Update: 4/13/20
If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve for six years, and in the seventh year he will go free without paying anything. If he came by himself, he must go free by himself; if he is married, then his wife must go free with him. If his master gave him a wife and she bore him sons or daughters, the wife and her children will belong to her master, and he must go free by himself (Exodus 21:2–4).
This passage begins the case laws of Exodus. These laws were applications of the Ten Commandments, which are recorded in Exodus 20. The case laws fill Exodus 21–23. I devote the third and fourth volumes of my commentary on Exodus, Authority and Dominion, to this section of Exodus. This Analysis section was published in Volume 3 as an introduction to Chapter 31: “Servitude, Protection, and Marriage.” This chapter introduced the concept of the bride price, which was the payment by a bridegroom to the father of the bride. The father then transferred this money to his daughter as her dowry. It was her permanent possession. It protected her in case her husband either died or left her. Payment to the father proved that the bridegroom had capital.
Verse 3 is clear: a married man who goes into indentured servitude, probably because of an unpaid charitable debt, takes his wife with him. She therefore departs with him when he goes out. Verse 4 is the difficult section for moralists. If he had been given a wife during his period of servitude, she and their children must remain behind with the master when the husband leaves.
The key question we need to ask ourselves is this: Where had the indentured servant received his wife if he originally brought her into the master’s household? The answer is crucial to understanding this passage: from her father. He would have had to pay a bride price to her father, thereby indicating his economic productivity, or at least his position as a man possessing inherited capital. The bridegroom’s payment of a required bride price is the key to understanding this case law.
The bride price would normally have been less than 50 shekels of silver. A man who seduced an unbetrothed virgin was required by law to pay 50 shekels to her father, and then marry her, with no future right of divorce (Deuteronomy 22:28–29). Additional evidence of this 50-shekel maximum: the bridegroom who falsely accused a new bride of not being a virgin at the time of their marriage, and who could not prove his accusation, had to pay 100 shekels of silver to her father (Deuteronomy 22:19). This was double restitution: two times 50.
1. To Give a Wife
Jacob wanted to marry Rachel. He had no visible, transferable capital, for he was a fugitive, even though he had received Isaac’s blessing. Without an assured inheritance, he had to pay Laban a bride price. That bride price was seven years of labor (Genesis 29:20a). His words at the end of this period of service are significant: “Give me my wife, for my days have been completed—so that I may marry her!” (Genesis 29:21b). Give me my wife, he insisted. The father had to give his daughter to the bridegroom, once the bridegroom had met the terms of the bride price. Rachel now belonged to Jacob. He had paid the price.
Exodus 21:4 reads: “If his master gave him a wife and she bore him sons or daughters, the wife and her children will belong to her master, and he must go free by himself.” The language is the same as Jacob’s to Laban: he has given her to him. This raises a second crucial question: Where did the master get a woman for his servant in order to be able to give her to him in marriage? Either she was a servant already owned by the master, or else she had been purchased by the master for the servant. Perhaps she had been some other family’s servant. Perhaps she had been the daughter of a free man. The point is, the master now lawfully controls her as a lawful father. He can therefore give her to his servant.
If she had been the daughter of a free man, then the master would have had to pay a bride price to her father. This assured the father that the man who was taking legal authority over his daughter was competent financially. The father had been given economic evidence that the requested transfer of authority over his daughter to another man posed no threat to her economic future. The bride price served as evidence of her future husband’s ability to support her; as a weaker vessel, she was legally entitled to such support.
If the master paid the bride price, and her father transferred to him the right to give her in marriage, then the master became her new father, covenantally speaking. He would remain legally responsible for her until she married a legally independent man. The master had the legal right to give her as a wife to a servant in his household, but only because she would remain in his household. He could not legally transfer to a servant the economic obligation to support her, for the servant was not a covenantally free agent, either economically or legally. Because the servant possessed no capital, the master remained her father covenantally until such time as the servant purchased her from him, that is, until he paid the master the bride price owed to a father.
