Dennis Tuuri

Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Joshua chapter 20. The Lord also spake unto Joshua, saying, “Speak to the children of Israel, saying, appoint out for you cities of refuge, whereof I speak unto you by the hand of Moses, that the slayer that killeth any person unawares and unwittingly may flee thither, and they shall be your refuge from the avenger of blood. And when he that fleeth into one of these cities shall stand at the entering of the gate of the city, and shall declare his cause in the ears of the elders of that city, they shall take him into the city unto them, and give him a place that he may dwell among them.

And if the avenger of blood pursue after him, then they shall not deliver the slayer up into his hand, because he smote his neighbor unwittingly, and hated him not beforetime. And he shall dwell in that city until he stand before the congregation for judgment and until the death of the high priest that shall be in those days. Then shall the slayer return and come unto his own city and unto his own house unto the city from whence he fled.

And they appointed Kadesh in Galilee in Mount Naphtali and Shechem in Mount Ephraim and Kirjath Arba which is Hebron in the mountain of Judah. And on the other side Jordan by Jericho eastward they assigned that in the wilderness on the plain out of the tribe of Reuben, and Ramoth in Gilead out of the tribe of Gad, and Golan in Bashan out of the tribe of Manasseh. These were the cities appointed for all the children of Israel, and for the stranger that sojourneth among them, that whosoever killeth any person at unawares might flee thither, and not die by the hand of the avenger of blood until he stood before the congregation.

We thank God for his holy word, and pray that he would illuminate it to our understanding. This is our annual service joined with many churches throughout the country in designating this Sunday as the Sanctity of Human Life Sunday. This Sunday is held the closest Sunday to the anniversary of a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America essentially legalizing the killing of pre-born infants on demand in our country.

That decision, as you probably know, is now 20 years old. That was made in 1973. This last Friday was the actual specific date. This is the Sunday closest to that date, but Friday was the day of the actual anniversary of that decision. And it was marked this year by an action, another commemoration. That commemoration was the signing by President Clinton of executive orders removing the so-called gag rule, which will now allow the counseling by federally financed clinics for the murder of pre-born infants.

He additionally signed executive orders permitting again the use of fetal tissue in medical experimentation. Such action will undoubtedly lead to the harvesting of pre-born infants’ parts for the cause of the greater good of those who seek that greater good through the death of the pre-born infants. He also moved the country a significant step closer to the importation of RU486, the so-called abortion pill.

Now, this action of President Clinton commemorating the Roe v. Wade decision capped what in my mind and correctly interpreted is a pretty incredible week. I know that you can easily fall into the delusion of your own self-importance. That can be generational as well, or frequently prone in our generation to think that the things that happen in the context of our lives are really extremely important to the history of the country.

I know that’s a self-delusion we can frequently fall into—the rapture generation, I think that’s part of the problem with thinking that way. It’s like ours is the lifetime in which all this will occur. So I know that’s a delusion it’s a delusion we want to avoid. But I would think still, and maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that the events of this past week are somewhat momentous in terms of the history of our country and certainly the direction in which it’s headed now.

The actions of this past week, including the signing of executive orders, are essentially symbolic in nature. And any of you who listen to Rush Limbaugh, you’ve heard him talk a lot about civil symbolism versus substance in terms of the Clinton presidency. And I tend to disagree with Mr. Limbaugh on this particular point. Symbols are very important and validly so.

You know, in terms of human beings, we’re created in the image of God. We’re created as religious beings, and so symbols, liturgies, rituals are extremely important to us, and that is not a bad thing. That’s actually a good thing. That’s what we do every week, right? We come together and we involve ourselves in various symbols or liturgical acts. You know, the Lord’s supper of course is the primary one that comes to mind. It’s a set of liturgical acts we go through. You stand up and you sit down on command essentially from the elders of the church in liturgical worship before God.

And so man is a religious creature. He responds to religious symbolic actions. You know, I think that’s a lot of the fascination of people with various rock groups. I think specifically of the video by R.E.M. with one of their songs where they do this kind of ritualistic symbolic actions with his hands. The lead singer does. David Byrne of the Talking Heads did a lot of that. And in one of David Byrne’s earliest videos, he interspersed clips of him doing these liturgical actions with clips of natives in Africa doing these same basic actions. He had derived a lot of them from the ritualistic worship services of pagan Africans.

Now certainly pagan rituals are bad, but the point of this is that people respond to those things. People respond to symbols because we are created in the image of God, and God is much greater than we can ever comprehend. And liturgical actions, symbolic actions in a way remind us of the fact that our intellectual understanding is never able to comprehend the mystery of our own being, the mystery of the universe, and certainly the mystery of salvation in Jesus Christ.

