Lesson 46 - Protocols for Protecting the Institution of Family

Deuteronomy Lesson 46

Protocols for Protecting the Institution of the Family

Deuteronomy 20:10–21

Fellowship Chapel
01 March 2011
Charles Clough
© Charles A. Clough 2011
www.BibleFrameworkApplied.org

Again, looking at your outline, we are on that section, chapters 19–21, where we’re looking at social issues and the theme, and again we want to emphasize this over and over and over and over again, that all these case laws that you see in the text, all these case laws are God’s way of illustrating what the Ten Commandments look like when they’re actually put into practice. So there are some of these passages that are difficult, some of them we have to kind of speculate on because we look at Israel’s history it doesn’t look like they were too careful about obeying this law, so we don’t have instances from the history books of what some of this looks like. So in this particular section in chapter 21, it’s the end of this large section that seems to be dealing with the sixth commandment, which is “Thou shalt not kill.” It’s the commandment of life, to protect life.

And we say that because if you look at chapter 19 and you look at chapter 20 they deal with instances where there is the application of lethal force, because you remember that government in the Scriptures is not a saving institution; civil authority in the Scripture is an evil restraining institution. And that’s the way God gave it in Genesis 9 and no sooner, of course, had He given it to the Noahic civilization, but you have the tower of Babel incident where the globalists of the time, basically almost the first United Nations building was the tower of Babel. There was an attempt on the part of world leaders—it was a small world but they were world leaders at the time—to use civil government, which was supposed to be a restraining force against evil in a positive way, to build a global empire and to make government an agency of salvation. And that’s still with us: the tension of misusing civil authority beyond what it was designed to do, turning it into a saving institution. It wasn’t ever given as a saving institution, all government can do to save is create laws, rules and regulations which really is an attempt to create salvation by legalism. So there’s no grace involved.

But in this passage we want to look at some of the details. This is a passage which follows this structure that we’ve seen before, where God uses two ways in a chiastic structure. And in chapters 6 and 7 it has this structure, and chapter 21 also has this structure. So it’s just a point of review, because this shows the two areas when the Word of God was taught by Moses, and the two areas that he concentrated on in both these cases. In 21, we have the bottom part here, the relationship with Yahweh, the relationship with God; that was central to the purpose, obviously, a relationship with God. But then Moses look at the way the verses are structured, the first part of these chapters, the first part and the last part deal with how-to procedures. So there are the mechanics; there is the operating doctrine, and then there’s the relationship inside that.

If you look at that you say to yourself, well, if in churches and teaching and our education programs we concentrate just on the relationship with God, that’s good, that’s central, that’s essential. But if that’s all we concentrate on and never give a specific how do you do this? How do you do that? It becomes frustra­ting because everybody wants a relationship but there’s no form to it; it’s just an emotional response. So you want the procedures. On the other extreme, if you just deal with procedures that in itself can develop into a legalism because it lacks the relationship; it lacks the personal thing.

So now in Deuteronomy 21:1-9 are how-to procedures, that was the one where we dealt with unsolved murder, that was the case of a homicide, and what you do in the case of a dead body, murdered body, how do you cope with that? And the procedures are there. As one of our former law people, police people said, where it says you measure to the nearest city and hold the elders of that city responsible for that unsolved murder, it’s good police work because the murders tend to be toward people that the murderer knew. And so therefore there’s a reason and a rationale why you would pick the nearest city, because that’s probably where this guy had some sort of relationship that went sour. That was verses 1-9.

And then verses 22-23, that’s what you do when there’s been an execution and the State therefore displays the body until sunset. “If a man has committed a sin deserving of death, and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, [23] his body shall not remain overnight on the tree, but you shall surely bury him that day, so that you do not defile the land which the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, for he who is hanged is accursed of God.” Actually it is he who is hung up there, a dead body, is accursed of God. That passage is so important because Paul picks that up in the New Testament and applies it to Jesus.

And when you see the original context back here, then that sort of makes this whole theology of imputed sin very real, because when Paul picks this up he’s saying Jesus became accursed. Well, if you read just the New Testament and never read the Old Testament you say yeah, I know, that’s the imputed sin stuff. But if you get into the heart of chapter 21 you suddenly realize, wait a minute, why did they display the corpse of an executed person? They displayed it, obviously, for deterrents; that here people walk by and see this body hanging there because the person has been executed by the State for obviously some crime, that that is a criminal. And the point that Paul says is that he picks up this last phrase, “for he who is hanged is accursed of God,” which means that the civil authorities executed someone but it wasn’t social vengeance that executed the person. It wasn’t society redeeming itself to execute the person. It’s a divine viewpoint of civil authority that when civil authority executes they’re carrying out God’s judgment because God delegated judgment to the fourth divine institution, the civil state.

