III. Separation
10 THE PROMISED LAND AS A COVENANTAL AGENT Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you: And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants. Ye shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments, and shall not commit any of these abominations; neither any of your own nation, nor any stranger that sojourneth among you: (For all these abominations have the men of the land done, which were before you, and the land is defiled;) That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you. For whosoever shall commit any of these abominations, even the souls that commit them shall be cut off from among their people (Lev. 18:24-29).
The theocentric meaning of this passage is that God is the Lord of history. He brings judgments in terms of His covenantal law. History is theocentric. It is therefore to be understood in terms of the covenant.
God, the supreme authority of the covenant (point one), possesses the power to impose sanctions directly (point four), but He usually chooses to use agents in this task (point two). In this passage, He uses an agent to separate covenant-breakers from the society of covenant-keepers (point three).
Leviticus 18, more than any other chapter in the Bible, connects a society's obedience to biblical law and its geography. This chapter describes the land as vomiting out those who disobey God's laws: separation. This graphic metaphor is that of a geographic area that literally forces out of its presence all those who disobey these laws.
The vomiting land of Canaan is one of the most peculiar metaphors in the Bible. Bible commentators do not go into detail on just why it was that the land should be described here as vomiting people from its midst. The reason for the commentators' silence is that they have not recognized that this language is more than metaphorical; it is covenantal. It has to do with a system of boundaries and oaths. The land of Canaan was a covenantal subordinate in a hierarchical system of authority, just as the whole earth has been since the creation of Adam. This language is therefore judgmental. It describes a unique hierarchical-judicial relation among God, the land of Israel, and those who lived inside the land's boundaries. The pre-fall hierarchical relationship -- God> covenant-keeping man> nature -- has been distorted because of sin, although the hierarchical requirement remains the same. The earth brings forth thorns and weeds to thwart mankind; the land of Israel vomited out its inhabitants.
The Promised Land as the Enforcer Israelites were warned to obey God's laws, "That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you." The land is described as serving as God's sanctioning agent. Like the hornets that went before the Israelites as they removed the Canaanites (Ex. 23:28), so would the land spew them out if they committed the same sorts of sins that the Canaanites had committed. Historically, the Assyrians and Babylonians spewed them out of the land under the Mosaic Covenant. Yet the land was spoken of as the covenantal agent in the Mosaic Covenant, while the ascended Jesus is spoken of as the agent of spewing in the New Covenant: "So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth" (Rev. 3:16). The language is both covenantal and symbolic in each case. The land did not have a literal stomach and a literal gullet. Jesus does not literally spew out churches. Yet the language of vomiting is used in both cases. The imagery of vomiting is appropriately disgusting, and it is used throughout the Scriptures to describe sin and its consequences.
He hath swallowed down riches, and he shall vomit them up again: God shall cast them out of his belly (Job 20:15).
The morsel which thou hast eaten shalt thou vomit up, and lose thy sweet words (Prov. 23:8).
As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly (Prov. 26:11).
The LORD hath mingled a perverse spirit in the midst thereof: and they have caused Egypt to err in every work thereof, as a drunken man staggereth in his vomit (Isa. 19:14).
For all tables are full of vomit and filthiness, so that there is no place clean (Isa. 28:8).
Make ye him drunken: for he magnified himself against the LORD: Moab also shall wallow in his vomit, and he also shall be in derision (Jer. 48:26).
But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire (II Pet. 2:22).
This imagery is that of a man who has eaten something that he should have avoided, and his stomach rebels. This unpleasant event is supposed to remind him: don't eat this again. The metaphor's message: "Go and sin no more." Israel never learned this lesson.
The imagery of the land's vomiting is closely connected to the Mosaic dietary laws, as we shall see. When those dietary laws ceased to have any covenantal relevance -- definitively in Acts 10; finally in A.D. 70 -- the Promised Land ceased to perform this covenantal task.
Special Promise, Special Claim
The strategic reality of the symbolism (rhetoric)(1) of the land's spewing out the Canaanites was that Israel possessed a unique legal claim on the land as a result of God's promise to Abraham. Israel was authorized by God to commit genocide, or mandate total expulsion, against the land's existing inhabitants. God brings negative sanctions in history. He did so with the firstborn of Egypt, and again when Egypt's army perished in the Red Sea. He had shown no mercy to those who rebelled against Him. He would tolerate no mercy on the part of the Israelites against the inhabitants of Canaan. "And thou shalt consume all the people which the LORD thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them: neither shalt thou serve their gods; for that will be a snare unto thee" (Deut. 7:16). Why no pity? Because of the abomination of their gods. God's warning: similar worship inside the land will bring similar military sanctions (Deut. 8:19-20). God subsequently raised up Assyria and Babylon to perform an analogous service for Him, which is why this passage warned of a future spewing forth.
