35 GOD'S ESCALATING WRATH I am the LORD your God, which brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, that ye should not be their bondmen; and I have broken the bands of your yoke, and made you go upright. But if ye will not hearken unto me, and will not do all these commandments; And if ye shall despise my statutes, or if your soul abhor my judgments, so that ye will not do all my commandments, but that ye break my covenant: I also will do this unto you; I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning ague, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart: and ye shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it. And I will set my face against you, and ye shall be slain before your enemies: they that hate you shall reign over you; and ye shall flee when none pursueth you (Lev. 26:13-17).
This passage introduces that section of Leviticus 26 which lists the types of negative corporate sanctions in history that Israel could expect if God's covenant people violated God's law. As is true of Deuteronomy 28, a parallel passage on corporate sanctions, the negative sanctions greatly outnumber the positive sanctions. The Israelites were to understand the theocentric basis of wisdom: "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding" (Prov. 9:10).
This section on sanctions appears in the fifth section of the Book of Leviticus. The fifth point of the covenant deals with succession. Why does a section on sanctions appear here? Because sanctions are linked covenantally to succession. This is why eschatology cannot be separated covenantally from theonomy, i.e., God's law and its biblically mandated sanctions. Sanctions determine who will inherit what: inheritance and disinheritance. God identifies Himself as the God of the covenant: deliverer, law-giver, and sanctions-bringer. God's threat of temporal wrath is to redirect the attention of citizens of a holy commonwealth to the possibility of disinheritance in history: wrath as the prelude to corporate disinheritance.
The Fear of God The passage begins with a reminder: the God who threatens these historical sanctions is the God of corporate grace in history. He led them out of bondage in Egypt. They had been bent under the yoke of slavery, but He had broken their yoke and made them walk upright. This upright physical walk was analogous to an upright ethical walk. The language of walking before God is the language of covenantal obedience, both individual and corporate.(1) The morally crooked walk is mirrored by the bent walk of the slave who is under a yoke.
The temptation is always disobedience to God's standards (point three of the biblical covenant model). "But if ye will not hearken unto me, and will not do all these commandments; And if ye shall despise my statutes, or if your soul abhor my judgments, so that ye will not do all my commandments, but that ye break my covenant." This necessarily involves the threat of negative sanctions (point four). "I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning ague, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart." The essence of this sanction is disinheritance (point five). "And ye shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it." Invaders will inherit: "And I will set my face against you, and ye shall be slain before your enemies: they that hate you shall reign over you; and ye shall flee when none pursueth you." So fearful will God's people become that they will flee when none pursue.
The covenantal issue is the fear of God. When men refuse to fear God, He raises up others who will terrify them. Covenant-breakers will thereby learn to fear God's human agents of wrath, so that they might better learn to fear God. The point is this: God is worth fearing even more than military invaders. If the stipulations of the Creator are widely ignored, then military invaders will become increasingly difficult to ignore. In this regard, the covenant-breaking adult is as foolish as a child. A father spanks a child when the child runs into a busy street. The real threat to the child is the street's traffic, but the child is fearless before this external threat. He must learn to fear his father in order to learn the greater fearfulness of the street. He fears the lesser threat more than the greater threat. Similarly, the covenant-breaker loses his fear of the Father -- the far greater threat -- and must be reminded to fear God by a lesser external threat. The magnitude of God's wrath is manifested by the magnitude of the threat of military sanctions: God's wrath is more of a threat than a military defeat. The lesser threat is imposed by God in order to remind men of the greater threat.
Softening Their Resistance The first negative sanction is both psychological and physical: terror and consumption. This will produce sorrow. This defensive mentality is the mentality of the slave and the prisoner. The second threatened negative sanction is military defeat. If this threat fails to persuade them to repent, the sanctions will escalate further. "And if ye will not yet for all this hearken unto me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sins" (Lev. 26:18). The stated punishment is drought. God's wrath is manifested by His destruction of a nation's food supply. This was a major threat to a pre-modern agricultural society. "And I will break the pride of your power; and I will make your heaven as iron, and your earth as brass: And your strength shall be spent in vain: for your land shall not yield her increase, neither shall the trees of the land yield their fruits" (Lev. 26:19-20). Drought was God's means of softening up the resistance of King Ahab against Elijah's message (I Ki. 17:1).
