Deuteronomy

Monarchy vs. Theocracy

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 56-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 056

Dictation Name: RR187AD56

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. The Lord is night unto all them that call upon Him, to all that call upon Him in truth. He will fulfill the desire of them that fear Him, He will also hear their cry and will save them. Oh Thou that hearest prayer unto Thee shall all flesh come. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God we come unto Thee unto Thy word. We thank Thee that Thou dost hear us. We thank Thee that there is nothing too great nor too small for Thy attention and for Thy solution. Therefore we come, we cast our every care upon Thee who carest for us more than we care for ourselves. Lead us in the way that we should go, bless and prosper us and grant us Thy peace. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Our scripture this morning is from Deuteronomy 17:14-20. Our subject is Monarchy vs. Theocracy. Deuteronomy 17:14-20.

“When thou art come unto the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, and shalt possess it, and shalt dwell therein, and shalt say, I will set a king over me, like as all the nations that are about me;

15 Thou shalt in any wise set him king over thee, whom the Lord thy God shall choose: one from among thy brethren shalt thou set king over thee: thou mayest not set a stranger over thee, which is not thy brother.

16 But he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt, to the end that he should multiply horses: forasmuch as the Lord hath said unto you, Ye shall henceforth return no more that way.

17 Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away: neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold.

18 And it shall be, when he sitteth upon the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write him a copy of this law in a book out of that which is before the priests the Levites:

19 And it shall be with him, and he shall read therein all the days of his life: that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do them:

20 That his heart be not lifted up above his brethren, and that he turn not aside from the commandment, to the right hand, or to the left: to the end that he may prolong his days in his kingdom, he, and his children, in the midst of Israel.”

I said that our subject is Monarchy vs. Theocracy. Theocracy meaning God’s rule. But Monarchy is a term that can be very inclusive. Who is sovereign, who is Lord in a political system? It can be one man, a king, or a dictator or a group of men or the people! If you study the legal language you find that Britain is still a monarchy but the sovereign power is now in Parliament. Now of course it’s in the European community. Our supreme Court against the Constitution has declared that the federal government is sovereign, it is the monarch, it is the lord. Whether you make the people the king or a group of people it is rule by man, not by God. Well biblical law is moral laws. It sets forth the premises to govern immoral man morally. Man is by nature immoral. The goal of his being is my will be done but our Lord says to God Thy will be done. Biblical law covers situations and problems which many may find intolerable but which are still aspects of the human scene. Modern statist law is not moral, what Congress or the California legislature or the county fathers pass is ad-hoc law. Ad, A-D, hoc, H-O-C, which is created in the context of a situation or crisis and intended to control it. Ad-hoc means very literally, it is Latin, to this. Ad-hoc law does not concern itself with the truth although in a Christianized culture it may use the language of truth.

Ad hoc law sees a problem and all it does is try and control it! And in so doing it normally advances the power of the governing group. Biblical law deals with God’s order, God’s justice, ad hoc law seeks to develop the power of the state. The state or the governing body makes up the rules as they go along, makes up the rules out of nothing. Scholars with an ad hoc law mentality cannot understand biblical law. The concern in this case is with monarchy. They cannot believe that it was written centuries before the Israelite monarchy came into being, that God hundreds in years in advance gave the law governing it, here and elsewhere. Told them they were not to have a monarchy but if they did they had to at least follow certain rules. Now, their ad hoc mentality leads them to re-date everything in the bible in terms of a crisis, an ad hoc context. The world today has an ad hoc mentality which means they make up the rules as they go along. The rules have no relationship to right and wrong it’s just ‘well we have a crisis here what are we going to do about it, well we’ve decided to do thus-and-so’ and their thus-and-so that they do has no relationship to truth. No relationship to right and wrong. In the current Reader’s Digest there is a case narrated about a man who in a state other than which he resided without a valid license driving under the influence was responsible for the death of a six year old boy. He could not be tried for murder because he did not have a legal license! Now that’s the ad hoc mentality. There is no moral principle governing anything just some kind of law passed in terms of a particular situation.

