The Divine Right of Nations

DW2A

So we have a generation of young Americans who are intimidated over devotion to their country and to the free enterprise system. This is revealed, and it is good to pick up these key phrases when you talk to college students, when you talk to the radicals, when you talk to the hippies, when you talk to the yippies, and when you talk to the Black Panthers. It is good to catch the phrases particularly in the sincere student who is disoriented and reaching out and trying to find himself, and who is admittedly confused in his thinking and has some internal turmoil about how he should feel toward his nation and the free enterprise system. One of these phases is "the good guys and the bad guys." You will notice this phrase coming up more and more in the parlance of college students. They say that there is no such thing as good guys and bad guys, trying to discredit the idea that communism and its point of view is bad and that they are the bad guys.

But make no mistake about it. Communists are the bad guys. And if you make that mistake you may yet live to rue the day and learn by experience just how bad they really are. It is they who must have the secret police. It is they who must have the slave labor camps. It is they who must use terror as an instrument of policy. It is they who must build walls, maintain guards, and use the guns in order to keep people inside the paradise of peace, plenty, and justice that they have created and envisioned for humanity. However, Americans are brainwashed today. This generation of Americans, the young adult generation of Americans, has been brainwashed deliberately by communist planning and by the radical students, or by the dupes that these radical students manipulate. Most college students are just dupes when they join forces with the radical students. Their idealism is being used. And disoriented Christians are the instruments of deliberate communist planning to brainwash Americans toward this subject of war.

Also, don't be taken in by another phrase that you will hear: "I'm against communism. I'm opposed to all of its brutality and all that it stands for, but I'm just against war." That's a sincere person, and remember to never trust a sincere person. He's a person who operates out of emotion. He's not a person who's operating on facts. He's a disoriented dupe. We remind you again as we did last time that American freedoms are due to the military establishment of this country and to the brave men who fought and died and won battles. That's why you can sit here, and the hippies can sit here, and the yippies can sit here, and they can sound out for peace and against our free enterprise system.

National destruction historically comes to a nation when a majority of its citizens becomes defective in their values and standards in the conscience. They then become animals. This is reflected in communal living. It's reflected in homosexuality, in drugs, in unisex, in promiscuity, in expediency on the part of leadership, and in anti-nationalism. The age of apostasy is in the church, represented ideally by the National Council of Churches. It purports to speak for the majority of Protestants in the country today, and is the primary instrument for action by the liberals. Apostasy in the church has built a generation of intellectually brilliant but morally disoriented young people. Brains, I remind you again, doesn't mean orientation to the truth. This is another expression I discover in talking to young people. They are impressed by the brilliance of the radical leaders on the college campuses, and they equate this with an understanding of the truth. But you can have all the brains in the world and be just as far away from God's point of view as anybody can be--as the greatest moron can be.

The Word of God tells us that there are only two systems by which humanly we can learn. That is, first of all, by rationalism. 1 Corinthians 1:20 says, "Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that, in the wisdom of God, the world wisdom (by rationalism, by thinking, and by brain power) knew not God. It pleased God by the foolishness of preaching (Bible exposition) to save them that believed." In 1 Corinthians 2:9, the other method of learning, empiricism, is also completely inadequate to come to God's point of view: "But as it is written, eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God has prepared for them that love Him." Your senses will not bring you to a knowledge of God. It is only by the faith system, believing the authority of the Word of God, that brings you into touch with God's thinking.

Within a national entity there is a spiritual kingdom. It is this spiritual kingdom which preserves the nation and its liberties. Israel, when it was presented with the truth concerning Christ, rejected Him. In time, its spiritual kingdom was destroyed. When that happened Israel as a nation fell. It has fallen to this day, for what exists in Palestine is not the nation returned in belief to God, but is simply the preparation for it. A spiritual kingdom is made up of believers who are oriented to Bible doctrine. It is the responsibility of the spiritual kingdom within a nation to influence that national entity but never to be combined with it. It is to be separation of church and state all the way down the line.

