OVERCOMING THE VISIBLE ODDS Hear, O Israel: Thou art to pass over Jordan this day, to go in to possess nations greater and mightier than thyself, cities great and fenced up to heaven, A people great and tall, the children of the Anakims, whom thou knowest, and of whom thou hast heard say, Who can stand before the children of Anak! Understand therefore this day, that the LORD thy God is he which goeth over before thee; as a consuming fire he shall destroy them, and he shall bring them down before thy face: so shalt thou drive them out, and destroy them quickly, as the LORD hath said unto thee. Speak not thou in thine heart, after that the LORD thy God hath cast them out from before thee, saying, For my righteousness the LORD hath brought me in to possess this land: but for the wickedness of these nations the LORD doth drive them out from before thee. Not for thy righteousness, or for the uprightness of thine heart, dost thou go to possess their land: but for the wickedness of these nations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee, and that he may perform the word which the LORD sware unto thy fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Understand therefore, that the LORD thy God giveth thee not this good land to possess it for thy righteousness; for thou art a stiffnecked people (Deut. 9:1-6).
Moses here presented a prophecy. This prophecy, as with all biblical prophecies, had an ethical component. God always deals with men covenantally, and the covenant rests on God's law.(1) This prophecy announced the near-term fulfillment of God's original promise to Abraham. That promise had linked Israel's victory to Canaan's immorality: "But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full" (Gen. 15:16). The iniquity of the Amorites was now full. The day of the Lord was at hand.
This prophecy was ethical, as all but messianic prophecies were. The Israelites were commanded to begin the conquest. This command rested on God as sovereign over history. His prophecy regarding the fourth-generation's conquest of Canaan was about to come true. The theocentric nature of this prophecy is obvious. Go's decree is sovereign.
This was a land law. It related to the conquest. But it had implications far beyond the conquest. It related corporate disobedience to defeat in history as a general principle. As Orwell might have put it in Animal Farm: "Original sin is total, but some sins are more total than others."
The Day of the Lord "Hear, O Israel: Thou art to pass over Jordan this day." This announcement was not supposed to be taken literally. The Israelites did not cross the Jordan that day. Moses still had a great deal more to tell them, as the length of the remainder of this commentary indicates. Moses did not die that day. After he died, the nation mourned 30 days (Deut. 33:8). Then they crossed the Jordan. So, what did Moses mean by "this day"?
The "day" referred to here was the day of the Lord. This phrase refers in Scripture to a period of divine judgment that constitutes a turning point in a society's history. The phrase does not occur in the Bible until the prophets; it occurs most often in the Book of Isaiah. Generally, it refers to a period of negative corporate sanctions.(2)
"Howl ye; for the day of the LORD is at hand; it shall come as a destruction from the Almighty" (Isa. 13:6). Occasionally, the phrase "that day" is used to describe a time of national restoration: positive corporate sanctions. "And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea. And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth" (Isa. 11:11-12). The day of the Lord was a period of national sanctions: inheritance and disinheritance. Usually, it meant disinheritance for rebellious Israel and inheritance for some invader. In this context, however, it meant Israel's inheritance and Canaan's disinheritance.
The Bible uses the language of heavenly transformation to describe covenantal-political transformations. This is clear in Isaiah's prophecy regarding the defeat of Babylon by Medo-Persia (Isa. 13:1). "Behold, the day of the LORD cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it. For the stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall not give their light: the sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and the moon shall not cause her light to shine. And I will punish the world for their evil, and the wicked for their iniquity; and I will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease, and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible. I will make a man more precious than fine gold; even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir. Therefore I will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her place, in the wrath of the LORD of hosts, and in the day of his fierce anger" (Isa. 13:9-13). This same cosmic language was invoked prophetically by Jesus to describe the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70: "Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken" (Matt. 24:29). The Bible uses the language of cosmic transformation to describe national disinheritance: the end of an old world order. An old world order is then replaced by a newer world order. The final new world order in history is Jesus Christ's. No other will ever replace it. "And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever" (Dan. 2:44).
