Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

King’s word for us today is found in Deuteronomy 4:6-10. Deuteronomy 4:6-10. Please stand for the reading of the King’s word.

Therefore, be careful to observe them, for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes and say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. For what great nation is there that has God so near to it as the Lord our God is to us for whatever reason we may call upon him?

And what great nation is there that has such statutes and righteous judgments as are in all of this law which I set before you this day only. Take heed to yourself. Diligently keep yourself, lest you forget the things your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life, and teach them to your children and your grandchildren, especially concerning the day you stood before the Lord your God in Horeb, when the Lord said to me, “Gather the people to me, and I will let them hear my words, that they may learn to fear me all the days they live on the earth and that they may teach their children.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you that we have been gathered together by your spirit today to hear your word, to learn to fear you properly, Father, to know your scriptures, particularly as they relate to our civil statutes and laws. Help us, Lord God, to understand today this text and its application to our lives. Help us to know the goal that we press toward, the mechanisms you’ve placed, Father, for us to reach that goal and make application in our lives.

Thank you, Father, for your word. Thank you for your spirit. We pray that your spirit would give us the good gift today of an understanding of your word as it relates to our lives that we may indeed fear you, reverence you, follow you, diligently keep these laws and diligently teach them to our children and grandchildren. We ask this in the name of the King, Jesus Christ, and for the sake of his kingdom, not ours.

Amen. Amen. Please be seated.

We’re continuing in our series on life in exile and we’re going to deal for several weeks here as we move into the election this fall. And to that admonition from Jeremiah 29:7, we read this: “Seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captive and pray to the Lord for it. For in its peace, you shall have peace.”

Just before this, the simple command in terms of exile living is to live the simple life—marriage, family. I will return to those verses after we finish up our discussion of seeking the peace in relationship to our elections. But I wanted to sort of jump ahead because the ballots will be mailed in a month and it seems like it’s important for us to think through the implications of seeking the peace of our city.

We are given here a command. It doesn’t say, “Well, you know, you might want to seek the peace.” It says seek the peace—the peace of the city where I sovereignly, God says, have placed you. That’s a command to us today. God has graciously brought us into relationship with him. Our response to that in part is to seek the peace of the city. So that’s a command.

Now, it’s a command to attain a particular goal, which is peace. So we have to know what the goal is in order to fulfill the command. And then God gives us some mechanisms to reach that goal. You know, we want to know what we’re supposed to do. We want to know where we’re going and we want to know how God’s word tells us to accomplish that particular goal. We’re not left to figure out the goal ourselves. We’re not left to say, “Well, that’s the goal. We can just make up whatever means we’re going to use to get there.” No, God’s command means there’s God’s goal and God’s mechanism for achieving the goal.

So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. And then we’ll bring that to specific application as we begin to think through the ballot measures here in Oregon. And we’ll deal with three of them, Lord willing, today as we seek to make application via the mechanism, the goal, and the command of seeking the peace where the Lord God has placed us.

Jeremiah says we’re supposed to seek, seek, strive after, go for—seek the peace of the city. Now, Jeremiah goes on to say to pray for the peace of the city as well. We’ll deal with that at the end of the sermon. But understand, it’s not enough just to pray for peace. We’re to seek the peace and we’re to pray for the peace of the city. So what we’re saying is we got to seek the peace, not just pray for the peace and we also have to pray for the peace and not just seek the peace. So we’ll talk more about praying at the end of the sermon, but we want to talk about seeking the peace today.

First and foremost, well, we need to know what peace is then. What is the goal?

Well, the goal for us in relationship to the earth is the same as it was when God set up the garden in Genesis. Doug S. brought a nice little overview of all that to us last week in the Sunday school program. God’s placed us in Eden. He’s placed us in the garden, which is in the east of Eden. He’s placed us with a responsibility to exercise dominion over all the world.

God builds this little garden. He starts it up. Our job is to transform the world to look like that garden. So we’ve got a job to do. We’re to exercise dominion. We’re to rule as proper stewards of the earth that the Lord Jesus Christ has given to us. We don’t believe in maintaining the pristine nature of the world. We believe in beautifying the world. That’s what God wants us to do. So our Christian life has application to every area of what we do as people.

Now, to beautify the world in a righteous way requires civil mechanisms, institutions, but it’s part of the great goal which is to exercise dominion and to beautify the world. From the beginning of Genesis to the very end of Revelation where we see the new heavens and the new earth, we see the temple coming down from heaven going over the earth. It doesn’t get rid of the earth. It transforms the world.

And it’s interesting because at the end of Revelation, we still read that the command is for people to come to the Savior. We still read that the gentiles are bringing their stuff into it. So the book of Revelation is not postponed to the end of times. It’s saying that’s what is in process of happening right now. It’ll happen definitively at the second coming of Jesus Christ. But right now God is transforming the world from a garden to a city and it’s a garden city.

So there’s development, maturation, culture, civilization, etc. That’s the big goal. The overarching goal of peace is to see the world transformed to become a beautiful place filled with city gardens where people acknowledge the King of Kings, the Lord Jesus Christ. Now that’s from Genesis to Revelation and the Great Commission is the same thing. You know, as you go, you’re to make disciples of the nations, right? First of all it tells us that nationality—you know, it doesn’t say the world, it says nations are God’s design for how men are to run their lives. Nations are supposed to actually disciple the nations.

And that discipling task is broken up into baptizing them, but then also teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. Our goal, peace for the city, is when they are taught to observe all things that Jesus Christ has commanded them. Now, the Great Commission says specifically in terms of nations. So yeah, it involves individuals, but it involves political institutions. We could say nations and by implication smaller institutions, cities, states, communities.

