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BOUNDARIES ON KINGSHIP When thou art come unto the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, and shalt possess it, and shalt dwell therein, and shalt say, I will set a king over me, like as all the nations that are about me. . . (Deut. 17:14).
The theocentric focus of this law is God's office as King of kings. This was a land law. It governed the office of king, an optional office in Old Covenant Israel. This biblically authorized office has not existed since the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. In fact, it has not existed in history since the exile. Men have called themselves kings, and they have acted as kings, but they have not been legitimate, in the sense that neither priest nor prophet has been legitimate. All three offices were Old Covenant offices that have been completed by Christ.
Moses' assumption here was that Israel would conquer the land of Canaan. There was a strong element of prophecy: predictions accompanied by ethical commands. The laws governing kingship in Israel assumed that Israel had already conquered the land. This is another instance in the Bible where grace precedes law, which is a fundamental principle of God's covenantal dealings with men. God would give them a military victory comparable to their deliverance out of Egypt. This victory would then serve as the historical basis of kingship. Without prior grace, there would be no earthly king over Israel. The very presence of an earthly king in Israel was supposed to remind them of the visible grace of God in history. Only because God is the sovereign master over history and the deliverer of His people in history could the Israelites ever set a king over themselves. The Israelites' mandatory presupposition of earthly kingship was supposed to be the absolute sovereignty of God over history. The Mosaic doctrine of kingship rested on this doctrine: Israel's true king was God. This was the theocentric focus of the kingship laws.
Israel broke these kingship laws when the people demanded a king four centuries later. Their motivation was not theocentric; it was humanistic. Samuel reminded them of the theocentric focus of Israel's kingship: God's gracious deliverance. "And ye have this day rejected your God, who himself saved you out of all your adversities and your tribulations; and ye have said unto him, Nay, but set a king over us. Now therefore present yourselves before the LORD by your tribes, and by your thousands" (I Sam. 10:19). God had revealed to Samuel that the Israelites were substituting a new covenant. This new covenant necessarily involved the rejection of the God of the Mosaic covenant: "And the LORD said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them" (I Sam. 8:7).
Note that God told Samuel to do what they asked. God gave them enough rope to hang themselves. He told His prophet to go along with them, anointing the new king in God's name. There would be four kings over Israel's united kingdom, but early in the reign of the fourth king, Rehoboam, there was a revolt which divided Israel into two kingdoms (I Ki. 12). This, too, was part of God's covenantal order: He visits the iniquity of the fathers unto the third and fourth generation of those who hate Him (Ex. 20:5). The glory of the Davidic kingdom and the wealth of Solomon's kingdom were aspects of God's covenantal curse on Israel: magnificent rope for a national hanging. "And it shall be, if thou do at all forget the LORD thy God, and walk after other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish. As the nations which the LORD destroyeth before your face, so shall ye perish; because ye would not be obedient unto the voice of the LORD your God" (Deut. 8:19-20). When they demanded a king, they began a journey into covenantal disobedience that led to Babylon. When they returned from the exile, they never again had an Israelite as a king. Final civil authority was imposed on them from headquarters outside the land: Medo-Persia, regional Hellenism, and Rome.
Kingship as Imitation God's law provided for the establishment of kings in Israel. This is not to say that God required kingship in Israel. He did not. When the Israelites first proposed a king to Samuel, the prophet warned them of the dire consequences that would surely follow. The king would tax them equal to the tithe (I Sam. 8:15, 17). This threat of looming tax tyranny did not deter them, any more than dire warnings against the establishment of a national income tax deterred voters in the early twentieth century. The people wanted a king in Israel; similarly, the people have wanted a savior State in the twentieth century, with the high tax rates necessary to fund such a would-be Savior State. The twentieth century has seen tax rates far above the tithe. To get back to a mere tithe, which Samuel warned was tyranny, most of the civil governments of the modern world would have to cut taxes by three quarters. To get back to the tax level of tyrannical Egypt under Joseph (Gen. 47:26) -- God's curse on Pharaoh-worshipping Egypt through Joseph -- modern welfare states would have to cut taxes by at least half.
