it all the assets of the nations. Such blessing in history is part of the blessing promised to New Jerusalem in Rev. 21:24, that “the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.” The same verse repeated several times in several different ways in the Old Testament, speaks of gifts, wealth, riches, etc. Children in the Bible, as we know, are all of it: riches, wealth, glory, etc. When the other nations are giving you their children, your nation still has hope. What the church is obligated to do is take these children and make them into its own children – mindful of what they were saved from, committed to conquer the world for Christ. Imagine if a donor came to your church and dropped a million-dollar check without asking for anything in return. Would your church reject such blessing. Well, having children of others given to you as your children and your inheritance is more valuable than all the money in the world. And rejecting such a blessing is rejecting a blessing from God Himself.

And, listen to this: there is no reason for a nation to reject God’s blessing unless – unless – that nation has adopted an anti-God worldview.

Most of my listeners have probably heard my lectures on immigration which I delivered several years ago at the Church of the King in McAllen TX. The place was providentially the most appropriate place for such lectures, for at the time, McAllen was in the center of an immigration so-called “crisis.” The “crisis” consisted of tens of thousands of children from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala who had embarked on the long trip from the southern to the northern border of Mexico using the Mexican railroads, hoping for a chance to enter the United States and remain there. Some were so young that it was clear that their parents back had arranged to pool them together and organize the trip using criminal channels. Such migration has been around for years; it has never been anything new. The “triangle” of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras has always been a hellhole of violence and poverty, with the local people being systematically uprooted and exterminated by governments and crime gangs alike (both supported in one way or another by the US government; it is only natural that, in their powerlessness to change their situation, the local people would prefer to send their children far away, hoping for a chance for them have a better life, rather than keep them home to a life of guaranteed slavery and misery. If anything was unusual in 2014, when the crisis happened, was the increase in the number of such children coming from that region: an increase of about 100%, which caught the border authorities unprepared.

How did America respond to this situation? Actually, how did the church in America respond to that situation? Did it respond Biblically, with joy that our nation has been blessed by God to acquire the inheritance of other nations? Did it at least respond with joy that, at the very least, we are blessed to have the opportunity to rescue these children from the curse of their land, adopting them and raising them to be Christians first, then Americans, and then use them to evangelize the world, as the early church did? Did we open our hearts and homes to these children?

No. At the time, the vast majority of American Christians and conservatives in general were screaming in terror that such a presence of 70,000 Honduran children (70,000, that is, 0.02%, that’s two-hundredths of one percent of the US population) was a clear sign of a plot for the destruction of America. These are all children under 14 years of age, most of them malnourished, many sick and dehydrated from the long trip in box cars across Mexico, all desiring nothing more than to have some food, water, and peace. When I talked to a federal worker at one of the temporary shelters, she told me that she had seen 10-12 yo kids who just wanted to get a job to sustain themselves, because most didn’t hope to be able to find their relatives. She said they were very disappointed that the laws in the US do not allow 10-12-year-olds to have gainful employment. It is of such kids that the brave and the free Christians and conservatives weer scared to death, because surely these kids must have come to destroy America, right? I heard at the time ridiculous, insane theories of global leaders who used that as a clever plot to change the face of America forever, and I saw thousands of Christians and conservatives believing those theories, and demanding that the kids are deported back to wherever they came from, even though we don’t even know how to find their parents, nor do we know if their parents are alive in the first place. “Whatever,” a blogger said, “just deport them and drop them there, let them find their parents, we are not responsible for them.” And there was no negative reaction to what he said. With over 300,000 Protestant congregations in America, there are 4-5 congregations to every one of these children who were caught in the middle of that crisis. In the final account, it was the federal government that worked to provide for these kids shelter, food, and to find their relatives in the US, and for those who had none, to find foster families. Can you imagine how low we have fallen, if faceless government bureaucrats take care of children, while the Church is screaming bloody hell against those same children? How does that compare to the practice of the early church in the Roman Empire, where the church saved and adopted the babies, often against the resistance of the Empire? And we wonder today why the church has lost her influence in our culture, and why the culture is increasingly secularized? God makes the nations give us their most precious inheritance; instead of adopting it and turning into an arsenal for the Kingdom of God, we are turning our backs on it.

OK, granted, this case was a bit extreme; real but extreme nevertheless, and it caught the whole nation off-guard. Although, I am not sure what was so hard to figure out: the children couldn’t be returned back home without putting their lives at risk, therefore they were to be raised in the US, in one way or another. (Although, keep in mind, the federal government has some history in abandoning deported children in the Mexican desert to die; read up on Operation Wetback under the Eisenhower administration.) But even if this case was a bit extreme, the case with the children brought here by their parents shouldn’t be that hard to figure out. These children have grown up in the US; culturally, they are Americans. Many of them don’t even speak the original language of their parents, or speak it very poorly. They have been educated here in the US. (And, please, don’t tell me someone else paid for their education; education is paid for by property taxes. Everyone who owns a house or pays rent pays for the public schools; this kind of tax doesn’t depend on your immigration status.) But even if the taxpayers have paid for their education, what stupidity is it to demand that such investment should be wasted by giving it to another country? I mean, where is the end of conservative schizophrenia? We have paid for the education of an immigrant child, and instead of doing it the good old Christian conservative way, give her the opportunity to work for us and pay back, we are donating her to another country, wasting her talent and our investment in the process??? Aren’t we complete idiots? It’s not just the immorality, that we have rejected the blessing of God in being given that child, it’s also the stupidity of throwing away our own capital together with the blessing. Forget about the Queen of the South and the people of Nineveh; I wouldn’t be surprised if the Pharaoh of the Exodus is present at the judgment of this generation of American Christians and conservatives.

And don’t forget, while in the more extreme case – the Honduran children – the church still had to sacrifice something by adopting the children, in the DACA case even that is not needed, first, because they already have their families here, and, second, because they are all perfectly integrated and capable of surviving and working in the American society. And we are still asking for a solution that is both immoral and stupid?

The obvious question now is, why we, the American church, being so knowledgeable in the Bible, having all these fancy seminaries and ministries and pulpits and celebrities, knowing well what a blessing from God is . . . why are we kicking against these blessings, again?

There can be only one possible answer to this: our worldview, as the church in America, has become detached from the worldview of the Bible. In fact, so detached, that it has become a cult of death. To love having children, to welcome getting more children, to rejoice in appropriating the children of the nations requires a worldview that celebrates life and has fearless, optimistic expectations of the future. It requires placing the value of life high above the value of man-made order; life, as Dennis Peacocke said in one of his lectures many years ago, is a messy thing (think of the mess in the room when a baby is delivered), while perfect order is found only in death. Just the news of having another child on the way is always a shock for the parents; and for the parents to embrace it as a good news, their minds have to be captive to a perspective that views life as constantly and inevitably growing, increasing, and filling the universe with more and more life. That’s why we don’t define biological life by the biochemical processes in the body; such processes can be replicated in the dead and sterile setting of the laboratory. For life to be present, there has to be a constant drive to reproduction, multiplication, growth, more than anything else – to the point that organisms are willing to sacrifice other functions just to ensure reproduction. It is for this reason that the Bible calls men who are still alive but incapable of producing children, “as good as dead.” Abraham in his old age, for example, is called in Heb. 11:12, nekrow, that is, “mortified, as if dead,” on account of the fact that he was too old to have children. You don’t rejoice over a new child unless you love life with a savage, uncontrollable, irrational, ecstatic love; anything else than such overwhelming love will make you focus only on the mess of having another life form around, and you will prefer to reject the blessing of God.

Thus, the only explanation for the rejection of those children is that in the American churches, and among American conservatives, there isn’t such love for life as the Bible prescribes. But where there is no love for life, there is a love for death. Adam and Eve could have eaten from the Tree of Life; by going to the other tree instead, they chose death. That death didn’t come because they wanted to die, but because they were not ultimately committed to life. The cult of death doesn’t need rituals of human sacrifices to flourish – it can flourish everywhere where life is not unconditionally embraced as the ultimate value. Unbelievers don’t openly hate life; but by rejecting the offer of eternal life, they eventually get death, and that eternal. Thus, when our society doesn’t value the blessing of having more children – actually, of having even the children of its enemies delivered to it for assimilation – our society demonstrates that it doesn’t value life, and therefore loves death. It is a death cult that controls our American churches, not the life of the Gospel. Our attitude to God’s blessings is a good testimony to that.

Of course, we don’t need to look at DACA to know that our culture today is in the grip of a death cult; all we need to do is look at the abortion mills in this country, at the fervor with which politicians and police defend them against abolitionists, and at the apathy of the churches who sometimes stand right across the street from abortion mills. And, of course, it is apathy from the pulpit and the ordinary members, but also active participation by the daughters of these congregations – several studies show that a good portion of churched girls have had an abortion. If their churches had and preached a gospel of life, that wouldn’t have happened. For these girls to be so unconcerned about the murders they commit, and for their parents to be so apathetic to the evil of abortion., it means that the pulpits have served a death cult, and not the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

And indeed, often you will hear the opponents of DACA, or of immigration in general, use the same argument as abortionists: “We have too many people, we can’t take care of more.” The enemies of God have been using this argument ever since the French Revolution. The bloody French revolutionaries in the 1790s had a theory that France could only feed so many people, and therefore millions must die so that there is enough food for the rest. Yes, the revolutionary terror was deliberately based on such “calculations.” The Nazis fought for Lebensraum, that is, “living space,” because their ideology told them that there were too mane people – or, subhuman beings – on the planet. Communism and modern environmentalism have the same ideology of demographics. And when it comes to children and especially immigrant children, the majority of American Christians and conservatives have the same ideology: “We have too much life here; we can’t afford to bring in more life.” It’s a worship of death.

In one of his lectures, R.J. Rushdoony mentions the immigration policies of the first Christian settlers in America, the Puritans and the Pilgrims. Their policy was open borders. They were willing to take in even the criminals of other nations: so deep was their faith and so great their worship of God, that they did not expect that anyone who reached their shores would remain untouched by the redemption and life of Jesus Christ. Bringing children was even higher on the list of priorities: When you read the list of the passengers on the Mayflower, keep in mind that there were a number of children from poor families who came over not with their families but as indentured servants of other families. Their support, of course, cost money and effort – although the children were still expected to work – but those early American Christians were willing to invest in children, because they valued and honored life. That honor of life, transferred from generation to generation, was what made America great. And the death cult of our generation will destroy her, if we don’t destroy the cult first.

In the final account, God has given us a blessing. He has brought to us the children of the nations. Children, who, if they stayed in their own country, could have been wasted lives, and may be turned into enemies of the US by their upbringing and education. By being brought to America by their parents, these children were delivered for education to us, so that we turn them into our allies and brothers. Such blessing is not common; it is very special. And yet, we have rejected it, and we have called for their return. We can have more life here, but we want less – and we want less life in every single area, including our own children whom we murder in the womb, thousands a day. We are ripe for judgment.

The book I will assign this week is Strangers at Our Door, by Zygmunt Bauman. You will have to use discernment, for not everything in Bauman’s worldview and practical ideology is commendable. But what you need to pay attention to, in the book, is his documenting how the political class in the West created and maintains the culture of panic and fear of the refugees and other migrants, with the purpose of expanding the power of the state over the minds of its subjects. Those today who are still captive to that fear and panic, are the easiest to manipulate for the purposes of the political elite . . . for their own safety and security, of course.

In your prayers and giving, consider Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization committed to building the intellectual foundation of the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe. We have just published two new translated books on homeschooling, helping the growing Christian homeschool community in Bulgaria grow in knowledge and understanding to prepare the future generation of Christians in Bulgaria. We need your help for publishing even more books. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to the newsletter, and donate. God bless you all.

Welcome to Episode 59 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will look at an old theological controversy from a different perspective and with a different terminology. We will see what terminology has been used to cover this particular controversy so far, and some of the errors which that terminology has led to; and we will try to look at the specific terminology the Bible uses on this particular topic, and then try to have a new discussion around that Biblical terminology.

The topic is the Law of God, and specifically the discontinuity and continuity of the Law of God. What in the Law of God as given through Moses remains valid today. And what has been abrogated on the Cross of Christ.

This topic has become quite hot in the last 40+ years, mainly because of the emergence of the teachings of Christian Reconstruction, and specifically of Theonomy. Theonomy, or the teaching that the Law of God as given in the Bible is the standard for righteousness and justice for all – whether private individuals or government entities. The Law of God, as summarized in the two greatest commandments, “Love God” and “Love your neighbor”; then expanded in the Ten Commandments; then explained as case laws in the rest of the Books of Moses; then applied as specific cases in the history of Israel and in the prophets; and eventually brought to its full light in the New Covenant. As we talked in the first episode of this podcast, covenantal thinking is centered on issues of justice and righteousness – the two pillars of God’s Throne – and the Law of God is the standard for justice and righteousness mean. The Law of God shows the way God would act if He was a Man . . . and guess what, He did become a Man, and He did perfectly obey the Law. The Law is His character.

Theonomy has had its opponents, of course. In the last 400 years, rival doctrines have arisen in the supposedly “Reformed” churches, doctrines that point to other sources of justice and righteousness but the law of God – whether some vague notion of “natural law,” or a not so vague obedience to the state. The opponents have their theological arguments, of course, and the main argument they use is that the Law of God has three parts: The Moral Law, which concerns individual righteousness; the Judicial Law, which concerns institutional justice; and the Ceremonial Law, which concerns the religious ceremonies which represented the Jewish religion. So the position of the anti-theonomists is that only the Moral Law is valid today; individuals are under obligation to model their individual behavior according to the moral rules of the Bible. For example, do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, etc. The Judicial Law, however, which gives God’s standards for civil justice, is not valid for today; just as the Ceremonial Law is not valid. Thus, governments, firms, and other governmental entities – civil or not – are not under obligation to look to the Law of God for their standards for conduct. When it comes to judicial standards, the Law of God has been replaced by the laws of men, or “natural law” – a law that is supposedly equally accepted as valid by both believers and unbelievers. Such is the position of the recently revived rhetoric of the “two kingdoms,” coming out of modern so-called “Reformed” seminaries. Of course, no one has that holy book of “natural law” and therefore no one knows what it says about the specifics of justice, so, in the final account, all that is left is whatever the current rulers arbitrarily impose and enforce. “Natural law” is simply another name for “unlimited civil government.” Justice abhors vacuum: when the Judicial Law of God is abandoned, the judicial lawlessness of man takes over.

The theonomist’s answer to this is that the Judicial Law of God is not abrogated. It continues to be valid today, because the New Testament has not abrogated it. The rule of thumb for the theonomist is that unless a law has been explicitly abrogated in the New Testament, it continues to be valid. This is the case with the Ceremonial Law: a number of passages in the New Testament show that the Ceremonial Law is abrogated; in fact, more than that, it is now idolatry to go back to the Ceremonial Law and use it for the purposes of redemption and restitution. We don’t sacrifice animals anymore. But the Judicial Law still stands. The civil government is still bound by it, and a nation whose civil government doesn’t abide by the Law of God sins in the same way as an individual who doesn’t abide by the Law of God. A nation which establishes and maintains concentration camps, or legalizes abortion, is just as guilty of murder as is an individual who commits murder. The whole Law of God is still valid, except for those parts that are explicitly abrogated.

The objection of the anti-theonomists to this are that not all ceremonial laws are explicitly abrogated. Are they therefore valid today? And another objection – especially popular in Presbyterian circles – is based on the Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter 19. The Confession apparently claims that the Judicial Law, quote, “expired with the State of these people,” that is, the Jews. Therefore, the argument goes, confessional Presbyterians can’t be theonomists because, you see, the Confession teaches that the Judicial Law has expired and therefore is not obliging. We can still use some of it, as the “general equity thereof may require,” and that general equity is just another name for “natural law.” But as far as the Judicial Law of the Bible is concerned, it should not be used as a source for what justice is supposed to look like.

Theonomists, on the other hand, point to the fact that all of the Westminster Divines were, in their sermons and writings and practices, theonomists, for they appealed to the Bible as a source of justice; and in fact, in many cases at the time, the law books had Biblical references attached to every single law in them. That may be a good argument, and it may not be a good argument. After all, the Confession says what it says, and if it says that the Judicial law has expired, then it has expired. So, the best we can say about this controversy is that it has led to a stalemate: The Confession says one thing in its plain text, the words and actions of its authors say the opposite. Looks like a serious confusion which would hardly resolve the issue in any definitive way.

My view is that neither of the sides reads the Westminster Confession for what it really says. A careful reading of the plain text of the Confession reveals that it doesn’t at all divide the Law of God into three parts, Moral, Judicial, and Ceremonial, as three separate, logically consistent bodies. It does speak of the Moral Law as one consistent body, singular, in articles 1 and 2 of chapter 19, and calls it a “perfect rule of righteousness,” and then sums it up in the Ten Commandments. When it moves to the next articles, however, where ceremonial and judicial are mentioned, these are not described as consolidated bodies of law, but only in plural. When it comes to the judicial portion of the Law of God, the Confession specifically speaks only of “sundry” laws, not of a body of Judicial Law:

[QUOTE]To them also, as a body politic, He gave sundry judicial laws, which expired together with the State of that people; [END OF QUOTE]

“Sundry,” which today means “various, miscellaneous,” had a completely different meaning in the 17th century English: it meant, “separate, disconnected.” (Hence the word “asunder,” meaning “into separate parts, apart.”) The Confession thus speaks of individual judicial laws that are sundry to the Law of God and are only related to the political body of Israel, not of a Judicial Law as part of the Law of God. What could these sundry judicial laws be? Well, those specifically related to the political body of Israel, duh. For example, the Jubilee Law, which was related specifically to the land of Canaan, given by God to Israel. The tribal divisions of the land. The specific judicial stipulations for the tribe of Levi and specifically about the Aaronic priesthood. For example, the death penalty for a priest’s daughter who has fornicated; for the rest of Israel, fornication – that is, sexual intercourse of unmarried persons – didn’t involve automatic death penalty. And many other such sundry laws explicitly related to the political system of Israel. What then about the general judicial laws, like the definitions of crimes and penalties for crimes like murder, theft, etc? Those were part of the Moral Law. Yes, for the Reformers and the writers of the Westminster Confession, the Moral Law included what today is considered “judicial law.” They did not have the modern dualism between moral and judicial. Without going into too much detail, read John Calvin’s Book 4, chapter 20 of his Institutes. It shows very clearly that Calvin considered government’s laws against crimes as part of the Moral Law and therefore valid today. The only thing he considered “judicial” was the specific mode and form of punishment. Now, I could argue with Calvin on whether the specific mode and form of punishment shouldn’t be part of the Moral Law (there are good reasons to believe that the specific forms of punishment in the Bible had their moral reasons), but what is relevant for this discussion is that Calvin thought government actions against crime are part of the Moral Law.

Thus, the Judicial Law that modern anti-theonomists claim to see in the Westminster Confession is simply not there. That Judicial Law is subsumed under the Moral Law, and the Moral Law continued to be, as the Confessions says, “obliging.”

Still, however, this is not a clear cut case for theonomy. Nor it is a case for anti-theonomy. Still, there is the question: if the law of God is all valid, as theonomists claim, what do we do with the ceremonial laws? Another important questions is: how do we distinguish between sundry judicial laws related to the body politic of Israel, and judicial laws that are part of the Moral Law? The deeper we go into these questions, the more difficult it becomes to sort things out. Why is it that this issue that is so important for the sanctification of the believer and of the modern societies, can’t seem to be open to resolution?

I think I have an answer to this. And the answer is that so far, the theological debate on these issues has been based on a fallacious terminology and a fallacious analysis of the Law of God. When I say “fallacious,” I mean un-Biblical. The division used by modern theologians – Moral, Civil, Ceremonial – is not found in the Bible. It is not mentioned anywhere, neither is there any hint at any differences between moral and judicial. The two words “justice and righteousness” are used, but neither is said to be more important than the other, and in fact, both are declared to be the foundations of the Throne of God (Ps. 89:14; 97:2, and multiple other verses). There is no difference in the moral requirements between an individual and a king: the king is commanded to obey the law just as much as an individual is commanded. Thus, the separation between moral and judicial is simply not there.

In addition, the separation between Moral, Judicial, and Ceremonial is a metaphysical separation between the laws, not covenantal. It separates the laws in terms of fictitious legal realms. Such separation doesn’t take in account the transcendent conflict between and evil, and it doesn’t take in account the immanent historical dynamics in the history of redemption – especially the concept of newer and better revelation after the Cross.

The true Biblical separation in the Law is given in the Bible in terms of “shadow” and “light.” Parts of the Law are shadows. Other parts of the Law are light. The central passage giving this description is Heb. 8:4-5:

[QUOTE] “since there are those who offer the gifts according to the Law; who serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things, just as Moses was warned by God when he was about to erect the tabernacle. . . . [END OF QUOTE]

The tabernacle, thus, and the gifts offered in it according to the Law were a shadow. Other verses confirm this concept. Heb. 10:1:

[QUOTE]For the Law, since it has only a shadow of the good things to come and not the very form of things, can never, by the same sacrifices which they offer continually year by year, make perfect those who draw near.[END OF QUOTE]

Col. 2:16-17:

[QUOTE]Therefore no one is to act as your judge in regard to food or drink or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day—things which are a mere shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ.[END OF QUOTE]

These shadows of the Law – the ceremonial sacrifices and the festivals and the foods – were meant, of course, to give a limited revelation of the light. It was the light that was to come in the New Covenant, as promised in Malachi 4:2: “But for you who fear My name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings.” The New Covenant was to be a sunrise, when the sun was going to rise, and therefore the shadows of the night were not to be the rule of faith anymore. This was the difference between the Old and the New Covenants: in the Old Covenant, God spoke only in part, through shadows. In the New Covenant, the “radiance of His glory” has been revealed (Heb. 1:3). The shadows in the Old Covenant were to be the Gospel of the Old Covenant; not having revealed Jesus Christ yet, God only showed His people, and through His people, the world, only shadows. The ceremonies, the sacrifices, the judicial laws of the Jubilee and the levitical priesthood, etc., were meant to keep the eyes of the people focused on the future Messiah. The shadows themselves did not produce righteousness nor saved anyone (Heb 10:1). But they preached the Gospel of the Kingdom in the only way possible in a world, where very little of that Kingdom was revealed in the first place.

But if those were only shadows, why were there death penalties for the violation of some of the shadow laws? The answer should be obvious: In that system of shadows, the place of the nation of Israel was central and very important. Luke 12:48 applied here: Israel was given an enormous privilege as a nation under God, but her responsibility was also enormous: she was under the obligation to exemplify that Gospel in pictures and symbols and shadows in a perfect way. Just as today we expect a preacher of the Gospel to exemplify the Gospel, Israel, God’s preacher and priest to the nations, had to live out not only the Law but also the Gospel in all respects. The sacrifices were shadows of Christ; she was supposed to offer her sacrifices as an image of Christ (not because they saved her but because they taught the nations). The Sabbath day, the Sabbath year, and the Jubilee were an image of Christ’s redemption and deliverance; Israel was supposed to keep them as a teaching display to the nations of what Christ would bring when He comes. The festivals were – obviously – images of Christ’s ministry and offices; Israel, therefore, was under obligation to keep them. Again, none of this observing the shadows was meant to be a method of salvation. All of it was a special burden of preaching the Gospel through partial images; but before Israel was given that special burden, she was also endowed with a special blessing.

