Lesson 44 - Protocols for Military Operations

Deuteronomy Lesson 44

Protocols for Military Operations

Deuteronomy 20:1–20

Fellowship Chapel
08 February 2011
Charles Clough
© Charles A. Clough 2011
www.BibleFrameworkApplied.org

We’re on the 20^th chapter of Deuteronomy, and we’ll go through, hopefully, the whole thing. This chapter is the second of three that we’re doing that have to do with the role of the civil government. I’ve thought about this since the last handout and I’m trying to group these sections to one of the Ten Commandments. And it looks to me like the common thing from chapter 19, chapter 20, chapter 21, is basically the judicial function and in particular the taking of life, or the protecting of life. And so that’s why we have the 6^th commandment. So I’m reminding you of that structure because when you read the book of Deuteronomy and think about it, and remember this is the book that outlines the theology for the whole Old Testament, these details are the Ten Commandments coming to fruition in details of culture.

The problem we have is that we get the Ten Commandments and they become abstractions, they become generic things. And what we want to show you here as we go down through all these chapters and these details is that we are looking at how those commandments actually are applied. Today that’s necessary because we have folks that will take a principle and they won’t see how to apply it. So in chapter 20 we are going to look at military policy. Chapter 19 was the judicial proceedings; in chapter 20 it’s war. And because war deals with execution and loss of life, I’ve put on the outline, just to review because we’ve had some breaks here and I wanted to be sure that we understood this whole thing, and that is the issue of capital punishment.

This is a big deal, there was an article in the Baltimore Sun not too long ago, I guess a week or two ago, it was before the last class, and the title of the editorial in the Sun was that capital punishment is inherently inhumane. This editorial is saying that not just there are problems administering, which everybody acknowledges, not problems administering capital punishment in a just and fair way, so that people who can afford a very wealthy defense attorney get off and the people who can’t afford a wealthy defense attorney get killed. There’s that problem, but that’s not what this editorial is saying. What this editorial is saying, and it’s very typical in our society, that somehow we have such a high moral standard that we think we have that we can second guess God and that what God has ordained is inhumane.

For example, it says: Countless studies have shown that the death penalty is no more effective in deterring crime than a sentence of life without parole, that it is so inherently discriminatory that it can never be fairly or consistently applied. The risk of executing an innocent person can never be eliminated, and the lengthy appeals deprive victim’s families of closure and it costs the state millions of dollars that could be better spent for other purposes. Then they conclude. Their final point in this editorial is, “as an instrument of justice it is a moral abomination that can never be rendered humane except by ending it altogether.”

Now as we say, that’s not the position of the Bible, and so now we have to say okay, what’s the Biblical point. Well, I give you the three points there in the outline. Point 1 is that at creation there was not death. The fact that there has to be death, suffering and sorrow goes back to the fall, and that goes back to sin and God’s judgment. And you’ll notice that under point 2, on the outline I have a parenthesis, and in the parenthesis I point out that we are all under the sentence of capital punishment. Isn’t that what happened in the Garden of Eden? So then it’s a mere case of some people getting their capital punishment sentence earlier than others. But the point is that we all are under the sentence of capital punishment because we are identified with Adam and the sin problem. So capital punishment is ultimately a divine judgment.

So that gets to point 3, when you come to the flood and the end of the antediluvian civilization God has three choices, and I give you those three choices there. The first civilization, from Adam to Noah ended, in anarchy and violence. It’s in the Scriptures. There was a time when there was no civil authority. And the first blank up there “civil authority’s use of lethal force.” What I’m trying to convey tonight in chapters 19, 20, and 21, is that when you think of government, civil government—because there’s family government, there are other kinds of government, but we’re talking about civil government—the emblem throughout the Scriptures is lethality. That’s the emblem of civil power. So you can’t sit there and divorce civil government and its authority from lethal force. It’s there from the beginning; it’s there through Scriptures; it’s there in the New Testament, which people say it isn’t. Yes it is! People fail to read Romans chapter 13.

So lethal force is throughout the Scriptures. And it’s there because of sin. And so the first civilization ended in anarchy and violence. The three possibilities then for God’s post-flood policies. God had three choices. Number one, he could have ended history at the flood. If He ended history at the flood then there wouldn’t be people saved throughout history. Number two, He could have no change and install the second civilization with the same structure as the first civilization had. And what would have happened then? It would have ended in anarchy and violence. So the third suggest was He is going to introduce a new instrument. The new instrument is lethal force, and it is designed to restrain sin. If you don’t have lethal force you don’t have any power to enforce anything.

People always say well, you can do without lethal force. No you can’t. Think about it, if you disobey the law lethal force is going to be used on you, whether it’s in a courtroom or not. If you’re going to resist arrest and use violence to resist it you’re going to get violence in return. So the lethal force doesn’t go away because somebody doesn’t like capital punishment.

And then finally, and I think this is far more serious. What is very serious about the whole argument of capital punishment is it completely misses the point of why the capital punishment is there. It was installed originally for murder, and so my argument would be that if you do not have capital punishment you have trivialized murder. Murder is so trivial that it doesn’t warrant any lethal response. In the Bible murder is taking and destroying somebody, a creature made in God’s image. That is important, not because society says so, it’s because that person is made in God’ s image and God made the person and God gives value to that person. Therefore, you can’t separate the two. The one who gives value to the murder victim is the same one, the same standard that argues that I want life for life. It’s My person that I have created in My image, and you, the murderer, you have taken what I have created and you have destroyed it. Therefore, I say (God speaking), I want that vindicated, I want justice done and it’s going to be done with lethal force.