So we are religious beings. I want to talk about several religious actions or liturgical symbolic actions that took place this last week, although I think they’re significant. I’m thinking primarily of the actions on Wednesday, of course, and for some Christians who are looking maybe reading synopsized press accounts, maybe not reading with a great deal of depth of understanding of what’s going on, these events pretty good.

Inauguration Day on Wednesday began with a prayer service. After all, the president starts off his day with a prayer service. And I thought it was kind of interesting. The TV cameras seem particularly fascinated with Chelsea Clinton falling asleep in the pew. Hope we never have cameras in here. Watching people nod off is a funny thing, but it isn’t really very nice to them. In any event, at the end of the prayer service, there was a sermon by a fellow, a Christian, supposedly a sermon on the two great commandments, loving God and loving your neighbor.

Hillary’s pastor was there part of the ceremony, an Episcopalian priest, I believe, and Mr. Clinton’s pastor, I think, was there, Southern Baptist. That was the first liturgical action of the day that kind of set the religious tone for the day. Then, of course, we moved on to the inauguration itself.

The inauguration was bookended by Billy Graham, you know, the leading spokesman of Christian evangelicalism. He gave the invocation invoking God’s presence and blessing upon the service. And he then gave the benediction at the end of the inauguration asking for God’s blessing, and he used those specific words on President Clinton and Vice President Gore and the administration.

In the context of the inauguration service, a gal named Maya Angelou recited a poem, and the poem was about the rock, the stream or river—I’m not sure which word she used—and the tree. Now here again, Rush Limbaugh, not thinking symbolically, not thinking religiously, was just confused by the whole thing. But those of you who have read your Bibles a lot and you listen to Maya Angelou’s poem, you should have recognized extremely strong references to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Jesus is the rock and he is the stream of living water, and he is the tree as well, planted by the living water, and us as we are in him are also incorporated into that stream and that tree. In Psalm 1, for instance, where we’re like the tree planted by living waters. The book of Revelation has that imagery, and of course we’ve already read scriptures today about Jesus being our rock.

Great number of biblical allusions by Maya Angelou in the context of her poem. Indeed, the Bible in which President Clinton took his oath of office was not a closed book this year, as it has been in some years in the past. It was an open book, and it was open to the book of Galatians, a New Testament book. It was open there specifically by President Clinton’s direction. The focal point on that page was to be the verse, “Do not grow weary in well-doing, for you will reap if you faint not.”

So the whole idea was to be persistent in well-doing. Very good verse. So we have that, we have then the service repended with biblical allusions, quotes from the scriptures, etc. And then even the inaugural balls that occurred that evening are kind of the way we cap off our day, you know, festivities. There is a sense of religious rejoicing that we do on the Lord’s day that should characterize all the rejoicing we do throughout the week as well. Our parties, if you want to look at them that way, our times of fellowship and having a good time, our balls, so to speak, and we listen to music and interact with one another are really formatted after the religious rejoicing feast we have together at the agape.

So there was a rejoicing liturgy as well. But then there was this fourth symbolic action on Friday. Now for those of people—as I said, who just sort of caught the tiny press glimpses or weren’t necessarily all that self-conscious of what was going on—these events are going to look real good. We’ve got a good Christian administration going here. Begins with prayer, has Billy Graham as the reading of scripture in the service and then also scriptural allusions in terms of poetry.

But if you take a little closer look at what these liturgical actions were about, then Friday’s decision, which seems to be not understood in relationship to these services on Wednesday, becomes crystal clear, and as I said, sort of interprets the rest of the week’s activities. What happened on Wednesday really in terms of those symbols ultimately pointed to the symbol of the decision by President Clinton to essentially sign a death certificate and a death order for many pre-born infants over these next four years in America.

Many more children will be killed by abortionists at the hands of abortionists, with the consent and volitional act of the mother involved, as a result of Clinton President Clinton’s order. His order means that this country has increased blood on its hands. And now how does that fit in with these other events? Well, if you understand that interfaith prayer service, for instance, was not just an interfaith prayer service. It was not a Christian prayer service.

Of course they had Episcopalians. They had a rabbi, which some people would see, you know, as being part of an interfaith prayer service. They actually went so far, however, as to have a Muslim there as well reading from the holy book of Muhammad, the Quran, and actually reading for some reason—which I don’t understand—the original language, and then he would interpret it after he read it. It was a blasphemous service. In other words, it was not Christian by any stretch of the imagination.

The preacher’s sermon was on the rich ruler who wanted to know what he had to do to inherit eternal life. Our Lord’s answer was the two commandments: Love God and love your neighbor. The whole point of that sermon missed the main point of the scriptures. Certainly in the command to love God and our neighbor, we have the model for how we ought to live our lives as regenerate creatures. It is the standard by which we’re judged by God and found wanting, but it’s the standard that’s also given to drive us to salvation in Jesus Christ.