This duty to exemplify the Gospel in the shadows of the Temple and the ceremonies and the sundry judicial laws was peculiar to national Israel, just as her blessing among the nations was peculiar. “What advantage has the Jew?”, Paul asks in Rom. 3:1, and answers, “Great in every respect. First of all, that they were entrusted with the oracles of God.” Being entrusted with them, they were obligated to preach the Gospel; but since they didn’t have the bright radiance of the Gospel as revealed in Christ, their preaching had to be in bits and pieces, symbols and shadows. That was the peculiar calling and function of national Israel. Once, however, Christ was revealed, that function and calling ceased. Christ now became Israel, and He became the Gospel, and the light of the Gospel. In this new economy, guided not by shadows but by the light, a return to the shadows would be a statement to the world that the light has not come. Such a statement, in the world after the cross, would be an idolatry. The Jewish leaders made that statement when they refused to accept Jesus as the Messiah, and this was counted by God as an idolatry, and Israel was visited with destruction for it.

“You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified?”, Paul asks in Gal. 3:1. This is in answer to their seeking righteousness through the shadows of the Law. In the previous chapter, he tells his story of confronting the chief of the apostles for the same reason: by separating from the Gentile Christians, he was sending out a message that the shadows of the Law – the dividing wall between a Jew and a Gentile – were still operational. Paul says that Peter “stood condemned.” Condemned for what? Just a few years before that, while Jesus was still with them, it was mandatory for Jews to stay away from the Gentiles; the Syro-Phoenician woman in Mark 7 admitted she was a “dog” and her place was not at the table with the sons. The centurion in Luke 7 didn’t allow Jesus to enter his house, knowing the Jewish law of separation. Jesus didn’t want to meet with the Greek worshipers at the Temple – this of course, doesn’t have to be related to the separation principle, but what is clear is that Jesus did promise in a way that He will go to them and make them His fruit after His resurrection (John 12:24). The disciples were amazed that Jesus was speaking to a Samaritan woman (John 4:27). Peter had grown up in a culture where associating with Gentiles was a no-no. It was no different than eating snakes and other crawling things (Acts 10:9-16). He was immersed in such a culture, and he never knew anything else in his life. And yet, Paul declares that he “stood condemned.” The Cross and Resurrection of Christ had changed things so abruptly, he had to learn now that what, just a few years ago, was an imperative for a Jew, now made the Jew condemned. This was an abrupt transformation in the nature of his religion, one that put an enormous amount of pressure on the believing Jews. It was like the difference between light and darkness . . . or at least, between light and shadow. Once he had the Light, Peter stood condemned if he continued to live in the darkness, as if the Jewish nation was still separated from the rest of the world. The Gospel preached through the shadows required separation; the Gospel preached in the light required the end of separation.

While part of the Law was shadows, the good news of the future Messiah told in pictures, another part of the Law was light. That light was the moral character of that future Messiah, a character that all believers are enjoined to imitate. The Old Covenant believers were not expected to only wait. They were also instructed to imitate God: “Be holy as God is holy” (Lev. 11:44-45; 19:2; 20:7, 26). The righteousness and the justice of the Law were supposed to be a light to the nations: Isaiah 51:4, “My justice will become a light to the nations.” Israel was supposed to preach the Gospel in its two aspects: the coming of Christ was to be preached through shadows, but the character of Christ (justice and righteousness) was to be preached in its fulness. Israel had to know what the Messiah’s moral character looked like in order to be able to recognize Him when He comes.

The Old Covenant, then, was just like Moses after he came down from the mountain a second time. He had seen Jesus as He is, and his face shone with the reflected radiance of Christ; but he put a veil on his face because the Israelites couldn’t stand the light. At the same time, while with the veil, he continued judging them and teaching them the Lord’s commandments. The coming of Christ was still to remain veiled; but His character in the Law was to be preached and taught and embodied in Israel. Be ye holy just as God is holy.

That light of the Law, the character of God, revealed how God would act in every situation if he was a man. How would God act if He was just an ordinary man with a family and a job? How would He act as a neighbor? Or as a member of the community? How would He act if he was an employer, or a banker, or a mortgage broker? How would he act if he was a ruler, or a king? Would He have different moral characters as an ordinary man and as a ruler? How would He act if he was an artist, a child, a merchant, a salesman? How would He act if he was a father and husband, or a wife and mother? (Don’t give me that offended patriarchal look, God does say that He cares for us like a nursing mother.)

That is, the light of Law taught Israel how God would act if He became a man. And guess what: He did become a Man, and His character was a full embodiment of the Law. It’s not because Jesus had reached the highest point of sanctification after a laborious process, and could now obey the Law. The Law was His very character, by nature, by birth, by conception. Jesus was the Light, and that Light was righteousness and justice, and the Law revealed that Light to the covenant people in the Old Covenant; and through them, to the nations around Israel. The nations were not commanded to abide by the shadows of the Law. But they were commanded to abide by the light of the Law.

This light, unlike the shadows, is to stay with us. It includes everything, from personal conduct, to family government, to church government, to civil government and business government and education and science and everything. The rise of the sun of righteousness, the manifestation of the Son of God, dispelled the shadows but it did not extinguish the light – it only made the light brighter. Now every one, Jew and Gentile alike, is obligated to abide by it.

Thus, in the New Covenant, the laws that describe the righteousness and justice of the Law of God continue to be valid. What is the standard for personal conduct of an individual who walks in the light? It is the light of the Law of God, the character of Christ. What is the standard for conduct of a family that walks in the light? It is the light of the Law of God. What is the standard for conduct for a businessman, church leader, civil government, courts, a scientist, a teacher, an explorer? It is the light of the Law of God. In every station of life, in every situation, in every position of power or submission, in every state of mind and action, man as an individual and men as collectives are to seek the instructions of the Law of God. None of these instructions have passed away. And there is no separation between moral and judicial – either in individual conduct or in corporate policies. What is evil as individual conduct, is evil as a corporate policy.

With this division of the Law into two categories, we can now analyze the two movements in the churches today that lead the church away from the Law of God into autonomy and ultimately antinomianism.

On one hand, we have modern pietism: a theological movement which views the validity of the Law of God as only limited to the personal piety of man. Man’s corporate conduct and therefore his institutions are to be regulated by a different set of laws, not found in the Bible. Man as an individual would have a different ethics than man as a ruler; and by default, since we are called to imitate Jesus Christ and be conformed to His image, Jesus Christ as an individual would have a different ethics than Jesus Christ as a ruler. This view basically states that the light of the Law is limited to only individual righteousness, and the justice of the Law was only a shadow. That justice has passed away. It is not valid anymore.

On the other hand, we have the modern liturgist movement which claims that the ceremonies of the Law have not passed away. That is, that what was used under the Old Covenant to teach about the future Messiah, should still be used in the churches as a teaching device. And therefore, a church service should borrow heavily from the Temple ceremonies under the Old Covenant. (There is an underlying conflict between two views about the church here, one holding that the Church is the modern Temple and should emulate the Temple, the other holding that the Church is the modern synagogue and the Lord’s Assembly; but we are going to talk about it in a future episode.) The liturgist movement, therefore, believes that liturgy – that is, a set of ceremonies that have a non-natural influence in the spiritual world – is a necessary part of the modern covenant.

Both of these movement, of course, lead people astray from the New Covenant. The New Covenant is Theonomic, that is, it takes the light of Law of God – all of its light – and applies it to our views and actions today; and it believes that the shadows – the images and the ceremonies which have depicted the person of Christ and His coming and ministry – have all passed away. Theonomy is simply the teaching that emphasizes this division between shadow and light, and builds a theology of action based on it.

The book I will assign this week is Gary North’s commentary on Leviticus part of his 31-volume economic commentary on the Bible. I know, you will say that Dr. North there is only looking at the economic truths in the most ceremonial book of the Bible. That is not true. Gary North stated in the very introduction to his first volume that the discipline of economics is impossible to learn in a value-free context. Biblical Economics is not simply a study of economic processes; it is a study of the moral and judicial actions of individuals and collectives in the context of the Covenant of God. That’s why the real field of study is not just economic, but law and economics. When you are reading North’s economic commentary on Leviticus, oay attention to that “law” part.

Finally, again, remember in your prayers and your giving Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a Reformed mission organization devoted to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe, through translation and publishing of book for the application of the Gospel to every area of life. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to the newsletter, and donate. God bless you all.

Welcome to Episode 58 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes our focus will be righteous rebellion. Or, for those Christians who don’t like the word “rebellion” (even though it is just a technical term and has no moral connotations), we may use the expression righteous resistance. Although, in reality, “rebellion” is a better word for it because it literally means “fighting back,” that is, it includes an active element of response. “Resistance” means “withstanding” or “standing in opposition to,” and thus doesn’t really express the activist aspect of our conflict with injustice and wickedness. True enough, rebellion against God is sinful, but so is resistance against God; and neither word in itself carries any negative connotations, for rebellion against tyrants is just as righteous as resistance against tyrants.

For the churches in America in the last 50 years – at least for those that are trying to be faithful to God’s Covenant in Christ – coming to the idea of righteous resistance against the state has been a painful process. I said coming to that idea, but in reality I should have said returning to that idea. That rulers do not deserve automatic allegiance – and indeed, deserve even revolutions and even executions – used to be accepted by default in Reformed circles. During the Reformation and after, wherever the Reformed faith appeared, revolutions of one sort or another against existing authorities inevitably followed. The Huguenots were the first to develop the concept of righteous resistance based on the concept of the Sovereignty of God; obviously, if God is Sovereign, the king is only a servant to God, and failing to perform as a servant automatically stripped him of the authority to rule. Calvin left many paragraphs in this vein, using as strong language as to say that we ought to spit on the heads of princes who abuse their power rather than obey them. The French Wars of Religion and persecution of Huguenots continued for two centuries, and despite being severely outnumbered, the Huguenots were a serious challenge to the French crown in terms of military resistance. Calvin’s and Zwingli’s Switzerland fared much better, but it had to fight against different claims of political and feudal sovereignty within the Holy Roman Empire. The Calvinists in the Netherlands organized their resistance against Spain even before they had their churches organized; so powerful was the influence of the so-called “hedge preachers” upon the population that the local magistrates always lagged behind the people in confronting the Spanish monarchy. The history of resistance of the Covenanters in Scotland – the original ones, not the modern fake ones who pretend to be their heirs – is well known, or should be well known to all Reformed; and the history of the English Revolution and the Commonwealth under Cromwell should be even better known. It is under that same Commonwealth that for the first time in the history of Europe, a King was taken to court and executed for crimes against his own nation; a logical conclusion of the Reformed concept that a ruler is supposed to be a servant, and a failure to be such is tantamount to treason deserving of death penalty. (Remember that Luke 12:48 verse so conveniently forgotten by modern American churchmen, “From everyone who has been given much, much shall be required”?)

That propensity of Reformed Christianity to give any political ruler a serious run for his money was not limited to the period of the Reformation. The American War of Independence was almost entirely influenced by Calvinist preachers in the colonies who spoke of righteous rebellion as a moral imperative in the face of a tyrannical government. Even as late as the 20thcentury, Reformed Christians in Nazi Germany were very clearly opposed to the regime. In at least two of the assassination attempts on Hitler, military officers from East Prussia and Brandenburg were at the center of those attempts. East Prussia and Brandenburg – at least their political and economic elite – were traditionally Calvinist, and you can see the influence of their faith in the letters of Henning von Trescow and Claus von Stauffenberg, the two best known conspirators, both of whom came from traditionally Calvinist Prussian aristocratic families. Even as late as the 1980s, in Romania, the revolution against the blood-thirsty Ceaușescu regime started with the open civil disobedience of a pastor from the Calvinist Hungarian minority –named László Tőkés – against the dreaded secret police of the regime. Historically, them Calvinists are a dangerous bunch; their finger is always on the trigger when tyrants and would be tyrants are trying to terrorize innocent people.

Except for the Reformed Christians in the United States in the last 100 years. Sometime in the last two decades of the 19th through the first two decades of the 20th century, in one way or another, the leadership of the Reformed and Evangelical churches in the US developed a relationship with the political elite that was a little too comfortable and amicable. The War Between the States of 1861-65 was, of course, a clash of two political powers, both devoted to anti-Christian ideologies. When one of them won militarily, the two then united politically in an agenda to destroy the Christian roots and influence on the social and civil life of the United States. Christianity was still strong, and was even stronger among the millions of immigrants, so the elite had to act duplicitously: on one hand, giving lip service to the Christian faith, and on the other, slowly eroding the spiritual foundation of the civil establishment. Politicians would loudly profess to be Christians, and then would introduce laws that were in essence anti-Christian: government regulations on business, taxation of income and land, government schools, immigration restrictions, fiat money and legal tender laws (including confiscation of gold), standing armies at home and abroad, systems of government redistribution of wealth, destruction of savings through inflation, taxation, and social security, etc., etc., etc. FDR was probably the most duplicitous of all, openly paying lip service to Christianity while acting every day in opposition to the Bible in his career as a politician; but he is not the only politician to do that. For two generations, between the 1880s and the 1960s, there was barely a political figure in the US who didn’t do the same.

These anti-Christian laws were not only designed to undermine the Christian influence on government, they were designed to also undermine the very churches themselves, and the very Christian culture the previous generations of Christians had left as a legacy. Economic liberty was taken away, financial freedom was taken away, Christian children were taken away, the ability of the church to act as God’s agent of welfare was taken away. . . . What was given, however, was a special tax status for churches and pastors. The government was taking away everything that the Christian culture of America has produced over several generations, and left a small handout to the pastors in the form of tax exemptions. This was enough to produce deep loyalty in the pastors. Their spiritual ancestors – the Black-Robed Regiment – preached against the government and rejected any handouts in the name of Christian liberty under God. The pastors of the 20th century elevated a false interpretation of Romans 13 as their fundamental doctrine of dealing with the civil government – a doctrine of full obedience to Caesar, except when Caesar specifically orders them to sin. (A doctrine that is fallacious and dangerous, because it renders Christians passive when injustice is committed by the government.) By the 1960s, there was no voice in any Protestant churches in America that spoke against the government. The doctrine of righteous resistance was forgotten. Of course, this amnesia was not limited to that doctrine; many other Biblical doctrines were forgotten, and especially those about the Biblical limits on civil government. As long as the government had special provisions for the pastors and for their incorporated entities, it was OK.

The first bits of awakening to the reality of this deception came in the 1962 with the Supreme Court’s decision in the Engel v. Vitale case where the Supreme Court declared prayer in public schools to be unconstitutional. (Interestingly enough, the plaintiffs were an alliance between the Synagogue Council of America, a few other Jewish rabbinical organizations, and the atheist Ethical Culture movement.) By 1962, apparently, the political elite considered its hold on the institutional churches to be strong enough to not worry about any backlash. And indeed, there wasn’t any backlash from the institutional churches. But the bitter taste left after that decision made at least some Christians realize that the days of comfortable co-existence with the political elite are over, and the government would now start using its power – and the passivity and acquiescence of the church leaders – to advance its anti-Christian agenda. The 1960s, thus, saw the beginning of the Christian school and homeschool movement. These first signs of resistance were taken very seriously by the civil authorities everywhere, to the point of persecuting homeschooling parents. Almost every single state held one or more trials against homeschoolers. Even the few individual families that dared defy the civil government were already considered a serious threat.

Then came January 22, 1973, when a panel of 5 Republican and 2 Democrat judges, all members of good standing of institutional churches (one Methodist, one Roman Catholic, two Episcopals, and three Presbyterians) ruled in favor of decriminalizing abortion. The mask was now off, and there was no way for any sincere professing Christian to even begin to imagine that civil government in the United States – at any level, federal, state, or county – was the government described in Romans 13. January 22, 1973 clearly revealed that for the last 100 years, a Revelation 13 beastly power had replaced the Romans 13 government authority that was meant by the original colonists.

One would think that this would be the point where the institutional churches would realize what was going on and would start prepare for battle. False. No denomination and no institutional church raised their voice in the first several years after that decision. In fact, if anything, a few supported it. No, not just the liberal ones; supposedly conservative denominations also supported it. For a while, in the 1970s, even the largest Evangelical denomination in the US, the Southern Baptist Convention, came up with a statement supporting the legalization of abortion. No, this is not a joke. Only a week after the ruling, Baptist Press, the official news service of the Southern Baptist Convention, came out with a report in support of the decision, including the following text:

Religious bodies and religious persons can continue to teach their own particular views to their constituents with all the vigor they desire. People whose conscience forbids abortion are not compelled by law to have abortions. They are free to practice their religion according to the tenets of their personal or corporate faith.

The reverse is also now true since the Supreme Court decision. Those whose conscience or religious convictions are not violated by abortion may not now be forbidden by a religious law to obtain an abortion if they so choose.

This continued for a while, in fact. As late as 1979, when Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich, and Howard Phillips were working to establish the Moral Majority, they discovered that for the majority of the churches, denominations, and Christian colleges and universities, abortion wasn’t even on the list of societal evils of our age. Some of those institutions were way more concerned how to keep receiving federal grants while maintaining a policy of racial segregation than that their own daughters were now free to go to the nearest abortion mill and murder their babies. When Operation Rescue started their work in the 1980s, their main opponents were not the atheists but the church pastors across America. Even today, the vast majority of denominations, churches, and pastors don’t really want abolition of abortion but only government regulation of the mode of abortion, and the mode of disposal of the bodies of the murdered children.

Or, if you take the case of government education, so far no large denomination has taken a stand against it. You would think that the very fact of property taxes (a real blasphemy, for only God owns the land) used to support it would have the so-called “conservative” churches up in arms. Not to mention that for the last 50 years the government schools have become openly anti-Christian not only in their sporadic practices, but also in their consistent, principled ideology. And yet, returning to that same largest Evangelical denomination, the Southern Baptists, 55 years after that decision by the Supreme Court, and after all this evidence of the evil of government education, there is still no definite official statement in favor of Christian education. Not even from Baptist Press. Not even after Obama’s directive to public schools to allow boys in girls bathrooms. In fact, in a news release of last year, Baptist Press took a rather disinterested approach to the issue, noting that Baptist parents don’t seem to be much alarmed by the possibility that their daughters might be forced to share showers with boys. And, wait for the most important confession in that article: “The church has not made up its mind on this issue.” Indeed. Or, to be more precise, it has. It has sided with the enemies of God. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act. Not to resist the enemy is to resist God.

The only true resistance and rebellion against the expansion of the pagan state in the US has been shown by individuals and what is called “para-church organizations.” (Although, thisterm is incorrect. According to the Westminster Confession of Faith, the visible church is not the institutions who claim to be churches, but all individuals who profess the true religion; under this definition, all professing individuals are the Church, and all Christian organizations are the Church, whether they are connected to an institutional body or not. If we are to be precise, the vast majority of institutional churches should be called “para-Kingdom religious clubs.”) The institutional churches have not only failed to organize a righteous resistance in accordance with their past history, in the majority of cases they have sided with the enemies of God, against those who have resisted. R.J. Rushdoony was threatened with excommunication from his denomination for speaking against government education, for Christian education. And he is only one case; there are thousands of such cases. And yet, the resistance has been mounting up among individual Christians and ministries, even where their so called “pastors” and “elders” have remained passive, or, since remaining passive is impossible, have remained faithful allies to more and more openly anti-Christian political powers.

Pressure from below, however, and especially pressure from the donations reports, can do miracles so powerful that even Evangelical churchmen sometimes can begin at least faking having a backbone, and faking involvement in the cultural battles of our time. Franklin Graham, who just 7 years ago declared that he won’t move a finger to fight the cultural war in America, last year played the role of unofficial campaign face for Trump among church-goers. Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church in Dallas intensified the spiritual battle by declaring that people salvation depends on whether they vote for Trump. Even John MacArthur, who for decades advised his followers to not worry nor participate in political or cultural struggles, now advised them to vote. (He didn’t explain how and why anyone would vote, if politics had nothing to do with “the gospel,” and we are only called to preach “the gospel”; but then again, this certainly is not MacArthur’s only manifestation of intellectual schizophrenia.) None of this, of course, is a return to the Reformed doctrine of righteous rebellion; it is only a political support for one side of the same secularist political elite, the one that is more willing to use seemingly religious language to advance the same secularist and pagan agenda. We can’t expect anything serious from there.

In all honesty, however, some individual churchmen are beginning to grasp the reality of the situation, and are beginning to call the church to its tradition of righteous rebellion. The historical memory of the Black-Robed Regiment has been revived in at least a few sermons and articles and books. Whether these churchmen are sincere or not is not clear, yet. Some may be sincere, and may indeed be preparing their flocks for a resistance that would be both effective and shrewd. Others may be just trying to ride what the see as a new wave, which may give them some advantages in more followers and donations. Similar to Paul’s sentiment in Philippians 1:15-18, whatever their motives are, whether in pretense or in truth, a return to the original spirit of resistance is preached.

That preaching is good and useful, of course, even if done in pretense. The problem is, however, it won’t work. I mean, yes, more preaching will inspire more individual Christians to seek ways to righteously resist and rebel against the secularism, statism, and paganism of state and its institutions. If more and more pastors start preaching it, perhaps more and more people will attempt it. But the real results won’t come. All we will have is people who want to resist the state but don’t know what to do. And in the final account, nothing is going to be achieved outside just words.

Why do I think so?

Because, following the Great Commission, I believe that Christians can’t do anything practical in the world outside the church before they have learned to do it within the church. The church is supposed to be the teacher of the nations. Or, as R.J. Rushdoony called it, “the recruiting station, the training field, and the armory” of the people of God. Whatever they have not trained for in the church, they won’t be able to do outside the church. If they were not trained to care for their families within the church, they won’t be able to do it on their own outside the church. If they were not trained to be entrepreneurs inside the church, they won’t be able to be entrepreneurs outside the church. If they were not trained to judge righteously inside the church, they won’t be able to judge righteously outside the church. (That’s why we had 7 judges, all members in good standing of their churches, judge in favor of abortion.) And I don’t mean the church as an institution bossed around by a few self-appointed men who imagine themselves to be “elders.” I mean the church in the confessional sense, namely, the community of all those who profess the true faith, and their children.

And now, fasten your seat belts: unless Christians practice righteous rebellion against corrupt church government within the church, they won’t be able to apply righteous rebellion against corrupt civil government outside the church. The church is supposed to be the teacher, the training ground. If it is, then we can’t hope to learn how to depose wicked civil rulers unless we first learn how to depose wicked church rulers. Unless we learn how to build a better church, free of tyranny, corruption, and false theologies, we can’t hope to build a better society, free of tyranny, corruption, and false ideologies. We can’t convince the world we have a solution to civil government, if we haven’t demonstrated we have one to church government. God’s judgment always starts from the House of God. That’s where our judgment must also start from. Otherwise, we won’t achieve anything. Before we learn to take care of the trash in our own backyard, no one will trust us that we can take care of the trash in the backyard of the society.

Consider this: No successful Christian resistance against political powers has ever started or has been successful where there hasn’t first been a large-scale rebellion against existing ecclesiastical powers. The Reformation and the political revolutions that followed from it – France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, England, Scotland, and finally, the American colonies – are our brightest most recent global example of that truth. But there are multiple others as well. The early church was only capable of resisting the Roman Empire because it was born first in the context of religious resistance against the ecclesiastical power of the Jewish Temple. We today tend to underestimate the influence and the oppression the early church got from the Jewish religious leaders – mainly because in our modern world, the Jews seem to be a rather small group of no religious significance. But in the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago, they were numerous (more than 20% of the urban population of the Empire; the Jewish quarters of the two most populous cities in the Empire, Rome and Alexandria, comprised about ¼ of the population); and not only numerous but also politically and economically powerful (Julius Caesar had freed all the Jews of taxes every seventh year, and during the other six years, their taxes were to be paid to the Temple, not to Rome, which gave the strong economic power). As we know from the New Testament, the Temple even had its own armed guards under local command, which was seldom allowed to the conquered nations. The religious establishment of the Jews was powerful and dangerous, and Christians had to first learn to rebel against it before they were able to turn the Empire around. Even after the destruction of Jerusalem and the weakening of the Jewish power and influence, different Christian groups had to resist corruption and tyranny within the church, and that before Constantine the Great. Tertullian and his struggle against corrupt church powers in Rome is little known today, but it reveals that the early church was not free of human ambition and tyranny; and it didn’t lack righteous rebels who stood against that tyranny.