So there shouldn’t be a problem with lethal force here. And the classical arguments against it: number 1, it can’t be administered perfectly. Well of course not, God knew that from the very beginning. His own Son was in an illegal trial that led to capital punishment. So God did understand that there would be misapplications? Of course He did. Obviously if God knew that capital punishment would be difficult to justly apply and He went ahead and did it anyway, to me that argues that He is saying it’s worth he risk, because if I don’t authorize it we’re going to have a problem with anarchy and go back to the way the first civilization worked.

And then, finally, on page 2, it’s a moral abomination, as the Baltimore Sun said. The answer to The Baltimore Sun is by what standard do you say that it’s a moral abomination? Where do you get your standard for this high and mighty judgment that you’re making that it’s somehow an abomination? An abomination according to what rule or what yardstick? What measure do you say? And since you’ve already denied the authority of Scripture it must be some authority of man, so it must be some subjective human yardstick that you’re using to make your moral judgment.

So now we come to chapter 20 and I’ve broken it down into four parts. You can see the way Moses is projecting this whole idea of military combat. The first nine verses he’s dealing, as he often does, with the heart preparation for combat. And verses 1-9 deal with that. Then he’s going to deal, second one, policy toward cities outside of the land. Then he’s going to deal, verses 16-18: policy toward cities inside the land; and then finally, policy toward the environment. So this is a pretty comprehensive sketch of the rules of engagement, the rules of warfare and he expounds those here.

Now if you look at Deuteronomy 7, I want to go back there because that was where previously, when we were dealing with “love the LORD thy God with all your heart, with all you mind, with all your soul,” Moses was preparing the heart for things like chapter 20, but back then we were only dealing with loving Yahweh with all your heart, now we’re dealing with loving Yahweh with all your life. And you remember the structure of chapter 7. You see where it’s a sandwich, remember we went through the sandwich structure? This tells you a lot about how Moses is thinking here. Verses 1-5 and verses 17-26 deal with procedures, they’re procedural addresses. We would say in the military it’s operating doctrine; this is your doctrine, this is how you approach the situation, your protocols. And I outline those for you; it’s all review.

And then we come to verses 17-26 and it’s managing fear and so on. And if you look at 17:17, he’s dealing with fear; he’s dealing with how to conquer the fear because he knows everybody is going to be fearful. Everybody in a war situation is going to be fearful, so you have to learn how to control that. And he gives you the procedure, verse 17-26. “If you should say in your heart, ‘These nations are greater than I; how can I dispossess them?’ [18] You will not be afraid of them, but you shall remember.” So notice what he’s doing, he’s saying you’ve got to know your history, and of course, history is demeaned today or worse than that it’s revised, so that w don’t really learn history. But that’s the way the Bible says you get your foundations; you learn history. “You will not be afraid of them but you will remember well what the LORD your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt; [19] the great trials which your eyes saw, the signs and the wonders, the mighty hand and he outstretched arm by which the LORD your God brought you out.”

Now I brought my little boom box here because I wanted to play something, but I’m fearful, I don’t want to take more than 3 or 4 minutes, and the lyrics don’t come through very well. But I just want to play something. This is Handel’s piece, you know Handel’s Messiah and you’re acquainted with that, but Handel wrote a lot of other pieces based on Scripture. And one of the pieces that Handel wrote is a piece called Israel and Egypt. And in the middle, halfway through that Israel and Egypt was a section called A Song of Moses, now if you go back over to Exodus 15 you’ll see what Handel was using for his lyrics. And he does something in this music which I think is fascinating because if you look at the text in Exodus 15:1, he talks about this, spoke to the Lord, “I will sing to the LORD, For He has triumphed gloriously! The horse and its rider He has thrown into the sea.” Now if you can listen to this music you’ll hear that being sung and Handel has so arranged it so it’s almost like it’s mocking: the horse and its rider He has thrown into the sea. In other words, you vaunted people, you super power people, you thought you were going to defeat us and God threw you into the sea. And there’s that victory song. But at the end of chapter 15, as you look down through it, you’ll see that verse 20, it was sung antiphonally. So the men sang, and then the women. “Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took the timbrel in her hand in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and dances, [21] And Miriam answered them; ‘Sing to the LORD, for He has triumphed gloriously! The horse and its rider He has thrown into the sea.” She starts that same piece, so the way Handel did this: [plays music, can’t understand singing]

You get the point, what he’s done here in bringing the male and the female voice into this as he goes through the verses, and the refrain, you heard that, “the horse and the rider,” they keep saying that in the background, “the horse and the rider He’s thrown into the sea, the horse and the rider He’s thrown into the sea.” That’s one of the background lyrics of this piece. So when you go back to Deuteronomy 7 Handel really picked up what Moses intended, what those people think, and that was, you will remember what the Lord God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt. So there he deals with the mental attitude.

Now if you come to chapter 20, in chapter 20 he’s going to go now into the details of their military policy; chapter 7 was back in that first section when he was “loving the Lord with all your heart,” now he’s saying okay, now here’s what happens in the details of life. So in verse 1, “When you go out to battle against your enemies.” Now here he’s not talking about the Exodus event, he’s talking about the battles to come, “When you go out to battle against your enemies and see horses and chariots and people more numerous than you.” And notice the “horses and chariots” again, see, that was the military armored people, the mobile armored corps of the time, and the Jews didn’t have any chariots. So today, if you want to kind of capture the feeling that’s like you’ve got an infantry group and you’re being attacked by an infantry mixed group, and it’s way off scale here.

