BY LAW OR BY PROMISE?

BIBLICAL ECONOMICS TODAY Vol. XX, No. 5 © 1998 Gary North August/September 1998 BY LAW OR BY PROMISE? by Gary North All the commandments which I command thee this day shall ye observe to do, that ye may live, and multiply, and go in and possess the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers (Deut. 8:1). The theocentric framework of this law is the dominion covenant: the command to be fruitful and multiply (Gen. 1:26-28). God established His authority over mankind with these words, even before He created man. This case law therefore was no seed law or land law. Deuteronomy 8 is by far the most important passage in the Bible dealing with the topic of Adam Smith’s classic 1776 book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. It announces the covenantal pattern for economic growth: grace, subordination, law, sanctions, and inheritance. It lists the unmerited gifts that God gave to Israel, from their deliverance out of bondage to the raw materials of the Promised Land. This is all grace. Twice it calls upon the Israelites to remember God’s grace (vv. 2, 18). This is a call to subordination. Four times it reminds them to keep God’s commandments (vv. 1, 2, 6, 11). It speaks of the positive sanction of economic growth (v. 13) and the negative sanction of expulsion from the land (vv. 19, 20). Yet the entire chapter deals with the inheritance: the land of Israel. To maintain this inheritance, the Israelites had to obey God’s Bible-revealed law. In other words, their maintenance of the inheritance was ethically conditional. The passage begins with a call to obedience. Moses warned the generation of the conquest to obey all of God’s commandments. The theme of covenantal faithfulness through national obedience is continual in Deuteronomy, for only through corporate covenantal obedience to the Mosaic law could the conquest generation maintain its inheritance. The language of the text is clear: collecting the promised inheritance was conditional. "All the commandments which I command thee this day shall ye observe to do, that ye may live, and multiply, and go in and possess the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers." This verse raises a theological problem regarding the terms of inheritance. God had sworn to the patriarchs that He would give the land to Israel. He had promised Abraham that the fourth generation would inherit (Gen. 15:16). The theological question is this: Was Israel’s inheritance legally secured by God’s promise or by their obedience to the law? Circumcision and Inheritance In the context of God’s promise to Abraham that his seed would inherit, Paul wrote: "For if the inheritance be of the law, it is no more of promise: but God gave it to Abraham by promise" (Gal. 3:18). Paul was speaking of Jesus Christ, not the Israelites, as the inheriting seed. He was speaking of the kingdom of God, not the land of Canaan. Nevertheless, the judicial question was the same in both cases: By law or by promise? Paul argued clearly: by promise. On this passage, Protestantism rests much of its case for salvation by grace rather than works: "That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith" (v. 14). Yet there is no doubt that one legal condition for Israel’s inheritance was circumcision. Abraham was required to circumcise his household’s males (Gen. 17:12-13). They, in turn, were supposed to circumcise their household males. The generation of the exodus had failed to do this, so Joshua had the conquest generation circumcised as soon as they crossed the boundary of the Jordan River (Josh. 5:7). The promise was valid, but to qualify judicially as the generation of the conquest, all the males had to be circumcised. Wasn’t circumcision a work of the law? Yes. So, if inheritance was by circumcision, how could it be by promise? Who Was a Lawful Heir? To make sense of this seeming anomaly, we should seek a solution in the judicial nature of the Abrahamic promise. The fourth generation would inherit, God had promised. He had sealed that promise with a covenantal oath-sign: passing a fire between pieces of a dismembered animal (Gen. 15:17). This was a sanctions-bound self-maledictory oath: "So let it be done unto Me if I do not bring to pass what I have promised to Abraham." But what constituted a generation? Judicially, this had to mean circumcised sons. A man was not an Israelite by birth; he was an Israelite by covenant. "And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant" (Gen. 17:14). The external mark of this covenant was circumcision. The same was true corporately of the inheriting generation. They would not become that promised generation by birth; they would become that generation by covenant. The promise was secure; nevertheless, conforming to the definitional terms of the promise mandated the work of circumcision: no circumcision–no generation; no generation–no fulfillment of the promise. So, the judicial basis of the fourth generation’s inheritance was law: circumcision. Yet the judicial basis of the possibility of inheritance was promise. This two-fold conclusion is inescapable: promise as the judicial basis of God’s granting of the inheritance to Israel through Abraham; Israel’s obedience as the judicial basis of His assigning it to them as promised. The special form of obedience was the oath. Circumcision was an oath sign. Protestant commentators have gone out of their way to avoid discussing the fourth generation’s circumcision as the judicial requirement of collecting the inheritance. It is clear why they have done this: the Pauline doctrine of inheritance by promise. While James did not write about the judicial basis of Christ’s inheritance, we can be fairly sure what he would have written: inheritance by Christ’s obedience. To mark Himself as the heir – the lawful heir – of the promise, Christ had to obey the law. The situation