Appendix A SACRILEGE AND SANCTIONS So Joshua sent messengers, and they ran unto the tent; and, behold, it was hid in his tent, and the silver under it. And they took them out of the midst of the tent, and brought them unto Joshua, and unto all the children of Israel, and laid them out before the LORD. And Joshua, and all Israel with him, took Achan the son of Zerah, and the silver, and the garment, and the wedge of gold, and his sons, and his daughters, and his oxen, and his asses, and his sheep, and his tent, and all that he had: and they brought them unto the valley of Achor. And Joshua said, Why hast thou troubled us? the LORD shall trouble thee this day. And all Israel stoned him with stones, and burned them with fire, after they had stoned them with stones. And they raised over him a great heap of stones unto this day. So the LORD turned from the fierceness of his anger. Wherefore the name of that place was called, The valley of Achor, unto this day (Josh. 7:22-26).
Achan appropriated forbidden objects in Jericho. These objects had been previously set aside by God for His temple. "But all the silver, and gold, and vessels of brass and iron, are consecrated unto the LORD: they shall come into the treasury of the LORD" (Josh. 6:19). This holy (set-aside) property is what Achan had appropriated. His was therefore an act of sacrilege. Sacrilege is a profane act, but a specific form of profanity: theft from a temple or a holy place.(1) Jericho was to be offered as the firstfruits sacrifice to God on God's fiery altar. The entire city was to be burned. Its confiscated treasures were to be set aside for God's temple.
Because of Achan's act of sacrilege, God killed 36 Israelites in the first battle of Ai (Josh. 7:5). They were not responsible for his act of sacrilege, but God nonetheless imposed capital sanctions on them. This event was later used by Joshua in his strategy to take the city of Ai: "For they will come out after us till we have drawn them from the city; for they will say, They flee before us, as at the first: therefore we will flee before them" (Josh. 8:6). Nevertheless, the 36 dead men were dead because of a sin committed by a man in secret, a man who was not a representative civil ruler in Israel. Judicially, why did God kill them? Because of Achan's representative position as a priest (Greek: hieros) of God in the national hierarchy (Greek: hierarch = high priest).
Achan's Priestly Role in a Holy War In his capacity as a warrior-priest, Achan had committed sacrilege. Jordan is correct: "All of Israel were [sic] a nation of priests, and it is the priests who prosecute holy war. God Himself had established a parallel between the war camp and the Tabernacle, both holy places. . . ."(2) As a member of God's holy army, Achan had been ordered to bring burning judgment against Jericho. His was not simply a run-of-the-mill capital crime of a father in his role as father; it was the sin of a man who had personally appropriated forbidden objects that were to be set apart for God, i.e., holy objects. His disobedience was a priestly act. The nation burned the remains of Achan and his family. God's direct sanction against false worship by a priest was fire (Lev. 10:2); it was also His punishment for a non-priest who offered incense illegally (Num. 16:35).(3)
The crime of sacrilege in the Old Covenant era carried with it a biblically unique degree of covenantal responsibility. The sanctions imposed by God and the State against this crime seem to have extended to all those who were under the criminal's legal jurisdiction. This analysis in turn suggests that Adam's primary crime was also sacrilege.(4) He had eaten a prohibited communion meal by appropriating fruit that had been explicitly set aside by God. Sacrilege was the original crime that brought all of humanity under God's negative sanctions. Adam's sons and daughters have received a death sentence because of the sins of their father. This sanction appears to be a unique judicial aspect of sacrilege, both in Adam's case and Achan's.(5)
The penalty imposed by Joshua and the court was the public execution of Achan, his family, and his entire inheritance. Even the stolen goods had become polluted through sacrilege, and therefore had to be burned with fire, along with the corpses (Josh. 7:25). God instructed the people of Israel to do with Achan what they had been instructed to do with Jericho. Worse; not even the silver and gold were to be salvaged for the tabernacle. The fire would be all-encompassing.
Fathers and Sons
There is no doubt that God sanctioned the execution of Achan and his household, for He immediately withdrew His anger and His negative sanctions (v. 26). Yet the targets of this public execution were Achan's family members. The crucial question is: Did they partake in their father's sin? If not, was this execution in violation of Deuteronomy 24:16? That text announces: "The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin." Why were the sons and daughters executed for the sin of the father? The text in Joshua does not say that they knew of the crime, although they may have. It does speak of the burning of his tent. This indicates that the goods had been buried inside his tent. Those inside may have known what was going on. It is not stated specifically that some of the children were too young to know, nor does it state that some were old enough to be in their own tents. The point is, inside the judicial boundary of Achan's tent, everything had been polluted. The tent represented the judicial boundary of Achan's authority as a household priest. Everything inside that boundary had become profane as a result of his unauthorized and self-conscious trespass of holy objects. Everything inside was fit for destruction.