And so this is a real threat, so don’t take lightly that verse 1, because the people are going to say that indeed: How are we going to up against horses and chariots when we’re just individual people here on the ground? And so what do you do, you go back to precedent, what is the precedent, where was the last time Israel ran into horses and chariots? It was Pharaoh, and what happened to the horses and chariots of Pharaoh? God took care of the problem. And there are times in the Scriptures where you’ll see that happen again.

If you read the book of Judges, chapter 4 and 5, Deborah is going up against horses and chariots from the city of Hazor, and Sisera comes after them. And you read very carefully the Song of Deborah, and she does the same thing that Miriam does, by the way. The women were always involved in these songs and they’re strong songs, they’re not some flaky little sentimental thing. In the Song of Deborah she’s singing and rejoicing because the horses and when the chariots of Sisera came to attack the Jewish people, God did something from heaven. And we think, judging from the text, He caused heavy rain to happen and it turned the whole field into mud, and Sisera’s horses and chariots got stuck in the goo, and that’s how the Jews won that battle. So the idea here is to trust the Lord who controls the geophysical environment as well as the people’s hearts.

“When you go out to battle against your enemies,” and the reason why we stress this as believers looking at Deuteronomy, it’s not just we’re studying little fine points of Jewish military science. These are the principles that come over in the New Testament because we fight unseen powers and principalities and it’s a fearsome thing; I mean, they are capable of killing us, they are capable of whipping up mobs against us, they’re capable of deceitfulness, they’re capable of sowing anti-Christian, anti-Biblical ideas in the culture around us to make us look like we’re the ones that are wrong. These are powerful enemies, but what we have to keep going back to is our Exodus, which is the cross of Jesus Christ, and at that point who won? In other words, at that point all of the demonic powers were there to get rid of Jesus, and it was a tactically brilliant but strategically foolish event because in Jesus death the principalities and powers are defeated. And so it was a master chess move. And so if the principalities and powers were made fun of by the cross of Jesus Christ, that’s something we need to remember, going forward in our church age when we have to deal with these principalities and powers.

So that’s why all this military stuff is useful. “…and don’t be afraid of them; for the Lord your God is with you, who” and here we go again, here’s history, verse 1, first verse, “who brought you up from the land of Egypt.” So right here we’re back to the Exodus event. [2] “So it shall be, when you are on the verge of battle.” Now right here there’s some interesting things and this should repeat what we saw earlier with the judicial system. Remember I made a big point, if you look carefully at the judicial system in Israel it had two functions; it had the ecclesiastical and the judicial. We only have the judicial because we’re not a theocracy. But if you’re not a theocracy, what in effect is happening is the civil state assumes the role of God because now the civil authorities expand, unbalanced by the ecclesiastical authority and take over every thing. But in the theocracy you have the ecclesiological function of the priests. Why are they there in the courtroom?

Remember what we said? The priests have the authority to interpret the Torah and to bring the Torah to bear on the case load. They were the students of the Word of God, not the civil authority. It was the ecclesiastical authorities that were the students of the Word of God. They and they alone knew the standards, so they bring the law to the civil authority. But the priests, what they can’t do is they have no authority to use legal force, they’re not part of the state, so they can’t execute, they can’t carry out sentences; only the civil authority can do that. See, that’s the balance between the ecclesiastical and the civil. The civil needs the law from the ecclesiastical but the ecclesiastical needs the power of the legal force of the civil authority. So you have to have two. And here, right in the middle of talking about going into war, in verses 2-4, look what we have. We have the dual function showing up again. Here’s the ecclesiastical and here also is the civil.

“And it shall be when you are on the verge of battle the priest shall approach and speak to the people. [3] And he shall say to them, ‘Hear, O Israel: Today you are on the verge of battle with your enemies. Do not let your heart faint, do not be afraid, and do not tremble or be terrified because of them; [4] for the Lord your God is He who goes with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to save you.’”

If you look at your notes on page 2, I have the Hebrew words there for fear; those are the four words that the priests are using, and each one of those verbs has a nuance, mentally, and one of them, of course, is [rakak] weak or soft, without conviction; another [yarah] one is standing in awe, overestimating the strength of the enemy, another one, chafaz is to be rushed by fear into doing something hastily and being off balance. And another one [ahratz] is to shake in fear.

Now the priest’s function was to show the soldiers that this was indeed a just war. In other words, God was in this. Because if the priest did not say that, then—there’s no draft here, as we will see in a moment, these are all volunteer soldiers here—they wouldn’t volunteer because they’re not sure that this battle is really of the Lord. So there are two verses that we can claim, by application, one of them Exodus 14:1-14. If you don’t know that promise you ought to know that promise, you ought to memorize that promise for your own Christian life because in Exodus 14:13, that’s when Israel had their back to the Red Sea and the horses and the chariots were coming, so they were cut off by land, they were cut off by water, and what does Moses say: “Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord.” A wonderful promise. Just “Stand still and watch the deliverance of the Lord.” And how we need that promise over and over and over again in our Christian life.

And then in 1 Samuel 17:47, that’s David going out to sling the stone at Goliath, and his whole confidence in doing that as a young boy against this fighting machine, probably twice his height, in 1 Samuel 17:47, what does David say? “The battle is the Lord’s.” So those verses point out that the confidence has to be that God is in the war. If God is not in the war then we have a right to be concerned. And one of the points I make on page 2, right above those two verses, you’ll see my little sentence, where I said the “Ark was physically carried into battle.” They physically carried that right ahead of the army and that was the sign that God is involved in this battle, so you don’t have to fear, we are going out with Him.

Then in verses 5-9 there’s a fascinating thing here and if you compare this text, verses 5-9 with the Ancient Near Eastern typical literature that deal with kings going to battle, this is unknown. There’s no procedure like verses 5-9, anywhere that I know of in pagan circles of literature. Let’s look at verses 5-9 and what is going on in verses 5-9 that make it so unique?