Because we cannot love God and our neighbor in our own strength, in our own power. We can never do it perfectly. Period. But this preacher didn’t use it to talk about salvation in Christ. He used it instead to say that’s what we’re going to try doing now in an increased sense in this country for the next four years. Now we could really love God our neighbor. And the sermon had allusions that to Bill Clinton being Messiah and being the one who would bring peace to the nation and prosperity again.

It was a blasphemous service. Let’s move on though to talk a little bit about the inauguration event itself. I mentioned the poem by Maya Angelou, which also was blasphemous, in my interpretation, a poem. Yes, there were biblical allusions, but those allusions were never drawn in the context of her poem, nor in commentary afterwards, to the Lord Jesus Christ. Those allusions became instead pantheistic, so to speak—to where God is immanent and not transcendent.

He is in our creation, in the rock, in the stream, in the tree itself. And those are the things that judge us. It’s the preeminence of the earth over God’s greatest image bearer, man himself. It’s an indictment not by God of man’s moral actions, which it could have been prophetically in a correct sense, I think, in terms of our nation. I mean, let’s face it, the people on the right and the free enterprise people are no more godly, by and large, than the people on the left.

They’re all sinfully wicked. And the people on the right drive the people on the left to state solutions, but they’re both—they’re the same creature. They’re janizaries, man essentially, as Cornelius Van Til would call him—going this way and swinging that way. So the poem could be interpreted prophetically as condemning those people who reject the lordship of Jesus Christ. But instead, it becomes a prophetic denouncement of man on the part of earth itself, speaking forth these things—not earth as the spokesman for God, as the lamb cries out for blood, being God crying out for the blood of the innocent, that God might avenge the blood of the innocent—but rather land itself being God and being therefore a terrible blasphemous poem.

Maya Angelou ends her poem with all these things saying to man, “Say look up, you know, and say good morning.” Really, her poem and the religious implications of it are good night—to those who and not good night, even bad night—the end, blackness and darkness instead of the light of Jesus Christ. That light is turned into the darkness of pagan religion in Maya Angelou’s poem.

The Bible—yes, it was open to the book of Galatians: “Grow not weary in well-doing.” But what’s the context of that verse? Prophetic. The word of God is always prophetic in nature, and the symbol used becomes, actually, when properly understood, a symbol against President Clinton and some of his unrepentant actions.

It goes on to say, “Yeah, don’t grow weary in doing good, but you will reap if you faint not.” But it goes on to say then that whatever you sow, that you shall reap. If you sow to the flesh, or rather, whatsoever you sow, that you shall reap. If you sow to the flesh, you will reap from the flesh; so to the spirit, you’ll reap from the spirit. That spirit isn’t Bill Clinton’s spirit. It’s the Holy Spirit of God.

Bill Clinton has sown to the flesh, and he’s not publicly repented of his sin relative to that sowing of the flesh. And I say in a physical sense, certainly in terms of what he’s doing now in terms of the abortion decision, the homosexual order, etc.—he’s certainly sowing to the flesh. And Galatians taught this two verses before the verse he liked: “Be not deceived. God is not mocked.” And God, while he attempted to essentially mock God at the inauguration service by proclaiming another God, another Messiah, and another order to things, but God is not mocked.

You know, in terms of the earth taking preeminence over man as an image—as part of religious strand that’s going through our country right now—I heard a news account a couple of days ago. We’re going to go to the metric system here in Oregon being mandated by the federal government. I don’t know. I hope they’re going to have both kind of highway signs. Hope we have miles and meters, or kilometers rather, on the freeways, but they talked about it just being kilometers.

That itself is—don’t have time to spend a lot of time on it—but, you know, the inch and the foot are based upon the length of a man’s foot. They’re based upon biblical allusions to certain measurements. The metric system is a result of the French Revolution, and it’s a result of man making the earth the measure of all things instead of man as God’s primary image. We’re related to God in his scriptures.

The whole change from the English system of measurement to the metric system is not a good thing. It’s not a good thing at all. It’s part of this—as Van Til called it—the downward integration into the void. It’s based upon the circumference of the earth, measured in a particular arc that was actually measured in France by the Frenchmen involved in the French revolution. That became the basis of the metric system. By the way, it’s an imperfect measurement, of course, because you can’t really accurately, totally accurately judge the circumference of the world.

But in any event, this whole transition has occurred—these religious significances to what happened on Wednesday are replete with warnings to us of the days ahead as well as the indictment of God against such things. I don’t know how a person who understands the meaning of the benediction could proclaim a benediction upon President Clinton, who it was already known would within two days increase the killing of pre-born infants in this country.

