03 - No King: Tyranny, Freedom, and the Bible [A]

No King: Tyranny, Freedom, and the Bible
The Book of Judges
Judges Lesson #003
January 26, 2021
Dr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org

Opening Prayer

“Our Father, we are so grateful that we have You to come to, You are our rock, our fortress. You are our strong tower, You are our bulwark, our shield, and we know that as we live in the devil’s world and we go throughout all of the different things that are happening around us and the uncertainties and vagaries of life seem to be exponentially increased during this time, we know that nothing changes with You.

“You’re the same yesterday, today and forever. Your plan has been the same. It has not changed, and You will allow that which You will allow in order to bring about the greatest glory for Yourself and to emphasize the fact that there is no hope, there is no meaning, there is no purpose. There is no stability at all in life apart from You. You are our foundation stone and the rock upon which our lives are grounded because that rock is Jesus Christ, the cornerstone of the church.

“Now Father, as we study Your Word, we pray that we might be strengthened and encouraged, that we might recognize that You have a plan even in the darkest of times as we see in this period of the judges in Israel, and that we can still have hope, we can have a positive outlook. We should not let that which goes on around us affect our mental attitude and our stability, and that is indeed the test right now is that we focus upon You, to get rid of all these external distractions that get in the way of our mental attitude stability, and focus upon You which is the way it always should be.

“So, we thank You for this test and those other tests that teach us to trust You. And we ask that You enlighten our minds to what we study this evening related to the Book of Judges and the period of the judges, and we pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”

Slide 2

Tonight we’re going to look at another general overview-type introductory message on the Book of Judges, in the period of the judges understanding these important themes. Last time we looked at the context of the Book of Judges fitting it with in the biblical history of Genesis through Joshua to understand the flow of what is going on in God’s plan and purpose for Israel.

In the first lesson, we did an overview of twenty-one chapters in Judges, and tonight we’re going to drill down a little bit on that which is the theme of this book that is stated in Judges 21:25, and that is that there’s no king in Israel and the implications of that.

What we’re going to see again and again as we go through this is there’s a rejection of authority, and when we reject authority in our lives, starting with the authority of God and the authorities that God has established, then the end result is always instability.

The end result is always chaos because once we deny the existence of God—just think about the implications of that—when we deny the existence of God, at that point, Romans says we’re suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. What that means is we’re creating our own truth; we’re creating our own alternate reality, and that starts at that point.

To some degree, whenever we operate on the sin nature, we’re operating on this fantasy world that somehow our God really isn’t in control; I don’t have to trust Him; I can find life and meaning and purpose somewhere other than God, and I can find hope in the details of His Creation rather than in having an intimate relationship with Him and His person. And if I don’t that, then I’m denying reality, the very foundation, structure, and Creator of reality.

So I can’t have any kind of stability if I’m not living in a realistic world and have a mindset that is based on reality. Once we reject that authority structure that’s established by God from the very beginning, then we start living in just a fantasy world.

Slide 3

Judges 21:25 says, “In those days there was no king in Israel;” and as I pointed out last time and tonight, that’s not just stating the fact that this is written at some time later, probably after Saul has become king. Because the implication here is telling the readers that back in that period, there wasn’t a king implies that the time it’s written there is a king. So, it’s early in the monarchy, probably written during the time of Saul.

But that’s not the point. The point is that in terms of the flow of God’s plan for Israel, during this time, God was the king. It was a theocracy. God set Himself up, and we will look at some of that this evening.

When God’s authority as king and God’s authority that would lie behind the king, when there was a king that He chose, then there would be stability. What He is showing is that when there’s this rejection of God as the ultimate authority, then in its place, everybody is always doing what’s right in their own eyes. I pointed that out last time.

If you go back to Eve in the Garden when the serpent comes to her and says, “Did God really say?” He’s putting her in a position where she has to decide whether what God said is true or not. So she is suddenly being forced to put herself as the judge to determine if God is right or not. At that point, she’s already on that slippery slope that will lead to sin, that she is thinking: I have to determine does God really have my best interests in mind? So, she’s deciding what is right in terms of her own frame of reference.

Slide 4

Three other times: in Judges 17:6, in Judges 18:1, and in Judges 19:1, the writer says that there was no king in Israel in those days. This is heavily emphasized. If you’ve gone through the courses I’ve taught on Bible Study Methods, in the first stage of Bible Study Methods you have the stage of observation. There are a lot of different things to look for in observation.

One of the things to look for is repetition. Whenever God the Holy Spirit repeats a verse or repeats a phrase several times in the same context, then you know that that is like a bold face with bright lights shining on it. That is the way that He is emphasizing something, and the repetition is to get our attention to pay attention to something.

