Numbers 13-14: Exploring Canaan and the Case for Christian Optimism

Numbers 13-14: Exploring Canaan and the Case for Christian Optimism

Sep 25, 2024 | Eschatology, Uncategorized

God communicates his redemptive story through a real people in history as a living metaphor for realities he would bring to pass in due course, a very long course. As I say, God is never in a hurry, and this took 2,000 years from its announcement in the calling of Abram in Genesis 12 to Christ. So as we read the Old Testament, the stories point forward to an ultimate fulfillment of those stories. Theologians call certain parts of those stories shadows and types of a reality to come. We only know this in supernatural hindsight because it took the Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth, to tell us so in Luke 24 after the resurrection. In this passage we learn from the word of God himself the ultimate Scriptural hermeneutics, or how the Bible is to be interpreted.

In this passage familiar to most Christians, two disciples left Jerusalem and were heading to a town called Emmaus, which is about seven miles from Jerusalem. They were undoubtably aware of the entirety of Jesus three-year ministry, and as they walked they were talking “about everything that had happened.” Jesus was once in a generation drama. In fact, the Jews had been waiting 400 years for their Messiah to come and rescue them from oppression. As I said, God is never in a hurry. As they were talking about the drama, Jesus came upon them but Luke tells us, “they were kept from recognizing him.” Jesus asked what they were talking about and they tell him:

They stood still, their faces downcast. 18 One of them, named Cleopas, asked him, “Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?

They tell him about this prophet Jesus of Nazareth, “powerful in word and deed,” and about the crucifixion and an unfathomable report the tomb was empty and he’d been seen alive. Jesus didn’t seem to care that a crucified and resurrected Messiah was, literally, beyond the ability of Jews to fathom, and he rebukes them:

25 He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! 26 Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” 27 And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

I laugh sometimes when I read or think about this passage because how in the world could they have understood something they could not conceive? It’s almost like him gently rebuking Peter because he couldn’t walk on water. Really? Does anybody but the Son of God not sink? I like the Greek word Luke uses here for foolish. The extended meaning from Strong’s Concordance:

properly, non-thinking, i.e. not “reasoning through” a matter (with proper logic); unmindful, which describes acting in a “mindless, dense” way (“just plain stupid”).

I think we can pull out Jesus’ meaning from the rebuke considering how obvious he is saying the meaning really is, so obvious that you’d have to be a moron to not get it! Being God, he fully understands that no Jew prior to his encounter with the disciples on that road would have understood that everything in the Old Testament was about the coming Messiah. Certain prophecies, certainly, but everything? Yes, everything. We can now see with perfect 20/20 hindsight how it teaches us about the Messiah, this young man named Jesus from Nazareth, and he wants us to continually mine the depths of this teaching so that with the Apostle Paul at the end of Romans 11 after he’s laid out this redemptive history, we proclaim:

Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!
    How unsearchable his judgments,
    and his paths beyond tracing out!

In modern parlance from my boomer upbringing in the 60s and 70s, it’s mind blowing!

The Exodus as Metaphor for Christ’s Work on the Cross
Before we get to Canaan, we have to go backward to understand the picture God is painting as he saves his people from bondage and slavery in Egypt. We know from Genesis 1-3 that man, male and female he created them, was created good, but rebelled in disobedience to God’s command and fell into sin and death. God, of course, had a plan revealed to us in Genesis 3:15. The seed that will strike the serpent’s head in perfect biblical hindsight is Jesus, and the rest of Israel’s history helps explain exactly who Jesus is and what he came to accomplish.

The next significant step in the story comes in Genesis 12 with the calling of Abram, not discounting what came in chapters 4-11. God promises to make him into a great nation, and that all the nations of the earth will be blessed through him. In chapter 15 God begins to fill in the contours of the story promising Abram an heir even though he is childless at 75 years-old, and his wife is barren at 65. We then see a bizarre ancient Near Eastern legal ceremony through which God declares he will unilaterally accomplish all that He is promising Abram. He then tells Abram his descendants will be enslaved in a foreign country for 400 years, but that He will rescue them, “and afterward they will come out with great possessions.” That foreign country is Egypt and the next significant step in the story is how God rescues them.