There’s no blessing by God upon people just because they hold office. You know, first what he does tell us is to first of all pray for amen and for rulers and authorities, but it doesn’t say to pray that God would bless them. That cheapens the whole sense of blessing or benediction. A benediction is a benediction, a good word. It’s an empowerment by God to serve him. It’s what we have every Sunday at the end of our service together. At this Sunday we include a malediction, a bad word, a malevolent word, saying that God’s curses reside upon those who ignore his law.

And certainly the increased responsibility of civil rulers is completely demonstrated throughout scripture. They had to bring bigger sacrifices in the Old Testament. Bigger animals, better animals, because their responsibility is greater, their culpability greater than others. So we can’t pray that God would bless a president who walks in complete disobedience to God’s word and twists it around and goes into a worship service that Jeremiah 7:1-7 is a ringing indictment against in terms of that interfaith prayer service.

How can you pray a benediction upon such a man? I don’t understand that. Maybe somebody can straighten me out on that later. But if we take the biblical sense of blessing and benediction, there’s no benediction that rests upon President Clinton when he does these actions.

We’re to pray for our leaders, thanking God that they give order. You know, the whole context of the verse again—to pray for our leaders—so that we might live a quiet and peaceable life. And God desires all men to come to salvation. We want peace in the land to preach the gospel. And civil magistrates, even evil civil magistrates, are good for us because they produce some sort of external order. Romans 13 tells us we’re to thank God for President Clinton. There’s no doubt about that. And thank God for the rulers that he’s placed over us, to give us some modicum of order.

But the thanks for that reduces in value, of course, as much as that becomes disorder in the land instead of order. The righteous are murdered, let go, and the innocent—any crime in terms of actual commission of crime (not innocent ultimately—we’re all tainted with the sin of Adam, but the innocent pre-born child is allowed to be murdered). And actually, your tax dollars go now to fund these things. Well, no benediction. And I don’t care what anybody attempts to do with what their words before God. The benediction is not some sort of mystical rite.

You know, sanctuary is not unconditional in the Old Testament. And benedictions are not unconditional in the Old Testament. I get up here and pronounce the benediction at the end of the service. If you get up here and give the benediction, if you’ve not heard the words, if you’ve not responded correctly, if you’ve stiffened your neck against God, don’t think that the blessing of God resides upon you as you leave the building.

No. The curse lies upon you. You have a greater responsibility, a greater culpability before God. There’s no benediction in terms of the inauguration service. Then the festivities themselves were incredible in terms of the gala events. Of course, the primary ball that evening, the most popular one, one you couldn’t get into, was the MTV inaugural ball.

Again, symbols are important. God wants to communicate to us symbolically in those other ways. En Vogue begins the inauguration service by singing the national anthem. These gals can actually sing, by the way. I didn’t realize that, but they can actually sing quite well. And they sang the national anthem. They had robes on, choir robes. So there’s a kind of religious patriotic cast to it. And then immediately at the end of the national anthem, they strip off the choir robes and they get essentially into a bump and grind in typical En Vogue fashion—and what they sing about—that’s what’s going on here.

We’re moving from patriotism and true religion of God and worship of God and respect and sanctity, etc., and holiness, to the bump and grind. The program was ended—the MTV ball is ended—by Don Henley, and he sang, I believe, five songs. Very interesting. I could go through all of them. I won’t. But the second song he sang—he sang “Dirty Laundry” first, about the press attacking anybody. That’s certainly true. It’s not good when the press attacks President Clinton either, really. It’s a denigration of the idea of office itself. Eventually, the people get dissatisfied with all government and move toward anarchy. That’s what the press always tends to do—is stir people toward anarchy.

But in any event, he’s singing that song. Second thing he’s singing is from Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are a-Changing.” Of course, change is the central theme of the symbolic actions on Wednesday. Okay. And very significantly, he had a group—a high school choir from Woodrow Wilson High School. Symbols are, you know, God-given. God weaves these things into the tapestry of the days on Wednesday as well.

There’s this public school choir. As he gets to a particular part of the song, he holds up his fingers like this—”Listen, really hear this now, America.” By the way, he’s got dark glasses on. He’s got combat boots on. It’s quite an image, intentionally given. These guys are very self-conscious of what they do. Artists who are in the upper areas of success are very self-conscious. He holds up his fingers, and then he sings the line, and he has them printed up on the screen so everybody can sing along with him:

“Come mothers and fathers throughout the land, and don’t criticize what you can’t understand. Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command. Your old world is rapidly changing. Get out of the new if you can’t lend a hand, for the times they are changing.”

You know, that’s a warning. That if you get in their way now, they will roll over you. They will roll over opposition. If you can’t understand, if you don’t agree with what’s going on with this change of religious perspective in America—from being a Christian nation explicitly built on the scriptures to those same scriptures being used now blasphemously in terms of interfaith prayer service, blasphemously in Maya Angelou’s poem, where allusions to Jesus Christ become immanentized to the earth itself, and now blasphemously when the Galatians—the very passage that should be a ringing indictment against the sort of unrepentant sin that the president involved himself in—has been used somehow instead as some sort of great movement toward change.

