COMMON GRACE AND LEGITIMATE INHERITANCE These are the statutes and judgments, which ye shall observe to do in the land, which the LORD God of thy fathers giveth thee to possess it, all the days that ye live upon the earth. Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree: And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place (Deut. 12:1-3).
The theocentric focus of this law is the illegitimacy of all other forms of worship. In the case of the gods of Canaan, illegitimacy meant illegality. To destroy the name of every god of Canaan was a morally mandatory act on the part of the Israelites. There was no neutrality possible. There also was no possibility of a nameless God in Israel. Either God's name would be destroyed inside the boundaries of Israel or else the Canaanite gods' names would be destroyed. God made it clear: their idols had to be smashed. As with their idols, so with their names: total elimination. ". . . make no mention of the name of other gods, neither let it be heard out of thy mouth" (Ex. 23:13b). This was a land law. It is no longer in force. It had to do with the destruction of Canaanite civilization and the theology of the ancient world: Canaan's gods as local deities tied to the land.
God refused to accept equality with other deities. This is as true under the New Covenant as it was in the Old. "Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars' hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you" (Acts 17:22-23). The Athenians had added an unidentified god to their pantheon of deities just to make sure some unacknowledged god would not bring negative sanctions against them because they had ignored him. The God of the Bible was being treated by Athens as if He were one of these nameless gods. But the God of the Bible cannot be placated with an altar to no god in particular, or with any altar at all. Paul announced: "God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; Neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things" (Acts 17:24-25). An occasional public sacrifice does not impress Him. He is the Creator God. What God demands is the sacrifice of every person's life, in every area of his life. "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service" (Rom. 12:1). He calls all men to devote the whole of their lives.(1) This has to include civil affairs. But the modern church rejects this politically incorrect conclusion.
Smashing Idols The conquest of Canaan was a military action. The Canaanites were to be completely destroyed. After the destruction of Canaan, only the Amalekites deserved total destruction because of the evil they had shown to Israel during Israel's wilderness wandering. God had established a covenant of total destruction with Israel against Amalek: "And the LORD said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua: for I will utterly put out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven. And Moses built an altar, and called the name of it Jehovah-nissi: For he said, Because the LORD hath sworn that the LORD will have war with Amalek from generation to generation" (Ex. 17:14-16). Samuel reminded Saul of this covenant: "Samuel also said unto Saul, The LORD sent me to anoint thee to be king over his people, over Israel: now therefore hearken thou unto the voice of the words of the LORD. Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass" (I Sam. 15:1-3). Saul lost his kingship for showing mercy to Amalek's king, as if his enemy's office as king made him an equal with Saul, and also for allowing the Israelites to keep Amalek's domesticated animals as spoils.(2) Samuel hacked Agag to pieces to demonstrate God's covenant of total destruction (I Sam. 15:33). This was an extension of a pre-conquest covenant of destruction. After Canaan was captured, no new war of annihilation was valid.
That the annihilation of Canaan was to be a one-time event is seen in the jubilee inheritance law. Every half century, ownership of every piece of rural land reverted back to the heirs of the families of the conquest generation (Lev. 25:13). But after Israel's return from the exile, the jubilee law was to be altered. "And it shall come to pass, that ye shall divide it by lot for an inheritance unto you, and to the strangers that sojourn among you, which shall beget children among you: and they shall be unto you as born in the country among the children of Israel; they shall have inheritance with you among the tribes of Israel. And it shall come to pass, that in what tribe the stranger sojourneth, there shall ye give him his inheritance, saith the Lord GOD" (Ezek. 47:22-23). Non-Israelites were not to be driven out, nor were they to be disinherited. Why not? Because the gods of Canaan by then had been annihilated in the hearts of men.
God, Stars, and History The ancient world believed that to defeat a city was to defeat that city's god or gods. To the degree that a conquering army spared the lives of the citizens of a defeated city, to that extent was mercy granted by the conquerors' god to the losers' god. To build an empire, a conquering nation either had to remove the citizens of a defeated city and replace them with people who worshipped the empire's gods, or else the empire had to incorporate the defeated city's gods into the pantheon of the empire. Where no provision for such incorporation existed theologically in the culture of the victor, the victor had to annihilate or completely dispossess the losers. This meant destroying all traces of their gods.