facing the fourth generation was analogous: to mark themselves as the lawful heirs of the promise, they had to obey the law. Paul wrote of Abraham, "For the promise, that he should be the heir of the world, was not to Abraham, or to his seed, through the law, but through the righteousness of faith. For if they which are of the law be heirs, faith is made void, and the promise made of none effect" (Rom. 4:13-14). But on what is saving faith grounded judicially? On the substitutionary atonement of Christ. This atonement was grounded judicially in the perfection of Christ, who obeyed the whole of the law of God. He was a perfect sacrifice; no other would have sufficed to placate God’s wrath. "Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered; And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him" (Heb. 5:8-9). Christ’s legal sonship was marked by His perfect obedience, even unto death. Analogously, the fourth generation’s heirship was marked by their circumcision, even unto risking death, i.e., their temporary military incapacity while inside the boundaries of the Promised Land. Protestants speak of unmerited grace. With respect to the recipients of grace, grace is indeed unmerited. Men do not merit God’s favor on their own account. But with respect to the judicial basis of grace, it is completely merited by the perfect life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Unmerited grace is grounded in Christ’s merit through obedience. This merit is a legal claim, and as heirs to grace, this legal claim passes to the elect. Salvation is legally claimed by the elect, not on the basis of their obedience, but on the basis of Christ’s obedience. Grace is grounded in the law and one man’s perfect fulfilling of its stipulations. So, to discuss Israel’s inheritance in terms of promise only or law only is to discuss half of the legal transaction. The inheritance was established by grace through God’s promise, but there was supposed to be obedience on the part of the fourth generation. While God might have graciously delivered the land to them despite their legal condition as uncircumcised men. Joshua understood the legal conditions of the inheritance. Israel might, by God’s grace, inherit without obedience, but they were supposed to obey. This was Moses’ message to them, too: maintenance of the kingdom grant was conditional. As the author of the Hebrews put it, "And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him" (Heb. 5:9). Maintaining the Kingdom Grant "All the commandments which I command thee this day shall ye observe to do, that ye may live, and multiply, and go in and possess the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers." This was not the announcement of the judicial definition of what constituted the fourth generation, namely, circumcision; this was an announcement of a covenantal link between obedience and inheritance. How can we make theological sense of Moses’ words? He invoked the promise while mandating obedience. First, we must ask: Did Moses expect the blessings listed in Deuteronomy 8 to unfold sequentially? Did he mean to say that the fourth generation had to obey the commandments in order for God to multiply them, to be followed by their conquest of the land? Obviously not, since he was preparing them for the conquest, not for a long period of population growth as the means of military conquest. Their multiplication would come after they had secured the land. Yet the text places multiplication prior to the securing of the land. If we were to take his words as sequentially meaningful, his call to obedience would make no chronological sense. The conquest would be delayed for another generation. But the fourth generation had to inherit. Second, we must ask: What was Moses getting at? Answer: the requirement that they obey God in order to possess the land, maintain the land, and multiply in the land. They obeyed God first by submitting to circumcision. This act of obedience preceded the conquest. While they might have relied on God’s grace to enable them to conquer the land without being circumcised, instead they relied on God’s grace to enable them to escape military defeat during their time of physical incapacity. They knew the story of Shechem: how Simeon and Levi had slaughtered them while the Shechemites were recovering from circumcision (Gen. 34:25-26). In both scenarios, they had to rely on grace. The form which grace took in that instance was the promise, which Moses cited. The promise they could be sure of. The question was: How best to claim the grace-based inheritance. By refusing to be circumcised or by risking a military setback? They chose the latter. Grace precedes law in both God’s covenant of creation and His covenant of redemption. He gave the law to Adam (Gen. 2:16) after He had given Adam life and land (Gen. 2:7–14). This is the covenantal pattern: grace precedes law. James Jordan is correct: "God’s Word is always promise before it is command. . . . God always bestows the Kingdom as a gift before presenting us with our duties in it." The kingdom had been bestowed on Abraham as a gift. That is, the land had long ago been assigned to Abraham’s heirs. God had assigned the land to Israel by grace and promise, but He had not yet passed legal title to the new owners. That would come through military conquest. They had received the law at Sinai four decades earlier, not four centuries earlier. They had been tested in the wilderness in terms of the Mosaic law, and the fourth generation had passed these tests. After the conquest, they would have to remain judicially faithful in order to retain possession. Grace always precedes law in God’s dealings with His subordinates. We are in debt to God even before He speaks to us. The land grant was based on the original promise given to Abraham. That promise came prior to the giving of the Mosaic law. This