The land specified as God's agent was the Promised Land, not Egypt or any other plot of ground. Only the land inside God's covenantal boundary of separation served as His agent of negative military sanctions. This leads us to a conclusion: because the Promised Land could serve as a prosecuting witness against Israel, it was unique. The witness for the prosecution is required to cast the first stone (Deut. 17:7). The earthquake is the obvious example of stone-casting by the land (Isa. 29:6; Zech. 14:5). "The earth shall quake before them; the heavens shall tremble: the sun and the moon shall be dark, and the stars shall withdraw their shining" (Joel 2:10). "The mountains quake at him, and the hills melt, and the earth is burned at his presence, yea, the world, and all that dwell therein" (Nahum 1:5). This quaking is the language of covenantal judgment. Israel's covenantal agent, Moses, had already experienced this. "And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly" (Ex. 19:18). It took place again at the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. "And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent" (Matt. 27:51). Conclusion: If the land's office as witness for the prosecution still exists, then its office as stone-caster still exists. Because the resurrected Christ appears as the vomiter in New Covenant imagery, I conclude that He is the witness who brings judgment against societies. His agency of sanctions today is social and biological rather than geological.
What about this prophecy in the Book of Revelation? "And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb" (Rev. 6:15-16). The reason such language applied to that event is because the prophecy was intended to be fulfilled a few years after it was written. This prophecy of looming covenantal judgment was fulfilled in A.D. 70: the fall of Jerusalem.(2)
Military Sanctions
The Mosaic Covenant's symbolic use of the land as God's agent of negative sanctions represented military conquest: Israel vs. the Canaanites, Moab vs. Israel (Jud. 3), Canaan vs. Israel (Jud. 4), Midian vs. Israel (Jud. 6), Phoenicia and Ammon vs. Israel (Jud. 10; 13), Syria vs. Israel (II Ki. 5:2). In the cases of Assyria vs. Israel and Babylon vs. Judah, the Israelites were actually removed from the land. If someone should argue that the New Covenant has transferred to the earth in general the symbolic authority to serve as an agent bringing negative sanctions, meaning that God still raises up nations to bring military sanctions against His people, he must also insist that genocide is still authorized by God as the mandatory strategy of covenantal conquest by His people. But genocide is not the way of the gospel; persuasion, not military conquest, is its means of evangelism. Conclusion: the land no longer serves as a covenantal agent under the New Covenant except in the general Adamic sense (Gen. 3:17-19). That is, the symbolism of the land as God's covenantal agent is no longer valid; the arena of covenantal conflict is no longer the military battlefield.
Similarly, if land marked off by a New Covenant-bound nation still possesses this Mosaic judicial authority, then the Abrahamic promise regarding the land must somehow extend into the New Covenant. If so, then so do the dietary laws. Contemporary British Israelites may choose to believe this regarding the dietary laws, but the church historically has emphatically dismissed all such suggestions. Conclusion: the land no longer serves as a covenantal agent under the New Covenant. One sign of this alteration is the New Testament's annulment of the Levitical dietary laws and its substitution of a new form of dietary law: the Lord's Supper.(3)
With the abolition of the unique covenantal status of Old Covenant Israel, God ceased to speak of the Promised Land as His covenantal agent. Remember, it did not act as a covenantal agent until the Israelites crossed into the land from the wilderness. Egypt had not spewed out God's enemies. The idea that the land is in some way the bringer of God's military sanctions against covenant-breakers was valid only under the Mosaic Covenant, and only within the boundaries of national Israel.
Law and Life in the Promised Land The issue was ethics, point three of the biblical covenant model. The focus was geography: the Promised Land.
Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, I am the LORD your God. After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye not do: and after the doings of the land of Canaan, whither I bring you, shall ye not do: neither shall ye walk in their ordinances. Ye shall do my judgments, and keep mine ordinances, to walk therein: I am the LORD your God. Ye shall therefore keep my statutes, and my judgments: which if a man do, he shall live in them: I am the LORD (Lev. 18:2-5).
The laws that God's people must follow should not be the laws of either Egypt or Canaan. While the text does not specifically mention it, it is clear that God's historical sanctions were involved. The Israelites had already seen the sanctions that God had brought against Egypt. First, there were plagues inside the land. Second, the Egyptians had given precious gems and precious metals to the fleeing Israelites. Third, the Israelites had been expelled from Egypt as God's means for providing deliverance and liberation. The Egyptians lost their slave labor force. Similarly, God tells them in this chapter that there will be comprehensive negative sanctions imposed against those who presently dwell in the land of Canaan. The Canaanites will someday be vomited out by the land, i.e., by the invading Israelites. The imagery of vomiting out symbolized a military phenomenon -- invasion of the land -- and the cultural phenomenon of replacement by a new nation. The operational factor here was ethics. God promised them that when they entered the land and established residence, the plagues of Egypt would be removed from the land, if they remained covenantally faithful (Deut. 7:15). The God of liberation they understood as the God who brings positive and negative sanctions in history. What is unique about this chapter is that the land itself is described as imposing negative sanctions against law-breakers. The Promised Land would become God's covenantal agent after they invaded Canaan.