As in the case of Egypt, the next sanction involved the children: "And if ye walk contrary unto me, and will not hearken unto me; I will bring seven times more plagues upon you according to your sins. I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle, and make you few in number; and your high ways shall be desolate" (Lev. 26:21-22). God sent beasts against those children who mocked the prophet Elisha: "And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare [tore] forty and two children of them" (II Ki. 2:23-24).
The judgments are again military: "And if ye will not be reformed by me by these things, but will walk contrary unto me; Then will I also walk contrary unto you, and will punish you yet seven times for your sins. And I will bring a sword upon you, that shall avenge the quarrel of my covenant: and when ye are gathered together within your cities, I will send the pestilence among you; and ye shall be delivered into the hand of the enemy. And when I have broken the staff of your bread, ten women shall bake your bread in one oven, and they shall deliver you your bread again by weight: and ye shall eat, and not be satisfied" (Lev. 26:23-26). Enemies laying siege outside the gates, pestilence and hunger inside the gates: so shall covenant-breakers be reminded of the importance of God's law.
But even this may prove futile. "And if ye will not for all this hearken unto me, but walk contrary unto me; Then I will walk contrary unto you also in fury; and I, even I, will chastise you seven times for your sins. And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat" (Lev. 26:27-29). This was fulfilled in the days of Elisha, during Ben-hadad's siege of Samaria:
And it came to pass after this, that Ben-hadad king of Syria gathered all his host, and went up, and besieged Samaria. And there was a great famine in Samaria: and, behold, they besieged it, until an ass's head was sold for fourscore pieces of silver, and the fourth part of a cab of dove's dung for five pieces of silver. And as the king of Israel was passing by upon the wall, there cried a woman unto him, saying, Help, my lord, O king. And he said, If the LORD do not help thee, whence shall I help thee? out of the barnfloor, or out of the winepress? And the king said unto her, What aileth thee? And she answered, This woman said unto me, Give thy son, that we may eat him to day, and we will eat my son to morrow. So we boiled my son, and did eat him: and I said unto her on the next day, Give thy son, that we may eat him: and she hath hid her son. And it came to pass, when the king heard the words of the woman, that he rent his clothes; and he passed by upon the wall, and the people looked, and, behold, he had sackcloth within upon his flesh (II Ki. 6:24-30).
Captivity
Destruction would come upon all the land, rural and urban. If men refused to honor the sabbatical year of release, God promised to give the land its rest through the captivity of the nation. "And I will make your cities waste, and bring your sanctuaries unto desolation, and I will not smell the savour of your sweet odours. And I will bring the land into desolation: and your enemies which dwell therein shall be astonished at it. And I will scatter you among the heathen, and will draw out a sword after you: and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste. Then shall the land enjoy her sabbaths, as long as it lieth desolate, and ye be in your enemies' land; even then shall the land rest, and enjoy her sabbaths. As long as it lieth desolate it shall rest; because it did not rest in your sabbaths, when ye dwelt upon it" (Lev. 26:31-35). The captivity of the people of Israel would be a negative sanction against the people and a positive sanction for the land: "The land also shall be left of them, and shall enjoy her sabbaths, while she lieth desolate without them: and they shall accept of the punishment of their iniquity: because, even because they despised my judgments, and because their soul abhorred my statutes" (Lev. 26:43). This judgment was imposed by God in the days of Jeremiah: "And they [the Chaldeans] burnt the house of God, and brake down the wall of Jerusalem, and burnt all the palaces thereof with fire, and destroyed all the goodly vessels thereof. And them that had escaped from the sword carried he away to Babylon; where they were servants to him and his sons until the reign of the kingdom of Persia: To fulfil the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her sabbaths: for as long as she lay desolate she kept sabbath, to fulfil threescore and ten years" (II Chron. 36:19-21).
The people were to eat the fat of the land of promise. This was God's promised positive sanction. They would feed on the land. In contrast, the negative sanction of captivity was pictured as another kind of feast: the eating of the people by a foreign land. "And ye shall perish among the heathen, and the land of your enemies shall eat you up. And they that are left of you shall pine away in their iniquity in your enemies' lands; and also in the iniquities of their fathers shall they pine away with them" (Lev. 26:38-39).
Step by step, sanction by sanction, God would bring them face to face with the magnitude of their rebellion. The goal was their repentance: "If they shall confess their iniquity, and the iniquity of their fathers, with their trespass which they trespassed against me, and that also they have walked contrary unto me; And that I also have walked contrary unto them, and have brought them into the land of their enemies; if then their uncircumcised hearts be humbled, and they then accept of the punishment of their iniquity: Then will I remember my covenant with Jacob, and also my covenant with Isaac, and also my covenant with Abraham will I remember; and I will remember the land" (Lev. 26:40-42). Negative corporate sanctions in history are designed to restore covenantal faithfulness on the part of God's people. They are not judgments unto oblivion but judgments unto restoration.