It was assumed that the gods of the two armies battled each other. In other words, what took place on the battlefield was matched by a conflict in heaven.(3) If there was conflict on the battlefield, there had to be conflict in heaven. There was no cosmic unity in paganism's nature; there was no absolute God who controlled what comes to pass in history. "On first looking upon the external world, man pictured it to himself as a sort of confused republic, where rival forces made war upon each other."(4) Two ways to conceive of unity in the cosmos, through impersonal forces, are fate and astrology. The belief that the heavens above are related to events on the earth below is the theoretical basis of astrology, a common belief in the ancient world and even today.
The ancient world believed that the heavens were related to earthly history. Immanuel Velikovsky goes so far as to argue that the Greek myth that Athena was born out of Zeus' forehead had its origin in the fact that the planet Venus was born in historical times: a spin-off (literally) of the planet Jupiter. Venus was originally a comet, he says, and it caused the events of the exodus.(5) While I do not think he is correct -- God did not use Venus to bring the plagues of the exodus on Egypt -- there is no doubt that the heavens and the gods were closely associated in ancient thought. This includes biblical thought. "The kings came and fought, then fought the kings of Canaan in Taanach by the waters of Megiddo; they took no gain of money. They fought from heaven; the stars in their courses fought against Sisera" (Jud. 5:19-20). This is not to be interpreted literally; these words appear in Deborah's song. Songs are exercises in symbolism.
There is a biblical analogy between stars and earthly affairs. The king of Babylon was described with an angelic-heavenly analogy: a star-angel who sought to surpass God's other star-angels. "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High" (Isa. 14:12-14). (Lucifer was the morning star in the ancient world, i.e., Venus, but only when it preceded the appearance of the sun. It was called Hesperos when it followed the sun.) The host of heaven is described as stars.
And out of one of them came forth a little horn, which waxed exceeding great, toward the south, and toward the east, and toward the pleasant land. And it waxed great, even to the host of heaven; and it cast down some of the host and of the stars to the ground, and stamped upon them" (Dan. 8:9-10).
And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind (Rev. 6:13).
And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born (Rev. 12:3-4).
Literal stars did not fall on earth, nor will they, contrary to dispensationalism's proclaimed hermeneutics of prophetic literalism. God defeated Satan's angelic host in history because of the incarnation of Jesus Christ in history. Satan and his host fell to earth. The transition from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant was marked by the casting down of Satan to earth. Preliminary phases of this casting down began during Christ's ministry. "And the seventy returned again with joy, saying, Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name. And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven" (Luke 10:17-18). The final act of heavenly disinheritance was post-crucifixion.
And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night. And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death. Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time. And when the dragon saw that he was cast unto the earth, he persecuted the woman which brought forth the man child (Rev. 12:7-13; emphasis added).
My point here is that the ancient world viewed reality as a supernatural realm. Men, local gods, and the heavenly orbs interacted in history. For example, the appearance of the star of Bethlehem was noted by non-Jewish star-gazers. They also understood what it meant: the birth of a long-prophesied king. They asked Herod: "Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him" (Matt. 2:2). With the end of the Old Covenant, these cosmic relationships ceased. The fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 completed the prophecies regarding stars falling from heaven: the end of the Old Covenant order and with it, the Mosaic order, with its temple sacrifices. Prior to A.D. 70, there were good reasons to believe in connections between the heavens and the earth. These reasons were covenantal, not astrological or astronomical. Men were to acknowledge that God governs both heaven and earth. The world is governed in terms of ethics, for God created the world. The prophet Amos said: "Ye who turn judgment to wormwood, and leave off righteousness in the earth, Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The LORD is his name: That strengtheneth the spoiled against the strong, so that the spoiled shall come against the fortress. They hate him that rebuketh in the gate, and they abhor him that speaketh uprightly" (Amos 5:7-10).
