JUDICIAL WARFARE
Christian Reconstruction and Its Blueprints For Dominion
by Greg Loren Durand

Chapter Twelve:
The Appeal to Deuteronomy 4:6-8

       Speaking of the Mosaic law, John Calvin wrote:

       The allegation, that insult is offered to the law of God enacted by Moses, where it is abrogated, and other new laws are preferred to it, is most absurd. Others are not preferred when they are more approved, and most absolutely, but from regard to time and place, and the condition of the people, or when those things are abrogated which were never enacted for us. The Lord did not deliver it by the hand of Moses to be promulgated in all countries, and to be everywhere enforced; but having taken the Jewish nation under his special care, patronage, and guardianship, he was pleased to be specially its legislator, and as became a wise legislator, he had special regard to it in enacting laws.⁽¹⁾

       Such is the standard Reformed position on the purpose and limited applicability of the law. To counter this position, Reconstructionists will frequently point to Deuteronomy 4:6-8:

       Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. For what nation is there so great, who hath God so nigh unto them, as the LORD our God is in all things that we call upon him for? And what nation is there so great, that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law, which I set before you this day?

       This passage is cited to prove that "God's Law was in fact designed to be a model for the nations"⁽²⁾ and that the Mosaic code was applicable "to those living outside the borders of Israel."⁽³⁾ From this premise the conclusion is reached that "People from all nations are under obligation to God's Law today"⁽⁴⁾ and, "The revealed law of God is supposed to be in the judicial center of every society today."⁽⁵⁾ "Otherwise," argued Greg Bahnsen, "God would be represented as having a double standard of judgment."⁽⁶⁾ The reader should keep in mind that when the Reconstructionist uses the term "God's law," he is not referring to the moral or natural law which God has infused as part of His image into the nature of man, but to the specific case laws (the rules and regulations), and the accompanying sanctions, of the Mosaic code:

       The cities of Sodom and Ninevah provide adequate proof that nations which have not been corporately selected by God for special care and that have not been granted a special, written transcript of God's law are nevertheless fully responsible to God's standard of holiness as revealed in the law. Being a city full of exceedingly wicked sinners (Gen. 13:13; 18:20), Sodom was justly destroyed for its "unlawfulness" (2 Pet. 2:6-8). For that reason it is paradigmatic throughout Scripture for God's judgment upon iniquity. Sodom was destroyed for breaking God's law; the ethical presupposition of this historical event was the responsibility of that non-Jewish nation to God's righteous requirements. And this was not simply a vague, general responsibility (e.g., to the broad guidelines of only the Decalogue), for the statute that Sodom was specifically guilty of violating is not one of the Ten summary Commandments but a specific and particularized case law: the prohibition of homosexuality (Gen. 19:4ff.; Lev. 18:22; 20:13; cf. Deut. 23:17; 1 Kings 14:24; 15:12; 22:26; 2 Kings 23:7). Hundreds of years before the constitution of Israel as a nation under the written law of God that same law had ethical authority; if there had been no binding law, there could have been no sin and hence no justified vengeance of God against the Sodomites [emphasis in original].⁽⁷⁾

