I Samuel 8:10 So Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking for a king from him. 11 He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. 12 And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plough his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. 15 He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. 16 He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men and your donkeys, and put them to his work. 17 He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. 18 And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the LORD will not answer you in that day.”
This proclivity of Government to be a tyrant over the people is a theme that we find repeated throughout history. In point of fact, this very kind of tyranny, that we find warned against in I Samuel 8 is listed as a reason by the 1776 Colonialists as a reason for Declaring Independence. In the list of complaints against King George III we find,
“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.”
Clearly the theme of harassment and the multiplying of offices is a link that connects I Samuel 8 and the Declaration of Independence. God warns Israel about the way of Tyrants and the Declaration of Independence complains about the ways of Tyrants.
However, we find the same thing happening in our own lives with the advent of Obama-care. Socialized Medicine parallels God’s warnings about tyrants and is consistent with the complaint denounced in the Declaration of multiplying offices. The number of regulations and the horde of administrators necessary to execute the scheme are staggering. We have only to think here of the Independent Payment Advisory Board. It is a commission of 15 members appointed by the President, charged with the task of reducing Medicare spending. Then there are the reports of the IRS needing thousands upon thousands of new employees to administer socialized health-care.
What else is this but a multiplying of offices? What else is this but the creating of swarms of Officers to harass people? What else is this but insuring that the substance of free people is confiscated and redistributed in order, in part, to feed the appetite of these swarms of new officers. The confiscatory taxation to pay for this boondoggle has a large percentage of it dedicated to pay the salaries of these swarms of officers.
God warned against this eventuality in I Samuel 8. God said the result of Israel being like the Nations around them with a cherished King would be enslavement. God was their King but now they would have a sovereign that was human and humanistic and the result would be slavery.
Thus is always the consequence of throwing off God’s Kingship for a human one. The result is always the loss of true liberty and the corresponding presence of slavery. Whether individually or corporately a person or people cannot throw off the rule of God without at the same time becoming a slave to man.
This explains why the Calvinistic heart has always burned so red hot for liberty. The Calvinist knows that God in Christ is His liege Lord. Christ has paid for his sins and set him free from the dominion of darkness. As such He would be ruled by God in every jurisdiction from government to self to government of family, to government of Church to government in the civil realm. Precisely because the Biblical Christian understands who he is governed by the Biblical Christian has not tolerated, through the centuries, those who would rule him in ways inconsistent with the Lordship of Jesus Christ. They learned this from Calvin who said,
“We are subject to the men who rule over us, but subject only in the Lord. If they command anything against him, let us not pay the least regard to it.”
Book Four, Calvin’s Institutes
“If princes demand that we turn from honor of God, if they force us into idolatry or superstition, then they have no more authority over us than frogs and lice do.”
Sermons Acts
John Calvin“For earthly princes lay aside their power when they rise up against God, and are unworthy to be reckoned among the number of mankind. We ought, rather, to spit upon their heads than to obey them.”
― John Calvin, Daniel, Vols 1-2
For the Biblical Christian — for the Calvinist this is a matter of the first commandment. Christ has paid for His sin and so the Christian is not His own but in life and death and body and soul belongs to His faithful savior Jesus Christ. As such the Biblical Christian’s fealty – loyalty is to God in Christ. and woe to anyone who would govern him in ways inconsistent with God’s expressed rule.
To paraphrase Kipling’s poetic advice of a King to his son who would one day rule,
"You can enslave your Methodist parsons, or abuse your
Lutheran peers;
But don't try that game on the Calvinist; you'll have the whole
brood round your ears.
From the richest old Thane in the county to the poorest chained
serf in the field,
They'll be at you and on you like hornets, and, if you are wise,
you will finally yield.
This nation, in its founding, was imbued with this disposition. It is true, there was also present contrary ideological winds in our founding. There was the presence of the Enlightenment deistic influence. There certainly was a Masonic influence as well. But however imperfectly present, Biblical Calvinist Christianity influenced the formation of this nation.
One of the Authors who I quite enjoy, Erik von Kuehnelt Leddihn once wrote,
“If we call the American statesmen of the late 18th century the Founding Fathers of the United States, the the Pilgrims and Puritans were the grandfathers and Calvin the great grandfather…. [T]hough the fashionable 18th century Deism may have pervaded some intellectual circles, the prevailing spirit of Americans before and after the war was essentially Calvinistic.”