So, four times, when these last few chapters of Judges tell us that, we really need to pay attention to this because that’s what He’s illustrating throughout this book. So the whole thesis in Judges is that when we reject the authority of God, it destroys our personal life, but it’s not just about us.

See that’s the little trick in our sin nature; it wants us to say you know you can get away with the sin because it’s just about you. But sin and the rejection of God’s authority in any of our lives not only impacts our own spiritual life, but it corrupts a marriage, it corrupts a family, it corrupts a city, a town, a country, a nation, a culture. All of those become corrupted, and that’s what is being illustrated here is that when we have an apostate, anti-God, relativistic culture, which is what we have. It changes everything.

Can you imagine your grandparents, born in the late 19^th century—for some of you that may mean your great-grandparents or great-great-grandparents—can you imagine taking somebody that was born in the 1880s or 1890s, and bringing them forward 130 or 140 years to 2021? They would be absolutely flabbergasted at where we are. They would be so upset and angry and offended; I can’t imagine the response because they would see a culture that they had never seen before.

Nothing that exists today under the guise of freedom is what they ever imagined, because they understood that for freedom to function, it has to be first of all, under authority, and second, it has to have personal responsibility and accountability for the decisions that we make in life. The more we get into moral relativism, the more those two things have disappeared.

So we have a culture and a world today that is degenerate, that is depraved, that is where a lot of criminality is just simply overlooked because if we were to truly prosecute all criminality, we would not have any place to put all the criminals. We have lost a sense of absolutes and living according to those absolutes.

Once we get into moral relativism, Judges teaches that it transforms worship practices. We’ve seen a radical transformation in what takes place within the walls of a church in this country in the last 40 years. My parents, if you were to take them from 1960 to now, they would not recognize what goes on in churches today. They would be offended by what goes on in churches under the guise of Christianity.

You see, that’s what happened in Israel because they start off and they don’t have the temple, but they have the tabernacle, and they have the guidelines of the tabernacle. Under Joshua and his generation, that is where worship took place was at the tabernacle following the feast days and all of the laws laid down in Israel.

Within a generation or two, what happens? You see these groves up in the forests where they are building these worship sites for the Baals and the Asherah, and it is a place where they have pagan orgies in the name of spirituality and prosperity seeking after God. Worship changed radically because of moral relativism.

Also, we see a change in the role of men and women in society. Some of those changes might have been helpful. But the framework within which they came goes back to the concept of a right thing done for wrong reasons and a wrong way is wrong, and that is exactly what has happened, because the underlying framework is that men and women are interchangeable.

I have taught this for forty years, and I was saying in the back in the 1970s and where this ultimately goes is where you can go in and get surgeries and you can be a man one day and a woman the next day. Being a man or woman has nothing to do whatsoever to do with what’s happening on the physical side of your body.

That’s what comes out of the presuppositions of the feminism of the mid-20^th century, is that women can do everything—they didn’t say some things a man can do—they said women can do everything a man can do. We don’t need men—that was the radical feminism of the day—and they can be pastors, and they can be this and they can be that.

But the Bible says, no women can be a lot of things but they can’t be pastors; there are some things that they can’t be: they couldn’t be a priest under the Mosaic Law. There are distinctions in the roles that God assigned to males and females.

But under paganism, that gets blotted out because God no longer speaks to what makes a man a man and what makes a woman a woman. So, true biblical masculinity is lost, and true biblical femininity is lost, because now everybody is just the accident of an electrical discharge on a mass of protoplasm at some time millions of years ago. So, we all come from that same blob of protoplasm, and it doesn’t make any difference. You can be anything you want to be: man, woman, or one of seventy-two other genders, take your pick.

It’s absurd, but once you grant the presuppositions that we’re all just the product of time plus chance, we’re all just accidents of something, then we can be anything that we want to be because we’re the ones who determine reality. There is no one else.

Not only is there the change in marriage and in the family, but you can have families where you have two husbands or two wives, you can have one single parent. The Bible says if you want to have stability in a nation there needs to be two parents: one is a male, one is a female. And they need to recognize the role distinctions, and they need not use their sin nature as a justification for tyranny and abuse of the other one. If that’s not followed, then you will not have a healthy society, healthy culture, or a successful nation, or a successful family.

So, this is what happens; a culture gets transformed from the inside out based on moral relativism because now each one determines their reality. You can have your reality and I can have my reality, but if you say something that contradicts my sense of reality, then I’m going to be offended and angry. I have to stop you from saying something different, because when my reality is challenged, then my world is shaken. So, I can’t let you have the freedom to express your opinion about reality if it’s going to shatter my view of reality.

That’s where we are today; the absolute break down in being able to allow people to have the freedom of different opinions without those who disagree with them just absolutely going berserk and going off on them shouting and yelling and screaming and having temper tantrums like ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter, and any number of other groups that are out there.