The whole religious structure of this country has changed radically, and the MTV ball was a fitting symbolic end to the symbols of that day, which were not Christian in any stretch of the imagination. They’re anti-Christian.

It reminds me of—as one of these commentators, these young guys from this revolution that came out of the ’60s, the Vietnam War, etc., that I was a part of. Praise God that I’ve been delivered from that. I thought of that too, watching MTV. I was chilled by what I saw during Don Henley’s songs, but I was also moved to great thankfulness to God that he brought me out of that, out of his grace, because I was part of that whole ’60s thing.

Well, one of these guys is looking up at the inauguration service, sees these military jets fly overhead, and gets kind of upset in his soul at first. “What are they doing up there?” You know, military display. The conservatives and liberal thing came up in his mind. But then he realized those jets are ours now. They’re ours now. They’ve got control of the jets. That means something, folks. These fellas are self-conscious of what they’re doing.

The change has become radical, and the change should be a warning to us. The mixed message on Wednesday became clear as day to anyone with eyes to see by Friday with the order relative to the anniversary of Roe v. Wade—and the removal of the gag order, fetal tissue research, RU486—the fruit of the rejection of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and as the determiner of our standards, our goals, our analysis of what we did wrong in the past and move toward the future.

The end result of the rejection of that and the supplanting it with a civil state, with a civil religion—and you know, there’s a columnist who used the term “the religious left” a couple weeks ago, absolutely appropriate—these people are not no longer secularists or materialists. Pluralism, as Rush Limbaugh has told us so often, is a transition from one orthodoxy to another, and the new orthodoxy arrived in symbolic form last Wednesday. And that’s a rejection of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And the end result of that path—meaning down that way, in the road of disobedience instead of the road of obedience—is what you see on Friday: Death. Death. Death. The rebellion that was spawned in the ’60s, reaction against the materialism of the parents in the ’50s, etc., has now found its fruition in more and more death in terms of abortion and the inauguration of greater tolerance in the military for homosexuals, which is, as one author properly put it, a death-style instead of a lifestyle.

The symbols are rampant. The implications are important for us, and they fly right in the face and help us then to understand the application in our time now of the cities of refuge to what we do this day in terms of asking for God’s special curses upon those who would kill pre-born infants.

Our liturgy that we will shortly be involved in does really two things. It affirms the sanctity of human life, but not the ultimacy of human life. Human life in and of itself removed from the image of God is not the ultimate source of value. God told us in Genesis 9, which you read last week, that “From man’s blood will be required [when] man’s blood is shed, for man is made in the image of God.”

Remove the connection, and there’s no value to human life. Ultimatize human life, and you’ve idolatized the whole thing. And that’s not what we’re about. And so we ask for God to curse certain people and to bring temporal judgments upon them to the end that they might repent of their sins and come to salvation in Jesus Christ, or that they might, in the words of Psalm 10, be removed from off the earth, that man might no longer oppress, that God would kill them and remove them instead of let them go on to continue to murder unborn infants.

So we affirm, as does the city of refuge laws taken in their entire context, that God’s judgments against men who are evil are just. We call for them. We implore God to seek to exercise his justice in the land. You know, it’s interesting. The Psalter is looked upon by a lot of ignorant people as just some sort of nice devotional book, but it is filled with ringing indictments of evildoers and models for us to use in terms of asking for God to punish them.

Psalm 10, of course, that we just read, is an important example. Verse 14 says that God has seen the evil. “Thou dost behold mischief and spite to requite it with thy hand. The poor commits himself unto thee. Thou art the help of the fatherless.” Who are the fatherless today? They’re the unborn children whose fathers and mothers have forsaken them—to the suction hose, to the salt solution, to the cutting scalpels of the abortionists. That’s the fatherless today.

And God—the Lord Jesus Christ whose thoughts and heart is recorded in the Psalter—says, I believe, in verse 15: “Break the arm of the wicked and the evil man. Seek out his wickedness till thou find none. The Lord is king forever and ever. The heathen are perished out of the land.”

Since God is sovereign, the end to which we pray for has been accomplished definitively and works now out through created history. And so the psalmist looks ahead to the day when the judgments we pray to God to execute upon unrepentant, disobedient, malevolent man—when those judgments find their conclusion—the evil will indeed be perished out of the land.