Near the end of the 400 years, God raises up Moses to lead his people out of slavery. He does this dramatically by killing all the firstborn of Egypt and instituting the Passover where the shedding of blood covers Israel so they don’t suffer God’s wrath as the Egyptians do. The Pharaoh is finally willing to let them leave, and by mighty acts of God they are led through the sea to eventual safety in the desert where they wander for 40 years. Prior to entering the land God promised Abram in the bizarre ceremony I referenced above, we learn that land is Canaan on the other side of the river, the west side. Before we get to there, though, let’s take a short theological look at where the story has taken us so far.

Israels’ slavery in Egypt is obviously analogous to our slavery to sin. God makes it very clear that as it took divine supernatural power to rescue the Israelites from their bondage in Egypt, so it takes His divine supernatural power to rescue us from our bondage to sin. In both, he takes the initiative and we respond because He wants to make clear what he proclaims through Zecheriah, “Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,” says the Lord Almighty (4:6). This truth of God’s almighty sovereign power and control over all things is a reality on both sides of the river, what we theologically call justification, rescue from Egypt and sin, and sanctification, taking over the land.

Wonderings in the Desert and Living by Faith
The story of the Israelites spending forty years wandering in the desert before they enter the promised land is familiar to every Christian. The why of the wanderings is probably not so well known. The Israelites made a beeline from Egypt to the border of the land God planned for them to inhabit. In Numbers 13, God picks twelve men, one from each tribe, to explore the land of Canaan. It was a scouting mission so the leaders of the tribes would know what they were going to encounter when they entered the land. It is wisdom 101 to never go into any project without knowing what we’re getting into and what we will likely encounter as we engage it. The men spent forty days exploring the land before they came back and reported to Moses, Aaron, and all the people what they had found.

All reported that indeed it was a land flowing with milk and honey just as the Lord promised, but there were clearly obstacles to them taking the land and enjoying its fruits. They reported that “the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large.” This was the report from ten of the twelve men who saw these as obstacles to taking the land. One of the other two didn’t see it that way:

30 Then Caleb silenced the people before Moses and said, “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.”

That’s called positive thinking! But the ten focusing on the obstacles wouldn’t see it that way:

31 But the men who had gone up with him said, “We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are.” 32 And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, “The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. 33 We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”

Given sinful human beings tend toward the negative anyway, this didn’t go over well among the people. They decide to rebel against Moses and Aaron, even saying it would have been better for them to die in Egypt or the wilderness than to go into the land and get slaughtered and enslaved by these giants. But the two who saw things differently implored them not to rebel:

6 Joshua son of Nun and Caleb son of Jephunneh, who were among those who had explored the land, tore their clothes 7 and said to the entire Israelite assembly, “The land we passed through and explored is exceedingly good. 8 If the Lord is pleased with us, he will lead us into that land, a land flowing with milk and honey, and will give it to us. 9 Only do not rebel against the Lord. And do not be afraid of the people of the land, because we will devour them. Their protection is gone, but the Lord is with us. Do not be afraid of them.”

Of courses they don’t listen, and God says they will spend forty years in the wilderness, one for every day the explored the land. Then He also struck down the ten who caused the people to rebel.

I facetiously called what Caleb and Joshua were doing positive thinking, but it actually has nothing to do with that phrase coming from the modern self-help movement. The question before the Israelites and before every one of us is, will we trust the word and track record of the living God, or our lying eyes. Our eyes, or how we interpret the events in our lives and in the world, will always lie to us unless they are informed by faith, by trust in God’s goodness and love, His promises, power, and plans. The essence of sanctification, of becoming more holy and set apart to God is this struggle of either trusting God, or not. It’s binary as we say nowadays, either/or, we do or we do not. My constant prayer comes from Isaiah 26:3:

You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.

If it ain’t perfect, we aren’t trusting God.

Expanding the Field of Trust: The Entire Earth is our Canaan
It is obvious the message from this story is that our lives should be reflected by Caleb and Joshua, the joyful warriors, not the ten who grumbled and complained about the impossible odds of taking the land God had promised. And unlike where I was most of my Christian life, I now believe this perspective, the victory which we are to expect because of God’s promises and commands, applies not only to our sanctification or personal holiness, but to everything in life as far as the curse is found. Isaac Watts wrote the great Christmas hymn Joy to the world in 1719 and paints the picture of the Christian’s field of trust. The first two stanzas he wrote let the earth receive her king and the Savior reigns. Here are the final two to get us in the Yuletide postmillennial mood:

No more let sins and sorrow grow
Nor thorns infest the ground
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found
Far as the curse is found
Far as, far as, the curse is found

He rules the world with truth and grace
And makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness
And wonders of His love
And wonders of His love
And wonders, wonders, of His love!