This fact is evidence that the modern world has adopted political tyranny in the name of freedom and economic justice. The modern secular world has strayed so far from belief in the God of the Bible that it regards tax tyranny as liberty. Tax reformers who call for a 20 percent national flat tax -- leaving intact all state and local taxes -- are dismissed by the vast majority of intellectuals and elected politicians as crackpot defenders of a near-libertarian State. Meanwhile, the modern church refuses to call for massive tax cuts in the name of the Bible. The operating alliance between secular humanists and the Old Testament-rejecting pietists has led to the establishment of the would-be Savior State, which promises healing to all mankind. This is modern man's version of salvation by law. Christians affirm its legitimacy in the name of their rejection of Old Testament law. They argue that the acceptance of Old Testament civil law is a form of legalism.
This has led Christians, step by step, into a political alliance with modernists, whose version of salvation by humanistic civil law has become a universal faith in the once-Christian West. In the same way that the Israelites demanded a king because the pagan nations around them had kings, so have Bible-affirming Christians voted for politicians who have imposed tax tyranny in the name of the Savior State, i.e., the welfare State.
The Origin of the Modern Welfare State The modern welfare State was the creation of Otto von Bismarck, who advocated State-funded pensions and health insurance in the 1880's in order to undermine the Social Democrats (socialists) and the liberals (laissez-faire) who were challenging his authority to rule over Germany's government.(1) Germany, which had by then become the center of State-funded education and biblical higher criticism, became the West's model for the welfare State after 1890.(2) Bismarck called his program "applied Christianity," but it was actually applied force for the purpose of increasing State power. He told his biographer in 1881, "Anybody who has before him the prospect of a pension, be it ever so small, in old age or infirmity is much happier and more content with his lot, and much more tractable and easy to manage, than he whose future is uncertain."(3) He also told him, "The State must take the matter into its own hands, not as alms-giving, but as the right that men have to be taken care of when, with the best will imaginable, they become unfit for work. . . . This thing will make its own way; it has a future. When I die, possibly our policy will come to grief. But State Socialism will have its day; and he who shall take it up again will assuredly be the man at the wheel."(4) In 1889, shortly after his forced retirement, Bismarck's tax-funded pension plan was voted into law.
Christians want to be like the pagan nations around them. This is especially true of Christians in college classrooms who have earned advanced academic degrees from State-funded universities and State-accredited private secular universities, which today serve as the institutional equivalent of Nebuchadnezzar's school for the sons of conquered nations (Dan. 1). This lust of covenant-keepers to conform to the latest manifestations of covenant-breaking society has undermined the covenants from the day that the nation of Israel ratified the national covenant in Exodus 19. The unwillingness of covenant-keepers to filter and then restructure imported ideas, institutions, and practices by means of God's law places them at the mercy of the ethical standards of their enemies. As dispensational author Tommy Ice once admitted, "Premillennialists have always been involved in the present world. And basically, they have picked up on the ethical position of their contemporaries."(5) This is equally true of the common forms of amillennialism.
The Mosaic law mandated restraints on Israel's kings. It placed specific boundaries on the king. One of these was that the king not multiply wives for himself. David and Solomon self-consciously defied this law. Yet the reigns of both men brought glory and wealth to Israel. The pinnacle of Israel's glory came during the reigns of kings who defied the Mosaic laws of kingship. David multiplied wives. Solomon multiplied wives and gold. Visible rebellion brought visible blessings: rope. The bills eventually came due. Rehoboam demanded the taxes necessary, he believed, to finance the kingdom that his father had consolidated. The visible splendor of earthly power and glory does not come cheaply. Rehoboam's demand for higher taxes led to a successful tax revolt that divided kingship in Israel. The centralized kingdom was decentralized by political revolution. This is the inevitable fate of every kingdom in history. God the king will not tolerate indefinitely the claims of rival kings and kingdoms.
Decentralized Civil Government Kingship in the ancient pagan world was associated with divinity. The king was frequently regarded as a divine-human link. This was not merely a judicial link; it was an ontological link. The king or emperor was believed to participate in the being of God.(6) Even today, the emperor of Japan is officially said to be a descendent of the gods.(7)
This belief has historical roots, according to the Bible. There was such a divine-human king in Old Covenant history: Melchizedek, king of Salem. The Epistle to the Hebrews describes him: "Without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually" (Heb. 7:3). The language of this epistle indicates that Melchizedek was a theophany, in the same way that the burning bush was. He held two offices: priest and king. This was not permitted to an Israelite king. The two offices had to be kept separate. Kings could not lawfully offer priestly sacrifices (I Sam. 13:9-14; II Chron. 26:19).
The separation of church and State was fundamental in the Mosaic law. There were two national judicial chains of command in Israel, civil and ecclesiastical. The high priest's office was separate from kingship. The priesthood exercised the sword only in a defensive perimeter around the tabernacle. God's law was divided structurally between ecclesiastical law and civil law. The centralization of power that was implied by kingship could not lawfully centralize ecclesiastical power under the State. There could be no Melchizedekan king-priest in Israel.
To call for an earthly king was Israel's public admission of political defeat. There is no question of the biblical legitimacy of kingship, for the Mosaic law established provisions governing the office. There is also no question that it was a second-best arrangement. The people of Israel abdicated when they had Samuel ordain a king. For four centuries, they had possessed the authority to follow or reject their judges. They also hold a veto. Although Deborah's song retroactively ridiculed those tribes that had not heeded her call to do battle against Sisera (Jud. 5:16-17), there was no question that she had not possessed lawful authority over them to compel their participation. Furthermore, without a joint declaration of war by the princes and the priests (Num. 10), Israel could not lawfully go to war. Israel was to be ruled by princes and judges, who were to consult with the Levites. Political leadership was decentralized in Israel because their king was God. There had to be a high priest in Israel; there did not have to be a king. Visible sovereignty was supposed to be ecclesiastical far more than civil. The final voice of civil authority was to be a corporate body: judges and priests who would declare God's judgments in specific cases (Deut. 17:9).(8) The presence of priests on this supreme civil court was designed to keep civil authority from becoming autonomous.
To maintain such a decentralized civil government, the Israelites would have to retain their confidence that God was truly in their midst and that He revealed Himself through His ordained representatives, both ecclesiastical and civil. The inauguration of a king was a public declaration that the nation no longer wanted its legal status as a thoroughly decentralized kingdom of priests. God recognized this, and He instructed Samuel to tell them this. The king would centralize tax collection and extract a tithe from them (I Sam. 8:15, 17). They did not heed Samuel's warning. Either they did not believe Samuel or they did not care. Either they believed that they could place limits on the king's taxing power or else they believed that the trade-off was worth it. They wanted to be like the nations around them.
In Moses' day, God knew they would eventually inaugurate a king. This is why He graciously had Moses announce tight boundaries on the king's legitimate authority. He gave the Israelites guidelines -- a blueprint -- that would enable them to identify when their king was moving toward apostasy, rebellion, and tyranny. Saul, a terrible king, did not openly violate them. David and Solomon did. Rehoboam, surely a third-rate king, imposed new taxes at the beginning of his reign. For this, the Northern Kingdom seceded. God kept Israel decentralized by authorizing a divided kingdom under Jeroboam and therefore two kingly lines.
Covenantal Boundaries Deuteronomy's first kingly law established that only an Israelite could occupy the office: "Thou shalt in any wise set him king over thee, whom the LORD thy God shall choose: one from among thy brethren shalt thou set king over thee: thou mayest not set a stranger over thee, which is not thy brother" (Deut. 17:15). This law governed the nation's civil and ecclesiastical representatives. In Israel, a joint ordination was mandatory for establishing kingship: church and State. Samuel anointed Saul, but he first went before the civil representatives of the nation to warn them not to raise up a king: a political creation of the congregation. Later, when Solomon's authority to reign as king was challenged by a rebellion by his brother Adonijah, the priests and the people decided in his favor. "And Zadok the priest took an horn of oil out of the tabernacle, and anointed Solomon. And they blew the trumpet; and all the people said, God save king Solomon" (I Ki. 1:39). This joint ordination procedure was even clearer in the case of the youthful Joash, who replaced the murderous Queen Athaliah.