The time period of judgment normally lasts for longer than a day, but the final consummation comes on one day, the day of final judgment being the archetype. It is marked by either the total destruction of the unrighteous or their unconditional surrender.(3) The siege of Jerusalem, which ended the Old Covenant order, took far more than a day, but it was consummated with a day of destruction: the burning of the temple -- not by official command -- by a pair of Roman soldiers. The Jewish defector Josephus, who became a court historian for the Roman emperor, referred to this as "that fatal day."(4) This fiery event marked the demise of the Mosaic priesthood in Israel. It also marked the origin of Rabbinic Judaism, or as Neusner calls it, "the Judaism of the two Torahs," i.e., the Old Testament and the Mishnah/Talmud.(5) The teachers of the oral law had followed the Pharisees rather than the Sadducees; their ideas triumphed among the Jews after the fall of Jerusalem.(6) From that time on, those who proclaimed themselves as the legitimate heirs of Moses added their respective authoritative commentaries on the Old Testament: the New Testament for Christians and Mishnah/Talmud for Jews.(7) In both cases, the respective interpretive commentaries were assumed by their adherents to take precedence operationally over the Old Testament, although neither group challenged the authority of the Old Testament.(8) Both sides acknowledged the radical covenantal discontinuity that had taken place with the burning of the temple. The Old Order was gone forever. It cannot possibly replace the New World Order of Jesus Christ, for no order ever will.
This is why dispensational theology is utterly wrong about: 1) the removal of the church from history by the Rapture; 2) the absence of every trace of the New Testament order during the interim period of seven years until Christ returns bodily to set up His millennial kingdom; and 3) the substitution of a Jewish theocratic-bureaucratic order during the millennium, where temple sacrifices of bulls and sheep and goats will be restored. Although dispensational theologians refuse to say this in print, these animal sacrifices would have to replace the Lord's Supper. The Lord's Supper is said by dispensationalists to memorialize the death of Christ. What will the "memorials" (Scofield's term)(9) of the animal sacrifices symbolize? There is no equality possible; one sacrificial "memorial" or the other must be authoritative.
There will be no revival of a Jewish theocratic order(10) because Jesus Christ is not a bigamist with two brides and a different sacramental system for each of them. The gentile church is not Leah with the Jewish church serving as Rachel, or vice versa. There is only one bride for the Bridegroom. There is also only one final world order: Jesus Christ's. It will never be broken by an eschatological discontinuity: the Rapture, followed by a Great Tribulation period. We learn this from Jesus' parable of the wheat and the tares. "He said unto them, An enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up? But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn" (Matt. 13:28-30). Jesus explained: "The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels. As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world" (vv. 39-40). There will be no uprooting of either wheat or tares, the church or the rebels, until the end of time.
Moses told Israel that a day of covenantal discontinuity had arrived. There would soon be a covenantal displacement in the land of Canaan. The Levitical laws governing landed inheritance (Lev. 25) and all the other Mosaic land laws would soon have a meaningful geographical context. A new world order was about to replace the Canaanites' old world order. The magnitude of this covenantal discontinuity would be visible to all. Everyone would know in retrospect that God alone had been behind this transformation because of the disparity in physical size between the winners and the losers. The multitude of Israelite ants would consume the Anakim elephants.
The Bigger They Are The Anakim were large people, probably Goliath-sized. Goliath was a little over nine feet tall (I Sam. 17:4). Spies sent by Moses to survey Canaan had reported: "And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight" (Num. 13:33). The region around Canaan had been the home of several groups of these giant peoples. "The Emims dwelt therein in times past, a people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakims; Which also were accounted giants, as the Anakims; but the Moabites call them Emims" (Deut. 2:10-11). The Hebrew word translated giant is rawfaw.
Og of Bashan was a giant. He was described by Moses as the last of them. "For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man" (Deut. 3:11). A man who sleeps in a bed that is over 13 feet long and six feet wide is either a giant or else worries a lot about falling out of bed. Og's size did him no good militarily. "And the rest of Gilead, and all Bashan, being the kingdom of Og, gave I unto the half tribe of Manasseh; all the region of Argob, with all Bashan, which was called the land of giants" (Deut. 3:13). The military success of Israel over Og of Bashan was a trans-Jordan preliminary testament: Israel would inherit Canaan despite the presence of giants.
Which giants? Wasn't Og the last of them? In what sense was Og the last of the remnant of giants, when Anakim still dwelt in Canaan? Moses said: "For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants." What did Moses mean by this? Was Og even larger than the others? The size of his bed indicates that he was. A man the size of Goliath does not need a bed over 13 feet long. Og was the largest giant of all, the last of the original race mentioned in Genesis 6:4.(11) Canaan's Anakim were accounted as giants (Deut. 2:11, 20). When God enabled Israel to conquer Og, He showed Israel that the "not quite giants" would not be a large problem.
