Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Micah 5:7-9

Scripture is Micah 5:7-9. “And the remnant of Jacob shall be in the midst of many people as a dew from the Lord, as the showers upon the grass that tarrieth not for man, nor waiteth for the sons of men. And the remnant of Jacob shall be among the Gentiles, and in the midst of many people, as a lion among the beasts of the forest, as a young lion among the flocks of sheep, who if he go through both treadeth down and teareth in pieces, and none can deliver.

Thine hand shall be lifted up upon thine adversaries, and all thine enemies shall be cut off.”

We’ve been talking about for the last few weeks the climactic section of the book of Micah. And this section we’re reading this morning really correlates well to the beginning of this particular whole section which is verses chapters four and five 1 through 3, talking about the judgment upon the nation, upon the world that will come about, and then chapters four and five talking about the establishment of the mountain of God as a result of that shaking. So five develops what is given in kernel form in Micah 4. The first four verses develops that. Now, what we’re doing this morning is God sort of repeats it in Micah 5 in a more expanded fashion about how this will come to pass.

And if you remember, there was an antiphonal response on the part of the people of God at the conclusion of those first four verses of Micah 4—that they’d walk in the name of the Lord their God, no matter what the nations did around them, knowing that God’s long-term purpose is the establishment of his kingdom and having all nations flock to God.

And so next week we’ll have a bit of an antiphonal response also of God calling us to an antiphonal response, the removal of idolatry on the basis of what we’ll conclude this morning, the passages we’ve been dealing with for some weeks now.

We said last week and this morning really follows up the verses we read last week and have talked about several weeks now. We said that today’s church needs desperately to know what this message has to say for the church in terms of history and what’s the purpose of history. What did Christ establish or accomplish with his coming? What’s the nature of that work? Is Satan really alive and well on planet Earth? Is Satan really the god of this world and therefore this world is given over totally to Satan? Does God only elect a small remnant of people throughout history? Are the end times spoken of in the New Testament about the church age really essentially times of evil and badness and destruction?

This is critical to our faith as we look at the world around us and try to interpret what the newspapers tell us about what history is doing. Do we see here just the natural working out of the fact that the gospel won’t be effective as it’s preached to the nations to converting those nations and bringing them under the dominion of Jesus Christ? Or do we see something else?

And so we’ve been talking about what the implications of these verses seem very clearly to be for the last days and for the times of Messiah’s coming and what he will do. And this morning we’re going to continue with what we’ve been talking about and tie these verses into what we’ve said before.

Title of this morning’s talk is the church in the nations.

And the first thing that is rather obvious from the verses we’ve just read is the place of the church relative to the nations. And that place is dispersed among the nations after Messiah comes. It seems rather obvious. Verse 7 says that the remnant of Jacob will be in the midst of many people. Verse 8, you’ll be among the Gentiles, in the midst of many people, among the beasts of the forest, among the flocks of sheep.

Five repetitive references to the fact that the church is dispersed among the peoples or among the nations during the time following the coming of Messiah and his birth and the birth of the shepherd king that we talked about at the beginning of chapter 5 of Micah. So the church is to be dispersed among the nations. And this is just one more indicator of course from the text itself of the appropriateness of assigning this portion of God’s holy word to the age we now live in—post the coming and the birth of the shepherd king whose birth we now move toward in the month of December to celebrate and rejoice before God.

The fact that the church is dispersed among the nations is also repeated of course in the great commission. Now that Messiah had come, the covenant keeper had come, the covenant mediator—now he then tells the church on the basis of his work to now go into all the world preaching the gospel, discipling all the nations. The church is no longer to be restricted to a specific geographic location to which the nations would go. But now the church is to go out across the face of the whole world in a power that had never been seen up to this point in time because Messiah had now come and ushered in his great work.

And so the church is commanded to go into all the world. There’s a correlation, we’ve talked about this before, between the book of Joshua and the book of Acts. Joshua, another name really that could be translated Jesus, a type of Jesus certainly in the Old Covenant history, leads the people into the promised land. And he tells them what the verse will conclude with this morning, that they’re to go and wherever they set their foot, that it’s God’s territory. They’re supposed to be strong and be very courageous because God will go with them. But they went into a specific geographic location.

The book of Acts, following the work of Messiah and the great commission that he gives us to go into all the world, says that we’ll go into the whole world the way that Joshua went into the promised land and we’re supposed to expect the same thing that he was commanded to do—to conquer that land because it had been given over to God for his purposes.