This law provided additional assurance to the woman’s natural father of the lifetime economic protection owed to his daughter. The master did not have the legal authority to transfer this economic responsibility to a former indentured servant until the latter had proven that he was able to pay the same bride price originally owed to the father. If this law had not been in existence, or if it was unenforced by civil law, then there would be no guarantee to the woman’s natural father that the master would not later decide to escape his economic liabilities to the woman by transferring such responsibility to a former indentured servant who had not yet demonstrated his economic competence. The legal requirement that the released servant pay the master the bride price before his wife could leave the household of the master was the natural father’s assurance of her continuing protection.
The modern world has pretended that it can somehow ignore the economic aspects of marriage. People assume that the ancient world was primitive, and therefore the attention given by ancient law codes to such matters as dowries and bride price payments is evidence of this primitivism. But it is the modern world that is primitive, for it has abandoned a covenantal view of marriage, and has substituted easily broken mutual contracts, where fathers have no responsibilities to investigate the economic competence of prospective sons-in-law, and wives have little legal protection from the courts if husbands decide to break their marriage contracts. Women have become the economic victims of divorce.
2. The Family as the Primary Protection Agency
Marriage is not lawless. It is a covenantal institution. It is the primary training ground for the next generation. It is the primary institution for welfare: care of the young, care of the aged, and education. It is the primary agency of economic inheritance. The family is therefore the primary institutional arrangement for fulfilling the terms of the dominion covenant (Genesis 1:27–28). God honored this crucial dominion function of the family by placing restrictions on it. A servant is expected to defer marriage until he is an independent man. Later, as a husband in a position of authority, he can exercise dominion under God as the head of his family. The model here is Jacob (Genesis 29:20).
Both marriage and labor are normally to be part of the dominion covenant between man and God. Because the servant’s dominion over his assigned portion of the earth is not independent of his master’s authority, his authority over a wife taken during his term of service is also under his master’s authority. There is a human mediator between God and the servant: the master. Therefore, it is the master, not the servant, who is directly responsible to God for the general care of the servant’s wife. The servant takes orders from the master.
The servant’s protection comes from the master. The capital at his disposal comes from his master. He takes orders directly from his master or a representative of the master. If he is a foreman himself, he issues orders only as a representative of his master, because he is acting as an official under the master’s general authority. The master is responsible before God for any delegation of authority to a servant, so the mediatorial position of the master is not abrogated simply because he turns limited authority over to the servant.
This law made it clear to any woman who married a Hebrew indentured servant that the ultimate human authority over her, and therefore her legal protector, was not her husband but rather her husband’s master. She was fulfilling the terms of the dominion covenant as a wife within a family unit, but the head of her family was her husband’s master. Her husband was therefore only a representative of the head of her family. The covenant of marriage was in this instance four-way: (1) God, (2) the master of the house, (3) the indentured servant, and (4) the servant’s wife. Because the protection of the wife and children was ultimately the legal responsibility of the master, the servant’s wife and the children remained with the master when the husband, now released, departed.
No biblical text explicitly specifies a right of redemption by the husband if the wife was owned by a Hebrew master. Nevertheless, such a legal right is an inescapable conclusion of Exodus 21:7–8: “If a man sells his daughter as a female servant, she must not go free as the male servants do. If she does not please her master, who has designated her for himself, then he must let her be bought back. He has no right to sell her to a foreign people. He has no such right, since he has treated her deceitfully.” The Hebrew daughter could be bought and sold as the Hebrew manservant could be. She could become a maidservant (Deuteronomy 15:12). She could also be purchased by means of a bride price, that is, to become a wife. Her father could not legally abolish the God-given judicial, covenantal office of father; he could only transfer this office to another man who was promising to become her future husband or her future father-in-law. This transfer of office was legally possible only because marriage is judicially a form of adoption.