Other tribes of peoples accounted as giants had been conquered by Israel's relatives, Esau and Ammon. "That also was accounted a land of giants: giants dwelt therein in old time; and the Ammonites call them Zamzummims; A people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakims; but the LORD destroyed them before them; and they succeeded them, and dwelt in their stead: As he did to the children of Esau, which dwelt in Seir, when he destroyed the Horims from before them; and they succeeded them, and dwelt in their stead even unto this day" (Deut. 2:20-22). If the heirs of evil Esau and the even more evil Ammon had inherited the lands of the giants, then Israel should not fear the Anakim. The issue was ethics, not size, as the text indicates.
Israel in David's time faced Philistine heirs of the giants. In each case, the giants lost their battles with individual challengers from Israel (II Sam. 21:16-22). The old phrase, "the bigger they are, the harder they fall," is well illustrated by the fate of the giants.
Counting the Costs Moses had sent out spies to survey the land and report back (Num. 13). The sight of the giants had terrified some of the spies (v. 33). What they had personally seen made a greater impression on them than what they had heard from God through Moses. Then Joshua and Caleb reminded them of what they had heard. "If the LORD delight in us, then he will bring us into this land, and give it us; a land which floweth with milk and honey. Only rebel not ye against the LORD, neither fear ye the people of the land; for they are bread for us: their defence is departed from them, and the LORD is with us: fear them not. But all the congregation bade stone them with stones. And the glory of the LORD appeared in the tabernacle of the congregation before all the children of Israel" (Num. 14:8-10). This did no good; in fact, it outraged the other spies. When men's hearts are rebellious, what they see means more to them than what God has told them. That was the ten spies' problem. Each of them substituted "I saw with my own eyes" for "Hear, O Israel."
We are told to count the cost of our actions. Jesus warned His listeners regarding the cost of discipleship. He used analogy of military planning. "Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down first, and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand? Or else, while the other is yet a great way off, he sendeth an ambassage, and desireth conditions of peace. So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple" (Luke 14:31-33). This requirement to count the cost led to Moses' decision to send out the spies. But what ten of the dozen spies forgot was this: facts are to be interpreted in terms of God's word. Facts are not autonomous; there are no "brute facts." Facts are always interpreted facts. They are interpreted correctly by God because they have been created by God. They are what God says they are because He created them that way. Van Til has put it this way: "The non-Christian assumes that man is ultimate, that is, that he is not created. Christianity assumes that man is created. The non-Christian assumes that the facts of man's environment are not created; the Christian assumes that these facts are created."(12) The spies were supposed to interpret what they saw by what God had told them. Lawrence "Yogi" Berra, the former New York Yankees baseball star and a legendary coiner of classic obvious phrases,(13) once said, "You can observe a lot just by looking." But far more important than looking is interpreting. Accurate interpreting begins and ends with hearing and believing the word of God.
Israel was facing what appeared to be enormous odds against them. The spies' own eyes seemed to tell them this. But men's eyes tell them nothing apart from men's faith. Our eyes may confirm our faith, fail to confirm it, or confuse us, but they do not operate autonomously. The information that eyes provide must then be interpreted. The Israelites were told to estimate the odds in terms of God's promise to Abraham regarding the sins of Canaan: "But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full" (Gen. 15:16).
Judicial Blindness and Deafness
Soon after Moses announced the crossing of the Jordan, he revealed to Israel the rules of warfare. The first rule: "When thou goest out to battle against thine enemies, and seest horses, and chariots, and a people more than thou, be not afraid of them: for the LORD thy God is with thee, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt" (Deut. 20:1). God subsequently warned them in the midst of the conquest of Canaan: "Be not afraid because of them: for to morrow about this time will I deliver them up all slain before Israel: thou shalt hough [hamstring] their horses, and burn their chariots with fire" (Josh. 11:6b). Israel defeated the initial wave of charioteers, just as God had promised (Josh. 11:9). But the Israelites refused to believe their own eyes, just as they had refused to believe their own eyes at the Red Sea. "And the children of Joseph said, The hill is not enough for us: and all the Canaanites that dwell in the land of the valley have chariots of iron, both they who are of Beth-shean and her towns, and they who are of the valley of Jezreel" (Josh. 17:16). "And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron" (Jud. 1:19).