So the church has to be dispersed in the nations.

Second, what is the role of the church in the nations? The role of the church as we’ve been talking about for several weeks now is the dispelling of darkness. We said that the result of the shepherd king’s birth is victory over the great dragon of Assyria and Nimrod—both indicators of the forces of the satanic forces, all forces that would oppose Messiah and his people.

And that Messiah comes to deliver his people, not just to keep them safe from Assyria and Nimrod, but to conquer and to go into the heart of Assyria, in the land of Nimrod, in the land of the demonic forces as it were that are talked about there conquering. And those demonic forces headed of course by the great Satan have been defeated definitively by Messiah at the cross. He has plundered the house of Satan with his coming to this world. He has affected the loss of authority and power of Satan, ending his reign that was significantly diminishing his ability to have influence over the nations.

We said that Messiah came to redeem the guilty and move them to acceptance with God in a full sense. All these animal sacrifices in the Old Testament pointed to Jesus Christ coming and redeeming the guilty. So we have a picture instead of Satan at the right hand of God accusing the saints before God—as it were his left hand I suppose—instead now that is replaced by the enthroned Messiah, his work completed, who pleads at the right hand of God and makes intercession for the saints on the basis of his work.

And so we have acceptance with God. And Christ has come and destroyed the works of Satan. He’s released those who are held by fear of death and bondage and servitude to sin and Satan. Christ has established peace for his people—not the peace of absence of conflict, but the peace of a correctly ordered world increasingly manifested through the preaching of the gospel. Holistic peace.

That the great Satan is not only defeated by Messiah, but indeed as Messiah has said, he takes the seven and eight men, principal men of the covenant people into Assyria and they go in there and destroy Assyria, the capital of Nineveh and whatever else would be manifested in that culture. So also the church then defeats Satan progressively. They mop up. They have a mopping up exercise as several people have noted. Having followed their Messiah now who has definitively won the victory over Satan, they now defeat Satan and his forces progressively over time. They’re protected from being harmed by Satan. They’re aggressively pressing forward offensively against the gates of hell which shall not prevail against the church.

Ephesians 6, we said before, is full of offensive references. And it’s just a travesty that we see that so often is strictly defensive. You see the cross references to Isaiah. You see the shedding of the preparation of the feet to tread upon Satan’s head. You see the word of God that goes forward victoriously. So the church aggressively presses forward and the church is promised to have effectual results in that.

There’ll be something successful and that’s the key to everything else—preaching of the gospel of Christ, converting men and nations and bringing them to discipleship to him. And so even the scriptures say even the cultic impostors of the church, the synagogues of Satan and whatnot will eventually have people converted out of those areas as well. We probably have people here this morning who were involved in cultic practices and cultic religions and whatnot who’ve been rescued and redeemed because the gospel is now successful in penetrating the darkest darkness that Satan has thrown upon the earth.

Evangelism, the preaching of the gospel of God is the power of God unto salvation. And that salvation has implications for everything that we say and do. And so there’s this shift now to the New Testament. We no longer have this remnant mentality, this winnowing down, narrowing down process. Messiah has come and now there’s a great expansion because we have evangelistic success and the gospel is preached in that power of the Holy Spirit that he gives us on the basis of Christ’s work.

So Satan is not alive and well on planet Earth. Satan is a bruised enemy. His reign has been significantly reduced. We no longer have a remnant being saved in the New Testament. We have tremendous promises of evangelistic success. And so we see much differently what we read in the papers than what people who believe those things would believe about what’s said there.

We said that the church is a serpent treading. We talked last week about resisting the adversary. Satan does bring temptations. But God says explicitly in First Corinthians that with the temptation that he brings to pass in our lives through the secondary means of allowing Satan to bring these things into our lives, with all these things we’re more than conquerors. With the temptation, we’re also given the means whereby we can resist that temptation.

And so it is just a tremendous sin and travesty—and this happens so often in our world today—for men to blame their environment, their external conditions, other people’s failures for their sin. That is a travesty. It’s a terrible thing to do because you see it’s God and his providence who brings all these things to pass. And when we blame our external surroundings for our failure to act in conformance to God’s word, we’re saying that somehow it’s God’s fault ultimately because he’s the one that brings those surroundings and temptations.

