Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
Winston Churchill is credited with saying, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
That’s clever. Yet, here we are, wondering how it got so weird around here.
Churchill’s quote, though witty, is inaccurate. The Hebrew Scriptures in the Bible (what we regularly call the Old Testament) present us with a better way.
Somewhere in the ballpark of 2000 B.C., God went and pulled a nation for himself out of the midst of another nation, with great power, signs, and wonders. They were a couple million descendants of Abraham the Hebrew, along with a bunch of Egyptians who had learned that Yahweh was the one, true God.
He organized them into the nation called Israel shortly after their exodus from Egypt was complete.
This is unique in human history. Beginning at “square one” God organized a political body, giving it a constitution called the law. He specified the nation’s structure and how it would govern itself. This was God’s idea for government.
For those who are not familiar with the biblical data: This government that God himself designed did not look anything like any modern democracy. Even less did it resemble any dictatorships, whether religious or not, with which we are familiar.
God gave Israel a form of government that provided the people with so much freedom, it’s tough for us to wrap our brains around it. Moses, the lawgiver, was thus a radical.
The law did not merely consist of moral and ceremonial guidelines. It gave God’s new nation a form of governance.
Most Christians are completely ignorant of this and would embarrass themselves if they had to describe it. Sadly, when it is described to them, it sounds foolish, unworkable, and dangerous. Their current government has done an excellent job of convincing them of its own necessity.
Moses showed newly free people how to govern themselves.
This was radical in his day, and still is. His instruction created a setting for real, civil freedom. A lot of believers have been taught to associate the law of Moses with the word “bondage,” though. Someone scared them away from looking into it too closely.
This is not how the Bible views the law. You won’t get that view, for instance, from reading the longest chapter of the Bible, Psalm 119. You’ll get the opposite. You’ll get agreement with the New Testament writer who called it the perfect law of liberty.
(For those whose defensive screens have already snapped on: No one here is advocating a fraudulent use of that law, as a means of justifying ourselves or proving how righteous we are. We aren’t proposing a system of works-based righteousness. We’re talking about receiving instruction, which is what the Hebrew word, torah, means. The law, the torah, is a teacher. We should be students.)
Freedom, and the responsibilities that adhere to it, can be frightening, especially to those who have never had a taste of it. This is part (at least) of why the Israelites who had this perfect law occasionally thought they would prefer to go back to their former slavery.
Genuine liberty grants the freedom to flourish and to fail. It’s not for cowards, but for radicals, like Moses.
Gordan Runyan is pastor of Tucumcari’s Immanuel Baptist Church and author of “Radical Moses: The Amazing Civil Freedom Built into Ancient Israel.” Contact him at: