LAW, SANCTIONS, AND INHERITANCE Therefore shall ye lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes. And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt write them upon the door posts of thine house, and upon thy gates: That your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers to give them, as the days of heaven upon the earth (Deut. 11:18-21).
The theocentric focus of this law is the authority of the word of God. The laying up of God's words in one's heart and soul was described as if the words were to be written on one's hand or written down on pieces of paper and pasted to one's forehead. The language here was analogical. God's words are not literally stored up in the blood-pumping organ we call the heart. They are, however, stored away in the obedient covenant-keeper's soul. They are to guide his actions. These words must be reinforced throughout the day by personal obedience and by teaching the next generation by word and deed.
The context of this passage was God's law (v. 20). Obeying the laws of God is to become a way of life for all men. The covenant-keeper is supposed to talk about the law from morning to night as he works beside his children. The law governs every aspect of our lives, and so we are to talk about it throughout the day. Our very conversations are to remind us of the comprehensive nature of God's law. Because God's law is comprehensive, our discussion of the law is to be comprehensive. Every covenant-keeper is to become an expert in the law of God. He is to think about it, discuss it, and explore its implications every day. Men are to discuss God's law daily because they are to honor it daily through obedience. Men are to use their own words to build ethical hedges around their lives. Their own words should serve as constant ethical reminders: guideposts. To argue that this law was exclusively a land law is to deny the previous sentences in this paragraph.
Yet there was a sense in which this was a land law. The Ten Commandments were to be written down on the doorposts of every home. This was a literal requirement under the Mosaic economy. In the United States in the 1950's, families often placed a rubber doormat in front of the door that said, "welcome." Those who came in were first supposed to wipe off the dirt from the soles of their shoes by standing on the doormat and rubbing their shoes on it. Symbolically, the Israelites were to wipe off their evil behavior from their souls when they entered a home. In modern times, Orthodox Jews seek to obey this law in a literal fashion. They place a tiny scroll of the Ten Commandments inside a small storage device called a mezuza, which is then affixed to the front door of the home or business. The problem with their interpretation of this law is that the scroll inside a mezuza can't be seen. The device can easily become a kind of talisman. I have seen a Jew kiss his fingers and then touch the mezuza on leaving his business. This is a way to show respect, but the problem is that the stipulations of the law itself are not visible. This makes the mezuza analogous to the Ark of the Covenant, where the tables of the law were stored. The idea of having the Decalogue written on the doorposts was that it could be read by all literate people who passed through the door. The same was true of all gateways. This included the gates of the city, where the judges met to decide cases. This law required that the Ten Commandments be written on the equivalent of the wall of a civil court.
Is this law still in force? The New Covenant indicates that there has been a definitive shift from external writing to internal writing. The Epistle to the Hebrews twice asserts that the New Covenant has fulfilled the prophecy of Jeremiah 33:31-33: "For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people" (Heb. 8:10). "This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them" (Heb. 10:16). I regard this as analogous to the circumcision of the heart, which is the fulfillment of the requirement of the circumcision of the flesh. "But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God (Rom. 2:29). The circumcision of the heart annulled the Old Covenant's requirement of the circumcision of the flesh. Similarly, embedding the law of God into the heart in the New Covenant annulled the law requiring the Israelites to write the Ten Commandments on their doorposts and gates. It is not that the Israelites were not also required to place the law in their hearts. They were, as this Deuteronomic passage indicates. But this external requirement is no longer judicially binding on covenant-keepers under the New Covenant.
Teaching One's Children The proper method of writing the law on the heart is by instruction. Parents are to instruct their children throughout the day. This is good for the children and better for the parent. The parent cannot in good faith utter that famous disclaimer, "Do as I say, not as I do."(1) The law of God requires obedience. There is no legitimate escape from the stipulations of the law. We are to keep the whole of the law in our mandated quest for perfection.(2)
The child is to see consistency between what the parent says and does.