Israel's theological inheritance to each succeeding generation was reduced by the power of sight over hearing. They would not listen to God's written word and His prophets. The Bible speaks of hearing and seeing as ethical. What is foundational is not the physical acuity of man's sight and hearing, but a man's covenantal framework of interpretation. Isaiah wrote: "Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me. And he said, Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not. Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed. Then said I, Lord, how long? And he answered, Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without man, and the land be utterly desolate, And the LORD have removed men far away, and there be a great forsaking in the midst of the land" (Isa. 6:8-12). God inflicted judicial blindness on the nation. Israelites would see and hear, yet they would not perceive the covenantal meaning of what they saw and heard. This biblical principle of judicial blindness was basic to Jesus' use of parables:
And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables? He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand. And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive: For this people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them. But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear (Matt. 13:10-16).
Paul also quoted Isaiah's words in his final recorded lecture to the Jews: "Go unto this people, and say, Hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and not perceive: For the heart of this people is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they closed; lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them" (Acts 28:26-27). The hearing that should govern men's decision-making is covenantal hearing.
Comparative Degrees of Moral Rebellion The text says that God would soon give the victory to the Israelites despite their unrighteousness. "Not for thy righteousness, or for the uprightness of thine heart, dost thou go to possess their land: but for the wickedness of these nations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee, and that he may perform the word which the LORD sware unto thy fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" (v. 5). Three ideas are present here: 1) Israel is not righteous; 2) the Canaanites are more unrighteous than Israel; 3) God's promise to Abraham will be fulfilled.
The original promise had included a prophecy regarding the sins of the Amorites: they would be filled, i.e., their national boundaries of tolerable rebellion would be breached. The promise of land for Abraham's heirs was not devoid of a specific prophecy regarding the ethical condition of the Canaanites. The fulfillment of the promise was therefore as secure as the fulfillment of the prophecy. The element of ethical conditionality had been present in the original terms of the promise.(14)
The promise not only did not annul the ethical stipulations of God's covenant with Abraham; its fulfillment would soon confirm that covenant, Moses said. But the Israelites were not to regard the fulfillment of the original promise as a confirmation of their righteousness. They were only to regard the fulfillment as confirming the Canaanites' even greater unrighteousness. The filling up of the Canaanites' iniquity had placed a chronological boundary around Canaan: the day of the Lord. The Canaanites would not extend their dominion over the land beyond this chronological boundary, which was both an ethical-covenantal boundary and a prophetic boundary. God had announced to Abraham, "Thus far and no farther" regarding Canaan's sins and its time remaining. Now He would fulfill His promise.
Canaanites Were Worse
Esau had defeated giants; so had Ammon (Deut. 2:20-22). Yet Esau and Ammon were not paragons of national virtue. Ammonites were so evil that it took ten generations of covenant membership to enable an Ammonite to become a citizen of Israel (Deut. 23:3). Yet God had delivered the giants into their hands. This victory was not evidence of the righteousness of either Esau or Ammon. Compared to the giants, however, they were better.
Moses warned Israel not to misinterpret the victory that lay ahead. "Speak not thou in thine heart, after that the LORD thy God hath cast them out from before thee, saying, For my righteousness the LORD hath brought me in to possess this land: but for the wickedness of these nations the LORD doth drive them out from before thee" (Deut. 9:4). The Israelites could not legitimately regard themselves as morally deserving of the victory. They deserved nothing special, but the Canaanites deserved worse. Their evil had multiplied over time. Their debts to God had compounded. Their day of reckoning had almost arrived. The Israelites were to serve as agents of God's judgment. Morally speaking, the Israelites were in much the same condition as the deceased reprobate at whose funeral the best that the eulogizer could say about him was this: "His brother was worse." Israel, as God's adopted son, was better than the Canaanites, the disinherited sons of Adam.
Autonomous man has no legal claim on God. The temptation of Israel was to regard the impending military victory as a sign of their superior ethical standing before God. The lure, once again, was autonomy. "For my righteousness the LORD hath brought me in to possess this land" was the ethical equivalent of "My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth" (Deut. 8:17). Both assertions rested on a belief in Israel's autonomy. Moses warned them: "Understand therefore, that the LORD thy God giveth thee not this good land to possess it for thy righteousness; for thou art a stiffnecked people" (Deut. 9:6). Then he recounted their experience in the wilderness: "Remember, and forget not, how thou provokedst the LORD thy God to wrath in the wilderness: from the day that thou didst depart out of the land of Egypt, until ye came unto this place, ye have been rebellious against the LORD. Also in Horeb ye provoked the LORD to wrath, so that the LORD was angry with you to have destroyed you" (vv. 9-10). The cause, Moses reminded them, was the golden calf incident (vv. 12-14).