It’s a complete rejection of authority, and that’s what we see in the Book of Judges. We see how it affects leadership and the deterioration of leadership from one generation to the other from the beginning with Othniel to the end with Samson. We have to understand this in terms of its general context. And part of that context is understanding that what has happened is they are assimilating to the culture of the world around them.

Slide 5

What I want to do is to start off with some of the things that God said to Israel, to the forefathers early on. Let’s look at what God said to Abram in Genesis 15. This is in the context of the Abrahamic Covenant. [This is] the first time that we really have the covenant being discussed and laid down. It is summarized in Genesis 15:1–3, but this is when God is articulating the details of the covenant.

He says to Abram in Genesis 15:13: “Know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs,”—so as part of the covenant, He is predicting, telling, Abram what will happen in the future. “They will be a stranger in a land that is not theirs,” is talking about Egypt—and will serve them their slavery in Egypt and they will afflict them four hundred years.”

So, God is saying that there’s going to come a time when your descendants are to be taken out of the land of Israel; they are going to go somewhere else; they are going to be enslaved to another people, and that’s going to last approximately 400 years. He’s not being specific here.

In Genesis 15:14, He says, “And also the nation whom they serve I will judge.” Well, that makes sense because in the Abrahamic Covenant, God says those who bless you, I will bless and those who disrespect you, I will judge harshly. That’s more of a literal sense of the two different words used for cursing there in Genesis 12:3.

So He judged Egypt rather harshly; He just about destroyed the nation. Nothing was heard from them for another 300 or 400 years. It took that long for them to rebuild their civilization.

It just says in Genesis 15:15–16: “ ‘Now as for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace;—that is a reference to Abram, his dying and his bones would be gathered and placed in the graves with his fathers; it has this sort of a literal sense—you shall be buried at a good old age. But in the fourth generation they shall return here—so in the fourth generation, after they are enslaved, they will return here—for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.’ ”

That’s the sentence I want to focus on because there is a purpose to what God is doing among the nations. God is saying that I, in My forbearance, in My patience, am giving these people who are living in that land enough time to either turn to Me or to completely destroy themselves in immorality. So He just summarizes all of these different people that lived in the area we now know in Israel as Amorites. Later, they will primarily be called Canaanites, but as we’ll see in these other verses, they are really composed of a number of different people groups.

Slide 6

Now this takes place with this announcement to Abraham. This takes place in about, I would say about 2060 BC. Abram is born in 2166; he is 100 years old when Isaac is born. So, that would be 2066 and this is a few years before that. So, this is about 2086 BC or so. His grandson Jacob—, Abraham, Isaac, and then Jacob. Jacob, we note moves the family to Egypt at the time that Joseph has been elevated to be the second in command over Egypt in order to provide a haven of protection for the nation, but also to isolate them from other nations so that they are not going to assimilate.

That’s always been a problem with the Jews is that trend towards assimilating to the surrounding culture. This was what was happening with the sons of Jacob as they were marrying Canaanite women, and they were adopting their idolatrous practices and all of the horrible things that were going on in Canaan at that time.

So God says, okay, I’ve got to get you away from that influence and I’m working to bring you to a place where the people hate you and despise you and won’t even eat in the same room that you’re in. That will keep you from assimilating to their culture.

So in 1876 BC, Jacob takes the family, and they go to Egypt. This date is the date. There’s a book From Abraham to Paul by Andrew Steinman that deals with clarification, I’m not going to say revision, but a clarification, of a lot of chronological problems, and he does a fascinating job. Doug Petrovich, who spoke here last year, Eugene Merrill who was the best, most conservative Old Testament professor at Dallas Seminary, in his book Kingdom of Priests, all of these agree that 1876 BC is when Jacob brings his sons into Egypt, and 400 years later is 1476.

Now the 400 years was, as I said earlier, an approximation. Later they would use the more precise calculation, 430. So, if you subtract 30 from 1476 you get 1446; that’s when the Exodus occurred. So, God is fairly precise in the way that He is using numbers. The Exodus occurs in 1446. This is also affirmed by conservatives, and this is called the early date.

Liberals come along and they say, no, no, no, no, it wasn’t 1446; it was about 1250 or maybe a little later, 1230 when Ramses was the Pharaoh. Has anybody heard of Ramses being the Pharaoh in Egypt during the time of the Exodus? That’s what Cecil B DeMille said. Everybody goes along; that’s because in the early 1800s when Egyptology is first coming along, they discover all this wealth and glory, the conquests of Ramses, and they say, “Well that Pharaoh in the Bible, he was all of those things, so that must apply to Ramses.” So, they made this connection, which wasn’t correct. In fact, there are a lot of conservatives who weren’t really even sure that it’s in the 18^th Dynasty that the Exodus took place.