The history of the dark ages gives us another example of it – and when I say “dark ages,” I don’t mean it in the secularist sense, that is, the centuries of Christendom before the French Revolution, but the period of invasions, migrations, and social chaos between the 5th and the 8th centuries AD, after the old Roman power disintegrated, but before Charlemagne consolidated his kingdom. It is not a well-known history for most Christians, and in a future episode, we will cover a grass roots movement that was unique in history, for it was the longest surviving grass roots movement ever, and yet, has the deepest impact on history, profoundly changing the moral rules for politics and government in the West: the Peace and Truce of God Movement. It is also the least known of all Christian grass roots movements, despite its enormous importance, that’s why we will cover it in a future episode. For now, suffice to understand that before the political establishment of feudal Europe could be trained to act in a civilized, Christian manner, there had to be first a series of church reforms where church leaders were confronted and often kicked out of their positions of power; and the monastic movement in the West played a revolutionary role in changing the leadership of the church.

I mentioned earlier the resistance of the Hungarian Reformed pastor László Tőkés against the Communist authorities. Even his mini-rebellion against the Communist government had to start with rebellion against the church powers; his bishop ordered him to stop preaching and vacate the church. László Tőkés refused. It is then that the secret police came to arrest him, and the events then unfolded. All righteous resistance starts with resisting ecclesiastical powers. Unless we start from the church, no political or social change is possible.

The only question we have to answer now is this: do we really have ecclesiastical powers that deserve to be rebelled against?

You bet.

Just like every positive change in the society starts in the church, every negative change is also the product of negative change in the church. We didn’t get thus far in losing America and what she stood for without the active collaboration of our churchmen with the authorities. Christianity didn’t lose influence just because of nothing. As the Bible always points out, the problem always starts with the shepherds. Thus, if we are looking for churchmen to rebel against, there are thousands of them, here, in America. That is where we need to start from.

Ironically, even many modern pastors and even church celebrities unwittingly admit it. “We need a new Reformation,” I have heard preached from many pulpits. “Semper reformanda,” always reforming, reply other churches. And as I am sometimes sitting in the pews, listening to such rhetoric, I want to rise up and say, “Amen, pastor, but do you realize what you are asking for?” Because only a precious few of these pastors who are asking for a new Reformation or for continuing Reformation really know what they are talking about. It’s like modern Christians who are awaiting “the Day of the Lord,” and God says in the Bible, “You idiots, do you know what you are asking for? You who are longing for the day of the LORD, for what purpose will the day of the LORD be to you? It will be darkness and not light” (Amos 5:18). In the same way, for what purpose will a new Reformation be to you? The Reformation is not an affirmation of your ecclesiastical power, it will be a revolt against your legal powers in the church. A new Reformation will start with judging you first, and all of your pulpit buddies, and the standard by which you will be judged won’t be your meager standard by which you have measured yourselves to excuse yourselves from responsibility. A new Reformation would be a day of darkness for many church ministers, in fact, for the vast majority of them. And that new Reformation’s first fruit will be the purging of all pulpits of all the churches in America from the pastors and the preachers that have brought us to this disastrous situation today.

It is clear that the modern state of the American church is God’s judgment on it for being unfaithful over the last two generations. It is also clear that there are lessons for all of us in this judgment; and that eventually God will raise His Church back to her state of faithfulness. A righteous rebellion against the expanding pagan and secularist state is inevitable, just as it was inevitable in the 1760s and the 1770s. The enemies of God won’t sign a truce, and won’t stop until they have established their control over everything – or get beaten back. And beating them back will only be accomplished by a church that has beaten the enemies of God in its own pulpits first. And that’s where righteous resistance starts from: from our resistance to our own corrupt shepherds.

The book I will assign for reading this week is by Alice Baldwin, titled, The New England Pulpit and the American Revolution. Notice the subtitle: When American Pastors Preached Politics, Resisted Tyranny, and Founded a Nation on the Bible. The book is published by American Vision. Read and learn your true Reformed heritage, not the watered down milk that comes out of our pulpits today.

And remember in your prayers and giving Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization committed to preaching the comprehensive message of the Kingdom of God in Eastern Europe through translation and publishing of Christian materials for the application of the Gospel to every area of life. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to out newsletter, and donate.

Welcome to Episode 57 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will talk about one of the greatest idols of American Christianity, an idol that has permeated every single corner of the life of American Christians, and has claimed a much greater following in the American churches than Jesus Christ Himself. The idol of celebrity worship.

That celebrity worship is a problem in American Christianity should be obvious to everyone. That it is a problem of gigantic proportions and at the level of idolatry, should also be obvious to everyone who cares. If there are some to whom it is not obvious, keep in mind that even Phil Johnson, of all people, graced the G3 conference this year with a lecture against celebrity worship. Yes, the same Phil Johnson who is the right-hand man of John MacArthur, the only person in fundamentalist churchianity today who has a study Bible officially named after himself, The MacArthur Study Bible. To hear Johnson speak on the evil of celebrity worship is like hearing Joseph Goebbels speak on the evil of racism or Molotov speak on the evil of collectivism, or Mitt Romney speak on the evil of government-controlled healthcare. To those of us who have studied propaganda, however, this is not a surprise: it is just an ordinary propaganda technique to become an ardent speaker against the very evils you practice, so that you can control the narrative and deflect criticisms. (“See, we can’t be guilty of celebrity worship if we speak against it ourselves, right?) Johnson’s obvious motives aside, the very fact that he found it necessary to speak on the issue – trying to control the narrative – is a clear indication that more and more Christians are aware of the problem. So, obviously, there is a problem with celebrity worship in American churchianity.

Several years ago, in his book commentary on 1 Samuel, chapter 11, Joel McDurmon touched on the psychology of a people who have abandoned the Law of God, in relation to how they choose their leaders.

[QUOTE] To begin with, we learn that the majority of Saul’s appeal was outward. And indeed, judging by outward appearances only, Saul was the greatest man in all of Israel. In 1 Sam. 9:1, we learn that Saul comes from great stock. His father was a man of wealth. There is question among the commentators whether the word for “wealth” here (chayil) should be translated “wealth” (as in Deut. 8:18) or “strength” (as in 1 Sam. 2:4). It can mean both, and both may very well apply to this case. What is not in dispute is that Saul was quite a physical specimen: he was a handsome young man. There was not a man among the people of Israel more handsome than he. From his shoulders upward he was taller than any of the people (9:2). This guy was the quarterback, the prom king, the star of the show. He had a commanding presence: he drew all the eyes when he entered the room. For a nation in search of a king who would lead them into battle and be a symbol of national greatness, Saul was just the guy who looked the part. [END OF QUOTE]

Joel has touched a nerve here. In the Bible, we have very few description of the physical appearance of men – we have them mostly of women, which is only natural. Whenever the outward appearance of men is mentioned, it is to emphasize some covenantal point. In this case, the covenantal point, obviously, is the stupidity of people who have abandoned God as their King, wanting a human leader over them. Ironically, instead of a true leader, what they elected is a celebrity figure, one devoid of the ability to lead or inspire, but certainly able to play to the superficial emotions of men.

Now, keep this in mind: this is how men elect their leaders when they have abandoned God. We will return to this issue a bit later, but first, we need to have a Biblical analysis of why people want to place themselves under the authority of celebrities, that is men whose only quality is their appeal to the emotions. Why is it that we get attracted to manipulators of no real moral strength? It in this question that we will find the reasons, as well as as the essence of the modern celebrity culture in the American churches. 1 Samuel 8 tells us that the people wanted a human king because they had abandoned God as their King. But what exactly is the sin that made them abandon God?

Ethically and judicially, making an authority of celebrities in the churches is not different than making an authority of celebrities in the political world. In neither case are men under any obligation nor necessity to have leaders over them. A man who is in the redemption of Jesus Christ and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit needs no leaders; as Paul says in 1 Cor. 11:3, “The head of every man is Christ,” not some human leaders. The same message was in the Law: the Law was all given in second person singular, that is, it was primarily a Law given by God to every individual member of Israel. The existence of civil government was limited only to the courts, and they were only involved when there was a crime or a dispute. Outside crimes and disputes, redeemed men under the law were subject to no government and could conduct their own lives as they saw fit, according to their own understanding of obedience under God. This was to be even more true in the New Covenant where, according to Jer. 31:34 and Heb. 8:11, the knowledge of God will eventually spread so far and deep, that men won’t even need teachers anymore. Men, therefore, in their redeemed state, do not need human rulers, whether political or ecclesiocratical. And the only reason they want rulers is that they have sinned against God.

The sinful motive for such self-subjection to human rulers should be clear: it is fear. We have talked about fear as a motivator in a previous episode of Axe to the Root. Just to remind us of the Biblical truth on this issue, fear of anything else but God is non-existent in the redeemed man. At the very heart of fear is the concern about the self; and the redeemed man doesn’t live for himself. Fear is at the foundation of all idolatry, and that’s why the commandment, “Do not fear,” is the most frequently repeated commandment in Scripture. Fear is what made Adam and Eve hide from God after they rebelled – had they been in a redeemed state, they would have approached God with repentance but not fear. Fear, as I pointed out in an article on ChristendomRestored.com titled, “Terrorism: Biblical Analysis and Solutions,” is in itself worship: those who fear God also worship God. And, conversely, those who fear other things than God, also worship other things than God. At the heart of every idolatry, therefore, is fear. Or, we can also say, paraphrasing Henry Van Til, idolatry is fear externalized.

Behind the idolatry of the celebrity worship and submission to human rulers, however, there is a very specific type of fear. We can see the nature of that type of fear in the story of the Tower of Babel. Before we consider that story, however, a look at the pre-history of it is needed. The Tower of Babel didn’t happen in a political vacuum; there was a submission to a celebrity prior to it. We read in Genesis 11:2 that the men who wanted to build the Tower of Babel arrived and settled in the Land of Shinar. Shinar (meaning “two rivers” in Hebrew) is another name for Babylon (the Hebrew language uses the same word for both Babel and Babylon). But in the context of Genesis 11, the land of Shinar has a very special significance: It wasn’t a no-man’s land. It was under the rule of a mighty man of power; or, to be precise, under the first mighty man of power. The previous chapter in Genesis, in verses 10-12, speaks about Nimrod who first became a mighty ruler and had a kingdom; “The beginning of his kingdom,” the text says, “was Babel and Erech and Accad and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.” If Babel was the “beginning of his kingdom,” then we can easily assume that it was the capital, or, as the Hebrew word rosh is usually translated, the “head.” Bishop Ussher, in his The Annals of the World, believes that Babel was the capital of Nimrod’s kingdom at the time of the tower, and in his History of the Jews, Josephus believes that Nimrod built Babel and oversaw the building of the Tower. This point is important here, for the men in Genesis 11 were not operating in a political vacuum. Before they set out to build a tower, they had first submitted themselves to the rule of the first mighty man recorded in the Bible, the first one to organize his own kingdom and have men under his power. The rebellion at Babel didn’t start with the construction project; the construction project was only the logical continuation of the true rebellion. The true rebellion was men submitting themselves to a human ruler where they should have submitted themselves to God.

What was their motive? Their own words explain it: “Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” It was Cain who built the first city to himself (more precisely, to his son, Enoch); the genetic line of Cain was extinguished in the Flood, but these men obviously continued the spiritual legacy of Cain. And just like Cain, who was concerned of being a wanderer on the face of the earth, these men were afraid of being scattered over the face of the earth. It was the fear of being scattered and becoming a wanderer that made men gather together and deliver their God-given liberty to a man of power, and give him authority over their lives.

Being scattered is a terrible punishment for men who are not under God. A man who is scattered over the face of the earth, who is a wanderer over the face of the earth, is forced to deal alone with all the challenges of life, to stand against a faceless, impersonal universe which he has no assurance is friendly toward him. Or even neutral. He doesn’t have any solid foundation to know what to do to achieve his goals and purposes. In fact, it is hard to even begin to establish goals and purposes in such a universe; after all, in an ocean with no shores and no bottom, how do you decide which way you are supposed to go; and once you have decided, how do you know if you are going in the right direction? It’s a terrible ordeal, and this is why God included the curse of scattering in His curses against Israel, if they rebelled against Him (Deut. 28:65). It was not just that they would be scattered, but they would be also wanderers, because, in the next verse, “Among those nations you shall find no rest, and there will be no resting place for the sole of your foot.”

Pagans in the ancient world understood this concept very well, and they dreaded it more than anything else. In the ancient Greek cities, one accused of a capital crime was given a choice: to either commit suicide or be exiled, that is, scattered away from his home to become a wanderer. It is surprising how many chose suicide; apparently, Cain’s complaint, “My punishment is too great to bear!”, was the complaint of many others of his spiritual descendants. And the same complaint can be seen in the motive of the builders of the Tower of Babel: “otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” This was their motive to gather together in one collective, under the same ruler, and build a tower that would cement their belonging to a collective. Notice, the purpose of the tower was to make a name, that is, one single name – which means one single purpose – for the collective, not many individual names and purposes for all the individual members of that congregation.

The motive was fear of being scattered. Once man abandons God, he abandons all solid ground. There is no purpose, no individual meaning of life, no direction in life – for the simple reason that purpose, meaning, direction are impossible in such a world without God. In that ocean without solid ground – whether bottom or shores – the only apparent solution is to establish a relative center of gravity, and just attach oneself to it. That center of gravity may be a collective of people, but soon enough, even the most democratic collectives degenerate into little kingdoms of a few attractive personalities. Whether in a local community, or a nation, or a tribe, or a church, or anything else, people without God are afraid of being scattered, and in seeking a safe place from being scattered, they appoint celebrities over themselves to serve as a point of gravity and cohesion. Most of the time, of course – as it was with Saul – the celebrities they choose for themselves are just as lost and without purpose under God, but they are skillful enough to make others follow them and serve them. Political and churchian celebrities have their power only because there are people willing to grant it to them; and the reason these people are willing to grant other people power over them is because they are afraid of being scattered. Yes, even those who otherwise profess the name of Christ and go to church; in fact, especially those who profess Christ and go to church – because the majority of those who go to church are just as lost and without purpose as any average unbeliever out there, if not even more.

Worth mentioning here is the fact that while for the covenant-breakers being scattered was an enormous curse, a “punishment too great to bear,” it was not a threat to the people of God. In fact, if anything, being scattered while under God’s Covenant was God’s way of expanding His kingdom. The history of God’s people is filled with numerous examples of people who were wanderers, some into the most desolate places of the world, forced to face dangers and challenges alone, while refusing to join collectives of iniquity and idolatry. Hebrews 11:38 speaks of these men of whom the world was not worthy, and the whole chapter names quite a few of them. The father of all who believe, Abraham, left the well-organized collective of his home town and embarked on a journey through the wilderness which tested both his faith and his ability to deal with challenges, many of them much greater than what an average man would be facing at the time. His grandson, Jacob, had to go through the same ordeal, and Jacob’s most beloved son, Joseph, was “scattered” by the betrayal of his own brothers – and yet, later Joseph declared that this “scattering” was God acting for the good of His people. Moses was “scattered” too, having to deal with hardship and challenges alone, and later, the nation of Israel left the civilized world of Egypt for the wilderness. Once in the Promised Land, Israel was supposed to stay “scattered” and not ask for human kings and rulers, but remain a free, decentralized society of independent individuals and families. More than that, in fact, as I argue in my article, “Christian Culture vs. Clan Culture,” the Law was designed so as to force the Israelite families to eventually look for opportunities out of the land, settle foreign lands and effectively conquer them. Three characteristics of the Law make this obvious: First, it is the Jubilee regulations which demand that the land within Canaan could not be sold between families. It had to remain within the same family as from the beginning; it could only be leased out for a period of up to 49 years. Second, the inheritance laws which demanded that all the sons get equal shares of the estate, with the oldest son getting a double share. And third, the promise that if obedient to God, Israel will have an explosive demographic growth, that is, many sons per family. The effect of all these three would be that centuries down the road, every Israelite son would inherit land the size of a handkerchief, and will only be able to lease it out but not sell it. This would force many Israelites to seek opportunities either in the cities or outside of Israel – similar to Joseph, the husband of Mary, who preferred to launch a carpentry business in Galilee rather than stay on the land of his family in Bethlehem. Thus, the mandate to scatter was embedded in the Law. Israel had to look to expand, and the expansion was supposed to be by individual families who will settle other lands.

The same mandate we see in the NT church. The task of evangelism requires that Christians scatter over the face of the earth. The same scattering which was dreadful to Cain and to the builder of the Tower of Babel, the same scattering that was only implied but not commanded in the commandments in the Law specific to national Israel, this same scattering is now an explicit mandate to the people of God. In fact, if anything, the Church is supposed to be built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, and “apostles” literally means “sent out.” The Book of Acts – which means the acts of the apostles – contains very little of what the apostles did in the church of Jerusalem, which was the largest church at the time, of thousands of people. The book is mainly concerned with the Christians who were “scattered” outside Jerusalem. And in fact, the very church in Jerusalem was meant to be scattered in the final account, and Jesus prophesied it in Matt. 24:16. Another promise, that of the events in the last days of history in the parable in Matt. 24:31 and Mark 13:27, speaks of His angels gathering the elect “from the four winds,” a Greek phrase which means that His elect must have been dispersed all over the face of the earth. To the woman at the well in John 3 Jesus declared that in His New Covenant, visible worship will no longer be centered around a geographical place or a congregational or denominational gathering. (As a side note, this concept is embedded in the Westminster Confession where the invisible church is described as “gathered,” while the visible church is described as “scattered,” or throughout the world. This is completely the opposite to today’s ideology in many Presbyterian churches, where the invisible church is seen as scattered, while the visible must be in official visible gatherings. Another example that the modern so-called “Presbyterians” have no clue whatsoever of what their own professed confession teaches.)

We see the same concept of scattering confirmed even in the events in the church in the last century or so. While current events can’t be used to build a theological concept around them, they can still be evidence for theological concepts found in Scripture. (Otherwise, history would have no meaning.) That the American church is in decline is obvious to all, and everyone talks about it, even those who have styled themselves as teachers of that church and rake in hundreds of millions of dollars for that task. (Why do we pay them, if they can’t teach the church well enough to prevent the decline, I ask?) At the same time, we all know that churches in Asia and Africa and Latin America are vibrant and live and growing. But that’s exactly what we should expect: American Christians are afraid of being scattered and prefer to cluster in “congregations” where they are comfortable and have no need to face the challenges of the world alone with God. Whereas the nature of the cultures on other continents forces the Christians there to scatter, and the Biblical principle is that in history, scattering produces growth for the people of God. We shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, of this discrepancy, but we should be aware of the covenantal reasons behind it, and act accordingly.

Being scattered, therefore, is not a curse but a blessing to covenant-keepers. Thus, among the people of God, the fear of being scattered should not exist. The people of God should gladly desire to be scattered, or sent out, so that the Kingdom expands. This means that among Christians – those who are truly obedient to Christ, at any rate – there should be no incentive nor desire to be placed under the power of other men, whether civil rulers or churchian celebrities. True Christians do not settle in any kind of Babel, whether political or ecclesiastical, do not put themselves under any kind of Nimrod, whether political or ecclesiastical, and do not build any tower reaching up to heaven, whether political or ecclesiastical. Throughout the last 20 centuries, therefore, Christians have always been the main troublemakers for all kinds of human powers. Why? Because they can’t be scared sufficiently to voluntarily place themselves under human rulers. (And forced subjugation never works with them anyway.) A mighty man or group of men of power – civil or ecclesiastical – has no tools in their arsenal to make a loyal subject of a true Christian; he will always have only Christ as his head, and will have no fear to compel him otherwise. Being scattered, or forced to deal with the challenges of life alone, against the world (contra mundum) is not a scary prospect for him; he will gladly accept it.

Until, of course, the second half of the 20th century. American Christianity underwent a serious change in its faithfulness, and therefore also a serious change in its view of power and authority. And the result of this change is the modern celebrity worship in the churches in the US. Losing the vision of God’s expanding kingdom, Christians have acquired, in its stead, fear. Fear of everything. Fear of a world that might ridicule them for their beliefs (and such ridicule is called persecution, imagine that). Fear of becoming culturally and politically unpopular. Fear of being personally perceived by the enemies of God in the society as mean and unloving. But most of all, fear of having to deal with the challenges of the modern culture alone, with God, without any visible help from any earthly source, be it economic, or political, or relational. In short, they have become fearful of being scattered. The irony is that this happened in the same nation which, for the last 300 years, has had a history replete with millions of examples of individual families who were not only not afraid of being scattered, but willingly took up the task of leaving their extended families and conquering the wilderness. The heirs of several generations of individuals and families who were willing to brave the harshest of the circumstances alone, in order to exercise their Christian liberty under God, have become fearful of losing their privileged status of being a majority, and have retreated to their collectivist ghettos, where they hope to be shielded from the prevailing culture . . . which they themselves have abandoned to the enemy. And collectivist ghettos – created by that fear of being scattered – are what produces the celebrity cult in our churches today. Let’s subject ourselves under this or that pulpit Nimrod, and let’s build ourselves an ecclesiastical tower and make a name for ourselves, lest we are scattered all over the face of the land and we are forced to deal with God’s enemies in God’s strength alone, and – God forbid – even expand His Kingdom.

Once idolatry, and through idolatry, fear, take dominion over the hearts of men, they can’t be rational or Biblical. They can’t be rational or Biblical even in electing their leaders and celebrities. Returning to Joel’s analysis we mentioned at the beginning, men who have rejected God are not capable of choosing their celebrities – civil or ecclesiastical – in a way that is in agreement with the Biblical qualifications for leaders. Saul, as Joel McDurmon shows in that chapter of his book, had no strong moral character. Despite his impressive stature, he was a coward, and yet, he was full of himself and in love with himself. It should have been clear to those wise leaders of Israel that the man they were electing lacked the courage to be a leader, and was a narcissist who would certainly abuse his power. And yet, they were only looking at his stature, tall above everyone else, and very handsome. Any wise woman would have known better than these fine specimen of male leadership in Israel; most women won’t fall for external handsomeness if there are abundant signs of lack of character. The male leaders did.

(On a side note, that’s why I am very skeptical when I hear today modern Christians whose level of discernment is not very different from those elders of Israel in 1 Samuel 8, insist on “male leadership” and use that concept to assign some subjugated place for women in our society and the churches. Yes, I am all for Biblical manhood and Biblical womanhood, and I am all for covenantal masculinity and femininity, but, puhleeze, don’t babble about “male leadership” until you actually have men who are qualified to be leaders. As of now, the American institutional churches have given no sign whatsoever of having male leaders. Thus, I don’t want to hear that nonsense. Real leaders don’t need to make up ideologies of submission – female or other – in order to be leaders.)

Modern America is just as obsessed with visible perceptions as these elders of Israel. As a friend of mine likes to say, look at baldness and its impact on elections. An estimated 20% or more of American men are bald, and yet, for the last 100 years, we have had only one bald man for president, and bald men are underrepresented among elected officials. Why is that? Is it because bald men are less qualified? Not at all. The truth is, in a nation where visible perception means almost everything, they have to fight an uphill battle against public perception which is entirely dominated by outward looks.

This obsession with outward appearance dictates both how people choose their celebrities, and it also dictates how the celebrities present themselves to become likeable. And in our modern society, perception is more than just outward looks. It is also PR, media presence, acting, visual presentation, etc. It is no coincidence that very few “successful” ministries are not run by media experts and PR stuntmen, who pose for preachers and theologians. It is also no wonder that for most so-called “ministries,” the most pressing necessity at the very beginning is hiring a video guru, or a Hollywood or TV celebrity; after all, the prospective market needs “leaders” who seem attractive, entertaining, appealing to the senses of their listeners rather than serving their souls.