So the conclusion is, when somebody’s walking down the road and they see this body hanging there, someone who’s been executed for a capital crime, that that person was judged and that judgment ultimately, though it was done through the civil authorities, was actually God’s judgment. So that’s what Paul picks up and he says, when Christ on the cross hung there, His corpse was on the cross after He died, and that that is an example of Him being executed, so to speak, by the State. Actually it really wasn’t an execution because He said I give up My spirit, but nevertheless, there’s the body of the Messiah and he is put in a position by this verse as being accursed of God. And I believe Paul meditated on Deuteronomy 21 and the Holy Spirit used chapter 21 to show Paul imputed sin, and that’s how Paul developed this whole important doctrine that our sins were transferred to the Lord Jesus Christ and the Lord Jesus Christ therefore became accursed, because He absorbed our sin.

So while this is some little obscure passage of two verses hidden away in the 21^st chapter of Deuteronomy regarding executions, all of a sudden this becomes the fountainhead to illuminate what went on on the cross. So there’s an example that you can’t be too careful about reading these passages.

Tonight we’re going to look at the center part, not verses 1-9, not verses 22-23, but verses 10-21. So we’re going to look at how they dealt, from verse 10-14, and that is the war bride passage. And this deals with the family institution and it deals with war, it deals with a lethal force of civil authority, and so now here are some of the results that happen. And the result is: [10] When you go out to war against your enemies; and the LORD your God delivers them into your hand, and you take them captive, [11] and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and desire her and would take her for your wife, [12] then you shall bring her home to your house, and she shall shave her head and trim her nails, [13] She shall put off the clothes of her captivity, remain in your house, and mourn for her father and her mother a full month; after that you may ago in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. [14] And it shall be, if you have no delight in her, then you shall set her free, but you certainly shall not sell her for money; you shall not treat her brutally, because you have humbled her.”

So now this is a war bride issue, but you have to back off and think what did we learn in the previous chapter about military doctrine, and that was there are two kinds of war. There’s holy war and then there’s just war. And if this were holy war there wouldn’t be any woman, so obviously knowing what we know from chapter 20, carrying it over to chapter 21, we can obviously see this was just war, that is, it was war against a city that was not a Canaanite city on the Promised Land. And they apparently had started a war with Israel, and so the procedures of chapter 20 took place. Well, here’s a survivor. Why is it a female? Because all the males over 20 would be killed, according to chapter 20, because they were held to be morally responsible had they, when Israel offered that city a truce, offered peace, and they didn’t accept it—the leaders said no, we’re going to fight you. Those men had the option at that point to defect, just like Rahab had the opportunity to defect, and she was part of the Canaanites—they’re held accountable, and so they were all killed. So that obviously left women and children.

Now the question becomes what about this particular woman? This is addressed to one of the Israelite men: you will see a beautiful woman, desire her and take her for your wife. Now there are restraints in this and there are actually three of them; three restraints in this text that prevent this from just being wartime rape. So the woman is protected here and this is an example of how, in these little tiny details of the text you see the heart of God, because He reaches down into a very high critical situation and he introduces restraints.

One of the first restraints is that yes, there was allowed polygamy going on in this period of time, in this era of history. So the number one restraint would be if this guy were already married, his first wife wouldn’t be taking too kindly to the second woman. So there was a restraint, at least among all the guys that were married who were warriors. So that’s number one.

So if that wasn’t the case, then in verse 13 it says, “She shall put off the clothes of her captivity, remain in your house, and mourn for her father and her mother a full month.” So the idea there was that the guy, it was a hands-off situation for thirty days, that’s a cooling off period, are you really interested in this woman. And the point is in the larger context of the Law, for this soldier, to marry this woman was an economic obligation. Keep in mind the economics. The first time I went through Deuteronomy years ago I was not tuned in to the economic structures that are going on here and the economic intrigue. But the whole idea here is that he would be taking upon himself an economic responsibility, and so that thirty day period was, do you want to undertake this responsibility or not, fellow? So that’s number two.