Ezekiel 16 is the great chapter on God’s adoption of the nation of Israel. Ezekiel described Israel as an abandoned child born of an Amorite father and a Hittite mother. “No eye had compassion for you to do any of these things for you, to be compassionate toward you. On the day that you were born, with loathing for your life, you were thrown out into the open field” (v. 5). God was gracious to this abandoned baby. This was an act of adoption. When Israel grew to maturity, God in his grace married Israel. “So I washed you with water and rinsed your blood off you, and I anointed you with oil. I dressed you in embroidered clothes and placed leather sandals on your feet. I wrapped you with fine linen and covered you with silk. Next I adorned you with jewelry, and I put bracelets on your hands, and a chain around your neck. I put a nose ring in your nostrils and earrings in your ears, and a beautiful crown on your head. So you were adorned with gold and silver, and you were dressed in fine linen, silk, and embroidered clothes; you ate fine flour, honey, and oil, and you were very beautiful, and you became a queen” (vv. 9–13). This is the description of a bridegroom who pays an enormous dowry to the bride. He does not pay her father. That is because she is the abandoned bastard daughter of Canaanites. He pays her out of his own resources.
Israel then became faithless: a prostitute. Israel wasted the dowry. “You took the fine jewels of the gold and silver that I gave you, and you made for yourself male figures, and you did with them as a prostitute would do” (v. 17). It was the worst kind of waste. Israel created idols with the precious metals. God then promised to bring Israel under negative sanctions. But the sanctions would not be permanent. “Then I will calm my fury against you; my anger will leave you, for I will be satisfied, and will no longer be angry” (v. 42).
The New Testament teaches that Israel rebelled again. The ultimate rebellion was the crucifixion of Christ. God brought final sanctions on the nation of Israel in A.D. 70, when the Romans surrounded the city, broke down its walls, and burned the temple. That ended the temple sacrifices forever. Having divorced Israel in full public view, God the Father then sought a new bride for his Son. That bride was the church. This is why Paul refers to the church as the Israel of God (Galatians 6:16).
Matthew 25 is devoted to the final judgment. It offers two parables: the parable of the ten virgins (vv. 1–13) and the parable of the three stewards (vv. 14–30). It ends with a description of the final judgment: the separation of the sheep from the goats (vv. 31–45). Here is the parable of the ten virgins.
The kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish and five were wise. For when the foolish virgins took their lamps, they did not take any oil with them. But the wise virgins took containers of oil along with their lamps. Now while the bridegroom was delayed, they all got sleepy and slept. But at midnight there was a cry, ‘Look, the bridegroom! Go out and meet him.' Then all those virgins rose up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil because our lamps are going out.'’ But the wise answered and said, ‘Since there will not be enough for us and you, go instead to those who sell and buy some for yourselves.’ While they went away to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him to the marriage feast, and the door was shut. Afterward the other virgins also came and said, ‘Master, master, open for us.’ But he answered and said, ‘Truly I say to you, I do not know you.' Watch therefore, for you do not know the day or the hour (Matthew 25:1–13).
It is clear that the bridegroom is Jesus Christ. In other New Testament passages, Christ is described as the bridegroom. John the Baptist was baptizing people when Jesus’ ministry began. His disciples came to him with a question. “Rabbi, the one who was with you on the other side of the Jordan River, about whom you have testified, look, he is baptizing, and they are all going to him. John replied, “A man cannot receive anything unless it has been given to him from heaven. You yourselves can testify that I said, ‘I am not the Christ,’ but instead, ‘I have been sent before him.’ The bride belongs to the bridegroom. Now the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly because of the voice of the bridegroom. This, then, is my joy made complete. He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:26b–30). Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. Christ gave himself for the church so that he might make her holy, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present her to himself as glorious, without stain or wrinkle or any such thing, but holy and without fault” (Ephesians 5:25–27). Christ is the bridegroom. The church is the bride. John wrote of the world beyond the grave: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, that came down out of heaven from God, prepared like a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21:1–2). This follows the wedding celebration or marriage supper of the lamb “‘Let us rejoice and be very happy and give him the glory because the wedding celebration of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready. She was permitted to be dressed in bright and clean fine linen’ (for fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints). The angel said to me, ‘Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding feast of the Lamb.’ He also said to me, ‘These are true words of God’” (Revelation 19:7–9).