Long Life
In verse five, long life and the law are linked. The text does not specifically use the word abundant, but this is the implication of the passage. The individual who obeys God's law is the individual who receives life, meaning abundant life. This does not refer to eternal life; it refers to life in history. The passage does not teach eternal salvation by man's own works, but it does teach that God brings positive sanctions in history to those who consistently obey His revealed word. The issue raised by this passage is this: how to preserve abundant life in the abundant new land (see also Deuteronomy 8). The Canaanites had not obeyed God; therefore they were no longer going to be allowed to live in the land. Their abundant inheritance would be transferred to the invaders, as had been promised to Abraham. But the Israelites were warned that if they disobeyed God's law in the future, they would also be removed from residence in the land.
The Promised Land was going to become the arena of covenantal conflict when the Israelites entered the land. It was not yet such an arena when Moses delivered the law to Israel. It had not yet vomited the residents out of its presence. In this sense, the Canaanites were analogous to the furniture inside a house that had been infected with biblical leprosy. The furniture and everything inside did not become judicially unclean until the priest entered it (Lev. 14:36). The people of Israel were the priests of the ancient world.(4) When they entered the land of Canaan, their presence would bring everything inside the land into a condition of legal uncleanness.(5) The land was defiled because of the sins of the Canaanites, but the priests had not yet entered it. When the conquest began, the invasion would judicially identify the land as polluted. When the people of Israel penetrated the boundary of the land, they brought both it and the Canaanites under the judicial sanctions of God. These sanctions would remain as a judicial threat to the land and its inhabitants for as long as the Israelites retained their priestly relationship with God. Do not commit such sins, they were warned, "That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you" (Lev. 18:28).
The Land as a Surrogate for Man The land of Canaan was analogous to both God and man in two senses. First, the land was omniscient within its boundaries. It saw every act of rebellion, even inside the family. Second, for everyone inside the land, the land was omnipresent. There was nowhere that someone could go within the land in which he would not be under the threat of the sanctions imposed by the land. Obviously, God is the viewing agent, but the language of the text drives home the point: no more could the nation of Israel escape being seen and judged by God in history than a man can escape standing on the ground beneath his feet.
Because the land of Canaan is described here as being under God's sanctions, it was also analogous to man. The land had refused to obey God. It had not yet brought a covenant lawsuit against transgressors within its boundaries. The land therefore was about to come under judgment. "And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants" (Lev. 18:25). When the land comes under judgment, the text says, it will then act under this pressure to enforce the law of God. It will vomit evildoers out of its presence.
The sanctions of God would be directed against the defilement of the land. First, the resident nations would be cast out by God (v. 24). This would be a corporate sanction against them. Second, the land itself would be punished (v. 25). This also was a collective sanction. When the people of Israel entered the land, these same collective sanctions would be imposed by God and by the land in order to avoid the defilement of the land.
The text does not say that the sanctions would be imposed to prevent the defilement of the people who live in the land; they would be imposed in order to avoid the defilement of the land itself. This indicates that the land was legally represented in some way by those who dwelt in the land. When they acted in an evil manner, the land itself was legally defiled. This is an extension of the principle which we find in Genesis 3:17-19. Adam sinned, and the land came under a curse. Adam represented the land in God's court, and in violating God's law, he brought the land under a curse.
We therefore need to understand the biblical doctrine of representation. There is a hierarchical relationship that links God to man and man's environment. When Adam rebelled against God, he disrupted this cosmic hierarchy. Adam defiled the land because he himself became judicially unclean. Sin inverts the hierarchy between God and man. Originally, man was given dominion over nature. When Satan rebelled against God by using the creation (the serpent and Adam and Eve), he brought God's curse against the serpent and Adam and Eve. When man rebelled against God by using nature as his instrument (the forbidden tree), he brought God's curse against nature, and therefore against him, for nature was his resource. Nature therefore became God's implement of cursing against mankind. God did to man what man had attempted to do to Him: use nature as a weapon. Nature in this sense was used as a rod of wrath.
Theocratic Order in the Promised Land All the residents in the land were under God's laws (v. 26). The civil covenant required that the State bring sanctions against the violators: cutting them off (v. 29). This was a form of covenantal death. God issued a divorce decree against the persons who committed the prohibited act. There had to be a public announcement of this divorce by church, State, and family.