Then number three, it says, verse 14, “And it shall be, if you have no delight in her, then you shall set her free, but you certainly shall not sell her for money; you shall not treat her brutally, because you have humbled her.” Now that could have been a business. In wartime this would have been a lucrative business of selling these women. Basically it’s pimping, and this stopped that because this guy could not sell the woman. And by the way, “have no delight in her” wasn’t some random thing. Most commentators sense that when it says “no delight in her” it would be a Gentile woman who comes into this home and she’s not really gung-ho Yahweh. So now we’ve got a religious conflict in the middle of the family. So “no delight in her” isn’t just because he doesn’t like the color of her hair or something, it’s more profound than that. And this allows for the fact that if she didn’t basically convert in her religious beliefs that he could divorce her.

So here we have at least three restraints. But then in the Hebrew if you look at verse 14 where it says, “you certainly shall not sell her”—I don’t know which translation you have, I’m operating off the New King James translation, but whatever your translation is—where it says “shall not sell,” your translation should have somewhere in the verb area an adverb that implies you certainly should not do this, or you must not do this, and that’s the Hebrew infinitive absolute construct. When you see that in the Mosaic Law it means this is serious business, and God is adamant about this particular thing: you will not, under any circumstances “sell her for money”. He’s making an issue out of that because obviously it was an issue in that day. And “you shall not treat her brutally, because you have humbled her.” So she’s not a divorced woman in an Ancient Near East society, without inheritance, without economic support. That’s what it means by “humbling.” And so what is the welfare of this woman. Well, the Mosaic Law remember, provides for orphans and widows and so forth, and divorced women who were single. They would be taken care of by the welfare system of the time. But it was the burden to the whole community. So this is also an issue that comes up.

We want to make sure that you take away from this that there is a sensitivity to women’s welfare in the Mosaic Law. You hear these people say oh well, gee, the Bible is patriarchal; it doesn’t worry about woman. Well, yes it does, and if you compare this passage to what was going on in the Code of Hammurabi, what was going on in Syria, what was going on in Egypt, you’ll see the difference. So that’s a passage that deals with the issue of the war bride.

Now we’re going to head toward verses 18-21 which is one of the most controversial passages in all of the Old Testament. Our illustrious President just went on and made some sarcastic reference about, what do you want to do, follow the Bible and kill your children? Well actually, as you’ll find out in a few minutes, that would have been a good idea. So the point that’s going on here is this is a very strongly worded passage and it is talking about executing a certain kind of child. And it’s shocking to the modern mind that God Himself would do this. And that’s why we also have to realize that people don’t seem to understand this. When you see passages like this, the tendency is to say well, you know, that passage is for then, we believe in the loving passages of the New Testament.

And I’ve mentioned this before, but there was a heretic in early church history, about A.D. 160, called Marcion, and Marcion argued that the God of the Old Testament is a different God than the God of the New Testament. And he argued so strongly that he threw out the Old Testament and did not want the Old Testament even in the church. And he argued this point by saying that in the Old Testament God is a God of hate; in the New Testament a God of love. The liberals still do this. And we believing that the same God is the same yesterday, today and forever, can’t do that. In fact, under the doctrine of the Trinity which of the three persons would have been the visible Yahweh? It would have been the Lord Jesus Christ, so when Joshua meets the anger of the Lord, the captain of the Lord’s host, who he’s really meeting is the preincarnate Lord Jesus Christ. And when Joshua is meeting with the preincarnate Lord Jesus Christ the Lord Jesus Christ is at that moment ready to engage in holy war, and genocide of all things. This is the loving Jesus.

So you have to reconcile this and realize that it’s the same God. The difference is that here in the Old Testament He is setting up the principles of His kingdom. This is what He as a Messiah looks like. This is what He’s going to look like in the Millennial Kingdom. When He comes He’s going to rule with a rod of iron, He means business. If you’re going to be in His kingdom you’re going to follow it. I’ve used this illustration before, when my wife and I take our walks there’s this gal that has her pickup parked out there and when the Iraq war started she had this bumper sticker on that said, Who Would Jesus Bomb—one of these “peace ladies”. And I came so close of not leaving a little 3M stick-um on her truck saying read the book of Revelation and you’ll find out who Jesus bombs. But the idea there is that Jesus is not just the gentle gracious person, there’s a time when grace stops and holy war begins. Grace doesn’t last forever; grace is a temporary situation in human history.

