Clough Divine institutions Lesson 17

Divine Institution #4 – Doctrine of War

Tonight we come to the last two parts of this entire series, and that is the problem of the discipline, and in particular the fourth divine institution, government. Tonight we get into a topic which has been a topic of much disagreement among Christians, the doctrine of war, and the place that war has. Now obviously there’s not a family, probably, in this congregation that doesn’t have a son or a father or some relative in the armed services, at some time or another. Now if the Bible has nothing to say on war, and can’t give any guidance in this matter, then we should come to the conclusion the Bible does not provide for every believer to every good work. Of course the Bible does; the Bible gives us a lot of principles to handle the problem of war and so therefore it’s particularly important that in our day when the problem of war itself, since the invention of nuclear weapons it has become such a crucial issue, that we be clear in our thinking that we have a biblical base for handling this kind of a problem, and that we not just argue emotionally, we do not argue on the basis of someone else’s ideas, but go direct to the Word of God.

Now first of all, the purpose of war; if you’ll turn to Matthew 24:6, one of the predictions about war which underscore its purpose. It’s the Lord Jesus Christ giving one of the last predictions of His life when He was on earth, before He died and rose again, when he left the disciples with a prediction of the entire age that would span His First Advent to His Second Advent and one of the things that He said was, “You will hear of wars and you will hear of rumors of wars; see that ye be not troubled, for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.” The “wars and rumors of wars” could be better translated today as “hot wars and cold wars, but see that you be not troubled, for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet,” thereby implying that war will always be part of human society until the Second Advent of Jesus Christ.

Now immediately if you’re at all alert to the present ways of thinking; this should do something. The next time you hear about some great program that’s going to abolish war, you can immediately discount it, because if that program really did abolish war then Jesus Christ prophecy would be invalidated and Christ would be proven a liar. Jesus Christ has said war will continue and therefore there will be no program to abolish war; it’s as simple as that, any program that is set forth to abolish war as such essentially is an antichristian attack on the position of Jesus Christ.

Now there is a time when there will not be war, so if you’ll go over to one of the most famous verses quoted in this context, Isaiah 2, this is the great verse that’s always quoted, if you go to New York City and you go into the United Nations building, where incidentally they will not allow you to discuss the gospel of Jesus Christ, but nevertheless, feel free evidently in some way of quoting Isaiah 2:4. In Isaiah 2:4 there is a prediction, another prediction. “And He,” Messiah, “will judge among the nations and shall rebuke many people, and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” And people have taken that and said see, doesn’t that show that war will be eliminated from history? Yes it does, but when will it be eliminated from history and here we’re forced back to the context again, verse 2, “It shall come to pass in the last days that the mountain of the LORD’s house,” that’s the temple in Jerusalem, “shall be established on the top of the mountain and shall be exalted above the hills, and all nations shall flow unto it. [3] And many people shall go and say,” and notice what the people are saying, this is before you have the disarmament of verse 4, “Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths; for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.”

Now it always appears to me that people are strangely deluded in their thinking about this verse because they will immediately jump to verse 4 and begin to take it quite literally…quite literally that this means actual literal physical disarmament. But if you’re going to take verse 4 literally, that this means real, literal physical disarmament, then why not take verse 3 also, and certainly you don’t have to be much of a Bible scholar to realize that in verse 3 it’s talking about a geographical location, a national entity to which all nations shall flow. Now that is obviously speaking of Israel; it’s speaking of Israel fulfilling her destiny in world history. You see, salvation for the individual comes through an Israelite, Jesus Christ. And salvation in the national and international scene comes from the Israelite nation. And so here in verse 3 is this prediction of social salvation or world salvation, international salvation, at the millennium.

And so since Jesus in Matthew 24 said the wars and rumors of wars are going to continue until I come, and since this says the peace is going to come, where then do you put the peace relative to Jesus Christ? Well obviously you put it after; here’s the Second Advent of Christ and the peace is on the other side. War is on this side; and we live on this side of the Second Advent and therefore we live in a regime that will be forever characterized by war. Now we’re not saying that we should rejoice in war; war is horrible. And for us in America who have never lived through it as the Europeans have, we probably can’t react emotionally quite like a person of European background would. But nevertheless, verse 4, to be taken literally, requires verse 3 to be taken literally. So if you’re going to hedge on verse 3 then you ought to be honest enough to hedge on verse 4 and say that too is only allegorical. But if you’re going to take verse 4 literally, then you’ve got to take verse 3 literally; you can’t change your method of interpretation as you move from one verse to the next.

So therefore as we begin and deal with the overall purpose of war let’s remember that it is a common feature of national and international society from the time of the Lord Jesus Christ on down to the time that He returns again. Now this is a view which has always been the position of historic Christianity, until we have come down to the modern time of the new theology. But historic Christianity, Biblical Christianity, has always maintained the normalcy of war; normalcy in the sense that it would always be an accompaniment of government. Remember we defined government when we started this whole series as what? The role of the government is to judge evil; the role of the government is to judge evil, not to bring about the millennium. The role of the government is a negative role, to curtail and to judge evil. War is one way the government has of judging evil, when, of course, the source of the evil lies outside of its own national sphere.

So we have internal police which maintain law within the national entity and we have the military forces that maintain order when this nation’s existence is threatened. This is not a justification, incidentally, for all war; we’ll get to that in a moment. What this says, however, is that war is a legitimate… repeat, war is a legitimate function of a national entity and there is nothing immoral per se about war. Nothing! It is a normal process. The reason why war is there is because of the sinfulness of man; that’s why it’s there, and it’s always going to be there, and it’s there as it is augmented by satanic forces and so on. So the war itself is not per se evil; it is the result of the fall of man but it itself is not an immoral point.

Now there’s two items that we want to clear up at the outset; first of all, the rest of the evening we’re not talking about so-called Christian wars. The so-called Christian wars of the Crusades, the Christian wars of the Reformation, counterreformation time that went across Europe and many people would say yes, yes, look at the Christians, ha-ha, look at all the wars they started in history and the worst wars are religious wars and so on and so forth. I’m sure you’ve heard this. Let us say at this point that the Christian war and all of this garbage that went on in the Middle Ages and has gone on in recent times and in one sense is going on in Ireland today, these kind of things must be measured against the system of Christianity. A Christian involved illegitimately in war does not disprove Christianity; Christianity can only be disproved as a system and therefore the answer when someone accuses you of Christians have been involved in wars, first of all, most of these were professing Christians, they were not true born again Christians, we know this because the very concept of the Crusades during the Middle Ages was to free the Holy Land. Well, if these people were born again Christians and understood the New Testament they wouldn’t have freed the Holy Land because the Bible says it’s in the hands of the Gentiles and not the Jews up until close to the Second Advent of Christ, so there’s no need to go freeing the Holy Land; it just doesn’t fit with the Biblical system. So therefore I feel no embarrassment whatever when someone comes up to me and says well ha-ha, look at all the Christians causing war, no embarrassment whatever because this only invalidates Christianity if you can show they were acting consistently with Christianity when they were executing the war and I can show they weren’t. So therefore it’s not a blot against Christianity, it’s just a blot against a few idiot Christians. You don’t disprove the system by someone who is just deliberately rebelling against the system, even though he may be known by the word “Christian.” So the concept of Christian war is not being discussed tonight.