Jesus’ role as the bridegroom of the church is central to His role as Redeemer. God selects the members of Christ’s church. Then He redeems them by grace. “God raised us up together with Christ, and God made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show to us the immeasurably great riches of his grace expressed in his kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this did not come from you, it is the gift of God, not from works and so no one may boast. For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good deeds that God planned long ago for us, so that we would walk in them” (Ephesians 2:6–10).
The bridegroom has a bride. The bride is the church. The history of mankind ever since the fall of man has been the story of the purification of the church. This purification is ethical. Paul wrote to the church at Corinth: “I wish that you could put up with me in some foolishness. But you are indeed putting up with me! For I am jealous about you. I have a godly jealousy for you, since I promised you in marriage to one husband. I promised to present you as a pure virgin to Christ. But I am afraid that somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your thoughts might be led astray away from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ” (II Corinthians 11:1–3). This is what he meant when he wrote of the church as being “without stain or wrinkle or any such thing, but holy and without fault” (Ephesians 5:27). There is a process of ethical sanctification here. Theologians call this progressive sanctification. This process leads to final sanctification. This will take place at the end of time: the wedding supper of the lamb, which will follow the final judgment.
Parts of this section appear in Chapter 22 of Authority and Dominion: “Wives and Concubines.” My discussion is far more detailed there.
The death of Christ on the cross paid a ransom. “For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). “For there is one God, and there is one mediator for God and man, the man Christ Jesus. He gave himself as a ransom for all, as the testimony at the right time” (I Timothy 2:5–6). “You know that it was not with perishable silver or gold that you have been redeemed from the foolish behavior that you learned from your fathers. Instead, you have been redeemed with the precious blood of Christ, who was like a lamb without blemish or spot” (I Peter 1:18–19). Jesus did not pay this ransom to Satan. He paid it to God the Father. It was paid in full at Calvary. It was definitive. This definitive payment has led to a progressive expansion of the final inheritance of the church as the church accumulates wealth, especially wisdom, the most valuable of assets. This expansion will continue until Christ’s final payment to God takes place at the end of time (I Corinthians 15:24–28). [North, First Corinthians, ch. 17] In the meantime, God is owed all of the productivity of mankind. This is an implication of the dominion covenant. It is taught in the parables of the talents and the minas.
What has Christ’s payment of the ransom to God got to do with the old covenants bride price system? It has to do with the recipient of grace. The recipient is the church. The church, meaning all redeemed people, survives in history only because of Christ’s payment of the ransom. The church is called the bride of Christ. It is this office of bride that is the basis of the connection between the payment of the ransom and the payment of the bride price.
There was a covenantal reason in the Old Testament for this economic obligation on the part of a bridegroom. The father of the prospective bride represented God to his daughter. This covenantal authority before God—this position as God’s representative to his daughter—had to be lawfully transferred from the father to the bridegroom. By paying the bride price to her father, the bridegroom ritually swore to a lifetime of faithfulness to his wife as God’s representative over her, faithfulness comparable to what her father’s faithfulness to her had been. This is precisely what Jesus swore to God the Father in His role as the cosmic Bridegroom. He paid the price at Calvary. God then transferred all authority over heaven and earth to Christ as His lawful representative (Matthew 28:18–20).
By the payment of the bride price, the groom was also acknowledging that he was capable of being as good a supporter of the girl as her father had been. He needed to assure her family of her future economic protection, thereby releasing her father and brothers from this legal responsibility. His ability to follow through on this covenantal guarantee was revealed by his ability to pay the bride price. The bride price was therefore an economic screening device for the family of the girl. The bridegroom’s ability to pay a bride price was evidence of his outward faithfulness to the terms of God’s covenant. The parents were transferring legal responsibility to a new covenantal head. They were participating in the establishment of a new family. Thus, the in-laws had to serve as God’s agents. The bride price was also a sign of the bridegroom’s future-orientation and self-discipline. Because Jacob came without capital into Laban’s household, he first had to work for Laban as a servant for seven years in order to prove his capacity to lead his own household. To lead covenantally, you must first follow. To rule, you must also have served. Dominion is by covenant, and covenants are always hierarchical.