Our goal is to see those nations discipled where the nations as a nation are obedient to the laws of the Lord Jesus Christ. We seek theocracy. There’s the big boogie term these days. Nobody wants to talk about theocracy. And there’s a reason. The well has been kind of poisoned by Islam. Islam does not advocate theocracy. Islam advocates ecclesiocracy. Theo is God. The crassy part of it refers to rule or authority, government.

Ecclesiocracy is a situation where the church as an institution rules the political and civil structures of the community. That’s what Islam wants. They don’t want, you know, theocracy. They want ecclesiocracy. They want the church ruling. They want the imams to decide what the laws should be. And then the civil governors say, “Okay, we’ll do whatever you guys tell us as head of the church.”

In the Bible, there’s a big division between church and state, rulers in each sphere. So we don’t want ecclesiocracy. We don’t want the church running the world or the nation or the city. That wasn’t the peace that God told him to seek in the city where they were planted. But the peace is theocracy—in other words, the rule of God over the world. Now, that’s a goal, but it’s also a reality. Is Jesus Christ reigning now? Well, yes and no, right? Is God in control now? Yeah. He’s sovereign. Jesus has always been, you know, the king. There’s a sense in which the triune God has overseen all the events of history.

We have a theocracy. We can either accept it or reject it. We can either get with the program or not. But God is God. God, he rules. He’s sovereign. In a sense, Jesus is king. Now, in a greater sense, that’s happened. Psalm 2 tells us with his resurrection, with his death and resurrection, there’s an enhanced sense in which Jesus Christ is now King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Man, you know, man and Jesus in his dual nature, his hypostatic union of humanity and divinity is now King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

And there’s a sense in which theocracy, or Jesus ruling, will become more manifest as time goes along. You know, people accuse us of wanting to bring in the kingdom. Sometimes we can talk about advancing Christ’s kingdom. We’re going to sing a song at the end of the service, “Christ Shall Have Dominion.” Seems like it’s future tense. And you know, those phrases aren’t wrong, but it does not mean to imply that somehow Jesus is powerless now and not king now.

You kids, the coloring sheet today says God reigns. He rules—in other words, right?—over all the earth. So Jesus Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords now. And our job is to make that more manifest, to reify, to make manifest, to make visible the reign of the Lord Jesus Christ, the theocracy that exists now. And to greatly embrace God’s rule of our families, our businesses, and certainly our political arena as well.

Peace is God’s order, the correct ordering of relationships, whether they’re family, church, state, business. Peace is God’s order and blessing in the world. “Blessed are the peacemakers.” Little kids, you can go home and tomorrow morning you can be a peacemaker by straightening up your bedroom, bringing order. And our job as Christians is to bring God’s order, not what we define as order, God’s order to the world.

We believe that God’s law then—how does God rule? His law, in a comprehensive sense, his law should rule in our city. How do we seek the peace of the city? Well, we want the city as city to reflect the person and work of Jesus Christ. And the law is a reflection of the eternal character of God. So we want God’s law to be our rule in our cities. Muslims think the church should rule. We think God should rule.

And we think that Jesus rules the world now, presently. So the goal is a well-ordered culture and society in every aspect and sphere. And that means our goal is Christ’s visible reign, which brings us to Deuteronomy 4:5-8. In terms of this, our text today is a reminder of what this means, how it works out. This goal is reflected in the text for us that we just read from Deuteronomy 4:5-10 rather. And what it says is: Well, have good laws, have good wise statutes and judgments so that the other nations will want to be like that.

So the goal is a well-ordered culture reflecting the orderliness of what we see. God’s law as it applies to judgments and statutes should be like. You know, it didn’t just say law abstractly in here. It says in verse 8, “What great nation is there that has such statutes and righteous judgments?” Statutes, laws, judgments, what happens if you break the law—as are in all this law. Law is the comprehensive word used of those specific elements which I set before you this day.

So God clearly says that the goal for a particular nation is to reflect the law of God in its statutes and judgments and its civil laws. And that this is going to be a model to every other nation, right? In the world. So the goal clearly is the establishment of God’s order, which means we could say the law of God being manifest in our civil statutes. When we have biblical laws, what does the text say will happen?

Well, it’s a beautiful thing. What happens? It says when you have these laws, these laws are your understanding and wisdom in the sight of the people—in other words, the nations around about you. They’ll hear these statutes and they will say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. What God, what nation has a God that’s so near? We may call upon him. What nation is there with such statutes and righteous judgments as before us this day?”

So what’s going to happen is the world around about a godly nation, whether it’s here or there or whatever continent it’s in, the world will see a godly nation. And those that God is calling to righteousness—which are, this is what history moves in terms of God’s people. These people will want to have their nations reflect those kind of righteous laws and judgments. So there’s a degree of political evangelism we could say as the palace, the civil arena, reflects the beauty of God’s character which is found in his law including statutes and judgments.

As the palace reflects the beauty of God, the nations round about will say, “Man, he is one good God, God. That is one wise and understanding people. They’ve got a wise and understanding God.” Notice here there’s a little structure to this. He begins by telling them be careful. Be careful to observe these. He concludes in verse 9, “take heed to yourself. Diligently keep them.” So the book ends are being diligent to keep and to observe them and to teach them to your grandkids.

And then he says, “Be careful because they are your wisdom and understanding in the sight of the people, in the sight of the people.” So our wisdom and understanding is found in the law of God. If you want to get rid of the law of God, it means you got to get rid of our wisdom. You can’t have wisdom apart from law. Now you have to have wisdom to reflect those laws in a particular setting. So he says be careful.

He talks about the wisdom and understanding of who we are. And he concludes just before he says to take diligent heed to this. He says, “You know, what nation is has such great judgments as to those which God has given to you.” So our wisdom is what’s around it. And in the middle, what we see is these nations are going to see this, they’re going to hear things, and then they’re going to say things. And what they’re going to say is praise to God.