Another concept, the concept that all wars are just is not being considered either. The Christian makes a distinction between a just war and an unjust war; it’s a very difficult distinction to make but there is the distinction. The reason for this goes back to the concept of Church and State, when we went through “render unto Caesar those things that are Caesars and unto God those things that are Gods.” For example, suppose that tomorrow the United States were to engage in an outright racial war directed toward the elimination of one race simply because they have a different color skin or come from a different background. Such a case, obviously, would be unjust and such a case is clearly unjust, and of course the Christian would not be obligated in this situation. We’ll deal though, with the problem that leads the Christian in his obedience in another context.

But the point is that we start off with these two positions. First the purpose of war; the purpose is to execute judgment upon evil, and under that we have two of these clarifications. We’re not talking about “Christian wars” in quotes, the Crusades and all the rest, since they were illegitimate even on the Biblical base. And secondly, we’re not justifying all war. We’re simply saying that war is and can be a legitimate function of government. Now if I didn’t believe this and I really didn’t believe…Christians hesitate at this point and they ruin their testimony, if I didn’t really believe this how could I minister to the many people in the congregation that come from Reese, for example. In good conscience could I? No, absolutely not, if I knew that they were disobeying the Word of God. On our prayer list we pray for soldiers; part of those prayers, I don’t know whether you realize this but part of the prayers is not just for their physical safety, part of their prayers for Christians involved in the military is that they be trained properly to use their weapons and use them effectively. That is a legitimate prayer request for a Christian in the military service. Now if you have qualms of conscience about praying for a loved one who is serving in the armed forces, who may, put it bluntly, take a gun and put a bayonet on the end of it and ram it through somebody’s gut, and you can’t pray legitimately for that person then you’ve got a problem here. And imagine yourself trying to pray for that and it’ll precipitate any problems that you may have in this area, so that you’ll be open to the problem that we face tonight. This is not a light issue.

So let’s start, I’m going to give nine basic principles of warfare and to illustrate this I’m going to try to show by comparing the Vietnam situation why it is that we have such a muddled situation here, and you’ll soon see that one reason why there’s such a muddled situation in Vietnam is that we have violated almost all nine of the principles of God’s Word.

The first principle; the first principle of warfare is finish it. It sounds obvious but it’s not always obvious. Let’s go to Joshua 11. If war is a judgment upon evil, then three can be no peace until the evil is eliminated, that is, until a victory has been attained. And therefore the first principle we find from the Word of God, if you grant that war, and you grant that you are into war to eliminate evil, you can’t stop until you’ve eliminated evil; it’s as simple as that. It follows directly from the overall purpose of the war to begin with. If the war to start with is a judgment upon evil, how then can you stop the war before the judgment on evil is finished?

Now in Joshua 11:23, it’s a section that immediately follows after the three-pronged attack that the Jews made into the land of Israel. Roughly here’s the situation. Forty years before Moses led the nation in a southern penetration; the strategy at that time was to move across Kadesh-barnea in a southern penetration and move up the coast. Now had they been obedient to the Lord the Lord would have rewarded this southern strategy. However, we know that they weren’t and they turned back at Kadesh-barnea and moved southward and wandered around and wandered around for forty years, thirty-eight years to be exact. And then they finally moved across and adopted a new strategy called the eastern strategy. This eastern strategy, laid forth in the book of Joshua, is actually the reason why today the Israeli army is so highly sensitive to the Jordanian land. You remember during the Six Day War, the reason why the Israeli army is so concerned about holding east of Jordan is that geographically that is the corridor to Israel by military land invasion. And they’re very sensitive to it, it always has been this way; this is the corridor that was used back in Genesis 14 when Abraham lived in the land and they came over from Babylonia, Chedorlaomer and the other kings came through this corridor from the east, and so God also had Joshua move through that eastern corridor and it’s a military invasion route, and anybody that occupies Palestine has to have some sort of defensive blocking to cut off this eastern military corridor.

Well, Moses leads the forces up here and dies; that’s where we left him in the book of Deuteronomy. Joshua comes across on the eastern strategy; his strategy and tactics as far as overwhelming the Canaanites is simply three steps. The first step is to divide; you’ve heard the expression, divide and conquer. Joshua does that; he drives across the center first, securing holds in Jericho and so on, and the strategy is well thought out militarily; we’re going to see it, this is one of the principles of the book of Joshua, even though the book of Joshua gives us the principles for the victorious Christian life and the principles of sanctification and so on, this book also shows us that the Christian doesn’t put his brains in the closet and lie down and let go and let God and all the rest of the mysticism that passes for orthodox Christianity today. The Christian is to use his brain and it means that Joshua sat down and evolved a military strategy that was thought out. It does not mean he ceased to rely upon God’s grace; it does mean that he thought, he was logical. You can be logical without being rationalistic; the two are totally different words. Here we have the military account of Joshua; phase one, divide. Phase two, move south and secure this area. Here then, of course, keeping down any problems from Egypt. So immediately he deploys his armed forces southward and secures the southern head here. After this he moves rapidly northward and secures phase three of the invasion.

Now Joshua did not conquer every city; Joshua died before he ever conquered even 50% of the land, but what he did was break the backbone and the main fortresses, and so it could be said that Joshua militarily won, in the sense that there were small isolated pockets for reason which we’ll see in the Bible why that was left, there were small pockets of Canaanites here and here and here and here, all around the land, but the main backbone of the power structure had been smashed in this three-pronged military attack and campaign.

Now in Joshua 11:23 we have this statement made. “So Joshua took the whole land,” again it does not mean he completely took it, it means he took the backbone, “according to all that the LORD said unto Moses; and Joshua gave it for an inheritance unto Israel according to the division by tribes, and the land rested from war.” Please notice the rest did not come; the peace did not come until Joshua had finished this war. And this is a principle, this same principle, that you can’t have peace until you have victory, is a cardinal principle of war. Now the United States since, actually even World War I, was blurring of this; in World War II it became more and more obvious that Americans did not understand the concept of war. You see, by the 20^th century America had lost much of orthodox Christianity that she had inherited from the Puritans. Now some of you have been taught by high school teachers or college professors who are about twenty years behind in their knowledge of Puritanism. Puritanism is a thing that’s coming back in English history and there’s a lot of scholarship and research going in and they’re discovering the Puritans weren’t those old fogies that you’ve been taught, and the prude and all the rest of it.