The bride price compensated the father for the expense of the daughter’s dowry. From a purely economic standpoint, the dowry could have been delivered directly from the bridegroom to the daughter. Why did God require this seemingly unnecessary intermediate step, the payment of the bride price to the father? Because the formal transfer of the bride price to her father pointed to the bridegroom’s requirement of covenantal subordination to her father.
The church needs a dowry. Every bride does. The language of Ezekiel 16 applies to the church. The New Testament church was the outcast of Israel. The gentiles were outcasts. The church had no wealth of its own that would satisfy God. The church could not provide its own dowry. Whatever the church has ever had, it has had only on the basis of the grace of God. Jesus Christ paid the bride price to God through His death at Calvary. This is the basis of His marriage to the bride, the church. The marriage supper of the Lamb must be preceded by the payment of a bride price. The church is a wife. The church is not a concubine. The concubine had no dowry. The church does have a dowry. But where did you get this dowry? Biblically, it has to come from the father. But the father gets the dowry from the bridegroom. The payment of the dowry marks the bridegroom as the responsible individual who is now taking responsibility for the bride.
In I Corinthians 15, Paul presents information on the final judgment. This judgment comes only after Christ has extended dominion across the face of the earth. He has subdued his enemies. “Then will be the end, when Christ will hand over the kingdom to God the Father. This is when he will abolish all rule and all authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For ‘he has put everything under his feet.’ But when it says ‘he has put everything,’ it is clear that this does not include the one who put everything in subjection to himself. When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will be subjected to him who put all things into subjection under him, that God may be all in all” (vv. 24–28).
Paul did not say what takes place next. But it is obvious what will take place next. We know from the book of Revelation what follows: the marriage supper of the Lamb. But this must be preceded by Christ’s payment of the bride price to God the Father. What Paul describes is the bride price. It is the whole world, and this world is redeemed. It is the whole world after the last enemy has been defeated: death. This has to be a description of the final judgment. This is the completion of the dominion covenant for history. This is the bride price.
What did the father in the Old Testament do with the bride price? He turned it over to the bride. It was the bride’s protection. In this case, it is the bride’s inheritance. It did not come from the bride. It came from the father of the bridegroom. The bride price for Israel was not paid by Israel’s father. Israel’s father was an Amorite. He had no legal standing to be a covenantal father. He had abandoned his daughter. The same is true of the many fathers of the bride of the church. From all over the world, members have been adopted. Jesus’ payment of the bride price at Calvary was paid to the Father. The Father holds it in trust for the bride. It is held in trust until the marriage supper of the Lamb.
Israel had two dowries in A.D. 70. The first was the covenant with Abraham. It included the promise of specific land. “I will establish my covenant between me and you and your descendants after you, throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your descendants after you. I will give to you, and to your descendants after you, the land where you have been living, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God” (Genesis 17:7–8) . The second was God’s promise to protect Israel and restore the nation to the land after any captivity. The clearest and most rhetorically powerful announcement of this is the song of Moses (Deuteronomy 32). [North, Deuteronomy, ch. 76]
The covenant was central to both promises. The covenant included the law. This law was written. The covenant also included the written history of God’s dealings with the nation of Israel. This written history was a testimonial to the reliability of God’s covenant promises and prophecies in history. He is the God of history.
With the fall of Jerusalem, God visibly broke His covenant with Israel. He destroyed the temple and its sacrifices. Soon after, the Romans removed large segments of the population from the land, which was an old tactic of Middle Eastern empires. The Jews revolted a second time in 132–35: Bar Kochba’s revolt. The Romans scattered the remaining Jews across the empire: the diaspora.
Without the temple’s sacrifices, a new order was imposed on Israel by the Jewish leaders after A.D. 70. The Pharisees replaced the Sadducees. The Sadducees had been associated with the temple sacrifices. The Pharisees had been masters of the oral law, developed mainly in Persia during the captivity. We know this as the Babylonian Talmud. This was a new religion: Judaism.