Israel fell nationally because a majority of its citizens had fallen spiritually. A Christian can be so confused doctrinally. Please get over, once and for all, the stupidity of equating knowing the Bible and being doctrinally oriented. There are plenty of churches in this city that teach the Bible where the people are totally disoriented to what they really are, to seeing themselves as they are, to the Word of God and its doctrinal aspects, and thus to have a view of the nation. I am talking about being doctrinally oriented--not simply knowing the Bible. It is possible for a Christian to know the Bible and be so confused doctrinally that he's even more disoriented politically.

The Conscience

Thinking is the key to living. This is the soul. We also have a human spirit. The human spirit is the point of our God consciousness and our contact with God. When God deals with you, it is through your spirit that He deals. God deals on the basis of what is in your spirit as a storage place. A spirit that is devoid of doctrinal orientation is a spirit which cannot influence these areas of your soul so that you are completely disoriented to God's point of view. Instead of ending up with divine viewpoint, you end up with human viewpoint. Our self-awareness enables us to know ourselves. Our mentality enables us to think. Our emotions enable us to have a sense of appreciation. Our will, or volition, enables us to make decisions. Our conscience is the place where our standards and values are located. The old sin nature perverts all of us.

The human spirit, we are told in the Word of God, is to receive the fullness of God. Without going into too much detail here, Ephesians 3:19 says, "And to know the love of Christ, which passes knowledge, that you might be with all the fullness of God." The fullness of God refers to doctrinal orientation. We Christians are to be filled with the fullness of God, doctrinal orientation. That takes place here in the soul. This is the warehouse of doctrine. The grace system has provided a basis for you to come to understand Bible doctrine and God's point of view. It doesn't matter what your human IQ is. Spiritual IQ is the development of how much doctrine you have in the human spirit.

Divine truth is still here as a result of your positive response to what you hear. You cannot store Bible doctrine through rationalism. You cannot store it through empiricism. You can only store it by faith. When you hear the Word taught, when you hear a doctrine like the doctrine of warfare taught, you are going to go negative or you're going to go positive. If you go positive toward what the Word of God says, that truth is now placed as full knowledge into your spirit where God the Holy Spirit will use it to direct the areas of your soul. If you go negative (although you've got the doctrine in your mind and you have Bible knowledge), it's meaningless. That's the person who knows so much and is so incompetent when it comes to Christian living, and is so inconsistent with what he knows.

This is the way you may treat a meal. Your mother or your wife calls you to a meal, and you may look at that meal, and on the basis of your senses, you may smell it, you may feel it, you may taste it, and you may make a decision about that meal. That's empiricism. You may do it rationally. You may look at this meal, and you may analyze its color, analyze what it looks like, and what it's made of, and whether that should be good or not good. Then you make a decision whether that's a good meal or not.

The other way is to accept by faith that your mother says, "Here is a good meal." You sit down, and you accept it, and eat it, and then in the process of eating, it's confirmed. You accept her word by faith. That may not always work. We discovered at our house that whenever we're told that we're going to have a delicious dinner, our signals go up because we know that out in the kitchen something exotic has been going on, and we're going to come in and find something like an eggplant and calf brain succotash. We are being prepared. Maybe you can't always accept by faith what you hear. You have to check your authority and know the pattern. Maybe at your house, when they say it's a delicious dinner that doesn't signal anything.

Now, doctrine protects us from emotional subjectivity. When you know doctrine, you are protected from emotional subjectivity. When you have a spirit filled with doctrine, you don't fall off into Pentecostalism and the emotional binge. You don't run around like a sincere person. You don't run around talking about Christians loving one another when you're totally ignorant of what "agape" love is as a non-emotional intellectual relationship. Watch out for sincere people. They're suspect to the core, and they will lead you astray every time, especially those who speak of love. They usually are totally disoriented to the language as to what they're even talking about.