Conclusion God's escalating wrath in history serves as a means of restoring dominion by covenant. These negative sanctions are positive in intent: restoring faithfulness and, in the case of captivity, providing rest to the land itself. These sanctions were part of the covenantal law-order of Israel. This is why the section listing the sanctions ends with these words: "These are the statutes and judgments and laws, which the LORD made between him and the children of Israel in mount Sinai by the hand of Moses" (Lev. 26:46). There is no doubt that the sanctions were part of the stipulations. There was no way to obey God's law without imposing the required negative sanctions. If the authorities refused to impose the stipulated negative sanctions, God would impose His stipulated negative sanctions. These negative sanctions would become progressively more painful. God's negative sanctions were designed to persuade men of the integrity -- the seamlessness -- of God's revealed law. If the people refused to learn from one set of punishments, God threatened to impose worse punishments.
The principle underlying this escalation of negative sanctions is simple to state: "But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more" (Luke 12:48). The escalating sanctions in Israel were a form of covenant-affirmation: establishing the social predictability of God's law. The reliability of God's law was visible in the escalation of God's corporate sanctions, both positive and negative.
Modern Christian theologians assume that the Mosaic Covenant's divine sanctions no longer operate in the New Covenant era.(2) From this idea (or at least paralleling it), they conclude that the Mosaic Covenant's civil sanctions are no longer valid. This is logical, given the incorrect presupposition. The divine sanctions undergirded the Bible-revealed familial, civil, and ecclesiastical stipulations; if the authorities refused to impose these mandatory sanctions, God would then impose His sanctions. If the threat of God's corporate sanctions are removed, then the sanctions undergirding the institutional sanctions are absent. Without sanctions, there is no law. Biblical sanctions are inseparable from biblical stipulations: no sanctions = no law. Remove God's corporate sanctions in history, and the legal order becomes judicially autonomous in history.
The autonomy of society from God's law is the agreed-upon agenda of an implicit alliance between the humanists and the pietists. The humanists assume that God's corporate sanctions have always been mythological. Christian pietists assume that these sanctions have been annulled by the New Covenant. This pair of false assumptions serves as the judicial basis of the humanist-pietist alliance against the ideal of God's theocratic kingdom in history: Christendom.
If God's sanctions did not operate predictably in history, it would be impossible to produce a self-consciously biblical form of social theory. Christians would have to rely on some version of pagan natural law theory in order to construct their social theories. This is what they have done for almost two millennia. With the collapse of natural law theory after Darwin, Christian social theory has floundered. Darwin's target was William Paley's providential and teleological order; he hit his target.(3) Everyone standing behind this target has been epistemologically defenseless ever since.
Summary Go threatens His covenant people with negative corporate sanctions in history.
He is the God of corporate grace in history: deliverance from Egypt.
God's people are to walk uprightly before Him.
Disobedience brings corporate negative sanctions.
The essence of these sanctions is disinheritance.
The fear of God is the key issue.
This fear was mediated by a fear of national invasion.
Negative sanctions soften men's resistance to God.
Terror and consumption are sanctions.
This is the slave's mentality: defensive.
Drought was listed: food supply threat.
God threatened their children with wild beasts (later fulfilled).
Family cannibalism is a threat (later fulfilled).
The Promised Land would be left desolate: receiving its accumulated sabbatical years (later fulfilled).
The sanctions were supposed to pressure them to repent.
The sanctions were inextricably linked to the case laws.
Escalating corporate sanctions were imposed by God to establish the predictability of His revealed law.
Without sanctions there is no law.
Footnotes:
1. "And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect" (Gen. 17:1). "And ye shall not walk in the manners of the nation, which I cast out before you: for they committed all these things, and therefore I abhorred them" (Lev. 20:23). "In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away into Assyria, and placed them in Halah and in Habor by the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes. For so it was, that the children of Israel had sinned against the LORD their God, which had brought them up out of the land of Egypt, from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and had feared other gods, And walked in the statutes of the heathen, whom the LORD cast out from before the children of Israel, and of the kings of Israel, which they had made" (II Ki. 17:6-8).
2. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), ch. 7.
3. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), pp. 256-57.
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