And when Athaliah heard the noise of the guard and of the people, she came to the people into the temple of the LORD. And when she looked, behold, the king stood by a pillar, as the manner was, and the princes and the trumpeters by the king, and all the people of the land rejoiced, and blew with trumpets: and Athaliah rent her clothes, and cried, Treason, Treason. But Jehoiada the priest commanded the captains of the hundreds, the officers of the host, and said unto them, Have her forth without the ranges: and him that followeth her kill with the sword. For the priest had said, Let her not be slain in the house of the LORD. And they laid hands on her; and she went by the way by the which the horses came into the king's house: and there was she slain. And Jehoiada made a covenant between the LORD and the king and the people that they should be the LORD'S people; between the king also and the people. And all the people of the land went into the house of Baal, and brake it down; his altars and his images brake they in pieces thoroughly, and slew Mattan the priest of Baal before the altars. And the priest appointed officers over the house of the LORD. And he took the rulers over hundreds, and the captains, and the guard, and all the people of the land; and they brought down the king from the house of the LORD, and came by the way of the gate of the guard to the king's house. And he sat on the throne of the kings (II Ki. 11:13-19).
Deuteronomy 17:15 told the people what they could not lawfully do: ordain a stranger as king. The king had to be eligible to be a judge, i.e., a citizen. Citizenship was covenantal. This citizenship principle established that only a circumcised male who was a member of the congregation, or the daughter or wife of a citizen (e.g., Deborah),(9) could lawfully be ordained to impose civil sanctions. He had to be under covenantal sanctions, marked in his flesh, in order to be eligible for kingship in Israel. This meant that in order for a man lawfully to impose civil covenantal sanctions, he had to be under ecclesiastical covenantal sanctions. A king's flesh had to reveal his implicit self-maledictory oath before God, which had been taken on his behalf by his circumcising parent, who had acted as a household priest.
Circumcision was a physical manifestation of what was to be an inward ethical condition. Moses had already warned Israel: "Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiffnecked" (Deut. 10:16). The stiffnecked person was someone who would not heed God's word. He was a rebel. The circumcised man might not be circumcised in heart, which was why Moses here revealed other marks of the circumcised heart in a man possessing supreme civil authority: one wife, no horses, and not much money.
After Israel returned from the Assyrian-Babylonian exile, its supreme civil rulers would no longer be circumcised. The people had no further say over who would rule over them. The final authority in civil government did not reside in a court in Jerusalem; it resided in some foreign capital. The history of Israel was a transition from judgeship to domestic kingship to foreign empire. Under foreign rulers, both at home and abroad, Israel was to learn the true meaning of kingship. Israel got its wish: to live as the other nations did -- as a subordinate nation in a foreign king's international empire.
Military Boundaries The horse was an offensive weapon. Horses were the basis of both the cavalry and chariots. There were to be few horses in the king's stable: "But he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt, to the end that he should multiply horses: forasmuch as the LORD hath said unto you, Ye shall henceforth return no more that way" (v. 16). The horse was a tool of empire. Kings could not lawfully multiply them.
The kingdom of God vs. the empire of man: here was the choice before Israel. Israel's civil order was to be decentralized. Decentralized societies cannot become empires without abandoning their political decentralization. Republican Rome is the most famous example in history: when Rome became an empire, she ceased being a republic. Decentralized societies lack what every empire requires: an offensive military force. A king or his functional equivalent is the commander of every empire. There must be a chain of command with one person serving as the final voice of authority in an empire. The military model requires one-man rule.(10) One-man rule is required in wartime, for the same reason that there can be only one captain on a ship: someone must be held personally accountable for making life-and-death decisions. When a decentralized society suffers a defensive war, this one-man rulership is temporary. A decentralized nation is difficult to lure into an offensive war because there is no king to promote it for his glory and many powerful local leaders who oppose it, knowing that their power will be transferred upward. Thus, when Israel anointed a king, the nation took the first step toward empire. The next step after this was a stable of horses.