[5] “Then the officers” so now we have the civil authority; so far it’s been the priests, the priests have ascertained that this battle is of the Lord, okay, but the priests don’t do the fighting, the offers do, so in verse 5, “Then the officer shall speak to the people, saying: ‘What man is there who has built a new house and has not dedicated it? Let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle and another man dedicate it.” So on page 3 of the notes I go into some of the ramifications here. You have to understand that this is a volunteer military. Numbers says yes, every boy up to 20 was registered. That’s what numbers means, the Bible says that’s a book called the census, but that does not mean that all the boys would join the army. There’s no draft, in other words, here, which is interesting. The draft starts with 1 Samuel 8 and in 1 Samuel 8 there you have the power of the expansion of the civil government, which compels, not only a draft to the boys for military service but also compels girls to be in government service. The legal compulsion comes after the expansion of power into the monarchy. But when you have a pure theocracy there’s no central authority like that, there are just ten tribes in a confederation. Remember what w said? What was the unifying force of the twelve tribes? Doctrine. It was the theology, the loyalty to Yahweh, it wasn’t a capital; there wasn’t a federal government there doing the unity. It was a spiritual unity surrounding Yahweh.

Well, we have quote that I’ve got here, here’s a quote that gives you a flavor for the Gentiles and how pagans view this. Now contrast this statement with what you’re reading here in the text. “The chief whose forces are not turned out in full and who leaves one man behind will incur the disfavor of the king.” That was the operating doctrine of the pagan army; that the king expected every person to serve in his army. Verses 5-9 don’t say that. So now we have to come back and say well, what is the thinking that’s going on with these qualifications. Let’s read further. [6] “Also what man is there who has planted a vineyard and has not eaten of it? Let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle and another man eat of it. [7] And what man is there who is betrothed to a woman and has not married her? Let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle and another man marry her.’” So there are three things here that he’s talking about: he’s talking about a house; he’s talking about a vineyard; he’s talking about a wife.

Now what’s going on here, if you look at the notes, we won’t have time to turn here but if you look at 20:6 note, on page 3, where I have it “planted a vineyard… another eat of it.” I give you Leviticus 19:23-25. If you go to that reference you’ll see that this was no short duration absentia from the military; this was five years. It took five years to get a vineyard into production. This man was excused for five years from military service because his vineyard wasn’t fruitful. Well, what’s the principle here? The principle is up above that in the notes, where I have “house…dedicate…another dedicate it. Personal productivity (economic dominion) comes before military service. A family was to extend itself into the future.” The house represents personal private property; it represents a guy who has got a family going. He has built his house; he has got his family economically started. And the idea there is he needs it economically started so that if he does die his sons, his wife, can carry on. It was important to preserve the family and they took great caution, because remember, we said back in education, back in Deuteronomy 6, who does the educating? Not the state, the family does. So the family is very, very central in this design of the theocracy. So to protect that the economic thing, the vineyard is another thing, the vineyard is the production, it’s an economic source, and this has to be protected.

Well, what does this show theologically? And the marriage, of course, the idea there; everything in verses 5, 6 and 7 is talking about the family; its economic resources, the marriage, the relationship there, that has to be started before it’s threatened by death in combat. It’s a very fascinating thing and I have a principle in the box there, I said in contrast to Islam that sends men into battle hoping they’ll die and get 72 virgins, the irony here is Yahweh works the other way around; you have your 72 virgins first and then you go to the battle. See, God blesses; He doesn’t expect us to give our lives to Him when He hasn’t blessed us. There’s a nature and the nature of God Himself in the Scriptures here that you want to see.

Now I give another slide, this is from Josephus, and this shows you that as late as Josephus (Josephus wrote in the time of Jesus) the Jews knew very well this procedure, because here Josephus is addressing Jewish rulers and he says: “Do you give leave to those that have lately built them houses, and have not yet lived in them a year’s time” Josephus says a year; excused for a year, “and to those that have planted them vineyards, and have not yet been partakers of their fruits… as well as those also who have betrothed, or lately married them wives, lets they have such affection for these things that they be too sparing of their lives….” Now that last sentence Josephus is trying to understand why this goes on and he’s just saying it would be a distraction to the guy. Yeah, it may be, but the principle, I think, is different than what Josephus interprets it. The principle here is that God wants us to have a firm foundation. He wants us to understand He is blessing us, or we would say today, He doesn’t expect a soldier to go out and fight for Yahweh. Remember, this is not Israel’s battle in the first place, right? It’s Yahweh’s battle.

So what God is saying to these men is, I want you to have skin in the game. In other words, when you go to battle now you’re defending your vineyard, now you’re defending your house, now you’re defending your wife. This comes up in Nehemiah when he talks about what’s going on in a fight. I remember being in Israel back in 1976, after the Yom Kippur War and we were talking and I had some military friends of mine and we were talking with some of the Israeli infantry guys, and I was commenting, because we were in the kibbutz near the Sea of Galilee there, Lake Kinneret, and I was looking up at the Golan Heights, and of course I knew my history, that that’s where the Syrian artillery came and fought, and it’s a very famous battle in the Yom Kipper War. Because the Jewish reserve forces took time to activate, the active duty guys went up there to try to stop the Syrians from driving down the Golan Heights and destroying the northern half of Israel. And they had their tanks up there but they took heavy casualties and a lot of the tanks were shot up. But for some reason the Arabs thought it was a trap, and so their column stopped, which was a fatal mistake of the Arabs. And during the night, as I recall the story, I may be wrong on some of the details, this 18 year old boy went from tank to tank to fire a gun, the ones that he could fire, to make the Arabs think that it was an ambush. And of course, by the morning the Israeli reserves swarmed up the thing and that was the end of the Syrian column. But it’s a fascinating story and so I was talking to this Israeli captain and I said, gosh, that was a neat thing you pulled off. And I’ll never forget his answer to me. He says, as he pointed back, because we were at Lake Kinneret, when your wife and you children are here you will fight them there. And it was another way of putting it in blunt terms what’s going on here in this passage.