Some time ago I read you a quotation by one of the great enemies of the Puritans, the English Puritans, and this man said this: You can laugh at the exterior idiosyncrasies of the Puritans, you can laugh the way they dress, you laugh at some of their surface features, but he said when you meet one in the halls of debate or behind the sword on the battlefield you know these people are the toughest people that we’ve ever faced. Now that was a compliment, a supreme compliment to the great Christians of that era. They were tough people. And in the halls of debate they would take second stance to no one, unlike a lot of Christians today who are embarrassed about testifying to their faith. The Puritans would not, and they would stand up to the most educated people of their time and give an educated presentation of Christianity, not an emotional one. And on the battlefield they knew the doctrine of war and knew their job. Now America has lost that concept of what war is and so therefore after World War II we were satisfied with a political solution. First of all, we do not recognize the political realities of history.

We had no sense of the historic problem of the eastern corridor of Europe and why it is that any time you break the center force, whether it’s the Huns, or the Germans or whatever it is that occupies the center of Europe, every time you destroy central Europe you are opening Europe to the east. It always has been that way, whether you go back in history to the time of the Visigoths and the Vandals and so on, you always have hordes pouring into Europe from the east whenever you remove the block in central Europe. This is a law of history and whether it’s the communists or somebody else, it doesn’t matter. This is a law of history; it ruined central Europe and it’s a vacuum that sucks hordes in from the east. It always has been this way, for thousands of years.

Now in 1945 George Patton, in the Press camp of the Third Army at Regensburg, Germany gave this report to the reporters. Those of you who saw the movie Patton saw one section of that; that was not really what he said there, they had him riding around on the horse, you remember in the scene. He said some things there but actually this is the original report from that press conference. This shows you that General Patton was a man who understood history; he wasn’t just some bloodthirsty general, he understood a principle of history. And you will find, incidentally, if you study military history and study the biographies of some of these great generals, they weren’t the blood-thirsty cutthroats that you’ve been led to believe because after all, they’re out in the middle of it, they want to get it over with and so you’ll generally find your military people are quite decisive in the matter of war. They want to get the thing over with becuase they’re the ones that are getting shot. Well, Patton, on May 8 1945 said this, as he was interviewed by American, French and British Correspondents:

“This war stopped right where it started. That’s not the end of this,” I’m reading excerpts from it, “That’s not the end of this business by any means. What the tin soldier politicians in Washington and Paris have managed to do is a story you’ll be writing for a long time to come. They have allowed us to kick hell out of one bunch and at the same time forced us to establish a second one as evil or more evil than the first. We’ve won a series of battles, but we have not won the war for peace.” Remember, this is May 8, 1945; “We have won a series of battles, but we have not won the war for peace. We’ve headed right down another long road to losing another peace; the Russians really took us for suckers after we saved their lives. This day we missed another date with our destiny and this time we’ll need Almighty God’s constant help if we’re to live in the same world with Stalin and his murdering cutthroats. I wonder what the dead will speak today when they know that for the first time in history, in centuries, we have opened central and Western Europe to the forces of Genghis Khan. I wonder how they feel now, when they know that there will be no peace in our time and that Americans, some not yet born, will have to fight the Russians tomorrow, or ten, or fifteen, or twenty years from tomorrow.”

Now why did Patton say that kind of thing? It’s simple; he recognized as all great military men have recognized that you can’t have peace until the issues are decisively met. World War II did not complete the issue, therefore we have had a continuation of World War II and thousands and thousands of young men have had to die because we have not finished the task. You cannot have peace, in other words, without victory.

The second principle, again from the Old Testament, Deuteronomy 20. This, incidentally, this part of the Mosaic treaty law in the 20^th chapter is that section that is addressed to what we would call the State Department; this was God’s verbal revelation, outlining what he felt would be the strategy, what Moses felt would be the strategy for this coming war that Joshua would have to fight. And in verses Deuteronomy 20:15-10 we have a balance. I want you to notice something, and the second principle is this, that war is not to be confused with a murderous slaughter. War, properly conducted is not to be confused with a murderous slaughter for the sake of murder. War, in other words, is not murder, because in Deuteronomy 20:10-15 I want you to notice how selective is the destruction. In verse 10, “When thou come near unto a city to fight against it,” and remember the situation here would be after Israel…this is a city outside the land, for the cities in the land are verses 16-17, these are the cities of the people in the land, but in verses 10-15 these are the cities outside the promised land. Now why would Israel be in a war with people outside the land? Well, obviously becuase they’d been threatened or something, you might have had Edom over here, you might have had some of the Arabian tribes out to the east, you may have had some of the Mesopotamian powers to the northeast and so on, you may have had any number of possibilities.

But whatever the possibility is God said, in that situation, when you’re facing an enemy from outside, then he says this is what you’re going to do. First, “When you come to a city to fight against it, proclaim peace.” In other words, showing very clearly the objective here is not just to annihilate people. The objective of a war is not annihilation; the objective of the war is the deciding of the issue, the judging of the evil. That’s the objective, the killing and all the rest of it is incidental to that point and if you can accomplish that point without killing, great, you’ve fulfilled the Biblical function of war. So war is not just to kill, that’s not the final point of war when considered from the viewpoint of God’s Word. The final point of war is to resolve the issue that led to it, not just kill people. And this is further obvious when you get down, even in verse 11 when the city rejects submission, because the offer here, “proclaim peace unto it. [11] And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace,” as we showed in our Deuteronomy series, this really entailed a theological problem in that would that city’s civilization destroy their idolatrous gods and submit to Yahweh, God of Israel. That was the key issue; you might say this was kind of aggressive evangelism, but… there was a theological issue involved here in that would this city or would it not submit to Jehovah. But notice, even when they make war, in verse 14, certain parts of the population are excluded.

Now when we studied this I noticed in verse 13 the word “male” in the original Hebrew means adult male. So there wasn’t just a sexual difference here; the point here was that these were the men generally considered adults in the Bible at twenty years; anybody under twenty not considered an adult in God’s Word, at least in the nation Israel. We have some exceptions though, however we have kings, some of them are ten, fourteen; now due to various circumstances, but generally in the Mosaic era it was twenty. Now the males over twenty were the ones that were politically responsible for the policies of that city-state that led to the war, and thus the war’s objective is to kill them for the evil that they have caused. But don’t you see, it’s not just to wipe out the city, it’s specifically to go in there and destroy those people who are responsible for the policy. And that’s why in verse 14, “But the women, and the little ones,” the “little ones” would mean male and female under twenty, were excluded. Of course obviously some would get killed in the slaughter, but when the armies of God would move into the city they would try to keep from killing the women and keep from killing the children under twenty. The reason for this was that God did not hold them responsible, they did not have the political freedom in this particular situation to back up the policies and therefore God did not hold them responsible.