Surely the animals did not know. Why were even the animals under his administration executed? What had these animals done to deserve stoning? They had done nothing more than the animals had done in Adam's representative Fall, yet they, too, had suffered the consequences, as have their descendants. A cursed form of death entered the animal kingdom as a judgment from God. The subordinates suffered as a result of their master's act of defiance.
Because the text of Joshua 7 is not specific regarding the knowledge of Achan's sons and daughters regarding their father's act of sacrilege, we cannot be sure that they did not know and understand what their father was doing. The fact that the family's animals were stoned does indicate that a comprehensive ban -- hormah -- had been placed by God on his whole household, irrespective of their knowledge or consent. If Deuteronomy 24:16 is accepted as a universally binding standard for Israel's civil government, then we must conclude that they both knew and understood. If they did not know and understand, then we must conclude that Deuteronomy 24:16 did not apply in cases of sacrilege. The text of Joshua 7 does not definitively prove one interpretation over the other, but the execution of the animals does suggest that sacrilege was a unique crime and therefore outside the judicial boundary of Deuteronomy 24:16 regarding innocent sons and guilty fathers.
Holy War
The issue at stake was the conquest's judicial character as a uniquely holy war. God had directed the Israelites to destroy all the families inside the boundaries of Canaan. "And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them" (Deut. 7:2; cf. 7:16). They were not allowed to show mercy, except to Rahab and her family, since she had covenanted with Israel before the holy army entered the land. Once the army had crossed over the boundary of the land, no other mercy was to be extended to the inhabitants within that boundary. The normal rules of holy warfare did not apply. Israel was not allowed to offer terms of surrender to any Canaanite city, unlike wars outside the land (Deut. 20:10-11).
By stealing holy objects in Jericho -- goods that God had appropriated for Himself -- Achan had not only stolen from God; he had also united himself and his family covenantally with Jericho. By stealing part of God's required first-fruits offering, Achan became a citizen of Jericho. He also became profane: the violator of a sacred boundary placed by God around the city of Jericho. He was therefore required to suffer the judgment of every citizen in Jericho: death. Achan's covenantal citizenship extended down to his children and his property: the animals and the stolen goods. Just as Rahab had become a citizen of Israel by hiding the spies and placing the red string publicly in her window, so did Achan become a citizen of Jericho by hiding the banned goods. Just as Rahab's family had survived because of her covenant, so did Achan's family perish because of his covenant. Achan and his family became Canaanites, and therefore the entire family came under the covenantal ban: hormah.
Aaron and His Sons Aaron built the golden calf and thereby brought sin on the people (Ex. 32). All of the people had initiated his representative priestly sin, so three thousand of them suffered the deadly consequences as representatives of the nation (Ex. 32:28). By serving as executioners against them, the Levites removed from their tribe the curse of Jacob (Gen. 49:7), becoming the priestly, holy, set-aside, first-born tribe (Num. 1:47-53).
In contrast to their father, Nadab and Abihu initiated their own sins. God brought direct sanctions against them: "And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took either of them his censer, and put fire therein, and put incense thereon, and offered strange fire before the LORD, which he commanded them not. And there went out fire from the LORD, and devoured them, and they died before the LORD. Then Moses said unto Aaron, This is it that the LORD spake, saying, I will be sanctified in them that come nigh me, and before all the people I will be glorified. And Aaron held his peace" (Lev. 10:1-3). Then Moses warned their father and their priestly successors not to display any sign of grief, lest the people be subjected to God's wrath. Instead, the people were to bewail God's fiery sanctions against the two priests. When God is so filled with wrath that He sends His sacred fire, His people are to bewail this event for God's sake.
And Moses called Mishael and Elzaphan, the sons of Uzziel the uncle of Aaron, and said unto them, Come near, carry your brethren from before the sanctuary out of the camp. So they went near, and carried them in their coats out of the camp; as Moses had said. And Moses said unto Aaron, and unto Eleazar and unto Ithamar, his sons, Uncover not your heads, neither rend your clothes; lest ye die, and lest wrath come upon all the people: but let your brethren, the whole house of Israel, bewail the burning which the LORD hath kindled. And ye shall not go out from the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, lest ye die: for the anointing oil of the LORD is upon you. And they did according to the word of Moses (Lev. 10:4-7; emphasis added).