The individual lost his membership in the fellowship of the saints. In modern terms, he was excommunicated. He lost his civil citizenship as well. Finally, he lost his position as a family member, which means he would lose his legal inheritance in the land. Under the old covenant, the jubilee land laws required that he be cut out of the right of reversion of his father's land during the jubilee year.(6) (Under the New Testament, this would no longer be the case, since the jubilee land laws no longer apply.) The head of the household was required by God to disinherit the individual who had transgressed any of these laws. What about the foreigner? The foreigner was not officially married to God. He could not be excommunicated from the fellowship of the saints, since he did not belong to the fellowship of the saints. Yet negative sanctions warned him not to violate the laws governing marriage and sexual contact (Lev. 18:6-23). Violators would be expelled physically from the nation. There can be no other meaning of the phrase, "cut off."
What about the resident alien? At the first infraction, he would have had his status shifted to that of foreigner. He would no longer have been under the same degree of protection by civil law that other resident aliens enjoyed. What were these protections? They were treated as Israelites except in two respects: 1) they could not hold the office of civil magistrate; 2) they could not inherit rural land. They were not allowed to bring negative civil sanctions against Israelites, since a resident alien was not formally covenanted to the Old Covenant church. The resident alien was not under God's ecclesiastical sanctions, so he was not legally entitled to bring God's negative civil sanctions in the holy commonwealth.(7) Because he could not inherit rural land, he could not become a freeman. The threat of permanent slavery would always face him (Lev. 25:44-45).
In all other respects, the resident alien was entitled to the same benefits that an Israelite was. When an Israelite fell into poverty, and approached one of his brothers for a zero-interest loan, the brother was not to be hard-hearted against him (Deut. 15:7-10). When the resident alien fell into poverty and sought a charitable loan from an Israelite, the resident alien also had a moral claim on the loan (Lev. 25:35-37). The foreigner who had no stake in the land did not possess such a claim. Second, the Israelite lender could extract usury from the foreigner (Deut. 23:20), which he was not allowed to collect from a poverty-stricken fellow member of the covenant or from a resident alien (Lev. 25:35b-36).(8) The foreigner did not benefit from the year of release for charity debts (Deut. 15:3). The resident alien did. His permanent presence in the land gave him special immunities and benefits. He was not of the covenant judicially, but he was inside the boundaries of the land of the covenant as a permanent resident.
The Land and Sanctions
Because the threat of God's divorce stood against the transgressors, the text speaks of the land as divorcing them. The Promised Land is described here as a covenantal agent of God. The land would cast out the nations of Canaan. In contrast, the land of Egypt had not cast out the Egyptians. This points to the unique judicial position of the Promised Land: first, because of the promise to Abraham; second, as the homeland of the Israelites. Only those residents who lived in the Promised Land would come under the sanctions of the land.(9) The land was a place of sanctions. It therefore was a sanctuary -- a sanctified place, a judicially set-apart place. It had been established by God as a special dwelling place for His people. It had specific boundaries. It was holy (set-apart) ground because it was the special dwelling place of God. It was the dwelling place of the saints (those sanctified by God) because they dwelt spiritually with God. The land was uniquely guarded by God, so that during the three annual festivals when the men journeyed to Jerusalem, God removed covetousness from the enemies of Israel (Ex. 34:24).
The land is said here to be under God's sanctions. This means that the Promised Land was a represented agent. The archetype here is the curse of the ground in Genesis 3:17-19. The creation still groans in expectation of the final judgment and full restoration (Rom. 8:22). Furthermore, the land of Canaan was entitled to a sabbath rest every seventh year (Lev. 25:1-5). When the people of Israel came into the land, they failed to give the land its rest (II Chr. 36:21). When it was represented unrighteously, it suffered.
The land was also to be punished by God as a representing agent. Earlier, the dual witness of the land and the shed blood of the innocent had brought a covenant lawsuit against the guilty party. Cain was punished by the ground (Gen. 4:9-12). We are told that he was driven from the face of God and also from the face of the ground (Gen 4:14). The "face of the ground" must have referred to the land in the immediate proximity of the garden: holy ground. (Obviously, we can never escape the face of the physical ground unless we reside off the planet.) The closer that Cain came to the garden, the closer he came to the place of God's judgment. Thus, he was driven from the place of God's earthly residence and judgment -- in one sense a curse (not being close to God), but in another sense a blessing (not being subject to immediate execution, thereby giving him time to repent).
This equating of the face of God and the face of the land is important for understanding the covenant nature of the Promised Land. It was punished for its failure to bring this covenant lawsuit against the Canaanites. This is peculiar language, but it is basic to understanding the nature of the threat against those who would subsequently violate God's law within the confines of the land. God regarded the Promised Land as His agent. The land therefore responds as the Israelites approach it in judgment. The Canaanites are driven out when the Israelites cross its boundaries. The text says, first, that God expels them (v. 24); it also says that the land expels them (vv. 25, 28). This language is reminiscent of the prophecy in Exodus 23:28: "And I will send hornets before thee, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite, from before thee." God and nature cooperate in the expulsion of the Canaanites. As in the case of the face of God and the face of the land, the expulsion of the Canaanites is discussed both as an act of God and as an act of the land.