I had a youngster in the academy recently who was having some problems. So I had a talk with her, and she said. "Oh, I'm not going to have any more difficulties." I said, "Why not?" She said, "I went to church last night and I had an experience." Right away I knew where she went to church, what kind of church she was going to, and sure enough, she had a Pentecostal experience and they had a good emotional meeting. She came forward and she had some kind of an experience. Now she wasn't going to have any more problems of conduct and the things that she was having troubles with in her personal life. She was operating on emotion. This is disoriented to the way God the Spirit works. I had to sit down with her and said, "I want to show you some things that the Bible has to say on how God works and thinks. I had to give her a little doctrine. And I said, "Now if you will accept that, your problems will be resolved. Your experience will mean nothing. All your experience is going to tell you is that a couple of weeks from now you have to go back for another shot of experience."

The Learning Cycle

Let's take a look at the mind. Your mind has two sides to it. Your mind has a thinking side and it has a conscience side. This is the point of trouble today. Your conscience is determined by what is down here in your human spirit. On the basis of what you have learned of the doctrine, you make decisions on what is moral and what is immoral; what is right and what is wrong; and, what is the mind of God and what is the mind of man. That sets the values and standards of your conscience. This in turn guides your thinking. The thinking side of your mind is governed by the conscience side. If your conscience is defective in its values and standards, you will be way off base in your thinking. This is what is happening to young people today. Because they are so pitifully ignorant of Bible doctrine in the spirit, they have no basis of establishing a set of values and of standards in the conscience.

We are talking particularly on the set of values and standards in reference to war and that doctrine. Thus, their thinking is totally disoriented to the mind of God, and they're operating on human viewpoint. So they resort to reason, to rationalism, or to substitutes. You may go negative, as of this point, and then the doctrine simply stays as an intellectual thing. The truth is of no use to you. You make up your own excuses, and you act purely on a subjective basis. The doctrine from the human spirit will cycle back to your mind and will affect your conscience side, and thus govern your thinking. Your mind is like a computer. It's controlled by what is put into it. It is amazing how many non-Christians who study the mind, who are experts in the field of psychology, are coming up exactly with this conclusion. It is fantastic. They don't have the scriptural orientation to it, but they're coming up exactly with this same understanding of how the mind works in a computer-like fashion. Its input determines its output.

Alright. Now here is the working of conscience. You have rights or wrongs based upon the doctrinal orientation that you have. This is totally devoid of feelings. This is an objective standard. Now if sin comes into the life, then what happens is a short-circuit at this point. Here's the problem with young people today. The involvement in sin on a broad scale has short-circuited the mind. Even among Christian kids, when sin comes in, they are short-circuited from the spirit. The result is that the conscience side of the mind has no access to the Word of God and to God's point of view. So the view of war is determined by the conscious side.

Solomon was a man who had an excellent set of values and standards in the conscience. This was reflected by what he was willing to choose when God said, "Anything you want, I'll give you." And yet, Solomon wrote the book of Ecclesiastics--a book which explains all of the things that he pursued as substitutes for his relationship to God--substitutes for a divine viewpoint, and how useless it all was. What happened to Solomon? He became promiscuous. With all of his multiplicity of wives, and heathen wives at that, sin came in on a physical level and it destroyed the conscience side of Solomon's brain. The result was that he became totally disoriented in his thinking. He must have come back, because he wrote the book of Ecclesiastics which relates his experience over the years that he drifted away from God.

So your conscience is, as 1 Timothy 4:2 says, "seared." You will be reduced to an animal level, and you will be totally confused. This is what happens. When this is seared, this is blanked out, then over here you become an animal. This again explains the animal conduct of the radical youth of today. Their conscience is out.

Divine Institutions

Nationalism

Human Government

Here is where you're going to have to go positive or negative first: It is the will of God for people to exist as nations in national entities. Job 12:23 says, "He increases the nations, and he destroys them. He enlarges the nations, and leads them away." God deals in terms of nations. Right now you're going to have to decide, "Does the Bible teach that it is the will of God that humanity exists in a group of national entities or not?" And when we say national entities, we mean as independent sovereign nations. Independent national groupings prevent an international dictatorship from silencing the promotion and the propagation of the Word of God. It preserves evangelism. It preserves the teaching of the Word of God for the edifying of believers.