He brings them into our lives in his providence. We can’t blame our external surroundings as our own sin. And God says that though Satan will tempt us, we’re able to resist that temptation. Satan brings fear and slavery, but we’ve been delivered in Hebrews 2 from fear and from slavery. We have faith to replace that fear, and we have obedience to God and his commandments to replace the slavery to sin that we had before.

Satan attempts to wreck the reconciliation that Christ has accomplished, striking at families, striking at churches, accusing the brethren. And when we do those things ourselves, we do his work. And we must realize that Christ has reconciled us to God. And he now builds relationships back up that Satan will attempt to intervene in. But Christ has definitively reconciled all things in himself. And so we work that out in our relationships.

I’m going to read this quote from Calvin again. It’s so important. It’s such a good quote. Calvin said that the fact that the devil is everywhere called God’s adversary and ours also ought to fire us to an unceasing struggle against him. For if we have God’s glory at heart—and that’s so key as I try to point out in terms of understanding that God’s glory is what we’re aiming for ultimately, not our own well-being ultimately, but God’s glory.

If we have God’s glory at heart, Calvin said, as we should have, we ought with all of our strength to contend against him who is trying to extinguish it. And if we are minded to affirm Christ’s kingdom as we ought, we must wage irreconcilable war with him who is plotting its ruin, which is the devil. Again, if we care about our salvation at all, we ought to have neither peace nor truce with him who continually lays traps to destroy us.

And so the church is called to move forward following the victor faithfully.

Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God. And if you fail to read the word of God on a consistent basis, you will not have the strength and faith that God wants you to have to resist those temptations. You will have denied the secondary means. So you’ve been in sin. God gives us a right understanding of the world through his scriptures. And the Holy Spirit writes those scriptures on our heart and builds our faith. You must be in the scriptures and you must be obedient to what those scriptures tell you to do—faith and obedience, orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

And we must pray continually that we would do these things. Prayer makes us realize that our reliance is upon God and his blessing in our life. It makes us understand that it’s not our strength ultimately that does this thing. We must rely upon God and his Holy Spirit. And so prayer is so important—to build as a regular discipline in your lives, the lives of your family, the life of you individually, the life of the church corporately, etc.

Prayer enables us to move forward obediently and faithfully to God’s purposes. Christ prayed, as we said before, that Simon would resist the temptation that Satan brought upon him, but not just that he would be okay afterwards, but that he might then turn and strengthen the brethren.

And so the church is to be a serpent treading church, strengthening the brethren. The church is to move forward obediently in the midst of the nations, dispelling the darkness. And the church is to realize that darkness’s source is Satan.

And I want to just spend a couple of minutes here. We don’t want to—you know it’d be we probably could talk a long time just about this set of verses—but I want to get through what we’ve prepared for this morning. I want to get to this text and talk about the implications of it for what we do in America today. So we’ll spend just a couple of minutes here.

I’ve listed four verses there in terms of this other point that’s always made—that Satan is the god of this world. And I just want to look at a couple of those briefly. Second Corinthians 4:4 says the god of this age has blinded the minds of the unbelievers.

Okay, so you have a statement here that Satan is the god of this age. And in these other verses you have the phrase the prince of the power of the air, the prince of this world. The whole world is under the control of the evil one. What do these things mean?

If these things mean that the entire created world that we have here is under Satan’s authority, we have some large problems because the scriptures tell us quite explicitly that God’s creation is good. When he created all things, they were good. And you see there was a man a long time ago, Mani, and his followers, Manicheans. They said that there are two different things going on here. There’s two gods as it were. There’s the god of this world, the physical created order, and as we participate in it. And then there’s the god of the spirit realm as it were. And those things they separated apart. They made an ultimate duality for all eternity between these two separate forces.

You know, that’s just a denial of what the word of God continually teaches throughout—that God created all things. The physical order is created by him and it was good and proper and it is good before God. That’s not what these verses mean. They can’t mean that.

Haddon Harriss in commenting on Second Corinthians 4:4 said the following. He said that Satan is called the god of this world, quote, “because of the power which he exercises over the men of the world and because of the servile obedience which they render to him.”

Now what Haddon Harriss is making is an ethical distinction there as opposed to a distinction of what the world is. It’s not a physical created order in terms of what it’s talking about here. The words use the term world or this age. Rather it’s talking about an ethical sphere in which men rebel against God. It’s as if you’d said for instance that Baal was the god of the Assyrians or the Philistines—rather more historically correct I suppose. If you said that Baal was the god of the Philistines, that doesn’t mean that he actually is the one who created them and in which they are absolutely forever bound into his authority.

