Editor’s Preface: This article is the first of a series SLM will be publishing with the intent to establish a baseline for understanding that a Theocracy – i.e., self-government in which God rules human hearts – is the only form of government on Earth in which righteousness can and does rule among men. Essentially, it is personal morality predicated on the concepts inherent in the Ten Commandments, which God gave to Moses on stone tablets, and which Moses in turn transmitted to the Israelites after God delivered them from 430 years of abject bondage under the Egyptians. Less than 3,000 years later a nation was born over 5,700 miles away in the Western Hemisphere whose founding fathers instituted a democratic republic form of government predicated upon the concepts inherent in those Ten Commandments and the Theocracy of which they were the foundation. Such a Theocracy cannot be legislated by any earthly government, but rather is the exclusive product of personal regeneration, i.e., being Born Again by the infusion of the Holy Spirit into one’s heart.
The study of the history of the many forms of government that evolved during human history is fascinating and revealing, but the bottom-line take-away reverberating forth from it for all to hear is that all forms of human or civil government, excepting one, have and will always end in failure and the utter demise of the nations who are so imprudent as to ignore history and thereby doom themselves to repeating it. The only form of government that has ever been successful and produced the desired beneficent results is the self-government of Theocracy ruling in the hearts of men wherein that “another commandment” that Jesus pronounced, which He said was not really another but rather a summing up of all the other Ten – The Law of Love – which is treating fellow humans with the same respect and goodness that you desire to be extended to you. This is what constitutes “personal morality” and personal morality constitutes self-government.
The only “perfect” form of government among humans is this self-government comprised of personal morality as delineated by God in His Word. It is this form of government the prophet Amos was speaking of when he prophesied, “But let justice roll down like waters And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24; NASB 1977) and which Martin Luther King Jr was referring to in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963), in which he chastised his fellow clergymen during the Civil Rights Movement concerning their moral laxity. It is the form of government this nation’s second president, John Adams, was referencing in his eloquent and poignant famous quote: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Every other form of government attempted by man in human history has failed and proven wholly inadequate, because righteousness is required in the hearts of the people in order to stand, prevail, and preserve a nation.
God’s Word sums up the whole matter: “When the righteous are in authority (government), the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn” (Pro. 29:2). In an hour when we are witnessing firsthand the utter destruction of what was once, without equivocation, “the greatest nation on earth,” having succumbed to a coup of Marxist socialism via an illegal election assisted by a false “plandemic” that will inevitably and ultimately (if not abated) lead to fascist totalitarianism, it is imperative that individual believers and the collective church be informed concerning the matter of proper government in order to continue to be, as long as the Lord wills, that entity whose primary role on Earth is to be that spiritual force which “letteth” or prevents (2 Thes. 2:7) the proliferation of the workings of iniquity, until we are caught up “in the clouds in the air” to be eternally united with the Lord for a time before returning with Him as His deputies to administrate His Millennial Reign on the earth, when “the perfect” (righteousness) shall surely have come and the partial shall surely have been done away with (1 Cor. 13:10) by the eradication (removal) of the sin nature from the Righteous! Hallelujah! [End Editor’s Preface]
realizing the fact that LAW IS NOT MADE FOR A RIGHTEOUS PERSON, but for those who are lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers and immoral men and homosexuals and kidnappers and liars and perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound teaching, according to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, with which I have been entrusted. (1 Tim. 1:9-11)
THE REPUBLIC OF THE ISRAELITES
By William Federer
The exodus of the Children of Israel out of Egypt occurred around 1,400 BC. When they entered the Promised Land, they had no king for the first 400 years.
• ISRAEL was the first well-recorded instance of an entire nation ruled without a king.
• In ISRAEL, everyone was equal under the Law. There was no royal family to butter-up to at this time. This was the beginning of the concept of equality.
Deuteronomy 1:17 “Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; but ye shall hear the small as well as the great.”
• In ISRAEL, every person, male and female, was made in the image of the Creator, possessing God-given rights which no government could take away. It was the responsibility of government to guarantee individual rights.