The threat then had been national destruction. It still was (Deut. 8:19-20). When God had threatened to destroy them after the golden calf incident, Moses had interceded with God, appealing to His name and reputation. "Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, and say, For mischief did he bring them out, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth? Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, thy servants, to whom thou swarest by thine own self, and saidst unto them, I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have spoken of will I give unto your seed, and they shall inherit it for ever. And the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people" (Ex. 32:12-14). It would have been futile for Moses to have invoked Israel's righteousness as the basis of God's extension of mercy. This was still true for the generation of the conquest.
The Adamic Covenant
Canaanite civilization was unrighteous. More than this: it was progressively unrighteous. It kept getting worse. It had therefore reached its temporal limits. It had reached its boundaries of dominion. Canaan was about to forfeit its inheritance.
If the unrighteousness of Canaan had progressed to such a degree that God was willing to impose total negative sanctions, then there must have been a standard of righteousness governing Canaan. Negative sanctions without law is tyranny. God is no arbitrary tyrant. Then on what lawful basis does God impose negative sanctions? Paul wrote that the negative sanction of death rules in history because the law of God condemns all of Adam's heirs. "Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned: (For until the law sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come" (Rom. 5:12-14). In short, no negative sanctions-no law. The converse is also true: if negative sanctions, then law.
Canaan was under covenantal stipulations. This was the judicial basis of God's prophecy against Canaan. Canaan had violated God's law long enough. The day of reckoning had arrived. This implies that Canaanites were under law. Which law? Covenantal law to which historical sanctions are attached.
This raises a crucial question: Which covenant? Canaan had not formally covenanted with God as Abram had (Gen. 15:18). Canaanites were not under the law of the covenant in the way that Abraham's heirs were. The transfer of inheritance was nevertheless about to take place based on Canaan's violation of God's law. How could this be?
The answer is found in the Adamic covenant. There is a universal covenant between God and Adam's heirs. It operates in history. Societies progress in terms of their conformity to the law of this covenant. Societies also are cut short in history in terms of this law: the second commandment. Moses had just reiterated the second commandment: "Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me" (Deut. 5:9). This warning was not limited to Israel, since it spoke of God-haters, i.e., covenant-breakers. The second commandment was the judicial basis of the negative sanctions that Israel was about to impose on Canaan: the Canaanites' sincere worship of false gods.
The Adamic covenant has corporate sanctions. It is not just a law governing individuals. Not only do individuals die, civilizations also die. Not only does God kill individuals, He also kills civilizations. God would soon prove this to Canaan and Israel. The Book of Deuteronomy, as the book of the inheritance, is both a testament and a testimony to the fact that God kills societies. He executes judgment in history in terms of the Adamic covenant's stipulations. Adam ate from the forbidden tree; so, Adam's heirs can distinguish good from evil, just as the serpent promised. They cannot legitimately plead ignorance of the law. That they actively suppress God's truth in unrighteousness, worshipping the creature rather than the Creator (Rom. 1:18-22), testifies to their covenantal knowledge of the truth, not their lack of knowledge.
Any suggestion that God does not hold all mankind responsible for obeying His law must come to grips with the destruction of Canaan. Why did God speak to Abraham of the growing iniquity of the Amorites if there was no ethical standard governing Amorite civilization? Because God brought judgment on Canaan, we must ask: By what standard?
Moses had warned Israel in the passage immediately preceding this one that if Israel worshipped other gods, God would bring the same judgment against Israel that He was about to bring against Canaan (Deut. 8:19-20). By worshipping other gods, men honor the laws of other covenants. Covenants have stipulations. To adopt other laws besides God's law constitutes rebellion.
How can God legitimately hold covenant-breakers in the Adamic sense responsible for breaking a corporate law-order that they have never publicly affirmed? Because they are covenant-breakers in Adam, and they are also covenant-breakers on their own account. Adam and his heirs are under corporate covenant law as surely as they are under individual covenant law. Whole societies perish as surely as individuals die. The question then is: How do Adam's heirs know about the law-order under which they operate and for which God holds them corporately responsible? Paul provided the answer: the work of the law is written in every person's heart.(15) "For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean [intervening] while accusing or else excusing one another" (Rom. 2:14-15).