The motive is clear: a PR expert, a media personality, a Hollywood or TV celebrity are proficient at creating a brand name. And creating a brand name is what the collectivist builders of the Tower of Babel wanted to do: “Let us make for ourselves a name” (Gen. 11:4). That’s why in the evangelical world in the US today, most ministries – at least the large ones – are more concerned with building their brand names than with preaching the Word of God. John the Baptist’s ministry principle, “He must increase and I must decrease” (John 3:30) is not an acceptable principle in the modern American celebrity worship culture. To the contrary, building a brand name always involves increasing oneself.

In our modern, complex world, thus, Saul’s handsomeness translates into many more things than just face and stature. It translates into constant professional media presence for the modern Sauls, and into building a name for them through media stunts. Rev. Saul preaching from an elevated pulpit to thousands of listeners. Rev. Saul meeting with the President or with other politicians. Rev. Saul in the jungles of South America; or climbing a glacier in Greenland. Rev. Saul denouncing some easy targets, like the Charismatics, at a conference. Rev. Saul doing useless debates with other Rev. Sauls on worn-out topics of marginal significance. Rev. Saul standing in front of the Mormon temple preaching to Mormons. All these activities are just as safe for Rev. Saul as the original, historical King Saul in his full shining armor on the hill, far far away from Goliath: in modern America, they do not carry any special stigma nor invite any personal persecution. (They pay well, however, in tax-exempt dollars.) All these activities are also useless in terms of equipping the saints; none of them involve training other people to do the work, they are all Rev. Saul creating an impression before his followers; an impression that Rev. Saul is powerful and influential enough to keep them from being scattered. That under his wing, or under the wings of his church, or denomination, or ministry, ordinary Christians who are not as powerful as Rev. Saul would be safe from having to face the challenges of Christian life alone under God, with self-government that is the fruit of His Spirit (Gal. 5:22-23).

This is what makes the celebrity cult worship what it is today. And I am not talking about Joel Osteen, Benny Hinn and the TBN types. I am talking about our own celebrity types within the supposedly “Reformed” circles; those who no one is ever allowed to criticize, even when they are clearly preaching false doctrines, and even when nothing of what they do is directed or effective in equipping the saints, but only in building brand names.

Of course, churchian celebrities are to blame for this deception, just as Saul had his own responsibility and guilt to carry. But let’s not forget that the only reason their deception flies is because ordinary Christians, the regular attendees in the churches, have lost their connection to God and therefore are looking for human masters. This is no different than the men who settled in Babel under the power of Nimrod, and no different than the Israelites who wanted to place as human king over themselves. And, it is no different than the trees who wanted to set a king over themselves in Jotham’s parable in Judges 9 – the finest, ever in history, parable about the real nature of man-made authority. When the trees want to set a king over themselves, those who are upright, productive, and service-oriented among them wouldn’t take the job, because that would divert them from serving others. Only a useless and fruitless tree like the bramble would take it. In all the cases, men set as king – or leader, or preacher, or elder, or celebrity – an unworthy man. No amount of democratic procedures, or session meetings, or seminary training, or examinations, or presbytery oversight can fix this problem. The celebrity culture is based on apostasy (“they have rejected Me from being king over them,” 1 Sam. 8:7), and no matter what techniques and procedures that culture may devise to elect the best men for leaders, it will always end up electing the worst men. The manipulators. The narcissists. The swindlers. The tyrants. Etc.

The parable of the trees in Judges 9 gives us also another insight into the celebrity culture and the drive of apostate men to subject themselves to false authorities: Not only are the people motivated by fear, as we saw, but the appointed human leaders understand very well that the motive is fear, and their first act to consolidate that power is to enhance that fear and make it an official policy. From Judges 9:14-15,

Finally all the trees said to the bramble, “You come, reign over us!” The bramble said to the trees, “If in truth you are anointing me as king over you, come and take refuge in my shade; but if not, may fire come out from the bramble and consume the cedars of Lebanon.”

We should immediately ask the question: What in the world is the bramble thinking? Why does he resort to threats right away? Can’t he see that the other trees are quite self-sufficient without him, and he risks being brought down from his new position of king? Why resort immediately to using fear to manipulate the others into submission?

Because the bramble knows the premise unspoken in the parable, namely, that there is no other motivation for people to place human rulers over themselves but fear. The “bramble” in the parable was Gideon’s son from his concubine, Abimelech. Abimelech used fear-based tactics to convince the people of Shechem: “Is it better for you that the seventy sons of Gideon to rule over you, or that I, your relative, rule over you?” It was a false dilemma, of course. They should have answered, “No one should rule over us.” Gideon was a man of many failures, but it seems he did have at least some righteous understanding of power, for in the previous chapter, when the men of Israel, again driven by fear, asked him, “Rule over us, both you and your son, also your son’s son, for you have delivered us from the hand of Midian,” he refused. “I will not rule over you, nor shall my son rule over you; the LORD shall rule over you.” This is what they should have replied to Abimelech: “No man but the Lord shall rule over us.” But Abimelech’s fear-based manipulation worked – because they were all driven by fear anyway. And then, their justification was, “He is our relative.”

Once made a king, the first thing Abimelech did was to show what he would do to even to those relatives whom he perceived as a threat to his power. The men of Shechem were his relatives, but so were the sons of Gideon who were his brothers. Abimelech hired a group of thugs and went and killed all of his brothers save one. In other words, “Now that you have all come under the shadow of the bramble, let me teach you what the bramble can do, even to his fellow trees.” You can read the rest of the story in Judges 9. What is important for us here is that once accepted as a king because of fear, he made sure to immediately reinforce that fear. After all, if fear made him a king, fear would keep him a king. So his first act was to produce more fear in the hearts of those who made him a king.

The celebrity culture in the churches in the US is no different. Once it has gained its followers and worshipers, it creates its own propaganda of fear. True, it can’t use the same physical violence Abimelech used. Churches, after all, are “spiritual” institutions, so the violence has to be spiritual, against the conscience of the individuals. It is the same violence used by the Roman church during the Reformation and in the centuries before the Reformation, namely, that the institutional organization is the same as the Church, and therefore anyone not in subjection to that institutional organization is by default outside the true Church, and therefore must not be saved. The same tactics of fear-mongering and institutional manipulation the Roman church used against the Reformers, are used today by churchmen – and I don’t mean just those of the liberal variety, not at all. Popular, supposedly “conservative” or “Reformed” preachers and churchmen have blown out of proportions one single verse of the Bible, Heb. 13:17, “Obey your leaders and submit to them,” with the manipulative insinuation that if one is not under the institutional power of those celebrity types, he must be outside the church and therefore not saved. Their fear-based rhetoric and propaganda has nothing to do with God’s Church nor with true submission; we saw it in the last several years in the smear and slander campaign against AHA, where even people of good standing in established churches were declared “haters of the church” only because they have dared criticize elevated churchian celebrities. In planting fear in the hearts of their followers, the celebrity culture is not above slander and lies. And the idolatry of celebrities produces arrogance in their hearts at the same level as the arrogance in Abimelech’s heart, to the point that even recent converts who should be elders in the first place, and have nothing under their belt but Hollywood charisma which drives up their popularity in the modern society, presume to speak as authoritative representatives of the Church who can declare who is part of the church and who isn’t. Just like Abimelech, these celebrities know very well that fear is the main factor that gave them power, and therefore fear must be maintained so that their power can be maintained.

The celebrity culture in the US, however, is not the Church, and it has nothing to do with the Church. It’s not even the institutional church. It may be an institution but it is not a church. It lacks the main characteristic of the true church, namely, equipping the saints to fight the good fight. The evidence is all around us and has been for 100 years. For the last 100 years, since the celebrity culture took over the religious market in the US, Christianity has retreated from every facet of our culture; a society that used to be deeply influenced by Christianity in its very center, has now cast Christianity to its periphery. And that while the celebrity types have been raking in millions and billions of dollars for their alleged “ministries.” Most of these celebrity types even declare that Christianity is not supposed to rule the culture anyway; or that there is no such thing as a Christian culture, or Christian victory in history; that any victory we see will be only in eternity. And even those who speak of some victory, have used it as a rhetoric to collect followers and donors but have left these followers and donors spiritually starved and practically powerless to fight the wars of God’s Kingdom.

Thus, the celebrity worship is not only not the Church, it is antithetical to the church, and it must be destroyed as an enemy of the Kingdom of God. The exodus from it has already started; the institutional churches have been losing numbers. There have been many complaints in the last decade from prominent churchian celebrities that Christians – and especially the younger generation, the millennials – are “leaving the church.” But this is not a bad thing; if anything, it is a movement inspired by the Holy Spirit; and no complaining on the part of celebrity preachers will stop it or reverse it. As I wrote in an article in response to such complaint by Kevin DeYoung, they are not leaving the church, they are taking it with them. These people have not lost their faith; to the contrary, they have matured in their faith to where they can see through the smoke and mirrors of the celebrity worship culture. They have figured out that there is no essence nor purpose in the current institutional system that calls itself “church.” They refuse to serve dumb idols. This exodus needs to be accelerated, however.

It will be accelerated when we realize the main motivation for people to place rulers over themselves, which is also the main prop for the celebrity culture: fear. Fear, specifically, of being “scattered,” of being left alone with God, instead of seeking safety in numbers and power structures. A true Christian is not afraid of being scattered, and not afraid of being alone against the world (contra mundum), even if that world includes the apostate religious power structures that call themselves “churches.” A true Christian knows that it is better to be separated because of the truth instead of united in lies. Thus, a true Christian keeps only Christ as head above him (1 Cor. 11:3), and rejects men who by manipulation try to assert their power over him. His submission is only to true elders, whose only ministry is equipping the saints – which is demonstrated by the fact that they teach self-government and individual purpose, not collectivism. The Reformation was based on the fundamental Biblical idea of self-government expressed in the Doctrine of the Right and Duty of Private Judgment. Even though this doctrine has been affirmed by every single Protestant theologian since Luther, it has been purged from our pulpits today. The reason? The reason is that this doctrine strikes a blow at the very heart of the modern celebrity worship. Once the private individual is given priority in judging all pretended leaders, elders, preachers, ministers, evangelists, pastors, etc., then the authority structure is flipped over to its true position, where men whose only concern is making a name for themselves are at the bottom, and tholes whose only concern is the equipping of the saints are acknowledged to be men of authority. This would be the death of the celebrity culture. And unless we kill that culture, it will kill the church in the US. And our children will inherit a nightmare.

The book I will assign for reading this week is Moscow 1937 by Karl Shlögel. It is an account of the show trials of Stalin’s Great Purge in the 1930s, where almost all former buddies of Stalin in his rise to power were arrested and accused of crimes against the party and the state. This book is relevant to our topic because among other things, it shows how even when crushed by the injustice of the Communist system, even when it was clear that they would be executed, they were still professing loyalty to that system and even to their main accuser and judge, Stalin. The fear of being scattered, of being left psychologically alone was stronger than the fear of death. Stalin knew it very well, and he played on it to create a massive cult to his own personality, cult that brought people to madness. Consider the fact that the celebrity preachers in the US know it very well, and are playing on it just as Stalin did.

In your prayers and your giving, consider Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization devoted not simply to planting churches, but to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe by translating books that apply the Gospel to every area of life. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. God bless y’all.

Welcome to Episode 56 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will talk about history. To be more precise, we will be talking about a part of history that has happened a long time ago, and there aren’t many historical documents left of that period; and yet, that part of history is very important to our understanding of the Bible, of the Kingdom of God, and of what we call “redemptive history,” that is, the history of salvation applied to this world and to its institutions. We are going to be talking about ancient history, and I mean, really ancient, like the history before Rome, actually, even before Persia and Classical Greece, as far back as the barbaric times of Greece, when the mythological heroes of Homer were just teenagers fighting over a girl, and Hammurabi, praised today as the first and the greatest lawgiver of mankind, was a mere local warlord who simply had the idea of recording his so-called laws on a stone. Whether these laws were his work or not, we will see later in this podcast, for now, keep in mind, that we are going really back in history, and if some of what I’m saying sounds like Greek to you, my friendly advice is: buy a few books about ancient history and get an overall idea of what it was all about.

A few years ago, at an annual conference of the Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society – just like the one I mentioned in the previous podcast, in Reading PA, titled, The Future of Christendom – I delivered a lecture titled, “History Is Nothing More Than the Perfection of the Creeds Over Time.” In it, I spoke of the principle of meaning of history, following R.J. Rushdoony’s The Foundations of Social Order. What binds history together? What creates the cause-and-effect relationship for all the events in history. What is the red thread that goes through history and defines it, and gives it meaning? The Biblical answer is: Faith. And since faith in history is visibly expressed in the creeds of the church, my point is that history is nothing more than the perfection of the creeds over time. At every point in history, there is a level of creedal awareness in Christians which expresses itself first in their formal creeds or confessions, and then in their ideologies applying these creeds to the realm of ideas, and finally, in their practice, applying the ideologies to the practical world of human action and endeavor. What about the unbelievers? They follow suit. Every event in history, every trend, every continuity (whether growth or decline) and discontinuity (whether a revolution, a catastrophe, or a discovery of new technologies) can be traced back to the current level of creedal growth of the Church and of its influence upon the world. As the creeds and confessions of the church develop the faith of the church into a more informed, detailed, and self-conscious faith – self-conscious about all its applications in all the areas of life – the level of maturity of the world’s civilization will grow, and the world will be turning into a better, more productive, and safer place. Faith is the motion principle of history; anything else follows from faith. And specifically, from the Christian faith, given that all the other faiths are worth nothing. I have the lecture published as a separate article. If you are interested in my thesis, you can find it on ChristendomRestored.com, as well as an audio lecture on Reconstructionist Radio.

I met my regular share of criticism. Some came from the regular atheist/agnostic crowd. Some came from the self-styled “strict subscriptionists” in the Reformed circles, that is, those who claim to “strictly subscribe” to the Confessions, and specifically to the Westminster Confession. Obviously, if history is the perfection of the creeds of time, then the Westminster Confession – or any other confession – is not perfect, and strictly subscribing to it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. To the contrary, what should be expected in history is the perfection of the Confession. Which means, some of its content will need to go, because it was theologically incorrect, some will have to be modified or expanded, and, of course, the main truths in it will remain the same, because there will always be continuity. None of these criticisms were serious enough to deserve more than a few words to answer.

Out of all the flak, however, came a good and serious question, which, in fact, reflects a greater problem for our faith in the field of apologetics. The question was as follows:

“I understand that history after the Cross is only the perfection of creeds over time. But what about history before the Cross, when the world had such rich history, and yet, knew nothing of Christ or the faith in Christ. Are there two separate and different principles for interpretation of history, one BC and the other AD?”

It was a wonderful and profound question, indeed. In a sense, we know that there is a discontinuity between the Old and the New Covenant, and there is a discontinuity in history between the two eras. So much is easy to say. On the other hand, is that discontinuity so radical that it excludes faith and confession of faith as the ruling principle for history? Was history before the cross defined and motivated by something other than faith in God? If it was so, then it sounds like at least for a time, God’s redemption and grace were not the most powerful factor this side of the final judgment; and yet, we know from the Bible that God’s grace – and with it, the faith in God – has been the central thread of all history. The Westminster Confession states that the Covenant of Grace was instituted right after the sin of Adam, and that the giving of the Law was itself one of the administrations of the Covenant of Grace. And grace only works through faith, whether in the life of the individual or in history. Thus, no matter what discontinuity we postulate between OT and NT history, faith and confession of faith must continue to be the central factor that defines and motivates history. But then, how does that happen in the OT, before the manifestation of the Author and Perfecter of our faith (Heb. 12:2)?

This question is also important in view of another problem, one related to apologetics. Those of us who have adopted the presuppositional epistemology of Van Til know well that one of the arguments for Christianity is that without faith in Christ, there is no basis for any ethics or law. The immediate reply of the unbelievers would be: “But before Christ, there were organized societies and civilizations, and they had their own systems of ethics and law. If without faith in Christ there is no basis for ethics or law, how did these societies emerge in the first place?” Indeed, how did Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome emerge? How did the empires in India and China appear and survived for a few thousand years before the first missionaries arrived? How did the empires of the Mayas, the Aztecs, and the Incas emerge?

These are all good questions, and they deserve an answer. Not an answer within the framework of a pagan worldview but within the context of a Biblical worldview, one that takes in account the nature of the very concepts of law and ethics and their relation to Christ, and also takes in account the clear Biblical history as it is related in the Old Testament of the Bible. Biblical history, not the modern secularized version. We talked in a previous podcast about the modern secularized version of history and its chronology. Modern secularist historians always act and speak as if they have everything nailed down, all the events, all the actors, and all the chronology of the ancient history. The truth is, they have very little, and most of what passes for ancient history in the modern textbooks is 90% or more conjectures, and less than 10% facts; and even these facts are rather a haphazard collection organized on nothing more than guesses and imagination. I have seen more than a few history students who somehow believe that the ancients for sure must have recorded all of their activities, and must have dated them as we do today, for example, “This happened on January 30th, 678 BC.” The modern history textbooks seldom contain more than pure conjectures, and the only book we have available that gives a reliable uninterrupted account of events and actors in ancient history is the Bible.

But the question still remains: How did these ancient civilizations appear, if we say that a civilization can’t appear without some sort of faith in Christ?

In order to answer this question, we need to make a short review of what is really known about ancient history, and then make note of one very interesting fact in that history that is seldom mentioned by secularist historians.

We know very little of the history of the world right after the Great Flood which happened about 2,400 BC. We know that Noah’s family multiplied greatly within a period of about 1,000 years. We don’t have many details about the historical events in that period. We know that Nimrod organized the first centralized state in Mesopotamia, and that under his rule some groups of men tried to build the Tower of Babel. Abraham came out of Ur of the Chaldeans about 400 years after the Flood, and by his time, there were societies organized as local monarchies all over the Middle East and Egypt. Some of these societies seem to have had high levels of technology, for they left us some construction wonders like the Pyramids and the Temple in Baalbek. Similar highly technological societies must have been founded in other parts of the globe, for we know of other, similarly impressive, construction projects in other places in the world, like South America, China, India, South Africa, and others. We know next to nothing about the real builders of these marvels of construction; as far as we can judge, they either disappeared, for one reason or another, or over time lost their technological knowledge and experience.

We have a sufficient Biblical explanation for the emergence and existence of these organized societies: In the several generations after the Flood, Noah’s descendants must have kept at least some remembrance of the Flood and of the reasons for it. The faith of Noah and his sons must have still been the dominant cultural factor in the world around them. After all, Noah was still alive when Abraham was born, and he passed away around the time Abraham was leaving his family. Even more interesting, Noah’s son, Shem, ancestor of Abraham, actually outlived Abraham by about 50 years! These direct survivors of the Flood must have been the ancient substitute for an official public creed; their faith had given the foundation of a worldview that helped establish law, organization, and structures of government which were not easily corrupted . . . well, in the beginning, at least. Even where the people may have fallen into idolatry, the worldview of the faith of Noah had remained as a cultural heritage (similar to the modern Western Europe) and provided the intellectual foundation for their societies. So, in these first generations after the Flood, history was defined and motivated, again, by the faith of the covenant people of God, and their influence on the world around them, including the unbelievers.

This situation did not remain for long, however, for even at the time of Abraham we see that the cultures through which he traveled were already reverting to barbarism. In not a single one of these societies was there anything close to an objective law of the land. (Objective in the sense that it doesn’t depend on the whim of a ruler or a caste of rulers.) Everywhere he went, Abraham had to deal with the whim of the local rulers – which was a tough task, given that he was traveling with a stunningly beautiful wife. He had to ask them for permission to travel and settle and do business; there was nothing like a law he could appeal to. Even hospitality, which is considered a “traditional value” in the region, had to be extracted from them through God’s threats in dreams and visions. Foreigners were not protected in any possible way; even though Lot and his family had nothing to do with the population of Sodom and Gomorrah, they were still taken captive by the victorious kings. And the only way Abraham could extract justice was by a military victory. This situation remained for more than just a few generations. At the time of the Exodus from Egypt, the pagan nations still had no idea of objective law or even courts; everything was done at the whim or permission of their rulers. From the Exodus from Egypt to the passing through Edom, through the times of David and Solomon and the rest of the kings of Judah and Israel, only Israel had an objective, public law, which didn’t depend on the whim of the ruler, but governed both rulers and ruled. The first instance in the Bible when objective law is mentioned as a concept in a pagan nation is Persia in the times of Daniel. Moses’s promise in Deut. 4:5-8 that Israel would be unique because of the Law it was given was very significant. True enough, no other nation had such a law . . . or even a concept of such a law.

It is of this period that the modern science of history has its first written documents. The memory of the great developed societies immediately after the Flood is lost completely. All we know about is that period of barbarism in which there was no commonly accepted system of ethics between the nations, and there was no law. Of that same period we have stories of the earliest kingdoms in Egypt, which were nothing more than warring clans. We also have Homer’s Iliad: a story of unruly and undisciplined young men, entrusted with whole armies, fighting over a woman. Other accounts of pre-classical Greece – especially that of Licurgus, whom we will mention later – also show that Greece was nothing more than a battlefield between different tribes, with no knowledge of law or civilization, or organization of life. Of that same period is the Xia Dynasty in China, of which very little is known, but what is known is that it was similarly, a period of warring clans. Apparently, after the death of Noah and his sons, the faith in God declined, and, accordingly, the worldview supported by that faith disappeared. With the disappearance of that worldview, the principle of cohesion in the society disappeared. All that was left was the absolute power of the local rulers, and a naked ambition for conquest and plunder.

As was to be expected, the principle of cohesion disappeared in the society, but it first disappeared in the religion and thephilosophy of the ancients. In his revolutionary work on the religion and society of the ancient Greece and Rome titled The Ancient City, the Swiss scholar Fustel de Coulanges describes the religion of the ancient Greeks and Romans. There was no concept of a universal God; all that they had were their family gods or heroes. There were hundreds of Jupiters and Junos and Minervas and Marses. Every town had its own version of some god, and had a temple to it. Every family had its gods, and these gods lived within the boundaries of the family property. (Think of Rachel stealing her father’s household idols in Gen. 31:19 as stealing the religion and the power of her father’s family.) That’s why it was so important for the deceased to be buried under the threshold of the house: this was a guarantee that his spirit will join the household gods and will continue having a strong influence on the household. This faith was so strong that, as de Coulanges relates, an Athenian admiral who won a sea battle was taken to court and sentenced to death because after the battle, due to an approaching storm, he decided to give up trying to recover the bodies of the killed Athenian sailors from the water, in order to save those who were alive. In the eyes of his compatriots, he put his country at risk; the dead bodies of Athenians were considered of a greater value for the defense of Athens than its living citizens. The admiral, of course, was motivated by the new spirit I will mention in a few minutes; and de Coulanges gives this as an example of a religious revolution through which the whole ancient world went through between twelfth and sixth centuries before Christ. The same view of the local power and nature of the gods can be seen in 1 Kings 20 where the Arameans believed that Jehovah is a god of the mountains, and therefore he won’t have any power in the valleys. The fragmentation of the ancient societies started with the fragmentation of their worldview first. Once the deity was fragmented and broken down to many gods limited to families and clans, there could be no ideology of universal manhood and civilization.

There could be no universal ethics either. De Coulanges demonstrates that not only the gods were limited to the families, but the very concepts of law and ethics were limited too. Law was not universal, it was private to the family; and when the ancient cities were formed, law and knowledge of the law were a restricted privilege to the ruling class; there was no public, objective law, and the lower classes were not taught any law. Rome is a good example of that: Between its founding and the time of Julius Caesar, there were multiple insurrections of the plebeians, that is, the lower classes. To their demand for equal rights, the patrician class always responded with, “We can’t grant you equal status. You have no knowledge of law.” The law of the land was not public knowledge; it was a privilege of the rulers to know it, and they used that knowledge as a means of oppression and suppression of discontent. In Greece, and especially in Sparta, it was illegal to teach slaves or foreigners the laws of the land; in some places, even teaching the slaves to read and write could earn one the death penalty. Foreigners could claim no protection, for such protection would have involved some interaction with the law; they were left entirely to the mercy of the citizens, and there was no court to take up the cause of a foreigner. It is for this reason Athenian residents convicted of treason were given the option of either suicide or exile, and many chose suicide, for exile was a much harsher penalty.