• ISRAEL had relatively few laws, as citizens were accountable to God to treat each other fairly.
Leviticus 19:18 “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your kinsfolk. Love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.”
• ISRAEL treated non-Israelites as equals, though the immigrants had to abide by the Law.
Leviticus 19:34 “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I the LORD am your God.”
• ISRAEL was tolerant. Though convinced they were worshiping the only true God, they never waged war to force other nations to accept Him, nor did they force non-Israelites living within their borders to convert. John Locke wrote in A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689):
Foreigners and such as were strangers to the commonwealth of Israel were not compelled by force to observe the rites of the Mosaical law… We find not one man forced into the Jewish religion and the worship of the true God … If any one … desired to be made a denizen [citizen] of their commonwealth … to embrace their religion … this he did willingly, on his own accord, not by constraint.
• ISRAEL had a system of honesty, thus providing a basis for commerce.
Leviticus 19:36 “Just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin, shall ye have.”
Proverbs 11:1 “A false balance is abomination to the LORD: but a just weight is his delight.”
• In ISRAEL, land was permanently titled to the families. This contrasted with most of the world, where kings granted land to loyal vassals, or as in Egypt, where the pharaohs owned the land. Israel called it the Promised “Land” because families actually owned title to their land. This prevented a dictator from gathering up the land and putting the people back into slavery. If a person owned land, they could accumulate possessions. The Bible called this being “blessed”; Karl Marx called it being a “capitalist.”
• ISRAEL had a bureaucracy-free welfare system. When someone harvested their field, they left the gleanings for the poor. This way, the poor were taken care of, while maintaining their dignity, without some political leader collecting everything and doling it back out to those who could help him stay in power.
• ISRAEL had no police. Everyone was taught the Law, and everyone was personally accountable to enforce it. It was as if everyone in the nation was “deputized.”
• ISRAEL had no prisons. The Law required swift justice at the “gates of the city” and a “city of refuge” where fugitives could flee to await trial.
• ISRAEL had no standing army, as every man was in the militia, armed with “his sword upon his thigh,” and ready at a moment’s notice to defend his family and community.
• ISRAEL was the first nation where everyone was taught to read. At the time in history when Moses and the Children of Israel left Egypt:
- the Hittite language had 375 cuneiform characters;
- the Indus Valley Harappan language had 417 symbols;
- the Luwian language of Anatolia had over 500 logographic hieroglyphs;
- the Akkadian language in Mesopotamia had over 1,500 Sumerian cuneiform characters;
- the Egyptian language had over 3,000 hieroglyphic characters;
- the Chinese language had nearly 10,000 pictogram and ideogram characters, invented by scribes of China’s Yellow Emperor.
When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, he not only had the Ten Commandments, but he had them in a 22-character alphabet. (“aleph” is the first letter in Hebrew, and “beth” is the second). With so few characters, everyone could learn to read, even children.
Israel’s priests and Levites taught the Law, and also taught people to read it for themselves. It was not just a privilege to read it, they were required to, as the law was addressed to each person who was personally accountable to God obey it. In most countries, reading and writing were skills only for kings, pharaohs, emperors, and their scribes, together with the ruling class and merchants.
As mentioned earlier, the first invention was the plow – “Cain was a tiller of the ground.” (Genesis 4:2) Then people started hitting each other with them and they turned into weapons. People gravitated together for protection, forming the first cities.
When people get together, something happens – one person ends up being better at fighting and the people ask him to be their captain. At first, this is great, as all are better able to survive. But then this person has sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons who claim to be an elite class, and it turns into a hereditary monarchy.
Kings claimed to own everything in the city and they needed accountants and scribes to count it all. In China, scribes developed a way of counting with knots in ropes. In Sumeria, they developed rods with beads – an abacus, then they used tokens in dishes.
They began making markings in the tokens – like tallying – which turned into cuneiform. Writing evolved to keep track of a king’s genealogy, decrees, astrological observations, myths, and royal propaganda.
There was no need for common people to read as they had relatively few possessions to keep track of, and obviously made no decrees. Slaves not only had no need to read, they were often forbidden to learn to read.