So we come now to this passage, but we get back to the same problem, the key to a passage is the context. So since we are going to eventually get into verses 18-21 it behooves us first to get into verses 15-17, because these verses set up the context to understand the next thing, and that deals with inheritance. [15] “If a man has two wives, one loved and the other unloved, and they have borne him children, both the loved and the unloved, and if the firstborn son is of her who is unloved, [16] then it shall be, on the day he bequeaths his possessions to his sons, that he must not bestow firstborn status on the son of the loved wife in preference to the son of the unloved, the true firstborn. [17] But he shall acknowledge the son of the unloved wife as the firstborn by giving him a double portion of all that he has, for he is the beginning of his strength; the right of the firstborn is his.”

Now clearly this is an inheritance passage, so that introduces inheritance, and the role that inheritance played. Inheritance in the Old Testament was protected. It was an asset given to the family and that inheritance had to be protected from generation to generation to generation. If the family got in dire economic straits and had to make a big business loan, whatever, and they got into an in debt situation to pay off this big business loan, and they couldn’t, something went wrong economically, they would not lose the title to that inheritance because in the 49^th year, the year of the Jubilee, the title would come back to that family, even though temporarily, for many, many decades that title was taken by the guy to whom they owed money, but it reverted back to that family. And again, when you look at the Old Testament those weird kind of customs are physical, political and socially visible example of spiritual truths. And the spiritual truth that is illustrated by this secure inheritance is eternal security. And that’s the theological thing, and that’s why God wants so carefully in the Old Testament preserved inheritance, because it’s a picture of what’s going to happen, our inheritance in the kingdom of God. It’s ours and it can’t be taken away.

So it can’t be taken away from a family in the Old Testament, so inheritance played a big role. Not only was it a picture of eternal security but it was the core of economic survival. Remember, there’s no social security, there’s no government welfare programs, the economic survival of a family depended on the transfer of assets from parents to children, parents to children, parents to children. And if all went well that inheritance would grow with time. The next generation would supposedly build on the shoulders of the first generation. And another obvious example of why this was so important is that that was the way they took care of their aged. Who took care of the old people? They had old people in the Old Testament, people that were probably in ill health; people who like Jacob were almost blind when they were elderly. Who takes care of the old people? It wasn’t a government program, it was the children, but which children? It was the child that was firstborn, he was given a double portion, not as a reward for being firstborn, he’s given the double portion because as firstborn he is in charge of taking care of the family; he’s the oldest son. And that gave him that responsibility. So to whom much is given much is expected. So this idea of giving double portions isn’t just, you know, a nice gift to the child to go blow somewhere; this was essential to the welfare of that family unit. So this whole inheritance thing, again, is a big, big economic issue.

Someone pointed out in today’s world when you have a child, by the time that child gets to be an adult you probably have spent, including education costs and everything else, probably close to a quarter million dollars, if not more. That’s big business, so if you’re having three or four children, you’re talking a big business; families are a business.

So it says, “If a man has two wives.” So here’s the polygamy problem. They’ve got a problem here, because again he shouldn’t have two wives, but now because they’re in a society that basically the Lord Jesus said, hardness of heart, remember in the Old Testament there’s believers and unbelievers, this is a mixed society, it’s not all believers. So you have a problem. So immediately, the first case in verse 15, you’ve got a case where the family has been disrupted. Here’s a case where they’re not following God’s design. Well, if you don’t follow God’s design you’re going to run into a problem. And so here’s the problem. He has one wife he prefers over the other one. That’s always “great” for a family situation! “…and they have borne him children,” and “the firstborn son is of her who is unloved.” So obviously the tendency is, because he has a better relationship with the other woman, to favor her children. Ah-ah, can’t do that, God said. And the reason he can’t do that has to do with how God considers this matter of firstborn. If you look down at the last clause in verse 17, that clause shows you a little bit about what God thinks about firstborn, or how the people thought about firstborn, “he is the beginning of his strength.”

Now there’s a series of passages in the Bible about firstborn. In your notes. Exodus 4:22 I quote there, Yahweh, Jehovah calls Israel His firstborn son. That means Israel is the first entity in history that is part and parcel to the kingdom of God. Israel is My firstborn son. Then in Exodus 13:1 God says, and I quote it all there in italics, “Consecrate to Me all the firstborn; whatever opens the womb among the

children of Israel, both of man and beast; it is Mine.” Now let’s start; we’ve got to ask the text something and look to the Lord for an answer. Notice in that Exodus 13:1 passage, I’ve underlined it. See the synonym they’re using for firstborn? The synonym there is he who “opens the womb.” So clearly there’s something about the firstborn here, physically. The first born is the one that opens the womb. And it happens to be, as we say in verse 17, “he is the beginning of your strength,” meaning this is the first evidence of the next generation in that family. That’s what’s so significant about the firstborn son. He’s a promise. He’s a picture of the fact that God is going to bless this family and we now know, because we’ve got a firstborn son. So there’s a significance to this.