You’re giving a description of what men have decided in their ethical disobedience to God to follow as their God. And there’s no doubt but what the indications from these texts is that there were a massive amount of ethical disobedience to God in the world at the time that these epistles were written. And that certainly has to be pointed out.

Greg Bahnsen in drawing this ethical metaphysical distinction—the fact that the world being spoken of here is the world in which men rebel, the societies and their own existence in an area in which they’ve been an ethical rebellion—Greg Bahnsen, to point out this difference of these terms in his journal, in his article in the Journal of Christian Reconstruction on Satanism, says that a good parallel is the verse that says that we’re not supposed to sorrow as the world sorrows, but with a godly sorrow.

You see, if you take world to be the whole created order, then we are part of that right now. And we could not avoid sorrowing as the world sorrows because we’re part of the world. You see, but that’s not that cannot be what that verse means. It means that when we sorrow, we have an ethical command by God to not sorrow in the same way as these guys.

And you could go trace that back in terms of implications to what you actually do. And you’ll find in the Old Covenant, of course, there were specific things you could not do. You couldn’t shave your head. You couldn’t cut your skin and sorrow in that way because you were people of life.

Point is that there’s another instance and a good parallel to one we’re considering now as to what the world means and what is Satan prince of. After all here, he’s not prince of the created order. He’s prince of those men who act in ethical disobedience to God. And those men during the times of the first century church certainly were in a preponderance, and Satan had a reign of authority over most men in their ethical rebellion.

That is now changed though. You see, the scriptures talk about in Second Corinthians 4:4, he’s the God of this age, but there is a new age. There is an age that Christ has ushered in now where things have changed. There’s been a corner’s been turned here. And I know I use the term new age there and I hope that doesn’t astound some of you. You know, that’s the biblical understanding of new age. It’s not brought in by man’s efforts and through combining with all of the religions.

But there is a new age in which Jesus Christ has ushered in a significant change in what happens in the world. Now, as we just talked about the evangelistic success the church has to have—his work has accomplished something on the cross and it’s accomplished something that has implications for us. He’s ushered in a new age in that now we’re in the age when that darkness is being pushed back. When the light shines into the world, when the light comes up before men and reveals either their sin, brings them into repentance or in a further judgment from God.

We’re in the age now when people are not cloistered up in a specific community in some geographic location, but in which we’re spread out over the whole world. And so when it says that Satan is the god of this age or Satan is the god of this world, the point is that’s not a static condition. Things have changed and the scriptures go on to say to make that change clear.

In fact, one of the verses I’ve pointed out there is John 12:31. And Jesus in John 12:31 says, “Now is the judgment of this world.” And then he says that now is the prince of this world cast out. His point is there is a change, and the church is to dispel the powers of darkness and by doing that they move progressively to roll back Satan’s effect and Satan’s reign over men because men now are loosed from those powers of darkness, come to conversion in Jesus Christ and no longer part of the world over which Satan has domain or control.

You see, there’s a change here. This world in the ethical sense in which it’s used in these verses we’ve got listed here is passing away as is that age. The new age has come—not as I say in the harmonic convergence. The new age has come in Jesus Christ 2,000 years ago. And I’m not ashamed to use that term. I think we’ve got to realize that’s God’s definition of what’s been accomplished from Jesus Christ.

The rainbow isn’t the New Ager’s sign. It’s God’s sign of the covenant. To allow them to take that without a fight is not good. We must recover that language.

Lenski speaking of the verse in John 12:31 said this: “What remains of him that is Satan is the hopeless attempt of an already dethroned ruler to maintain himself in a kingdom the very existence of which is blasted forever.”

It’s a tremendous quote. I’ll read that again. What remains of Satan is the hopeless attempt of an already dethroned ruler to maintain himself in a kingdom the very existence of which is blasted forever.

That’s what John 12:31 says. Now is the prince of this world cast out. Change has happened. All these terms mean that Satan is the ruler of the ungodly but that the realm of the ungodly has been invaded by Jesus Christ and now by his church as we preach the gospel, and that sphere will lessen increasingly as the new order that Christ has established in his work blossoms and grows.

That’s the darkness we’re talking about—the source of that darkness is Satan, prince of the ethical men or the ethical sphere of men who rebel against God, and that sphere has been invaded by Jesus Christ and so the prince of this world in that sense is cast out.