Genocide as Deicide The destruction of Canaan would necessarily involve the destruction of Canaan's gods. A defeated army meant the defeat of the army's gods. This was the theology of Canaan and the nations around Canaan. This was not biblical theology. A defeat of Israel on the battlefield would be a sanction against the nation for its unrighteousness. The Israelites would be subjected militarily or carried into captivity as God's predictable sanction against national rebellion, Moses repeatedly warned. This would not testify to God's weakness but to His sovereignty. The victors who thought otherwise would be punished. "For thus saith the LORD of hosts; After the glory hath he sent me unto the nations which spoiled you: for he that toucheth you toucheth the apple of his eye. For, behold, I will shake mine hand upon them, and they shall be a spoil to their servants: and ye shall know that the LORD of hosts hath sent me" (Zech. 2:8-9). Only with the transfer of the kingdom's inheritance to a new nation, the church of Jesus Christ, would final destruction come to Old Covenant Israel. Jesus warned Israel's leaders: "Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof" (Matt. 21:43). This was an implied threat: the destruction of Israel except insofar as Israel united covenantally with this new nation in terms of the New Covenant (Rom. 11).
Canaanite culture was so evil in God's sight that it had to be destroyed. Israel would soon serve as God's sanctions-bringer in history. There was to be no mercy shown, because the evil of Canaanite culture was too great. To show mercy to the Canaanites would be the equivalent of accepting the evils which they had practiced. It would be a grant of mercy to their gods. This is why Moses demanded the total annihilation of both men and idols.
By publicly removing the Canaanites from history, God would demonstrate His wrath against evil. He had already partially done this with Egypt. This partial destruction had terrified the Canaanites, according to Rahab (Josh. 2:9-11). God had already done it completely with the Canaanite cultures beyond the Jordan: Arad and Bashan.
The gods of the land of Canaan would become a snare to Israel. The very survival of these gods would testify either to Israel's military weakness or God's inability to bring to pass what He had promised to Abraham: full inheritance. Such military weakness would be interpreted by Israel in terms of Canaanite theology: the partially successful defense of Canaan's old order against the new order of Israel. That is, the gods of Canaan would be seen as possessing partial sovereignty in history. The absolute sovereignty of God would be understood by covenant-breaking Israelites as a myth because of the very survival of Canaan's gods and Canaan's original residents. In short, neither mercy nor military weakness was allowed to Israel by God during this one-time conquest.
The gods of the ancient world were local gods: gods of the nation, city, or family. These gods were said to rule within certain geographical boundaries. Their power was tied to geography and to the rites practiced by their followers. Fustel wrote: "There was nothing more sacred within the city than this altar, on which the sacred fire was always maintained." The perpetual fire on the altar became central liturgically to Mosaic Israel (Lev. 6:13), but this had not been true in pre-Mosaic covenant religion. Israel could exist and even prosper without this altar, as the Assyrian-Babylonian captivity indicated, but God did demand sacrifice inside the land, and the altar's fire was basic to this requirement. In other ancient religions, however, a break in the fire's continuity was considered catastrophic. For example, any virgin who allowed Rome's sacred fire to go out in the temple of Vesta was buried alive as a sanction.
Israel was told to break down Canaan's altars. There could be no rival sacred fire in Israel -- not in the home, the city, or anywhere else. "Burn their groves with fire," Moses said. These destructive fires were not sacred fires. They were merely military acts. It did not require a Mosaic priest to officiate at the destruction of a sacred Canaanite altar. So it would be for Israel in A.D. 70, when Roman soldiers burned the temple. No priest officiated.
The Spoils of War and Common Grace The destruction of Canaan's altars served as a representative destruction of Canaan's culture. With the exception of Jericho, which had to be completely destroyed, the economic capital of Canaan became part of Israel's inheritance. If the Israelites killed the Canaanites and smashed their implements of worship, they were entitled to the spoils of war.