But it’s crucial that you see the destruction process of the war is selective. It’s as though you’d take a sword and you’d carefully, as a surgeon cut, and you cut out the evil; you don’t come with a sledge hammer and just go smash; you try to be as selective as possible to cut the evil out, and that’s the function of war. And then of course in verses 19-20 even the natural land, here you have conservation principles taught in God’s Word. All this business you hear about Christians being responsible for ecology, the ecological difficulties, don’t you buy it. Verses 10-20 prove that historic orthodoxy has always stood for conservation of resources. So Christians cannot be accused of being ecologically ignorant. Deuteronomy 20:19-20, even the ecology was to be dealt with, careful selections not to destroy natural resources.

So our second principle is that war is not murder. Now it’s interesting, we have in our library a book by Captain Hutchins; Captain Hutchins graduated from Dallas Seminary the year that I was a first year man and he later went on to be a very well known chaplain in Vietnam. He was known because first of all he was paratrooper before he went into the ministry; he went into the ministry and went back with the Airborne and fought in Vietnam, and he was known for his bravery as a chaplain because he believed that he could minister to the men in the middle of the battle, and he would be out and was shot twice, while out with the men in the field. He wasn’t the kind of chaplain that comes up and reads a prayer every once in a while, you might as well just send a letter with the prayer in it, but this chaplain was out with the men when they were getting shot at, crawling through the bushes and so on with them, and he was written up in Time Magazine and so on. His book is Beyond Combat. He makes this observation about a Christian soldier who’s in a combat situation, who’s firing to kill, is that Christian soldier at that point have murder in his heart. And this is what he says:

“A soldier engaging the enemy with hate and malice thereby commits murder in his heart. My observations, however, convince me that the soldier motivated by hate is not an efficient fighting man. His judgments are fogged; there is a recklessness about him that places not only himself but all those with him in jeopardy. The best fighting man is one motivated by a sense of duty and responsibility and subjection to his government. The commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill,” should prevent a Christian soldier from murder but should also motivate him to be willing to serve in the armed forces so as to help prevent others from such sin.”

Now he’s not at all talking about don’t kill the enemy; the point is the mental attitude that accompanies this action. If the mental attitude is submission to my government because I am acting in this sense as a police officer judging evil, that is not murder to shoot to kill. It’s quite another thing however to just murder for the sake of murder, and the Bible makes this distinction. So the second principle the Bible teaches for the Christian who is involved in the military or you have a friend in the military, the second Biblical principle you have to use in the situation is that war is not murder; there’s two different points here. Therefore we might say that the Vietnam POWs in this sense cannot be tried as war murderers, as war criminals as Hanoi says.

The third principle, Numbers 1:3, and this will astound some of you. The third principle from God’s Word is that the concept of the draft is legitimate. They had it in Israel. The draft is found on Biblical principles. “From twenty years old and upward, all that are able to go forth to war in Israel; thou and Aaron shall number them by their armies,” and it goes on. Every male twenty or above was subject to call to the army of Israel. This was just the way it was understood; remember this is Scripture. God has given His authentication to this, and therefore a draft is legitimate.

The fourth principle, Numbers 31:3-5, and this gets into quite a principle but the fourth principle is this, that military preparedness is a Biblical prerequisite for war; military preparedness, meaning two things. One, you have trained personnel and two you give them proper weapons; the combination of trained personnel and proper weapons; you can have the most wonderful weapons in the world and if you’ve got a bunch of clucks that are trying to operate them they won’t work, as the Russians found when they tried to work with the Arabs in Egypt. You can supply them with all kinds of sophisticated electronic equipment and the Arab will sit there and look at infinity. So it’s not any good to give Arabs all sorts of sophisticated electronic equipment; give them slingshots and they do fine, you give them ABMs or something and they don’t know where the button is. So you have to match your weapons with the quality of personnel you have. And you can take an army actually with inferior weapons…inferior weapons, and have the men well-trained in their youth and you can beat the other side, even though the other side has superior weapons, simply because your men are trained.

In Numbers 31:3-5, “And Moses spoke unto the people, saying, Arm some of yourselves unto the war, and let them go against the Midianites, and avenge the LORD of Midian. [4] Of every tribe a thousand, throughout all the tribes of Israel, shall ye send to the war. [5] So there delivered...” and so on. Now the two words in verse 3 and verse 5, first verse 3, “arm some of yourselves,” and then verse 5, “arm.” The Hebrew word here is more than just…you know, you walk up to a soldier and say here, here’s your M-14 or M-16, go to it. The word “arm” in the Hebrew means to prepare for war; it includes providing the weapons, training the men in the use of his weapon; it includes both those concepts. It includes both provision of the weapons system and provision in the training. So in that little word, a-r-m there’s a lot contained. It just doesn’t mean arm them, it means provide the weapons and provide the military training.

Let’s go to Judges 3:2 for the same principle. We’re just excerpting principles from various portions of the Law. I want you to notice something, a very strange verse in God’s Word, and this tells you why, one of the reasons why God did not kick the Canaanites out of the land all at once. Verse 1, “Now these are the nations which the LORD left, to test Israel by them, even as many of Israel as had not known all the wars of Canaan.” Do you notice that last phrase, they “had not known the wars,” what do you mean they don’t know, of course they know. The word “know” means to experience in the Hebrew. It’s not theoretical knowledge, it means real experience, and he’s saying that what happens. You have the invasion of Israel here, and you might have had it… well, it started in 1400 BC and it moves on down to say a major portion done by 1300 BC and you have the major strongholds conquered. What about the kids that are babies right at this time, 1300 BC, and so about 1250 BC they are fifty year old men; what about in this period. It means they did not know the war; they did not have military experience. That’s the point; they did not know the wars of Canaan; this was a generation that had not fought, a generation that had no military experience.

And so Judges 3:2, “only that the generations of the children of Israel might know, to teach them war, at the least such as before knew nothing of it.” In other words, not only train them and give the weapons, not only run them through basic training, but provide enough military action to always at some time have a residue of military offices that have known actual combat conditions. So in this situation God reserved the complete and total execution of justice upon evil, He slowed it down in order to maintain the strength of the military posture of Israel.