Egypt had been an empire based on chariots. There were limits on what chariots could accomplish. Chariots had failed to keep Israel inside Egypt's boundaries. No Israelite king was to send Israelites down to Egypt to buy horses or to learn the arts of horse-based warfare. Horses were forbidden to Israel's kings because empire was forbidden. Israel would be defended by God, just as she had been at the Red Sea. Israelites were not to put their trust in horses.
Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God (Ps. 20:7).
Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help; and stay on horses, and trust in chariots, because they are many; and in horsemen, because they are very strong; but they look not unto the Holy One of Israel, neither seek the LORD! (Isa. 31:1).
An Israelite army without horses was at the mercy of God, not the mercy of Egypt. To preserve the inheritance of Israel, the king had to conform to God's laws, for he was the nation's supreme civil representative. A stable full of horses would serve as a symbol of the king's trust in military might rather than God's preserving hand. An arms race in offensive weaponry in Israel would testify to a national loss of faith. Men of valor seated on slow-moving donkeys or on foot would be sufficient to defend the borders of Israel and preserve the inheritance. There were other chariots on call: "And Elisha prayed, and said, LORD, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And the LORD opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha" (II Ki. 6:17). Chariots of fire, not chariots of horses, were to constitute Israel's strategic defense initiative.
Marital Boundaries "Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away" (17a). Saul had only one wife (I Sam. 14:50). Ahab had only one wife, probably out of fear of upsetting her. Ahab's kingship indicates that monogamy was no guarantee of righteousness. David had an unknown number of wives and concubines (II Sam. 5:13), in addition to his eight listed wives.(11) Solomon, of course, was the world record-holder: 700 wives and 300 concubines, i.e., wives without dowries (I Ki. 11:3). The problem was, as is said of Solomon, "his wives turned away his heart" (I Ki. 11:3).
The prohibition on polygamy applied in the Old Covenant only to kings. The most likely reason why the king was singled out in this regard was his access to foreign wives. These marital alliances were not merely biological; they were covenantal. They were therefore political. These wives would likely be part of military alliances with foreign kings. These marriages could be useful as military alliances. David's wife Maacah was the daughter of a king (II Sam. 3:3). The multiplication of foreign wives was a lure into polytheism, for with foreign wives might come foreign gods. A king's polygamy could easily lead to polytheism. Polytheism was the obvious way for a king to reconcile in his competitive household the imported gods of his wives and their sons. Foreign wives could accept this solution, for the gods of the ancient Near East were polytheistic. This is what happened to Solomon. His wives wore him down theologically.
From the viewpoint of a foreign king seeking to undermine Israel, an alliance through his daughter's marriage to an Israelite king was ideal. This was a low-cost strategy of subversion. The Israelite king's polytheistic example could undermine Israel in all four covenants: personal, ecclesiastical, civil and familial. The family was therefore the weak link in the religion of Israel. So concerned was God to preserve the monotheism of the Israelite family that He demanded the death penalty for any family member who tempted another member to worship a false God (Deut. 13:6-10). The prosecuting family members were to cast the first stones after the errant member's conviction (v. 9). This was because witnesses were required to cast the first stones under Mosaic law (Deut. 17:7).(12)
Treasury Boundaries The text continues: ". . . neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold" (17b). These precious metals could be used to build monuments to kingly power: public works projects. These public works projects honor the king or the State. They must then be permanently maintained through permanent taxation, unless the State is willing to admit defeat and transfer their ownership to private organizations.(13) Precious metals could be used to build up an offensive army: the way of empire.(14) They could be used in profligate moral dissipation by the king and his court.(15) It was a violation of God's law for a king to use his authority to extract so much wealth from the population that the excess revenue could be horded in the form of money.