David's Numbering of a Non-Holy Army Another example of a near-sacrilegious(6) crime in which there was a representative legal relationship was David's numbering of the people. This census-taking was allowed by God only when the nation was being set aside for holy war to bring God's capital sanction against His enemies (Num. 1:3). Thus, David could act legally only in his capacity as senior military priest. He misused his civil authority as king to number the people, despite Joab's strong warning (II Sam. 24:3).
The people were at fault for numerous crimes, but not David's particular crime, which was only possible for Israel's senior military leader to commit: high military priest of the holy army. But because there was no imminent holy war, David's act was an act of theft: treating God's holy army as if it were the king's army. David's priestly act of sacrilege would bring all those under his jurisdiction under the threat of God's wrath. The text says that God wanted to punish Israel, and David was God's means to that end. "And again the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them to say, Go, number Israel and Judah" (II Sam. 24:1).(7) The use of the metaphorical verb kindled points to His holy ban against them. It was nevertheless David's personal sin that he numbered them, for he was not preparing for holy war.
He soon recognized that he had sinned. "And David's heart smote him after that he had numbered the people. And David said unto the LORD, I have sinned greatly in that I have done: and now, I beseech thee, O LORD, take away the iniquity of thy servant; for I have done very foolishly" (II Sam. 24:10). He asked God for forgiveness, and God offered him the choice of one negative sanction among three. David told God that He should decide. That was what God had been waiting for and aiming toward: "So the LORD sent a pestilence upon Israel from the morning even to the time appointed: and there died of the people from Dan even to Beer-sheba seventy thousand men" (II Sam. 24:15). Only men died in this plague. Clearly, it was a judicial plague, not biological -- analogous to the death of all the firstborn of Egypt, who also were not contagious. Public health measures would not have reduced the death rate.
The Bible does not say that all 70,000 men deserved the negative sanction of death. Some surely did; some probably didn't. Men live in societies, and as members of covenant-bound collectives, they become subject both to God's negative sanctions and His positive sanctions. Jeremiah and Ezekiel went out in the Babylonian captivity, yet both had remained faithful to God. Individuals cannot always escape the negative sanctions associated with corporate responsibility simply by their own righteous behavior. Good men can suffer in unrighteous societies, while bad men can prosper in righteous societies (Ps. 72). In any case, they did not deserve death for the crime of sacrilege; if anyone did, David did, yet he was not punished directly. He was punished representatively: through the decimation of his army. His kingdom was reduced by 70,000 men. Like the stolen goods in Achan's tent that could never be used in the temple, so were these 70,000 potential holy warriors. David had sought confirmation of his power as king through the census. God reduced the nation's power by 70,000 potential holy warriors.
Jeroboam and the Priesthood Consider Jeroboam's revolt against Rehoboam. The revolt itself was not illegal. The subsequent problem for the Northern Kingdom was that Jeroboam committed sacrilege after the secession, and the people consented. He appointed new priests to administer the sacrifices. He appointed the dregs of society to these offices. "After this thing Jeroboam returned not from his evil way, but made again of the lowest of the people priests of the high places: whosoever would, he consecrated him, and he became one of the priests of the high places. And this thing became sin unto the house of Jeroboam, even to cut it off, and to destroy it from off the face of the earth" (I Ki. 13:33-34). Once again, we see that sacrilege leads to the disinheritance of the offender's sons, even though they had not committed the original crime.
Why was his decision an act of sacrilege? What had Jeroboam stolen from the temple? Jeroboam had stolen the actual rites of the temple; he had stolen God's lawful worship. He had violated the monopoly of worship that God had established for the entire nation, not just the Southern Kingdom.
He had also stolen God's holy army of priests. Jeroboam removed God's holy army from the highways of the nation. No longer would the holy army of Israel march three times a year to Jerusalem. The people implicitly consented to Jeroboam's sacrilegious decision: they could have walked to Jerusalem to offer their sacrifices, but most chose not to. They preferred Jeroboam's local golden calves (II Ki. 10:29). What the people saved in travel expenses and trouble, however, they more than lost when God brought negative sanctions against them.