The children are to internalize the law -- write it in their hearts -- though hearing it, seeing parents applying it daily, and obeying it. They mimic their parents, and in doing so, they reinforce the law of God, which is already written on their hearts through the grace of conversion. They are to achieve progressively daily what regeneration has already done for them definitively. The transition from wrath to grace involves God's preparation of the heart for the law. At the time of redemption, God creates a special place in a covenant-keeping man's conscience that is designed to house God's law. Then the covenant-keeper is supposed to work all of his life to fill up this designated area of his conscience with practical knowledge of the law. As he increases his understanding of how the laws are to be applied in specific cases, he becomes a mature Christian.
Successful teachers tell us that the very process of teaching increases the teacher's understanding of the material taught. The process reinforces what the teacher knows, imbedding it in his mind. If he does not teach it, the material fades from his thinking. Like notes taken in college and never reviewed or taught, yet never thrown away, the note-taker's memory of them fades. James wrote: "But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass [mirror]: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed" (James 1:22-25). Moses warned Israel not to permit the forgetfulness born of inaction. The mental notes taken in childhood must be reviewed and renewed throughout life. The very act of imparting this knowledge to children throughout the normal events of the day is a means of retaining the law and writing it in the heart.
Van Til's Childhood Experience
The Calvinist philosopher Cornelius Van Til described his early years growing up on a Dutch farm in the late nineteenth century: "Ours was not in any sense a pietistic family. There were not any great emotional outbursts on any occasion that I recall. There was much ado about making hay in the summer and about caring for the cows and sheep in the winter, but round about it all there was a deep conditioning atmosphere. Though there were no tropical showers of revivals, the relative humidity was always very high. At every meal the whole family was present. There was a closing as well as an opening prayer, and a chapter of the Bible was read each time. The Bible was read through from Genesis to Revelation. At breakfast or at dinner, as the case might be, we would hear of the New Testament, or of `the children of Gad after their families, of Zephon and Haggi and Shuni and Ozni, of Eri and Areli.' I do not claim that I always fully understood the meaning of it all. Yet of the total effect there can be no doubt. The Bible became for me, in all its parts, in every syllable, the very Word of God. I learned that I must believe the Scripture story, and that `faith' was a gift of God. What had happened in the past, and particularly what had happened in the past in Palestine, was of the greatest moment to me."(3)
His parents understood the need of presenting the Bible to their children day by day. The children learned that the Bible was very important to their parents. It therefore became important for the children. Years later, Van Til would tell his students at Westminster Seminary that his father used to teach him and his brother as the three of them worked in the fields on their hands and knees. His brother's son Henry later followed in his uncle's footsteps to become a professor and author.(4) Henry's son also became a professor and an author.(5) This inheritance began in the fields, with a father teaching his sons the Bible and the catechism. The father was planting more than physical seeds as they worked.
The Christian School The day came when Van Til's parents sent him to a Christian school. He remembered his vaccination decades later. "I can still feel it."(6) The school was itself a form of vaccination: a vaccination against covenant-breaking. The school was an extension of his family. His parents had vowed at his baptism to instruct him in God's ways. "It was in pursuance of this vow that they sent me to a Christian grade school."(7) The school taught a curriculum from the point of view of his Dutch Calvinist parents. "In short, the whole wide world that gradually opened up for me through my schooling was regarded as operating in its every aspect under the direction of the all-powerful God whose child I was through Christ. I was to learn to think God's thoughts after him in every field of endeavor."(8)
Sending children to a Christian school was common to conservative Dutch households in his day, and remains so. The Christian school has kept the Dutch community together in the United States, and it has kept Dutch Calvinists together in the secular, covenant-breaking Netherlands. The Christian school provides specialized education that parents are not always capable of providing. The school is based on the biblical principle of the division of labor: "Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular. And God hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers, after that miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, diversities of tongues" (I Cor. 12:27-28).
The school provides specialized instruction. This instruction replaces the father's time in the fields or wherever he works. With the vast increase in the division of labor since the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century, a father is less and less able to pass his skills to his sons. He works away from home, and his skills rarely match his sons' abilities or interests. They learn their morality from him, but not their occupations.