This means that the products of a culture are not inherently tainted by the ethics of that culture. This fact legitimizes trade. It is neither ritually polluting nor immoral to exchange goods and services with someone who practices a rival religion. The fact that a Canaanite had created something of value as a testament to his own faith or religious premises did not pollute the item he created unless it was actually used in some cultic rite. Canaan's sacred implements were targeted for destruction, but the common implements of life that testified to the Canaanites' view of the sacred became legitimate spoils of war.
This points to a theological distinction between common grace and special rebellion. The sacred groves of Canaan were in fact unholy groves, i.e., profane groves in which covenant-breakers transgressed God's standards of righteous worship. The lawful boundaries of God's sacred worship had been violated repeatedly in Canaan, which is why their groves were profane. Special rebellion had polluted these groves so thoroughly that Israel had to smash them. But the other aspects of Canaan's culture -- orchards, houses, fields, etc. -- were part of the realm of the common. They were neither sacred nor profane. The realm of the common is analogous to the trees of Eden, except for the forbidden tree and tree of life after the Fall: open to all men without covenantal restriction. Thus, the capital of Canaan, like the capital of Egypt, could become part of Israel's inheritance.
Common grace is defined as God's unmerited gifts to men irrespective of their covenantal confessions. Men do not earn these gifts, nor is God required to provide these gifts by anything other than His autonomous choice. But by His healing common grace, God enables men of many religious confessions to become productive. This productivity benefits mankind. But in the final analysis, God does this for the sake of His people, who will progressively inherit the earth in history. If the saints do not inherit in history, then the productivity and wealth of covenant-breakers must be supplied by God primarily for the purpose of condemning them in eternity, as Dives was condemned (Luke 16:19-25). Their very productivity will condemn them: "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more" (Luke 12:48b). There would therefore be no continuity between the process of inheritance and disinheritance in history and God's declaration of final inheritance and disinheritance in eternity. The process of corporate covenantal sanctions in history would then have nothing predictable to do with the corporate sanctions in eternity: saved vs. lost. In short, the bodily resurrection and ascension of Christ in history -- positive sanctions for His perfect covenant-keeping -- would have nothing predictable to do with the outcome of the Great Commission in history (Matt. 28:18-20).
The complete disinheritance of Canaan was God's means of destroying the works of unrighteous men. But rather than destroying their capital assets, God destroyed them and the ritual implements for worshipping their gods. Even in the unique case of Jericho's assets, the precious metals were to go to the temple (Josh. 6:19). The special grace of God would thereby overcome the special rebellion of Jericho.
Because of the extent of the rebellion of the Canaanites, Israel could not lawfully enslave them. Canaanites were not allowed to remain inside the boundaries of the land. To have allowed this would have meant allowing the continuing presence of agents of Canaan's local deities. They would become evangelists for a false religion. Because pagan religion was expressly a religion of the land, the mere presence of Canaanites would testify falsely to the partial sovereignty of Canaan's gods. Any assertion of the partial sovereignty of any god except the Bible's God is inescapably a denial of the religion of the Bible. Thus, the presence of Canaanites inside Israel's boundaries posed too great a threat for Israel to bear safely. The Israelites would eventually interpret the mere presence of Canaanites as a partial victory of Canaan's gods over Moses' God, rather than blaming their own fears and their disobedience to God. Such a false view of God would lead to Israel's rebellion and false worship: idolatry.
The trickery of the Gibeonites overcame this rule, but they became slaves to the temple (Josh. 9:27). Individual Israelites could not profit from the trickery of Gibeon; the Levites alone did. The special grace of God overcame His declaration of genocide against Gibeon, but the priestly tribe alone profited. The Gibeonites and their labor did not become part of the common grace inheritance of individual families outside of Levi. The Gibeonites' labor would reduce the burdens on Levi, not the burdens of any other tribe.
The Rejection of Christendom "And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place. Ye shall not do so unto the LORD your God" (vv. 3-4). The principle here is obvious: mandated negative sanctions imposed against Canaan's gods; none against Him. To leave Canaan's idols intact was illegal; to impose negative sanctions on God's ritual implements was also illegal. There could be no judicial equality between God and Canaan's deities. There was no judicial neutrality possible. To assert the equality of Canaan's gods with the God of the Bible was to assert a world without the God of the Bible.