So up until this we have the officers going through and saying look, if you haven’t got skin in the game, you haven’t enjoyed a blessing from Yahweh, you’re will excused from military service. But now, verse 8, the officers continue, verses 8-9. “The officers shall speak further to the people, and say, ‘What man is there who is fearful and fainthearted? Let him go and return to his house, lest the heart of his brethren faint like his heart.’ [9] And so it shall be, when the officers have finished speaking to the people, that they shall make captains of the armies to lead the people.”

Two things to notice in this text: Now he’s dealing with the mental attitude, he doesn’t want panic to set in the ranks. This is the same thing Gideon, in the book of Judges is talking about, he gets rid of all these people; come on, if you’re scared get out of here because we don’t want your fear to contaminate everybody else. Besides, you’re not going to protect the flanks of the guys who are trying to fight if you’re going to run. Then it says in verse 9, then they organized their units, so until verse 9 the units aren’t organized; you don’t have the leaders declared; you don’t have the squads and the platoons put together here. This comes after this purging process, and so by verse 9 they know who they can count on.

That’s verses 1-9; that was all dealing with the mental attitude. And you can see how much emphasis the Word of God puts on mental attitude, even in these situations where it’s dealing with all the little details. On page four of the outline, point 2: Therefore it relies on God- directed, God-supplied preparation. In other words, not having the draft that came in with 1 Samuel 8 and the monarchy, what do you suppose that does as a check on leader’s powers? If a leader has to rely on volunteers instead of compelling it; if a king has power to compel; there’s a temptation to go into war just to build his empire, because he knows he can compel people to be in his army. But on the other hand, if you’re the leader and you can’t compel people, you have to win them to your view. Then it’s a whole other story, so it makes it more difficult for tyrants to reign; these are controls here. That’s pointed out by Gary North in his study in the book of Deuteronomy.

Now in verse 10, from verse 10 to 15, policy toward the cities outside the land. Remember, inside the land they’re to be obliterated because this is a culture that’s gone comatose spiritually. But now from verses 10-15 this is where they’re going to deal with what we would call just war. So I’m going to use two different terms here. For verses 10-15 I’m going to call that just war, and then we’re going to call from verses 16-18 holy war, and there are two different kinds here. Holy war doesn’t happen today but principles of just war do. And so in verse 10, “When you go near a city to fight against it, then proclaim an offer of peace to it.” This is going to come out with a neat application in the New Testament and some of you already can see where it applies. “When you go near a city to fight against it, proclaim an offer of peace to it. [11] And it shall be that if they accept your offer of peace, and open to you, then all the people who are found in it shall be placed under tribute to you, and serve you.”

In other words, this is not a war of aggression either, by the way; a just war is a defensive war that was probably started by somebody attacking Israel. These policies probably were not followed very well in actual practice. These are policies; these are what Moses and God wanted them to follow. But let me give you some verses where you can see what this process looked like; the process is proclaiming peace to a city, if they accept your offer of peace, then they will do tribute to you.

So if you’ll hold the place and turn to Joshua 9 you’ll see that at least with Joshua it was carried out. In Joshua 9 we have the Gibeonite issue, and part of the deception involved in this and so on. But “And it came to pass when all the kings who were on this side of the Jordan, in the hills and in the lowlands,” and so on, [2] that they gathered together to fight with Joshua and Israel with one accord. [3] But the inhabitants of Gibeon heard what Joshua had done to Jericho and Ai.” Now these people chickened out, these are the Canaanites that really realized that we’ve got a real problem here and you know what, we think the Jews are going to win and we’re not going to be on the losing side so we’re going to defect from the Canaanites confederacy and go over and see if we can make peace with Joshua. [4] “they worked craftily and went and pretended to be ambassadors. And they took old sacks on their donkeys, old wineskins torn and mended,” and they deceived him, [6] “And they went to Joshua, to the camp at Gilgal, and said to him and to the men of Israel, “We have come from a far country, now therefore make a covenant,” or a contract “with us.” [7] “Then the men of Israel to the Hivites, ‘Perhaps you dwell among us, so how can we make a covenant with you? [8] But they said to Joshua, We are your servants.” And Joshua said to them, “Who are you, and where do you come from? [9] So they said to him, “From a very far country your servants have come,” so it turns out that they became vassals of Joshua; they should have been eliminated them but Joshua made them into vassals and they became a thorn in Israel’s side.

Move over one more book to the book of Judges and look at chapter 1 you’ll see the narration of the war toward the end of Joshua’s time. In Judges 1:28, “And it came to pass, when Israel was strong, that they put the Canaanites under tribute, but not completely drive them out.” So you see, what they did is they applied the policy of just war, not the policy of holy war. But at least it shows you the idea that they put them under tribute. In other words, they economically dominated these people.