Natural Law and Common Grace
In the history of Western political theory, this judicial knowledge has been referred to as natural law. In one sense, such knowledge is inborn and therefore natural. It is built into the hearts of all rational men. In another sense, it is supernatural: as an image of God, each man reflects God. Such knowledge is not sufficient to bring all men to saving faith, but it is sufficient to condemn them before God. Such knowledge is sufficient to enable them to perceive the external requirements of the common law. The question is: Will they obey what they know to be true? The biblical answer is simple: "If God gives them the grace to obey." Grace in this sense is an unearned gift from God, i.e., a gift earned by Jesus Christ on the cross but not earned by the recipients on their own account. Calvinist theologians often call this unearned gift common grace. Calvin called it general grace.(16) Common grace enables men to obey at least some of the works of the common law in their hearts. But when this common grace is removed from them in history, societies march into the valley of the shadow of death.
Moses announced that Canaan was nearing the end of its long march into destruction. Those Christians who deny the existence of common grace in history have a major exegetical problem with Israel's conquest of Canaan. Why was Canaan condemned by God? By what standard was Canaan condemned? How had Canaan filled up its cup of iniquity by Joshua's day? What should Christians call those historical means by which God had earlier prevented them from following the dictates of their rebellious hearts? If the cup of iniquity was full in Joshua's day, what had reduced the level of iniquity in Abraham's day? Without the concept of common grace, and specifically corporate common grace, these questions are unanswerable covenantally.(17)
Sects that refuse to acknowledge the existence of common grace are unable to develop an explicitly biblical social theory or political theory. They must therefore sit under the academic and judicial tables of covenant-breakers, praying to God that a few scraps will fall from the tables occasionally to feed them (Matt. 15:22-27). They necessarily must view the history of the church as one long march into the shadow of death. They necessarily must adopt a view of Christians as perpetual crumb-eaters in history. In other words, they necessarily must adopt pessimillennialism, either premillennialism or amillennialism.(18) They must reject an eschatology that insists that Christianity will triumph in history, for such a triumph would mean that the positive sanctions of saving faith are in some way related judicially to the negative sanctions that disinherit covenant-breakers in history. This triumphant scenario raises the issue of corporate common grace and its removal from covenant-breaking societies in history. In short, they cannot explain the covenantal relationship between Israel and Canaan, between Christ and Caesar. So, they simply ignore it.
There is no neutrality. To deny common grace is to affirm a universal common law other than God's covenant law. Some law must rule society; sanctions must be applied in terms of some law. By denying common grace in history, Christians necessarily affirm the sovereignty of natural law over God's revealed law. They affirm the autonomy of Adamic law over Bible-revealed law. They affirm covenant-breaking man's superior authority to interpret Adamic law apart from God's special grace of biblical revelation. If predictable sanctions in history are not imposed by God in terms of the stipulations of His Bible-revealed law, which has precedence over natural (Adamic) law, then predictable sanctions in history must governed by Adamic common law. One set of sanctions must become dominant in society: either those that are attached to biblical law or those that are understood by covenant-breaking men to be attached to what they regard as uncursed natural law. There is no equality possible here: one law-order must be superior to the other. The predictability of corporate historical sanctions will be assessed by men in terms of biblical law or natural law.
The triumph of Israel over Canaan tells us which law-order is dominant -- biblical law -- but those who deny common grace do not get the message. They are forced to explain the victory of Israel over Canaan as some sort of anomaly in history. So also must they explain the victory of Christ over Caesar, i.e., the replacement of pagan Rome by Christianity. As far as cultural dominance in history is concerned, critics of common grace think that God is on the side of covenant-breakers. Their worldview is straightforward: evil must get more powerful over time, while Christianity must get weaker.
The question then arises: Why should Christians attempt to develop biblical social theory? Isn't this in effect wasted effort eschatologically, an exercise in intellectual futility? By their actions, pessimillennialists and the critics of common grace theology have demonstrated that this is exactly what they believe. They have counted the costs of dominion, which include the personal costs of developing an explicitly biblical social theory. They have compared these estimated costs with the estimated benefits of success. They have weighed in the balance biblical social theory and biblical social action, and they have found both wanting. Why? Because their risk-reward estimates have been affected by their pessimillennialism. They have echoed the ten spies: "And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight" (Num. 13:33). They have made it clear that they believe that in New Covenant history, God is on the side of covenant-breaking societies. In short, "Nice guys finish last."(19)
Which Side Is God On? The most important question in estimating the costs of any risky action is this: Will God be pleased with what I am about to undertake? To estimate the height of the Anakim was not difficult. The difference in physical stature between the Anakim and the Israelites was obvious. Their eyes told them: seek peace, avoid confrontation. But what they saw was not the heart of the cost-benefit analysis. The heart of the matter was their heart before God. Were they going to believe His promise or their own eyes?