Now the problem comes that if you look at the Genesis stories of the patriarchs the firstborn son didn’t necessarily get the seed transfer, or the son of the covenant. Remember, Isaac, Jacob and Esau and those stories, and Abraham and Sarah desperately wanted children and they wound up producing Ishmael who now is basically the father of all the Arabs. Instead, Ishmael, though he was older than Isaac, he was not the inheritor of the Messianic promise. And remember, we went through circumcision and so forth, it’s because God doesn’t necessarily honor the firstborn spiritually. The spiritual character is a result of whether this child was born again, whether he’s in the covenant or not, but the money would generally go to the firstborn because they were physically responsible.

Now, the question is, what do you do about a child who is not sufficiently mature, he somehow shows his mom and dad that he’s really not reliable for inheriting the family business and carrying on? That’s going to come up. But right now the disinheriting process cannot be due to personal preference of the mothers. So that’s what’s forbidden here. You could disinherit, but the reason for the disinheritance could not be that well, she was my favorite wife and so therefore I’m going to favor her children. That is an insufficient reason. And probably it was very wise because if that were the case and the son of the well-loved wife was in control of the family finances he would naturally support his mother to the detriment of whom? To the detriment of the woman that was not well-loved. So there was a little reasoning behind this whole thing. I know, we’re not going to let little Johnnie have all the money because I know what you’re going to do with it, you’re going to favor your own mom over the unloved woman. So there are economic restraints in this whole passage.

Now we come down to the passage at hand, verses 18-21, the execution of this, and this is Dr. North’s commentary on Deuteronomy and I cite it, not because I agree with everything Dr. North does, but he has some very insightful comments about the implications of these principles into today’s culture. And I think it’s well worth looking at this quote.

“The State has become a pseudo-family, educating children according to its standards and presuppo­sitions, funding health care, paying for men’s retirement, and so forth.” Is that not correct? This is what our society has done; the European society is doing this. “To do this,” now watch, here’s the complication, here’s where it gets greasy, “To do this the State must decapitalize the family through taxation.” Now what is he talking about by “decapitalizing the family”? Let’s think about that. What is family capital? Family capital is the assets that family owns to be able to pass to the next generation. When he uses that word “decapitalize” he’s talking about the state reaching into the family and grabbing those assets and taking them away. That’s decapitalizing the family. Now why does the government do that? Well, let me read on.

“The State, unlike a biblically-defined family, does not create wealth.” Government doesn’t make wealth. They have a printing press, and people say oh well, we can just keep on spending, spending, spending; just print more money. Ah, but the downside is that every time you start the printing presses each dollar gets less and less and less in value, and so what you’ve really done is steal from everybody. The State doesn’t create wealth, it consumes wealth as it redistributes it from one group to another.…” Boy, doesn’t that sound contemporary! This was written, by the way, a decade ago. “It consumes wealth.” “Voters do not recognize the cause-and-effect relationship between the State’s offer of support for the aged.” Such a popular legislation! People say oh, if we cut government we’re going to cut all the health to the aged. “They do not recognize the implicit legal claim which the State is making: reducing the ability of economically successful men to pass on wealth to their heirs.” That’s why they have to decapitalize the family. “As voters transfer more and more responsibility to the State for the care of the aged, the State steadily becomes the substitute heir.”

So now we have a role reversal, don’t we? The State now assumes a role of the firstborn son. Who now becomes responsible for the aged? The State. And it’s responsible because everybody voted for it. It sounds like a great idea, I don’t want to be bothered by my old lady, my old man, I’m going to let the State take care of them. Yeah, but the State then takes the money away from the family unit because basically the family unit is dysfunctional, so why should it retain any assets. It’s already obligated the State to take up the slack. So this is some, I think, very contemporary, serious concepts that when you think about the Old Testament, and yes, there’s some things in here that we couldn’t apply today, and we would do it differently, but the big ideas behind this text still hold.