Now one further Bible verse on this fourth principle, it’s found in the New Testament, in the Gospel of Luke; Luke 14:31, the Lord Jesus Christ. Here Jesus in a parable says this: “Or what king, going to make war against another king, sits not down first, and consults whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him that comes against him with twenty thousand.” He says this is a matter of life; military training is a matter of the normal every day life that He would pick out here and there for parables. Jesus would pick out farming, agriculture parables and He’s pick out military parables and others. Jesus didn’t go oh gee, I shouldn’t use those military illustrations for parables. You’ll military illustrations used throughout the New Testament; now isn’t that funny, if war is so bad why is it being used to teach Biblical principles?

I know a minister, he ministers to some of my relatives and he told some of them that he wasn’t going to have any hymn singing, like Onward Christian Soldiers and some of the hymns because that’s militaristic and we’ll get rid of all that stuff. Well, he misses the point completely, absolutely misses the point. And you’ll find later on some of these principles that it’s the people that want peace that are the ones that all gum the works up so you have a real good war. When you get the peaceniks started you are guaranteed to have an excellent war. You’ll have one of the most fouled up, mixed up wars you ever had because the people that always yakking around about peace and disarmament and all the rest are usually the people that start the wars, and they’re usually the people that lead them on. They are the people in the 1920s and 1930s who disarmed the United States and said yes Hitler, go ahead and take over Europe. They’re the Neville Chamberlains and so on who say oh, we’re going to have peace in our time and all the rest of it.

Now people that want to disarm and so on are the people that start wars and always mark it out. The yak-yaks, they’re always knocking for peace, are always the people that set up the conditions for war. Watch. Do you know why? Because they’re stupid. Idiots are always the source of war; the reason is that they do not understand laws of history and in particular they do not understand man’s sin nature and they do not understand that there’s a rule of law on earth that must be enforced with the sword, and they are naïve to the core and have no concept whatever of the sinfulness and fallenness of man. With the result that they’re just naïve, they’re just dumb, and they think they can bring in peace by talking about it and by throwing away the arms and so on.

So the results today, if you look at this fourth principle, military preparedness, and apply it to the United States, we find ourselves in the same position that we were in this country forty years ago for in the 1970s you have the same human cry that went up in the 1930s, exactly the same, no different whatever. People never learn. Forty years have gone by in our national history and nobody has learned a thing because back in the 20s and 30s everybody was saying well, we’ve got to disarm, we had that horrible World War I and now let’s get rid of it, we don’t want to think about it, and we’ll pacts and all the rest of it and go around and disarm and make a little treaty with the Japanese and the British and so on and we’ll agree to have a 3-3-1 division of our navy and so on, and go through all this.

We’re doing the same thing, aren’t we, with nuclear disarmament. The Russians are going to have so many missiles and we’ll have so many missiles. That’s exactly what we did in the 20s and 30s. In 1928 the United States went into a pact and said Great Britain will have so many ships, Japan will have so many ships, the United States will have so many ships. Did that stop World War II? Absolutely not! Do you know who it helped? The Japanese. That’s who it helped; it always helps the aggressor. And so any time we say we’re going to have so many missiles and the Russians are… do you know it helps? It’s helping Moscow, that’s who it’s helping. It’s not helping us. Proof of it is in the reaction. We have, for example, a reduction of the United States Army from 17 to 11 divisions. What on earth are we doing reducing the United States Army in the situation we have. We’ve got a problem in the Middle East; we’ve got a problem in Eastern Europe; we’ve got a problem all over Asia from Korea south to Vietnam and now we’re crying about the army’s too big; we’ve got Cuba 90 miles off our shore, and so what do we do? We reduce the army from 17 divisions; it’s so weak now it doesn’t know what to do and now we reduce it to 11 divisions, make it weaker, make it an open invitation for someone. We take the Marines, they’re too strong, we’ve got to reduce them. So we cut the Marines down to 200,000 men. This is the same kind of operation.

We have, in the recent talks, the Salt talks and so on that have gone on; this is the statistics that we have: the ICBM mega tonnage, the United States has reduced hers by 40%, we are sticking with our position. What has Russia done? She’s increased her mega tonnage 400%. So who’s disarming? Where’s the balance here? Just how far does this have to go before we repeat the same history of the 1920s and 30s, except this time it’s going to be too late. This time it won’t be a short, little sweet little invitation into Poland somewhere; it’s going to be a short sweet ICBM down the chimney of some city. There won’t be any time for people to arm and so on, and of course it goes right on because we’re going to disarm and let the Russians walk all over the place. You take the United States Air Force, the Russian Air Force in the last 10 to 15 years have developed six to seven tactical aircraft; we have developed zero. We have no tactical aircraft that has been developed. The last bomber that we built was the B-58, and that was phased out. The B-52 has been jacked around with a lot of electronics, trying to increase the penetration ability to target zones, increase its range with certain missiles and so on, but it’s still the lumbering old B-52 that was built about a decade and a half ago and is slower than most commercial jet transports. You can get on a jet transport and fly faster than a B-52. That’s our bomber force; no bombers, no fighters. Russia has a bomber force and Russia has some brand new fighters and right at the moment I have been told by combat pilots in the United States Air Force that we have nothing that will compare with these Russian fighters.

Right at the moment the Russians have air superiority as far as fighter aircraft are concerned; we have nothing to match them. The F-4, the Phantom that has been used in Vietnam is no match for the new Russian fighters. They can outmaneuver the F-4 and so here we sit. But we’re too strong, we’re spending too much money on the military, you see. So we have no new bombers, no new aircraft, we have reduced our ICBM mega tonnage 40% while the Russians have increased 400%. In the submarines we are even worse. Here’s the USSR and here’s the US. The Russians have 360 active patrolling submarines; the United States has 147. Now who has the most coastline? We have the open coast of the Atlantic Coast and the Pacific Coast, and the Gulf Coast. If you were a submarine commander of the Russians, what would you do? Look it, you don’t even need an air force to hit the United States; you’ve got the Gulf, the Atlantic and the Pacific. Take missiles that will rock 1500 miles in, draw your lines and you can wipe out about two-thirds of the United States right from the water, nobody can do anything, and we are destroying our submarines.

The USSR during this time has developed 65 cruise missiles; we refuse to develop any cruise missiles. The Russians have developed and are working on a 3,000 mile missile, such that it will be launched from the Atlantic Ocean and can reach any Midwestern city; they don’t even have to come into the Gulf any more. And we have nothing; we are not doing any research because that might offend the Russians and might show people that we mean business. So we go on our merry way, repeating the same old history of the 1920s and 30s. In the ABM class, this is the most ridiculous thing ever imaginable; the ABM, a defense missile, Anti Ballistic Missile, a missile designed not to offend anybody, it’s purely a defensive weapon. The Russians have 100 and we have zero. That’s the way it goes, weapon system after weapon system.