Their problem was this: rebellious hearts make bad estimates. After God had told the exodus generation that their representatives' treatment of Joshua and Caleb had doomed them to death in the wilderness, they decided that it was time to march into battle. "And they rose up early in the morning, and gat them up into the top of the mountain, saying, Lo, we be here, and will go up unto the place which the LORD hath promised: for we have sinned. And Moses said, Wherefore now do ye transgress the commandment of the LORD? but it shall not prosper. Go not up, for the LORD is not among you; that ye be not smitten before your enemies. For the Amalekites and the Canaanites are there before you, and ye shall fall by the sword: because ye are turned away from the LORD, therefore the LORD will not be with you. But they presumed to go up unto the hill top: nevertheless the ark of the covenant of the LORD, and Moses, departed not out of the camp. Then the Amalekites came down, and the Canaanites which dwelt in that hill, and smote them, and discomfited them, even unto Hormah" (Num. 14:40-45). Not until the next generation came to maturity did Israel have a victory at Hormah (Num. 21:3).
The Israelites were not supposed to go into battle unless the war had been authorized by the priesthood. The tribes were to march into battle only after the priests had blown the trumpets. "And the sons of Aaron, the priests, shall blow with the trumpets; and they shall be to you for an ordinance for ever throughout your generations" (Num. 10:8). Bloodshed had to be preceded by the payment of atonement money to the priests (Ex. 30:12-13).(20) Under the Mosaic covenant, the priesthood had the exclusive authority to decide if God was on the side of Israel. Their declaration alone sanctioned the war in God's eyes; without this sanction, a war should not have been sanctioned in the nation's eyes.
The West has always placed the authority to declare war exclusively in the hands of the national civil government. The churches historically have had no interest in challenging this state of affairs. At most, the medieval church claimed the right to impose a few of the rules of warfare, such as truce days. Today, secular agencies do this, most notably the International Red Cross. Once a war is declared by the government, the churches immediately become vocal supporters of the war effort.(21) There is no further discussion about the legitimacy of the war. Whatever discussion takes place must take place before the war breaks out. Those who favor peace lose the debate completely on the day that war is declared. All debate ends. One mark of a society that has lost faith in its moral foundations is the existence of such debate after a war begins. For example, in the American Civil War (1861-65), by late 1864, after the fall of the city of Atlanta, when the Confederacy was beginning to be seen by its supporters as a lost cause militarily, a few Southern preachers began to voice doubts about both the moral legitimacy of slavery and the justness of the Confederacy's cause. After the war ended in defeat, almost no Southerner publicly lamented the demise of slavery.(22) The shock of military defeat had changed their minds. Moral legitimacy had been determined on the battlefield; the South's preachers merely reflected the military results.(23)
Conclusion Moses told the Israelites that the day of the Lord had arrived. The day of the Lord was a day of historical sanctions: positive for Israel and negative for Canaan. While its completion would take place only under Joshua -- a six-year day of vengeance -- the day had already begun.
The day of the Lord is always a day of sanctions. Moses warned Israel: the fact that God was going to use Israel to bring negative corporate sanctions against Canaan should not lead them to conclude that they had any legal claim on God based on their own righteousness. They would replace Canaan as God's agents in the land, but their legal claim to the land was based on two things only: God's promise to Abraham and the two-fold boundary that God had placed on Canaan's iniquity, ethical and temporal. God's announcement of "no further dominion" for Canaan was not to be regarded as an announcement of unconditional dominion for Israel. Dominion is by covenant, and God's covenant is always ethically conditional. The covenant has stipulations to which predictable historical sanctions are attached. These sanctions are the basis of extending the inheritance. Canaan had forfeited its inheritance by breaking the Adamic covenant's corporate stipulations. These stipulations were common grace stipulations.
The Canaanites looked invincible. They were in fact highly vincible. They were guaranteed losers in history, according to the Abrahamic promise, which was in fact an integral aspect of the Abrahamic covenant. This promise was a prophecy regarding the temporal limits of corporate rebellion. Canaan's transgression of the Adamic covenant's boundaries would bring predictable negative sanctions in history. The prediction was the Abrahamic promise: "But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full" (Gen. 15:16).
Footnotes:
1. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 3.