Now most of these guys go along with that, but some years ago—I did not make this particular pastor’s conference—but George Meisinger brought in about five or six different conservative Bible-based Egyptologists. They all picked a different Pharaoh from the intermediate periods when nobody really knows very much about them.

Because if you think about it, when the ten plagues are over with, Egypt’s infrastructure has been absolutely and totally destroyed—all of their crops, all of their herds, all of their flocks have been decimated. There’s nothing left. The Bible doesn’t mention Egypt again for over 300 years, almost 400 years. It’s not until you get to the time of Solomon.

Solomon comes to the throne about 979, that’s when he builds the temple. So, let’s say roughly 980 BC. How long is it from 1446 to 980? 500 years. That’s a long time. Egypt has not been a major player on the world stage for that long. It took that long for them to recover from the ten plagues.

So I’ve always been extremely hesitant to identify the Pharaoh of the of the Exodus. I think there are enough questions about the chronology to have certain level of doubts, but I know that a lot of conservatives will put it in the 18^th Dynasty, and they have their arguments, and I’m willing to say, “Okay, maybe that’s true.”

But I’m not going to get in the pulpit and name the Pharaoh, and say, “Yeah that was Thutmose III. That’s dangerous because then if it’s discovered that it wasn’t, you’ve hung a lot of doctrine on the wrong person. So, we can’t be absolutely certain.

1 Kings 6:1 tells us that in the “… 480th year after the children of Israel had come out of the land of Egypt in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel … he began to build a house of the Lord.” So, we know that that is in 979. That’s his fourth year, so we’re at 983 and whatever it is, you add it altogether, and it goes back to 1446. It goes back to somewhere in there; I didn’t put all those numbers in there, but it adds up to 1446.

Slide 7

Forty years after they’re in the desert, they cross the Jordan in 1406 BC and in 1400, six years later, they completed the major part of the conquests. They’ve defeated Jericho; they defeated the northern confederacy of Canaanite armies and the southern confederacy in six years. They are in control of the major trade routes there. They controlled the major cities. They still have a huge mopping up operation to go through.

By 1379, some 21 years later, the last of Joshua’s generation dies. This is when things begin to really fall apart. We’ll get into that in the first and second chapters of Judges. The first oppression comes from a Mesopotamian king named Cushan-Rishathaim. So that just gives us a little bit of the introductory timeframe, and we will build on that chronology as we go forward.

The first thing I really want you to notice is that God had told Abram that they’re going to be slaves for 400 years plus in a foreign land. Then He is going to bring them back, and it has something to do with the Amorites’ sinfulness coming to completion. God’s giving them enough time to be fully corrupt.

The second thing that we need to recognize is God’s promises to Moses. We’ve gone from Abraham in roughly 2080 BC. Now we’re at Moses in 1446 to 1450 BC, because God first appears to Moses over in Midian, and you’ve got a couple years there, So the whole story there leads up to the Exodus and when that begins and when the first plague comes. That’s in 1446, and all the plagues take place during that year, and then they are told to finally leave.

Slide 8

God makes various promises to Moses and reminds him first of all of the promises He made to the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. and Joseph. Those are in Exodus 3:8, Exodus 3:17; Exodus 6:15, Exodus 13:5, and 13:11. But in Exodus 23:23, He’s telling Moses what was going to take place in the future. He says, [Exodus 23:23], “For My Angel—this would be the Angel of the Lord, the pre-incarnate Lord Jesus Christ, My Angel—will go before you and bring you into the Amorites and the Hittites and the Perizzites and the Canaanites and the Hivites and the Jebusites.”

You see the Canaanites aren’t just one ethnic group; they’re made up of, notice, the first one is the Amorites. That would be the most numerous; that’s who God mentioned back to Abraham back in Genesis 15, but you also have the Hittites, whose area primarily was to the north up in the area of Anatolia or modern-day Turkey.

Then you had others. You had the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hivites, the Jebusites. Where did the Jebusites live? In Jebus. Do you have another name for Jebus? Jerusalem, Salem, Jerusalem.

Israel did not take Jebus or Jerusalem until David conquered the city of the Jebusites. So, that’s the Jebusites. They are all part of this culture that generally is going to be described as the Canaanites, and God says He is going to take them into the land and He’s going to cut off all these people.

In Exodus 23:28, God says, “And I will send hornets before you, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittites from before you,” so that seems to suggest something that God is doing in a more supernatural way to create fear in the hearts of the people of the land.