The Egyptians had not been driven out of Egypt. Why not? Because Egypt was not holy ground. It was not a permanent sanctuary, although it was repeatedly to play the role of a temporary sanctuary for Israel, culminating in its service as a sanctuary for Jesus and His family in Herod's day (Matt. 2:13-15). Because the land of Canaan had been set apart by God's promise to Abraham, it drove out those who violated the judicial terms of the covenant, once the time came for God to fulfill His promise. The Canaanites as a civilization were driven out of the land during the conquest. When Israel came into the land, the vomiting process began: conquest = spewing. Centuries later, both Israel and Judah were driven out by God during the exile.
Strangers in the Land During the post-exilic era, the same degree of civic evil in the land did not defile the land in equal measure as it had before the exile. There are several reasons for this. Most important, the exile marked the end of the Davidic theocracy. Kingship was never again restored politically inside the boundaries of Israel. The highest civil appeals court lay outside the boundaries of the land. The post-exilic period was the era of the empires: Medo-Persia, Macedonia, and Rome. Cyrus of Persia was God's designated anointed agent (Isa. 45:1). This transfer of kingship beyond the land's boundaries led to a fundamental judicial change inside the land. Resident aliens could now inherit rural land permanently (Ezek. 47:23). Also, Greek and then Roman military forces remained in the land. The Samaritans, brought in by the Assyrians after the Northern Kingdom fell, remained as permanent residents within the original geographical boundaries of Israel, accepting a deviant theology that was loosely related to authorized worship (John 4:19-25).
The central judicial manifestation of the sanctuary status of the Promised Land was the temple. There was a judicial centrality of worship in the post-exilic era that was even greater than during the pre-exilic era. The Israelites never again indulged themselves in the worship of the gods of Canaan. The purity of the temple, the sacrificial system, and the national synagogue system was primary. The land is no longer said to be a covenantal agent after the exile. It did become a covenantal threat one last time in A.D. 70, but this was after the establishment of the New Covenant. The fall of Jerusalem marked the transfer of the kingdom of God to the church (Matt. 21:43): the final annulment of the Promised Land's covenantal status. There were strangers in the land after the Babylonian exile, and these strangers exercised lawful civil authority, but this no longer threatened the sanctuary status of the nation. What would threaten it was the presence of strangers in the temple.
The metaphor of vomiting symbolized a successful military invasion of the land and its subsequent conquest. After the exile, God's people were no longer sovereign over civil affairs in the land. The threat of invasion by a strange nation was no longer a covenantal threat to Israel's civil order, which was not governed by God's covenantal hierarchy. In this sense, a boundary violation of Israel's borders was no longer a major theological problem. Being vomited out of the land was no longer a covenantal threat, except in response to their unsuccessful rebellion against pagan civil authorities who were already in the land.
When Antiochus began to persecute the Jews in the second century B.C., he did so by God's sovereignty as the agent who imposed negative sanctions. There had been covenantal rebellion in the land. This rebellion was initiated by Jews who broke the covenant with God and attempted to covenant the nation with Hellenism and the Greeks. A foreign athletic hall was built in Jerusalem. Circumcision ceased (I Macc. 1:11-15). It was only then that the persecution by Antiochus began. First, he subdued Egypt; then he returned to conquer Israel. He established false worship in the temple (I Macc. 1:54-55). Again, the threat was to the temple, not to Israel's civil order. Their repeated rebellions had broken the terms of the Mosaic civil covenant so thoroughly that God no longer trusted them to administer the civil covenant inside the boundaries of the land. This was a curse against them, as it is in every biblically covenanted social order.
The Church as the New Temple
In the New Testament, the church replaced the old temple order. Local churches also replaced the local synagogue order. There is a new Bride for God. There must therefore be a new form of covenantal divorce. Christ is said to spew lukewarm churches out of His mouth (Rev. 3:16). There must be no mixing of God's old and new brides. We know this because we know that God is not a polygamist. The Jews understood this, which is why they persecuted the church in Jerusalem, Israel, and in all the cities in which the synagogues had been built outside of Israel. The church left Jerusalem in 69 A.D., just prior to the invasion of the land and the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus.(10) This was the exodus event of the New Covenant order.
The rebellion against Rome by the Jews led to the scattering of the Jews: the diaspora. First, it led to the 70 A.D. invasion of the temple by gentiles, followed immediately by its destruction. This led to the triumph of the Pharisees over the Sadducees, who had been the dominant influence in the temple.(11) Second, six decades later, another revolt led by Bar Kochba resulted in the second wave out of the land. After the defeat of this rebellion in 135, the Romans forced most of the Jews out of the land of Palestine, but by this late date, the land possessed no covenantal status.