The twentieth-century West is pluralistic. It has been marked by a functional atheism unknown in any previous society. Most people say that they believe in a god of some kind. Only in the formerly Communist, former East Germany is admitted atheism as high as 40 percent of the population. In the nations of Western Europe, those who claim to be church members constitute no less than 58 percent of the population (The Netherlands) and as high as 98 percent (Ireland). Yet only in Ireland is once-a-month church attendance as high as 82 percent; the second-place country is Italy, at 36 percent. Some 93 percent of Denmark's population claim to be church members, yet once-a-month church attendance is about 4 percent. In the United Kingdom, it is 11 percent; France is 13 percent; Spain is 14 percent; Germany is 21 percent.
The United States has higher attendance: in 1990, 40 percent of those surveyed claimed to have attended religious services within the previous week, although the only streets that experience traffic jams on Sunday mornings are those located close to stadiums during professional football season. Many Americans surveyed probably lied about their recent attendance, but at least they believed that they should have attended. These percentages have stayed constant for three decades. But in 1776, in what was then regarded as an intensely Christian society, only 17 percent of the American population were church members. This doubled to 34 percent by 1850 as a result of the revival known as the Second Great Awakening. It climbed to half the population by 1900. Demands on church members declined throughout the nineteenth century, and have continued to decline. Parallelling this increase in church membership has been the progressive secularization of American society.
Operationally, the public institutions of the West are atheistic. The State is officially neutral religiously in the United States, and the State demands sacrifice of 40 percent or more of the citizenry's income. In Western European nations, what passes for tax-funded Christianity is theological liberalism, which is humanism in clerical robes. God's name has been publicly disenfranchised. The ideal of Christian civilization -- Christendom -- is ridiculed by Christians and humanists alike as theocratic oppression, "medievalism," and "triumphalism." Professed religious neutrality is the civil order of the day. Civil neutrality has been a myth highly useful to humanists in the early stages of their infiltration and transformation of Christian society.
The only alternative to Christian triumphalism is Christian defeatism, but "defeatism" is word avoided like the plague by the eschatological defeatists who publicly ridicule triumphalism. Conservative theological seminaries universally reject postmillennialism's triumphalism. In this, they are joined by the humanists, who govern the present "neutral" social order. It is as if the leaders of Mosaic Israel had joined political forces with the leaders of Canaanite society in order to create a common pluralist civil order. This pluralist-syncretist impulse was exactly what Moses warned against. It always means the defeat of God's people and their political subservience to His enemies.
There is no legitimate confessional neutrality. There is no permanent common confession in history between Christ and antichrist. "He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad" (Matt. 12:30). There is no middle ground between Christian social defeatism and Christian social triumphalism. There is therefore no permanent eschatological neutrality. Eschatology cannot legitimately be dismissed as an aspect of adiaphora: things indifferent to the faith. But this is not believed by the vast majority of those who call themselves evangelical Christians today. In the name of both amillennialism and premillennialism, the ancient ideal of Christendom is dismissed as impossible in history and therefore illegitimate as a goal.
The Kingdom of God, Sort Of
Pessimillennial pietists assert such incoherent judicial statements as this one: "But the Kingdom of God is a rule, not a realm." What does this mean? It means that there is no biblically revealed law of God worth enforcing by the State solely on the basis of its status as biblically revealed. The kingdom of God supposedly has neither a uniquely biblical civil law nor appropriate civil sanctions. This means that God is on permanent leave as king in history. A king with no realm is not a king; he is merely: 1) an abdicated monarch; 2) a publicly rejected monarch who used to have a realm; or 3) a would-be monarch without enough dedicated followers to enforce his claim. This means that "Thus saith the Lord!" is judicially irrelevant unless it is accompanied by "Thus saith religiously neutral common-ground logic." The god of such a confessionally neutral civil realm is self-proclaimed autonomous man. Anyone who asserts that "religious neutrality is a myth" without concluding that "political pluralism is therefore equally a myth" is suffering from self-delusion and confusion on a crippling scale.