There were now two religions that claimed divine authority in the name of the God of the Bible. Both religions claimed ownership of the written text that Christians call the Old Testament. Both claimed to be the lawful heirs of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and David. This is why the Gospels of Matthew and Luke provide genealogies tracing Jesus back to Abraham through David. Both claimed to represent the God of the Bible covenantally in history. Both denied the legitimacy of the other religion’s claims.
The New Testament’s revelation of Jesus as the bodily incarnation of the Second Person of the Godhead and therefore as the Creator and the Redeemer of Israel is crucial to a proper understanding of redemptive history. The doctrine of the church as the bride of Christ is the covenantal foundation of the doctrine of the divorce of Old Covenant Israel. Christ is not a bigamist. Therefore, He lawfully divorced Israel.
This raises a question. What happened to Old Covenant Israel’s dowry in AD 70? Biblically, the promise of the land of Canaan/Israel ended. Neither Christianity nor Judaism has a legal claim to the land of Palestine that supposedly is lawfully grounded in God’s promise to Abraham. The church has a far greater inheritance: the whole earth. Jesus said: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5). [North, Matthew, ch. 4] This means meek before God. This was Jesus’ strategy of world conquest. “The kings of the Gentiles are masters over them, and the ones who have authority over them are referred to as those who do good to their people. But it must not be like this with you. Instead, let the one who is the greatest among you become like the youngest, and let the one who is the most important become like the one who serves. For who is greater, the one who sits at the table, or the one who serves? Is it not the one who sits at the table? Yet I am among you as one who serves. But you are the ones who have continued with me in my temptations. I give to you a kingdom, even as my Father has given a kingdom to me, that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and you will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Luke 22:25–30). [North, Luke, ch. 51]
Old Covenant Israel used the Roman legal system to execute Jesus. Jesus used the Roman legal system to execute Old Covenant Israel. This was fitting. “So when Pilate saw that he could not do anything, but instead a riot was starting, he took water, washed his hands in front of the crowd, and said, ‘I am innocent of the blood of this innocent man. See to it yourselves.’ All the people said, ‘May his blood be on us and our children.’ Then he released Barabbas to them, but he scourged Jesus and handed him over to be crucified” (Matthew 27:24–26). That negative sanctions of that self-maledictory covenantal oath were imposed by God in A.D. 70. Old Covenant Israel died. This is why it has always been illegitimate for Christians to seek revenge against Jews in the name of that oath. It is no longer covenantally binding. Nor is the marriage oath between Christ and Israel. The adulterous partner was executed by the civil government that God had placed in authority over Israel. Israel rebelled militarily, and it did not survive.
As the victimized husband of Israel, Jesus transferred the covenantal dowry from lawfully divorced and lawfully executed Old Covenant Israel to the church. This included the written text of the Old Testament. It also involved an extension of the promise of land to Abraham. The promise was extended to the whole world. On what legal basis did Jesus do this? On the legal basis of His status as the Creator. “The earth is the Lord’s, and its fullness, the world, and all who live in it. For he has founded it upon the seas and established it on the rivers” (Psalm 24:1–2). [North, Psalms, ch. 5]
The church is made up of former covenant-breakers. In this, the church is no different from what Israel had been. God adopted Israel. God adopted the church. It was an act of grace.
The book of Revelation describes the end of history. It uses the language of a marriage supper. It is the marriage supper of the Lamb. “Then I heard what sounded like the voice of a great number of people, like the roar of many waters, and like loud crashes of thunder, saying, ‘Hallelujah! For the Lord reigns, the God who rules over all. Let us rejoice and be very happy and give him the glory because the wedding celebration of the Lamb has come, and his bride and has made herself ready. She was permitted to be dressed in bright and clean fine linen’ (for fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints). The angel said to me, ‘Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding feast of the Lamb.’ He also said to me, ‘These are true words of God’” (Revelation 19:6–9). The remainder of Revelation 19 and half of Revelation 20 are devoted to the final confrontation between God and Satan. Then comes Revelation 21, the post-resurrection era. “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, that came down out of heaven from God, prepared like a bride adorned for her husband” (vv. 1–2). “One of the seven angels came to me, the one who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues, and he said, ‘Come here. I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.’ Then he carried me away in the Spirit to a great and high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God” (vv. 9–10). This is post-resurrection: “The one who conquers will inherit these things, and I will be his God, and he will be my son. But as for the cowards, the faithless, the detestable, the murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. That is the second death” (vv. 7–8). The language is clear. This is a matter of inheritance. Covenant-keepers inherit; covenant-breakers are disinherited for all eternity.