So let’s look at what happens in verse 18, now we come to another case law, it’s another one of these “ifs.” What do we do now? By the way, the heresy of Marcion is this slide here. He distinguished between the Creator God, the Old Testament God, versus the New Testament God. People do this all the time and don’t realize there heretics when they do it, but this is the title of this heretic, Marcion. And the person who does this kind of thing you can eruditely refer to as Marcions, or Marcionites. And then put that in the trivia quiz.

Now, let me look now at this: [18] “If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and who, when they have chastened him, will not heed them, [19] then,” so here’s the if/then, “then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city, to the gate of his city.” Now there’s several things in this “if” clause, so we’re getting up to a capital crime here so we have to track carefully what’s going on here to cause this episode. It says, he “has a stubborn and rebellious son,” so now we know two adjectives that describe this child. And it appears that this child, by the way, is not a child; this is a person who is an adult son, ready to carry on the family line because inheritance is the context here.

[18] “If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother,” so now mother and dad, because remember, you can’t go into the jurisprudence protocols of the Old Testament, how many witnesses do you need in the Old Testament? You need two. That’s why capital punishment in the Old Testament is probably rare, actually, it was probably rarely done because you had such a high standard of rules of evidence, there had to be two witnesses. And how many times are there going to be two witnesses to a murder? Not too often. So ironically the people that fuss about oh, there’s capital punishment in the Old Testament, don’t also read there are very strict rules of evidence for capital punishment in the Old Testament. So here you have to have mother and father, BOTH agreeing. So this isn’t just one parent that’s ticked off. Now probably every parent at one time or another would like to have done this, but you have to have unity in the home to agree that this is not working; it’s a “stubborn and rebellious son.”

“…when they have chastened him, will not heed them,” so that shows that these parents have been exercising their parental authority to the extent that they have authority inside the family. They do not have, a family does not have the right of execution. And that’s important because in the ancient world the family did have the right to kill their children; in Rome it was regularly done. In Rome, a Roman dad, if he didn’t like his kid he could kick him out in the street, kill him. If his wife delivered a baby, he didn’t like the baby, he’d stick it outside the door and it’d starve to death. And by the way, you know who would pick up the babies that were put in the streets? The Christians. That was one of the social impacts of the Christian religion in the Roman Empire. They were the ones that basically scoured the streets; they were the Mother Theresa’s of their time that took care of these babies and children. So that was historically a big point.

But here, in the Mosaic Law the mom and dad had gone to the full extent of their authority and it was not working. They had chastened him and he “will not heed them.” So they’re at their wits end, they’ve done everything they can, and the way of chastening in the Scriptures involved discipline, it involved even corporal punishment. It was not a case of beating the life out of the kid; it wasn’t supposed to be done that way. The model is in Hebrews 12 where the author of the Hebrews says God does that to us. As Christians He disciplines us, because He’s a loving Father. And in fact the author of Hebrews goes so far as to say that if we be without discipline when we sin it’s a sign we’re not saved. I have to laugh at some of these people who are into lordship salvation, they’re always looking for fruit as evidence of salvation; they ought to look at some beaten butts as an evidence of salvation because that’s what the author of Hebrews is saying, that you don’t get away with things in the Father’s family. Discipline, suffering and so on, is a sign that you are saved.

So here we are, and the parents are up to their necks in this thing: “then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city, to the gate of his city.” Now this introduces civil authority. Notice the shift, you go from family authority to civil authority. [20] “And they shall say to the elders of his city…” Now we have to look at this statement carefully because it’s not straightforward what’s going on here, so you have to kind of exercise your mind on where is the capital crime. I mean, if this is going to be capital punishment there’s got to be a crime here, and gluttony isn’t a crime, according to the Mosaic Law. So watch the charging language, and then we have to infer from that in the context what is the basis for a civil suit.

“They shall say to the elders of the city, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’” Now people fix on the last two things, a glutton and a drunkard. That may be sarcasm, in other words, it may not even be that he’s a literal glutton and a drunkard. That may (as in Proverbs, sometimes you’ll see that) be a way of describing a useless individual who was a fool, a person who is in rebellion. I think the key in this sentence is “he is stubborn and rebellious,” because that’s the second time in this passage that phraseology is repeated. Notice what it said back in verse 18, same phrase. So this is the second time that phrase occurs, “he is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice, he is a glutton and a drunkard.”

