“Of course there is to be contact between the nations, but not supranational miscegenation or slow genocide. National seclusion is wrong, but even a supranational ecumencial movement can be guilty of seclusion! For as Dooyweerd remarks: ‘The history of the building of the tower of Babel, viewed in the light of the cultural commandment is contrary to the divine ordinance. Cultural expansion, the spread of humanity over the surface of the earth in the differentiation of the cultural groups, and the cultural contact between these groups, have been set as a task to mankind.’ And again: ‘In the removal of the rigid walls of isolation, historical development moves in the line of cultural integration. The latter has its counterpart in the process of an increasing differentiation. This process of cultural integration and differentiation should be sharply distinguished from the levelling tendencies which in our days threaten to penetrate the so-called under-developed cultures with secularized factors of Western Civilizations.’
In spite of a slight amount of marginal intermixing and still less of intermarriage with other stocks, God preserved the the Israelitic nation and its culture (and land and language) up to the advent of Christ. Neither did Christ destroy nationality, but sought to preserve it and to cleanse it from sin to perfect it. And this involved at least two things: His mandate to improve international relations, but also to sanctify national life to His glory.
Christ insisted on His followers improving international relations. And this they were to do by loving their neighbors as themselves, yes, by loving even their hostile Samaritan neighbors. Also, they were to pray for their enemies, even for their Roman conquerors, and, after Christ’s death and ascension, to go into all the world and teach all the nations, as commanded in Christ’s Great commission.
Yet they were also to sanctify national life and to promote specifically the National welfare. Jesus Himself clearly taught the necessity of the Israelitic believers’ ministering first to the ‘lost sheep of the house of Israel’ and that it was not meet to take the Israelitic “children’s bread cast it ‘ to other nations. Nor should Samaritans be encouraged to inundate the temple of the Jews in Jerusalem, but rather worship God in their own temple in their own land for ‘God is spirit: and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit,’ that is, in one and the same spirit, and not necessarily in one and the same international or supranational geographical location. And, have assured his followers that nations would still be in existence on the future day of Judgment, and that many would then come from the east and the west into the Kingdom of heaven, He told His followers to go into all the world, and disciple the nations (as nations!), beginning amongst their own nation in Jerusalem, but going forth thence even into the hostile territory of ‘Samaria’ and into the uttermost parts of the earth.’
Shortly, after that, the risen Christ poured out His Spirit on the day of Pentecost, causing the disciples to speak of his wonderful works of God in every then known language for the benefit of those Parthians, Medes, Elamites, etc., who were then in Jerusalem for the feast. Far from suggesting the future creation of a one-world nation with a one-world language, this important event certainly suggests the sanctification of the then existing nationalities to the service of God, inasmuch as ‘devout men, out of every nation under heaven’ there heard the Gospel ‘ever man in our own tongue, wherein we were born.’
Nor did the Christians later lose their nationality. Even amongst the early Israelitic Christians, the Greek speaking Israelites maintained their group consciousness vis-a-vis the Hebrew-speaking Israelites. Paul became a Roman to the Romans solely so that he might save some, but in spite of all this he still remained an Israelite, spoke always to the )ews first and then to the Greeks, and loved his people so much that he was prepared to sacrifice himself in their stead, as it were. At the same time, he emphasized that in Christ there is neither Greek no )ew nor barbarian, nor Scythian, and that as the nations of the world were progressively more and more won for Christ, and as Christians of each nation prayed for their kings and those in authority so that Christian men may lead a quiet and peaceable life and so that all men may be saved and come unto the knowledge of the truth, national and international relations would improve, in spite of all temporary setbacks, as the Gospel runs its course through the world of nation. The Cretans may be liars, evil beast, slow bellies, the Corinthians may be factious and passionate; the Galatians may be foolish; the Thessalonians lazy; the Israelites blinded; but the day is coming when Christ shall be all in all.
It shall come to pass in the latter days
that the mountain of the house of the Lord
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and it shall be lifted up above the hills;
and peoples shall flow to it,
2 and many nations shall come, and say:
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob,
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth the law,[a]
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
3 He shall judge between many peoples,
and shall decide for strong nations far away;
and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war anymore;By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it,… they will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.”