And it’s not the only psalm. We could go on to cite lots of psalms. Another one is Psalm 68, where it says that God is a father of the fatherless. And certainly that’s true in terms of looking at the abortion situation. And verse one of that Psalm 68 says, “Let God arise. Let his enemies be scattered. Let them also that hate him flee before him. God is seen as an avenger, to come to cause the rebellious to dwell in a dry land.” Verse six—judgment upon them. “God shall rule the head of his enemies, and a holy scalp of such—” one is open, as goeth out. Well, anyway, he says God shall wound or crush the head of his enemies. It says that “the saint shall dip our feet in the blood of our enemies.”

We see in verse 30 of our Savior’s thoughts and words: “Rebuke the company of the spearmen, till everyone should submit himself with pieces of silver.” Over and over again in the Psalter we have allusions to God’s justice being poured out against those who would kill the unborn—the fatherless, so to speak.

Now it’s interesting that in Lamentations 2:20, we read the following verse: “Behold, O Lord, and consider to whom thou hast done this. Shall the women eat their fruit and children of a span long? Shall the priests and the prophets be slain in the sanctuary of the Lord?”

The parallelism there shows the judgment that comes to the land that forsakes God: the priest and the prophet slain in the sanctuary, the child being eaten by his mother—a child of a span long, not very long. If I understand the use of the term, not long enough to have been born yet. Well, there’s a correlation here between the sanctuary—I think a God-given correlation in this parallelism involved in Lamentations 2—between the sanctuary of God’s altar and the sanctuary of the womb as well. Both are violated in Lamentations 2.

And so we read in the cities of refuge that the sanctuary comes from God’s altar. And then we see a nation that not only has rejected and abolished forms of religious sanctuary according to God’s word, but is then moved to allow women to abolish the sanctuary of the womb. We see the tremendous working out of the implications of the faith that rejects the Lord Jesus Christ.

“All them that hate God love death.” And that is the end of their actions. Our liturgical actions affirm the sanctity of human life, but not the ultimacy of it.

The city of refuge, of course, as I said last week, affirms in a very dramatic sense the sanctity of human life. Let me read a couple of commentators here. Dale Ralph Davis in his commentary, No Falling Word, says: “This chapter breathes the sanctity of human life, both the manslayer’s and the dead man’s.” He says that the city of exile was both refuge and prison. It was safety, but it was also exile for the one who had accidentally killed the man.

“Such is the costliness of destroying human life. Even when life is taken unintentionally, the consequences of that wrong must be carried. Life made in God’s image always remains exceedingly sacred.” So even though the person running to the city of refuge had not intended to kill somebody—it was an accident, the axe head flew off the axe, whatever it was—still that blood defiles the land. That blood must be atoned for by the high priest by his death. Ultimately, that land must have—that shed blood rather—has consequences for the person who did it, even accidentally.

Human life is always seen as exceedingly sacred because man is made in the image of God. Calvin said this about the cities of refuge: “Lastly, the people were accustomed by the establishment of the cities of refuge to detest murder, since homicide, even when not culpable, was followed by exile from country and home till the death of the high priest. For that temporary exile clearly showed how precious human blood is in the sight of God.”

Pink in his commentary on Joshua 20 said: “To deface the king’s image is a sort of treason against men. Applying a hatred against him, and that if he himself were in reach he would be served himself in the same manner. By the way, that was an indictment against the press, who regularly defaces the king’s image, wanting to deface the king himself.” Pink goes on then to say: “Though how much more heinous then it must be to destroy, curse, oppress, pass, or in any way abuse the image of the King of Kings. Man is that image. And so when men reach out to hurt—intentionally or unintentionally—human life, it is a great affront to the one whose image is borne by man, to God himself.”

And so the cities of refuge speak to us of the sanctity of human life. They speak to us of the need to value human life highly. And of course, as Calvin said, properly understood and applied under today, it would sensitize us to the horrible nature of murder. But of course, the reverse exists in our culture. Not only are we not sensitized to it, we’re actually desensitized to murder in our land.

Pink said that the nation that moves away from capital punishment does a tremendous disservice to its population. It moves toward a sentimentality toward crime and to the loss of human life as it moves away from capital punishment. And it is no coincidence that we have done two things in this country in the last 20 years. We’ve moved away from capital punishment, and we’ve moved toward abortion on demand. We’ve moved against both things that are taught to us in terms of the cities of refuge in Joshua 20 and throughout the scriptures.

We move subconsciously away from both aspects of the laws of the cities of refuge. Those whose blood is intentionally taken—those who tried to kill somebody else, whether it’s a pre-born infant or not—those are to be put to death. The statutes clearly tell us, in the case law we refer to last week, that you cannot take a ransom for a murderer. You can. There’s no substitute punishment you can give out to those people that take human life intentionally. Their punishment must be death. Our nation has moved away from that.