Meanwhile, the lawful priesthood departed from Israel:
And the priests and the Levites that were in all Israel resorted to him out of all their coasts. For the Levites left their suburbs and their possession, and came to Judah and Jerusalem: for Jeroboam and his sons had cast them off from executing the priest's office unto the LORD: And he ordained him priests for the high places, and for the devils, and for the calves which he had made. And after them out of all the tribes of Israel such as set their hearts to seek the LORD God of Israel came to Jerusalem, to sacrifice unto the LORD God of their fathers. So they strengthened the kingdom of Judah, and made Rehoboam the son of Solomon strong, three years: for three years they walked in the way of David and Solomon (II Chron. 11:13-17).
Jeroboam brought negative sanctions against the lawful priests; God therefore brought negative sanctions against the Northern Kingdom. The northern tribes of Israel accepted the representation of politically appointed, profane priests, who in turn committed sacrilege daily. The Northern Kingdom of Israel did not recover from these priestly acts of sacrilege. It was burdened by kings who were far more corrupt and tyrannical than Judah's kings, and it went into captivity under a vicious nation, Assyria, over a century before Judah fell to the more tolerant Babylonians. Israel's land was inhabited from then on by the Samaritans: foreigners who were brought into the land by the Assyrians to replace the captive Hebrews.
For the children of Israel walked in all the sins of Jeroboam which he did; they departed not from them; Until the LORD removed Israel out of his sight, as he had said by all his servants the prophets. So was Israel carried away out of their own land to Assyria unto this day. And the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon, and from Cuthah, and from Ava, and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel: and they possessed Samaria, and dwelt in the cities thereof (II Ki. 17:22-24).
The people were at risk in the rebellion of their king, for the king placed them under the rule of a new priesthood. By consenting to the decision of Jeroboam, the people became sacrilegious. It was their continuing consent to sacrilege rather than Jeroboam's initial act of sacrilege that eventually brought God's permanent sanction of captivity upon the Northern Kingdom.
New Testament Biblical Theology: The High Priest The primary sin in history is sacrilege. The penalty for sacrilege is fire; so is the final negative sanction (Rev. 20:14-15). The representative nature of sacrilege is the primary message of the gospel: from the first Adam to the second Adam, the curse of death was revealed in all men. The resurrection of Jesus Christ, the second Adam, revealed that He has representatively atoned for that original sin, which had brought all of mankind under the curse. Paul wrote: "Therefore as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life. For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous" (Rom. 5:18-19).
The New Testament does not speak of the atoning work of Jesus Christ in His capacity as king, but rather in His capacity as high priest. "But Christ being come an high priest of good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this building; Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us" (Heb. 9:11-12). It was in His representative office as high priest, not as king, that Jesus Christ established the link between Himself and the covenant people, the saints of God: those people who have come under God's eternal positive sanctions because Jesus Christ came under God the Father's negative sanctions.
Sacrilege in English History Until the advent of the modern worldview, it was a common belief among Christians that sacrilege is always visited by God's negative sanctions. An old English proverb appeared in several versions: "Evil-gotten goods lightly come and lightly go." "Ill-gotten goods will not last three crops." "Ill-gotten goods would not last to the third heir."(8) It is therefore appropriate to refer at this point to the work of Sir Henry Spelman.