is why Jordan says that the laws of Leviticus are more than legislation; the focus of the laws is not simply obedience to God, but rather on maintaining the grant. The basis of maintaining the grant was ethics, not the sacrifices. Man cannot maintain the kingdom in sin. Moses continued: "And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no" (v. 2). This would seem to violate the principle of grace preceding redemption. God had humbled them in order to see whether or not they would obey Him. The giving of the law at Sinai was followed by the negative sanction of national humiliation. Only four decades later was the prospect of inheritance before them. This seems to point to another pattern: law-humiliation-grace. To whom was Moses speaking? To the heirs of a formerly enslaved nation. The giving of the law did not take place in an historical vacuum. It took place after a series of miraculous deliverances. The giving of the Mosaic law was the culminating act of national deliverance. Grace precedes law, but it does not annul law. Law confirms grace. It ratifies a prior gift of God. Covenantal Predictability and Social Theory Is the historical fulfillment of God’s promises separate from the law? Not according to Moses. Is this fulfillment separate from the recipients’ fulfillment of the law? Only partially. Grace may bring fulfillment despite a period of rebellion. Nevertheless, there is a covenantal pattern announced in the law, but especially in Deuteronomy: obedience brings blessings; disobedience brings cursings. Inheritance and disinheritance are not random; they are predictable covenantally. They are not predictable perfectly in all cases because grace is greater than sin. Negative sanctions are sometimes delayed despite sin (e.g., the Amorites in Canaan, Abraham to Moses – an example of common grace). But our affirmation of grace must not become an affirmation of historical indeterminism regarding corporate blessings and cursings. If grace is invoked to deny the consequences of law, then he who so invokes grace has become an ally of covenant-breakers. He has denied the covenant. He has denied the historical relevance of God’s law in history. But history does not take place in a judicial vacuum. Other law-orders will be imposed in order to govern men, including Christians. We must decide: God’s law or chaos? God’s law or tyranny? Whenever the covenantal predictability of corporate inheritance and disinheritance is denied, a uniquely biblical social theory becomes impossible. This is why Lutheranism has always been incapable of producing independent social theory. Luther was adamant about the irrelevance of Christianity for legal theory. To rulers, he wrote: "Certainly it is true of Christians, so far as they themselves are concerned, are subject neither to law [n]or sword, and have need of neither. But take heed and fill the world with real Christians before you attempt to rule in a Christian and evangelical manner." [Martin Luther, "Temporal Authority: To What Extent Should It Be Obeyed" (1523), Luther’s Works (1962), XLV, p. 91.] As for true Christians, "these people need no temporal law or sword. If all the world were composed of real Christians, that is, true believers, there would be no need for or benefits from prince, king, sword, or law." (p. 89). Luther was an ethical dualist. Because Lutheranism denies any relevance to biblical law in the arrival of corporate blessings, it must invoke ethical dualism: natural law or pagan law for the civil sphere, personal morality for the individual Christian, and silence regarding the church. But what is true of Lutheranism is equally true of any form of Christianity which uses the doctrine of grace to annul the covenantal predictability of historical sanctions. When Calvinism abandons faith in covenantal predictability in history, it ceases to be Calvinism; it becomes Lutheran. Protestant social theology has almost always been Lutheran in content, if not form: an unstable mixture of personal Christian morality combined with humanistic, common-ground natural law theory. Personal morality is regarded as having had no meaningful implications for the development of social theory. This delivers social theory into the hands of covenant-breakers and their intellectual allies within the church, who share the covenant-breakers’ assumptions regarding the possibility of both ethical neutrality and epistemological neutrality, as well as the irrelevance or even harmful effects of Old Testament law on society. When theonomists challenge this unofficial but long-term alliance, they are challenged with some variation of the following: "The LORD look upon you, and judge; because ye have made our savour to be abhorred in the eyes of Pharaoh, and in the eyes of his servants, to put a sword in their hand to slay us" (Ex. 5:21). Dispensational author David Allen Lewis offered this reason for rejecting Christian Reconstruction: it may upset humanists, who will inevitably become more powerful. ". . . as the secular, humanistic, demonically-dominated world system becomes more and more aware that the Dominionists and Reconstructionists are a real political threat, they will sponsor more and more concerted efforts to destroy the Evangelical church. Unnecessary persecution could be stirred up." [Lewis, Prophecy 2000 (Green Forest, Arkansas: New Leaf Press, 1990), p. 277.] The Quest for an Explanation We have believed that wealth comes from human creativity, or State planning, or through the exploitation of the environment, or a dozen other explanations that place man as the sovereign lord over the earth. What we have not heard for three centuries is that wealth comes from God, and that the terms ownership are ethically conditional. We are about to enter a period of worldwide crisis. It will be an era in which the familiar promises will be abandoned: high employment, secure