And on the other hand, the laws tell us that those who are not guilty of capital crimes and who have need protection from those who would seek to kill them unjustly—actually in terms of God’s law, they must be protected by God’s system of civil laws, the court system that’s established in the cities of refuge, with the presumption of innocence, with the need for a trial, with sanctuary given before the trial is held, etc. All those things must be part of a judicial system. And yet in terms of pre-born infants in this country, they’re all done away with in our culture.

Our liturgy, on the other hand, affirms both these things. It says that the murder of pre-born infants is just that: murder. It defiles and bloodies our land. It brings God’s just punishments to bear, not simply against the individuals but against the land itself. And we see ourselves in America today move further and further away from Christian values, Christian standards, and the plain teaching of the word of God to religious pluralism, which is not pluralism—which is the establishment of a new orthodoxy that denies salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ is the city of refuge. And in a very important application of what I have to say today, we can condemn what goes on in the world around us. We have to do it based upon God’s word. We have to pray in relationship not to our own thoughts or desires, but in relationship to his word. And his word tells us to speak forth for those who cannot speak, to try to rescue those who are being hauled off to slaughter, and to try to reach out to God and implore him to save the fatherless when they are oppressed by civil rulers or by others.

We must do that. We must engage ourselves in a service of malediction. But the end result of that malediction is not simply the destruction of the kingdom of man. It is rather the establishment of the kingdom of God. As hard as the winds blow, and it’s interesting, isn’t it, that we had a tremendous windstorm here in the Pacific Northwest—the “Great Inauguration Day Storm” they’re calling it. More eight people, I think, died up in the Seattle area as the windstorm hit.

The winds of change have blown, and now are blowing stronger. And that change is away from the standard of God’s word toward a new religious orthodoxy that denies God’s word, denies salvation in Jesus Christ, and attempts to use all those things to serve man and the created order’s purpose instead of glorifying God in heaven. And those winds that blew hard for us last Wednesday morning are an indication, a symbol, if you will, from God to us of the judgment that blows across this land as it moves self-consciously toward encouraging the murder of pre-born infants as one example—another symbol of the whole change that’s happened.

But as much as I want you to understand the nature of the shift and the need to understand that the wind will blow hard outside and will for some time—to recognize that those winds are from God. There’s another old rock song I used to like to listen to that said, “God’s aloft. The winds are raging. God’s aloft. The winds are cold.” They’re winds of judgment. But that judgment is also winds of establishment. They’re to the end that the wicked might be taken off the land, that the man of evil may no longer oppress, that God’s people may be established, and his kingdom might come and his will might be done on earth as it is in heaven.

This church is a picture of that. I’ve talked about political allusions, political applications of the cities of refuge. Oregon is becoming such a city of refuge. There is a degree of sanctuary available in this state as opposed to what’s going on in the country. Why do I say that? Because we now have self-consciously Christian people in the legislature. And we have other men who are willing to look in terms of God’s principles, understand them, and move politically in terms of them.

We will not see, if I’m correct in my assertion of the body politic in the state of Oregon, we will not see some sort of pro-abortion bill pass the Oregon legislature. I do not believe that we will see a pro-homosexual bill pass the Oregon legislature. Bulwarks have been built into our situation here in Oregon over the last 10 years.

Why is that? Why is it better here politically now than it is in the nation? There’s only one reason for it. It’s because good men, good Christian men who understand the application of God’s word to the civil sphere did something in the last 10 years. People in this very congregation did things. They spoke forth the word’s relevance to our civil laws. They took passages such as the case laws in terms of the Levitical order, etc., and applied them to the civil sphere in terms of where we’re going to go and got the goal out there and then begin to move toward that goal.

These things don’t just happen, folks. They happen as a result of our efforts. And God blesses those efforts. We see the blessing of our efforts here in Oregon in the legislature now and in the change and understanding of the body politic and the freedom of homeschoolers. There’s new battles ahead. There’s no doubt about that. The enemy just doesn’t lie down and die. It’s a dying enemy, but its death throes will be bloody.

There’s lots of work to be done. But don’t forget that God is establishing a city of refuge in his church now, in this state. The work of this church in particular, I think, has been extremely important to the establishment of homes of refuge and a homeschooling population throughout the state of Oregon. Our homes are sanctuaries.

Now, we had a piano teacher come over. She comes over every other week, gives lessons to our kids. Let me say first that I recognize that I have limitations as a father and as a manager of a household. I wish I was raised Christian. I wasn’t. I understand my limitations better than anybody. So I don’t say this by way of pride. I’m embarrassed by my failure to rule my household in a proper sense. And I pray to God that he’ll continue to mature me toward that goal. But I praise God also for the work that he has accomplished in our household to this point in time.