Even though I’ve been a culture warrior since I discovered Francis Schaeffer in the early years of my Christian faith, and believed all truth is God’s truth, and that a Christian worldview applies to every square inch of life, deep down I was a pessimist. In the land we are to conquer, the entire world, all I could see were the giants. I believed we didn’t really have a chance, and it’s all gonna burn in the end anyway.

That mentality, thankfully, was prior to my embracing postmillennialism in August 2022. I had a typically Evangelical perspective of the Israelites wanderings in the wilderness as a picture of the sanctification in the personal life of the Christian. Those 40 years were a wandering, as is ours in this wilderness of a fallen world, so we have a lifetime of mostly futility because even though we can grow in personal sanctification, Satan has the upper hand “down here,” or so I believed. After all, “our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 3:20), a verse completely misinterpreted as meaning what really matters is heaven and the afterlife. Sadly, I bought the misinterpretation, which meant I was stuck in the wilderness until I die . . . .  then victory! That was the crossing of the Jordan river into the promised land, a figure of heaven. I no longer see it this way. Crossing the Jordan into the promised land was when the battle really began.

The tragic constricting of the gospel only to the Christian’s salvation and personal life only developed recently, in the mid-19th century with the rise of dispensational premillennialism. Those who developed it believed the world and the church were hopelessly corrupt, so they proclaimed the gospel should be preached and as many people as possible saved from the sinking ship because Jesus was coming back soon. In fact, dispensational premillennialism grew as a rejection of a secularized and liberal Christian view of postmillennialism that viewed it as the inevitable progress of science and knowledge. That position was completely discredited by the disastrous 20th century with only a few stalwarts willing to espouse and defend it.

Thankfully, that started changing in the last twenty years, and especially in the last ten. There has been a revival of postmillennialism, and I encourage you to join us. Once you buy the Scriptural argument, it’s a much more inspiring way to live because God in the reign of Christ is taking back the world from Satan one square inch at a time. As he promised the Israelites victory in the land of Canaan if only they would trust him and fight, so He’s promised this world to His Son, and we are his body to accomplish the task by the power of His Holy Spirit.

Read Psalm 2, Psalm 72, and Psalm 110 back to back, and ask yourself these questions . What if these truths apply not just to when Jesus returns to bring heaven to earth a la Revelation 21, but apply to his first coming when he accomplished his mission of God reconciling the world to Himself? Could it be that it is we, his Church, his people, who are to bring heaven to earth as he taught us to pray? That it is we who are to slay the giants and to cultivate the land, to be fruitful and multiply for generations to come, to subdue the earth and have dominion over it as Christ extends his reign, God advances His kingdom, and builds His church?

I’m just askin’.

 

God’s Promise in Habakkuk to Fill the Earth with the Knowledge of his Glory

God’s Promise in Habakkuk to Fill the Earth with the Knowledge of his Glory

Sep 18, 2024 | Eschatology

I recently read The Puritan Hope by Ian H. Murray, and we can sure use a lot more Puritan hope in the church today. In it he describes how the Puritans of the 16th through the 18th centuries had a passion for seeing the Great Commission fulfilled in due course because of their efforts. They did not believe the point of preaching the gospel and seeing God save people was so they can merely go to heaven when they die, as is so prevalent today. Their vision was more this-worldly, more transformational of this fallen world, as I pray would become ours. The favorite verse repeated consistently in their writing and preaching was Habakkuk 2:14:

For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

And they believed this would happen on this earth, and not only when Christ returned at the end of time. I will address this fascinating verse and prophet below because I believe he has much to teach us in our day.

None of the Puritans were under any illusion this would happen in their lifetimes, but saw themselves as standing upon the word of God in an unending chain of God’s covenant faithfulness to His people. They were also not under any illusion this would be easy, or that the odds were in their favor. They did something we seem to have difficulty with today; they lived by faith not by sight. If God promised ultimate victory in the gospel, that was going to happen no matter what it looked like at the moment.