Spelman wrote a popular book against laymen who impropriated tithes, which are owed exclusively to the institutional church: De non temerandis ecclessis (1613). It went through four editions. It emphasized divine judgments against the sacrilegious. In 1632, he began a study of the families that bought or inherited the church and monastic properties confiscated by Henry VIII in 1546. He limited his research to ex-monastic estates within a 12-mile radius of Rougham in Norfolk.(9) This study was published posthumously in 1698: The History and Fate of Sacrilege. Webb and Neale in the mid-1800's carried forward this suggestive research. They found that of 630 families that inherited these lands, only 14 families still survived, and that 600 had clearly come under special judgment. They asserted that there was a statistically significant factor in the disasters that befell the 600.(10) A similar though shorter study was written by Sir Simon Degge in 1699.(11) Thomas remarks that "Degge's conclusions were, like Spelman's, regarded as too dangerous to be published at the time, and only appeared in print in 1717."(12)
Nevertheless, throughout the seventeenth century, similar warnings had been offered by Catholic controversialists and many leading Anglican scholars, including John Whitgift, Francis Godwin, Lancelot Andrewes, Jeremy Taylor, Joseph Mede, Isaac Basire, and Robert South.(13) There were also famous political leaders who warned their children against purchasing church lands: William Cecil (Lord Burleigh), Edward Hyde (Lord Chatham), and Thomas Wentworth (Earl of Strafford).(14) Others, including John Milton, denied any such a punishment for those who bought and sold "monkish lands."(15)
John Winthrop and Oliver CromwellTwo families that had profited from the confiscations and which still survived in Spelman's day were the families of Oliver Cromwell, Puritan England's Lord Protector, and his contemporary John Winthrop, the first governor of the Puritans' Massachusetts Bay Colony. Ironically, Winthrop's ancestor, who had purchased from King Henry in 1544 the land of the monastery at Bury St. Edmunds, was named Adam Winthrop -- appropriate, if his crime was indeed sacrilege.(16)
Richard Williams, Oliver Cromwell's ancestor, took the name Cromwell from his uncle, Thomas Cromwell, "hammer of the monks" and the architect of the English Reformation. Richard had acted as Cromwell's agent in the suppression of the monasteries, and his reward was great: three abbeys, two priories, and the nunnery of Hinchinbrooke, which alone was worth some 2,500 per year, an immense fortune. The fortunes on both sides of young Oliver's family had been founded on the spoliation of the church.(17) But the extravagances of Sir Oliver Cromwell, young Oliver's uncle, who lived for almost a century, led to the dissolution of much of the main family's fortune, and Hinchinbrooke was sold in 1627, the year before young Oliver's first election to Parliament.(18) In any case, Oliver's side of the family had not owned Hinchinbrooke, but it did own smaller, less productive former church lands.
Doctoral dissertations are seldom useful to anyone, let alone useful to the kingdom of God, but a series of detailed dissertations on the fate of the families that bought these monastic lands, compared to the fate of families that did not, would be eminently useful. It would be a very difficult task, however, given the carnage and disruptions of the Puritan Revolution, 1642-59, and its aftermath in 1660, the restoration of Charles II.
Conclusion We have considered the crime of sacrilege at some length. There is no question that it invoked God's direct sanctions, which immediately extended to those under the authority of the priestly transgressor: from Adam to his heirs, from Achan to his heirs, and from David to 70,000 Israelites. Achan's case indicates that the civil magistrate was required to impose the capital sanction against the transgressor's whole household, including animals. That there were Old Covenant corporate sanctions applied by God in history in response to a representative agent's sin is an inescapable conclusion, at least in the case of sacrilege.
If unintentional sins by the priests brought the assembly under God's negative sanctions,(19) then what of sacrilege? Sacrilege is far worse. This leads us to a political conclusion that breaks definitively with the Enlightenment: if God ever provides the historical circumstances in which His saints become the founders of a new civil society or the inheritors of an old one, they must maintain the sanctioning authority which God has publicly entrusted to them. They must guard against acts of sacrilege in both the ordained priesthood and the public at large. Sacrilege is not merely sin in general or an improper profession of faith; it is a specific kind of sin: stealing God's property. Those who believe that God will sit back indefinitely while the modern State or modern witches commit atrocities against the property of the church of Jesus Christ do not understand Leviticus 4: God's judgment will come in history.(20) The State is still required by God to defend the church against sacrilege. The State is not neutral.
As in the Old Covenant era, the moral integrity of the people, not their rulers, is judicially primary. The priests and civil rulers will eventually reflect the moral condition of the people, for priests and civil rulers are the people's ordained representatives. Those citizens who remain covenantally faithful to God by obeying His law through His grace (Eph. 2:8-10) will find that their enemies are eventually brought under God's negative sanctions. The covenant-breaker, if he is consistent, is eventually driven to commit sacrilege. At the banquets of covenant-breakers, the holy treasures of the temple will be used as common plates: profanity. When this happens, the handwriting is on the wall for the rulers and the social order they represent. They will be replaced (Dan. 5).(21)
Because the function of civil government is to apply negative temporal sanctions against convicted transgressors in order to protect the entire society from God's negative temporal sanctions, the sacrilege laws are still in force in the New Covenant era. This means that the death penalty must still be imposed on people who commit sacrilege. On the other hand, the hormah of the Mosaic Covenant -- a priestly act of total destruction within the boundaries of geographical Israel -- was required by God only during the original conquest of Canaan. It did not apply after Israel's return from the exile, when strangers living in the land were to be protected by the jubilee land laws (Ezek. 47:21-23).