Francis Nigel Lee
Communist Eschatology — pg. 770 – 772
Athanasiaus … A Knight of the Rectangular Table
This sense of Victory that we find in Psalm 98 and in Watt’s Hymn was common place enough throughout Church History. Athanasius, who lived through some of the worst persecution that the early Church knew, and who knew the trials of being a wilderness voice for orthodoxy on the trinity for nigh unto 40 years – A man who was exiled 5 times and was often in danger of losing his life could still speak of this victory. Athanasius could be Athanasius contra mundum (Athanasius against the World) because the man believed, that with Christ’s coming the Kingdom had come. Athanasius believed the “age to come” Kingdom that Christ established was overcoming this present wicked age. Athanasius wrote to that end,
“Since the Savior came to dwell among us, not only does idolatry no longer increase, but it is getting less and gradually ceasing to be. Similarly, not only does the wisdom of the Greeks no longer make any progress, but that which used to be is disappearing. And demons, so far from continuing to impose on people by their deceits and oracle-givings and sorceries, are routed by the sign of the cross if they so much as try. On the other hand, while idolatry and everything else that opposes the faith of Christ is daily dwindling and weakening and falling, see, the Savior’s teaching is increasing everywhere! Worship, then, the Savior “Who is above all” and mighty, even God the Word, and condemn those who are being defeated and made to disappear by Him. When the sun has come, darkness prevails no longer; any of it that may be left anywhere is driven away. So also, now that the Divine epiphany of the Word of God has taken place, the darkness of idols prevails no more, and all parts of the world in every direction are enlightened by His teaching. Similarly, if a king be reigning somewhere, but stays in his own house and does not let himself be seen, it often happens that some insubordinate fellows, taking advantage of his retirement, will have themselves proclaimed in his stead; and each of them, being invested with the semblance of kingship, misleads the simple who, because they cannot enter the palace and see the real king, are led astray by just hearing a king named. When the real king emerges, however, and appears to view, things stand differently. The insubordinate impostors areshown up by his presence, and men, seeing the real king, forsake those who previously misled them. In the same way the demons used formerly to impose on men, investing themselves with the honor due to God. But since the Word of God has been manifested in a body, and has made known to us His own Father, the fraud of the demons is stopped and made to disappear; and men, turning their eyes to the true God, Word of the Father, forsake the idols and come to know the true God.”
Lenin & his Pupils on the Assimilation of the Nations
“All advocacy of the segregation of workers of one nation from another, all attacks on Marxist assimilation … is bourgeois nationalism, against which it is essential to wage a ruthless struggle.
The theory and program of ‘cultural-national autonomy [is] petty bourgeois, for it converts bourgeois nationalism into an absolute category, exalts it as the acme of perfection, and purges it of violence, injustice, etc.
Marxism cannot be reconciled with Nationalism, be it even of the ‘most just,’ ‘purest,’ most refined and civilized brand. In place of all forms of nationalism, Marxism advances internationalism, the amalgamation of all nations into a higher unity, a unity that is growing before our eyes…
The proletariat … welcomes every kind of assimilation of nations, except that which is founded on force or privilege.
The proletariat cannot support any consecration of nationalism: on the contrary, it supports everything that helps to obliterate national distinctions and remove national barriers; it supports everything that makes the ties between nationalities closer and closer, or tends to merge nations.”
Vladimir Lenin
Critical Remarks on the National Question
And here we find Obama channeling Marx.
“That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another. The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic can not stand.” “The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least can not stand.” “The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christians and Muslims and Jews can not stand. These hallowed walls we must tear down.”
Barack Obama – Berlin, July, 2008
And here we find Bojidar Marinov, (he who has been embraced by institutional Reconstructionism).
Marinov.
” The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least can not stand.” “The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christians and Muslims and Jews can not stand. These hallowed walls we must tear down.”
Imprecatory Psalms — Overview
Imprecatory Psalms
These are the Psalms where we find the longing of God’s people for God’s enemies to be defeated so that the glory of God’s name may not be tarnished or diminished.
There is an urgency in the Psalms with which we are too often unfamiliar. An urgency to protect God’s honor and his position. The closest that we may be able to get to this is the instinct that a husband might have to protect the reputation and honor of his wife were her reputation and name to be called into question.
Though we will be looking at the Psalms this morning we see some of this urgency to protect God’s honor and his position when the Lord Christ, by means of violence, clears the Temple of the money-changers. God’s name was being brought into disrepute and the Lord Christ rose up to defend His name.