This was not necessarily new with the Puritans. All through church history, Christians saw their role in the world as transformational and not escapist, as unfortunately too many modern Christians do. For them Christianity wasn’t a fire drill to rescue people from a burning building. This other worldly mentality is a relatively new phenomenon in the history of Christianity as we’ll discuss. Even the monks of the Middle Ages believed they were carrying on Christian knowledge and traditions to the next generations and to the world. And though life, in the famous words of Thomas Hobbes was “nasty, brutish and short,” Christians were invested in this world. In fact, after the fall of the Roman Empire, it was Irish monks inspired by St. Patrick who saved all of the Christian and pagan learning that had previously flourished but was now disappearing because the heathens had destroyed the civilized Roman world. 

In the last couple of years one of my favorite metaphors speaks to what should be common among Christians, a multi-generational vision of the faith. As I often say, we are building cathedrals we will never worship in. Can you imagine a church doing a building campaign telling the parishioners they should give generously because the church will be finished in 200 years? That was the mentality of the Puritans, and the Christians who went before them. Why is it not ours? And it is not because we’re modern Americans who want it now, fast food, microwaves and all that. It’s much more profound than that, and a bit of history is in order to find out why. 

Pietism and The Great Awakening
I’m not a big fan of Pietism, nor should anyone else be, and if we knew our history we would know why. The Reformation was a heady religious phenomenon with intellectuals leading the way, which by the 17th century had come to be known as scholasticism. For some there came to be a negative connotation associated with the term, and scholastics were considered as dry, cerebral scholars who missed the emotional aspects of Christianity. Germany had become mostly Lutheran for obvious reasons, and those who pushed back against the church’s perceived stress on doctrine and theology over Christian living came to be called Pietists. They began to push the Lutheran church toward a more personal faith, and in due course it’s influence spread throughout Europe into every Protestant Christian tradition, including the Puritans making their way to the New World.

It wasn’t until the 18th century and the amazing ministry of the amazing John Wesley that Pietism started to become the default understanding of the Christian faith. Wesley spent only two years in America (1733-1735), but it changed the course of Protestant Evangelical Christian history. On the harrowing voyage over, Wesley encountered Moravians (modern day Czech Republic) whose passionate personal faith was foreign to him. After a terrible trip back to England, Wesley had what we would later come to call a born-again or conversion experience. He also met one of the most influential men in Christian and Western history upon his return, the great evangelist George Whitfield. Shortly after their meeting, Whitfield went to America where Wesley had failed so miserably, in the state of Georgia. And now you know, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story.

In due course through Jonathan Edwards, Whitfield, and Wesley, and by the power of God’s Holy Spirit, there came a Great Awakening. For our purposes, it was this period of time where the idea of a personal conversion experience made its way into popular Protestant Christianity. We might ask, what’s wrong with that. Nothing per se, but fallen sinful human beings always seem to take good things and turn them into ultimate things. In this case, faith became primarily about a person’s subjective emotional experiences, and not about objective biblical and gospel truth. Both are required for true faith, but the pendulum had swung in the opposite direction from scholasticism, and it would never swing back, at least as far as Evangelical Protestant Christianity in general. The Second Great Awakening in the 19th century established a pietistic personalized subjective faith as the default in Evangelicalism, which in the early 20th century came to be called fundamentalism, the faith I was born-again into in the fall of 1978.

I didn’t know this at the time, but this dominant version of Evangelical faith had certain unique historically determined traits. In addition to being more subjective and turned inward, it was anti-theological, ahistorical, and anti-intellectual, as I learned when I was introduced to Reformed theology in early 1984. This was also a time when dispensationalism was hugely popular, with Hal Lindsey’s 1970 book The Late Great Planet Earth selling a zillion copies. Even though the catastrophes never bring the end, people still believe the premise: things are getting worse and will until Jesus comes back to save the day and rescue us from doom. Sadly, what this “end times” perspective does is inculcate a persistent pessimism into Christians so doom and gloom are the order of the day. When we say eschatology matters this is why, positive or negative; how we view the end will determine how we interpret the present. 

It’s All About the Kingdom of God
Puritans, by contrast, even though living in much more challenging times, were anything but doom and gloom. They were gritty realists, but believed in God’s covenant promises to advance His kingdom in this world, thus the consistent affirmation of Habakkuk 2:14. Prior to embracing postmillennialism, I believed the fulfillment of this verse would only happen in the consummated kingdom when Christ returned. Considering my eschatological perspective I could not think otherwise, given both pre and a-mill see sin having the upper hand in this world. I believed that. Now I have more in common with the Puritans because I believe God’s kingdom came at Christ’s first coming, slowly al la the parables of the mustard seed and leaven (Matt. 13 ) until it fills the entire earth.