So next time you hear these bleeding hearts crying about we’re spending too much money, ask them, funny where our weapons are going isn’t it; funny how we’re reducing our army to 11 divisions, the Marines down; funny we don’t have any fighter planes, what was this about too much money for the military. The reason why we don’t have enough money in this country is we’re giving it to a lot of lazy people who can’t work, that’s the trouble. It has nothing to do with the military so don’t get the military blamed for the reason why the United States treasury is bankrupt. It’s bankrupt because we’ve given to every Tom, Dick and Harry that’s had his hand out. It has nothing to do whatever with the United States defense and the military.

The fifth principle of military leadership; the fourth one was military preparedness. Military leadership, Proverbs 24:6. Incidentally, do you know who are the people that are behind a lot of this disarmament? Prominent laymen in certain great denominations, one of whom happens to be the sponsor of a certain campus organization, which I won’t name. So these are the men, the senators and so on that are behind a lot of this disarmament stuff, a lot of them born again Christians who evidently never came in five minutes contact with the Word of God and now they’re in high places and they go around giving great gloating testimonies how they’re Christians and get written up in Christian life and all the rest of it, and get passed around that so and so is a great Christian. Senator so and so is a great Christian, he does this and he does that and yet when he gets into a decision making situation the Word of God is left somewhere, it’s obviously not in his mental attitude. One of these particular individuals of whom I’m speaking I happen to know a little about since I went to school with a man whose sister he dated for many years, and he told me personally that his sister couldn’t stand him because the guy was so ignorant of Bible doctrine that he didn’t know how to come in out of the rain, and yet here’s this man up giving gloating testimonies all over the United States. This is what’s happening; Christians are behind some of this.

The fifth principle, Proverbs 24:6, “For by wise counsel,” now remember, this is the teachings of Solomon to his son; this is normal wisdom or chokmah in the Old Testament. All of this is how to live. When we finish Ephesians I think we’re going to go into Proverbs and we’re going to take some of these Proverbs because they’re fantastic, they give you principles that operate in any social situation. You master the Proverbs and you can handle people. Proverbs is a fantastic book. And here is one way, dealing with war, Proverbs 24:6, “For by wise counsel, thou shalt make thy war,” now it reads in your King James, “in multitude of counselors there is safety.” Literally it means there is deliverance, you see where it says “safety,” that word is T^eushua, from which we get Joshua, it means deliverance, “there is deliverance in the greatness of the counselor,” it is singular here, not plural, “greatness of the counselor,” it is responsible for the deliverance.

And what does this mean? The fifth principle is that you must have a well-trained military leadership. There must be, not just the soldier in the field but there must be men who are the pros, great military men are an asset to a country. And yet in our country in the past 15 or 20 years we have done everything imaginable to discourage young men who are trying to follow in the footsteps of the great men of the past. We have demoted men, we have taken military people… when you get on the Chiefs of Staff you have a whole series of seniority and we have had President after President after President take somebody 25^th on down the list and promote him and make him Chief of Staff. Do you know why? Because he can get along with him, in other words, this guy, if he wants a cut in the service we’ll promote General so and so because he won’t stand up for his service and we’ll get rid of somebody like Curtis LeMay who tells of people and if he doesn’t like you he’ll tell you so; we don’t like those people, get rid of them, put them in a basket some place because they will stand up for their service. This goes on and we have systematically I this country destroyed our military leadership. We have in the military today officers in the general class and under who have gotten there simply by brownie points, because this has been a postwar military and the only reason why they stuck it out is because they could brownnose their way into various positions and all the rest, and that’s exactly why they’re there. And the real men have either gotten frustrated and quit or they’ve just kind of stuck it out as Major and somewhere else down along the line. And that’s the condition. So today we have systematically destroyed our military leadership.

The sixth principle, back to Deuteronomy 20 but this time the first part of chapter 20. It’s not a very pleasant picture to paint when you compare the history of the United States with some of these Biblical principles; you begin to see the seriousness of the situation we are in today and why it is absolutely ridiculous for some of the clergy to be doing some of the ridiculous things they are doing. The clergy has had a large responsibility in destroying this country. The clergy have started riots, have promulgated riots, have accomplished all sorts of systems for civil disobedience and so on. I remember when I was in college at MIT one of the great chaplains there who we always had our friendly knocks with, he was down at that time riding through the south on these so-called freedom rides, and he did more damage than he did help as far as the cause of civil rights and one time he came home with a bandaged head because somebody threw a rock through the bus and hit him. I thought he’d done him a favor and he knocked him out. But nevertheless this was the kind of thing going down, troublemakers you see. And then the moment you bring the police out then they’re screaming police brutality. All they have to do is get some of the conservative clergy, they wouldn’t have to call the police, just bring some of the conservative clergy out to take on the liberals; I think that’d be a fine game.

In Deuteronomy 20:1 and following we have the sixth principle of military leadership and that is that in the situation of combat, and this goes particularly for the believer you must have an aggressive mental attitude that comes from two sources. It comes from one source; it comes out of a peace in the conscience that the cause is just. The believer must follow the Lord’s will, you have to have confidence of the justness of the cause; to think it through and be grounded that this is right, that you can fight for this thing, and the second thing is a knowledge of Bible doctrine. So in Deuteronomy 20:1-9 you have the way in which they organized their armies for battle in the ancient nation Israel. First, it starts out with God, verse 1. Now obviously we cannot claim these same things; these principles are not exactly parallel because this is holy war and God is not with us in this sense, but nevertheless He is in the direct sense of a war is an execution upon evil and if the cause is just fine.

Now the command in verse 3 is don’t sweat it, don’t get shook up and so on. It starts with a mental attitude; now these people are all trained. Now a mental attitude is no substitute for lack of training; remember all males of twenty and above, it’s UMT, universal military training, no excuses because momma writes a letter to the Congressman, would you please get Johnnie out because he has a sore toe and all the rest of it. It was universal military training, all the males were trained. Then after they were trained they were excused, and only those with a positive mental attitude were kept, and this is the elimination process. First in verse 5, if he’s got his mind on his house at home and can’t concentrate in the battle, get out. Down in verse 7 if he’s just married a girl and sees her every time he closes his eyes, forget about it, he’s not ready to fight.

In Deuteronomy 20:8 is the principle, “And the officers shall speak further unto the people, [and they shall say], What man is there who is fearful and fainthearted?” And then the principle is given, “Let him go and return unto his house, lest his brother’s heart faint [as well as his heart].” Do you know why? If one man panics, bang, the whole thing goes. Panic is contagious; courage is contagious too, but if you are in a tight knit group and one man loses his cool, and begins to fear he can set up and ruin the whole unit, and men can get killed because one man got afraid to move at a certain time, in a certain situation. Sometimes if he doesn’t move he gets shot, that’s one of the problems. But the point is that if he doesn’t stay with it he can ruin the lives of his brethren.