All this started changing in the 8th and the 7th centuries BC. First, the concept of gods as universal principles began to emerge. Those universal principles were soon separated from the local deities with whose names they were associated; the gods were sent to abide on the Mount Olympus, and they were now given universal power over the earth. The idea of Jupiter as an exalted Father of the gods appeared, and was promoted by a number of play-wrights and philosophers. Remember, however, this was an attack on the older religion which considered the gods as belonging to families and clans. The conflicts were severe at times, and the story of the Athenian admiral I shared earlier was part of that religious conflict: obviously, the man had a universal view of the gods and rejected the localist view of divinity limited to tribe and clan and kin; that made him free of the superstition that the dead bodies of slain warriors would protect the home if they were buried in the same ground. The conflict can be seen in quite a few of the Greek tragedies by play-wrights like Sophocles and Euripides. A number of Greek philosophical schools of the time were based on the belief in the universal nature of the godhead; and therefore some philosophies were devoted to examine the nature of that godhead. Apparently, by the time of Paul that nature hasn’t been discovered yet, for Paul believed that the “unknown god” whom some in Athens believed in was the same God as that of the Bible. Similar transition from local deities to universal gods and goddesses was happening in the same period in India. In China, the period around the 10th century BC (or perhaps later, given the habit of Chinese historians to stretch their chronology) was marked by the rule of the Shang Dynasty. The Shang, or the Heavenly Dynasty was known for introducing new concepts of religion and law in China, and building the first modern organized society. In its religious reformed, the Shang Dynasty established the worship of one god, ShangDi, the heavenly God. True enough, at the lowest, practical level, the Chinese people still venerated and deified their ancestors, but at the level of official state ideology, monotheism seems to have been the rule, and this was a serious break with the older Shamanism of the first Dynasty, the Xia Dynasty.

Modern secularist historians, of course, claim that such change from local demons to universal gods was just a natural “evolutionary development.” It is very hard to accept such an interpretation, however, given two facts: First, the change was not accepted as “normal” or “natural.” There was resistance, and the old beliefs continued existing along with the new worldview. And second, the change happened almost simultaneously around the world; as if it came from the same source. These lead us to a conclusion – may be not 100% proven, but more probable than the alternatives – that the nations of the world learned about a universal god or gods from the same source which was popular around the world at the time. But was there such a source, and what was it?

The Bible gives us the answer: Solomon.

We are all influenced today by the modern secularist thinking that ancient Israel was somehow just a small insignificant kingdom in the big picture of things, and that when we study ancient history, we can easily ignore it. Somehow the Bible has its own version of history, and it relates to Israel, while there is also real history, which relates to the real events, and the two are in a state of dualistic separation. But the truth is, the Bible speaks true history, and modern textbook history is 90% and more the imagination of modern secularist historians. And the Bible gives us the most reliable account of the events of ancient history.

Hold on to your chairs now.

The Bible specifically says about Solomon that his fame spread over the whole earth, and that all the kings of the earth came to him to ask for advice. Not just some kings, not just the local kings. All of them. 1 Kings 4:34: “Men came from all peoples to hear the wisdom of Solomon, from all the kings of the earth who had heard of his wisdom.” 1 Kings 10:23-24: “So King Solomon became greater than all the kings of the earth in riches and in wisdom. All the earth was seeking the presence of Solomon, to hear his wisdom which God had put in his heart.” 2 Chr. 9:22-23: “So King Solomon became greater than all the kings of the earth in riches and wisdom. And all the kings of the earth were seeking the presence of Solomon, to hear his wisdom which God had put in his heart.”

Keep in mind that what was happening to Solomon was simply the promise of Moses in Deut. 4:5-8 coming true. The nations of the earth were expected to be attracted to the wisdom of Israel and thus acknowledge and glorify the God of Israel. In the same way, the kings and the nations of the earth were attracted to the wisdom of Solomon; and this couldn’t lead to anything else but to some form of acknowledgment of the God of Solomon. And since the God of Solomon was unique in the fact that he was not a local deity limited to a nation or a piece of land, but a universal God, the nations of the earth started applying that universalist concept to their own religions. Granted, they did not accept the God of Solomon as their God; such worldwide conversion was saved for later, for the ministry of Jesus Christ and His Church; but even before Christ the knowledge of the Jewish religion was known around the world; after all, that’s why we had the Magi coming from the East to worship the King of the Jews, and that’s why there were Greek worshippers in the Temple in Jesus’s time. And yet, even if their religion didn’t change, their view of reality started changing towards seeking for the God of the universe, “if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:27).

We don’t have the time to go into details, but given the facts of history, and given the Biblical narrative, we have an explanation how mankind, which in the several generations after the Flood had fallen into barbarism and lawlessness, was raised back to civilization: The fame of Solomon’s wisdom restored around the world the religion – or at least the worldview following from that religion – which the authority of Noah and his sons had maintained for several hundred years after the Flood. We may not know today how all these kings learned about Solomon; we may even be influenced by the secularist ideas that communications at that time were not such as to make it possible for ships to reach all the parts of the globe. The truth is, however, we have abundant evidence that the peoples of the Middle East and Europe were trading with the whole world, including East Asia and the Americas. Early Hebrew, Phoenician, and Celtic inscriptions were found, and still exist, in some places in America, and some of the Psalms and the prophets seem to indicate long-range voyages for commodities normally not known to the Mediterranean. I will assign for reading a book that deals with these issues, so now, let’s continue to the logical consequence of this change in religious worldview:

Not only the worldview changed, but the view of law and justice changed, too.

Some time ago I wrote an article which you can find on Christendom Restored.com, titled, “The Shadow of Christ in the Legal Revolutions in Greece and Rome.” I wish I could read the whole article here, but that would make this episode too long. So I will just give a short resume.

It is beyond doubt that by the time of Christ, mankind had put the earlier stage of barbarism behind and had adopted a more civilized approach to society and justice. This doesn’t mean that the Classical civilization had any idea of mercy or detested cruelty; far from it. But at least, unlike in the early years of Greece and Rome, law was believed to be something objective and public, and was published for common knowledge and restraint. To get an understanding of how sharp the difference was, keep in mind that any earlier attempt to make the law public for all to read and understand, including for the plebeians, was promptly suppressed by the senatorial class. What we know today as “Roman Law” only came about with the Empire, when Julius Caesar and then Augustus started the process of dismantling the old aristocracy. But how did the ancient world come to an understanding that the law should be public?

The Christian historian Eusebius explains in his History of the Church that this change started with Moses:

. . . an entire nation appeared, sprung from the Hebrews and practicing the true religion. To them, through the prophet Moses, he revealed images and symbols of a mystical Sabbath and of circumcision, as well as instruction in other spiritual principles, but no complete revelation of the mysteries, for they were still bound by old practices. Yet when their law became famous and penetrated everywhere like a fragrant breeze, the minds of most of the heathen were moderated by lawgivers and philosophers. Savage brutality changed into mildness, so that profound peace, friendship, and easy communication prevailed.

Indeed, in the ancient world, there was only one nation that had an objective law, not dependent on the whim of the rulers, and that law was supposed to be read publicly every seven years for all to know. And, if this was not enough, there was a special class in Israel, the Levites, who were supposed to be supported by the general population with the sole purpose of teaching the Law of God to their hosts. Israel was unique in this regard, and if there is a nation that could be the source of the revolutionary change in the thinking and legislation of the nations of the world at the time, that nation would be Israel.

By tradition, the creation of first public law in Greece was ascribed to Lycurgus, a king of Sparta who lived just a generation after Solomon. According to the many accounts of him, he was distressed by the internecine strife in his native country, and he voluntarily abdicated from his kingship and went abroad in the search of a good law to bring back. On his journeys, he met one of the most mysterious characters we know of in ancient history: someone named Thales (like the other Thales, of Milletus, the father of Greek philosophy and mathematics), or Thaletas. This Thaletas made his living as a bard at weddings and funerals, but he was universally known as one of the ablest lawgivers in the antiquity, who used his songs to teach his listeners law. Now, that was a novelty at the time. Not that the pagan nations didn’t have their bards, but these bards usually sang praises to their heroes and kings. Using songs to teach law was something new. Lycurgus didn’t waste time, and he asked Thaletas to move to Sparta and start a music school. there. Thaletas thus became the father of Greek music and the father of Greek legislation.

Interestingly enough, however, the name Thaletas is not Greek and it doesn’t mean anything in Greek. The name is clearly Semitic, and in both Hebrew and Aramean it means the same: a Lamb. Thus, the first laws of Greece were made by someone who sang songs about the Law (like David) and used a Semitic name meaning “a Lamb.” The story was well known to the classical world and especially to all Greek-speaking inhabitants of the Roman Empire. Apparently, the Bible also directs the attention of its Greek readers to it: in one of the very few instances where Aramean is used instead of Greek, Mark 5:41, Jesus uses the word “talitha” (a ewe-lamb, a name normally used for young girls, just like a “kid” today is used for children): Talitha Kumi. There is no obvious reason why Mark should use the Aramean version of Jesus’s words here, until we realize that for a Greek speaker, the text sounds like, “Thaletas, rise!” As if Jesus was declaring to all His Greek readers that in His ministry, He was the new Thaletas, the supreme legislator of the Greek world.

Thaletas’s work, of course, did not give the perfect solution to Greece; that perfection was to be brought only by Christ Himself. Lycurgus’s laws, based on the counsel of Thaletas, did not deal with the deep divisions of the Spartan society. The social castes were preserved, the oppression of certain people was preserved, and Sparta remained a militarized society. There were also improvements, however: the civil wars ended, and Sparta had internal peace for several centuries. Three hundred years later a legislator in Athens, Solon, continued the work by giving Athens laws that were much better and more just than those of Lycurgus. Still not perfect, that is, not according to the Law of God, but much better nevertheless. The Greek worldwas being civilized step by step, and that process was started by a Hebrew bard, who sang the Law in his songs.

Solon, on his turn, was the inspiration for the legal and religious reforms of Numa Pompilius, the second King of Rome after Romulus. Numa was the man of peace in a bloodthirsty generation, a man of spirit in a generation of lusty materialists, and a man of justice in a generation that believed that injustice is the way to achieving cultural domination. He claimed divine guidance, but there are indications that he also learned from the east, specifically Athens, but also Israel. Numa started his reforms by closing first the temple of the god of war, Mars, and then all the other temple of the pagan gods. According to Plutarch, the reason for this was that,

Numa forbade the Romans to represent God in the form of man or beast, nor was there any painted or graven image of a deity admitted amongst them for the space of the first hundred and seventy years, all of which time their temples and chapels were kept free and pure from images; to such baser objects they deemed it impious to liken the highest, and all access to God impossible, except by the pure act of the intellect.

Now, where could Numa have gotten such an idea? Noah and his sons had been dead for 1,000 years, at least, and none of their descendants continued the faith of these patriarchs. There was only one place in the world at the time of Numa – 8th century BC – where such ideas about God were the official religion: Israel. Numa took the throne in 715 BC, about 200 years after the death of Solomon. Solomon’s fame must still have been remembered, and his ideas about God and religion must have left some trace in the minds of many people on the planet. The Hebrew origin of Numa’s religion and worldview is quite clear.

He didn’t leave it there. Numa also started a legal reform, a reform which was supposed to give the plebeian population of Rome their own vote in the assembly, as well as legal protection for them and their families against the arbitrary dictat of the senatorial class. At the foundation of his reform was the belief that a public law, equal and just to all, was the foundation of peace in the society. Again, such idea was unheard of in the pagan societies at the time; it was an idea unique to Israel and the Law of God. He also began an institutional reform designed to free the government institutions from the tyranny of the politically and economically powerful of the day. He was so successful in this that centuries later, many of the political and judicial institutions of Rome were still ascribed to his genius. He also disbanded many political institutions and made his government economically effective, by reducing his expenses.

Numa lived to old age and died in his 80th year of age. After his death, however, the patrician class made sure that his legal and religious reforms were reversed. The public plates with his laws were buried with him in his grave; many generations later, when his library was discovered, members of the Senate demanded that it be burned, for in h is library several books were discovered with Numa’s views on justice and the legal system – the idea of making the law available to all inhabitants of Rome was unthinkable for those pagan aristocrats. Again, as with Lycurgus, God gave Rome in its early years a worldview that would at least preserve her for a while. The perfect law was to be given later, at the Cross of Christ.

But meanwhile, as Eusebius pointed out, the pagan world was learning spiritual principles from Moses, through the fame of Solomon. The pagans themselves knew very well where their civilization came from. Julius Caesar read the Septuagint and freed the Jews in his empire from any taxes. The temple in Jerusalem was a place where many Greeks and Romans and other nations came to worship. Wise men from the east came to worship the King of the Jews, and Titus specifically instructed his legions to spare the Temple of God. Proselytes – even from the house of Caesar – joined the Jewish communities and became part of the nation of Israel, later of the nation of the Church. When the covenantal status of ethnic Israel was removed, then the burden of defining and directing history through a confession of faith fell to the Church. But the Church didn’t act in a vacuum. It had material to work on: a civilization which in the course of centuries, slowly and painfully, was shaped and influenced by the Hebrew worldview to become more civilized, seeking God, and thus more open to accept His Gospel. In the final account, even the ancient world was driven by a profession of faith; and history was simply the perfection of that faith.

The book I will assign for reading this week is America BC by Barry Fell. It is not directly related to this topic, but it will give you evidence that the modern views of ancient history are strongly deficient, that in the time of Solomon, people traveled all over the globe, and brought with them their religion and worldview, and cultural practices.

Remember in your prayers Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization devoted to building a Christian culture in Eastern Europe through the translation and publishing of solid Reformed and Reconstructionist books. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to the newsletter, and donate. God bless y’all.

Welcome to Episode 55 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will talk about a theology of selfishness. Or, rather, an idolatry of selfishness. Or, to be more precise, an idolatry of selfishness that in the last 100 years has been established as a “mainstream” in the pulpits of the modern supposedly “Reformed” churches and seminaries, and parades – using theologically correct language, of course – as “Reformed theology.” Yes, it is all theologically correct, it uses all the lingo of true Reformed theology, and also its theological and terminological constructs. All heresies and idolatries, however, as we know from history, can be adjusted to speak in theologically correct language – and from the history of the Church we know, that this has been the task of church theologians, to be able to sort through the smoke and mirrors and be able to identify idolatry even when it parades under theologically correct language. And the idolatry of selfishness we will tackle this week has been thoroughly developed to look like it is the real orthodoxy.

Before I delve into this issue, I would like to break my routine for once and extend an invitation to my listeners at the beginning of this episode. The invitation is rather directly tied to what we are going to be talking about today; for today we are going to be bringing down idols, and the invitation has to do with offering the Biblical alternative to those idols. I invite as many of our listeners who can make the trip to join me and many others at the Future of Christendom Conference in Reading, Pennsylvania, organized by the Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society. I will be one of many speakers, and you will have the chance to meet many Christians committed to the task of Christian Reconstruction and restoring Christendom. This won’t be your typical celebrity-ladden, dairy diet, fundamentalist event where a number of armchair philosophizers offer the latest fashionable fancy ways of expressing the TULIP or splitting hairs over the meaning of substitutionary atonement and supralapsarianism. This will be a tactical event, where we will be talking about how to change the focus of the church from itself to the Kingdom of Christ, and how to conquer the world for Christ. Find out more on the FB page of the Future of Christendom Conference. And then come and join us on July 7, 2017. Back to our topic now.

Before we start explaining the modern idolatry, I need to go into some pre-history here.

The religion described in the Old Testament was unique in the ancient world. Unique by many indicators, but one indicator is very relevant to us now: it had no mystical elements in it. The essence of the religion was its ethical/judicial core. God was not far removed, and man didn’t have to strive to get a spiritual access to him; in fact, exactly the opposite, Moses declared to Israel that there was no need – as it was with the Gentiles – for the Hebrews to try to find God. “The word is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart” (Deut. 30:14; Rom. 10:8). The pagan nations didn’t have such a God; their gods were remote, and it took elaborate rituals to have access to them (including sacrifice of children, self-castration, magic, etc.), and that access had to be through an elite of priests and rulers. To the contrary, the Jews just had to call on God and He would listen. “For what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as is the LORD our God whenever we call on Him?” (Deut. 4:7). The rituals in the Temple had no magical significance; their purpose was not to manipulate God’s favor, it was only evangelistic and revelational. (We will talk about it in a future episode.) Man’s access to God was not mystical; obviously, you don’t need mystical rituals to speak directly to someone who is sitting next to you; much less to speak to someone who is in your heart and in your mouth. man’s relationship with God was covenantal, which means ethical/judicial. That is, the main issue of the divine-human relationship was the issue of good and evil. Man kept his relationship to God by doing good, and lost it by doing evil. Nothing else mattered, neither ceremonies (which God suspended for a long time, and yet still expected covenantal obedience) nor intelligence or artistic abilities, nor any political abilities or collective efforts. The only boundary God acknowledged was ethical/judicial: do good, you are in a good relationship with God; do evil, you have lost it, and you are doomed.

The pagan religions, on the other hand, postulated gods who were removed from their worshipers in another realm, separate and unlike the material realm. To seek them out and implore them, the pagan worshiper had to find a way to bridge the gap between the two worlds. We know today of the occult rituals used in voodoo and associated with the Ouija board; the purpose of these rituals is to bridge the gap between the two realms, and summon a being from the other world. All pagan religions are in their essence a version of the Ouija board; their worship is entirely predicated on the magical attempt of men to bridge the gap to the spiritual world in order to be able to procure blessings from the gods in that world.

Since the difference between the two worlds is metaphysical (spirit vs. matter), and not ethical/judicial, for a pagan worshiper to gain access to his god, he must effect some metaphysical or occult transformation in his own being. Ethical commitment and faithfulness is not enough – and often, it is the other way around, immorality is required to achieve a higher metaphysical union with the gods. (Think of the ceremonial orgies and prostitution in the pagan temples. Also, read Gary North’s Marx’s Religion of Revolution.) Man must work on himself to achieve a higher level of mystical consciousness, which – listen to this, this is important – will take him away from this world and thus open the spiritual world for him. Pagan prophets and shamans and medicine men all had to artificially force themselves into a form of trans or self-hypnosis in order to be able to hear from the spirits. Modern occult mediums also have to be in a trans to speak for a spirit. In both ancient religions and in the modern New Age practices, man has to gaze deeply into himself, away from the world, in order to discover his true nature and reality. Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan relied heavily on narcotics to achieve his higher level of “awareness,” and this influenced a whole generation of young people to experiment with drugs. Again, in all these religions and ideologies, bridging the gap between the material and the spiritual world required a self-conscious withdrawal from the real world, and self-conscious focus on the inner self of the worshiper, as deep as possible, into discovering oneself’s hidden spiritual potential, in order to make the connection with the world beyond.

All pagan religions developed their own rituals and rules for such withdrawal from the world. Even physical self-mutilation has been used as a tool: The candidates for priests of many pagan cults had to go through self-castration in order to qualify. The meaning was clear: in order to get access to the deity, get as far away from the world as you can, or even make yourself as impotent in the world as you can, in order to ascend to a higher spiritual level. (Remember, the Law of God forbade eunuchs not only from being priests in the Temple, but even from being members of the assembly.) Ancient mathematics is another example. It is commonly accepted today that the Greeks who developed mathematics used it for the same purpose as we do today – to model physical realities. However, the pioneers of Greek mathematics, like Pythagoras, saw in mathematics not a tool for practical knowledge and transformation of the world – God forbid! They saw it as a medium for achieving occult enlightenment and ability to communicate with the spiritual world. For this to happen, mathematics had to be completely divorced from any practical applications. It was not just an ivory tower of theoretical science; it was a self-conscious castration of knowledge to the level of complete inaplicability, so that a higher level of occult spirituality was achieved. (Read Mathematics: Is God Silent? by James Nickel.) So deep was the religious commitment of the Greek mathematicians that when one member of Pythagoras’s circle proved through practical examples that irrational numbers do exist (and for their mysticism, irrational was the same as satanic), the disciples of Pythagoras excommunicated that member, built a tomb, and offered libations as if he was already dead.

The Jews – and later, the early Christians – did not have any mysticism in their religion. Not having mysticism, they had nothing of the trappings of mysticism: elaborate rituals and ceremonies, special magical rites of cleansing and achieving higher consciousness and spirituality, spells for invoking beings from other realms, and, most importantly, rules for withdrawing from the real world – or for one or another form of self-castration – in order to reach out to the spiritual world. It is for this reason they were often accused by their pagan contemporaries of . . . “atheism.” The faith of the God of Abraham was ethical/judicial, mainly concerned with righteousness and justice here in this world. For a pagan, this amounted to no belief in any god; after all, what god can be so close to his worshipers as to not need special effort by them to get access to him? This difference was so stark that Paul made it the main point of his sermon in Athens; read carefully his sermon on Mars Hill in Acts 17:22-29 to see that the main antithesis there is between God Who is close to His worshipers and the ignorance of the gentiles who believe that the gods can be reached through temples and services by human hands. With God being so close, holiness for Jews and Christians was ethical obedience; and since ethical obedience was impossible for the fallen man, holiness was in their faith of a Savior who will bridge the ethical gap between their fallen state and God’s holiness. It was not them who had to strive to buy that holiness; it was the Savior. Once that holiness was redeemed and restored, they had to return to their task of ethical obedience. For the pagans, it was way too simple, way too easy. What kind of God can be so lax to His worshipers, to not require that they sweat and cut themselves and cry out all day long?

The early church started without any such mysticism. The New Testament describes the life of the church in the same ethical/judicial, and practical terms as was the synagogue. Christians got together to break bread, and then went about their business, bringing the Gospel to the world. There was no focus on hyper-spiritualized Christianity, or on Christianity self-obsessed with some sort of mystical connection to Christ. Spirituality was defined by the ability of a man to judge all things by the standard of the Law of God (1 Cor. 2:15; Heb. 5:14). Even their breaking the bread was not a mystical ceremony; in the first two centuries, it was just a communal meal. The covenantal part of it, as described by Paul in 1 Cor. 11, was about oath and judgment, not about mystical connections, and certainly not about hyper-spiritualized self-improvement. It was a meal, and because it was a covenant meal, it was supposed to be . . . er, covenantal, that is, ethical/judicial. Judgment was expected from God. Man had to make no effort. He was there not to make spiritual exercises. He was there to recline on the table, even lie comfortably down, if he could, and just . . . eat! If there was to be judgment, God was supposed to act, not man.

Paganism, however, crept in the church from its early decades. And it was to be expected, given that the Church in the AD 1ct century didn’t have the luxury of 2,000 years history of Christendom. Pagan ideas – especially from Persia and Greece – crept into the church. And one of the first such idea to creep in was the idea of a different, higher spirituality, which requires not just ethical commitment, but ritual cleansing and deep mystical self-absorption. This pagan influence led to the rise of many mystical practices in the church, from ascetism and monasticism to different mystical and pietist cults, to the rise of ceremonial religion. Hundreds and thousands of people, excited by the prospect of achieving this higher spirituality, fled to the deserts of Egypt, Syria, and Libya, and spent years and decades living like animals in caves or on pillars, engaged in deep mystical battles against their own imaginations. The practice did not differ in anything from the pagan mysteries and hermits. It has for its purpose an occult connection to the spiritual world; it required withdrawal from the world; and it was entirely obsessed with the self.