Prior to my eschatological awakening, I conflated the kingdom of God and the church, thinking they were one on the same. I’ve written about this here before, so I won’t explain it in detail, but there are 116 references to kingdom in the synoptic gospels, and only three to the church, all in Matthew. Jesus came preaching “the good news of the kingdom” not the good news of the church. The church and the Christians in it are the kingdom builders, bringing that good news, but they go out into the world to build and advance it.

When Jesus taught us to pray, thy kingdom come thy will be done, he meant now, in this world, not waiting for the next. It is an other worldly spiritual kingdom that has material implications in this fallen world.  In bringing the kingdom we are pushing back the fall, the curse of sin, here now, to take back territory, so to speak, the devil won in the garden. When the devil confronted Jesus in the wilderness (Matt. 4), the kingdoms of this world were his to give, but Jesus defeated him on the cross and in the resurrection, taking back the world he created from the one whose mission is to destroy it. Now through the church, his called out ones, his body, he is taking back territory lost in the fall, and that means in every area of life, every single square inch of reality.

This Puritan vision, sadly, has been lost on much of the church. As Pietism’s influence developed over time, it wasn’t until the early 19th century that the break between this world and the next happened in the life and ministry of Irishman John Nelson Darby. In the 1830s he developed several theological innovations that were new in the history of the church. One of these was a new type of premillennial eschatology that was especially doom and gloom. He and those he influenced came to believe that Jesus was coming back soon because it was getting so bad, with many predicting dates. People predicting the immanent return of Jesus was nothing new in church history, but this was different. Over time an entire theology of doom was built around it that came to be known in the 20th century as dispensational premillennialism. It is out of Darby and this movement that the idea of a rapture made its way into the Evangelical mind. Even though dispensationalism is no longer taken seriously on a scholarly level as it once was, it is still the eschatology of most Evangelical Christians. That just won’t do. 

Habakkuk and the Argument for Optimism
I came to my optimism, as I explain in my recent book Going Back to Find the Way Foward, before my eschatological awakening. It wasn’t until after that when I heard Doug Wilson say these words, “Now you have a theological justification for your optimism.” Bingo! That’s it! This isn’t wishful thinking. Nor is it what much of the 19th century postmillennialism was, a confusion of secular progressivism and liberal Christianity with eschatology. It’s biblical! I think Habakkuk two gives us a hint that it is.

As I was reading The Puritan Hope and seeing the verse, 2:14, quoted so often, I had to look it up and read the context. It had been a while since I’d read Habakkuk. What I found was unexpected, although I should know by now not to be surprised by the elegance of God’s revelation of His truth. As we know, the job of prophet in ancient Israel was a tough one. Speaking God’s truth to people who don’t want to hear it is a risky business, so you see throughout the prophets their lamenting and complaints. How many Christians can relate to Habakkuk’s lament with which he opens up the book:

2 How long, Lord, must I call for help,
    but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, “Violence!”
    but you do not save?
3 Why do you make me look at injustice?
    Why do you tolerate wrongdoing?
Destruction and violence are before me;
    there is strife, and conflict abounds.
4 Therefore the law is paralyzed,
    and justice never prevails.
The wicked hem in the righteous,
    so that justice is perverted.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. The most common question in human history? Why God? That’s Habakkuk’s struggle, and ours. He knows God is true, that His covenant promises through the Patriarchs to bless Israel and the nations is assured, but as Paul says in Romans 3:4, let God be true and every man a liar. It just doesn’t look good.

Chapter 2 is the Lord’s response to Habakkuk’s complaint, nineteen verses of judgment against the wicked. And right there in the middle of unrelenting negativity is one verse, a sparkling jewel that doesn’t seem to belong in such a messy setting, verse 14. You ask yourself, incredulously, what in the world is that doing there? God doesn’t expand on the vivid picture of this victory of the earth being filled with the knowledge of His glory as the waters cover the sea. But that is a lot of water! And a lot of glory! About 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, with the oceans corresponding to about 96.5% of all Earth’s water. But what does this mean, and why did God see fit to put it right in the middle of all the hostility to sinful humanity? That’s the $64,000 question (in today’s dollars that would be over $1.3 million!). Get it right and you’re rich! Metaphorically speaking.