Education today is overwhelmingly formalized. From age five through graduate school, the student is educated in the classroom education. Formal education is tied to the printed word. Apprenticeship has been replaced by classroom bureaucracy and written examinations. The educational cost per student is far lower under bureaucracy. In the eighteenth century and earlier, wealthy families hired tutors for their children. The less wealthy had to settle for a classroom setting: more students per instructor and therefore lower cost per family. The wealthy in England have for two centuries sent their sons to boarding schools in order to separate them from their families. This is also done by the wealthiest old families in the United States.(9) This is a rite of passage into the elite of both societies.
The modern State seeks to steal the legacy of the faithful: the hearts and minds of children. The educational bureaucrats today have imposed a massive system of ideological kidnapping on the voters. This is the inherent nature of all compulsory education, regulated education, and tax-funded education. Education is not neutral. The bureaucrats have built a gigantic system of humanist indoctrination with funds extracted from all local residents in the name of common-ground education. This justification has always been a lie, from Horace Mann's public schools in Massachusetts in the 1830's until today.(10) From the late nineteenth century until today, leading American educators have been forthright in their public pronouncements of their agenda. This agenda is deeply religious. John Dewey, the "father" of progressive education, dedicated humanist, and philosopher stated his position plainly: "Our schools, in bringing together those of different nationalities, languages, traditions, and creeds, in assimilating them together upon the basis of what is common and public in endeavor and achievement, are performing an infinitely significant religious work."(11) More than this: "In such a dim, blind, but effective way the American people is conscious that its schools serve best the cause of religion in serving the cause of social unification. . . ."(12)
Enjoying the Inheritance There is a positive sanction attached to the law governing judicial instruction: "That your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers to give them, as the days of heaven upon the earth" (Deut. 11:21). Long life in the land is a universally desirable gift from God. Nobody appeared a second time before any king in the ancient world with the greeting: O, King, live briefly." They said, "O, King, live forever."(13)
The promise of long life connects law and sanctions judicially. In this case, the connection is stated positively: teach your children God's law, and both you and they will enjoy long life. This is an extension of the fifth commandment: "Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee" (Ex. 20:12). Paul wrote: "Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right. Honour thy father and mother; (which is the first commandment with promise;) That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth" (Eph. 6:1-3). There is no question that Paul regarded the judicial link between obedience to parents and long life on earth as a New Covenant phenomenon. This means that the fifth commandment was not a land law whose visible corporate sanction was tied exclusively to the Mosaic economy in Israel. The positive sanction of long life for obedience to parents has not been annulled by the transition from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant. This implies that the positive sanction of long life for teaching one's children about God's law has also not been annulled. What has been annulled is the circumscribed geographical focus of the public reign of the original laws: the land of Israel. Covenant-keepers are no longer promised that they will live long in the land of Israel in peace and prosperity, handing down the inheritance. Paul made it clear: the promise now applies to the whole earth. The New Covenant rests on the Great Commission. The predictable sanctions of God's law now apply everywhere that the gospel is preached and the covenant is affirmed corporately. This is what it means to disciple the nations. They are brought under the discipline -- the sanctions -- of God's covenant.
This is extremely significant for the development of Christian social theory. The covenantal link between God's Bible-revealed law and His predictable corporate sanctions in history has not been broken by the advent of the New Covenant. In the case of Deuteronomy 11:21, the connection was rigorously covenantal: 1) God has given His people the land (transcendence); 2) parents teach children (hierarchy); 3) God's law is put into the heart (ethics); 4) Israelites can live long in the land sworn by God to the fathers (oath); 5) their children can also live long in the land (succession).