Now in light of the context of inheritance and the responsibility to carry on the family name, this could be a firstborn son here that’s being talked about. If this is the firstborn son and he is supposed to have responsibility for the assets of the family and he’s just rebellious, he obviously is rebelling against the structures of God, he is maybe a glutton and a drunkard, is that son in a position to carry on the responsibilities of that family? Absolutely not because inheritance in that day and that economy (the theocratic kingdom) was the security of that family unit; and it’s not just a case where this son is just a random brat, this is a case of a person who is going to destroy that family. That family will ultimately go down because you have a child here that doesn’t get it, that apparently thinks the world owes him a living and can suck the nutrition out of everybody around him, and will not bear his own weight.

So now we have a situation, and the charge here we know from other passages of Scripture can’t be that he struck his parents. In all this discipline there doesn’t seem to be any physical assault back on his parents. If that were the case and that is Exodus 21:15, 17, as I point out in the handout, would have been a capital crime. So it was not an assault against his parents, physically. So that’s out of the window. The only other one that comes to mind is Deuteronomy 13:6-11 and that is he could become an idolater or going after one of the religious cults and being an advocate for that, and that would have been a capital crime. But the parents aren’t accusing him of that either. So since the parents aren’t accusing him of violence, they’re not accusing him of being a false prophet, what are they accusing him of? And it appears that he is just somebody who is ill fit to carry on that family destiny.

Now you could argue still, but why do they have to kill him, why don’t they just disinherit them. Let’s think about that objection. Let’s suppose, here they are, and they decide okay, you worthless thing, we’re going to cut off. And they could; they could disinherit the child. But let’s ask another question. If they disinherited that child who, then, gets involved with the child? All the rest of the city. So what happens here is they’re dumping their problem child onto society. You see what’s happening. Now think about what goes on today and tell me that this is a cruel way of dealing with the problem. What this passage is doing is it goes back to the structure of families. Families are the culture generators; tomorrow’s culture is what is being bred in our families today.

So if we want a look at what the country is going to look like we look at the children of today. This is why those of us who can remember the horrors of the 70s with the hippies running around and the anti-war demonstrators and everybody fleeing to Canada and all these proud late teenagers and college students that were very moral and ethical and so on as they fornicated in the communes of Colorado and lived on their parent’s credit cards; this is the same group that leads our country today. Do your math; figure out the ages. The people that run this country today are the people that grew up in the 70s, in that era. And yes, they’ve cut their hair and they take a bath and they smell better, but the point still remains is that mentally their perspective is exactly the way it was in the 70s. No responsibilities, it’s always somebody else’s fault; I’m never responsible so I’m never going to admit that I’m wrong, and so forth. And by the way, I don’t have to wealth because the world owes me a living; I have entitlements to whatever. And this is the way they think. And so they, in turn, are breeding another generation they’re indoctrinating with the same way of thinking.

So now in God’s sight, in the theocracy, He cut if off. When a child was incapable of handling the responsibility that would fall on his shoulders as the head of that family they’d get rid of him. And they wouldn’t dump him out so all the other families have to take up the slack and through taxes and everything else they’ve got to do financial sacrifice to take care of this problem that that family should have taken care of.

So now we have, what they say, “This son of ours is stubborn,” [20] “Then all the men…” And then interesting, in the passages that deal with execution, who is the one that throws the first stone? The accuser. Remember those passages, when you have capital punishment by stoning the people who brought the accusation are the ones that throw the first stone. And that was a nice sobering way to make sure that you don’t bring false accusation, you have to stand there and look this person in the face and hit him with a rock. It tends to make you a little bit more sober about accusing someone of something. But who, in this verse, throws the first stone. Notice what happens? It’s not following the same procedure of execution here.

It says, [21] “Then all the men of his city shall stone him to death with stones; so shall you put away the evil from among you, and all Israel shall hear and fear.” So it wasn’t the parents that threw the first stones, and that might be God’s compassion. I mean, no parent is going to sit here and just be so happy that they’re killing their son. So the men of the village would come and they would be the ones that would do the executions.

Now, I want to conclude, I have originally in this, you see in the handout where I put some of Dr. North’s commentary because I think it’s very contemporary. I think he’s thought through some of these issue. He is a theonomist, he’s a guy that would impose the Mosaic Law today and we don’t believe that God is setting up His kingdom; we’re not living in a theocracy. But nonetheless, that idea of using the Law has made him and his scholars careful exegetes of the Law. They have really thought through the implications.