And He did because we know from the conversations that the two spies had who went into Jericho with Rahab, that Rahab said, “Oh we know all about what God did to the Egyptians, and we’ve been scared to death ever since.” So that fear, I think that’s what God is talking about here in Exodus 23:28, that He is going to engage in psychological warfare against the Canaanites when they hear about what happened in Egypt.

Slide 9

In Exodus 33:2, it says, “And I will send My Angel before you, and I will drive out the Canaanite, and the Amorite and the Hittite and the Perrizite and the Hivite and the Jebusite.” And in Exodus 34:11, “Observe what I command you this day. Behold, I am driving out from before you, the Amorite and the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite.”

The reason I reminded you of this is that when they got to the border of the Promise Land at Kadesh Barnea, and Moses sent the twelve spies in, they misinterpreted Moses’ command. Moses didn’t send them in to see if they could take the land. That’s what they thought their mission was.

You’ve got to pay attention to the words of Scripture. The words of Scripture are that God is going to give them that land. There was no doubt. It didn’t matter how big they were, how many there were, or what their cities were like, or what their military technology was. God had already promised that the land of the Canaanites was theirs.

They were not going into the land to determine if they could take it; they were going to go into the land just to spy out how wonderful this new land was that God was giving to them. But ten of them misinterpreted Scripture, and they were afraid because of the circumstances around them.

Only two, Joshua and Caleb, said, “We will trust God. He’s given us this land. Why are we afraid?” They understood that the battle is the Lord’s.

Tat has great application for us today, because we look around the world and there are a number circumstances that can be quite daunting if we focus on the circumstances. But we don’t want to be like the ten spies; we don’t want to be like Peter focusing on the waves. We want to be like Moses and like David and like others who trusted in the Lord and recognized that the battle is the Lord’s.

God took them into the land, but right before they went into the land, Moses reminded them of the Law, and that is sort of a retelling of the Law. But the Law is a reminder of what God has said, and how God said they should live when they get into the land.

Remember, for there to be a nation, you have to have three things. You have to have a people; you have to have a piece of real estate for the country that has borders that are protected and defined. When you don’t have borders that are protected and defined, you can’t have a nation. That is why you have passages such as Genesis 11, dealing with the Tower of Babel, talking about how God determined the borders of the nations. Paul refers to that in the New Testament in Acts 17 talking about how God established the borders for the peoples.

God is the One who initiated nations. Nations, and this idea of making Christian nationalism a pejorative is just the devil’s own lie because God is the One who established nations. Nations are for the survival and protection of the human race. Biblical nationalism is God’s plan until the Lord Jesus Christ returns and establishes His Kingdom because it is to prevent internationalism. Internationalism is seen from the Tower of Babel on as always, the basis for the human race coming together to try and solve all of man’s problems without God. So God has put limitations on what man can do. That is why He divided the languages and established the nations.

Slide 10

But God’s plan for Israel did include having a king, a human king, but not from the beginning. We know this from Deuteronomy 17 where God gives certain specifics about the king. Deuteronomy 17:14 says, “When you come to the land which the Lord your God is giving you and possess it and dwell in it, and says, ‘I will set a king over me like all the nations that are around me,’ ” pay attention to that language because that is exactly what happens in 1 Samuel 8. They say to Samuel, give us a king, so we can be like all the nations around us.

Who are the nations around them? To their southwest they had Egypt. What do we know about the Pharaoh, the king of Egypt? The Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, was thought of as an incarnation of one of their gods. You see the power when you look at the sphynx, and you see the head of the Pharaoh on the sphynx. The body is that of a lion which speaks of majesty and power. So, the Pharaoh is making a claim there to have that kind of majesty and power. He is the most powerful one.

If you go into the Valley of the Kings [in Egypt], and you go into the various tombs of the different Pharaohs, there are these incredible depictions and mosaics all along the walls of all kinds of different things. You always know who the Pharaoh is because the Pharaoh, with all the images of humans, is five times taller than anybody else because he’s not a normal human. He is a divine king.

You go to the northeast of Israel, and you are in the Mesopotamian area, and their kings were attributed deity, but they are not an incarnation of the gods. It’s something granted to them along with kingship.

Later on, when you have the Roman Empire, when you became Caesar, you became a god. You just became another of many different gods, and you were to be worshiped as god.

But when you are in Israel, there is a difference. In these other nations, there is an autocracy; the king has absolute power and that is why he is given the attributes of deity.

When you get into the Church Age, what you see is states, especially in the last 200 to 300 years where states want to take on the role of a god. They have messianic attentions; they are going to solve the problems of poverty; they are going to solve the problems of sickness; they are going to solve the problem of bad education; they are going to solve all of the problems of the world. You see this even in the UN and it makes tremendous messianic claims and pretentions.