Okay. The church among the nations dispels darkness. Darkness is undone by the means of spiritual warfare. And I was going to talk about this last week and I’ll talk about it a little bit now.

I would encourage you to read an article, and again in that Journal of Christian Reconstruction on Satanism, on the early church fathers’ understanding of spiritual warfare and demons. I’ll read a few quotes from that article now. It’s very important that we understand what the church fathers thought and I think that they were essentially correct in these things.

The writer of the article says: When Paul wrote of the prince of the world and the prince of the power of the air in Ephesians 2:2, he was writing about the prevailing cultural atmosphere, the climate of opinion, the spirit of man’s disobedience and departure from God which characterized the ancient world.

So the idea is that there’s an ethos, an atmosphere we live in, the context of that is often characterized by this ethical rebellion against God. And it’s that atmosphere created by man’s ethical rejection of God and his law that is the sphere, the spiritual darkness that we’re doing battle against.

The church fathers believed that all pagan culture and religions were essentially demonic, demon inspired, inspired by forces that are in rebellion against God.

Henry Schellier described the character of the demonic atmosphere and the demons’ means of controlling men’s minds in this way. Quoting now from this man, and again his understanding of the church fathers:

“This domination usually begins in the general spirit of the world or in the spirit of a particular period, attitude, nation or locality. This spirit in which the course of the world rules is not just floating about freely. Men inhale it and then pass it on into their institutions in various conditions. In certain situations it becomes concentrated. Indeed, it is so intense and powerful that no individual can escape it. It serves as a norm and is taken for granted. To act, think or speak against this spirit is regarded as nonsensical or even as wrong and criminal.”

And you know, if you think a little bit about that, you see that the spirit of ethical disobedience in certain areas today in our culture has taken root to just that extent—where if you say something to the opposite or even think about challenging it, is regarded as nonsensical by the culture in which we live in.

We live in an age, United States today, that is an ethical rebellion against God. And that atmosphere and ethos is penetrated by this spiritual darkness. And the darkness is such that to try to light a match in it, people laugh.

Okay, I’ll go on to continue what he said.

“It is in this spirit that men encounter the world and affairs, which means that they accept the world as this spirit presents it to them with all of its ideas and values in the form in which he wants them to find it. The domination which the prince of this world exercises over the atmosphere gives the world—and again atmosphere not there in the sense of the physical air but in the sense of the moral environment created by these things—gives the world with its affairs, relationships and situations and even to existence itself the appearance of belonging to him. It imposes his valuation on everything.”

Okay, it imposes his valuation on everything. When you’re in the context of spiritual darkness, you’re in the context of Satan who has produced the lie against God’s word. Men walk according to the lie instead of to the truth. That culture then, that’s produced by those men, is a result of that spiritual darkness. And what it does, it imposed Satan’s evaluation upon everything instead of God’s.

That’s the context in which the early church, the early fathers found themselves. But they didn’t think that was unresolvable. They thought that to preach the gospel meant to talk about the implications of the gospel in all these various spheres. And so when you go out for instance and talk about the failure of the society to act in obedience to God in the economic sphere or the political sphere or in the recreational sphere, and you challenge the things that they do which is the result of their ethical rebellion to God, you’re doing warfare against this spiritual darkness. You’re driving it back when you confront the society at any point.

They thought that the entire cultural system of the pagans was thus considered demonic, and this was an important ground of the early Christians’ attack. When the apologists attacked pagan beliefs, they were attacking the forces behind the beliefs as well as the ideas themselves.

Now, Ignatius, writing about the victory the church would experience in doing and entering into this warfare and combating the ideas and the forces behind the ideas because of the culture that’s permeated by the rebellion against God, they saw that was going to be victorious. They were going to be victorious in that warfare. Ignatius said the following:

“A star blazed forth in the sky outshining all the other stars and its light was indescribable and its novelty provoked wonderment. And all the starry orbs with the sun and the moon formed a choir around that star. But its light exceeded that of all the rest, and there was perplexity as to the cause of the unparalleled novelty. This was the reason why every form of magic began to be destroyed, every malignant spell to be broken, ignorance to be dethroned, an ancient empire to be overthrown. God was making his appearance in human form to mold the newness of eternal life. Then at length was ushered in what God had prepared in his councils. Then all the world was in an upheaval because the destruction of death was being prosecuted by God.”