The Jews did not believe this regarding the land. After they were expelled from the land by the Romans, they believed that they had to restructure Judaic law. They could lawfully receive the laying on of hands only inside the land. Because this was no longer possible, they believed that they could no longer impose the Mosaic law's sanctions to settle their disputes. They believed that they had lost the judicial anointing that had allowed them to impose such sanctions. Jewish legal scholar George Horowitz writes: "This chain of traditional ordination broke down completely after the rebellion of Bar Kokeba and the consequent persecutions by the Roman emperor Hadrian (c. 135 A.D.). The Rabbis were compelled, therefore, in order to preserve the Torah and to maintain law and order, to enlarge the authority of Rabbinical tribunals. This they accomplished by emphasizing the distinction between Biblical penalties and Rabbinical penalties. Rabbinical courts after the second century had no authority to impose Biblical punishments since they lacked semikah; but as regards penalties created by Rabbinical legislation, the Rabbis had of necessity, the widest powers of enforcement. They instituted, accordingly, a whole series of sanctions and penalties: excommunication, fines, physical punishment, use of the `secular arm' in imitation of the Church, etc."(12) This led to a restructuring of sanctions within the Jewish community, and it also led to the creation of a ghetto culture. They needed to separate themselves from the gentile culture in order to have the authority to impose the sanctions of what later became known as Talmudic law.(13) They became strangers in other lands.
The Replacement of the Promised Land The kingdom of God cannot be confined geographically in New Testament times. Any nation can lawfully covenant with God today.(14) Israel was the single covenanted nation of Old Testament, which alone acknowledged the sanctions of God and the revealed law of God, and which alone required circumcision of all its male citizens. Only one other nation briefly covenanted under God, Assyria (under Jonah's preaching), but this covenant was soon broken.(15) Today, however, there is no monopoly of the Promised Land. All nations are required by God to covenant with Him.(16) Their law structures are supposed to be biblical. They are to turn to the whole Bible in search of civil laws and civil sanctions.
This means that the civil law's marital sanctions have not changed. It also means that civil law's protection of the family is still in force. In today's world, the various covenanted lands replace the Old Testament's land of promise. The Promised Land's covenanted status has come to the nations. It becomes a sanctuary by means of the national covenant. Covenant Land legal status becomes a universal promise to all nations rather than a restricted promise to one nation. Where the preaching of the gospel is, there we find a nation being asked to become judicially holy ground. The gospel has universalized the promises of God.
The whole earth has been judicially cleansed by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The geographical boundaries between sacred and common have moved from national boundaries to ecclesiastical boundaries: the New Testament equivalent of the covenantally sacred space of the temple after the exile. There are sacred (i.e., sacramental) ecclesiastical acts -- holy baptism and holy communion -- but no sacred civil space. We no longer reside in sacred space. We no longer measure men's distance from God's kingdom by means of geography. We measure it by their church membership: personal confession, ethical behavior, and judicial subordination. The land of a covenanted nation is no longer God's covenantal agent, except in the sense that it is the place to which men's bodies return after death. The land has always been a covenantal agent in this general sense in the post-fall era (Gen. 3:19). But in the sense of an agent with a jurisdictional boundary, land is no longer a covenantal agent.
Natural and Supernational Disasters
The land of Israel ceased to be an agent of vomiting when the Old Covenant ended in A.D. 70. After A.D. 70, earthquakes and other geographical phenomena ceased to be relevant covenantally within Palestine, i.e., ceased to be predictable in terms of corporate ethics. This is not to say that earthquakes, like any other kind of disaster, are not signs of God's wrath in general against mankind in general, but there is very little biblical evidence that earthquakes are still part of God's predictable covenantal sanctions in history. Jesus is now the agent of judgment, seated on the throne beside God. The geological land of Israel is no longer an instrument for separating covenant-breakers from covenant-keepers. While nations can lawfully covenant with God in the New Testament order, the lands so constituted judicially are not part of the Abrahamic promise, a promise geographically limited to what Abraham could see and walk through (Gen. 13:15-17). Thus, it is fruitless to search the historical records of earthquakes in covenant-keeping nations and covenant-breaking nations in the expectation that a predictable pattern will be discovered.(17)
If I am incorrect about this, then the land still mediates between God and man. We do have such a case in the Old Testament: Cain's curse. "When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth" (Gen. 4:12). This was a sanction against Cain, whose brother's blood had penetrated the land and testified against Cain (Gen. 4:10). The promised sanction was not active but rather negative: the absence of positive sanctions. The curse in Genesis 4 was agricultural: the land would no longer yield its fruit to Cain. So, Cain built a city (Gen. 4:17). He had been a tiller of the soil; he became a resident of a city. He was not threatened with an earthquake; he was threatened with personal famine. He avoided personal famine by building a city and becoming a trader or other non-agricultural producer. He escaped the curse of the ground by switching occupations and residency: rural to urban.