This type of mindset, minus the violence that the Lord Christ brought to the Temple, is what is driving the Psalms of imprecation. He sees God’s name being overcome. He longs for God to be vindicated against those who are God’s sworn enemies and in that context he calls down imprecations and curses upon the wicked.
When we consider, what moderns consider to be the Harshness of these Psalms we agree with D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
“Look at the Psalmist. Look at some of those imprecatory Psalms. What are they? There is nothing wrong with them. It’s just the zeal of the Psalmist. He’s grieved and troubled because these people are not honoring God as they should be. That is His supreme concern.”
Moving on we understand that “Imprecate”, “Imprecatory”, and “Imprecation” are words that we seldom use any more so we briefly pause to define what these words mean.
IM’PRECATE, L. imprecor which means “in”(precor) to pray.
So, to imprecate is to invoke, evil upon any one.
It is to pray that a curse or calamity may fall on one’s self or on another person.
So, in the inspired prayer book and song book that God left to us one finds these Imprecatory Psalms. These imprecatory Psalms are those that invoke judgment, calamity, or curses, upon one’s enemies
We find these Imprecations sprinkled throughout the Psalms
Psalms 5, 6, 11, 12, 35, 37, 40, 52, 54, 56, 58, 69, 79, 83, 109, 137, 139, and 143
Besides what was read this morning from Psalm 58 I offer just a few samples of what we are speaking of,
“Pour out Your indignation on them, and let Your burning anger overtake them” — Psalm 69:24
“Happy the one, who taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the rock.” — Psalm 137:9
“Let death take my enemies by surprise; let them go down alive to the grave.” Psalm 55:15
“O God, break the teeth in their mouths.” Psalm 58:6
“May they be blotted out of the book of life and not be listed with the righteous.” Psalm 69:28
“May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.” Psalm 109:9
Well, here we have these Imprecatory Psalms. They are Psalms that typically offend modern sensibilities. They are Psalms that don’t comport either with our vision of God or our vision of Christians. How should we understand them?
Well, there have been different approaches to understanding them.
A.) Some folks just want to ignore them as being repulsive.
Well known Bible teacher of the 20th Century Bill Bright speaking of these Psalms said,
“We cannot demand that the Bible give us nothing but correct teachings and safe moral instruction and be offended when it does not.”
A 19th century Bible teacher, John J. Owen could write,
(These) “forms of expression are of such cold blooded and malignant cruelty, as to preclude entertaining the idea for a moment that they were inspired by God.”
Another popular evangelical bible handbook of the 20th century offers,
“In OT times God, in measure, for expedience’ sake, accommodated Himself to men’s ideas. In NT times God began to deal with men according to his own ideas.”
C. S. Lewis spoke of these Psalms as “devilish” and “diabolical.”
C. I. Scofield could say — these are a “cry unsuited to the Church.”
Examples like this could be multiplied but the point is that there has been a large contingency of men who have basically said that these Imprecatory Psalms do not count. They are, so they say, unworthy of God and of Scripture.
The problem here of course is that man’s fallen sensibilities are being used as a guide to what God can and cannot say. To refuse these Psalms is to fall to the ancient ploy of the Serpent when he came to Eve planting doubt in her mind by hissing, “Hath God really said?” If we do not allow these Psalms to be God’s voice then haven’t we become God, determining good and evil? How can we fault those who claim to be Christian and yet who deny the Virgin Birth, the divine creation of the world, the resurrection of Christ, and all the miracles of Scripture if we just, on our own whim, read these Psalms out of Scripture?
A second problem is that one doesn’t get away from Imprecatory sentiments in Scripture by getting rid of the Imprecatory Psalms. The imprecations of God continue throughout the OT right into the NT. The point here is that we couldn’t get rid of, what we consider to be the unsavory character of God, by eliminating the Imprecatory Psalms. Imprecation is everywhere throughout the Scripture including the NT.
Matthew 23:13 But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.
(These “Woe Passages” are a Imprecatory prophetic pronouncement against God’s enemies in which a Divine lawsuit is being brought against God’s enemies)
Matthew 26:23-24 And he answered and said, He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish, the same shall betray me. 24 The Son of man goeth as it is written of him: but woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born.
1 Corinthians 16:22 If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema (accursed) Maranatha.
Galatians 1:8-9 But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. 9 As we said before, so say I now again, If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed.