Now when in a degree in terms of his lights and lesser lights—but the point that Ignatius understood fully from the scriptures is that when Jesus, the light of the world, comes into the world, he drives back darkness. The destruction of death is prosecuted by God through the coming of Jesus Christ. And the fathers understood that.

In conclusion of this article, the author wrote the following:

“The Christians of the first three centuries recognized that they were in spiritual war with several types of battles and instruments of warfare. They were, to use modern parlance, in a war of liberation. They fought for the liberation of the pagan world from the despair and fear which enveloped it. And we know where that fear comes from. They were in a cultural battle struggling to show how demonic and permeated with falsehood the practices and ideas of their contemporary society really were. Satan counterattacked these militant Christians through persecution. But even then they fought back and had the assurance of ultimate victory because Christ on the cross had himself dealt the death blow to Satan’s empire. The church was seen as part of Christ’s conquest over demons and she can wage war against the powers of darkness with confidence because victory is certain.”

Now I think that the early church has a lot to teach us about spiritual warfare and about the fact that Christ has won the victory and we prosecute that victory in his name. We go forward driving back the darkness. Now, that is commanded of us—the church—as well as it is both prophesied of here that we press the battle against the Assyrians.

So, it’s commanded of the church to enter into that spiritual warfare in our day and age. I guess one way to put it in terms of Portland is that Portland is wrapped up in cobwebs—fear, despair, ignorance, rejection of God, producing all these things coming forth from Satan. And we have the light of the world. We’re supposed to go into those cobwebs, cut them off, drive back the darkness.

Philippians 2, verse 14 says, “Do all things without murmurings and disputings, that you may be blameless and harmless, the sons of God without rebuke in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world, holding forth the word of life, that I may rejoice in the day of Christ, that I have not run in vain, neither labored in vain.”

We live in the context of a crooked and perverse generation today. And we’re supposed to hold forth the word of light. And that light dispels darkness. It drives back the chains of unbelief as it were. It forces men to confront God’s word and either respond to that word in repentance or to stiffen their necks against that word.

Wars are won on the offensive. Defensive football teams score zero points and you can’t win the game without scoring points. We have to press the battle is the point of all this. We have to engage ourselves in spiritual warfare.

This means, of course, that it’s not enough just to fix up our families. As we pointed out last week, it’s not enough for us to have achieved a reconstructed peace in our households and to fail to press the battle outside of those households. You don’t endanger your household. You have a priority there in terms of guarding that house. But you must realize, particularly the men of the congregation, that you are called on by God to press that warfare in whatever sphere God has called you to activity in, and certainly for most of you that includes the business sphere, and we’ll talk about that in a minute.

The gospel of personal peace and affluence, even with a reconstructionist twist to it, is still not the gospel of Jesus Christ. We’re to go on the offensive dispelling darkness before God. Our feet must be treading in order to crush Satan.

Now, that works gradually. And I was asked last week by a couple of folks to at least talk a little bit about gradualism in the context of what we’re talking about this morning.

Deuteronomy 7:22 says, “The Lord thy God will put out those nations before thee by little and little. Thou mayest not consume them at once, lest the beasts of the field increase upon thee, but the Lord thy God shall deliver them unto thee, and shall destroy them with a mighty destruction until they be destroyed.”

Now, there’s a passage dealing with gradualism, and it tells us some important things. There’s several ways a person could respond to this verse. If you’ve gotten this verse and you’re going to go into the promised land now, one way is to say, well, he says here that he’s not going to drive out the Philistines overnight. It’s going to be little by little. So, I guess when we take over our particular plot of land, we should allow a few of them to stay there, you know, because God doesn’t want them out all together. The animals of the field might multiply then and hurt us.

That’d be an incorrect way to interpret that. God says, “You will not consume them at once. But he has ordered them to act as if they would consume them. He tells them to go forward pressing the battle. But then he says that the way this is going to work out is they won’t be all gone at once. They were supposed to go wherever they went trying to get rid of those Philistines. But God says it won’t happen overnight.

Now gradualism—or rather gradual—does not mean that we reduce our attempts and strive only for half good and half bad solutions. Okay, that’s not what gradualism means. No, we strive for and proclaim only what we can support fully from the word of God.