They have the verse from Isaiah 2 referring to the world peace that will come under the Messiah, that you will beat your spears into pruning hooks and your swords into plowshares, and man shall learn war no more. That is engraved in the stone over the entryway to the United Nations. They are claiming they can do what only Messiah can do. You have a huge statue out there where you have a man beating a sword into a plowshare.

To ignore the symbolism there is to blind yourself to reality that the UN is our present form of internationalism. And globalism is the message of the day. That does not say that nations cannot have treaties and trade and all of that. We saw that fine. But it is saying that they are coming together to solve all of the problems of the world. There is that difference, to make that messianic claim. That will only happen when Messiah returns and establishes His Kingdom. These are part of the underlying issues in the political theater of our day.

One of the reasons I firmly believe that you can argue all day long about this thing that Trump did and that thing he did that you don’t like or don’t agree with. I haven’t had a president I agree more than 50% with in my lifetime. They’re all human, and they all have failings and they all have limitations.

But I think there was one thing Trump argued for and that was “America first,” and whatever flaws and failures he had in the way he articulated that, he understood that America had to defend her national identity and integrity, and that angered the internationalists and globalists incredibly. That is the root of a lot of antagonism to him, more so than anything else.

He didn’t have a great personality, but I’m enough of a student of history to know that there were a lot of presidents who didn’t have great personalities. There are a lot of leaders who don’t have great personalities, and they are very offensive in a lot of things that they have said and done. But I think the real core issue was an ideological issue that he stood against the flow toward globalism that has been dominant in America for 200–300 years. And there was the sense on the left that that was within their grasp, and they just had a huge temper tantrum. That’s just my interpretation.

We know that that’s the flow of history. Because when the time comes, and the church is removed through the Rapture and God allows Satan to put his man in charge, we will have a globalist, international government. We know that’s where it’s headed, and one of its centers will be in Babylon. There’s always that battle in the Bible between Jerusalem and Babylon. When you get to Revelation, the kingdom that the anti-Christ has is identified with Babylon, and a literal Babylon I believe.

So, God has a role for a king in the nation, but not like all the other nations. So, in Deuteronomy 17:14, when they say that I want to have a king like all of the other nations, they want to give up their freedom and have a king like the Pharaoh, or the kings in Rome, or the kings in the Mesopotamian area—these are the kings that have an autocratic divine power.

Slide 11

Deuteronomy 17:15 goes on to say, “you shall surely set a king over you whom the Lord your God chooses;—so it says, you may want a king that you choose, but the one you’re going to set over you is the one God chooses. Mark that distinction because that contrast is what comes up in 1 Samuel 8—one from among your brethren you shall set as king over you.”

Slide 12

So, there are two stipulations: (1) he’s got to be an Israelite; he’s not a foreigner, he’s one of your brethren. The other one is given down in Deuteronomy 17:18: “Also it shall be, when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write for himself a copy of this law in a book, from the one before the priests, the Levites.” He’s going to have a witness; the priests are going to bring him the scrolls and he’s going to make his own-handwritten copy of the entire Pentateuch, the Law of Moses, the Torah. That’s so he learns it; it changes the way he thinks.

That worked for about four kings in the Southern Kingdom and no kings in the Northern Kingdom, plus of course, David and Solomon in his early years. But all the kings of the Northern Kingdom and all but four in the Southern Kingdom went against God. They all followed in the sins of idolatry. They all wanted to do things according to their own ideas, their own thoughts. They did what was right in their own eyes.

So, God has two stipulations: He’s got to be an Israelite, number one; and he’s got to copy the Law, and the purpose for that is in Deuteronomy 17:20, “that his heart may not be lifted above his brethren, that he may not turn aside from the commandment to the right hand or to the left,” he’s got to understand absolutes. He’s got to understand he’s under God’s authority.

If you don’t have a king that understands he’s under the authority of God, then you’re going to be in trouble because he will make himself the ultimate authority. He’s not answerable to the Law, he’s not answerable to God, but he’s answerable only to himself or his allies in power. So, this is God’s plan that He has established that there will be a king in the future.

Slide 13

Initially, God was going to be the King of Israel, but He did make a provision for a future king. But God is rejected, and that is the purpose of the Book of Judges, is to show what happens when God is rejected, when God is the source of absolute justice. And you think, how can that be? You have the Mosaic Law, it is perfect justice. But man does not want perfect justice because perfect justice is always oriented to God, but it’s not oriented to me.

The same thing is going to happen in the Millennial Kingdom because Jesus will come back, and Jesus will establish a perfect righteous way. He is the Prince of Righteousness, and He will establish perfect justice on the Earth. He will reign for a thousand years, and at the end of that thousand years, Satan is going to be released from prison.