Galatians 5:12 I would they were even cut off which trouble you.
2 Timothy 4:14 Alexander the coppersmith did me much evil: the Lord reward him according to his works:
II Thes. 1:6 since indeed God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, 7 and to grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels 8 in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. 9 They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from[b] the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might,
Revelation 6:10 And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?
More than that many of these Imprecatory Psalms are quoted in the New Testament. The Lord Christ quotes from them in John 15:25, and John 2:17, while Paul the Apostle quotes from Psalm 69 in the Epistle to the Romans 11:9-10 and 15:3.
So, again we say that we don’t relieve God of His “meanness” by just eliminating the Imprecatory Psalms. Even without these Psalms God remains “mean.” And we do see that summarily removing parts of the Scripture we don’t like ends up with us being sovereign over Scripture.
B.) Another tack that some have taken with these Psalms is to admit that they are inspired and so legitimate. However they then immediately insist that these Psalms were for a different time … a different era. They suggest that we must understand that God has changed with the coming of Christ.
A noted white hat “Reformed” Theologian who is a Professor on the West Coast, for example has written,
“The imprecatory Psalms, invoking God’s judgment on enemies, are appropriate on the lips of David and the martyrs in heaven. However, they are entirely out of place on the lips of Christians today, guided as we are not by the ethics of intrusion but by the ethics of common grace.
Therefore, moderns are wrong for dismissing such episodes as immoral, and fundamentalists are wrong for invoking them as if they were in effect during this intermission between Christ’s two advents.”
Michael Horton, The Christian faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Grand Rapids, 2011), pp 961-2.
Here the idea is that the Imprecatory Psalms are true but they are to be regarded as only appropriate to the OT saints or to the Martyrs in heaven. The idea is that we live in an age of common grace that does not allow us to pray this way, whereas in the OT they lived in a time when
We are explicitly told we would be wrong to pray that God would vindicate His name by crushing His enemies today.
Wrong to pray that God would crush those who “put women and children under the ground who were alive,” as it is being reported is being done to Christians in Iraq.
Here is another description of what is going on in the World and remember we are told that we are wrong to pray Imprecatory Psalms against these people.
“They tied the hands of one woman to the back of a car and her legs to another car and they split her into two,” another said. “Have you seen anything like this? This is all because she is not Muslim and did not want to be converted.”
What I’m seeking to do here is to tease out the real life implications of suggesting that we should not pray the Imprecatory Psalms asking for God to visit justice upon His enemies who will not relent.
Here is another case where we are told it is wrong for God to rise up to defeat His enemies.
One of our family members has abandoned his wife and children to pursue a lifetime of perversion, which he apparently has been engaging in for the last seven years. He moved out in January to go live with the new friend but continued attending church with the family and picking up the children (ages 14, 12, and 5) to go spend time with his new paramour. The wife is moderately sick from a Tick bite and relies on expensive medications to suppress the symptoms, but they no longer have medical insurance because he’s unemployed due to his new instability. She can’t pay the kids’ private school tuition; they’re about to lose the house and go bankrupt; and she just applied for welfare. The church is in the process of excommunicating him; no facility is willing to hire him; the older two kids hate him; and he is trying to get a divorce so he can move to Texas with his new paramour.
Those who say that we cannot pray against God’s enemies and petition God to destroy those who would destroy him or His people have forgotten that, in the words of Cornelius Van Til,
It is at all times a part of the task of the people of God to destroy evil. Once we see this we do not, for instance, meanly apologize for the imprecatory Psalms but glory in them.
C. Van Til
Christian Theistic Ethics
We agree with Theologian Dabney that,
This age has witnessed a whole spawn of religionists, very rife and rampant in some sections of the church, who pretentiously declared themselves the apostles of a lovelier Christianity than that of the sweet Psalmist of Israel. His ethics were entirely too vindictive and barbarous for them, forsooth; and they, with their Peace societies, and new lights, would teach the world a more beneficent code.
R. L. Dabney
Discussions– Evangelical and Theological (Vol. 1, pg — 709-710)
Of course the major obstacle to the reasoning that the Imprecatory prayers are not for us to pray has already been mentioned. The major obstacle is that we find the same type, though not the same degree, of Imprecation going on in the NT. Anathemas and Woes are pronounced upon people by Jesus and Paul. Portions of the Imprecatory Psalms are quoted by the Lord Christ and others. Alexander the Coppersmith is explicitly inveighed against in an imprecatory fashion. The principle of imprecation is found in the NT and if in the NT that suggests the idea that Imprecations are only for the NT age is a theory that is not satisfactory.