Now, really the middle of that is verse 7. “What great nation is there that has God so near to the Lord our God to us for whatever reason we may call upon him. What great nation is there that has such statutes and judgments?” So the middle actually is that calling upon God. Statutes and judgments bounded on either side. But the very heart of this little narrative or this little section of scripture I think is calling upon God, the prayer that we do.

And so that cannot be left out of the equation. But Deuteronomy 4 says this is our wisdom. And it’s not just our wisdom personally. It’s our wisdom in the sight of the nations. It says that when we have biblical laws, more men want the same laws. They’ll want the same laws as we do. And when we have biblical laws, men are drawn to Jesus. They’re drawn to Jesus Christ through a nation that has such laws, statutes, and judgments.

Now, this is consistent with the reformed witness. We’re a confessional church. We adhere to the reformed confessions. We particularly take as our secondary standard the Westminster Confession of Faith and its catechisms. And if we were to take the time to go through all the various reformed confessions that were produced in the 16th and 17th centuries, we’d see that there is a united witness throughout them that the civil magistrate is an institution, a person who has been ordained to punish the evildoers and to protect the righteous.

Consistent message found from the beginning to the end of these reformed confessions and creeds. You’ll also see messages in these creeds where they say the Anabaptists who say that civil government is inherently evil—those guys are all goofed up. They’re wrong. So in several of the confessions, they say the idea that the civil magistrate shouldn’t be Christian and that the civil arena shouldn’t be affected by the Christian worldview—that is what one confession, the First Helvetic Confession, calls hurly-burly. That’s all mixed up. That produces horrible dissension and contentions and difficulties in the civil arena. And it’s wrong.

Biblically, all too many Christians today think that the civil government is somehow inherently evil. It’s not really important and we don’t want Christian rulers. Maybe not the majority, but a number of people think this. And the reformed confessions and creeds had a consistent witness against this and said that the civil magistrate, whether Christian or non-Christian, is deserving of our reverence and whether Christian or non-Christian, his job is to punish the wicked and to protect the righteous. And several times it references that this righteousness, this justice that he’s supposed to produce has to have a relationship to the law of God.

So what we’re saying today isn’t really controversial in the long flow of reformed history. It is somewhat controversial in America. What we’re talking about in terms of theocracy is the center. It’s the cutting edge. It’s the difficult part of what has become known as theonomic law. Greg Bahnsen didn’t bring a new message to the reformed world that people should keep the moral implications of the Ten Commandments. Nothing new about that. Everybody knew that. And Greg Bahnsen didn’t bring something new by saying the ceremonial law has been transformed, changed, and in a sense put out of joint, replaced with new ceremonies. Everybody knew that.

The hot point of theonomy was Greg’s insistence that the laws of the nation should reflect the laws of God. And those laws of God given to us in the Old Testament have to be understood and wisely applied to our day and age. Greg never said you just take a law from Israel and put it into our law book. You know, you do that in some cases. Thou shalt not murder. Great. We put that in our law books.

But what he said was that civil law of the Old Testament was given to God’s people as a model of what at that particular time and place—a perfect model of what society should look like, how they should govern themselves. And we have an obligation, not just a privilege. It is a privilege. Not just an opportunity, it’s an opportunity. We have an obligation to pray for and seek the peace of the city by having some degree of involvement in the political processes of our day to make our laws reflect the equity, the truth, the value of what God’s law was seen like in the particular statutes and judgments of the Old Testament. That is not new and novel. That is the historic witness.

I said, we’re a confessional people and the Westminster Confession of Faith talks about the law of God and I’m going to read three sections. Not all of them, but referencing—maybe I will read all of them. Section three on the law of God says: “Besides this law commonly called moral, God was pleased to give to the people of Israel as a church under age ceremonial laws containing several typical ordinances, partly of worship prefiguring Christ his graces actions sufferings and benefits and partly holding forth diverse instruction of moral duties. All which ceremonial laws are now abrogated under the New Testament.”

Now, I think there’s a little bit of problem when you talk about ceremonial law, moral law, and civil law. It’s useful to categorize some things that way, but you know, what we have in the Bible usually is stuff that’s somewhat ceremonial, somewhat moral, and somewhat civil. They don’t fall into neat, tidy categories because God’s word is ultimately not a law book. It is a sermon. It’s a representation of God himself as reflected in various laws, statutes, and judgments.

But it’s not as if God said, “Here’s a law code.” He said, “Here’s some words, right? Here are 10 words. Here are 10 little sermons.” Some are brief. Some have reasons attached to them, you know? Some have a little explanation of what’s going on. Law codes don’t have that. They just have a strict listing of laws and then the fines or the punishments to with those laws.

The Ten Commandments isn’t like that. That’s why it’s frequently called by some people the 10 words, not the Ten Commandments. You know, the fact that God delivered us from Egypt is not a commandment. It’s connected to the commandments of receiving his law and keeping the fourth commandment, but it’s part of the fourth commandment, but it’s a word explaining things about it. So, you know, it’s the same with all the so-called case laws.

You know, they have—they’re kind of like little nuggets. They’re like the Proverbs. They’re little nuggets of wisdom, civil wisdom. And yes, they were directly applied in particular cases, but they reflect things about the Lord Jesus Christ. They reflect things about our own personal morality, and they reflect things about the state. But if we’re going to talk about him in three ways, the Westminster Confession says the ceremonial law, right? Cleansing for leprosy and the sacrifices been abrogated. Okay, we all agree that those ceremonial laws have so definitively changed as to be said—you can say they’re abrogated.