Pessimillennial pietists assert a two-stage kingdom of God: today's exclusively internal, spiritual manifestation of God's kingdom -- "for Christians only" -- and an exclusively future comprehensive kingdom, when Jesus will come back to rule over His presently nonexistent realm. They write such things as this: "Jesus spoke about a Kingdom that had come and a Kingdom that was still to come -- one Kingdom in two stages. . . . The second stage, which will take place when Christ returns, will assert God's rule over all the universe; His kingdom will be visible without imperfection."(6) The authors are telling us in no uncertain terms that there is no judicial, confessional, and civilizational continuity in history between the first stage and the second stage of God's kingdom.
In the first stage, God supposedly has no realm. His people must therefore content themselves throughout history with life in the confessional equivalent of pre-Mosaic Canaan. They live today in what is fast becoming a new Sodom, yet they seek to persuade each other that all we need to do today is to restore the social order of Ur of the Chaldees. If this blindness continues, they will eventually find themselves, as Lot found himself, crying out to Sodomites: "Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof" (Gen. 19:8). Like Lot, they naively believe that their homes somehow possess a widely acknowledged immunity from social evil in today's common-confession civil order. They think that a common-confession State will protect their rights as confessional Christians in the family and the church. But the humanist State is at war with the Christian family and the Christian church. The State demands subservience by the family and the church. This was also true in the Roman Empire, which is why the war between Christianity and pagan Rome was absolute: a war to the death.
Christians today believe in the possibility of a permanent common civil confession between Christianity and humanism. In its more insightful moments, modern evangelicalism prophesies a coming revival of Roman Empire-like tyranny. This was Francis Schaeffer's point in How Should We Then Live? (1976). In fact, he thought that the coming "imposed order" might be worse than Rome's. As an alternative, he called for a return to the Bible, not as a utilitarian solution to cultural problems, but as a moral requirement. "It means the acceptance of Christ as Savior and Lord, and it means living under God's revelation." But as a consistent premillennialist, he had never accepted the theocratic ideal of Christendom for the era prior to the millennium. The best that Christians can legitimately hope for, he said, is minority status. "Such Christians do not need to be a majority in order for this influence on society to occur."(7)
This made no sense, given his premillennial eschatology. His book and his film series surveyed the systematic growth of religious self-consciousness on the part of non-Christians in the West: their dedication to removing every trace of Christian influence. The series began with a section on the persecution of Christians by the Roman Empire. There is no doubt as to what he privately thought must come: something far worse for the Church, namely, the Great Tribulation. But he was not willing to admit forthrightly to his film audience and to his readers that this was the underlying eschatological presupposition of his life's work. This was why his work was not a call to explicitly Christian social action but a survey of what the Church has given up; not an explicitly biblical blueprint for social and cultural reconstruction but a cataloguing of Christendom's surrender and hand-wringing disguised as an intellectual's cultural critique; not a call for the progressive establishment of God's kingdom on earth in history but a program of religious common-ground anti-abortion politics -- yet somehow in the name of a non-utilitarian Christianity. He forthrightly denied the legitimacy of a confessional Christian nation.
In the Old Testament there was a theocracy commanded by God. In the New Testament, with the church being made up of Jews and Gentiles, and spreading all over the known world from India to Spain in one generation, the church was its own entity. There is no New Testament basis for a linking of church and state until Christ, the King returns. The whole "Constantine mentality" from the fourth century up to our day was a mistake. Constantine, as the Roman Emperor, in 313 ended the persecution of Christians. Unfortunately, the support he gave to the church led by 381 to the enforcing of Christianity, by Theodosius I, as the official state religion. Making Christianity the official state religion opened the way for confusion up till our own day. There have been times of very good government when this interrelationship of church and state has been present. But through the centuries it has caused great confusion between loyalty to the state and loyalty to Christ, between patriotism and being a Christian.