But we do not have to take Leddihn’s word for this. The Historian Carlson informs us,
“When Cornwallis was driven back to ultimate retreat and surrender at Yorktown, all of the colonels of the Colonial Army but one were Presbyterian elders. It is estimated that more than one half of all the soldiers and officers of the American Army during the Revolution were Presbyterian.”
The Calvinist drive for Liberty against Tyranny was embodied by a Presbyterian minister named James Caldwell,
In the Battle of Springfield, Pastor Caldwell, who’s own Church had been burned to the ground by the British, discovered that Patriot troops were out of paper wadding for their muskets. Caldwell rushed to a nearby church, gathered up the hymnbooks, and brought them to the battle front.
As the Patriot soldiers tore through the hymnals to stuff the paper down their muskets, Caldwell noted that many of the hymns in the book were written by Isaac Watts. With that, Parson Caldwell rallied the Patriots with his now famous battle cry, “Now put Watts into them, boys!”
And on the influence of Calvinism and it’s thirst for Liberty upon this country we remember that Horace Walpole spoke from the English House of Commons to report on these “extraordinary proceedings” in the colonies of the new world. Walpole said, “There is no good crying about the matter. Cousin America has run off with the Presbyterian parson, and that is the end of it.”
And these Calvinists … these Biblical Christians did not countenance political enslavement. They would not be ruled by those who would place upon them the yoke of humanist slavery. Some have suggested that the Calvinist war for Independence in the Colonies was merely a continuation of the English Civil War when there also the Puritans would not be tyrannized by King Charles.
That the Calvinists would not be enslaved is also seen by their refusal to have a Bishop named for the Colonies. This is a factor in our Independence that is seldom spoken of today. The Colonialists were dreadfully concerned that King George was going to appoint a Anglican Bishop over them. They understood that this was one more example of the Crown trying to enslave the colonies because they understood the political power wielded by Anglican Bishops for the Crown. The Calvinists, many of whose forbears fled England in order to escape Anglicanism, were not going to have any of that.
In a political cartoon about the plot to impose an Anglican bishop over the American colonies, the patriot mobs in New England, influenced by their Calvinist Churches, throw a copy of John Calvin’s book at a bishop… The crowds shout to the Bishop, “No Lords Spiritual or Temporal in New England,” and “Liberty and Freedom of Conscience,” and “Shall they be obliged to maintain bishops who cannot maintain themselves.” John Adams later wrote that the rumor that a bishop might be appointed in the colonies was one of the first sparks that ignited the American Revolution. The Presbyterian Francis Alison stated in 1766 that ‘he did not care if the Anglicans had 50 bishops in America …. what we dread is their political power and their courts. The Presbyterians feared that this appointment would lead to religious tyranny and a loss of freedom to worship.
This aspect of the matter demonstrates how the religious and the political are always intertwined.
Christians have always believed that this kind of Tyranny they lived with then and which we are living with today is Usurpation that must be directly stood against. Because Christian have always believed this Usurper and Tyrants have always hated Christians and Christianity. Where there is a willingness to live with this kind of tyranny it is a open question how much Christianity is really influencing the people.
Well, that is where we started. Where are we today?
I’m afraid that our Calvinist and Reformed blood runs thin and anemic. No longer is there the will to resist tyrants … either in the Civil realm or in the Church. Whereas Calvinists used to live so as to bend recalcitrant Rulers to God’s revelation now many many Calvinists find themselves so far bending to tyranny as to try and defend it as “God honoring.” Or, alternately we have the effeminate Calvinist crowd who are constantly declaring that the Church has no business being concerned with what Tyrannical Magistrates do in the common realm. These current effeminate Calvinists would not be recognized by Farel, Beza, Knox, Witherspoon, and the authors of Vindication Against Tyrants, as Calvinists.
Conclusion
We live in desperate times and because of that there is reason to rejoice. The wicked create a trap for the righteous but then fall into it. A sinner’s wealth is stored up for the righteous. When the fall comes it is the Biblical Christian who will rebuild if he is ready.
Like my Fathers before me, I am weary with the habits of a bloated State. I believe it is time for vocalizing counter-revolutionary sentiments that we are no longer going to be content to allow the State to usurp the place of God. We will not continue to make the mistakes that the Israelites made in I Samuel 8.
We are a blood bought people. Christ has redeemed us from the rule of darkness and so with no God but God we will not be ruled by those who have set their face against Christ and His authoritative law Word.