As I said above, I thought this could only be fulfilled at the second coming of Christ, but if you take God’s metaphor seriously, it can’t be. Notice this knowledge doesn’t cover the entire earth. If it were the new heavens and earth, God’s glory would cover the earth entirely, but here it’s not. It will, however, cover the earth as massively as oceans cover the earth, and that is a lot! This means there will be no “golden age” we might mistake for the heavenly city of Revelation 21 coming down out of heaven, but it does mean substantial victory for the kingdom of God and God’s people. It means the Puritans were right, that we must live by faith, by trust in the power and promises of God that the victory is ours not just eternally, but here and now. And this means Jesus is king and ruler now at the right hand of God over every square inch of existence, over everything and every one, whether they acknowledge his lordship or not. It also means to bring our Christian faith and worldview to every single thing we do as well, and yes, including politics and how societies govern themselves.

The question is, will we give in to pessimism living by sight, or trust God and His promised victory in Christ regardless of the circumstances or the news of the day. The last three verses of chapter three that end this short book are a testimony to trust, to living by faith not sight. They’ve brought tears to my eyes more than onces.

16 I heard and my heart pounded,
    my lips quivered at the sound;
decay crept into my bones,
    and my legs trembled.
Yet I will wait patiently for the day of calamity
    to come on the nation invading us.
17 Though the fig tree does not bud
    and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
    and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
    and no cattle in the stalls,
18 yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
    I will be joyful in God my Savior.
19 The Sovereign Lord is my strength;
   he makes my feet like the feet of a deer
   he enables me to tread on the heights.

That is trust, and the trust we’re called to in Christ because we may not get to worship in the cathedral we’re building. To me the power of verse 14 of chapter two is that it tells us the judgment of God is not an end in itself, just a way for God to avenge his holiness and dispense justice. It is rather a means to lead many to repentance because until it gets really bad, people tend to be willfully blind. All the stuff happening around us that makes us shake our head is happening for a reason, and it is as I argue in my book, to bring a Great Awakening, and for that I daily pray.

 

Evangelicals and Their Ambivalence to God’s Law

Evangelicals and Their Ambivalence to God’s Law

Sep 4, 2024 | Theology

I’m currently reading Greg Bahsen’s Theonomy in Christian Ethics, an extensive study about God’s law (theos-nomos) as it applies to ethics, the study of the principles of right and wrong conduct. We Evangelicals tend to have a love/hate relationship to God’s law. On the one hand it’s God’s, so we know it is a reflection of his character and our obedience is required. On the other, it condemns us because keeping it to the degree we must is impossible for sinful human beings. When Jesus says, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48), I reply, good luck! Calvin calls this use of the law a mirror because when we look into it, it’s not pretty. It condemns us specifically so we can realize our helplessness before our Holy Creator God, and be driven to Christ and his shed blood for us, he who fulfilled the law in our place.

Unfortunately, for most Christians because of the history of revivalistic fundamentalist Christianity, this is about as far as it goes. Our tendency is to be antinomian, against law, because we are saved by grace and not by works of the law, as Paul says for example in Galatians 2:16. We see God’s law as primarily if not solely a hostile force. If we’re honest, though, we’re not quite sure what to think about God’s law, thus the ambivalence. Bahnsen shows this isn’t just lay people who think God’s law isn’t relevant to Christian ethics. He quotes numerous scholars from various Christian traditions, including his and my Reformed tradition, who all discount God’s law to one degree or another. 

My first encounter to the relevance of God’s law to the Christian life came after I’d been a Christian for over five years. It came in the form of my introduction to Reformed theology and the soteriology of John Calvin. I learned to see the purpose of God’s law as relevant to the Christian life, not as something only to drive me to the cross. I’m sure I studied it in seminary and developed some convictions at the time, but that was a long time ago and the study of God’s law never became a priority after that. Then in August 2022 when I embraced postmillennial eschatology, I found people in that camp have no ambivalence toward God’s law whatsoever. I wrote about theonomy and God’s law in my latest book, but I’m really just beginning this journey of developing my own convictions, specifically how God’s law relates to my sanctification and applies to the governing of nations.