Back to Deuteronomy 19:10-15. I’ll just say this in passing in the interest of time, where it says you go to a city, you fight against it, proclaim an offer of peace unto it, and so on. Do any of you remember in the Gospels Jesus commissioning His disciples to go into the cities the first time? Remember what He told them to do? Go into the city and proclaim peace to it, and if they don’t accept Me shake your foot, turn them over. Jesus was actually telling His disciples to sort of recapitulate this, although He didn’t tell them to go into battle with them; spiritually they were to go to the different villages, proclaim peace; will you accept the Messiah? Do you believe that Jesus is the Messiah? And if you do, yield to us, be baptized and so forth, and if you don’t then we’re going to bypass you and you’re going to be under judgment from the Messiah. So it’s a very kind of similar process.

Then it says, [12] “Now if the city will not make peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. [13] And when the Lord your God delivers it into your hands, you shall strike every male in it with the edge of the sword. [14] But the women, the little ones, the livestock, and all that is in the city, all its spoil, you shall plunder for yourself; and you shall eat the enemies’ plunder which the Lord your God gives you. [15] Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far from you, which are not of the cities of these nations.” And you can say how cruel that they eliminated every male. Well, Numbers 1:3, twenty years and above was considered an adult, and if these people were fighting against them they were in the army of the opposition. So this ended the military threat.

Then in verses 16-18, we deal with the holy war; it’s not just war now, it’s holy war. [16] “But of the cities of these peoples which the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance,” so this is within the land, “you shall let nothing that breathes remain alive, [17] but you shall utterly destroy them: the Hittite and the Amorite and the Canaanite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite, just as the Lord your God has commanded you, [18] lest they teach you to do according to all their abominations which they have done for their gods, and you sin against the Lord your God.” You’ll notice the phrase, destroy “nothing that breathes remain alive.” That meant destruction of all livestock, that meant the destruction throughout the whole city, everything was to be destroyed. Homes weren’t, but the people were all to be destroyed, men, women and children. And you say how horrible it is; and it is, it’s genocide. And that’s why in chapter 7, when I dealt with that we stopped, remember we went through why is this genocide there and the genocide we said was because, as Kline said in his The Treaty of the Great King, and I think Dr. Kline has probably the clearest explanation of what’s going here of an commentary I’ve ever read on it:

“The identification of God’s kingdom with the earthly kingdom of Israel brought an Old Testament anticipation of the final judgment which is to overtake those who remain outside the redemptive kingdom of Christ.” This is the ethics—remember I said back in chapter 7, the ethics of common grace stop and the ethics of final judgment intrude. This is an intrusion of an ethical norm and standard from the final judgment to come. You and I we work, and we have for centuries, under the common grace principle because only God can authorize something like this. But what this does, is it gives us a glimpse from real history, where people could actually see this happen. This is a revelation of what is going to take place in the future, and it shocks people. After I understood this principle, and after you understand this principle I think you’ll see this: when people are shocked by this kind of a passage in the Bible, what are they going to do when Jesus comes back? Won’t they have the same moral objection? I mean, think about it, if this is objectionable what are you going to do with God’s judgments? You know, you don’t want them to be there suffering this. But then on the other hand, you’re curious; I’m curious. What are you going to say when this happens?

So let’s follow his logic. The first sentence, “It’s an anticipation of the final judgment which is to overtake those who remain outside the redemptive kingdom of Christ. This Old Testament judgment, however, could not be executed universally,” for this reason. “For then the age of grace for the nations would have been prematurely terminated, and the covenant promise that Israel should be a blessing to all the nations through the Messianic seed of Abraham (Genesis 12:3) would have been nullified. Therefore, the typology of final judgment was strictly applied only in warfare against nations within the boundaries claimed by Yahweh in his typical kingdom.”

And that’s the answer and I think it’s a sufficient ethical answer and defense of this sort of activity that you see in Scripture. God is a God of judgment, and people who whine and bellyache about this; you know what the answer to that is? If you don’t like this, for God to separate good and evil, then you’re going to live with evil for the rest of your existence. And your sons, your daughters, your granddaughters, you want history to keep on going the same way it’s going? Is this a real pleasant lifestyle, to be constantly facing death and sorrow and heartache, or do you want it to end? Well, I want it to end. Well then, the judgment of God is going to end it. You can’t have it both ways. Either history goes on perpetually the way it is, with no interference, no culmination, or there is a culmination. And God has a right to culminate it the way He wants to culminate it, and the way He does is He wants to separate permanently good and evil so there’s never another fall again. Enough is enough. And that’s scary, yes, but that’s the only answer to evil. You don’t have an answer if you don’t like that.

So finally we come to the last two verses, policy toward the environment. And this is kind of interesting because you don’t see this either. These are these little delicate gems that are sown into the text of Scripture that show you what kind of a God it is that we worship. And by the way, you might think about the fact that when you read texts like this, don’t think that this is just the Father of the Trinity speaking. The God who is seen in history, the One who shows up physically, has got to be the Son, because John says no one has ever seen the Father. So this is he Son, this is the preincarnate Jesus Christ. And you know, I think this is one reason why people misinterpret the character of Jesus, because they have this kind of New Testament view and, oh Jesus is so kind. Really He’s quite blunt in the New Testament, it’s just that people kind of use the cafeteria approach to the text of the New Testament and pick out the nice, loving passages, oh, that’s the Jesus, I really like the Jesus there, but the Old Testament, that… But the Old Testament is Jesus. So by not reading the Old Testament thoroughly you come up with a very truncated view of who Jesus is. But you can’t separate; it’s the same God here.

So we come, then, to a thing like verses 19 and 20; these are these little tidbits. Now we show concern for the fact that God does care for His creation. And we are to care for it also. We are to be stewards of it, not worship it. We’re not tree-huggers, we don’t believe nature is superior to man, like we do today. You can get arrested for breaking an eagle egg but you don’t get arrested for aborting a human fetus. So what does that tell you about the relative value of nature versus man? It tells you nature is more important than man now; that’s why we have all of the thing about a global overpopulation, why we’ll have to sterilize people, so we get rid of the human race to which I say well, you start, lead the way, but they don’t want to, of course.