Judicial Boundaries The king was told to become familiar with the Mosaic law. "And it shall be, when he sitteth upon the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write him a copy of this law in a book out of that which is before the priests the Levites: And it shall be with him, and he shall read therein all the days of his life: that he may learn to fear the LORD his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do them: That his heart be not lifted up above his brethren, and that he turn not aside from the commandment, to the right hand, or to the left: to the end that he may prolong his days in his kingdom, he, and his children, in the midst of Israel" (Deut. 17:18-20).
First, at the time of his accession to the throne, he was to copy the law in his own hand. This meant that he had to be literate. A king in Israel could not lawfully claim that he had not read the law. He had not only read it; he had written it down. To maintain this kingly inheritance, his son would have to be able to read. This writing down of the law was a joint brain-hand exercise: suitable for memorization. Also, by writing down the law, he was submitting to the treaty of the great king. i.e., God Himself, whose laws and sanctions appear in the text.
Second, the priests kept the original copy. This meant that the priests were the law-keepers in Israel. They were the ones with exclusive access to the original source document of Moses' judicials. The king could not tamper with this document. He could not retroactively write new copies of the law in order to mislead the judges of the nation. He was not to become a forger who might later be identified as such by some higher critic of the Bible. He was not sovereign over the law. He was under its authority, as preserved in written form by the priests. Priestly authority was superior to kingly authority in the area of law, and this was to be acknowledged by the king by his act of copying the law from the priests' version.
Third, he was required to read the law continually. He was to learn to fear God and to keep God's law. The sign of his fear of God would be his obedience to God's revealed law. This would keep him in his place: "That his heart be not lifted up above his brethren, and that he turn not aside from the commandment, to the right hand, or to the left" (v. 20a).
Fourth, there was a positive sanction attached to this law: ". . . to the end that he may prolong his days in his kingdom, he, and his children, in the midst of Israel" (v. 20b). This was an extension of the fifth commandment's promise: "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). By honoring God by obeying His law, the king could bring the blessings of long life and extended authority to himself and his heirs. The law specifically identified the land as "his kingdom." To preserve his family's kingly line, he had to master and obey the law.
Taxes and Control Centralization means a transfer of authority away from the individual. Taxes imposed by a central government are transmitted to an agency of government more distant from the taxpayer than local governments. The taxpayer has less influence over the spending of this money. This means that the spending preferences of the individual are usually compromised by the collecting agency. His preferences are drowned out by the preferences of other taxpayers and special-interest political pressure groups. The central collecting agency can play off one competing group against another. This allows the civil government's decision-makers to substitute their spending preferences for those of the taxpayers. Meanwhile, organized opposition to specific taxes will be sporadic and diffused.(16)
The king in Israel faced competing demands for the money he collected. There is always heavy demand for free money. Those desiring access to the king's money might even be located outside the country. The king, as the official representative of all the people, had more claims on the use of his funds than any local government faced. The spending decisions made by a king were therefore more complex. Meanwhile, the taxpayer found it difficult to gain the king's support for the taxpayer's preferred project. His preferences were drowned in the noise of competition.
This noise transferred greater power to the king and his agents. The more complex the problems facing the king, and the more noise there was in the competition for access to the funds, the greater the flexibility of the king in spending the taxpayers' money. This means greater arbitrariness and less of a restraining effect by the law. The more money collected by the king, the more detailed the law book had to be to govern the allocation of the revenue. One rule of bureaucracy is this: the thicker the law book, the more arbitrary the decisions. If the law book is too thick to make it easy for anyone to coordinate the details of the law, the bureaucrat has fewer restraints on his decision-making. This is another reason why the Bible's law book is comparatively thin -- thin enough to be read to the assembled population once every seven years (Deut. 31:10-12).