The Fulfillment of the Law
Unfortunately, as Bahnsen points out, Christians have effectively become secularists when it comes to law in society. The ethics of Christianity, of what is right and wrong, is only applied to individual Christians, and even there, God’s law is not embraced as relevant to the Christian’s sanctification. Christians have no problem citing the Sermon on the Mount as foundational to Christian ethics, but when it comes to the L word we get cold feet. For some reason we ignore or explain away this passage about Jesus not abolishing the Law right in the middle of that sermon:

17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19 Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.

I’m not sure how you get from this to God’s law being only a mirror for the Christian to drive him to Christ, but that’s been the dominant view in Evangelicalism since the Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century.

First let’s ask what it means when Jesus says he’s come not to abolish the law but to fulfill it. Bahnsen goes into great detail, quoting numerous scholars and perspectives. Giving away his own, he titles this chapter, “The Abiding Validity of the Law in Exhaustive Detail.” No ambivalence there! After an extensive survey of various scholars and lexical analysis of the text, he comes to this conclusion:

It is hard to imagine how Jesus could have more intensely affirmed that every bit of the law remains binding in the gospel age.

He also quotes Charles Spurgeon commenting on v. 17 which for most Christians lends significant credibility:

The law of God he established and confirmed. . . . our king has not come to abrogate the law but to confirm and reassert it.

What Jesus is saying about abolish and fulfill is related directly to something the Pharisees, the most respected Jewish religious professionals of the day, did to in some way abolish or abrogate it, to somehow make it null and void. We know from a later rebuke of Jesus that they “strain out a gnat and swallow a camel” (Matt. 23:24). The Greek word refers to straining water through a cloth or sieve to remove impurities, which relates back to an obscure part of the law they interpreted as meaning they should purify their water. They were so focused on the details of the law, the smallest minutia that in fact they went beyond the words and intent of the law, and at the same time ignored immense sins (swallowing camels) like pride, greed, and arrogance.

There is a lot of debate, and always will be, as to what exactly all this means. We know from the Apostle Paul that righteousness cannot be obtained by obedience to the law. We also know as Protestant Evangelical Christians, if that is what we are, that Christ lived the perfect obedience to the law that is required by God’s holiness, and his righteousness has been legally granted to us in him, it is forensic. The law could never do this, thus it condemns us, but the law itself is still valid for us, as Jesus says, not one jot or one tittle (KJV v. 18) shall pass away until everything is accomplished or fulfilled. Most agree this means at the end of the age, the consummation of all things in the second coming of Christ. It is necessary then to conclude what Bhansen does, though many won’t, that the law has an abiding validity in exhaustive detail. Of course we all know, pun intended, the devil is in the details.

Misunderstanding God’s Law as Totalitarian
What is it about God’s law that creates such ambivalence in modern Christians, both as relates to us personally as Christians, and its application in society? I recently realized the problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of law itself. We tend to think of law as totalitarian, but experience law as liberty. The two concepts, totalitarianism and liberty, are diametrically opposed to one another. The former seeks to control everything, all thought and behavior, while the latter gives wide latitude for people to determine their own thoughts and behavior.

I use the contrast of the French and American Revolutions here frequently to explain the only two choices of existence in a fallen world, totalitarianism and liberty, the former inspired by an anti-Christian secularism, and the latter by a widely accepted Protestant Christianity. Robespierre and his buddies on the left introduced what came to be called the Reign of Terror. Anyone not thinking and acting a certain way was condemned to death by the infamous Madam de Guillotine. In American, by contrast, the people were free to think and act within the confines of the law with a limited government, and we call that liberty.

The modern world has given us numerous revolutions inspired by the French, each one bloodier than the next. We learn from the 20th century varieties the true nature of totalitarianism which by contrast enables us to better understand liberty and its relation to law. A simple definition of totalitarianism is total and comprehensive control of all aspects of life, including all thought and action of the people. This is of course impossible, which is why totalitarian regimes never last. In addition to raw history, there are numerous fictional accounts that give us a window into the totalitarian mind, the presumption that total control is possible. One is the classic novel by George Orwell, 1984. The protagonist, Winston Smith, resists the ubiquitous thought control throughout the story, lying when it is required to escape punishment, but it doesn’t work. The state in the form of Big Brother demands total, sincere fealty, and in the end brain washing accomplishes this in Winston when he genuinely falls in love with Big Brother. He now believes two and two equals five. The total in totalitarianism is complete. The other is much less well known, a 1983 movie called The Lives of Others about life in Soviet East Berlin and their secret police, the Stasi. This is an excellent depiction of the inevitable failure of trying total control human beings, who because they are made in God’s image cannot be totally controlled.