So Deuteronomy 10:1-9 give you the sixth principle and that is after all the military training, after all the weapons, still even after that there’s a necessity to pair off those that cannot go into battle with an aggressive mental attitude.

Finally the seventh; the evilness of peace propaganda. Turn to Micah 3; this is addressed to apostate clergy. And as so now so then; in Micah 3 the National Council was usually out with their peace and disarmament propaganda and so Micah has to address them. And in Micah 3:1 he says, “I pray you, O heads of Jacob, and ye princes of the house of Israel, It is not for you to know judgment. [2] Who hate the good, and love the evil; who pluck off their skin from them, and their flesh from off their bones; [3] Who also eat the flesh of my people, and flay their skin from them…. [4] Then shall they cry unto the LORD, but He will not hear them; He will even hide His face from them at that time, as they have behaved themselves ill in their doings. [5] Thus saith the LORD concerning the prophets,” preachers, “that make my people err,” look at that statement, do you know why? False doctrine, “that make my people ear, that bite with their teeth, and cry, Peace; and he puts not into their mouths, they even prepare war against him. [6] Therefore night shall be unto you, that ye shall not have a vision,” and so on.

The point that Micah is making, and this prophecy was made in the latter days of the southern kingdom, remember the northern kingdom fell in 721 BC at Samaria as of the Assyrians and the southern kingdom fell in 586 BC to the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Now Micah is prophesying in the last days and he’s got a problem because the clergy of his time, these prophets were going around, for a price, and for other reasons, and saying “peace and prosperity.” You get this a lot in Jeremiah, you get this a lot in Jeremiah but we don’t want to go into Jeremiah and the details, “Peace, peace, peace” they say, and God said there isn’t going to be peace because the reason you don’t have peace is because of negative volition. And so instead of curing the problem that was leading to the coming war, what were these preachers doing? Glossing over it; they were not only causing disarmament to occur so they couldn’t handle themselves in the war, not only was that wrong but even more profound than that they weren’t grappling with the inner spiritual rebellion that brought the whole thing about to start with. And they just calmly passed it over, “Peace, peace, peace.” And Jeremiah ridicules them, sometime we’re going to have to go through Jeremiah and I’m going to write out the translation, raw from the Hebrew, so you can see how he’s sarcastic and he says oh you sweet little boys, going around calling “peace, peace and prosperity,” and he really goes after them because this was their pitch. And it’s usually these people that are pitching you this peace line, you watch who they are because usually down underneath there are a few ulterior motives and/or ignorance. So in Micah 3 we have one of the classic examples.

We have other classic examples in God’s Word of the eighth principle, similar to this and that is peace propaganda from outside the country. Let’s just turn to one of those, Isaiah 36. This is one of the great, great classic times of war propaganda in the Bible and how Bible-believing Christians responded to it and weren’t shook at all. It was a time of tremendous interest, there was no time in history, I think, in all of ancient history, that was as exciting as the time that Isaiah lived in. It was a time when you had great interactions between the power spheres; you had Assyria over here, one of the greatest and strongest nations of the ancient world. The Assyrians were the men who would walk into a country and they developed a system of torture that nobody’s ever had since and that is that they’d take their prisoners and tie them out, tie their hands out and tie their legs out and then take a knife and peel them alive; this is how the Assyrians treated the people. These were the kind of people; now I give you that background to understand the tension that the people were in. The Assyrians had systematically moved westward and they had destroyed the fortifications around Jerusalem. Fortification after fortification was destroyed; see, Jerusalem had these cities of defense around them and they’d pick these off one by one by one and Sennacherib led the Assyrian forces until finally they surrounded Jerusalem and in Isaiah 36 you’ve got this situation.

Now it’s exciting because at this particular point we find that we have a situation where Isaiah’s Bible classes have paid off. Isaiah 36:1, you have Isaiah, who had taught God’s word hour after hour after hour, week after week, and finally it pays off because when Sennacherib comes up he sends some of his propaganda squad up to the walls. “Now it came to pass in the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah, that Sennacherib, king of Assyria, came up against all the defenced cities of Judah, and took them. [2] And the king of Assyria sent the Rabshakeh from Lachish to Jerusalem unto King Hezekiah with a great army. And he stood by the conduit of the upper pool in the highway of the fuller’s filed. [3] Then came forth unto him Eliakim, Hilkiah’s son, who was over the house, and Shebna, the scribe, and Joah, Asaph’s son, the recorder.”

Now the people mentioned in verse 3 are three of the biggest nitwits that Israel ever had. They went out here and they were the State Department of that day, and they went out to this man and he came up here with his army and he was going to intimidate them; he got his army right close to the wall. Now who was on the wall? The people, the people are all sitting up on the wall, wondering, good night, you know what’s going to happen if these Assyrians get in the city? We’re going to get peeled. And so there was a little tension going on and people were revising their theology a little bit. So we had some self-examination going on and there was a little tension. And so what this man was going to do, he figured that he could get in that city without losing his army, and the simple way was to convince them to open the door. You know, he was a nice boy, and he wasn’t going to be baddy baddy like the rest of the Assyrians, and he made sure that he brought his army right close to the wall so everybody on the wall could hear this conversation that was going to go on. So all these people are looking down and he’s yelling at the top of his lungs, of course these people are about ten feet away, but he’s yelling good and loud so everybody up on the wall can hear what’s going on.

And he begins to say, verse 4, “And the Rabshakeh said unto them, Say now to Hezekiah, Thus saith the great king of, the king of Assyria, What confidence is this in which you trusteth? [5] I say, sayest thou (but they are but vain words), I have counsel and strength for war; now on whom does thou trust, do you rebel against me? [6] Lo, thou trusts in the staff of Egypt,” that’s when Israel made a mistake and trusted in some human viewpoint gimmick and they God disciplined, “on which a man lean, it will go into his hand and pierce it; so is Pharaoh, king of Egypt, to all who trust in him.” He got clobbered by the Assyrians. Verse 7, “But if thou say to me, We trust in the LORD our God: is it not he, whose high places and whose altars Hezekiah has taken away,” now that was a real clever jab.

You see, the Assyrians had a little G-2 squad that reported certain things that was going on and Hezekiah was a man who led one of the great Biblical revivals of the nation Israel. And one of these Biblical revivals is he went around and eliminated all the apostate sanctuaries of worship; that was part of the revival, he destroyed these sanctuaries. And the G-2 squad, not being too informed on what was going on, thought that what Hezekiah was doing was knocking off the nations gods, and so they say, aha, and the G-2 report back and they say listen, I’ll tell you what, here’s how we can design the propaganda, when you get up to that wall all you have to say is start splitting the people away and say, see wasn’t Hezekiah a nasty nasty, he destroyed all your gods and now isn’t that sweet, now here we are 175,000 soldiers amassed around the wall and he destroyed your gods; that wasn’t very nice of Hezekiah, was it? Of course it was all wrong, but the believers who knew the issue were prepared in that day. It would have been obvious to any Bible-believing Christian that had the least amount of Bible doctrine.