And then I’m going to skip number four and move to number five. “The moral law does forever bind all as well justified persons as others to the obedience thereof.” They’re saying everybody’s supposed to keep the moral law including Christians and non-Christians. You’re supposed to keep it. Okay. Not only in regard of the matter contained in it but also in respect of the authority of God the creator who gave it. Neither does Christ in the gospel any way dissolve but much strengthens this obligation.

So in terms of whether people should, you know, kill other people or not—as a moral law—they’re saying sure, everybody still has the moral law. Ceremonial law ended, moral law stays in place. And listen to what they say about the civil law. In the middle of this—the civil law, right? Now they could say it’s abrogated like the ceremonial laws or they could say it has perpetual authority like the moral laws. They don’t say that. Here’s what they say: “To them also as a body politic he gave sundry various judicial laws which expired together with the state of that people not obliging under any—not obliging under any now further than the greater equity or the general equity rather thereof may require.”

This is a little bit of a rough translation. What they’re saying is these civil laws in the Old Testament, well, they’ve pretty much expired. They’re not obligatory to us, except there remains a general equity of them that pertains to us today. Now, they could have just thrown it all out and said, “Well, all that’s left is the moral law and individual morality, nothing with the civil law.” That’s not what they did because they didn’t believe that.

They believe, like we do, that peace is the definition of God’s order and a body politic as well as in a family or personal matter and that the laws of the country should reflect the equity—the general equity of those Mosaic judicials. That’s what we believe. That’s what theonomy has always held. It’s a confessional position. Okay? It’s a confessional position that the law of God—not, you know, cut and paste in the Old Testament, but we understand the general equity of that law in that particular setting and then we use it to inform us now of what we do in our particular setting.

So we have a command: seek the peace. We have the goal. The peace is a culture and a civil polity, a city, a nation reflecting the equity of God’s laws in the Old Testament. Okay, that’s the goal. And now there’s a mechanism. There are several mechanisms to accomplish the goal. And the first mechanism I want to talk to is Mars Hill and as one reason to engage in the political process as a mechanism.

You know the story of Mars Hill. Paul goes to Athens. Let me just read a couple of verses at the beginning. “Now, while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him when he saw that the city was given over to idols. Therefore, he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and with the Gentile worshippers. And in the marketplace daily with those who happen to be there.” Okay? Paul saw certain things.

Okay? And what he saw about Athens got him ticked off. He got agitated and it was a righteous anger that he felt. All anger is not wrong. It was a righteous anger, righteous irritation with what’s happening when it’s idolatrous. And that’s what he saw. And that moved him—a recognition that this city wasn’t at peace. It was at unpeace because of idolatry. That moved him to talk to the church about these things and the relationship of the church to the culture.

And then he led them in what they were supposed to do by going into the marketplace. You know, you go from Acropolis—worship place—to agora—marketplace. So you go from the temple into the city and that’s a Greek notion that reflects some basic truth. They messed it up by having idolatry and thus an idolatrous marketplace. But Christians—it’s the same thing. The water flows out of the temple and transforms the marketplace. This is what Paul does.

So Paul’s upset about the city not reflecting the peace of God. He talks to the church and he shows the church what we should be doing is talking in the marketplace to the city. We want to seek the peace in the city where God has placed us. That’s what Paul is doing here. Okay, he understood this exile thing. He understood the church in exile. We talked before at the beginning of this series, 1 Timothy, “first of all, prayers for all people because in their peace, you’ll have peace.” Words to that effect.

He lined right up with Jeremiah 29:5-7 in 1 Timothy as he instructs Timothy how to think about the church and what to do there. And here he’s doing the same thing. He lines right up. He knows the church is in an like an exile situation. He knows they should not be just avoiding the culture, you know, he knows and they shouldn’t just be taking on the culture. Don’t become idolatrous.

It’s idolatrous cuz we’re not in there. The water’s bad because we haven’t been thrown into it yet to bring it calmness and to bring it sanity. So Paul engages the marketplace. Well, he went to the mall. No, the marketplace is the place and where he’ll end up at is Mars Hill where these discussions go on, the exchange of ideas. And in our particular place where God has placed us, political action, political the political mechanism is largely the way people talk about the big issues of life.

There are other places too. You can go to the pub. Good place to go and talk to people about Christ. Go to Starbucks. Go to the marketplace. We’re a sent people, right? We’re outward facing. We go out there and change. We seek the peace of the city where we’re at in lots of ways. But one of those central ways is what Paul did. He went to the marketplace, got invited to Mars Hill, come up to Salem, and let’s have a discussion about how this all applies to who we are and what we do.

This is a story that I like because at the end of it, there’s a man and a woman who become converts. And the guy that becomes a convert is named Dionysius the Areopagite. And Dionysius is the root of my name, Dennis. And I like to sit around and talk a lot like the Areopagite did on Mars Hill. So I know it’s kind of particular close to my heart, but this is what we’re supposed to do.

The political period of time leading up to an election is a tremendous opportunity for you individually to seek the peace of the city, the county, the state, and the nation where God has placed you. You have that opportunity. And so one thing we do, one of the mechanisms to reach that goal—the other mechanism is our hands. Christian voting. We have an obligation to vote.

I believe that Christians have an absolute obligation to vote. I think that’s always true as we seek the peace of the city to make the laws reflect God’s law. I think it’s particularly true in this day and age when many of the taxes upon your family, upon your livelihood, upon your house, upon everything that’s near and dear to you and eventually even the church—eventually we’re moving closer to that. Those taxes come from the political mechanism.

And as Christians pull out, you know, the people that oppose Christianity move in. And when we got out of politics cuz it was dirty, it became even more dirty. And it’s tough to get back in it now. But that’s what we’ve got to do. We have an obligation. If you’re going to guard your family, if you’re going to guard your vocation, if you’re going to guard your money and your property, and if you’re going to guard this church, you have to know where the trumpet is sounding of attack upon us is primarily the political mechanisms of the culture.