So, Satan and the demons won’t be influencing human beings at all. The purpose is to show that the problem really isn’t somebody else; the problem is us and the sin nature. What happens, as hard as it is to believe in the perfect environment where you have a perfect ruler, a perfect government, the people will be deceived and led into a revolt at the end of that time. Myriads upon myriads are going to follow Satan in an attempt to overthrow the Lord Jesus Christ as the King of the Earth.

God is going to destroy them, incinerate them, vaporize them in a heartbeat with brimstone and ashes. They’re going to be gone. But God is pointing this out even in the Old Testament, that when He is rejected, the result is absolutely disastrous. So that is seen through this period.

We come to 1 Samuel 8. 1 Samuel 8 is also one of the most significant chapters on political theory in all of the Bible. It was cited numerous times by our Founding Fathers in their deliberations as well as the passage we just went to recently in Deuteronomy 17. All of these passages were in the thinking of our Founding Fathers.

We know that because former professor of political science here in Houston [Donald Lutz], I don’t know anything about him, his religious convictions or anything, but he had his students, over a period of ten years in the early years of using computers, input all of the data from diaries and letters and political speeches and other things when political leaders would identify the source of what they were saying—whether they were quoting Montesquieu or Locke or quoting the Bible—they would say so. And 33 percent of their citations were from the Bible.

Number two was from John Locke, and he was around 20–21 percent, but about half of his citations were paraphrases from the Bible. So, they understood the Bible and they thought biblically. They were very familiar with this passage and in Lutz’s book that deals with all of this, he lists all of the different passages. Most of them were from the Old Testament: they were from Deuteronomy, they were from Exodus, they were from 1 Samuel 8.

Slide 14

When we look at 1 Samuel 8, what happens at the beginning is [1 Samuel 8:1] “Now it came to pass when Samuel was old, that he made his sons judges over Israel.” But that didn’t go well because his sons were products of their culture. They were antinomian as well. This is still well within the period of the judges, and they did what was right in their own eyes.

1 Samuel 8:3–5 “But his sons did not walk in his ways; they turned aside after dishonest gain, they took bribes and perverted justice. Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah, and said to him, ‘Look, you are old, and your sons do not walk in your ways—and what did they say then?—Now, make us a king to judge us like all the nations.’ ”

Isn’t that what God predicted over in Deuteronomy 17:14, when He said that they would want to have a king like all of the other nations? That’s exactly what they want; they want to be like everybody else.

One of the things that made the United States of America distinct is they were going to do something different. They weren’t going to be like Europe anymore; they weren’t going to be like the other nations. But that is not what we’ve heard in the last years. We’ve heard that we want to do things like Europe. And if so, we will end up being like Europe.

But we were set up to be different, to be distinct, and that’s because all of our original, political philosophy came out of the Bible, came out of a Judeo-Christian worldview.

Their thinking was not to be like all the other nations, but that’s the thinking of Israel. They wanted to be like all the other nations and have a government like all the other nations and in 1 Samuel 8:8, God says, “don’t be upset Samuel; they haven’t rejected you, they’ve rejected Me.” That’s our key to understand that the King, the real King prior to this was God and not a human king, and they’ve rejected God as their king.

Slide 15

So, He says to Samuel in 1 Samuel 8:9, “Now therefore, heed their voice. However, you shall solemnly forewarn them, and show them the behavior of the king who will reign over them.” This is the problem. Human government as an institution was established by God in Genesis 9:1–17 in the Noahic Covenant. In that Covenant with Noah, God establishes the authority of humans to adjudicate criminality and to execute criminals, to take their life. That’s the most serious decision a human being can make. That is the foundation of nations and of government.

What’s interesting is that in the last couple of years, I’ve been reading a lot of different writings by some Jewish—most of whom are orthodox; not all of them are orthodox—Jewish thinkers, intellectuals who are writing on the subject of government and writing on the subject of nationalism. A very insightful book by Yoram Hazony is a book called The Virtue of Nationalism.

You may not want to wade through that book, but what I suggest that you do is you go onto YouTube and find the interview where Ben Shapiro interviews Yoram Hazony, two orthodox Jews who are talking about the importance of nations. Yoram Hazony builds a biblical case.

He’s not going to look at it the same way you and I do; I don’t know if he actually believes in the historicity of Noah or the Tower of Babel, but he knows historically that the historical Jewish belief, the historic Judeo-Christian belief and the belief of Western Civilization is that those events were literal and historical, and that’s the foundation of our law.

Whether it actually happened or not, those events described in the Bible are the foundation of our view of nations and our view of government. They build from this, and there are just a lot of these orthodox Jews and others who are doing some insightful thinking about nations and governments based upon this. Hazony also started a think tank dedicated to Edmund Burke, The Edmund Burke Foundation, and these guys get together—I get their e-mails and they are linked to all kinds of papers that are being written, and they are just absolutely profound.