Inheritance and Disinheritance The land would be someone's inheritance, either Israel's or the Canaanites'. The alternative was for the land to return to the beasts, which God would not allow (Ex. 23:29). Mankind, not the beasts, is to exercise dominion over nature (Gen. 1:26; 9:1-3). The conservationist rhetoric about the sacred wilderness rests on very bad theology. For Israel to inherit, the Canaanites would have to be disinherited. This is the model for eschatology: the expansion of God's kingdom in history must come at the expense of Satan's. To argue otherwise is to argue that Satan's visible kingdom must expand at the expense of God's, which is exactly what amillennialists argue, and premillennialists argue regarding the premillennial "Church Age." In the final judgment, Satan and his covenantal subordinates will be totally disinherited (Rev. 20:10). Covenant-keepers will then openly inherit the whole earth, and both it and they will be relieved of the burden of sin and its curses (Rev. 21). The conquest of Canaan was a type of the final judgment.
What would be the basis of Israel's inheritance? Judicially, it would be obedience: the covenantally representative obedience of the coming messiah (Isa. 53). But obedience was not the whole story; it never is. Sanctions are attached to God's law. The sanctions in this case would be confidence (positive) and fear (negative).
For if ye shall diligently keep all these commandments which I command you, to do them, to love the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, and to cleave unto him; Then will the LORD drive out all these nations from before you, and ye shall possess greater nations and mightier than yourselves. Every place whereon the soles of your feet shall tread shall be yours: from the wilderness and Lebanon, from the river, the river Euphrates, even unto the uttermost sea shall your coast be. There shall no man be able to stand before you: for the LORD your God shall lay the fear of you and the dread of you upon all the land that ye shall tread upon, as he hath said unto you (Deut. 11:22-25).
The Israelites were supposed to have confidence in God as totally sovereign over history. Next, they were supposed to trust Moses' words as representing God. Third, they were supposed to trust God's law. Fourth, they were supposed to trust God's prophecy of the fear which He would place in the hearts of the Canaanites. Obedience to God's law was the key. Their obedience would prove their faith in God and Moses' words in God's name. If they obeyed God's law, they would inevitably inherit the Promised Land.
The crucial theological point here is that inheritance is fundamentally ethical. Obedience to God's law is the inescapable component of inheritance. Faith in God is important, but faith without works is dead faith (James 2:17-20). It does not count. It is analogous to someone who believes that the stock market will rise, but who then refuses to invest his money in terms of what he believes. He refuses to "put his money where his mouth is." He does not participate in the rise. His accurate forecast haunts him after it turns out to be true. This, too, is a model for eschatology. "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also" (Matt. 6:19-21). The person who views the inheritance as ultimately eschatological must see to it that he structures his life in terms of the covenantal stipulations governing this inheritance. "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" (Mark 8:36).
The Israelites would not be allowed to claim this victory without risk, nor would they possesses it overnight. "I will not drive them out from before thee in one year; lest the land become desolate, and the beast of the field multiply against thee. By little and little I will drive them out from before thee, until thou be increased, and inherit the land" (Ex. 23:29-30). (There is nothing sacred about wilderness areas. They are merely as-yet undomesticated regions, like the garden of Eden prior to Adam.) The promise to Abraham regarding the fourth generation's inheritance of the land was God's definitive eschatological announcement (Gen. 15:16). The military conquest of Canaan would be the progressive fulfillment of this prophecy. The eventual displacement of the Canaanites would be the final aspect of this prophecy. To achieve this, the Israelites had to trust God's promises.
Again, this is a model for biblical eschatology. The inheritance of the earth in history by God's covenant people is definitive, for God has announced it repeatedly. The process of inheritance is ethical: ever-increasing obedience to God's law, which is followed by ever-increasing positive economic sanctions that confirm the covenant. "But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day" (Deut. 8:18). Covenant-keepers are required to redeem the world for God, i.e., buy it back. They are not to use military conquest or force; that was a one-time event for Israel. They must buy it back by preaching the gospel, obeying God's law, and faithfully employing the wealth that God pours down on them because of their obedience. Covenant-keepers will inherit the earth progressively through their obedience to God's law, their confidence in the transforming power of the gospel, their ability to meet consumer demand efficiently, their biological multiplication, their tithing to the church, and their charitable service. "He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much: and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much" (Luke 16:10).