We must not confuse the Kingdom of God with our country. To say it another way: "We should not wrap Christianity in our national flag."(8)
What he really meant, of course, is that we should not wrap our nation in Christianity's flag. But every nation must be wrapped in some religious flag. There is no religious or ethical neutrality, after all. So, we must ask ourselves, what flag did Francis Schaeffer prefer that we wrap our nation in? He never said, but since there is no neutrality, there will always be a flag (i.e., a public symbol of political sovereignty). It flies high today in the name of neutrality, flapping over the public school system. It flies high every time a nation defaults from an explicit religion. That flag is the flag of secular humanism.Jesus is described by Colson as a "King Without a Country." Yet this is hardly what Jesus announced: "Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof" (Matt. 21:43). Jesus has a country: His church. This universal country is supposed to permeate every country on earth, bringing them all under covenantal subordination to Jesus Christ: "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost" (Matt. 28:19). One piece of evidence of such national subordination is the Trinitarian confession of the nation's civil covenant. Because Christians have ceased to believe this, they have allowed and then promoted the substitution of other oaths and other covenants, but always in the name of a purer, higher, and more mature Christianity.
Kingdom Oath
The ideal of Christendom is out of favor today. Christendom is the cultural manifestation of the Trinitarian kingdom of God, a social order founded on a confession of faith in the Trinitarian God of the Bible. The rejection of the legitimacy of the visible kingdom of God -- and, by implication, of the Great Commission which underlies it -- is universal, even inside the churches. The universal commitment today is to political pluralism and the ideal of a religiously oath-less civil order. But there are always oaths; the question is: To which god? The God of the Bible or some rival god?
The most popular rival god today is the State. Men must swear allegiance to the State and its constitution, not to God and His Bible, when they seek or confirm their citizenship in today's "neutral" societies. Christian evangelicals accept this arrangement as both normal and normative. Yet there has never been a single treatise written by any Bible-affirming Protestant Christian apologist for pluralism that shows how the Bible's required sanctions against false worship are consistent with political pluralism, i.e., a common civil oath. Christians speak today in defense of pluralism as if such a general treatise had been written three centuries ago, with dozens of monographs and textbooks following it through the centuries. They act as though the civil religion of political pluralism is consistent with -- an extension of -- the Bible. It never occurs to them that political pluralism is a form of polytheism: equal time for all religions in civil affairs, equal time for all law-orders, equal time for covenant-breakers and the gods they represent. The god of the State then is elevated to the throne of civil power. This god banishes all gods whose spokesmen do not acknowledge his sovereignty in history. Christian pluralism's assertion of "equal time for Jesus" then becomes humanism's "no time for Jesus." The Christians' cries of "Unfair!" accomplish nothing politically significant. There is no neutrality. There can be no covenant between Christ and Satan. But Christ's spokesmen for over three centuries have insisted that there is such a covenant in the civil realm. The result has been exactly what Moses said it would be: the cultural displacement of biblical religion by its enemies. The Trinitarians assent to a surrender to the civil confession of the unitarians; then both groups surrender to the civil confession of the humanists. Christians then find themselves in the absurd position of having to call for a restoration of the defunct common-ground unitarian confession in the name of traditional civil liberty. The humanists laugh in derision, having long since absorbed the unitarians into their ranks. The supposedly naked public square is in fact fully clothed in the clerical robes of humanism.
Genocide and Economic Inheritance The annihilation of Canaan's population and the destruction of Canaan's implements of worship were mandated by God in order to demonstrate His absolute sovereignty. The Canaanites had rebelled long enough. Their evil had compounded too far for God to tolerate it any longer. Their cup of iniquity was full (Gen. 15:16). In terms of the pagan theology of the ancient world, the continuing toleration of Canaan would have constituted God's incomplete victory over His rival gods, i.e., His limited sovereignty. In terms of Moses' warning, Israel's toleration of Canaanites would have meant that His people were playing the harlot, or would soon do so, with the gods of Canaan. Showing mercy to Canaanites would represent an ethical failure on Israel's part, not any sharing of sovereignty between God and the gods of Canaan.