It all really comes down to this. Do we love God and His Kingdom enough to not love those who viciously oppose God and His Kingdom? Do our hearts burn within us to see God’s name exalted by the leveling of Satan’s Kingdom?
God’s Kingdom cannot come without Satan’s kingdom being destroyed. God’s will cannot be done on earth without the destruction of evil. Evil cannot be destroyed without the destruction of men who are permanently identified with it. Instead of being influenced by the sickly sentimentalism of the present day, Christian people should realize the glory of God demands the destruction of evil. Instead of being insistent upon the assumed, but really, non existent, rights of men, they should focus their attention upon the rights of God. Instead of being ashamed of the imprecatory Psalms, and attempting to apologize for them and explain them away, Christian people should glory in them and not hesitate to use them in the public and private exercises of the worship of God.
Johannes G. Vos
The Ethical Problem of the Imprecatory Psalms
Westminster Theological Journal
Now, what is the danger of praying these Psalms? The danger is that we will be praying them with a lack of love. You see it is love that drives us to pray in such a way. Love for God and others.
Puritan David Dickson gets at this point when he offer
If any of the enemies of God’s people belong to God’s election, the Church’s prayer against them giveth way to their conversion, and seeketh no more than that the judgment should follow them, only until they acknowledge their sin, turn, and seek God.
So we pray God’s judgment against them as God’s enemies fully realizing that should they turn and be saved that our Imprecatory prayers against them immediately cease.
We pray Imprecatorily with hopes that God will crush His enemies the same we He crushed us when we were enemies and that is by granting repentance.
At this point we are one with Luther who said on this score,
We should pray that our enemies be converted and become our friends, and if not, that their doing and designing be bound to fail and have no success and that their persons perish rather than the Gospel and the kingdom of Christ.
Martin Luther
Our tendency to pray Imprecatorily, as our tendency to love unbiblically is too often forgetful of a genuine love to God and His Christ. Whether praying imprecations or loving unbiblically what to often drives us is love for self. When we pray imprecatorily we have ourselves at the center thinking only of the wrong done to us personally and forgetting the injury to thrice Holy and Glorious God. Similarly, when we love unbiblically we have ourselves at the center. We refuse to oppose others, via imprecatory praying or in other ways, because we love ourselves to much to want to risk being widely disliked. And so, too often both in our Imprecatory praying and in our unbiblical loving we have self at the center.
Republication Ruin #5
“When we come to the Republication Paradigm, merit is being defined and used differently than in the Westminster Standards.”
Elam, Van Kooten, Bergquist
Moses and Merit; A Critique of the Klinean Doctrine of Republication
1.) The reason that merit is being defined and used differently than in the Westminster standards is because the whole idea of “merit,” as handled by the Klinean Republication lads, is resting in a different worldview from those who wrote the Westminster standards. Words are worldview dependent and the worldview of the Escondido Theology is a different worldview than the Westminster divines and so their definition of merit is as different as the worldview that they own.
2.) Concretely speaking, merit is different in the Escondido Theology because, following Kline, the Escondido theology no longer is taking into consideration the ontological divide between man as creature and God as Creator. Because the Westminster West lads view merit only covenantally there is little understanding in their position to see the inability whereby Adam could gain, even in the prelapsarian covenant, a strict merit. Adam could never have earned a strict merit due to the ontological distance between the Creator and the creature.
Adam gained merit in the prelapsarian covenant only due to God’s condescension. God’s condescension allowed Adam to accrue “covenant merit.” However, covenant merit could never be strict merit because of the ontological divide between God and Adam. The only one who could ever gain strict merit was the Lord Christ; and that only because there was not ontological divide between the Father and Son. The Escondido theology severely minimizes this ontological distance between God and man and so does not render justice to the idea of God condescending to man.
The sum of it all is that the changes made in the Escondido Republication Theology goes a long way towards giving a facelift to the Reformed faith so that it no longer is what it once was. You simply cannot rearrange and redefine central concepts of the Reformed faith without sending ripple effects through the whole theological structure.