But in these verses, here is where you see God caring for the environment. So even in military war God is concerned. [19] “When you besiege a city for a long time, while making war against it to take it, you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an ax against them; if you can eat of them, do not cut them down to use in the siege, for the tree of the field is man’s food. [20] Only the trees which you know are not trees for food you may destroy and cut down, to build siege works against the city that makes war with you, until it is subdued.” There’s a discrimination there so that the fruitfulness of nature should be preserved. It shouldn’t be destroyed and wrecked, and it’s just God’s care.

So going back then to the last slide let’s kind of wrap up what we’ve done here. We’re looking at the institution of government and the image that we have to have. And I’m consciously saying this because I’m fighting against an idea that to a degree we all have been infected with. We’ve all, to a degree, been infected with the idea that the civil government is some sort of a Messiah, that the civil government’s job is to send out welfare checks to everybody. That it’s the civil government’s job to give me a job. That it’s the civil government’s role to bring in the Millennial Kingdom. That’s not the civil government in the Scriptures. The civil government is important in the Bible but it’s also ominous. There’s an ominousness to it, it has kind of, almost like a terror to it. In fact, Paul uses that in Romans 13, rulers are a terror, they are a terror to evil works.

So why I’m saying this is that whenever you hear about the government is going to inaugurate a new policy, we’re going to have a policy statement, or we’re going to create a new policy or this or that, just remember, you’re empowering this machine. Do you really want a new regulation backed up by lethal force? Now some regulations, yeah, we have to have; but do you want regulation piled upon regulation piled upon regulation, with this? This is not God and His grace, this is not the Messiah; this is a temporary restrainer to carry out God’s judgments in some areas. That’s all it is. And today we have vastly overrated the power of civil government. Civil government can’t make dysfunctional families functional families. That’s why it is a perpetual drain on our economy to deal with the crime and the after effects of dysfunctional families, because this isn’t the tool, it’s the gospel of Jesus Christ that is the tool.

If the gospel can’t do it a social program can’t do it. That’s not to say there aren’t, you know, details of life, I mean there are gals here in the church that work in Birthright, and by the way, they work without salary, unlike a certain other organization that helps everybody get abortions. But the idea here is when you have Birthright you have these other things. There’s gals here that spend hours, hours every week helping, solving problems, by he way, and having a social outreach because they’re Christians and they’re operating on a biblical frame of reference. That is the social solution. And there are plenty of places out there that we, you and I can help, but this, the State, the civil power needs to tend to its business, which it isn’t. The whole point of the State and civil power in government is to create a social ordering so we can have our jobs, so our families can be protected, so our properties are protected, so contracts have integrity to them. And if that stability is there prosperity follows. Prosperity will always follow those conditions; those are the preconditions for economic prosperity, but it starts with this: restraint against sin. It doesn’t start on a positive note; this is a negative note.

So coming away from this, as I say on page 5, [1] Military policy is connected with civil authority. It necessarily involves lethal force. [2] In the theocracy both ecclesiastical and civil authorities function together, which are not happening in any of the anthropocentric states of history. [3] In the theocracy, military judgments were strictly limited to volunteer soldiers, so they had to have the confidence that God was behind this because it was His judgment.

Father, we thank You…..

Are there any questions that you want to toss around? [Can’t hear question] This is strange, the question is in God’s judgment, why do the animals get it? And there’s some strange passages, like that one in Jonah, where, remember at the end of the book of Jonah where Jonah is whining about Nineveh and the judgment of God and God says don’t you know that I have so many people and their animals there? A very strange verse, I remember going through that in Hebrew, I had to translate that one time and I thought what is this? And you look at commentaries and they hit grease, usual commentaries, and whenever there’s an obvious passage everybody is oh, it’s so clear, and then you get some passage like that and people are skating all over the place. There’s something, some connection between man and animal and the Scripture takes it very seriously because when the Millennial Kingdom happens, animal behavior is altered. And I’ve collected over the years videos that… people send me these videos of these animals doing unusual behavior. I’ve got this video that was done by a person in England who dealt with a lion and raised this lion as a cub and obviously the lion cub got too big to put in their living room, so they took it back to Africa; it had been injured or something, I forgot what the story was, they took it back to Africa and the lion had to be taught for about a year how to feed itself around a flock of other lions so that it would learn what it never learned from humans. And then they released it. And this amazing film was taken a year later when the people who raised that lion came out to the edge of the land and the lion showed up with the others, and when he saw that person he comes bounding over to them, and he comes up and he hugs them. And what is that?

When you see that kind of behavior, I believe what that shows is that animals are not inherently vicious toward people. That is the thing that Genesis 9 talks about. And we haven’t got the foggiest clue what we’re talking about here, that people, you know, ha-ha-ha, what do you do about the carnivorous animals and so forth. Maybe they aren’t carnivorous originally, maybe this is a zoological transform, because obviously when God cursed the ground, that’s not just a little Sunday School story with a sweet little addendum stuck to it, oh gee, thorns and thistles came up. Think about it. If thorns and thistles came up and the never were there before, do you know what a thistle is? It’s a degenerate branch; we’re talking about a botanical transformation in plant life.

And then we’re talking about animals here. And people make fun of… oh, you premils, you have this phony idea about the lion and the lamb lying down together. I’ve got a picture of it happening right now in our society, it happened in Washington State, I’ve got a photograph of it because a lion and a lamb were brought up together, they never seemed to learn that they were enemies.