Cain's curse did not speak of earthquakes: the active stone-casting that the land later brought against Israel at the close of the Old Covenant order in A.D. 70. While I believe that God will reveal to covenant-keeping societies techniques that minimize the effects of earthquakes, I do not believe that He will predictably alter their number and intensity in relation to the degree of the societies' obedience to His law.
The last great wave of such covenantal speculation took place in the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.(18) When rational men concluded that they could make no ethical sense of that momentous event, they ceased searching for such covenantal connections in history. Their initial error in expecting to find specific ethical relevance in the 1755 earthquake led to a rejection of a covenantal worldview in general, a rejection that enhanced the universal triumph of Newtonian rationalism in the late eighteenth century.(19) If earthquakes are irrelevant covenantally, rational men concluded, then so are all the other natural disasters of life, which is why we call them natural disasters. This was also Solomon's conclusion in the midst of his existential period: "All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not: as is the good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an oath" (Eccl. 9:2). What we should affirm is this: the arena of God's predictable historical sanctions has moved from geography to society.
Let me give an example of this move from geography to society. Jesus announced that God does not send more or less rain on a society in terms of its theology or its ethical standards. On the contrary, God "maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust" (Matt. 5:45b). The positive effects and negative effects of sun and rain fall indiscriminately on the righteous and the wicked. The positive effects of sun and rain are accentuated economically by societies that pursue God's law. Similarly, the negative effects of too much sun and too much rain are minimized in societies that pursue God's law. I believe that Matthew 5:45 is a statement regarding God's general laws of covenantal cause and effect; the statement applies to earthquakes as well as to sun and rain. In other words, people who build homes in flood plains or on top of major seismic faults will not see their property protected from the effects of flooding or earthquakes merely because they pray a lot or give money to the poor. The best they can legitimately expect from God is better information about controlling floods or better construction methods that resist Richter-7 quakes. I seriously doubt that increased percentages of adultery will produce increased percentages of Richter-9 quakes.(20)
Conclusion Under the Mosaic Covenant, God dwelt in Israel in a unique way. As men approached God's earthly throne room, they approached holy ground. The extreme edges of this series of concentric holy boundaries were the nation's geographical boundaries. The land of Israel therefore acted as God's covenantal agent. In the New Covenant era, there is no holy ground separate from common ground. We do not take our shoes off when we enter a church, as God required of Moses when he stood on holy ground (Ex. 3:5), and as some Eastern religions and Islam require. We do not have ritual foot washings. The land of the New Covenant no longer serves as a covenantal agent. It no longer brings predictable sanctions in history. It is no longer tied covenantally to military affairs.
Leviticus 18 establishes the family as a unique covenantal institution, and protects it by civil law. The sanction associated with the violation of these requirements was to be cut off from the people. This means a cutting off from the covenant, which in turn means excommunication. This excommunication was not merely ecclesiastical but also civil and familial. A person moved from being either a covenanted Israelite or a resident alien, and he became the legal equivalent of a foreigner who was in the land for purposes of trade. Covenant-breaking foreigners were permanently expelled from the nation.
Prior to the exile period, the land was spoken of in terms of its covenantal position as God's representing and represented agent. The land was represented by man, but it also represented God when it came time for God to bring His negative sanctions against covenantally rebellious residents inside the land's boundaries. The Promised Land was analogous to God in the sense that it is said to vomit the nations out of the land, just as God is also said to be the one who drives the nations out of the land.
In the New Testament, we no longer legitimately speak of the land's vomiting out its inhabitants. Instead, we read of the kingdom and its worldwide expansion. Because the self-consciousness and consistency of the individual is supposed to be greater under the New Covenant than under the Old, the New Testament does not speak of the land as analogous to both God and man. We read instead of the sword of the Lord, meaning the word of God that proceeds out of the mouth of God. "And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God" (Rev. 19:15).
One reason why the land is no longer spoken of as vomiting out its inhabitants is that the progress of the gospel is no longer conducted by means of military conquest. There is no longer a God-sanctioned system for covenant-keeping people to replace covenant-breaking people by means of expulsion. Today, they replace covenant-breakers through performance and productivity. They are to replace them in positions of cultural and political leadership -- not by force but by performance.