       From this and other similar instances in the Old Testament (i.e. the threatened destruction of Ninevah, the annihilation of the Canaanite peoples, etc.), Bahnsen derived "scriptural reason to deny the premise that God's law did not morally bind the nations outside of Israel's covenant community."⁽⁸⁾ However, there is one important question which Bahnsen avoided in presenting his case: since he admitted that the "specific and particularized case law" prohibiting homosexuality had not yet been delivered, how could the Sodomites have known of God's condemnation of such behavior and have thus been deserving of His wrath? Whether his avoidance of this question was intentional or not, the fact remains that the only answer is that God's prohibition against homosexuality was written upon the Sodomites' hearts as part of the law of nature. This is precisely the doctrine of the Apostle Paul, who wrote in Romans 1:26-32 that homosexuals know their behavior is against nature and yet willfully indulge in it nonetheless. Thus, by appealing to the destruction of Sodom as a proof-text for the universal application of the Mosaic case laws, Bahnsen unwittingly undermined his own thesis. Even if we were to accept the Reconstructionists' claim that man must have a specifically revealed law of God to regulate his behavior, we need not look for it in Leviticus or Deuteronomy. The moral prohibition against homosexuality is implied in the first words God spoke to Noah, and through him to all his posterity, following the flood: "Be fruitful and multiply" (Genesis 9:1). This was merely a reaffirmation of the commandment delivered to mankind through Adam and is part of the creation mandate which predated the Mosaic law by about two thousand years. Homosexuality is counterproductive to this commandment and contrary to the natural order, resulting in corruption and death (Romans 1:27). It therefore falls within the purview of the civil magistrate's duty to protect society from decay from within by restraining and punishing the commission of unnatural behavior. Paul acknowledged that homosexuality is so detrimental to the health of human society that it is "worthy of death" (Romans 1:32), equating "the judgment of God" with the natural order of creation, not the civil sanctions of the Mosaic code as Rushdoony claimed.⁽⁹⁾
       Deuteronomy 4:6-8, when carefully read, does not support the lofty claims made for it by the Reconstructionists. The "statutes and righteous judgments" were said to be the "wisdom" and "understanding" of the Hebrew people "in the sight of the peoples," but nothing is ever said about the obligation of the heathen to adopt the Mosaic code within their own respective nations. To the contrary, verse eight clearly states that no other nation but Israel "hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law," which agrees with the Apostle Paul's statement in Romans 2:14 that the Gentiles "have not the law." However, heathen kings outside of Israel were highly esteemed by God when they ruled justly according to the natural law. Of Cyrus, king of Persia, God said, "He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure" (Isaiah 44:28), and Cyrus is then called God's "anointed" (Isaiah 45:1), even though he never enacted the Mosaic code within his kingdom. Following his return to sanity, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, "praised and honored him that liveth for ever, whose dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom is from generation to generation" (Daniel 4:34). And yet, this acknowledgment of God's "crown rights" over the earth and the subsequent restoration of his throne did not lead Nebuchadnezzar to enact the Mosaic code within his kingdom either. Neither Joseph in Egypt nor Daniel in Babylon had any scruples against holding positions of authority in heathen governments, even though the natural law, rather than the Mosaic code, was the law of the lands in which they sojourned. The Gentiles' admiration of the Israelites for their just laws simply does not equal an obligation to enact those same laws in their own countries. It therefore follows that the law of Moses is not now the legislative standard for modern America nor any other nation on earth. The following comments of Kenneth Myers are instructive in this regard:

       Israel had an obligation to be a covenantally righteous nation, to meet standards that God did not establish for, say, Egypt. Israel was a holy nation as no nation before or since could claim to be. Its national identity was a mechanism of God's redemptive work in a unique way. In every aspect of its national life as ordered by God, Israel was anticipating the character of the people of God upon the consummation of redemptive history.... To regard either the law (as do my postmillennialist friends and some of my premillennialist friends) or the prophets (as do many of my premillennialist and amillennialist friends) as speaking univocally to the United States begs too many questions, to say the least. There are certainly many principles for the development of political thinking within the Old Testament. But any application of a text that ignores its original context in redemptive history, especially the relationship of the covenant to the original recipients of the text, must be regarded as of dubious value.
       There is no a priori reason to believe that any given aspects of the law of Israel are normative for the U.S. civil code.... Unless we have established that the law is normative for our age, we must not assume it to be. Similarly, we must not take the declamations of the prophets out of their eschatological context and regard them as timeless wisdom.... Unfortunately, many of these doctrines are obscured in the attempt to reduplicate Israel's national polity or to anticipate the eschatological kingdom in ways we are not meant to. Until Christ returns, the church is God's new holy nation, and God has postponed his judgment. Our thinking about political obedience must keep this in view.⁽¹⁰⁾

Endnotes

1. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book IV, Chapter XX:16.

2. Gentry, He Shall Have Dominion, page 464.

3. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics, page 342. Gary North differed from Bahnsen on this point, claiming that the Mosaic law did not bind the other nations until the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. He even suggested that the nations antecedent to the establishing of Israel were under the terms of the Noahic covenant, not the Mosaic (Tools of Dominion, page 89), which necessarily means that they were under natural law — a conclusion which contradicts his claim elsewhere in the same book that "there is no such thing as a universal system of rational natural law which is accessible to fallen human reason" [emphasis in original; ibid., page 28].

4. Gentry, He Shall Have Dominion, page 465.

5. North, Political Polytheism, page 104.

6. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics, page 342.

7. Bahnsen, ibid., page 354.

8. Bahnsen, ibid., page 356.

9. Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law, page 735.

10. Kenneth A. Myers, essay: "Biblical Obedience and Political Thought: Some Reflections on Theological Method," in Richard John Neuhaus (editor), The Bible, Politics, and Democracy (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdman's Publishing Company, 1987), pages 24-25.