Someone says: Wasn’t that the result the fall, the animosity between animals? Clough: I don’t know, I know the animosity between animals and man is stated to be in Genesis 9. So we’re on thin ice here about just what information we have. I just think that we err when we dismiss too hastily these passages of Scripture that we find hard to believe, and we just zip right over them. And I think we’re going to find out, in the final analysis, that there’s a lot more truth in those verses than we thought. This business about the Millennial Kingdom and you have the transforming of the plants and the animals and so forth, I mean, think about how fast that must happen. And do we have any precedence of any radical physiological anatomical transformation; sure we do, anybody with a piece of graph paper or a computer, Excel spread sheet can show it, graph the ages of death of the patriarchs and watch what happens after the flood; it goes down an exponential decay curve, and anybody that’s been in engineering knows what that shows you; if you have an exponential decay curve you don’t have it because of a calendar, some of these Old Testament {?} oh well, we had a different calendar. No, it’d be a step function, not an exponential decay function, it comes down like this, it’s the kind of decay you get when you go from one electrical level to another and a capacitor, it’s the same thing you have when you go from hot water to cold water, put an ice cube in and measure the temperature, it’s always an exponential decay curve; you go from one steady state to another. Do you think Moses had his little iPad and he made up the numbers in Genesis so it would work out t be an exponential decay curve? Nonsense, the Scripture is reporting something that Moses probably didn’t know what that mean, but if you read the other literature in the Ancient East and you read about 250,000 year life spans, there’s just complete exaggeration. But what does the exaggeration tell you? Doesn’t it tell you that this is what that information looks like after its perverted; that’s why you have myths. So there’s an enormous amount of stuff in the Scriptures. One of my sons is a veterinarian and we talked about animals in the Bible quite a bit and one of the things I’ve mentioned to my son, I said if you look at the angels around the throne of God they have animal forms; they’re zoological. Now that’s interesting, the angels have zoological forms but which came first in creation? Angels came first. So does that argue that the form that we see in animals is actually a derivative of angelic form, so we could say that animals are put together from angel parts as far as format goes.

See, there are a lot of things going on here and it’s intriguing to me, just think through the length and the depth of the Word of God, it’s amazing.

Question asked [can’t hear]. Yes, I don’t think he was a Catholic but I think Handel, he did funny things because in his day the culture was so aware of biblical things that he could write these things. He wrote one eloquent music, Xerxes, but it turns out it’s a farce, I mean, he intended it to be a farce, but he has written these things, and it’s nice, this one piece that I played tonight, if you get a chance you ought to go through that, it’s a really neat composition that he put together, and it gives you, as Handel can do it, he has that majestic music flowing and then you can see how he combines it with the text.

[Question asked, can’t hear enough to get] The question is about the Nephilim in Genesis 6 and it shows up later. That’s a word that’s applied to, really freaky people. If you track the term there’s a whole family of freaks that last from the time of the Exodus all the way up to Goliath, the Anakim, somehow there’s something going on here with these people, and they were big people, they were giant people, and if they preexisted the flood and they showed up afterwards, and the problem we have with Genesis 6, “the sons of God coming in to the daughters of men” that’s a very challenging passage and there’s three or four views of that, but Hebrew makes it quite clear that the “sons of God” are angelic beings, that’s the word throughout Scripture. Now what is going on there we don’t know, there’s been speculation that one of the reason God had to send the flood was because you had an attempt at that point to genetically destroy the human race.

[Questioner says more] Well, there weren’t that many involved in Numbers. I don’t know, we just have to stop where the Scripture stops and it just tells us there were some strange things going on before the flood, that’s for sure.

[question asked about Egypt] The question is what about Egypt, with all the stuff going on; I would defer to Dr. Ice who’s going to be here for the missions conference for some detail like that; I’ve read some stuff, {?} has gone around and said that this is the fulfillment of the dragon and so on, that’s what we call historicism of trying to correlate contemporary events with the book of Revelation rather than seeing events today as stage setting for whatever is going to take place; these people actually want to fulfill it now and that led in the 19^th century to your Seventh Day Adventism, it’s led to all the date setting guys when they’re trying to predict when Christ is coming, you know, what’s the latest one, May of 2011 or 12 or something, Jesus is supposed to come back. So you have to be careful about trying to make a contemporary event a fulfilled prophecy; that’s kind of out to lunch. I think you’re safer just saying that there are trends in history and that the issue is that now that the Jews have come back to the land you’ve got a state of Israel, you’re going to have hard times because Satan doesn’t want that country established because it’s got to be there, somebody’s got to be there with a temple for Jesus to come back to. So what’s going to happen in Egypt and some of these other areas we don’t know. I know from listening to some of the commentators that really know Israel and what goes on inside Israel, Israel is very concerned about this and hope that the young people are involved that they will be… how shall we say, not typical college students that get so swept up in ideology that they allow the Muslim Brotherhood to take over.

The problem here, and I think this is the wisest comment without getting into speculation, this is one of the wisest comments I’ve heard so far about this whole thing. This proves that Israel is not the problem in the Middle East. This isn’t caused by Israel. How is the Egyptian stuff caused by Israel; Israel has nothing to do with this. It’s the economic inability of some of these Arab nations to get their act together and have full employment; that’s the problem. It’s not Israel, Israel has enough employment, in fact, Israel has to employ Palestinians to keep their economy going. So I think it’s a very insightful thing that the media really hasn’t grabbed hold of, this refutes the whole position of our foreign policy, that we’ve got to get Israel and the Palestinians together or there won’t be peace in the Middle East. What has Egypt got to do with Israel?