Covenant-keepers are also to conquer covenant-breakers by means of preaching. Men are to brought into the "Promised Land" today by bringing them into the church, and then by bringing the whole nation under the biblical civil covenant through a democratic vote. This does not equate the visible church with the Promised Land, but it acknowledges that the kingdom of God is primarily manifested in history by the church, and all those who profess to be Christians are supposed to be members of the church. Thus, the land is not the primary agent of enforcement; Jesus Christ is. By purifying the church, He enables His people to purify themselves and to begin the conquest of the earth by means of the preaching of the gospel. He draws men to Himself rather than casting them out of the land. He does not need to remove covenant-breakers from the land in order to make room for His people. Instead, the kingdom of God is the Promised Land, in history and eternity, and by preaching the gospel, we invite all men to enter into that Promised Land. Ultimately, it is the goal of Christianity to bring the whole earth under the dominion of Christ.(21) This means that it would do no good for the land to vomit the inhabitants out because, ultimately, there is no contiguous land to vomit them into. The New Covenant's strategy is conquest by conversion rather than conquest by destruction and expulsion.
Summary Leviticus 18:24-29 links ethics and geography: law and negative sanctions.
The metaphor of the land's vomiting is judicial.
The land is God's sanctioning agent.
Vomiting in this case symbolized an invading army.
Only the land of Canaan served as God's agent.
This office was established by the promise to Abraham.
Its performance was invoked by a boundary violation: Israel came into the land.
In the New Covenant, dominion is through conversion, not military conquest and extermination.
The land no longer has a judicial function.
The land of Canaan became judicially defiled when the priestly nation crossed the boundary.
The land in effect covenanted with Israel against the Canaanites.
Sin within its boundaries would defile it again.
All those within the land's boundaries were under God's law.
Violators of the major laws of holiness had to be removed from the land: either by execution or expulsion.
The land was God's agent, both represented and representing.
After the exile, the land's degree of holiness was reduced.
The land is not spoken of as a covenantal agent after the return from Babylon.
Strangers exercised civil authority in the land; no invasion was necessary -- no vomiting.
The kingdom of God cannot be confined geographically today.
There is no New Covenant national monopoly on Covenant Land status.
Covenant Land status is an option to all nations.
Natural geographical and climatic disasters are no longer covenantally predictable.
The land no longer mediates between God and man.
The arena of God's predictable sanctions has moved from geography to society.
The kingdom of God is now the Promised Land: universal in scope.
Footnotes:
1. Rhetoric is used as a means of persuasion. It is the third biblical interpretive principle: grammar (grammatico-historical), (theo)logic, and rhetoric (symbolism). The medieval educational Trivium was a manifestation of this three-fold system of biblical hermeneutics.
2. David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987), pp. 196-97.
3. I suggest that there will be a tendency for those who hold that the Mosaic dietary laws still are judicially binding to search for evidence that there has been an increase in the frequency of earthquakes in the morally rebellious twentieth century. Rushdoony, for example, regards as judicially significant the escalation of reported earthquakes, 1950-1963: ten instances, compared to eight, 1900-49. R. J. Rushdoony, The Biblical Philosophy of History (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1969), p. 79. It was in the late 1960's, while he was writing The Institutes of Biblical Law, that he first decided that the Mosaic dietary laws are still binding.
4. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), p. 830; James B. Jordan, The Sociology of the Church: Essays in Reconstruction (Tyler, Texas: Geneva Ministries, 1986), pp. 101-2.
5. This could take place only after they were circumcised (Josh. 5): a mark of Israel's priestly judicial status .
6. North, Tools of Dominion, p. 838.
7. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), ch. 2.
8. North, Tools of Dominion, p. 710.
9. Those Israelites who journeyed outside the land had to return annually to Israel, so they were brought under dual sanctions: Passover and land.
10. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, III:v.
11. Herbert Danby, "Introduction," The Mishnah (New York: Oxford University Press, [1933] 1987), p. xiii.
12. George Horowitz, The Spirit of Jewish Law (New York: Central Book Co., [1953] 1973), p. 93.
13. On the Talmud, see North, Tools of Dominion, Appendix B.
14. Gary DeMar, Ruler of the Nations: Biblical Blueprints for Government (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987).
15. This seems to have been a common grace covenanting process -- formal public obedience to the outward civil laws of the Bible -- since there were no covenantal heirs remaining at the time of Assyria's conquest of Israel. Also, there is no indication that they were circumcised as part of their national repentance.
16. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., The Greatness of the Great Commission: The Christian Enterprise in a Fallen World (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), ch. 10.
17. One earthquake that struck a sin center was the 1994 southern California earthquake, which centered in the Canoga Park-Chatsworth area. This is the center for pornographic movie production in the U.S. Models who appear in such movies temporarily became less enthusiastic about their work, according to one agent for these performers. "It's put the fear of God into them." Christianity Today (March 7, 1994), p. 57.
18. T. D. Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake (Philadelphia: Lippencott, 1956).
19. Voltaire included a section on the Lisbon earthquake in Candide.
20. If I am wrong, Westminster Seminary West would be wise to move out of Escondido, California to, say, Lynden, Washington. Combine the morality of Southern California and the San Andreas fault, and you have a prescription for disaster if the land is still a covenantal agent.
21. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., He Shall Have Dominion: A Postmillennial Eschatology (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992).
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