The Mosaic law established a political order in which civil power was decentralized. There could be a king, but for four centuries, there wasn't. Civil government's decision-making was kept at the local level. So was tax revenue. This decentralization made it possible for local taxpayers to have a greater voice in the distribution of their funds. It also allowed them to place pressure on the government when taxes got too high. It was far more difficult to restrict a distant king's power over the purse. It took a political revolution under Jeroboam to reduce the burden of Rehoboam's taxes (I Ki. 12). Revolution is an expensive, risky, and infrequent occurrence in the affairs of nations.
Conclusion The king, as the voice of civil authority, was not to replace the supreme court, which had to include priests. Yet because the king possessed an army and personal authority, he would inevitably become a major source of judicial interpretation. He would threaten the system of co-judgeship in which the priests served as counsellors to civil judges. The authority to declare the law in God's name and then enforce it is the foundation of covenantal authority. The State has the power to enforce the law physically. In a covenantally rebellious society, the fear of the State is greater than the fear of excommunication. The State becomes the most feared interpreter of the law.
This is why Absalom used the promise of wise judicial declaration as his primary weapon in his subversion of his father's throne. "And Absalom rose up early, and stood beside the way of the gate: and it was so, that when any man that had a controversy came to the king for judgment, then Absalom called unto him, and said, Of what city art thou? And he said, Thy servant is of one of the tribes of Israel. And Absalom said unto him, See, thy matters are good and right; but there is no man deputed of the king to hear thee. Absalom said moreover, Oh that I were made judge in the land, that every man which hath any suit or cause might come unto me, and I would do him justice! And it was so, that when any man came nigh to him to do him obeisance, he put forth his hand, and took him, and kissed him. And on this manner did Absalom to all Israel that came to the king for judgment: so Absalom stole the hearts of the men of Israel" (II Sam. 15:2-6). Absalom promised to do what Moses could not do: render perfect justice to all-comers. His offer would not have been believable had the king not already undermined the supreme court's function by arrogating judicial authority to himself, and through his own person, to the autonomous State.
Foreign kings repeatedly made trouble for Israel, from the day that Chedorlaomer kidnapped Lot (Gen. 14) to the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. The Pharaoh of the oppression was the archetype of what a king could become if left unchecked by law and God's historical sanctions. There had been only one exception: Melchizedek. Abram had gone to meet him, bringing tithes to him and receiving bread and wine from him. But Melchizedek was different from the other kings: he was also the priest of Salem. He lawfully possessed both offices: king and priest (Gen. 14:8). He was a royal priest. He, too, was an archetype -- not for individual kingship but for corporate kingship. Israel as a nation of priests was to imitate Melchizedek.
Israel was set apart by God at Sinai. The nation took an oath there to obey God's law (Ex. 19). God then gave them His law (Ex. 20-23). At Sinai, God had prophesied that they would become a kingdom of priests (Ex. 19:6). They were not yet such a kingdom, He implied, but someday they would be. It was the fulfillment of this prophecy by the church that Peter announced: "But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light" (I Pet. 2:9).
Implicit in Peter's doctrine of the institutional church as a holy nation is the call for a return to the decentralized Israel of the judges era, though without a high priest. Decentralization is to be both civil and ecclesiastical, for Jesus Christ is the high priest after the order of Melchizedek (Heb. 5:10) and therefore a king (Heb. 7:1-2). He reigns exclusively from heaven, not from an earthly holy of holies. But it took until 1918 for the Christian West to come to grips with the civil implications of the doctrine of the bodily ascension of Christ. By the end of World War I, when the kings at last departed, Christendom had also departed. It was not Christianity that finally abolished kings; it was the Enlightenment, both left wing (Communist) and right wing (democratic).
Footnotes:
1. He could not persuade the parliament in 1881 to vote for government funding of health insurance, but it did vote for State-mandated health insurance (1883) and accident insurance (1884), to be co-funded by workers and employers. But, economically speaking, workers funded the employers' share, too. The employers would have been willing to pay the workers the same money in salaries. The payment was simply a cost of doing business. It went to insurance rather than wages.
2. A. J. P. Taylor, England's prolific socialistic historian, wrote: "German social insurance was the first in the world, and has served as a model for every other civilized country. The great conservative became the greatest of innovators." Taylor, Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman (New York: Knopf, 1955), p. 203.