So we have an always have an obligation to vote to seek this goal of God’s peace and we have it particularly now when so much of the attacks upon the church come from that particular arena. We have an obligation to vote in a distinctively Christian manner. You know the story of Esther and Mordecai. Esther becomes the queen and she doesn’t know—you know, the king’s okay to program to kill off all the believers, all the Jews. Esther’s a Jew. The king doesn’t know it. Should I tell the king? What should I do? Should I intercede for my people? She asks Mordecai. And Mordecai says, you know, God has brought you to the kingdom. It may be that God has brought you to the kingdom for just this very purpose.

We have our own potential modern-day Esther being brought potentially maybe to the kingdom in the form of Sarah Palin. Pray for her. But you’re the same thing. Esther is a representation of the church of Jesus Christ. And when we vote, when we have discussions about politics and culture, you know, we don’t like to be made fun of. We don’t like to be mocked. We don’t like people not to like us. So we tend to kind of, you know, not tell them who we are.

Mordecai tells Esther, you know, God’s going to be okay. God’s going to preserve his people. Don’t think that, you know, you’re—when I tell you’ve been—you might have been brought to the kingdom for this very purpose. You know, it’s because you’re the only savior we’ve got? Uh-uh. He says, “But you may not be saved. You may be destroyed.” At the end of the day, we have an obligation to vote, to get engaged, and have discussions in a distinctively Christian way.

Not because the manifestation of Christ’s kingdom is dependent upon you, but because your survival as a person is dependent upon him and doing what you’re supposed to do. You may be killed before God stops the killing off of the church of Jesus Christ. Your property will be diminished. Your children may be forced to have the wrong kinds of education. So we have an obligation.

The Third Commandment says don’t take God’s name in vain. And we always thought, “Okay, don’t swear.” No, it means don’t take upon yourself the name of Christian in an empty way. Vanity is emptiness. And all too many Christians violate the Third Commandment by talking common sense, natural law instead of ever referencing the King of Kings and Lord of Lords when they talk about politics and what to do and how to vote. Empty witness.

Now, I’m not saying you got to get it right out there and be offensive about it. But I am saying that the Third Commandment says we’re supposed to have a full witness of who we are as Christians in everything we do. And that includes political action. And as I said, the end result of being distinctively Christian in our political action, the end result is tremendous blessing.

The end result, as Deuteronomy 4 tells us, is political evangelism. Not only do our laws become more like the person and character of God in what we do, but other nations, other peoples are drawn to that and it becomes a way to talk about the implications of Christ both directly in terms of evangelism. You know, evangelism is good news. And the good news of evangelism is that Jesus Christ reigns and his law is gracious. His yoke is not heavy. It is an easy one to bear and it’s a delightful thing to wear. And apart from God’s yoke, Christ’s yoke, we’re under the heavy burden of men and oppression.

So, you know, the implications of being distinctively Christian in our approach to political action lead to great blessings for us personally, for the city that we’re seeking the peace of and for the people individually who are brought to Jesus Christ through that. And also as I said from Deuteronomy 4, it seems to be there’s political evangelism that’s accomplished because it’s really just the proclamation of the crown rights of Jesus Christ in terms of political action.

So there’s the command: seek the peace. There’s the goal: a well-ordered society reflecting God’s character, which means reflecting the general equity of God’s laws found in the Old Testament. And the mechanism during this particular one of the mechanisms—and the mechanism we’re talking about right now—is discussion, speaking and then also using your hands to vote in a distinctively Christian way.

Now, let’s talk about application.

There are 12 measures on the Oregon statewide ballot this fall. And if you go to the Secretary of State’s office on the website web page at the elections division, on that elections division page, the top link right now is the voters’s guide, the state voters’s guide, which lists all these measures and the arguments that people have made who paid money to get in the voters pamphlet. So you already have a resource that’s available to you.

For many years I’ve been writing two drafts of a ballot measure voters’s guide. The first one I give to Oregon Family Council. I’m a board member. And they always take my first draft and kind of, you know, take the rough edges off, improve the communication ability by getting a real wordsmith to work on it. And they also tend to kind of, you know, reduce the number of scripture references and take a little bit of the edge off and maybe isn’t quite as theonomic or theocratic as mine would be.

But I’m delighted that it happens and I’m delighted that we have an opportunity. I have an opportunity and your prayers and advice to me, you know, will actually literally affect hundreds of thousands of Oregonians who get OFC’s ballot measure voters’s guide and reflecting some of these things we’re talking about today. And then in two weeks or so, I’ll finalize the PAPAC voters’s guide. And that’ll be longer, more wordy because I’m Dionysius of the Areopagite. I like to talk. And for people that want to read a little more background on the measures and stuff, I’ll have more stuff in there.

But we’re going to talk about those things now. Okay. First one, Measure 54.

Pick an age. Any age. Measure 54. The Constitution standardizes voting eligibility for schoolboard elections with other state and local elections. What this means is right now our constitution says you got to be 21 to vote in a state schoolboard election. And they’re going to—this measure will make it 18. Most people see it as a housekeeping measure because the 26th Amendment to the United States Constitution says 18 is the voting age everywhere for every election.

Even in states, most people don’t know how that happened though. Maybe some of you do. What happened was the Vietnam War and because you know it’s interesting. I was reading a thing on taxation and it said that a measure of the consent of people to taxation is their willingness to go to battle for their country. And in the Vietnam War there wasn’t enough willingness. And so what they had to do is draft people. And they decided to draft people as young as 18.