It required a restoration of the old pagan dualism in the teachings of the church; the dualism of Plato, and of the Persian Zoroastrians (in fact, endemic to any pagan religion): the dualism between spirit and matter, between sacred and secular, between nature and grace, etc. The dualism had to be developed further. Two realms were postulated, with different laws and standards – the spiritual and the secular. Of course, the spiritual was the higher one, and those entirely devoted to the spiritual realm were people of much higher value in the society. Monasteries and convents continued the same tradition of paganism of imagining some sort of higher, mystical spirituality, which was divorced from the ethical commitment and obedience of man in the real world. Oh, yes, not to forget castration; it was not practiced physically, but the Roman church required of all its priests to become castrated for all practical purposes.

Granted, it was not all bad. Many monasteries and monks were active in the practical applications of the Gospel. After the fall of the Roman Empire, it was the monasteries that preserved valuable knowledge – especially on practical topics like agriculture, construction, medicine, etc. Churchmen organized the defense against barbarians and acted as civil judges in the absence of civil government. Learning was preserved by the efforts of priests in places like Ireland and Visigothic Spain. But inside all this great development, there were still seeds of the old mystical paganism.

The Reformation, of course, destroyed the false dichotomy between sacred and secular, by restoring in the Church the covenant antithesis of the Bible. There was no more any higher spirituality or higher conscience or mystical awareness. Both prayer and work were sacred – or could be profane, if in violation of Scripture. What most opponents of the Reformation at the time, and most Christians today don’t realize, is that the doctrine of the Sovereignty of God is first and foremost a doctrine of the Closeness of God. That closeness of which Moses spoke when he said in Deut. 30:12-14,

It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up to heaven for us to get it for us and make us hear it, that we may observe it?’ “Nor is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross the sea for us to get it for us and make us hear it, that we may observe it?’ “But the word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart, that you may observe it.

A God Who is absolutely Sovereign is also a God Who doesn’t need man’s efforts to establish a spiritual connection. He grants access with any efforts of man, because such a God can be everywhere, near his worshipers, in fact, even in their mouth as they speak. The doctrine of the Sovereignty of God thus restored, Christians didn’t need any special efforts to reach God. A simple prayer – or even a silent prayer – will be heard, without mystical exercises and lavish rituals. Man was thus freed again to focus on the practical application of the Gospel in the real world. Out of this came an enormous growth of innovation and industry; and eventually, the Western civilization established its technological and economic superiority. Not because Westerners are any better than the rest of the world, but because the faith they had adopted was superior. When everything in life is spiritual, when you don’t have to work to get access to God, and when God is as close to you as your mouth, there is no limit to creativity and growth. Men go to work and produce because they know they don’t have to spend hours and days procuring God’s mercy. It is already theirs.

The antithesis should be obvious to any Reformed Christian: A God Who is near vs. gods who are remote, in another realm. Access to God provided by God Himself vs. man groping in the darkness, trying to touch something he doesn’t even know what. Ethical obedience and commitment vs. mystical exercises and rituals for bridging the gap between the two realms. Full practical judicial participation in the world God has created vs. withdrawal, passivity, and self-castration. The Biblical faith is not mystical; it doesn’t try to manipulate God to listen. To the contrary, God listens even when you wish He didn’t. It doesn’t try to create a higher consciousness. Your higher covenantal consciousness is simple and rational; it is your knowledge of the Law of God and the application of it for judging all. Simple and clear.

But not so simple and clear to today’s Reformed Christians.

A few months ago I listened to a sermon by a well-known and respected Reformed celebrity. I admit, I seldom listen to sermons by celebrities anymore. They are all the same to me. They all speak of the same things over and over again, and they are all focused on the same limited range of topics: The confessions, the sacraments, personal salvation, church membership and obedience to the elders, and personal holiness. They would probably go as far as to speak of the Christian families and parents and children – and even there it is everyone repeating the same things over and over again. (I don’t even know why people in those pews need to be repeated the same simple things over and over again.) To me, every modern sermon I hear is just the same sermon as the previous, just on a different verse. The broader ethical/judicial application of the faith to all of life is missing. This particular sermon, however, was recommended to me by a friend, so I decided to listen to it.

The preacher was very emotional, and his topic was personal holiness and dealing with sin. Not a bad topic, of course, we all need it. Since the preacher passed for Reformed, I expected him to apply the Reformed understanding to the issue. Namely, “You are a sinner, period. You have no way to change that. But God has already changed that. You are now still a sinner, but you are a redeemed sinner. And you are also a transformed sinner. Thus, repent for your sins, ask God to help you in your unbelief, and this is it. And now, go find a productive occupation and make the world a better place for the Kingdom of God. And if sin returns to you, rebuke it and reject it. If you succumb to it, ask for forgiveness, learn your lessons, and . . . get back to work. Never abide on your sin, or on what miserable sinner you are. Abide on the purpose God has for your life.”

But I was mistaken. The preacher, supposedly Reformed, was not going to let his listeners off the hook so easy. If they wanted holiness, they had to work for it.

He did first talk about our general sin and the sins we commit. He did mention that there is a ready solution to them: repent and believe. With a God so close to us, nothing more is needed. In fact, nothing more can be done anyway. And here, where his sermon should have moved on to the Kingdom and the work associated with it, he took a turn. This was only the initial step. There was more.

Once we have repented, according to him, we need to go deeply into our hearts and start searching for more sins to confess and repent. Start examining for sin every thought we ever had, every desire we ever had. Examine our appetite, our desire for fancier clothes. Examine the way we think and dream. Examine our vocabulary, the words we use. Try actively to find any sin we may have committed or commit.

Then go back to our past. What sins have been most prone to. What can we do to avoid them. Build awareness of those sins. Spend some time every day recapitulating those sins and asking God to free us of them.

Our minds must abide on these things all the time. Our sanctification and perfection is the most important thing for us. More important than our work or ministry. If we do not achieve that perfection that God requires in repentance, our life is a wasted life. We are obligated to apply ourselves to such exercises, constantly, and strive for that purity without which no one can see God.

Our work for the Kingdom? It is just secondary. In fact, we better not do it unless we have resolved the problem with our spirituality and purity first. Nothing more matters.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, of course. While other preachers are less emotional and less emphatic, the majority of sermons in the Reformed churches are like this one: focused on pietistic issues, and very often, like the desert hermits of the early church, working hard to find demons everywhere in order to play “spiritual warfare” against them. There is an extensive concentration on one’s own navel, on one’s own spiritual perfection, and one’s own salvation.

It all must come, of course, with making our practical work in the world a lower priority. Perhaps not as bad as the hermits, but close. Perhaps not as brutal as the castration of the pagan priests, but close. At the very least, the scope of your work in the world should be limited; you need the time to search for those demons in your heart.

On the surface, it looks very pious. It is, after all, true spirituality: spirituality free of involvement in the world. In fact, the world and our work in it are put on the back burner, until we achieve the true access to God, through spiritual exercises. Withdraw and focus on yourself. The ancient pagan mysteries revived, in a theologically correct form.

Behind this mentality, as behind all pagan mentality, there is a worldview of selfishness. It regards the Gospel as centered on the salvation and the perfection of the individual. There is truth to the saying that “Jesus died for me.” But the modern Reformed Christians take this to mean that “me” was the central point of Jesus’s death. As if the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit have for their ultimate goal and purpose the salvation of individuals. With salvation being the ultimate goal of the Gospel, the Kingdom of God remains in the second place. It’s all about ME. That was the main objective of paganism also. The pagan worships his gods not because he believes they deserve worship, and not because he elevates them to a higher level. He worships them because he wants to get something from them. His worship of them is not a covenant, it is a market transaction: I sacrifice this for you, you give me that. The gods had to be placated to provide favors for their worshipers – whether prosperity, or salvation, or military success. Outside such favors, worship was useless and didn’t make any sense. If the gods didn’t deliver, they didn’t deserve worship.

In the modern pseudo-Calvinism, the same focus is obvious – except that the favor that is sought now is personal salvation. Personal salvation, personal perfection, personal sinlessness, personal purity. And the work of the Kingdom of God, of applying the Gospel to all of life, of bringing God’s righteousness and justice to earth and administer them in our societies, is neglected. We have built for ourselves a comfortable, navel-gazing religion.

And it is this religion which has destroyed the influence of the church in America. It is time to throw it on the dustbin of history. The legacy of the Reformation teaches us that we shouldn’t invest our time in achieving personal perfection. Pietism and mysticism are not the legacy of the Gospel, and not the legacy of the Reformation. Our sins are real, and the judgment for them is real. But our redemption is even more real. We won’t make our sinful nature less sinful by exercises. We will achieve perfection only when we do God’s work in this world, and we let God do His in us. Our personal salvation is only a means to a goal. And we better treat it like that.

The book I will assign for reading this week is Gary DeMar’s You’ve Heard It Said. The book contains simple but comprehensive answers to modern pietism. Read that book, and teach your children to avoid the mysticism and pietism of the modern Reformed churches. Nothing kills true Biblical spirituality as a navel-gazing religion, devoted to attention on the self, and subjecting all of God’s work to our own salvation and perfection. God is our perfection. But He won’t do out Kingdom work for us.

Also, remember in your prayers and giving Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a foreign mission to Eastern Europe committed to preaching the whole counsel of God to all of life. We have books to translate and publish, an intellectual foundation to build. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to the newsletter, and donate.

Welcome to Episode 54 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes I would like to tackle the question, “What is true leadership?” And, to ask the same question in more practical and obvious terms, “What kind of leadership changes history?” The question, obviously, is the same, because true leadership is only defined by real results from it. If the work of an alleged “leader” doesn’t result in any visible change in history, if things remain the same as they have always been, then that alleged “leader” hasn’t really led his people too far, has he? And as I tackle true leadership, I want to do it in the context of a growing movement, or, rather, a growing ideology, or, rather, a growing worldview in the Church in America today, namely, Abolish Human Abortion. Why do I want to do it in this context? Well, because abolition of abortion is about the most “radical” of all ideas that are floating in the church today. You know, there are many ideas whose authors and adherents claim to be “radical”; but when I look at them, the claim is simply ridiculous. Recently, for example, a supposedly Reformed celebrity preacher thundered from his pulpit that the idea of the grace of God being sufficient for salvation was a “radical” idea, and there is no idea that the world hates more than it. He, of course, has been preaching mainly the grace of God (not His Kingdom, nor His judgment, nor much of anything else) for over thirty years, and that from behind one of the safest pulpits ever in history, raking in 70+ million dollars in tax-free donations a year; and over the course of those 30+ years, there has not been one recorded case where he has been persecuted by any worldly power for preaching the grace of God. (In fact, in at least one case, he encouraged the state to persecute other Christians for acting as Christians.) It doesn’t take much brainpower to realize that his claims of the grace of God being a “radical idea hated by the world” are empty babble. Hated, radical ideas meet a different kind of reaction from the world. Such truly radical idea today is the abolition of abortion. Judging from the reaction of the world – and judging from the reaction of the vast majority of alleged “church ministers” – it is truly a radical and hated idea. Thus, obviously, if there is an area where we will have to see true leadership, it will be in the abolition of abortion in America. Preaching the same old theological milk from behind safe 501(c)3 pulpits or making celebrity debates and conferences on long-resolved theoretical and theological topics is not where true leadership is exercised.

Anyone who has been at the abortion mills knows what hatred is; he knows what it is to meet the Beast face in face. (Remember that scene from The Lord of the Rings where Pippin decided to look into the Palantir, and the paralyzing hatred he saw? That’s you see every time you confront the staff and the murderous mothers in front of the mill.) Operation Rescue people experienced it on their bodies when they tried to interpose and block the access to some mills. The hatred of their opponents was so strong that even cops who otherwise claim they are Christian and go to church every week, were not above brutally torturing women and elderly people on the street, and even kicking and torturing pregnant women until their babies were killed in the womb. This same hatred continues today, unabated, and it comes more and more from the same celebrities who hide behind their 501(c)3 pulpits, and call the cops on those faithful Christians who today call for the abolition of legalized murder. And when it comes to political action, even elected representatives are not safe from this hatred; the Texas House representative who introduced the bill to abolish abortion, Tony Tinderholt, was the target of numerous anonymous death threats. And the same happened to representatives in other states as well.

Thus, Evangelical celebrities worth millions of dollars babble about persecutions, but they always stay within their safe perimeters when it comes to preaching and action. The real action and preaching, earning real persecution, is done outside the institutional system of American Evangelicalism. And it is there where we should be looking for examples of true leadership, and it is on that soil that we need to discuss the different approaches to leadership. The pulpits are dead, and it’s time for us to acknowledge this reality. But the Church is still alive, outside the pulpits and separate from the pulpits, and we need to plan and discuss the future of the Church in such terms.

Just plunging into the world of radical and universally hated ideas, however, is not sufficient . . . especially if we plunge in it with no clear idea of what we are doing, and with no principles for action and plan for expansion and success. By default, being the proponent of a radical and hated idea is a lonely business; to make it worse, being an active worker for a radical and hated idea leaves you not only lonely but also a target for other people’s hatred. (I can tell you a number of stories from my mission work in Bulgaria.) By default, you start from very small and humble beginnings. You need to grow from those humble beginnings. The vast majority of people around you will be most apathetic about your passion. At the very least, they don’t care if children are butchered across the street from their church building. In most cases, they or their pastors have made up some good excuses why they shouldn’t care or why they shouldn’t act as if they cared. And since our war is first and foremost for capturing the minds of men, anyone who engages in such a ministry, will have to be a true leader, if he is to succeed in his vision and mission. People will follow a true leader; they won’t follow a fake leader. Or, more precisely, a true leader will attract the right kind of people, those who will indeed fight the right battle the right way and with the right spirit. A fake leader, on the other hand, may attract people, but they won’t be the right kind of people, and they won’t have the right spirit to fight the battle. At the beginning, it may not be obvious who’s attracting and leading the right kind of people. Over time, however, it will become obvious. What I want to do here is to lay the principles for making that judgment as early as possible, so that we don’t waste time and effort following false leaders.

Now, before you misunderstand me, this episode is not about training leaders. As much as we can talk about leadership, I don’t believe in training leaders. I don’t believe in leadership conferences, seminars, books, training manuals etc. All these are useless. Why? Because Biblically, leaders are not trained, they are born. No matter how much you train a person to be a leader, no matter how many titles you put before his name or ordain him thousands of times in big ceremonies or give him enormous power over people, he won’t be a leader if he was not born to be a leader. And no matter how much you try to suppress a born leader – put him in chains, in jail, or even kill him – he will continue to be a leader once he touches the field where he was born to be a leader. We don’t try to create leaders; leadership is a spiritual gift and it is only conferred by the Holy Spirit, irrespective of human decisions and PR campaign and ordination ceremonies. The best we can do is try to encourage the born leaders among us by opening the broad horizons of the Kingdom of God before as many covenant people as we can, hoping that the Holy Spirit will stir their leadership gift to action, and praying for discernment to be able to recognize His leaders and sift out those driven by human ambition and pride. Thus, y’all need to understand, my purpose here is not to talk about how we train leaders. My purpose is to talk about how we discern and recognize the true leaders God has raised. And it is there where we Christians so often fail, and where we so often reward with our obedience and money petty dictators, manipulators, soulless and faceless bureaucrats, entertainment gurus, PR experts – in short, we obey and follow and elevate and idolize people whom God despises. And we despise those whom He has really raised as His servants, for the growth and the maturity of His Church. And it is because of this widespread failure that the American church in the last one century has been such a disaster, delivering into the hands of the enemy a culture that our ancestors in the faith had won for Christ.

Whether we realize it or not, whether we are willing to admit it or not, our modern Christianity has inherited a concept of “leadership” from our pagan past, a concept which continues to plague our churches today and our society today. That concept is that a leader is someone who is capable of gathering a host of followers who do the bidding of the leader. He has the collective vision, he has control over the collective mission, and he is the one barking out orders. The structure of his ministry is usually pyramidal, with one or a few elite leaders at the top who control everything the ministry does. The rest are either only participants, or workers, whose function is only to perform the tasks given to them by the leaders. They are not expected, and often not allowed to speak as representatives of the ministry. They are all admonished to “submit” to the leaders of the ministry, or, to put it in some more religious terms, “to place themselves under the care” of the leaders of the ministry. Under permanent care, to be precise, for such an ideology of leadership assumes the permanence of the relation “leader-follower.” A leader is a job for life, and the leader is entitled to permanent obedience from his followers. Or, to put it in Biblical terms, the followers are expected to remain immature and in need of being babysat by the leaders for life.

Just a couple of months ago I had the opportunity to witness an example of such kind of thinking and ideology, in a conversation with the pastor of a PCA church. The man was no different than the vast majority of Presbyterian pastors in this country – about 99% of them: limited knowledge of the Bible, barely educated in the doctrines of the Reformation, unfamiliar even with the constitution of his own denomination, and utterly incapable of any logical discourse. In short, the typical representative of three generations of Presbyterian ministers who, for the last one century, have led Presbyterianism to collapse from being the dominant cultural influence in America to being just a marginal sect today, salt thrown out and trampled under the feet of men. At some point in our conversation I asked him if he believed that church government was necessary for the existence of the church; my point was to return him back to his own denomination’s constitution which explicitly says that church government is not necessary for the being of the church, only for its well-being. His first reply was that church government was necessary for the being of the church – that is, if there is no formal church government, there is no church. That was contrary to his own denomination’s constitution. When I pointed to him the very church constitution to which he had taken an oath to subscribe, he changed his reply, and then added that what he meant was that a mature church would need church government, and that he expects only immature churches to not have governments . . . but as they mature, they will have to have governments.

I know, this is just one Presbyterian pastor, and he was rather low-level in terms of knowledge and education; but the evidence around us is that he is not alone. Presbyterians or Baptists, Reformed, Charismatics, Methodists, Lutherans, in the whole American church today, this is the established view: that the more “mature” a church becomes, the more it has to have institutionalized legal power and the establishment of an elite caste of “leaders.” The function of the Church is defined by its elite government; the purpose of the Church is institutionalization, and “maturity” is defined not in terms of the growth of the individual believers in the Church, but rather in terms of greater institutionalization.

This, of course, is contrary to the testimony of Scripture. The promise of the New Covenant is that it will lead to mature individuals who won’t need to be under anyone’s guidance, because they will all know God (Heb. 8:11; Jer. 31:34). Numerous other promises in the Old Testament point to the fact that under the New Covenant, all believers will be taught directly by God (see, for example, John 6:45, or Is. 54:13). The author of Hebrews, in chapter 5, chastises his readers that they still need someone to teach them, and then admonishes them to grow to maturity where they themselves should be teachers and don’t need to return to the six basic doctrines. Where special ministries of special authority will be needed, they will be temporary, until the individual believers under their ministries achieve maturity: In Eph. 4, after Paul says that God gave apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers, he adds, “until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.” The role of these ministries is temporary, and their authority is temporary, just as the authority of parents and teachers is temporary; and Paul adds: “As a result, we are no longer to be children.” The purpose of Biblical leadership is not the maturity of the institution, but the maturity of the individual. Thus, Biblically, the more mature a church is, the less it will need a government. Not the other way around.

Such a top-down view of leadership, of course, comes from paganism. It is in paganism where “authority” is conceived of as a top-down relationship, and where authority is expected to “organize” men into collectives under a central command. The Bible contains numerous testimonies that the farther men deviate from God, the less value their human individuality has to them, and the more they succumb to centralized government, tyranny, and bureaucracy. Right after the Flood, we see Nimrod leading the way by establishing his own empire in the lands where today Mesopotamia is (Gen. 10:8-12). The Tower of Babel of which the next chapter of Genesis speaks was built in the same lands, under Nimrod’s empire. (By the way, contrary to modern fashionable interpretations, the Tower of Babel was not an attempt at globalism; it was rather an attempt at localism, at gathering people locally under the power of a local leader, or local pastor, or local governing body. The fear of these people was that they were going to be scattered globally. God’s answer to their rebellion was true globalism: He scattered them over the face of the earth. Next time you hear some celebrity preacher see “globalism” in the Tower of Babel, keep in mind he hasn’t read the text.) Further on, the pagan nations around Abraham and later Israel are shown to be controlled by the whim of their kings. Neither Egypt nor the nations of Canaan had anything close to a free society based on public law and self-government; they all had kings who were expected to rule by diktat and permit. The same principle was operational in all pagan empires in history: a small elite at the top, ruling with raw power over the masses of people. At the first attempt at establishing a monarchy in Israel, the rule of Abimelech, Jotham, the youngest son of Gideon, responded with the finest parable in all history of the nature of centralized political power, in Judges 9:7-15. In the final account, when people want to establish a centralized power over themselves, they end with the worst (the brambles) being at the top, trying to subjugate all the productive members of the society (olive trees, fig trees, and vines), threatening them with vengeance if they don’t. Israel was meant to be exactly the opposite: the ideal constitution was no earthly king, and a population that was thoroughly instructed in the Law, in private and in public, capable of maintaining law and order without any official bureaucracy or police or other executive institutions.

Jesus explained the same principle to His disciples when they were arguing who would be the greatest: “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those who exercise authority over them are called ‘Benefactors’” (Luke 22:25). And then He said that “It’s not this way among you.” In His Kingdom, the concept of greatness and leadership and authority was to be very different.

In general, such ideology of the vertical nature of leadership affects everyone in the churches, but its principal victims are people who have been through some abuse in their past – usually drug addicts, orphans, slaves, victims of domestic abuse, oppressed peoples, etc. The tactics of establishing a mini-empire of vertical “leadership” is to find a social sample of people who suffer from abuse, and liberate them from that abuse, but only to the point where they will be simply attached to their new liberator, not freed to develop to maturity and to follow their own individual purpose in life. Being freed of a more damaging dependence, such people will gladly accept a less damaging dependence as an “improvement” in their life; and then, not being taught to become independent, they will be constantly reminded of their old dependence, so that they appreciate the new one. A very informative example of the nature of this tactics can be seen in the educational theory and practice of the Communist educational expert, Anton Makarenko, in the 1920s and the 1930s in the Soviet Union. In his attempt to create, through education, the new Soviet man who will be perfectly obedient to the Party and shaped and motivated and conditioned by the collective, Makarenko focused his educational efforts on orphans who were in abundance in the Soviet Union after decades of constant wars and political purges. Having come from a life of chronic starvation and living on the streets, without shelter, the orphans found in the new educational colonies obvious improvement of their lives: regular nutrition and relative safety. An important part of the children’s education was being reminded of their past; but since no individual purpose and future were taught, the children were trained to grow in subjection to the collective, and in obedience to the Party. Eventually, some of Makarenko’s early disciples became henchmen for Stalin’s regime; after the death of Stalin, many were used as spies abroad or as informants at home.

Granted, the same ideology of “leadership” in the churches doesn’t result in such extreme immoral use of people, but it does lead to the same lack of individual purpose and future for the followers. The exorbitant focus on “grace” and on “our wretched sinfulness” in modern “Reformed” preaching, without any follow-up with the concepts of the Dominion Covenant and the Kingdom of God in history, has the same purpose as the educational tactics of Makarenko: Keep the listeners focused on their miserable past, never offer them a glorious individual meaning of a future of maturity and productivity, and insist on their “obedience” and “being under care,” so that they remain constantly dependent on their current “leaders.”