If there were no predictable corporate sanctions attached to God's law, we could have no confidence in the future success of the kingdom of God in history. Our eschatological hopes would be exclusively post-mortem. But the Bible teaches that what takes place on earth is a down payment -- an earnest -- for what will take place beyond the final judgment. History points to eternity; earth points to heaven. Jesus warned Nicodemus: "If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?" (John 3:12). At the final judgment, covenant-keepers will inherit the earth; covenant-breakers will be completely disinherited (Matt. 25:31-46). But final judgment is preceded by progressive judgment in history. What takes place in history mirrors the final inheritance and disinheritance, so as to provide a covenantal warning in history. There must be sufficient continuity between history and eternity to provide covenant-keepers with legitimate confidence and to provide covenant-breakers with legitimate fear. The conquest of Canaan is the model for history, which in turn is the model for eternity.
Conclusion Moses gave Israel a command and a promise: law and sanctions. He told them to mark their dwelling places by the law of God. He told them to teach their children the law. In doing this, they would hide the law in their hearts (Ps. 119:11). If they did this, Moses said, they would be visibly blessed with large families. They would enjoy "the days of heaven upon the earth" (Deut. 11:21).
The covenantal link between obedience and visible sanctions was basic to this passage. The inheritance was defined in terms of heirs and their possession of land. Paul wrote that the same link still operates under the New Covenant (Eph. 6:1-3). There is no way covenantally to break the link uniting law-keeping, positive sanctions, and inheritance, any more than there is a way to break the link uniting law-breaking, disobedience, and disinheritance. These links make possible the development of biblical social theory. Being possible, the development of an explicitly biblical social theory is a covenantal mandate, part of the dominion covenant itself.
Because Christian theologians for nineteen centuries have ignored or even denied the existence of these judicial links in the New Covenant era, the church has never been able to develop an explicitly biblical social theory. The result is the Babylonian captivity of the church today. And like the Hebrews during the original Babylonian captivity, most Christians prefer ghetto life outside the Promised Land to the rigors of a life of rebuilding the nation's broken wall and the crumbling homes of their forefathers. For now, only a remnant has decided to return.
Footnotes:
1. "Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ" (I Cor. 11:1).
2. "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). "Thou shalt be perfect with the LORD thy God" (Deut. 18:13). "He is the Rock, his work is perfect: for all his ways are judgment: a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is he" (Deut. 32:4). "Let your heart therefore be perfect with the LORD our God, to walk in his statutes, and to keep his commandments, as at this day (I Ki. 8:61). "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect" (Matt. 5:48).
3. Cornelius Van Til, Why I Believe in God (Philadelphia: Committee on Christian Education, Orthodox Presbyterian Church, n.d.), pp. 5-6.
4. Henry R. Van Til, The Calvinistic Concept of Culture (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1959).
5. L. John Van Til, Liberty of Conscience: The History of a Puritan Idea (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1972).
6. Van Til, Why I Believe in God, p. 6.
7. Ibid., p. 7.
8. Idem.
9. Nelson Aldrich, Jr., Old Money: The Mythology of America's Upper Class (New York: Knopf, 1988), pp. 144-58.
10. R. J. Rushdoony, The Messianic Character of American Education: Studies in the History of the Philosophy of Education (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1963).
11. John Dewey, "Religion and Our Schools," Hibbert Journal (July 1908); reprinted in Education Today, edited by Joseph Ratner (New York: Putnam's, 1940), p. 80. This document is reprinted photographically in David Noebel, et al., Clergy in the Classroom: The Religion of Secular Humanism (Manitou Springs, Colorado: Summit Press, 1995), p. 19. Many other statements like Dewey's appear in this highly useful book.
12. Ibid., pp. 80-81; in Noebel, ibid., pp. 19-20.
13. I Kings 1:31; Nehemiah 2:3; Daniel 2:4; 3:9; 5:10; 6:6, 21.
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