It is important to explore the failed attempts at implementing totalitarianism in various countries to contrast it with liberty, but more importantly, to show us what law is not, and specifically God’s law. I am convinced that the ambivalence or hostility to God’s law is in the misunderstanding of it as fundamentally totalitarian, as if the purpose of the law is to control every aspect of people’s lives. In fact, just the opposite is true. James in chapter 1 of his epistle is imploring Christians to be not just hearers but doers of the word, and then he says this:

25 But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it—he will be blessed in what he does.

The word freedom can be translated as liberty, and means freedom from slavery. James uses the same phrase in chapter 2, “So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty,” the context being the Ten Commandments. We see this as well in the Old Testament in Isaiah 61:1, something Jesus proclaims as he announces his ministry in his hometown of Nazareth (Luke 4)

18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
    and recovering of sight to the blind,
    to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

This liberty can be found only within the confines of obedience to God’s law, which can only truly be had by those freed from their bondage to sin by the gospel. God’s law is not a fence to keep us in, but a guardrail to keep us safe so we don’t careen down the cliff and crash into a ball of flames on the rocks of life.

The Law’s Abiding Validity for the Christian and Societal Life
First and briefly, it seems the law’s validity for our Christian lives and sanctification should be obvious. I will quote Paul from 2 Tim. 3 to make the point: 

16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the man  of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

The Scripture Paul refers to is the Old Testament, the only Bible they had. All includes God’s law, every jot and tittle, lived as best we can in love, which as Jesus told is the fulfillment of the law. Read Psalm 119 if you need a reminder of the importance of God’s law for God’s people.

The abiding validity of God’s law for society is more complicated. There is a reason God starts the revelation of his law with the Ten Commandments. Those are the broad principles under which people should live to have true liberty and human flourishing, both individually and in community (i.e., nations). God didn’t start with details, with the minutia. Those developed over time because of the messiness of life lived in a fallen world among fallen people in fallen bodies. Take the ninth commandment to not lie or bear false witness against your neighbor. The command to not lie is not absolute. Rahab the prostitute lied to protect the Hebrew spies in Jericho, and not only was this prostitute and her family spared from the city’s destruction, but she is in the hall of fame of faith in Hebrews 11. Leave it to God to put a prostitute in the hall of fame of faith! Or take Corrie Ten Boom during WWII in the Netherlands when the Nazis took over. She was part of a group hiding Jews from the Nazis, and when they were asked if they were hiding Jews, of course they said no, they lied, and saved lives.

Over time people being the sinners they are, brought specific issues before Moses so he could judge conflicts and dispense justice. It soon became too much for him. When his father-in-law Jethro saw this, he told Moses to appoint judges among the people so he wouldn’t have to do it all himself. Out of this arose something we call case law which are laws based on precedents from previous cases because of the many varieties, for example, of bearing false witness. In the Christian West Alfred the Great in the 9th century in what is now England established his law based on the Ten Commandments, out of which eventually flowed the liberty developed in England and fulfilled in America’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution. The primary principle is one of government of limited means, and laws with broad boundaries in which people can live freely without any coercion of the government.

How we decide what the validity of the law is in exhaustive detail, in Bahnsen’s words, is the challenge. The important thing to remember is that exhaustive detail is not totalitarian. If we do not break the law we are free to do whatever we want within the confines of the law. And the fewer the laws the healthier a society. A representative republic like America should not need a plethora of laws to cover a self-governing people. America as currently constituted is not a healthy society as indicated by its multitudinous laws.

Also, thinking there are simplistic answers like there is a one-to-one correlation between Israel’s laws and America, for instance, is a category error. America isn’t Israel, and every nation is unique in how it is arranged. Finally, we must remember there is no neutrality, thus the issue isn’t theocracy or theonomy; every nation is ruled by a god or a worldview and set of ultimate values. The question is which God. The question in the West is will it be the god of secularism and tyranny, or the God of the Bible and liberty. As Paul says in Romans 13 discussing the Ten Commandments, “Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” The goal of a biblically based theocracy isn’t control, but loving our neighbors so our society can truly flourish. Only God’s law can do that.