Of course, since a mass of people is supposed to be ruled or “taken care of” by a small elite of “ministers,” high social visibility is a must for the “leaders,” for without such high social visibility, control and manipulation become difficult. In previous eras, such visibility was achieved through two means: magnificent construction projects (think the Tower of Babel, designed to prevent people from scattering, and think of all the construction marvels of the ancient world), and lavish garments and ceremonies. Israel’s public ceremonies were decentralized and limited to eating and drinking before the Lord; the only centralized public ceremony was every seven years and was a public reading of the Law, not a pompous ceremony of worshiping the political power. Communism was just as committed to gigantic centralized ceremonies that establish the high social visibility of the state. But Communism was also the political system that introduced the new tool for high social visibility: the media. Vladimir Lenin said in 1919, in conversation with film producers, that “of all arts, the most important to us is the cinema.” Following that, the Soviet Union produced the first state propaganda films in the 1920s and the 1930s, and they astonishingly impressive for the time. With the cinema – and the media in general – providing this high social visibility, modern “leadership” thus has changed the requirements for the modern so-called “leaders.” A “leader” today is is an entertainer, someone proficient in the use of media, someone capable of keeping his followers fixed on the screen, a PR expert, a producer of movies or of music, etc. This change in the concept of the “leader” into an entertainer led to the emergence of modern celebrity worship in the churches in the US; all the celebrity preachers in the US are skillful media manipulators first and foremost. Most “ministries” are stuck at the same level of teaching and preaching, ministries of 30+ years teach today exactly the same things they have taught 30 years ago. Thus, real service of helping their listeners mature to higher levels of theological and practical knowledge is not valued; what is valued is the ability of the “leader” to find fancier and more entertaining ways of saying the same old simple, basic things, to keep his audience fixed on the superficial, and never really go in depth in teaching them to discern good and evil in everything, as mature men should do. Only in the last one year I have counted two dozen new and fancier phrases by modern “Reformed” celebrities to say that we were dead in our sins and we were saved by grace; for the same period, not a single one of these same “Reformed” celebrities offered to his listeners any tactical knowledge of how to fight evil and injustice in our society, let alone lead them in the fight for abolishing abortion. The modern “Reformed” world is a huge tomb full of dead bones, but its walls are covered with pure sparkling white. No true leadership can come out of dead bones.

While the system based on such concept of leadership – a small elite of entertainers and conference speakers and a large crowd of faceless and inactive listeners – may command for a time superior financial resources, in reality, it produces no results. Let me qualify this statement: it can produce no results for the Kingdom of God. It does serve well the purposes of small human kingdoms – whether political establishments or denominations or local churches – but it never produces any advance of the Gospel. As the churches in the US shifted their operational focus from individual maturity to collectivist submission to institutional hierarchy (local churches and denominations), they lost both their ability to preach the Gospel and their ability to influence the culture. I have talked in a previous episode about American Presbyterianism and how within less than two generations it degenerated from being the dominant influence in America to being a marginal sect of no significance at all: an astonishing modern example of salt that has lost its savor and is thrown out to be trampled by men. The same applies to all American churches in general. The pro-life movement, very early in its history, adopted the same system of leadership, a small political and ecclesiastical elite and large faceless masses who are only expected to send the checks and wait for the magic to happen at the highest levels of church and civil government. Forty-plus years later, that kind of “leadership” has led us nowhere, abortion continues to be legalized, Planned Parenthood makes more money than ever and laughs in the face of the pro-life movement, and the “leaders” of that movement continue asking for more money from the same gullible public that has bought into their concept of leadership. And, as if that is not clear, we have new celebrities now who continue subscribing to the same kind of institutionalized leadership, and continue offering promises that if we just have another conference to “train” church ministers how to do it, this time we will certainly be able to “end abortion.” As if the problem of these church ministers so far has been their lack of knowledge, and not their cowardice, greed, and lust for power. Institutionalized leadership doesn’t work for the Kingdom of God. It has never worked for the Kingdom of God, and never will.

Sit down and hold fast to your chair. You will be administered a doze of BFO, that is, a blinding flash of the obvious. If you grasp it, it will immediately explain to you the reasons for the gigantic failure of leadership in the American churches in the last one century, that same failure which has made the church be thrown out and trampled under the feet of men.

Here it is: The ultimate example of true leadership and discipleship in history and in the Bible was designed so as to only continue three and a half years.

In three and a half years the disciples were given the vision and some initial training in basic things. Then they were left alone with the Holy Spirit. Worse than that: they were brutally weaned off of their dependence on their Leader. Yes, not just left alone; they had to witness the crucifixion of their leader, which pretty much sealed it for them: He is not coming back. He designed it that way, to show an example of leadership. In His concept of leadership, unless He left them alone, they wouldn’t get the Holy Spirit. John 15:7 is very clear: “If I don’t go, the Helper will not come to you.” The Holy Spirit doesn’t come to people who are dependent on constant babysitting by their leaders. The Holy Spirit comes only to teach adult people to maturity, to being able to discern between good and evil in everything, without having to be “under the care of leaders,” and without having to return over and over again to the milk of the faith (Heb. 5:11-6:2).

This should be a no-brainer. As I have mentioned in many other places, this is one of the most prominent promises of the New Covenant, that all will be taught directly by God (Is. 54:13; John 6:45); that there will be no more a need for people teaching each other (Jer. 31:34; Heb. 8:11). That was the very purpose of the giving of the Holy Spirit: so that everyone who believes can know God, and there is no need for middlemen. The Levitical priesthood was removed; the access to God is open. And this access is not just limited to salvation, as many allegedly “Reformed” claim; it is an access of priesthood, that is, of direct learning and direct authority for every individual believer in the redemption of the world.

True Biblical leadership, therefore, has for its purpose not the perennial dependency of the masses under the leaders, but to the contrary, the maturity of each individual to do the work of the Kingdom. It is always temporary, until the listeners achieve maturity, as Ephesians 4:13 teaches. A true Biblical leader is not one who leads a host of faceless followers; he starts a fire in the minds of men and only makes sure the fire continues to spread. As far as his leadership and authority is concerned, the Biblical leader works hard to phase himself out of relevance; he does everything he can to say to his disciples, “I have to go, so that you continue the work.” The sooner, the better. Any Evangelical celebrity who plans for a lifetime of “ministry” – profitable ministry, to be precise – is not worth following, and odds are, he is a dangerous wolf. Especially if he continues insisting on “obedience” and “being under the care of leaders.” It is the maturity of the disciples that is the focus of a true leader, not the survival of his own “ministry.”

This is the way Jesus acted with His disciples, and this is the way Paul treated his converts. Paul never stopped for too long at the same place to establish himself as a “leader.” He never requested obedience to himself as a leader. Initially, he didn’t even establish authority structures in the churches he planted; most of his epistles speak not to the elders in the churches but only to the mass of Christians in them. See, or example, how he deals with the disorder in the Corinthian church; there is not a single reference to elders or church ministers in the several chapters where Paul lays down the rules for order in the church. He expected that the Christians in Corinth – yes, even in Corinth – will be mature enough to establish order without any hierarchical structures. The only cases in which he arranged for the ordination of elders and establishment of structures is in the epistles to Timothy and Titus; and in both cases the reason was that disorderliness of those churches was so great, that there was no hope of recovery without some level of institutional structure. If the Christians in those churches were more mature – like the Corinthians – such measure wouldn’t be needed.

“I have come to cast fire upon the earth,” Jesus said in Luke 12:49. He had just finished speaking about stewardship as servanthood. He continued speaking about division on the earth; and that division was to be not some gigantic collective clash of armies but division on individual and family level, within the families: three against two and two against three, father against son, mother against daughter, etc. This all tells us that the fight will be at individual level first and foremost; for people to be willing to stand against their families, there had to be strong commitment and leadership in each one of these individuals. The family always commands the strongest loyalty; only a committed leader will be able to break from the bonds of such loyalty and pursue righteousness and justice. The fire Jesus was speaking about was that leadership which spreads like a fire: creating more and more independent individuals who can lead others to become independent individuals. So independent that they would be able to stand even against their own families of they oppose the Gospel. It was not a fire of faceless collectives; it was a to be a movement of committed, independent, free individuals, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. And only such a movement can achieve the goals of the Kingdom of God.

Abortion, therefore, won’t be ended by professional entertainers and institutional leaders building their own brand names and a host of spectators. Neither will it be ended by conferences that rely on the institutional church system to do the work; the pastors’ inactivity is not caused because they don’t know what to do, and won’t be removed by teaching them what to do. Abortion will be abolished only by the work of those leaders who, within three and a half years, recreate themselves in many others, through teaching them the vision, and entrusting them to the Holy Spirit. The true Biblical leaders whose first care is the maturity, and not the institutional obedience of their listeners. Those who are building a movement based on a vision and a worldview, not an institution based on personal charisma and soundbites. And therefore leaders who work hard to phase themselves out of relevance, because their vision has been multiplied beyond their limited reach, and the fire is spreading.

The book I will assign this week is R.J. Rushdoony’s The Atheism of the Early Church. A short book with short chapters. But full of important content. There is a chapter in it, titled “The Future of Justice.” Pay close attention to what it says.

And remember in your prayers and giving Bulgarian Reformation Ministries: A foreign mission devoted to building a Christian civilization in Eastern Europe by building first the intellectual foundation for it: translation and publishing of books and other materials. While working on this episode, I am also preparing for my annual trip to Bulgaria for our Worldview Conference there, where Joel McDurmon and I will be speaking on personal investment, entrepreneurship, and the future. We need your prayers and your support. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to the newsletter, and donate. May God bless you all.

Welcome to Episode 53 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 one of the worst sins of Christian Reconstruction in the eyes of antinomian supposedly “Reformed” seminary professors: namely, its doctrine of covenantal sanctions in history. We won’t talk just in general terms about it, nor will we repeat over and over the theology behind it. This theology has already been expressed sufficiently by men greater than me, like R.J. Rushdoony, Gary North, and Greg Bahnsen. In fact, going all the way back to the Reformation, giants like John Calvin and John Knox believed that God visits nations and groups and kings and ruling bodies, in history, with His judgment – whether judgment for blessing for their obedience (as imperfect it can be at times) or judgment for curse for their disobedience. I don’t need to repeat their words; it is your responsibility to sit on your you-know-what and read the big books. No amount of podcasts and episodes can replace solid reading. If you want to know what books speak of this doctrine of God’s covenantal sanctions in history, you can find it developed in Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law, in chapters 13 and 15 of his Systematic Theology, and also in his Biblical Philosophy of History, in Greg Bahnsen’s By This Standard andTheonomy in Christian Ethics, as well as in Gary North’s Unconditional Surrender, Dominion and Common Grace, Millennialism and Social Theory, and the economic commentary on Numbers. And you can also revisit John Calvin’s sermons on Deuteronomy 27-28.

So, in this episode I will be giving a specific historical example. It’s much easier, y’know, after the big guys have written their books, for me to look at history and discover specific examples of a Biblical covenantal principle. Having studied history extensively, I can give tons of them, especially from the history of the Balkans, which I know quite well. But since these last weeks another European country has been in the focus of American conservatives – France – I will use the history of France as an example. And specifically, the history of the Roman Catholics in France as a distinct religious and cultural group.

Several years ago I gave talk at an American Vision conference, titled “Europe as a Mirror to America.” In it, one of the historical examples I gave was the example of the French province of the Vendée and the revolt in the 1790s of its Roman Catholic population against the Republican government in Paris during the French Revolution. While I gave historical accounts of the horrible massacre of Roman Catholics by Republican troops (named officially “the columns of hell”), my focus was rather on the agenda of political secularism in fighting Christendom. In the case of the Vendée revolt, the issue was authority: whether family and church as institutions will be controlled by the government, or will remain as separate and independent in their spheres of jurisdiction. And I explained the reason why the French Republican government, in times of total war on all its frontiers against all of Europe, decided to set aside 20% of its army to not simply pacify, but completely massacre and obliterate a small province which was posing no real strategic threat to the government in Paris. The issue was religious, of course, it was an issue of whether family and church will remain free of government interference, or will become, in everything, subservient to the state.

What I didn’t cover, however, was, why this happened to the Roman Catholics in the Vendée. And, in fact, why it all happened to France. Why did France, which used to be the most staunchly Roman Catholic nation in Europe, suddenly fall into secularism? And even worse, why did it have to happen with such bloodshed? Secularism advanced in other countries as well, but in many of them, while there was a change towards tyranny – because secularism always presupposes the tyranny of man, the new god – very few of them had such domestic genocide as France did. Why did that happen? This question is very important from a covenantal perspective, because it involves a fundamental ethical/judicial issue: why did moral restraint in France fail so spectacularly, to the point of Frenchmen killing Frenchmen by the hundreds of thousands and the millions?

The covenantal importance of this question becomes even more obvious when we consider the traditional role of France in Europe throughout most of the history of Christendom. Today, Americans and most Europeans look at France with a slight dose of condescension and even some disdain. After all, this is the country which, despite its population, got effortlessly defeated by Germany in three major wars (the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, WWI, and WWII). In the two world wars, France had to rely on the help of the United States, which most French disdain as an example of rugged individualism and capitalism; and of national pride and arrogance also. (Although, I would say on the pride and arrogance, the French seem to compete well with us, Americans; just as we seem to be trying to catch up with them in the socialism and collectivism race.) To add insult to the injury, France seems to be never capable of catching up with Germany in terms of economic growth, even when the cards are stacked decisively in its favor. After WWI, France received enormous reparations from Germany, plus control over Germany’s most industrialized province, for several years. After WWII, Germany was devastated, deprived of 1/3 of its previous territory, and split in two. And yet, in both cases, just a decade down the road, France was eating the dust behind Germany’s economic train.

The French themselves are aware of the inferiority of their own country. Just a few weeks ago, before the elections, one of the candidates, Marie le Pen, stated that no matter what the result of the elections, France will be ruled by a woman: Either Marie le Pen herself, or Germany’s Angela Merkel. How correct that statement is we will leave aside; but the fact that it was accepted as valid by at least 40% of France’s active voters shows that the French do not consider their country powerful or stable enough, and always in danger of being controlled by another nation. A sentiment that would be natural for a small Eastern European country, but hardly expected to come from one of the supposed world’s superpowers.

Strange that this should be so. For much of its history, France was the undisputed political and cultural center of Europe. She was also the undisputed demographic center of Europe. In its modern territories, France reached a population of almost 30 million in the late 1600s and the early 1700s. To compare, Germany at the time (devastated by the Thirty-Year War), was about 10-12 million, and England, Scotland, and Wales numbered less than 7 million total. Four hundred years later, the UK has grown to 65 million (10-fold increase), Germany, with all its wars and disasters and calamities and political turmoil, and within only 2/3 of its previous territory, has grown to 82 million (7-8-fold increase), while France has grown to only 64 million, barely over two-fold increase of the population.

Put it in different terms, if modern stock exchanges existed in the 1500s or the 1600s, and if you asked an investment adviser, “What are the most prosperous and secure economies where I can invest my money for future generations of my children and grandchildren?”, his first answer would be: France. His second answer would be: Spain. These were the most prosperous and the most stable nations in Europe. If anyone suggested that the Netherlands, or Germany, or England, or Switzerland, or Norway would be a good investment, you would laugh at them. And yet, 400 years down the road, France is steadily sinking in the ranking of world’s superpowers, and soon will be nothing more than just another middle-size nation of marginal significance. And that, while nations who previously showed no prospect of any greatness, are now surpassing it on all fronts: economy, culture, technology, influence, etc.

How did that happen? How did the most powerful nation in Christendom for several hundred years sink down to the level of such insignificance?

The answer, of course, is covenantal. France – and specifically the Roman Catholic population of France, as a distinct religious and cultural group – has been under God’s covenantal sanctions. And since this group has historically been the largest cultural group in France, God’s covenantal curse on it has been affecting France as a whole. And the curse has been for committed injustice and murder against a whole group of other Frenchmen, for no other reason but for their conversion to Protestantism. This sin of the French Roman Catholics was not simply a sin of passivity and omission, where the civil rulers commit the injustice and the population just remains silent. (Think of the Holocaust in Germany.) It was a sin of commission, or even of active commitment by the general Roman Catholic population, far beyond the orders of its rulers, and at times, in opposition and disobedience to their rulers’ edicts for toleration. We all know of the French Revolution and of the drunkenness of a whole generation in France and the rivers of blood shed during the last two decades of the 18th century. What is less known is that France had experienced a much worse drunkenness 200 years before that, and had shed rivers of blood for several generations.

To find out about it, we need to go back to the time of the Reformation. France gave the Reformation two of its most illustrious scholars and theologians, namely, William Farel and John Calvin. Calvin, whose name remained in history because of his work in the Reformation in Geneva, but also because of his enormous productivity as an author and his ability to summarize Christian doctrine, wrote in two languages: Latin and his native French. When we today think of Calvin’s influence, we always imagine nations like the Netherlands, Scotland, England, and the United States. The truth is, originally, the first country to be most seriously impacted by his teachings was his native France.

Calvin published his first systematic treatise on the Christian religion, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, in 1536. It was in Latin. Over the next 28 years, with only a small leave of 2 years, he lived and worked in Geneva, expanding his Institutes, and also producing innumerable volumes of sermons, commentaries, and other theological material. He wrote much of it in French, and the Institutes themselves had six French editions, the last one being in 1560. While his material was mainly meant for the French-speaking Swiss and the Savoyards south of Geneva, an unknown number of copies have been smuggled in France and have been re-printed and distributed. Calvin never returned to his native France, but his books were having influence greater than he could ever achieve himself.

So successful were his books, that by the mid-1560s, and estimated 10-12% of the population of France was Protestant, or, as they called themselves, reformés, Reformed. The majority of the Reformed population was in the west of France, along the Atlantic coast, and the south central of France. These were the regions with the best developed urban and industrial culture; cities like La Rochelle, Montauban, Montpellier, were major industrial centers in the economy of France of the time. Since Protestantism largely spread by the power of persuasion of written theological books, the bulk of the Protestants in France was among the educated and the literate: the nobility and the urban industrial elite and factory workers. For their small overall numbers, Protestants could boast with a disproportional representation in the government of the country. The old royal family of Bourbon of Navarre joined the cause of the Protestants, and the brothers de Coligny – Odet, Gaspar, and François – of an ancient noble family of Burgundy also became champions of the Protestant faith in France. The second oldest of these brothers, Admiral Gaspar de Coligny, eventually became the undisputed political leader of Protestantism in France. As we will see, his influence and authority were of such great importance that when the Roman Catholic royal court decided to move against the Protestants, they found it expedient to start their attack with the assassination of Admiral Gaspar de Coligny.

By the early 1560s, the Protestants in France were known as Huguenots, for reasons that no historian today is able to guess. They were now a force to be reckoned with, for the teachings of Calvin were spreading in a number of cities. In 1558, a national Reformed synod was held in Paris. At the time, France was under the rule of Henry II, a king who was tolerant of the Protestants, and even took their sides on a number of issues. Henry, however, died in 1559 of an infected wound from a jousting incident. His son being only 14, the regency was given to Henry II’s wife, the Italian Catherine de’Medici, a devout Roman Catholic, and a brutal and unprincipled political player.

Catherine started the persecutions almost immediately after the death of her husband. Huguenots were rounded up and delivered to Roman Catholic courts on charges of heresy. The first massacre happened in Wassy in north-east France, where the Huguenots were in the minority. A church gathering of Huguenots was attacked by royal troops and by the local Roman Catholic population. Close to 100 people were murdered, and 200 were wounded. After this, he Huguenots started organizing militarily and politically, and by 1562 they held over 60 walled cities, and their leaders, Henry of Navarre and Admiral de Coligny, commanded a significant army. Catherine de’Medici was soon forced to escalate the conflict to keep up with them, forthe Protestants had become a serious threat to the royal government. For the next eight years, the French Wars of Religion continued with no clear promise of victory to either side; the death toll of these wars, however, for that period, was quite high. Close to half million people lost their lives between 1562 and 1570, until the peace of Saint-Germain, which put an end to the wars and restored all the rights and privileges of the Protestant minority.

Ironically, the culmination and the decisive action in the Wars of Religion came only after the peace treaty was signed. Catherine de’Medici, rather tired of the wars and desirous of consolidating the power of her family through diplomacy, offered her daughter Margaret in marriage to the Protestant prince Henry of Navarre; the rationale was dynastic connections and claims, not so much religion. By 1572 Catherine seems to had lost her zeal for religious controversies. The population of Paris, however, hadn’t. The idea of one of their Roman Catholic princesses being married to a Protestant created a number of riots in Paris in 1572, as distinguished Protestant leaders began to arrive in the city for the royal marriage in August. While the government was seeking reconciliation and co-operation, the population of Paris was revolting. On August 18, 1572, a political assassin by the name of Charles Maurevert shot and wounded Admiral de Coligny, the leader of the Huguenots. For the next several days, rumors were spread in the city that the Huguenots were planning a revenge on the city and on the royal family. The rumors became so persistent, and the pressure of the mobs so uncontrollable, that on August 22, Catherine de’Medici reluctantly decided, for safety, to move against the Huguenots. She broke her promise and oath, as well as the peace treaty she had signed, and ordered the massacre of their leaders gathered in Paris.

On the night of August 23, the carnage started. But it didn’t all go by plan. The original orders were to exterminate only the leaders. Once the common people of Paris got wind of what was happening, all Paris was cheerfully given to hunting and barbaric killing of all Huguenots: including women and children. Remember, the French government didn’t order all the executions; the majority of the murders – especially of non-combatants and innocent people – were committed by the common people of Paris. The St. Bartholomew’s Night was not just government injustice; it was truly a national crime of Biblical proportions, of all French Roman Catholics. Innocent blood was shed on that night on the streets of Paris, blood which later repeatedly spelled curse for Paris and the French nation.

There are no official numbers, but estimates of the massacre give anywhere between 25,000 and 50,000 Huguenots slain in one night. These were the elite of Protestantism in France, plus their entire households. Gaspar de Coligny was killed in his bed and his body was thrown out of the window, on the street. By the morning of August 24, the streets of Paris were full with the bodies of slain Huguenots and covered with blood.

The reaction of Christendom – whether Roman Catholic or Protestant – was unanimously negative. Protestant countries, of course, immediately cut their diplomatic ties with France, and for a generation, France – previously dominant on the European scene – lost both its ability to conduct a successful foreign policy and its control over the trade routes and market. (Protestant merchants, Dutch and English, who were gaining ascendance in the developing trade with Asia and America, simply preferred to avoid French ports.) The Roman Catholic world first reacted with joy to the news: the prospect of losing the most populous and most powerful European nation to Protestantism was a nightmare to the Papacy. When the details of the massacre became known, however, most Roman Catholics outside France changed their minds. The Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian II, father-in-law of the French king Charles IX, described the massacre as “shameful.” Pope Gregory XIII, who first praised the massacre, later had misgivings about it. When the killer of Gaspar de Coligny, Charles Maurevert, wanted an audience with him, the Pope declined under the pretext that Maurevert was a murderer. The massacre became such a focal point of the attention of all Europe that even the Russian Czar, Ivan the Terrible, himself never flinching from shedding the blood of his own people, used it as an argument in a letter to Maximilian II concerning the dynastic succession in Poland. At the end of that letter, he added completely out of context, “You deplore, my brother, the horrible massacre of so many innocents on St. Bartholomew’s Day! All Christian monarchs ought to be distressed on that account!”

The murder of innocents didn’t stop there, however. The King sent orders to the provincial governors to refrain from violence and to abide by the terms of the peace of Saint-Germain. Once the news of the massacre reached the provinces, however, nothing could stop the local Roman Catholic population, goaded by the local clergy, from committing the same crimes. In many cities of France where there was a sizable Huguenot minority, there were massacres. Between August and November 1572, a number of French cities were entirely cleared of Protestants. Nobles and commonfolk, men and women and children were murdered indiscriminately. While numbers it is not possible to have exact numbers, estimates are that only in these months, more than 100,000 Huguenots were killed in France, in addition to the massacre in Paris. Many Huguenots escaped by fleeing deep in the south of France where the influence of Roman Catholicism was weaker. Thousands fled the country towards the Netherlands and England.

The culmination of Protestantism in France was 1572. The Huguenots numbered over 2 million. The pogroms of 1572 decapitated their community. From there, Protestantism started its decline in France. A decline caused not by its weakness, but by the treachery and bloodthirstiness of its enemies.