In Ancient Egypt, the literacy rate was less than one percent. The National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece, in its section on Egyptian Artifacts, has a display on “Scribes,” stating:
Only a small percentage of ancient Egypt’s population was literate, namely the pharaoh, members of the royal family, officials, priests and scribes. Particularly popular and lucrative, the scribe’s profession was mostly hereditary. Scribes had careers in the government, priesthood, and army. They began their rigorous training in their early childhood. Most of their training took place inside a building called the “House of Life,” attached to the temple. Scribes wrote on stone or clay sherds, wooden boards, linen, papyrus, and parchment.
Writing was the scribes’ secret knowledge. It is theorized they kept writing complicated as job security. They were needed to decipher cryptic hieroglyphs.
The ruling class used complicated writing to maintain control over uneducated masses. Anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss (1908–2009), wrote:
Ancient writing’s main function was to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings. George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four: In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
This was similar to Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, where only the upper class and clergy could read. Most commoners were illiterate, which allowed them to be more easily controlled.
This happened in the United States prior to the Civil War, where Southern Democrat slave-holding states had laws making it illegal to teach slaves to read, especially after Nat Turner’s slave rebellion. It was easier to control illiterate, uneducated people.
Frederick Douglass, a Republican advisor to President Lincoln, was born a slave in Baltimore, Maryland. When he was about 12 years old, his master’s sister-in-law, Sophia Auld, began teaching him the alphabet.
When her husband found out, he adamantly forbade it, arguing that if slaves could read, they would grow discontent, forge their documents, and run away.
Douglass considered this the “first decidedly anti-slavery lecture” he had ever heard, causing him to be even more determined to learn how to read.
He wrote in his autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: His Early Life as a Slave, His Escape from Bondage, and His Complete History (1881), of being caught attempting to read a newspaper. It was snatched away from him with a scolding. Frederick at last learned to read from neighborhood white children, as well as carefully observing the writings of men he worked with.
• In ISRAEL, the people chose their own leaders. Honest elections allowed for government by the consent of the governed.
Deuteronomy 1:3–13 “Moses spoke unto the children of Israel … How can I myself alone bear your … burden … TAKE YOU wise men, and understanding, and KNOWN AMONG YOUR TRIBES, and I will make them rulers over you.”
Deuteronomy 16:18–19 “Judges and officers SHALT THOU MAKE THEE IN ALL THY GATES which the Lord thy God giveth thee throughout thy tribes.”
Exodus 18:21 “Moreover thou shalt provide OUT OF ALL THE PEOPLE able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness; and place such over them, to be rulers of thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens.”
Rather than a pyramid style, top-down form of government where the king’s will was law, Israel had a bottom-up form of government, like a living tree, with each cell contributing to its growth.
Each town had their own city elders. Anyone could be raised to leadership: Jephthah was the son of a prostitute; Gideon was from an obscure family; and Deborah was an honest woman who knew the Law. Where else in the world at that time could a woman unrelated to any royalty rise to be a national leader?
Israel was truly unique. E.C. Wines wrote in Commentaries on the Laws of the Ancient Hebrews, with an Introductory Essay on Civil Society & Government (NY: Geo. P. Putnam & Co., 1853):
Menes in Egypt; Minos in Crete; Cadmus in Thebes; Lycurgus in Sparta; Zaleucus in Locris; and Numa in Rome. But … Moses differed fundamentally from … these heathen legislators. They employed religion in establishing their political institutions, while he made use of a civil constitution as a means of perpetuating religion … Moses’ … national unity … was not that species of unity, which the world has since so often seen, in which vast multitudes of human beings are delivered up to the arbitrary will of one man. It was a unity, effected by the abolition of caste; a unity, founded on the principle of equal rights; a unity, in which the whole people formed the state … contrary to the celebrated declaration of a French monarch [Louis XIV], who avowed himself to be the state.
Federer, William. Who is King in America? And Who are the Counselors to the King? – An Overview of 6,000 Years of History & Why America is Unique (pp. 108-109). Kindle Edition.
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