The lady came over and said that she liked to come to our home because she said—actually she said she thought it was a privilege to come to our home to teach our kids piano because it sort of reminds her of in books we read about homes in the past where the kids, the girls, are sitting around doing crochet and needlework, and there’s music playing, and there’s peace to the home, etc. Now she’s not there every day, right, but, you know, there is a peace developing there. And if it isn’t 100% well, it’s at least 20, 30, 40%. There’s a peace that’s developing, and she sees that. She sees the difference between her household and other households that she sees, and it reminds her of the past.

Well, I guess what I’m trying to say is it should also remind us of the future. That’s what we’re going to move toward in this country inevitably. That’s the way history flows in relationship to the establishment of God’s kingdom, which is a place of peace, order, industriousness, beautification. All these things are good and proper under the headship of the Lord Jesus Christ. So that is the sanctuary that we’re providing in our homes now. And we should thank God for that sanctuary, that city of refuge.

In terms of Reformation Covenant Church, the people that are here and other Christians, of course, across the state as well, there are sanctuaries in our homes where the winds don’t blow, at least not very much. They may get in the cracks a little bit, but the peace of Jesus Christ reigns in those homes. And here at Reformation Covenant Church, we have a city of refuge. And this city of refuge should be seen as quite important to you because the family by itself, I do not believe, can resist the onslaught of the winds of change—the soft tyranny that we’re now headed toward in this country that is increasing now in its growth. It’s one that pulls at people in subtle ways.

Maya Angelou’s poem, for instance, Billy Graham’s presence at the inauguration—they pull you in subtle ways to move toward that change. But it’s a change away from the Lord Jesus Christ. And the church, the institutional church, grows in importance, I think, in terms of the city of refuge and its provision that it provides a sanctuary and refuge as the winds blow stronger outside.

And so what we ask God to do this day in seeking his temporal judgments against abortionists and against those who kill pre-born infants—also, we pray to God then to establish his kingdom, that all the world might eventually be a city of refuge where God’s laws, God’s system of order, God’s preeminent standard in the scriptures is the source of all law and is the ultimate place to which men can make appeal to the source of law in the scriptures themselves and the altar, of course, which is Jesus Christ.

It’s interesting to me though that even here, in terms of the institutional church, we talk about capital punishment and its loss in our day and age. We could talk about excommunication as well. And it’s a declension in practice in American churches, and you can see the parallelism right in place. I thought this week of the Joab again being torn from the horns of the altar. And I thought in terms of Jeremiah 7 that there are churches throughout this country, probably even some who celebrate Sanctity of Human Life Sunday, in which people are allowed in who should not be allowed in—who participate in abortions, who condone them, who may have even had one themselves and not come to repentance for it.

Surely there is grace in the Lord Jesus Christ. We pray that God might bring his judgments that people might repent, as we repented and were slain by the sword, but then healed by it. But there are people in the altars across this country today who cling to the horns of those altars for refuge when they’re not repentant of their sins. Joab was stripped from that altar, and our churches in America today are filled with people who should be stripped away from the visible representations of God’s presence in his people.

The interfaith prayer service—people should have been called out of that place bodily by Levitical guards. Will we to again move toward a self-conscious application of the word of God in terms of worship? But they’re not. They sit there. And so we ask that God would bring his judgments to bear, that people might be hauled away from the altar they do not belong there, because after all the church is the preeminent symbol of the application of the word of God and religious worship, the community is the pre-eminent symbol. It’s the way Clinton’s inauguration day began, and it’s the way reformation and reconstruction will begin again when preachers preach the word of God, the application of it to every area of life and thought, and certainly to the murder of pre-born infants.

So what we pray for this day is a change not just in the civil polity. We pray for God’s judgments as well against those professing members of the Christian community who profess the Lord Jesus Christ and yet who move in terms of allowing abortions and not excommunicating those people who have participated in them and not come to repentance.

A lot of work to be done, but God tells us indeed that we build not simply to restore back what we had before—times of glory before him—but we build looking toward a new establishment of an even greater self-consciousness on the part of the American population of the word of God as its standard. And to the end that the inauguration of Clinton and its symbols shows the result of death and destruction, the result of turning away from God’s word, that also is an administration of God and his grace to this country.

The people who put together Wednesday and Friday—we have a ministration of grace to teach us that if you remove the Lord Jesus Christ and refer to him only in terms of being the Son or the Mighty Counselor and don’t use the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and bring in all that he did in his incarnation, you move from life rather to death. It’s a ministration of God’s grace to bring us to repentance.

Let us pray that the church would come to repentance of the nation and would as well. Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your teaching in the cities of refuge. We thank you, Lord God, that they affirm to us the sanctity of human life, but not its ultimacy. We thank you, Father, for the reformation and revival that you’re causing in our land.

We thank you, Lord God, for the sanctuaries that exist in our homes. We thank you for the sanctuary that exists in this church and other faithful churches throughout the region. We pray that you would establish them and strengthen them. Lord God, we pray that people would see the need increasing.