Now, gradualism also means though that we don’t expect an attempted complete reversal of what has occurred and built up over hundreds of years overnight. That’s the rapture mentality we’ve all kind of gotten away from, I hope. It’s the mentality of the quick fix. It’s also the political solution. It’s a short jump to hoping for political salvation to hoping to a rapture salvation—in the sense of the cultural manifestations of salvation. That is what I’m saying—is either one denies the fact that we have a gradual process that we must go through. We cannot with the stroke of a pen change our culture tomorrow. It’s not how it’s going to work.

Gradualism says to attempt that is wrong. That solution fails to know that man’s problem is sin and ethical rebellion, not ultimately laws or the environment he lives in the context of. Men must change and society and the men in the society to change the society itself. Political action is not thereby irrelevant, but it is acknowledged to be but one small part of the mechanism whereby God’s holy standard is again raised and the nations are either blessed or cursed in relationship to their response to it.

Political action is part of the proclamation of God’s word. One small part. But it has to be the shining forth of the pure light of God’s word. It can’t be saying, “Let’s turn down the voltage a little bit.” Whatever you’re involved in, political action has to be in conformance to God’s word.

Now, maybe you’ll give—maybe this isn’t very clear what I’m saying yet, but I’m going to make a practical illustration now, and hopefully this will help clear it up.

And I’d like to make—I probably should have said this at the beginning of this little section that I want to make. I almost—uh, this obviously is a topic that we could go on for some time about, and I just wanted to address it briefly this morning. And the examples I’m going to use are ones that I think I’ve thought through pretty well, but if you think I haven’t, be sure to talk to me about it. Okay?

Let’s look at an example. Death penalty.

Now, we believe ultimately that the death penalty should be imposed for a wide variety of crimes according to the scriptures. Now does that mean that to introduce a bill in the legislature, and I’m going to use the political sphere, but I’m going to talk about implications for economics here in a couple of minutes as well—does that mean to lobby for a bill that only asks for the death penalty for senior citizens, for instance, is wrong?

Well, I don’t think it does, because when we go into the legislature and say we believe that any murder of a senior citizen should be executed, we’re speaking the truth. We’re speaking light from God relative to a particular situation in our society—the murder of senior citizens. And so what I’m saying is that is 100% defensible according to the word of God that killers of murderers of senior citizens should be executed.

Now let’s use a different example. Let’s say we went in and said, “Well, our society isn’t going to buy that right away. So what we’ll do instead, we’ll try to introduce a bill.” Now you as an individual, you as part of a line group, whatever it is, you go to Salem, you say, “Well, I know you won’t buy that. So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to ask you to say that a first time killer of senior citizens would get 10 years in prison. And the second time he kills a senior citizen, he’s murdered.”

Now, that may appear to be gradualism, but it isn’t biblical gradualism on your part because you don’t believe that. It’s not the pure light of God’s word relative to a particular scenario. You don’t want the first time killer of senior citizens to be given 20 years or 10 years in prison. So don’t go there and tell them you do want that. You want killers of senior citizens to be executed.

Okay. So whatever you do won’t be holistic. You don’t—I don’t think there’s any requirement, and we said that obviously there is no requirement, to ask for it to go down to Salem with a legislative package this big in terms of every area in which the political sphere is affected by the word of God. That’s not what it says. It says that as you go into the world you shine light in specific areas. And so whatever you do has to be wholly consistent with the truth of God’s word and with the light that he’s given you to shine into that area—for instance, the recompense due to murderers.

But it isn’t comprehensive in everything that you say. Everything you say isn’t comprehensive of the total package. Okay.

Now another factor of course that you have to consider in this area of gradualism is that God says go ahead try to wipe out the Philistines in your area there where you’re going into. And so go ahead try to wipe out the ideas that murder is not to be punished by the death penalty by proposing this solution relative to the execution of murders of senior citizens.

But he says that as you do that I’m not going to change this thing overnight. The point is that because the spiritual darkness is thick, because God and his providence has brought to pass a situation in which things will not change overnight, we input into a system that is essentially godless in terms of the political sphere. And it really isn’t that much different in terms of most of your economic spheres as well.

You input God’s pure light into a situation that is essentially godless. And usually you’re not going to come out the other end with a good biblical solution. And what I’m trying to say is that once you introduce that bill that asks for the execution of senior citizen killers, you can expect that at the other end of that process, you may well end up with a bill that says first time killers of senior citizens will be given 20 years in prison and second time killers will be given the death penalty.

Now, that’s not your fault. You’ve put your light out. That’s your responsibility to be faithful in that. God and his providence will bring other things to pass as judgment upon the nation for their sins.