If you want to learn to think through these issues, these are the people that you need to be reading because they are not coming at it from biblical authority in the same level that we are, but they have that respect for the Bible as being the foundation for our views of government.

I’ve got another book dealing with the politics of power written by some other conservative Jews. It’s all about the development of political theory from 1 Samuel. Phenomenal stuff. You may not agree with everything; I’m not saying that. They are not exactly where we are, but they are very close, and it is because they may not believe the Bible is the Word of God like you and I do, but they believe the Bible provides the foundation for the thinking of Western Civilization and the stability of Western Civilization.

God tells Samuel to warn the people what’s going to happen if they give too much power to the king. So, what we see here is that there’s this pendulum swing in human history between an autocracy, whether it’s a dictator or a king or any form of government that takes all power to itself, or whether it goes in the other direction where you over-emphasize individual freedoms, and everybody just becomes so fragmented that it eventually leads to anarchy and everybody doing what they think is right in their own eyes. It leads to collapse.

So, you go back and forth between these extremes because the only thing that is going to stabilize things is a perfect, sinless king. That doesn’t work in the Millennium because you don’t have a perfect, sinless population.

The problem with the whole social justice movement is that they are assuming that sinless, corrupt people—because they deny total depravity and sin—can bring in a perfect, sinless society. They can’t. As a result of that, they don’t put checks and balances on those corrupt desires. That’s why we have three branches of government. We have to have those checks and balances in order to protect against the corrupt desires of men to gain power for themselves.  Even that is falling apart because we live in a fallen world. If you don’t believe in total depravity, you’ll always be frustrated.

So, there’s a warning that what’s going to happen is if you give all of this power to the king, he’s going to have a draft, he’s going to draft your sons and bring them into the military, and he’s going to organize and have a big army. Then he’s going to take your daughters and bring them in to run the kitchens and everything related to running the government. What you end up with is a top-heavy government with a huge bureaucracy that is self-destructive. That’s also where we are today.

Slide 18

At the end of all of this in 1 Samuel 8:18, he says, “And you will cry out in that day because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves.” That’s Saul. God, in His permissive will allowed it, but Saul is the one they chose for themselves because he looked like a king. He stood head and shoulders above everybody else. [1 Samuel 8:18] “… your king whom you have chosen for yourselves,—and how is God going to respond to their prayer?— and the Lord will not hear you in that day” because you have asked amiss.

This is the problem that because of sin and because of corruption, there will always be this problem in human government. God warns of the abuse of power, and this provides us for a framework of understanding what is going to happen in the Book of Judges as we see this indictment first of the leadership, Othniel, Deborah, Barak, Gideon, Jephthah, Samson. Then we’re going to see the indictment of the priests and an indictment of the people. The bottom line is that when sin is allowed to run amuck, there’s no order; there’s no future. There’s just disorder and chaos and collapse.

What’s the solution?—see I should have taught this before I taught Samuel—the solution comes in 1 Samuel 1. Hannah, if you remember, prays that she can have a son and she recognizes in her song in 1 Samuel 2 that that son that God gives her is going to be instrumental in bringing in the Messiah. The Messiah, of course, is going to come through the line of David, and that her son will anoint that kingly line. She has an understanding of that.

So, I like to look at this whole thing as, this is the gospel. You start off showing the depravity of man in Judges and where that leads, and then you see the grace of God in providing a solution through the Messiah, through the Davidic line that comes in the books of Samuel.

All of this then develops out of an understanding of Deuteronomy, which sets the stage at the end of Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy 28, 29, and 30. There God outlines that if you are disobedient to Me, these are the judgments I will bring on the nation. And if you are obedient to Me, these are the blessings that I will bring. The Book of Judges is an illustration of those curses and those blessings. So, we’ll come back next time to begin to sort of work our way through the first chapter of Judges.

Closing Prayer

“Father, we thank You for this opportunity to look at these things, to see that the truths that are illustrated here in Judges, the history that took place is repeated again and again through one cycle after another all through history. Those who humble themselves under Your mighty hand, will be lifted up, but those who are arrogant and raise themselves up against You and make war against You, You will make war against them and destroy them.

“And Father, for we who are living here in this difficult time, a time when the powers that be are hateful and antagonistic toward You, we know that there will be difficult times, but we trust in You. You are our Rock, You are our Redeemer, You are the same God who enabled Israel to survive through these dark ages of the Judges, and You are the same God who will enable us to survive and glorify You and be a light in the midst of this wicked and perverse generation.

“We pray that we may be able to live up to that wonder legacy that has been given to us, and to honor and glorify You with our lives. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”