Paul made it clear that this transfer of payment at the end of time is the completion of the bride price. The initial price was paid at Calvary. In other words, title was transferred to God the father, but title has to be reclaimed by the church in history. This is the meaning of the dominion covenant. Through the grace of God, the church buys back the world. But it does so only in the name of Christ. The church works through history to redeem the world, but this is done only by the grace of God. Jesus has empowered the church, and the Holy Spirit has guided the church. Everything that the church possesses, it possesses only as a steward possesses anything. In the day of reckoning, the stewards must give an account of their stewardship. All of mankind must do this. We know from the parables of the talents in the minas that God will impose final sanctions. All of the church does, it does in the name of God and on behalf of God. Jesus is the property owner who does the final reckoning. He collects what is His, but then He transfers wealth to the profitable stewards. This is post-final judgment. The wealth goes to the stewards. The stewards are members of the church. The stewards are part of the bride of Christ.
The combination of the imagery of the stewards and the imagery of the bride provides us with an understanding of the inheritance. The post-judgment inheritance is the whole world, but a world redeemed. It is a world without the presence of covenant-breakers. It is a sin-free world. This is the eternal dowry of the church.
This dowry is valuable. It is the completed development of the capital that God gave to mankind in the Garden of Eden. This is the inheritance of the church, and of members of the church, that they will use to extend dominion in the world beyond the final judgment. There will be plenty to do. God is infinite. Men must examine the relationship between an infinite God and the creation. This is not a world devoid of increasing knowledge. But increasing knowledge must be applied knowledge if it is to be meaningful. It is not knowledge for its own sake. It is knowledge for dominion’s sake. It will not end when sin disappears in the post-judgment world. It would not have ended in Eden if the serpent’s temptation had been rejected by Adam and Eve. There was lots that could be done. If they had participated in a communion meal at the tree of life, that would have been the beginning of the process of dominion. Dominion was not empowered by sin. It was hampered by God’s judgment on this sin. In the world beyond the final judgment, the process of dominion will no longer be hampered by God’s judgment on sin. There will be no sin.
The church is the bride of Christ. The dowry is held in trust by God the Father, but it has been paid by Jesus Christ. It was paid by his resurrection and ascension to the right hand of God. Where else could it have come from?
Once we understand the economic function of the dowry, and once we understand that the Bridegroom pays the Father the money that constitutes the dowry, we begin to understand the importance of eschatology in our understanding of the development of Christendom. The extension of the kingdom of God in history is by evangelism. This leads to comprehensive redemption, meaning the redemption of institutions. It means the transformation of the world through voluntary exchange. The church in the broadest sense does this as God’s steward in history. This is both judicial, meaning trusteeship, and economic, meaning stewardship. It is done through the extension of biblical law into every nook and cranny of the world. It is done through the power of the Holy Spirit to transform and educate Christians.
The parables of the stewards make it clear that, at the end of time, God will evaluate the performance of every individual. He will evaluate the performance of the two branches of his family: the adopted family and the disinherited family. It is clear from the parables of the stewards that the nonperforming family will not inherit anything. Everything that they possess, which they received from God, is transferred to the most efficient stewards. Clearly, this refers to the final judgment. The parable of the talents is in the section of Jesus’ parables on the final judgment.