Now, you have to at that point decide whether you’re going to support that bill, whether you’re going to vote for it, whether you’re going to vote against it, whether you’re going to try to lobby against it. And that can be a tough call.

Now, I may be incorrect here, but my understanding is at that point in time when you’ve got a bill that’s gone through a humanistic filter and now is in essence essentially their bill—it’s been taken, they’ve taken your light, dimmed it up, whatever it is—my understanding at that point is that then you have to say with this bill, with this law, if enacted, move us in a more positive direction or a negative direction. Can I live with the consequences of this bill?

Now, you may not be able to. You may think that in God’s scheme of things, if that bill was passed, it’s going to cause people to break God’s law. And if you think that, you’d better oppose that bill with all your strength. Otherwise, you may end up supporting the bill.

Now, this exact scenario, take it into the situation in which we were involved four years ago is exactly what happened with the home school bill in Oregon four years ago. When we went in there and lobbied, we asked for complete decontrol of home education to put it in the same category as private schools which are totally unregulated, totally unlicensed, no notification, nothing, not a—that’s what we put into the system. But what came out of the system was a bill that was radically altered. Had three words I think it was—three words—”satisfactory educational progress” put into our words.

As a result of that, we then had to say, are we going to support this bill or are we not going to support this bill? And it was a struggle. And those things are not always easy because now you’re in a different ballgame now. Now you’re saying, are we going to—would we be able to obey this law now? You know, are we not able to obey the law that it’s given before us?

So at that point, the scenario’s changed. It’s not your bill anymore, as it were. It’s been gone through this humanistic filter. And we thought that it was appropriate to support the bill, and not at least we didn’t at least not to actively work against it because we thought that it was acceptable in the terms of it wouldn’t cause somebody to break a command of God to obey it, whereas the existing law would cause us to break the command of God.

But that’s a practical illustration of gradualism. You go in shining the light of God’s word, but God says that light isn’t going to shine very far into this darkness yet. You’ll push it back somewhat. You’ll begin to clear up some people’s mind about state control of children for instance when you lobby for those things, and you’ll free people who understand that they’re to be responsible for their children’s education. You’ll do that as well. So you’ve cut away some cobwebs. But God says it’ll happen slowly, little by little.

Now couple of other things here that just in correlation to this whole idea of political action. And of course, that indicates that if you’re going to shine the light of God’s word into a specific area to drive back the spiritual darkness that exists in a particular set of legislative codes, for instance, you have got to know what the word of God says about that issue.

Now, I hear a lot of people—I’ll give you an example, and I’m not—and I’ll tell you right now where my position is. I do not believe the state has a compelling state interest in education. But I hear people move far too glibly to making that statement in our society, in the culture in which, in the context in which we as a group of men dealing with homeschoolers act.

What I’m saying is you’ve got to think this thing through long and hard and in terms of compelling state interests. I mentioned this before. The laws of Plymouth Colony said there was a compelling state interest for children to be able to read the Bible and have a vocation. If you didn’t educate your child to that extent, they’d take them away eventually. They’d find you two times. Third time, they take the child and put them with somebody that would teach him the word of God.

Is that right or wrong? I think it’s probably wrong. But what I’m saying is if you’re going to get involved in a particular area of legislation, you better have fought through those things. You better have studied the word of God to understand what the light is that you’re to shine into that process, and don’t glibly move off in a particular direction.

Now, another thing is how would you establish your priorities as you shine in that darkness? Well, I think that one thing you’ve got to say is that we want to be law abiding citizens. We want—what I’m saying is that disobedience to the civil government should make us very uncomfortable. It should make us uncomfortable because we have it is a specific sphere of authority that God has called us to participate in and walk in obedience to. It’s part of how God orders society.

It’s as if you had a radical disagreement with the church in which you fellowshipped. That should—now you may want to still stay there and ch and put up with that for a while, but it should make you uncomfortable. And it should make you uncomfortable, I believe, to such an extent that you do something about it.

You see, that’s another problem with the context in which we live and the people that we talk to about these things outside of this church. People are far too quick to jump to conclusions about what the word of God teaches without diligent study. And people today disobey the civil magistrate far too glibly because the authority of God is no longer taught in this country. And the civil magistrate has the authority of God unless he causes you to break God’s command. And that isn’t taught anymore. And so people have far too much of an easy time breaking the civil laws and doing nothing about it.