So justice is not done. Justice is not the concern. Now this attitude towards law means that history’s crisis’ not God the Lord determines history or at least they think so. The bible therefore is reordered by them in terms of ad hoc crisis’s which ostensibly led to the particular law or revelation, in other words, if God said anything about monarchy it had to be because there was a king about to be chosen. Not God, but human experience becomes the ultimate determiner. Now this ad hoc dispensation is common not only to Biblical scholars but existed among the Israelites as verse fourteen tells us. The land and the law come from God but the peoples will still look to other nations for example and for guidance. Implicit in this is a disregard for God on their part. Also implicit in it is the statement if God gave the land cannot He keep it for them without anything on their part? But if God gave the law He is therefore their king, then why cannot He best rule over them. In other words, the demand for a king was an act of apostasy from God the King. As Samuel told them centuries later:

“And when ye saw that Nahash the king of the children of Ammon came against you, ye said unto me, Nay; but a king shall reign over us: when the LORD your God was your king.”

What do they do? They saw the Ammonites come with a king who was a person who gave the orders and they said oh that’s a beautiful system, let’s be ruled by someone and then we don’t have the responsibilities for decisions. And let the king make up the rules as he goes along instead of having the Lord to rule over us. The ad hoc mentality.

This is deeply ingrained in our time. When in the 1960s the student rebellion broke out at Berkeley one of the first things issued by the students was a triple ad hoc declaration. They were not looking to see ‘what is right and wrong here’ but they wanted a rule that would suit them, ad hoc. Now God knew that in time the people would reject a theocracy, rule by God’s law, in favor of a rule by a monarch, by a man and his law. When European monarchs used the Bible to vindicate monarchy their use of texts was very selective and the Bible in the hands of the people was frowned upon, it was very unpopular. The Geneva bible had many marginal notes on texts unfavorable to monarchs. It is interesting that there is no marginal note to this text because they knew it would be the first case to which King James would turn to see what those people were saying, so they scattered their comments about monarchy in other places. Anticipating Israel’s waywardness here as elsewhere God laid down certain restrictions after stating monarchy would be a form of apostasy, of rebellion against Him. First they could not choose a foreigner as their king. Since monarchy was a pagan practice and since it meant supplanting God as King with a mere man at least they should avoid an alien. Second, the king had to be one of them, a fellow Hebrew so that there would be to some degree an awareness of the covenant of God’s law. Ignorance of this would lead as it did when Jezebel took over the initiative from Ahab, evil such as Ahab did not dare to institute on his own.

And third he shall not multiply horses unto himself, verse sixteen tells us. Now this is a very interesting requirement because it is a ban on foreign wars. This is why Washington was against foreign wars. An infantry could effectively defend the homeland whereas a cavalry was a necessity in invasions of foreign countries. Horses in that era were primarily military animals. Oxen and asses were used for farming and travel and in some areas camels were also used. Incidentally there are as you know several breeds of giant horses, the Clydesdale and others. These were bred out of necessity for war because a knight with armor was a man with a great deal of weight on him, often a weight equal to himself. You had to be a strong man to move around in armor and the horse had to be armored in part as well so you had to have a giant horse to carry a knight. Once that type of warfare ended these giant horses were used for things, as in this country, pulling huge brewery wagons because of their strength. Farm animals did not have to be that big. Then fourth, there should be no return to Egypt in any way, God said. Egypt was the great horse breeding and horse selling country of antiquity. So it was a very seductive idea to establish close ties with a nation so very important in military preparedness if you were going to wage foreign wars. Then fifth, verse seventeen says the monarchs shall not multiply wives unto himself. These would wean his heart away, we are told. Now our modern tendency is to assume that this was simply sexual. But the purpose of royal polygamy in antiquity was to establish international alliances. This was true until fairly recent times and up until the last century with the monarchs of Europe. They would marry in terms of forming alliances and they would be given mistresses by other countries also for political reasons, to try and influence the king in a certain direction. As recent as the 1930s I was told by a missionary that if an African chief was not given a wife by say a particular tribe or if he rejected the wife or concubine they sent him it was tantamount to a declaration of war. It was a form of establishing alliances so the more alliances, the more wives.