So I put the whole thing there, we don’t have time to go through all the notes, but I’ll put three slides up that I’ll show you. And I think these speak to our times because they speak to the design of what’s going on sociologically. Parents today cry out to the State: “We can’t control our children, they rebel against our authority continually; therefore we must address the drug dealers, convict them, imprison them and throw away the keys”. What they do not say is this: our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice, he’s a drug addict; stone him to death so other people’s son learn to fear. See, it doesn’t stop there and I point out that historically we don’t have one instance in all the Old Testament of this ever being executed. This procedure, there’s not a record of it anywhere; even in secular sources parallel to the Old Testament. So this was apparently never done and it was either because the kids did mind their parents out of fear of this thing or the parents never could bring themselves to do it. And this is why in the New Testament, when Jesus is talking about making disciples, notice what He said, “He who loves mother and father more than Me is not worthy of Me,” and then He adds the next clause, where He says, “and He who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.” So Jesus sets the same priorities as this text does.

Here’s the second thing excerpted from the notes that I’ve attached to your handouts. “Sons and daughters in today’s world of unprecedented wealth are then, nevertheless, willfully destroying themselves, squandering their inheritance; not in some far country as the prodigal son did, but in the bedrooms of their parent’s homes. They are perfect examples of the rebellious son of Deuteronomy 21. Here is why the drug trade flourishes. Parents have given their children enormous wealth without guidance or restrictions, and have sent them into the government’s tax-funded schools, which have become the primary marketplace for drugs, especially in the early stages of addiction. The modern public schools are a state-funded drug emporium.” How’s that for a page 1 article in The Baltimore Sun?

“The question here is the primary locus of enforcement; the biblical locus of primary law enforcement is the family…” In other words, that’s where you first see the problem. “… The Bible acknowledges that the institution of the lowest cost of attaining accurate information should be the initial law enforcing agent. This is obviously the family in cases of gluttonous, drunkenness and drug addiction. Any attempt by parents to shift the locus of primary responsibility to either school or State is illegitimate.” Do you see how this cuts across the thinking of our society and our culture today? I mean, it just cuts right across that.

So that’s what we want to look at when we start thinking about the text of the theocracy, because this kind of kingdom and the moral and ethical principles that we see in the Old Testament is coming. When the Lord Jesus Christ sets up the Millennial Kingdom He’s going to rule the same way He ruled in the Old Testament; there’s going to be capital punishment in the Millennial Kingdom. I don’t know what all of the lawyers are going to do. They probably won’t get into the Kingdom to start with, but the point is that there’s going to be stuff that’s going to shock people, and the idea of this nice gentle Jesus, because He’s going to rule with a rod of iron, not ungraciously but because it’s going to be in a fallen world, still, that sin has to be forcibly restrained.

Okay, well this finishes up chapter 21 so let’s close out and we’ll have just a few minutes of Q and A.

[question asked] That’s a good point, that that passages requires a two-fold witness and that you can’t… it’s dealing with a polygamous society, you can tell, there’s restraints in there, God had to deal with it because that’s what was going on. So He had to build restraints in there but again, as I say, nowhere in the Old Testament do we have any reference of this ever happening. And again it may be due to the fact that the parents couldn’t bring themselves to do it. Lots of the rules in the Mosaic Law Code were not really carried out. The conquest was never carried out, but when you look at the text you still have to keep asking yourself, why is this in the text, why does God want that to happen, regardless of whether it was actually obeyed or not or carried out.

Next time we’re going to finish chapter 23 and we’re going to be moving into the area of the text that deals with the 8^th commandment which is the fact that “thou shalt not steal,” and like these other commandments, when you get into these things you realize that “thou shalt not steal” isn’t just talking about stealing somebody’s donkey or something, I mean, it includes that but it includes a lot more. And you’ve already seen part of that because in one of these sections, remember, if you find somebody’s donkey that’s loose, that’s stray, you’re supposed to take care of that and hold it until you find the owner. Well, you wouldn’t think of not doing that as theft, but see, there’s a bigger idea behind these Ten Commandments, they look simple and that’s why I think there’s so many of these case laws to show you that the heart of God when He gave those Ten Commandments.

One more question [can’t hear]. A good point, everybody get the point he’s making, that the spiritual side of this is that we as individual believers, we are kind of like the firstborn there in that God has given to us our assets in Christ, and we have been stubborn, and when we sin, stubborn, rebellious, and you know, it’s good that our Father doesn’t do to us spiritually what is going on back there. And then, the very passage on substitutionary atonement occurs right after the child thing there, so that’s a good observation.

Next week we’ll finish up chapter 23.