Genocide was required inside the boundaries of the Promised Land because the Israelites were spiritually weak. If the Canaanites remained in the land, the Israelites would be lured into the power religions of Canaan, just as they had been lured into the worship of the golden calf. Inside the land's boundaries, the Canaanites had claimed sovereignty for their local gods. This claim had to be visibly refuted by Israel's annihilation of the Canaanites. For Israel to inherit the Promised Land, the Canaanites had to be disinherited. So did the gods of Canaan and the theology of Canaan. The dominion religion had to overcome the power religion by military action this one time. The spiritual vulnerability of Israel had to be offset by a complete military victory.
But such was not to be. They were too weak spiritually to impose God's negative sanctions completely. They did not totally annihilate the Canaanites. As Moses prophesied, Israel then fell back into sin and idolatry. The incomplete military victory of the Book of Joshua was followed by the repeated military defeats of the Book of Judges. The Israelites imposed incomplete military sanctions against Canaan; their enemies outside the land subsequently imposed far more complete military sanctions against the Israelites. From this bondage the judges repeatedly delivered them.
This requirement of annihilation did not apply to the economic assets of Canaan, which could be claimed by the Israelites as part of their inheritance: the spoils of war. Canaan's capital was the product of false local religions, but it was also part of the general dominion covenant: mankind's mandatory subduing of the earth (Gen. 1:26). The more general dominion covenant took precedence over the special rebellion of Canaan. Only those highly specialized capital goods that were expressly designed for false worship came under the ban. With the exception of the precious metals of Jericho, which were set aside for the tabernacle (Josh. 7:24), even the gold and silver implements of Canaan's worship could be claimed by the conquering Israelites, though obviously not in the form of idols. Melted down -- transformed from specific to general economic uses -- the precious metals of Canaanite religion could become the lawful inheritance of the Israelites. Here was another reason to burn the groves of Canaan: Israelites could lawfully confiscate any gold and silver. The common grace of God, as seen in the lawful use of Canaan's precious metals, added an incentive for the special judgment of God against the special rebellion of Canaan.
Conclusion The annihilation of Canaan was to be a one-time event. Other rules of war applied to nations outside the boundaries of Canaan (Deut. 20). God did not require that the names of gods outside the land not be mentioned. The focus of God's concern was Canaan and its gods. After the exile, the inheritance pattern of the jubilee year was to be extended to gentiles living in the land at the time of Israel's return (Ezek. 47:22-23). The law was altered because the conditions had altered. Never again would Israel be tempted to worship the gods of Canaan, for the authority represented by those gods had been totally vanquished by the invading empires. Never again did Israel worship the gods of Canaan.
The New Testament does not authorize either genocide or the elimination of the mention of the names of other gods. The civil issue in the New Testament is political sanctions, not military sanctions. The legitimate possession of the civil authority to declare and enforce God's law is sufficient for covenant-keepers: sanctions by Trinitarian oath. The names of other gods may be spoken. The relevant covenantal question is: Whose name do citizens invoke in the civil oath? In other words, by whose name are civil sanctions invoked? Here, no neutrality is possible. The quest for such neutrality is the quest for political polytheism.
Footnotes:
1. This was what the American Communist Party demanded of its members. Benjamin Gitlow, The Whole of Their Lives (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948). Before he recanted, Gitlow had been the senior official of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), and had held virtually every important office, including editor-in-chief. He went to jail for his beliefs, 1919-21.
2. "But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them: but every thing that was vile and refuse, that they destroyed utterly. Then came the word of the LORD unto Samuel, saying, It repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be king: for he is turned back from following me, and hath not performed my commandments" (I Sam. 15:9-10).
3. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, [1864] 1955), Book III, Chapter XV, pp. 205-6.
4. Ibid., III:II, p. 121.
5. Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1950), p. 172.
6. Charles Colson and Ellen Santilli Vaughn, Kingdoms in Conflict (New York: William Morrow, 1987), pp. 84, 85.
7. Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? ((Tappan, New Jersey: Revell, 1976), p. 252.
8. Francis A. Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, 1981), p. 121.
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