These foreign women also served to infiltrate a pagan religion into a country. Then sixth, in verse seventeen we are told the ruler should not greatly multiply to himself silver and gold. Now the law barring false weights and measures in Leviticus 19:35-37 and Deuteronomy 25:13-16 and elsewhere, this law requires the use of gold and silver as a loan. True weights, true measures, true money. So this requirement of the rulers is not a law against hard money. It has reference to Exodus 30:11-16. This law limited the civil tax to half a shekel to all males twenty years of age and older. If we had something like that today we would say the only tax that could be imposed on any person could not be on women on children, but all males twenty years and older, was two hundred dollars a year. No more, no less, the same for rich and poor, this was the law. And for centuries in some countries it was practiced. We have a survival of it in this country in the pole tax but then they added other taxes onto that as they departed from God’s way. The ruler is forbidden to accumulate wealth by undue taxes because it is not God’s purpose that the king be rich but rather that the people prosper. Then seventh, the king must have a copy of God’s law and he must study it constantly. It is imperative that he govern by God’s law and it is so he must master it, he must know it. He must learn to fear God’s law, to serve God’s law and to use it and to see it as ruling over himself and all the people. The reasons for this are then given. First if the ruler does not see God’s law as over him then his heart will be lifted up above the people, he will be proud and arrogant, verse twenty tells us. He will regard himself as a person apart, not as a minister of God’s government. Then second, this means that the ruler must not depart from God’s law to the right hand or to the left, in other words, he must not be more severe than God’s law permits nor more lax. He must apply it faithfully.

Third, only by God’s law can a ruler prolong the days of his posterity and himself in peace and prosperity. The expression ‘to have his heart lifted up’ means to act proudly and haughtily as though he was above his people. The law makes clear that the ruler is equally under God’s law as the people and even more so. Our Lord tells us ‘for unto whom much is given of him shall be much required and to whom men have committed much of him they will ask the more’. Now this is basic to biblical law. The more important a man’s position is the more severe the punishment of him has to be. This means that the judge has to be judged more severely than the people who appear before him. That rulers, people in high places, have to be judged more severely than the people at large. Arrogance too readily goes with power. The desire in Israel for a monarchy was to increase the nation’s efficiency and power. But power decreases efficiency because as the power accrues to civil rulers they govern increasingly in terms of power goals rather than justice. Injustice then prevails and efforts to remedy it by statist means only aggravate the problem. The arrogance of human power has a long history. Now, this is man’s government rather than God’s. In man’s government whether it is monarchy, dictatorship, aristocracy, republic or democracy the idea is rule by man. And its essential temper can be summed up in the statement ‘my will be done’. But what God says is that we must say to Him ‘Thy will be done’. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God we thank Thee for this Thy word. We know that it applies to our times and our redemption requires its application. For men have rebelled against Thee, they have cast off the kingship of our Lord and they have made themselves into rulers, into gods dominating the human scene. Deliver us oh Lord in Thy mercy. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

This is an issue that we shall return to as we continue our studies in Deuteronomy because basic to it whether it be the requirements of weights and measures, is whose will shall be done: man’s will or God’s? Yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes…

[Same man continues talking]

[Rushdoony] In antiquity it was not so much choice but power that led to various men ruling rather than a hereditary rule. The monarchs who came to power early in Europe were a series of very remarkable men. Their failure was not because their genetic character was weak, it was very strong, but it was endless inbreeding, the royal families kept intermarrying and the result was they were producing more and more peculiar people, retarded people, and they committed suicide that way. When it was a matter of choice it was a struggle for power among various groups. When it was a matter of hereditary then because blue bloods so called was regarded as necessary for a Queen the result was excessive inbreeding. One of the things that created a crisis all over Europe was there was so much intermarriage, well, King George the Fifth and Nicholas the Second, sorry, not Nicholas the Second, well the last Czar of Russia, looked as though they were twins, they were cousins. Queen Victoria gave certain genetic deformities to all her children and grandchildren; this is why the English royal house has tried to marry out of the usual pattern in order to restore some vitality to their line. So none of the attempts whether elective or hereditary have worked, they’ve created problems. Any other questions or comments?

Well if not let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, we pray that as we move into one of history’s greatest if not the greatest crisis’s, when men and nations shall be shaken, that by Thy spirit Thou wouldst return peoples to Thy law word so that we may rebuild on a sure foundation, that we may know the kingship of Christ and the rule of Thy law. We pray oh Lord make us again a righteous people. And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, Amen.