Sons and daughters can escape the fate of their father by declaring themselves no longer his sons. The New Testament emphasizes God's gracious adoption as more powerful in history than Adam's sacrilege and subsequent disinheritance. The sins of the sacrilegious parent do not extend to the children in the New Covenant era if the children break publicly with their father when they learn of his sacrilege. Furthermore, there is no evidence that this was not also the case in the Old Covenant. But what of a child too young to have understood what his father had done, or one who did not discover the crime until after his father's conviction? To escape execution, he would have to have been adopted by another family. All those who remained within the family of the sacrilegious agent had to suffer the same penalty. This is still the way of escape for the sons of Adam: adoption by a family whose head is untainted by the crime of sacrilege. There is only one such family: the family of God, redeemed by the Second Adam, Jesus Christ.
Footnotes:
1. The Greek word for "sacrilege," hierarsuleo, means "to rob a temple." Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, trans. William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich (University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 374. New Testament examples: "Thou that sayest a man should not commit adultery, dost thou commit adultery? thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou commit sacrilege?" (Rom. 2:22). "For ye have brought hither these men, which are neither robbers of churches, nor yet blasphemers of your goddess" (Acts 19:37).
2. James B. Jordan, Judges: God's War Against Humanism (Tyler, Texas: Geneva Ministries, 1985), p. 93.
3. Prostitution was not specified as a capital crime in Israel, except when committed by a priest's daughter. "And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire" (Lev. 21:9). This indicates that a connection to the priesthood placed special restrictions on individuals, and violations brought a unique sanction: execution by fire.
4. Wrote Sir Henry Spelman in the seventeenth century: "Thus it appeareth that Sacrilege was the first sin, the master-sin, and the common sin at the beginning of the world, committed in earth by man in corruption, committed in paradise by man in perfection, committed in heaven itself by the angels in glory; . . ." Spelman, The History and Fate of Sacrilege (1698); Eades edition (London: John Hodges, 1888), p. 1; cited by R. J. Rushdoony, Law and Society, vol. 2 of Institutes of Biblical Law (Vallecito, California: Ross House, 1982), p. 33.
5. A fiery sword was placed by God at the entrance of the garden to keep out the sacrilegious priest and his heirs (Gen. 3:24). Achan's remains were burned (Josh. 7:25).
6. "Near-sacrilegious" may be too weak a designation. The event has the marks of sacrilege, if I am correct in my thesis that numbering the people was a priestly act.
7. The intermediary agent between God and David was Satan: "And Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel" (I Chron. 21:1). Satan bore responsibility for this action, as did David, but the Bible clearly says that God moved David to do it. Those who seek to assert a philosophical contradiction between God's will and David's actions need to listen to Paul's warning against such a misuse of moral philosophy: "Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will? Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?" (Rom. 9:19-21).
8. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971), p. 97.
9. Ibid., p. 99.
10. Rushdoony, Law and Society, ch. 7. Rushdoony's strong endorsement of Spelman's thesis on sacrilege and its sanctions is curious, given Rushdoony's firm commitment to the view that tithes do not belong to the institutional church, and that the layman can lawfully give it to any kind of Christian charity. Rushdoony, "To Whom Do We Tithe," in Rushdoony and Edward A. Powell, Tithing and Dominion (Vallecito, California: Ross House, 1979), ch. 7. See Appendix B, below: "Rushdoony on the Tithe: A Critique."
11. Degge, Observations upon the possessors of monastery-lands in Staffordshire.
12. Thomas, Religion, p. 99.
13. Ibid., p. 100.
14. Ibid., p. 101.
15. Ibid., p. 103.
16. Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958), p. 1.
17. Christopher Hill, God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (New York: Harper Torchbooks, [1970] 1972), p. 37.
18. Antonia Fraser, Cromwell: The Lord Protector (New York: Knopf, 1974), p. 13.
19. See above, Chapter 4: "Corporate Responsibility."
20. The Soviet Union persecuted the church. Robert Conquest (ed.), Religion in the U.S.S.R. (New York: Praeger, 1968); Gerhard Simon, Church, State and Opposition in the U.S.S.R. (London: C. Hurst, [1970] 1974). In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed overnight: August 19-21.
21. In the twentieth century -- perhaps throughout modern times -- the events in the Soviet Union of August 19-21, 1991, best illustrate this principle of replacement. The astoundingly inept attempted coup by the old guard Soviet leaders failed in a nearly bloodless series of events. Within a matter of months, one of the great Christian revivals in history began in Russia, although the secular media in the West rarely mentions it. The experiment in atheism, 1917-1991, had failed.
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