3. Moritz Busch, Our Chancellor (Bismarck): Sketches for a Historical Picture, trans. William Beatty-Kingston, 2 vols. (New York: Books for Libraries, [1884] 1970), II, p. 217.
4. Ibid., II, pp. 321-32.
5. Cited in Gary DeMar, The Debate Over Christian Reconstruction (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1988), p. 185.
6. R. J. Rushdoony, The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy (Fairfax, Virginia: Thoburn Press, [1971] 1978), ch. 3.
7. The emperor Jimmu (660 B.C.) is said to be the grandson of Hiro Hohodemi, the son of the god Ninigi, and Toyotama, daughter of the sea god. "Jimmu," Grolier's Encyclopedia (1997).
8. See Chapter 39.
9. She was a judge. She commanded the army, but only as a U.S. President does: as a civilian. She could not legally be drafted into the army. Only men were mustered (numbered) in God's holy army. I conclude that her civil authority as a judge stemmed either from her husband or father, although the text in Judges does not say this. The judicial issue is circumcision: the mark of being under the covenant's negative sanctions.
10. In England's nineteenth-century naval empire, the Prime Minister served in place of the king. Today's largest empire, the United States, does not rule directly over other nations, but rules as first among equals in an international world order. As with England a century ago, the United States' main international concern is commerce. The largest private U.S. banks have more long-term authority in the maintenance of this commercial empire than the politicians do, which was also the case in England's empire.
11. Michal (I Sam. 18:27-28), Abigail (I Sam. 25:39), Ahinoam (II Sam. 2:2), Bathsheba (II Sam. 11:27), Maacah, Haggith, Abital, and Eglah (II Sam. 3:3-5).
12. Jesus understood the implications of this civil law: "And the brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause them to be put to death" (Matt. 10:21). "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me" (Matt. 10:34-37). He did not deny the validity of this law in His lifetime, which was a matter of inheritance in Israel.
13. The national highway system built by the U.S. Federal government in the late 1950's and 1960's is now becoming a major financial drain on state and local finances as these roads and bridges steadily wear out. Governments did not set aside gasoline tax revenues to pay for the roads' replacement. The consumption of capital took place over several decades. Now the budgets of these governments are constrained by massive debt and by political promises regarding welfare: the support of the poor. Even worse in this respect is the century-old underground water systems of older U.S. cities, especially in the Northeast.
14. Such hoards of precious metals do not last long in wartime; the costs of warfare are too high. But the presence of a hoard of precious metals in reserve might lure a short-sighted king into starting a war that would outlast his hoard. The problem with a war paid for by the king's precious metals is that his army must gain a string of victories over wealthy opponents in order to replenish his dwindling supply of gold. The offensive military campaign becomes self-reinforcing. To maintain the conquests, wealth must be extracted from the conquered peoples, who resent the imposition. The Roman Republic did not extricate itself from its military victories. The government used the wealth extracted from the provinces to maintain local control over them. Little of this wealth flowed back into Rome's treasury except immediately after an initial military victory. Private Roman citizens kept most of the booty. Bribery and extortion became common with local governors and Rome's senators. A. H. M. Jones, The Roman Economy: Studies in Ancient Economic and Administrative History (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman & Littlefield, 1974), pp. 115-21. The republic became an empire. Eventually, the cost of maintaining it led to bankruptcy and mass inflation. Ibid., ch. 9.
15. Isaiah warned: "His watchmen are blind: they are all ignorant, they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber. Yea, they are greedy dogs which can never have enough, and they are shepherds that cannot understand: they all look to their own way, every one for his gain, from his quarter. Come ye, say they, I will fetch wine, and we will fill ourselves with strong drink; and to morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant" (Isa. 56:10-12). The court at Versailles under Louis XIV and Louis XV left a mountain of royal debt and oligarchical moral debauchery for Louis XVI to deal with. He and the old order did not survive the ordeal.
16. Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), pp. 292-94.
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