2. "For the day of the LORD of hosts shall be upon every one that is proud and lofty, and upon every one that is lifted up; and he shall be brought low" (Isa. 2:12). "And the loftiness of man shall be bowed down, and the haughtiness of men shall be made low: and the LORD alone shall be exalted in that day" (Isa. 2:17). "Therefore the LORD will cut off from Israel head and tail, branch and rush, in one day" (Isa. 9:14).
3. Gary North, Unconditional Surrender: God's Program for Victory (3rd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988).
4. Flavius Josephus, The Wars of The Jews, VI:IV:5.
5. Jacob Neusner, An Introduction to Judaism: A Textbook and Reader (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), p. 157. Neusner is the most prolific scholarly author in modern history; his bibliography runs over 30 single-spaced pages, over 400 volumes.
6. Herbert Danby, The Mishnah (New York: Oxford University Press, [1933] 1987), p. xiii.
7. An exception is the Karaite sect of Judaism, which acknowledges the authority only of the Pentateuch. They organized themselves as a separate sect in the eighth century, A.D. Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 169.
8. Jacob Neusner, Judaism and Scripture: The Evidence of Leviticus Rabbah (University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. xi.
9. See the comments on Ezekiel 43:19 in the original Scofield Reference Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1909), p. 890, and suggestion number one in the New Scofield Reference Bible (Oxford, 1967), p. 888n. Suggestion number one is that these animal sacrifices will be memorials, just as Scofield wrote. Suggestion number two simply scraps the whole temple-sacrifice scheme by allegorizing the passage -- a familiar approach of dispensational "hermeneutical literalists" whenever their professed hermeneutics leads them into some embarrassing exegetical dead end. The authors were too timid to say which suggestion they prefer.
10. If, as the dispensationalists argue, "Israel always means Israel and not the church," then the millennial age must be Jewish. Dispensationalists appeal to the Psalms to describe the restored kingdom. As postmillennialist O. T. Allis wrote a generation ago, "According to Dispensationalists the Psalms have as their central theme, Christ and the Jewish remnant in the millennial age." Oswald T. Allis, Prophecy and the Church (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1945), p. 244.
11. The legend of these giants can be found in Hesiod's Theogany, lines 53-54. This is probably an eighth-century work contemporary with the ministry of Isaiah. See also Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (2nd ed.; New Hyde Park, New York: University Books, [1927] 1962), pp. 452-53.
12. Cornelius Van Til, The Christian Theory of Knowledge (n.p.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1969), p. 14.
13. His most famous: "It's déjà-vu all over again." Another: "When you reach a fork in the road, take it."
14. Chapter 17.
15. On the distinction between the work of the law written in an unregenerate person's heart and the law written in the regenerate person's heart, see John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1965), I, pp. 74-76.
16. John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), II:II:17. Ford Lewis Battles translation, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), I:276. See Battles' footnotes on the same page.
17. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987).
18. The Protestant Reformed Church openly denies common grace and affirms amillennialism. For a critique of the anti-postmillennial presentations of the Protestant Reformed Church's senior theologian, see Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., He Shall Have Dominion: A Postmillennial Eschatology (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), Appendix A: "Cultural Antinomianism."
19. Another baseball slogan. Leo Durocher is the source. Years later, he said that he was misquoted. His reference to a last-place team was: "Nice guys. Finished last."
20. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), ch. 32.
21. American clerics who opposed the World War I sometimes suffered civil sanctions: arrest and imprisonment. A Church of the Brethren pastor was sent to prison for having recommended to his congregation that they refuse to buy war bonds. He was tried after the armistice in 1918 and sentenced to prison for ten years, later commuted to a year and a day. H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, 1917-1918 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, [1957] 1968), pp. 118-19. As the authors point out, clerical opponents of the war were usually from smaller, poorer churches. Ibid., p. 117. For publishing an anti-war book on prophecy, The Finished Mystery, in July of 1917, eight leaders of the Jehovah's Witnesses, including Joseph Rutherford, were sentenced to 20 years in prison in June of 1918, after World War I had ended. A Federal appeals court overturned this decision in 1919. James J. Martin, An American Adventure in Bookburning In The Style of 1918 (Colorado Springs: Ralph Myles Press, 1989), pp. 16-17. Martin's account is more accurate than Peterson and Fite's (pp. 119-20).
22. One who did was the Presbyterian theologian Robert Dabney. See his book, A Defence of Virginia [And Through Her, of the South] (New York: Negro University Press, [1867] 1969). Cf. North, Tools of Dominion, pp. 234-35.
23. Richard E. Beringer, et al., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), ch. 14: "God, Guilt, and the Confederacy in Collapse."
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