So they’re drafted people 18 and people saying, “Wow, if they’re going to go off and die for their country, they ought to get to vote for their leaders who are drafting them.” Okay. So, you know, they then made the voting age for federal elections 18. And most states said, “Okay, it’s 18 all the time.” But Oregon says, “Well, we still want to leave our schoolboard elections at 21. We want to leave our state elections at 21. We don’t like 18. National elections, okay, you’re the boss. State elections, we’re the boss. We’re going to leave it at 21.”

This set it up before the United States Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said, “Oregon’s right. There’s nothing unconstitutional what they’re doing.” And then Washington DC said, “Well, we’ll get the last word on this. We’re going to pass an amendment to the Constitution.” And after that amendment passes, it’ll be unconstitutional for Oregon to only let 21-year-olds and up vote in the schoolboard election. That’s how it happened.

Now, in the Bible, and we’re not going to go over the texts—they’re listed on your outline. In the Bible, the age of maturation, particularly for compulsory military service, the militia of Israel was like that. That age was 20. If we’re going to pick an age, any age at which we sort of say that people are now fully adult and able to enter into civil obligations, community obligations—seems like the Bible sets that at 20. And it’s not just the military. It’s what the census was taken. This was sort of the men when they became 20. They were part of the census. The head tax was paid on everybody 20 and above.

There’s lots of references to 20 being the age of maturity. So I think that the voting age ought to be 20 and not 21. Now I could be wrong, but that’s trying to apply the general equity of those provisions in the Old Testament to our day and age.

And it’s interesting because I think that you can make a very strong case that a draft itself is problematic and an even stronger case that to draft 18-year-olds seems contrary to what that biblical evidence is of the mind of God. So our country erred in drafting 18-year-olds. And rather than admit the error, they fell into more error. This is the way it works, right? Sin gives way to sin. They gave way in my mind to more error by saying, “Okay, if they’re going to go off and die for their country, we’ll let them vote.” So now they lower what was always the age 21 down to 18.

And then they further erred by centralizing authority over elections by passing the 26th Amendment. In the Bible, government is more or less decentralized. There’s lots of texts for that, but you know, the tribes were pretty autonomous regions. There was some civil government going on. Even Solomon had 12 districts he divided people up into, but they were pretty self-governing. You know, it wasn’t greatly centralized.

Well, here we’ve become more and more centralized, and the federal government is telling the state it has to let people vote under the age they’d like to. So said and certainly under the age the scriptures seem to reflect. So for that reason I’m encouraging a no vote on this particular measure and it’s an opportunity to talk to people about the relevance of God’s word to voting and to age requirements for this sort of thing.

You had to be 25 before you could be an apprentice Levite. You couldn’t actually serve as a Levite till you’re 30. I think that has some application for pastors. I don’t like 25-year-old guys coming out of seminary thinking they can pastor. They ought to be, you know, apprentices someplace like the Levites were. We could go on, but the point is a simple one. We take the general equity of God’s civil laws that seem to mark off, demarcate 20 years of age. We apply it to ourselves today to this particular situation. And what we say is it seems like we eventually ought to get to the place where our laws reflect that 20-year-old mark.

Now, let me quickly say that the 20-year-old mark is for civil involvement, right? I’m not saying people shouldn’t get married before 20. That’s a different matter altogether. That’s and in fact that’s kind of the point—is that people are expected, men particularly but men and women are expected to be able to run a household for a few years and get the maturity to then move on into civil rule. That’s the way the Bible sort of works. Vocation, marriage, civil rule. So I’m not at all trying to imply that marriage or a lot of other things can’t be done under age 20. I’m just saying that in terms of civil obligations, being forced to go off and fight for your country and be part of the militia or army, the draft—I’m not saying you can’t volunteer earlier than that, but I’m saying the draft itself and then setting the voting age seems problematic at that particular age.

So there are 12 ballot measures. 20 is the biblical age. Men couldn’t be forced to go to war until they were 20 in the Bible. Should men and women wait until 20 to get married? No, not necessarily. And 25 was the age to begin ruling in office as an apprentice first.

So okay. So that’s I think trying to apply the evidence.

Measure 56: Taxation, Representation, and Consent.

In the providence of God, I had a funny thing happen to me this week. I was looking for a Vic Lockman track just cuz I wanted a cartoon to put on the back of the orders of worship today and we couldn’t find it. So I’m up there looking in this cupboard with all these tracks I’ve saved over the years and most of them I haven’t looked at in 10 years or five years and one fell at my feet. You know, “Oh, that’s interesting. I wonder what that one is.” I look at the just tax. I’m talking about taxes on Sunday. Maybe this book has something interesting to say. A great book, little booklet. I think it was published in theology or something. Originally written, I think in the ’50s or something like that. It’s got a little forward by a guy named T. Robert Ingram.

I’ll bet you if I was to ask for a show of hands, people who know who T. Robert Ingram is—very few of you would. A lot of you had never read Rushdoony, let alone T. Robert Ingram. There was a time when a guy I knew and he was a little different but I think he was—it wasn’t bad comment—said “if the country goes down in a heap, three guys can bring it back: Rushdoony, T. Robert Ingram, and E.L. Hebden Taylor.” Probably you’ve read at least one of you’ve read at most one of those authors. T. Robert Ingram—we have a book or two books of his I think in the church library. “Schools Way in the Balance”—excellent book—and another book he has called “The World Under God’s Law.” Excellent book.

T. Robert Ingram has the introduction to this. Well, anyway, the point is the guy brings up three points of taxation. And the first one is the one I want to talk about here. He says that these days we’re always talking about taxation without representation. You’ve heard that all your life. But the representation was a mechanism to achieve something else. Representation is one mechanism to achieve the consent of free and responsible men.