The persecutions didn’t stop in 1572. The French government tried to restrain the population, and in 1589 an edict of toleration was declared. But that edict was violated multiple times by the central government and by the local governments. And, worstof all, the common population of France continued its hostilities against the Huguenots, despite the government attempts at greater restraint. Eventually, in 1685s, the Sun-King Louis XIV repealed the edict of toleration and declared Protestantism illegal in France. The sanctuary cities of the Huguenots – among which were Montpelier, La Rochelle, and others – were besieged by the army and their walls rased to the ground. Huguenot families were subject to official harassment by army officers, taken to court on trumped-up charges, their children taken away from them, or left to be lynched by the mobs. Within a few years, due to murders or emigration, France lost about 1 million Huguenots, many of whom fled to America or South Africa. By the end of his Reign, Louis XIV bragged that he left not a single Protestant in his realm.

It wasn’t until the French Revolution that a French government officially erased the legal discrimination between the different Christian faiths. But God had more in store for France.

The decline of France as the greatest power in Europe started with the decline of Protestantism, in the late 1500s. For one, since the Huguenots at the time were disproportionately represented among the nobility and the industrial class (factory owners, factory workers, and craftsmen), the death and the emigration of hundreds of thousands of these people made France lose a significant share in the economy of Europe. Blacksmiths and goldsmiths, weavers, technicians and engineers, military commanders and executives took their knowledge and experience with them to the Netherlands and England. The loss of talent and skill is seldom replaceable within one generation; the loss of so much talent and skill was irreplaceable, period. Losing a significant portion of its middle class, France lost its economic advantage over the rest of Europe. The country was pacified, but only at the expense of losing the productivity which the peace was supposed to protect. Peace without rising productivity is the formula for stagnation, and for the next 200 years, France experienced only stagnation, watching its smaller competitors, the Dutch and the English, take over the ocean trade, build mighty fleets, and even challenge France on the battlefields of Europe. In the 1700s, this economic stagnation brought economic crisis, and even widespread famine. It is such famine that eventually became the trigger for the French Revolution; and it also became the context for the famous phrase ascribed to Marie-Antoinette, “If they don’t have bread, let them eat cakes.” God started his covenantal judgment on France immediately after its national crime in 1572.

But the economic judgment was nothing compared to what was coming; God was only preparing the stage for visiting the crimes of the fathers on the children. When the French Revolution started in 1789, its leaders specifically targeted Roman Catholics and their priests exactly the way 200 years earlier the Roman Catholics targeted Protestants. A predominantly Roman Catholic population which had previous rejected having Protestant political and economic elite was now subject to the bloodthirstiness and cruelty of a secularist elite. Ironically, as if to remind the Roman Catholics that this is God’s judgment on them, some of the leaders of the French Revolution justified their acts of terror against Roman Catholicism with the fact that Roman Catholics were themselves guilty of terrorism against the Huguenots. And if this was not enough to point to God’s judgment, the worst massacres of Roman Catholic population in France happened exactly in the same areas of France (in the west, that is, in the Vendée, and in the south) where for the last 200 years Huguenots were massacred. It is ironic that in the Vendée revolt against the republican government, the rebels raised a flag with a motto which 200 years prior was a motto of many Huguenots (some of whom were anti-monarchists): Dieu le Roi, God the King. And just as Huguenots used to be slaughtered under that motto in the 1570s, in the 1790s, hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholic Vendeans were slaughtered by the soldiers of the “columns of hell” sent by the republican government. For anyone who was paying attention in France, what was happening was clearly God visiting the nation and treating it the way it treated the Huguenots. Within two decades, the body of France was eaten from the inside. In 1815, all that was left of the old superpower was a defeated, bankrupt nation subservient to other, new superpowers.

God is not mocked. A nation can ignore His words in Deuteronomy 28, but it can’t escape their implication. And until there is repentance in France, and Protestantism is revived again, as it was in the 1500s, France will continue to sink, slowly but surely. Even today, we Americans imagine that the population of France is predominantly secularist. The truth is, it is predominantly Roman Catholic. Remember, just last year, millions of ordinary French people demonstrated on the streets of France against the socialist government’s attempt to legalize sodomite “marriage.” Apparently, France still has more Roman Catholic influence than we can see on the surface. But this Roman Catholic population is ruled by a secularist elite. There is a reason why. And that reason is God’s covenantal sanctions in history.

We would be fools if we stopped here, however. Every time we see God visiting a nation with His judgment, we need to stop and consider our own situation, as American Christians and conservatives. Is there a similar judgment of God on us as a religious and cultural group in America? And if there is, we need to pay attention and look for the reasons for it.

Indeed, there is such a judgment. Ever noticed how for the last 40 years, ever since the rise of Moral Majority, we as Christians seem to lose the cultural battles in America? No matter what we do, no matter how much effort we put into it, no matter how many billions of dollars we spend on conservative politicians and lobbying and political action councils, all we get is lies, broken promises, corruption, and new lies. No matter how much we spend on seminaries, evangelical celebrities, churches and pastors, we continue to see a decline of the influence of Christianity in our culture, and the cultural ascendance of the enemies of God. It’s time for us to stop and consider: There is covenant judgment in action. It is still in its preliminary stages, but it is there and it is real. The question is, What brought it upon us? We must have committed injustice, in beliefs, words, or actions, against others. We need to find where the covenantal root of the problem is.

And indeed, we have committed many injustice. We have been silent and passive about the slaughter of unborn babies in our nation. We could have stopped this slaughter many years ago, if we cared. We have been silent about police brutality, especially against minorities. We have been silent about government schools – and we have even supported them. We have supported unjust immigration restriction laws. We have supported injustices like the War on Drugs and the prison-industrial complex. We have said nothing against the Federal Reserve and the IRS. Our pulpits have babbled about basic issues, but they have never touched on the tow pillars of God’s Throne, Righteousness and Justice.

And there is judgment in progress. We better start making corrections in our faith, word, and action. Or our kids will pay the price for our complacency.

The book I will assign this week is The Covenant Enforced: John Calvin’s Sermons on Deuteronomy 27 and 28. Read and consider how our nation, and we as Christians may fall under the curse section of these verses.

Remember also, I don’t want donations for myself. There is a mission field which I have in my heart, and where I want to see God’s Covenant enforced: Eastern Europe. Visit BulgarianReformation.com to read more about Bulgarian Reformation Ministries. Subscribe to the newsletter, and donate.

Welcome to Episode 52 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 20 minutes we will be talking about patriarchy and feminism, and what both patriarchy and feminism can’t understand about women, about their place in the society and the Kingdom of God, and about the relationship between a man and a woman in the family. Yes, you heard well, I dumped both patriarchy and feminism together. As a Christian, you may have been taught to think that patriarchy is Biblical while feminism is secular and pagan. This is not true. Both modern patriarchy and modern feminism have pagan and idolatrous foundations and origins, and neither is consistent with the message of the Bible. And this week we will try to describe the true Biblical woman and her rightful place in the Kingdom of God, based on Proverbs 31.

Modern feminism, of course, is completely lost in a hole of irrationality and, to be honest, outright insanity; this is so obvious to all – including those on the left side of the political spectrum – that it hardly needs to be demonstrated. Even the leading figures and celebrities on the left stay away from it, and lead a lifestyle that is more consistent with a more traditional, quasi-Christian family life. The extremist feminism is left to childish street activists, all of whom are culturally irrelevant, and continue being culturally irrelevant. Not to mention, of course, that such modern feminists continue destroying their own credibility in the eyes of the very women they supposedly care about. The most recent feminist idiocy is the conclusion of some recent so-called “study” published in some supposedly scientific journal that calling breastfeeding “natural” is unethical, because it has sexist overtones. What does that mean? Well, that means that,

“calling breastfeeding ‘natural’ reinforces a certain set of values about the gender roles.” It is, I suppose, much more ethical to call it “unnatural.” I wonder how they will sell that nonsense to the millions of mothers in this country. Seriously, wanna tell a mother of a newborn baby that her breastfeeding is “unnatural”?

In reality, most of what secular feminism has been doing in the last one generation is put its foot in its mouth so deep as to touch its throat with its toes. It has been hijacked by mentally unstable women who have built their defense of women by trying to make women be men. Even the most independent woman would be grossed out by such an idea, if she is sane. Women who find their self-identity in pretending to be men are very rare even among non-Christians; and such women are seldom capable of having any influence over other women. But don’t be quick to assume that just because modern feminism is self-destructive, this will automatically translate into a cultural victory for the church. It won’t. And the reason is that the church has things in its past to repent of. Yes, specifically concerning the place and authority of women in the society. There was a time when the church joined the side of injustice on this issue. And we have still not repented for it.

The earlier women’s rights movement, the so-called “first-wave” feminism, was about defending the legal rights and equality of women in the society, which have been under attack by the different legal theories of the Enlightenment. In his Institutes of Biblical Law, pages 348-353, R.J. Rushdoony points to the fact that because of its biological theory of women, the Enlightenment quickly destroyed the legal equality which European Christendom had built for women. Yes, you heard that well. Contrary to what many people believe today, the humiliating lower legal status of women in the 19th century was not the product of Christianity, but of the Enlightenment. Thus, the original women’s rights movement was not directed at destroying the family, but only at what Rushdoony called, “restoring women to their rightful place of authority beside men.” That is, to the same place to which they were elevated after centuries of Christendom. Paganism had no legal rights – nor any legal place – for women in its society. The legal status of married women in Athens, for example, was no different than the legal status of married women in modern Saudi Arabia: women were not allowed to leave the home unattended, and were not allowed to inherit property. Courtesans, in fact, enjoyed greater freedom and public influence than married women. Christendom, on the other hand, elevated women and gave them a special place in the society, culturally and legally. Especially married women. The Enlightenment restored the pagan view of women, and led to lower civil rights for women. And the early women’s rights movement tried to restore the Christendom’s ideal.

Unfortunately, the churches in the 19th and the early 20th century did not respond to the women’s rights movement with the Biblical view, but instead joined the Enlightenment’s pagan view of women and of their role in the society. That, of course, was one of the many reasons for the decline of the Christian influence in the West. For over a millennium, Christendom had built a foundation of justice for the place of women in society. Then, within a few generations, justice was aborted. And the church joined the side of injustice. That’s how we have a church that is trampled under the feet of men. Thus, even if modern feminism is self-destructive, this won’t restore the church to her position of authority. That authority is earned by repenting and taking the side of justice. Or, if you want it simple, the Church is a woman, a bride. One woman can’t establish her own authority by denigrating the authority of other women in the society. That much should be obvious to all.

Modern feminism is insane, it approaches men and women as isolated atoms who shouldn’t be allowed to be in any meaningful relation to each as men and women. And since this is obviously idiotic, modern feminism is an easy target. And it has been a target of many conservative preachers and churches whose purpose was to restore and protect the Biblical family. So far so good.

The problem with many, if not most, of these conservative preachers and churches is that their criticism of feminism and defense of the Biblical family are based on another extreme which has pagan origins: patriarchy. Patriarchy, as in the idea that the father and husband in the family is the ruler of the family. Ruler, to the point where the wife – and by extension, all the other women in the family – is absorbed into the family unit as an addendum, not as an individual and distinct person of authority and covenantal standing. Ruler, to the point where his wife has no independent authority of her own, but her authority is only “delegated” to her by her husband. The concept of “rulership” has been then expanded to include not only the children in their childhood (Biblically, the children are legally considered no different than slaves in the household, according to Gal. 4:1), but also the children in their adult years. They are supposed to stay within a clan system, obeying their father and serving their father even while having their own families and children. Girls are not encouraged to develop academically and professionally, because their place is in the kitchen anyway. Or to breed more children. As some modern patriarchalist preachers declare, “A woman who works outside the house commits sin.” This institutional subjugation of women is then extended to an ideology of the ontological and therefore intellectual inferiority of women – which was exactly the concept of the Enlightenment, inherited from paganism. One of the popular books in the Patriarchy movement, Family Man, Family Leader, by Phillip Lancaster, advises the husband, before leaving for work in the morning, to leave for Mom a list of chores and errands she is supposed to do during the day, with clear instructions on each point. Thus, according to the book, Mom knows that this heavy burden of deciding what needs to be done is taken off her shoulders, and all she needs to do is follow the list. Then, at the end of the day, Dad comes back home and spends time with Mom going over the list, praising her for what she has accomplished, and working for improvement on the points she hasn’t. I am not kidding you, find the book and read it. The book is a perfectly good example of the modern patriarchalist ideologies: it works to establish man’s authority by denigrating and humiliating women as nothing more than imbeciles under care.

Ironically, what that has produced has been not more families and more stable families in these patriarchalist circles, but fewer families and much later ages of marriage for the average young person. The reason should be obvious: such views of women produce in young Christian men the expectation that the women they want to marry must be somehow inclined to be babysat and patronized. One such man shared with me once that when considering marriage, he wants to go out with the woman and observe how she does her shopping, and whether she is willing to be teachable in areas where her shopping doesn’t meet his high standards. (I just laughed in his face when he told me that. “You think you know better than a woman how to shop?”) This was 15 years ago, and he is still not married. Another, having been looking for a wife for the last 10 years, told me that he first gives the girl a book, and sees if she is going to read it, and then talks to her over the book in order to find out if she would be humble and willing enough to be “discipled” by him. Because, you know, he considers it his duty as a husband to disciple his wife in the faith as much as he should disciple his children. My response was that the girl that would be happy to take such insult to her intelligence and God-given authority is not the girl he would be happy with, and the ones he wants will never suffer such humiliation and patronizing. In the final account, many of these young men are looking not for a mate (as in help-mate) but for a maid (as in house maid), for a perpetual child which they will patronize and boss around under the pretense of “exercising male leadership” in the house. Patriarchalism creates in men the impression that women are inferior creatures, and that not much can be entrusted to them outside cooking, laundry, and giving birth; for everything else they need “discipling”; and any authority they have in the house must be carefully controlled by their husbands.

(And, of course, as an extension of this ideology, the husbands are expected to remain perpetual children and therefore to be constantly controlled by their fathers, or, in some cases, by their fathers-in-law. The system is consistent in that it doesn’t allow for any level of independent maturity under God, at any level. But we will confine ourselves to the authority of the women here.)

As I pointed out in an episode of Axe to the Root titled “The Concubinage,” such a woman who is restricted to the position of a housemaid, with only delegated but no direct authority in the house, is considered a concubine in the Bible, not a wife. A concubine in the Bible is a woman who comes into the family without a dowry, and therefore has no inheritance in the family. Having no inheritance, she has no authority of her own in the family, except over her own children – who, by the way, don’t have the right to inheritance either. She is entitled to all the rights of a wife but she doesn’t have the privileges of a wife. Any authority she may possess over her husband’s home can come only from his good will; he has the right to delegate to her responsibilities and authority, but he has no obligation to do so. Thus, from a covenantal perspective, modern patriarchalists, by denigrating the authority of the woman in the family and by placing all authority in the hands of the husband – to delegate to her whatever he wants – are really looking not for wives but for concubines.

But in the world after the Cross, there are to be no more concubines, no more second-rate wives. This characteristic has a much more profound meaning, and we won’t have the time to examine it today. One application of it, however, needs to be mentioned: the fact that there are no more concubines in the world after the Cross affects the way we view the Church and her covenantal status before God. In an article in Faith for All Life several years ago, I made the connection between the different existing eschatologies and how they view the Church as the Bride of Christ. Modern amillennialism views the Church as simply a girlfriend, or, at best, a fiancee of Christ. “Almost a wife but not yet.” She has no authority over the world which is her Husband’s estate. Like a virtuous fiancee, her focus is on purity, not on responsibility and authority. She is not expected to take over the world as her legitimate sphere of work and dominion; she doesn’t have that legal right. Modern dispensationalism views the Church as a concubine of Christ. The real, fully privileged wife is national Israel, and all the promises and the inheritance belong to that real wife. But since, for a time, the real wife has eloped with her heathen lovers, Jesus has taken a temporary consort, the Church, with the purpose to incite the real wife, national Israel, to jealousy, and thus return Israel to Himself. The Church has all the rights of a wife and she will be rewarded for her services, but she has no inheritance or authority, for all the promises belong by right to Israel. Finally, postmillennialism view the Church as the true, fully privileged wife of Christ. Not only does she have the rights of a wife, she is fully representative of her Husband and has full authority over His estate, the world. She is expected to take dominion over the world now and to exercise her authority in bringing the world. She has full authority; she doesn’t have to wait for any more permission to rule in her own right. Being Christ’s body and His fulness (Eph. 1:23), redeemed, crowned, and enthroned to rule with Him, her job is to occupy, or, in another translation, do business, or, using the Greek original, pragmateusaathe (from the same root as “practice”), until He comes.

But that mandate is not limited to the church. It is actually a mandate to every wife. Whoever claims that wives are supposed to remain passive and waiting for their husbands to rule over them and tell them what to do, micromanaging their work, shopping, and business decisions, has no idea of what the Biblical view of the virtuous wife is. That Biblical view is expressed very specifically in one of the most important chapters about the Biblical view family: Proverbs 31. Anyone who does not lay Proverbs 31 as the foundation of his view of the family, is not restoring the Biblical family, but some twisted pagan view of the family, whether patriarchal or feminist, but the Biblical view.

Proverbs 31:10 gives us the introduction: “An excellent wife who can find?” That’s New American Standard, the one I usually prefer, because it sticks closer to the literal meaning of the words . . . well, most of the time. But if you compare all the available translations, you will find out they can’t agree on the translation. Some translations have “excellent” translated as “virtuous.” Others as “of noble character.” Still others as “of strong character.” Still others translate it as “capable,” or “worthy,” or “diligent.” I have seen disagreements between translations, but, boy, the disagreement over this word is a bit too much. Why is there such a disagreement? Because, believe it or not, the original Hebrew word means nothing like these words. The original Hebrew word is chayil, that is, “army.” “And army wife who can find?” The root for the chayil, of course, is the word for “strength, force, endurance.” No matter how you want to translate the literal text “army wife,” one thing is perfectly sure: the kind of wife commended by it is certainly not the docile, servile, subjugated type of woman ancient and modern patriarchalism imagine. The woman in Proverbs 31 is very different.

As Andrea Schwartz pointed recently, the virtuous wife in Proverbs 31 is not known for her ostentatious spirituality. There are no women’s meetings in that chapter, no church activities. The virtuous wife is not known for being a prayer warrior. Not that she doesn’t pray, of course, but long prayers and church activities are not what defines her as virtuous. Neither is she defined by her obedience to her husband. Such obedience is not mentioned at all – to the contrary, the virtuous woman is shown as an independent woman who makes her own decisions.

What defines her as virtuous is her ability to take dominion. More than that: what defines her as virtuous is her ability to take dominion independently of her husband, making decisions for him, with his and her property, in his absence.

To start with, notice where her husband is. He is not in the home barking orders. Nothing like this. He is in the gates, taking dominion in the world outside the family. (The city gates were the locus of judicial authority in Israel.) He doesn’t oversee her work; in fact, verse 11 specifically says that “his heart trusts in her.” (Nothing even similar to discipling her as an immature child.) The decisions to buy and sell are her own, not his, according to verses 14 and 16. (Nothing even remotely similar to teaching a wife how to shop. She makes the economic decisions as to what the family should produce (verse 13), and she makes the economic decisions if something should be produced or bought at a lower price (verse 14). She controls the labor force of the business (verse 15), and she controls the charity contributions of that business (verse 20). All this means, she is not a woman whose training has stopped at being able to cook and do laundry and give birth. We have here a woman who is educated and knowledgeable, in order to make all these decisions. Many of these decisions, depending on the specific situation of the family, will require a business education, and the production part may require engineering or other technical education. (You don’t expect that the “spindle” in verse 19 will still be just a spindle in the 21st century, do you?) The Biblical woman is not expected to be dumb or uneducated; she is expected to be as highly educated as the circumstances allow it, in all available information.

Oh, but this is not all. Wait for it. She is not silent either, neither does she need to be discipled in the faith, that is, to be patronized and humiliated. Not at all. She is herself a source of wisdom and teaching, for verse 26 says that she opens her mouth in wisdom. The same wisdom of which Proverbs 8 speaks. But that wisdom goes far beyond that. The virtuous woman of Proverbs 31 is expected to speak with God’s authority. How do I know this? Because in two places (Proverbs 1:8 and 6:20), the author of Proverbs admonishes a young man to not forget the teaching of his mother. But the word for teaching there, in both places, is actually torah, the same word used to denote God’s Law. The author could have used another Hebrew word for teaching, like musar. That he chose, twice in a row, to use torah, for the teaching of a woman, is very significant. When a woman and a mother is speaking with wisdom, she is speaking as God’s representative. Her authority is not delegated through anyone, not even her husband. It may be united with his authority in the same covenant, but it is distinct. She has her own authority under God, and it is her own, whether her husband “delegates” it or not. The family is not the husband, plus a wife as an addendum. The family is the husband cleaving to his wife, as his equal, of equal and distinct authority.

So distinct it is, and so equal to his, that she is under obligation to oppose her husband when he goes astray. The greatest Biblical example of this is Rebekah and her deception of her husband Isaac. While we won’t have too much time to discuss it, one thing is clear: contrary to many claims today, Rebekah was not in rebellion against Isaac when she encouraged Jacob to deceive his father. It was Isaac who had gone against the will of God, trying to thwart God’s plan by giving away the birthright for a meal. (What his unbelieving son Esau had done years before to his brother Jacob.) Rebekah’s actions were aimed at keeping her husband withing the plan of God. She was successful, and Isaac acknowledged it. He never changed his mind. Listen to my sermon, “Redeeming Jacob.”

The importance and power of the woman’s authority in the family can be seen also in the fact that the Bible doesn’t expect women to be passive even in the very act of marriage proposal. In our culture today we have adopted the practice of the women being passive, while the men are supposed to take the initiative to make the marriage proposals. While this sounds quite romantic, the passivity of the woman in such relationships is not a Biblical standard; it rather comes from earlier, pagan times. I will refrain from discussing the Song of Solomon here, but everyone can read it and notice how normal it should be for the woman to take the initiative. What is more important is that in the New Testament, Paul actually commands women to take the initiative in getting married! I want the younger widows, he says in 1 Tim. 5:14, to marry, bear children, and rule households. (Notice, rule households.) But such command is impossible in our modern church culture. How can a woman – let alone a widow – obey Paul’s command, if she has to abide by the rules of our modern society? If she is to remain passive, waiting for a man to come to her, she may never be able to marry again. It is hard enough for unmarried girls to find bridegrooms in the modern effeminate church culture; how would a widow be able to do it, unless she takes the initiative. And obviously, Paul connects such initiative to her ruling a house. Apparently the woman of Proverbs 31 must be a woman who can initiate a marriage proposal too.

In the final account, if you are looking for a passive, docile, obedient woman, a woman that would be satisfied to be bossed around and “discipled” and told what to do and be patronized and taught and instructed . . . you are looking for the wrong kind of woman. Take those patriarchal ideas and throw them in the garbage can. The Biblical woman you need and want is a woman who will be your partner – independent of mind and spirit, but committed to the same purpose. She is a woman that can run your household and make your decisions in your place while you are away. She is a woman who can provide for the family, and stay tough and enduring – like an army wife – in the worst of the worst circumstances. And, most important of all, she is a woman who won’t hesitate to stand up to you and speak truth in your face when you go astray; and thus protect you from yourself. If you are looking for anything different, you are in for a disaster.

The reading assigned for this week is Rodney Stark’s book, The Rise of Christianity. Some of his claims may need to be verified, but pay attention to the role of women in the early centuries of Christianity. You may be surprised to learn how much our modern world has been shaped by those Christian women.

Remember in your prayers and in your giving the Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization committed to building an intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. God bless you all.