jobs, easy retirement, equal opportunity, free education, government safety nets, collective bargaining, and government-insured bank deposits. When promises are revoked, legitimacy is destroyed. Political legitimacy is about to be overturned. Men’s faith in the State, like men’s faith in neutral science, is about to take a body blow. Men seek reasons for disaster. They expect good times; they look for those to blame when good times fail to endure. The greater the disaster, the worse the blame. The Year 2000 Problem will create whole industries of blame production. It will be a bad era for incumbents. It will be the greatest window of opportunity for political outsiders in world history. But it will be more than politics this time. It will be social authority. This crisis will go way beyond politics. It will be a matter of religion. Those institutions that offer aid will be the primary candidates for social authority. Those healing institutions whose leaders have explanations for what went wrong, and therefore how to keep them from going wrong again, will be the most likely victors. That is why the church has its great opportunity ahead of it. For three centuries, social theory in the West has been a debate between left wing humanists who adopted the Jesuits’ bureaucratic model and right wing humanists who adopted the Presbyterians’ bureaucratic model. Both groups agreed to keep the Christians out of the debate. The left wing model sank in August of 1991. The right wing model will sink in 2000. That leaves the field open as never before. Christians will demand answers. Their pastors will have to turn to the Bible for answers. The day they do, they will become theonomists. The day they find answers and start preaching them, they will become Christian Reconstructionists. Dispensationalism is still afloat only because it offers the Great Escape for Christians: the pre-tribulation Rapture. The Year 2000 Problem and what follows will strip away that hope. Once the faithful see that there is no way out of life except the good, old fashioned way – death – they will drop dispensationalism like an out-of-style pair of shoes. If you want to think of what is coming for dispensationalism, imagine Hal Lindsey in a pair of 1970’s Lil’ Abner shoes. Three nations, more than any others, are uniquely vulnerable to y2k: Taiwan, because it is rich and will no longer be protected by the U.S. Navy; South Korea, for the same reasons; and the state of Israel. The state of Israel depends on tourism, the deadest of dead industries because of the air traffic control systems’ dependence on obsolete computers. It depends on foreign aid from the United States, a weak reed in 2000. It depends on foreign trade and high tech agriculture in a desert. It depends, most of all, on high tech weaponry. If it does not gets its computers fixed in 1999, it will be a sitting duck to the low tech terrorists within its borders and the Arab nations that surround it. If Israel is pushed into the sea, which I expect, dispensationalism will perish with it. Any attempt to rework dispensationalism on the basis of a revived state of Israel, a century or more in the future, will fall on deaf ears. To a dispensationalist, "the state of Israel" translates as "I don’t have to die because Jesus is coming soon." Take away the state of Israel, and death stares him in the face. If he can’t have victory through a supernatural escape from history, he will go looking for a supernatural victory in history. Have I got an eschatology for him! Conclusion Moses told the conquest generation to obey God’s law. Yet he also cited the promise. He said that the long-term success of the conquest was dependent on their continued covenantal faithfulness. Yet the promise God made to Abraham was secure: sealed by an oath-sign. Their conquest of the land was guaranteed. Yet they were told to obey God’s laws. There can be no doubt that Moses invoked both the law and the promise. This is what troubles Protestant commentators. The solution to the problem is to recognize the judicial basis of the promise, which was a form of grace. All grace is grounded judicially on the perfect fulfillment of the whole of God’s law. There must be perfect obedience. "For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all" (James 2:10). There can be no separation of law and promise, for promise is grounded in law. The question is: Whose obedience? The answer is inescapable: Jesus Christ’s obedience. So, the fulfillment of any promise rests judicially on the fulfillment of the demands of the law. Grace is present because of the representative character of Christ’s fulfillment, just as the curse is present because of the representative character of Adam’s Fall. Imputation by God is fundamental: the imputation of Christ’s perfection or the imputation of Adam’s sin. God looks on each person and imputes – declares judicially – one or the other moral condition. Then He pronounces sentence: "Guilty" or "Not guilty." The Israelites would soon mark themselves as lawful heirs to the promise through circumcision. This they did under Joshua. In the wilderness, it had not mattered so much that they were not circumcised, but after they crossed the boundary of the land, they would have remained profane – sacred boundary violators – had they not become circumcised. To avoid remaining profane, they submitted to circumcision. Then they proceeded to remove the truly profane nations from the land. Moses was also warning them in this passage about the ethical basis of maintaining the kingdom grant. A nation of covenant-breakers could not indefinitely occupy the Promised Land. God would remove them (Deut. 8:19-20). This is what the Millennium Bug is all about: a recapitulation of Deuteronomy 8:17-20. And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth. But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power