So he went on, in verse 8, “Now, therefore, give pledges, I pray thee, to my master, the king of Assyria, and I will give thee two thousand horses, if thou be able on thy part to set riders upon them.” See, another sarcasm, he says if you’ve got enough men to ride 2,000 horses we’ll give them to you; it’s just loaded with sarcasm. Verse 9, “How, then, will you turn away the face of one captain of the least of my master’s servants, and put thy trust on Egypt for chariots and for horsemen?” In other words, we could send one little patrol out here and you’d drop dead our Assyrian army is so great. [10] “And am I now come up without the LORD against this land to destroy it? The LORD said unto me, Go up against this land, and destroy it.” Now notice the force of this. He is claiming God, Jehovah, spoke to him to destroy Israel. See, they’ve got this thing pretty well knocked, it was a very careful spy system that they had done, and it was deliberately designed to destroy believers who did not know the Word of God in that generation… it was deliberately designed to confuse them, claiming that God spoke to them and all the rest, claiming all these great religious experiences that God spoke to me and told me to do this.

And then in verse 11 we have the reaction on the part of the State Department. “Then said Eliakim and Shebna and Joah unto the Rabshakeh, Speak, I pray thee, unto thy servants in the Syrian language,” this is Aramaic, “for we understand it; and speak not to us in the Jews’ language, in the hearing of the people that re on the wall,” they might hear you. Keep it down boys, lower your volume, turn into another language. You see, the State Department is afraid the people on the wall are going to panic but if we had time to really develop this I’d show you the people that were panicking were the State Department. The people on the wall thought it was pretty funny because they had been schooled under Isaiah, they had developed a real confidence in Jehovah and they were, to a degree, relaxed, relaxed in the omnipotence of God, the ability that God had to handle the situation. And so here’s the State Department down here, hey, put it over in Aramaic, will you, so they won’t hear you, and all the rest of it. And they were so shook up that the people might panic.

Now this is not the first time that this has happened in history where the leadership of a nation panics but the citizens are strong. You sometimes get this in history; oftentimes we have it this country, where the men at the top panic before the people on the common level; very interesting, and here is a classic case of it. These people at the bottom had been studying Bible under Isaiah and were prepared. So here you have peace propaganda from another country and believers are able to resist it on the basis of God’s Word. This is kind of a threat in peace; in other words, you don’t want a nasty war so disarm. We could go on in the rest of chapter 36 and show what he wanted them to do was disarm. And they’d have peace all right; pieces is what they’d have.

Finally I’d like to conclude with the Christian in war. Numbers 32:5 this has necessarily been a little extended in time but you understand we can’t stop in the middle of these principles. Is there a base for conscientious objection? Here was a situation, again a map of Israel; the land over here had been conquered, and three tribes already had their homeland; the situation is this. These three tribes say listen, we’ve had enough of war and we’re not too interested in going over and starting some more war, we’ve had it. We don’t want to fight any more, so we’ll let the other tribes, the nine tribes, go over here and take care of all this land, and we’ll just sit over here, we want our peace and we’re not going to go to war, and so they wanted to get out of it. So in verse 5, “If we have found grace in thy sight, let this land be given unto thy servants for a possession, and bring us not over the Jordan. [6] And Moses said unto the children of Gad and to the children of Reuben, Shall our brethren go to war and ye sit here? [7] And wherefore discourage ye the heart of the children of Israel from going over into the land which the LORD has given them? [8] Thus did your fathers, when I sent them from Kadesh-barnea to see the land,” and he goes on. Finally in verse 14, “And, behold, you are risen up in your father’s stead, and increase of sinful men, to augment yet the fierce anger of the LORD toward Israel.”

The principle there was teamwork, and it’s a traitorous act if some young men are out on the battlefield and you don’t want to go in there. Conscientious objection, therefore, has no base in Scripture. There is one legitimate principle for the Christian, and that is if he, in all good conscience, carefully examining on Biblical grounds finds the war unjust, and he feels in good conscience he cannot partake of it, and he’d better have some pretty good reasons, but if he feels he can’t, as I see it he has two alternatives that are Scriptural. One alternative is to leave the country if he can and don’t claim protection of the country; if you don’t want to defend it, then don’t claim the protection of it; don’t be a parasite. If you expect the country to protect your freedoms then you get out there and fight for them, and if you don’t expect the country to do that then you just leave.

The second possibility is the doctrine of civil disobedience taught in the book of Acts, in which the Christian has the right to disobey the law under certain very exceptional conditions, but in the book of Acts when the apostles disobeyed the civil law they never started a riot; they went quietly to jail, some not so quiet, they sang hymns in jail and woke all the people up so they could teach the Word, but nevertheless, the point was the Christians did not start a riot and try to tear down the government just because they didn’t like it. The Christians took their lumps and if they went against the civil law in the book of Acts they went to jail for it, they declared their testimony for Jesus Christ and they put themselves at the mercy of God’s sovereignty, and that’s it, but there wasn’t any of this frothing at the mouth and causing riots and all the rest of it. That is unbiblical and any clergyman or any religious organization that tells you that that is Christian is apostate and they are not following the Word of God. And the police and the military have every right in the world to go in there and just clobber every one of them. And they can’t yell and bellyache and so on and claim, oh, what are you doing this for, and all the rest of it. Any military organization has the right to destroy, and I mean destroy them, kill them, annihilate them, whether Christians or not, because if they followed the Word of God they wouldn’t be out there; if they followed the Word of God they’d go to jail peacefully and stay there.

Now that’s the Christian alternative. And you say well I don’t like that. Well that’s too bad, that’s what the Word of God says. And besides that if you have a concept of what God can do in your life you won’t have to worry about it in jail because you can be in a jail and be the most free person alive. You trust in the Lord and you can have opportunities in jail that you’d never have on the outside; you can be further in captivity outside the jail than inside the jail, and that’s the whole perspective of Paul. See, the early Christians could go to jail peacefully because they had the doctrine and the knowledge and the faith to do it, and the reasons why the Christians are crybabies today is because they’re so weak, and they can’t trust their God to work out situations, so they raise banners and placards and so on. We could go in, as I said, we don’t have time tonight, to the nuclear war and the particular problems of nuclear war. I have covered that in other portions and we won’t deal with it tonight, but this is the nine principles of warfare developed in Scripture and I hope that they will be used; I have had to explain some of them to people in counseling situations so I know some people at least have these on their mind.