When we combine the two images, meaning the stewardship of the church and Christ’s payment of the bride price to the father, we understand the nature of ownership in history. At the beginning of history, God granted capital to mankind. This was the dominion covenant. Men must develop all aspects of this capital, especially wisdom. Then, at the end of time, God evaluates performance. The church is the great beneficiary of its own performance and history, under the guidance of Christ and the Holy Spirit. This reward is indirect. Christ subdues his enemies. He transfers all authority back to the father. Then the father transfers this authority of administration back to covenant keepers. That is the inheritance. That is the transfer of the dowry. It is Christ’s work in history that builds the value of this dowry. He does not keep it. God the Father does not keep it. It becomes the inheritance of covenant-keepers. It is their capital they will use to launch the next phase of dominion in the world beyond the final judgment. All of this is eschatological. It is surely economic.
The book of Proverbs makes it clear that wisdom is the greatest economic asset. “The one who finds wisdom is blessed; he also gets understanding. What you gain from wisdom is better than what silver will give in return and its profit is better than gold. Wisdom is more precious than jewels and nothing you desire can compare to her” (Proverbs 3:13–15). [North, Proverbs, ch. 9] This tells us that covenant-keepers will gain dominion in history through wisdom and by obedience to the laws of God. To imagine that they will remain the world’s economic losers until the end of time, while covenant-breakers extend the kingdom of mammon by means of its laws, only to see the vast productivity of their program of dominion transferred to covenant-keepers at the end of time, is to imagine that the wisdom of the mammon is the source of wealth. This is contrary to the explicit teaching of Moses. “He fed you in the wilderness with manna that your ancestors had never known, so that he might humble you and test you, to do you good in the end, but you may say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand acquired all this wealth.’ But you will call to mind the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the power to get wealth; that he may establish his covenant that he swore to your fathers, as it is today” (Deuteronomy 8:16–18). [North, Deuteronomy, ch. 22]
In the parables of the talents and the minas, we learn that covenant keepers are the productive stewards, and the covenant breaker is the unproductive steward. When the owner returns for a final accounting, he is pleased with the covenant keeping stewards. He cast out the covenant-breaking steward. The performance of the covenant-keepers in history is a prelude to their endowment by God after the final judgment. Similarly, the performance of the covenant- breaker in history reflects his final inheritance. There is continuity of performance and reward in both groups, not discontinuity. It is not that the covenant- breaker was the productive steward, whereupon the owner transferred his wealth to impoverished covenant-keepers. The opposite is the case. Our understanding of the parables of the stewards should shape our eschatology. Our eschatology should be consistent with the message of the two parables.
The greater the value of the sin-free world at the end of time, the larger the dowry inherited by the church. Part of this dowry will be the lost legacy of the disinherited family of man. Part of this dowry will be the developed legacy of the adopted family of man. Amillennialists believe that the bulk of this dowry will be supplied by the disinherited family of man. They do not believe in the development of Christendom. Postmillennialists believe that the bulk of this inheritance will come from the efforts of the adopted family of man. The kingdom of God will have extended across the face of the earth, and it will have developed in terms of biblical ethics. Premillennialists agree with the postmillennialists, but they think that Jesus must supervise the development of this inheritance in Person. They do not believe that covenant-keepers can produce much of value on their own.
Christian economics rests on a presupposition: there is ethical cause-and-effect in economic development. There is consistency between ethical conformity to the laws of God and economic productivity. There is also consistency between covenant-breaking and long-term impoverishment. We saw this most clearly in the development of the economies of the Soviet Union (1917–1991) and Communist China (1949–1979), both of which led to impoverishment.
Christians need to understand the system of the bride price and the dowry in the Old Testament. They also need to recognize that this system still prevails in the New Testament. It will culminate in Jesus’ transfer of the bride price to God the Father. God the Father will then transfer this dowry to the church at the end of time. This understanding enables us to understand the meaning of the two parables of the stewards: talents and minas. The bride price/dowry system and the parables of the stewards point to the church’s inheritance at the end of history. This is why economic theory is inseparable from biblical eschatology. They reinforce each other. If our understanding is incorrect in either area, it will be incorrect overall.
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