Okay. So we want to restore the idea that representation is a simple mechanism of consent to something the civil government wants to do. It’s fascinating—the history of taxation. Under Norman rule, one of the areas of England, they accepted a small tax on gabled houses in their area in direct exchange for the right to trial by jury instead of trial by ordeal. Now, that sounds really weird to us. A tax tied—but that was the way taxation was always conceived of until our day and age.

Well, I’m sure some pagan cultures it was different. But in Christendom—okay, it’s another word for theocracy. In Christendom, taxation was seen as a contractual deal, an agreement between the civil state and the individual and usually about something pretty specific. “We’ll do this for you at this money. You give us this money” and the people would say yea or nay—consent. You don’t have that anymore because all we’ve got is some kind of general fund budget usually at the state and national level. All kinds of things are thrown in there.

Now see, consent—if you had individual taxes to pay for individual aspects, this was the reason why it used to be okay if you were a Quaker and did every theology right, but you sincerely held to that belief, you could opt out of that part of the tax cuz that was only a certain part of the tax given to the military, to defense, to wars for the country. You could opt out of that part of your tax. You can’t do that anymore because it’s all mixed up.

If you know there was a tax to provide for abortion counseling, you could opt out because you don’t consent to that. See, how is consent arranged for? I’m not trying to make a case for individual consent, but I am saying there should be a general consent of people to taxation. I will speak more in future weeks about this booklet. Very interesting booklet. I commend it to you.

Well, all this is to say that Measure 56 is an attack upon consent.

Measure 56 says “amends the Constitution, provides that May and November property tax elections are decided by majority of voters voting.” Who’s going to vote no on that? If that’s all you read—is the ballot title and then they give a little explanation that’s heavily weighted in a yes favor of this. Who’s going to vote against that? If all you read is the ballot title, which is what most people do, you know, the problem is, you know, how ballot titles are supposed to work.

You put a measure on the ballot, the Attorney General is supposed to give it the ballot title. He’s an uninterested party. And then people that don’t like it are supposed to be able to appeal the title through the court system, going up the Oregon Supreme Court if necessary. Not so with this ballot title. The Democrats have done some interesting things the last few years here in the Oregon legislature. They are taking now—to this is a referral from the legislature. They’re taking now to referring things to the voters. They have to, by the way. They’re not saying, “Oh, we want you to have a role in it, too. This amends the Constitution.” They can’t do it without your vote, without your consent.

But they pass a ballot measure and then they pass another law saying “this has to be the title” and the Attorney General can’t do anything about it and the court system can’t do anything about it. That’s a usurpation—a power to itself they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with. People don’t know about it. It’s a deceptive title. But what it does is it gets rid of consent.

Right now there’s a double majority law. And one way to think of it is: if you’re going to raise property taxes, that’s what we’re talking about here. You have to have a quorum of the majority of the voters vote in that election before that election is valid. You know, IRC, we got, you know, 60 guys sitting in a room. Let’s say you got 60 delegates to a meeting. If 40 and go home, the last 20 can only continue to conduct business until somebody calls for the quorum. And once the quorum is acknowledged not to be met, you’re done. Just go on home. We don’t care if all of you want to vote a particular way. This is a basic element of representation in civil matters and in rulemaking authority.

So right now they put a ballot measure on the thing, property tax measure, it gets 75% approval of 20% of the voters. It doesn’t pass because they didn’t meet the quorum requirement. Only 20% of the people were voting in favor of this. You see, so it may sound odd—it is an odd situation—it’s the way normal businesses are run through quorum requirements to hold legitimate votes. The quorum is a simple majority. Doesn’t ask for more than that. We have now. And they want to get rid of quorum requirements.

What they want is your taxes to be higher. Plain and simple. Simple ballot measure title ought to say “we want to raise your property taxes. Vote yes on this so we can do it.” That’s what it’s about. And the taxes are already ungodly high. I I hesitate to say this, but I don’t have the article yet, but maybe some of you could help me find it. I was told by Jack Phelps that the Wall Street Journal ran an analysis about a month or two ago of gasoline prices. And they said—and what they did was—well, there’s tax on oil coming out of the wellhead up there in Alaska. There’s tax on the transportation of it. There’s tax on the refineries going to refine into gasoline. There’s tax on the transportation of that gasoline to wherever it’s going. There’s taxes on all the businesses involved in this. There’s business taxes involved, right? There’s all kinds of taxes.

And what they found out was according to this—my source is Jack Phelps, Wall Street Journal—he says, and I think it probably is going to astonish you, but out of your gasoline, 70% of the price you pay at the pump according to this analysis done goes to taxes. Goes to taxes. We don’t see our taxes. There’s so many hidden taxes in our culture. That’s why you have to look at gross domestic product. How much money is the country produced? And then you look at the how much the taxes are and it’s over 50% typically. Half of your labor goes to pay taxes.

Too high. You know, Israel was warned of tyrants who would take 10%. 10% seems to be amount that God has placed into the context of his sovereignty and any institution that wants more than 10%—watch out—and the taxing institutions get much more than that. So obviously I think this is a bad measure and should be voted no on. It shouldn’t be that you get a 20% voter turnout, 50% of them vote for property taxes, meaning 10% of the voters force 90% of the voters to pay a tax. There’s no consent in that.

So if we look at representation and consent, I think—and you know I’m not saying here how you should vote but it’s my understanding of what the scriptures say about taxation and representation being a mechanism of consent—my belief is that this is a bad idea, that we need the consent of the governed and this would move us even further away from that.

So that’s Measure 56.

Taxes are what the government uses to pay for itself. A small number of voters shouldn’t be able to tax all the rest of the people.

And then finally, Measure 59.

Measure 59 creates an unlimited deduction for federal income taxes on individual taxpayers Oregon income tax returns. So the idea is that you make so much money, but the federal government takes—let’s say 15%—of your money and right now if you—that 15% is regarded as taxable income after a certain level. Now for most people their incomes are not high enough—you actually get the deduction for your federal income tax. But people that make I don’t know how much it is—100,000 or more, maybe something like that—they don’t get a deduction for their federal income taxes. Okay.

This measure would say everybody—nobody in Oregon ought to pay tax on money you don’t get. Money that the federal government takes before you get it. Okay, that seems eminently reasonable. God’s tithe, you know, he had you count out every tenth cow and that was it—tied to reality. And that tithe is based on actual increase out of the land, out of the produce that you’ve developed, not potential income.

So it seems like this is a good measure. Now, what you’re going to hear is the fat cats want it passed. You’re going to hear the politics of envy. Envy says, “You got more money than me. I’ll never be able to make that much money. Therefore, I’m going to burn your money.” Better to burn your money, give it to the state and who knows what they’ll do with it, then let you keep it. That’s envy. And the Bible says, you know, the worker is worthy of his wages and men should make what they’re going to make and it’s not up to you or me. Envy is a horrific sin. We talked about it a couple weeks ago. It’s what—why they killed Jesus. They envied him. It’s why they threw Joseph in the pit. They envied him. Couldn’t ever get what he had. He just wanted to destroy somebody else.

And this measure fights that kind of envy. It says no, we should protect high wage earners from unjust taxation because taxation is supposed to be on what we actually get, not on some supposed income that we might get. So again on this particular measure, I believe that an application of God’s word—the laws of taxation, an increase based on the tithe—the application of that would be that we could seek the peace of our city by voting yes on Measure 59. It will allow people to keep more of the money that they would have to give to taxes—upon taxes other than that.

So those are three applications I think of the general equity of the Mosaic law to our particular ballot measures and may open up opportunities for you to discuss with other people.

Now I want to conclude by talking about the analysis of the problem here. How did we get to this state where we got taxes on no income? Where we got taxes without consent? Where we got taxes that aren’t tied to particular things? Where we’ve got younger and younger people giving the voting age? Where everything seems to be moving so contrary to what we are.

The Bible prohibited passing a child through the fire to Moloch. And you know there were cases of actual death of children passed through fires to the state. Moloch is like milcom. It’s the state. But that is not all that’s prohibited by that text from Leviticus. It says to pass through the fire. It’s referring to a practice known as februation. Februation was a passing something through the fire to dedicate it and consecrate it to a particular purpose. Okay? And passing a child through the fires of Moloch meant dedicating that child to be ultimately a servant of the state, not a servant of Yahweh.

You know, we all love John McCain’s speech at the end of his speech this last week—a stirring message, a great message of humility and how God humbled him and brought him down. But what I didn’t like about it is that ultimately the highest goal that we’re asked to accomplish by Senator McCain is to be a servant of our country. Country. Now, patriotism is a good thing. Countries are good things—God-given. But obligation to country must always be subjugated to obligations to God.

We’re Christians first. We’re Americans second. And in our day and age, the reason why we have such trouble is that people don’t think that way. Our leading candidate on the conservative side doesn’t think that way. We’re admonished to be good Americans. Obama—his experience—I it was astonishing to me to watch television shows the last three or four weeks and to hear reporter after reporter say that Obama’s great qualification compared to Sarah Palin being an administrator of a city in a state. His great qualification was that he ran for president for the last two years. This is a qualification to be president. The fact that you ran for president for two years—that’s a statist perspective. Yeah, I know there’s management stuff that requires of all that, but that is essentially from my view. It shows the statism, the allegiance not to God first and foremost, but to state and to the political process.

Walter Mondale, the old presidential candidate, said it was our most sacred duty—I’m sure many politicians say this all the time—that our most sacred duty is to cast votes in the civil elections. It’s not our most sacred duty. It’s an application of the great and sacred duty we have to worship God and to receive good gifts from him. Because our country is filled with people that vote their pocketbooks, vote pragmatically, vote in an unprincipled way in terms of religion, that’s why we have what we have.

The problem is, as the problem that drove the people into exile was, they didn’t listen attentively to God. They defined for themselves what the peace of that city Jerusalem was supposed to be like, and they saw destruction. And that’s why I return then to seeking the peace as important. Political action should never be diminished as something irrelevant to us, but it is not the first and foremost thing you’re to do to seek the peace.

Seeking the peace involves that, but it involves prayer. Prayer undergirds whatever we do. Why? Because it helps us remember that the goal of all this is not a good life. Not that we get to keep our money, none of that stuff. The goal is the honor and glory of the transcendent God, the kingship of the Lord Jesus Christ who died that he might rule this planet and earth. That’s the goal. Our goal and glory is not to be good Americans, not to be patriotic, not to subjugate ourselves to service to America, but rather to subjugate all that we are, including our political action to the glory of God.

The Lord God says that when we attend to that task, he says that’s what’s going to happen. Jesus doesn’t say disciple the nations and then say it might work, it might not. The question isn’t are we going to disciple the nations or not. The question is are you going to be part of it or not? Are you going to receive the blessings of discipling the nations? Are you going to sit back, vote pragmatically, be an American first, Christian second, and as a result find yourself not the recipient of God’s blessings, but his righteous chastisements.

Let’s pray. Lord God, it is our desire to glorify you, to seek your glory of your name, and to acknowledge the kingship of Jesus Christ, the graciousness of your laws in all that we do and say, including, of course, the area of politics. Bless us this season as we think about our command to seek the peace, as we think about the goal of a well-ordered society and apply ourselves to the mechanisms of conversations, discussions, and then voting.

In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.