Satan

Now the Tower of Babel was perhaps the first big attempt at internationalism, and God broke it out. Genesis 11:1-9 describe how they were going to get together, and they were going to have this rallying point. The result of all this was that it brought an intense wickedness and a rejection of divine viewpoint. The Word tells us that God said, "If We of the Trinity permit man to do this, he'll be restrained from no evil whatsoever." Internationalism breeds the most intense kind of evil in wickedness. So God scattered the human race into national groupings on the basis of languages, which later evolved into racial groups.

Acts 17 tells us that national entities make it possible for people to seek and define the truth about God. Acts 17:26 says, "And has made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the face of the earth, and has determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if perhaps they might feel after Him and find him, though He is not far from every one of us." I don't think you could put it any clearer than that. God has made men to dwell; He has appointed their times; and, He has appointed the boundaries of their habitation. Why? So they could reach out for God and find Him. Once you destroy a nation's sovereignty, once the world becomes one massive beehive, the first thing that will go is the opportunity of a person to reach out and the opportunity to find God. A national entity has been designed by God as a system to provide law and order. Law is to be enforced objectively, not so the victims are the ones who are punished. Any opposition to capital punishment is satanic. Under the Noahic Covenant, capital punishment was given as the supreme power of the state in order to preserve that state. From that all other punishments stem. Anybody who opposes capital punishment is disoriented to the Word of God and is off base, and badly needs to get straightened out.

Romans Chapter 13:4, in speaking of civil authority, says, "For he is the minister of God to you for good, but if you do that which is evil, be afraid for he bears not the sword in vain." That's capital punishment. He bears not capital punishment in vain for he is a minister of God "and avenger to execute wrath upon him that does evil." Don't be carried away by these rosy pictures that where capital punishment doesn't exist, crime decreases. That's a lie. Where capital punishment does not exist, crime increases. The fear of what the results will be are removed from those who are the most brutal. People who are disoriented to divine viewpoint oppose capital punishment. They usually parade themselves as humane, as enlightened, as intelligent, and as loving, but they are as confused as they can be.

A national identity is not only to provide law and order, but is to protect freedom within laws--freedom to travel, freedom to work, and freedom to reside wherever you want to. A national entity ensures privacy for the individual. There are no secret police as is essential to the communist setup. A national entity respects private property. Please remember that there is no freedom possible unless you can own your own property. If you cannot own your own property, if you cannot live under private ownership, there is no freedom. You are then under rules and regulations of some kind of a bureaucracy, some kind of an authority, that's telling you where to go, what to do, and how to use the things that are provided you. Private property ownership and human freedom always go together.

Private Ownership

In the book of Acts, this is a sharing situation. This is certainly not communism here at all in the terms of Soviet communism as we know today. In Acts 5:3, we have the Christians sharing together. We had this case of a husband and wife, Ananias and Sapphira, who wanted to pretend that they also wanted to share with the Christians, and they lied about how much they had for a certain piece of property. You notice it was their property. It was their right to sell it. It was their right not to sell it. It was their right to give some of the money or to give none of the money. None of this was criticized. This was their right because this is the way the Word of God is set up, that you own your things and you do with them as you please. But the thing is that was their deceit was their lust for pride which was going to be fulfilled by making a good impression on the other Christians as to how much they had given, all of what they had for their property. So Peter said, "Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit to keep that part of the price of the land while it remained? Was it not your own? And after it was sold, was it not in your own power? Why have you conceived this thing in your heart? You have not lied unto men but unto God." Private ownership was the pattern even among Christians who shared in the New Testament church.

The Purpose of National Entities

Now Satan attacks all this. Satan attacks national groupings. Why? In order to enslave humanity in spiritual darkness. Communism does this everywhere that it controls, and it would do it every place that it could. In a publication called "Church and State," there was a very interesting article concerning Soviet Christians today. Every now and then we have some famous evangelist that goes to Russia, and they take him around on a setup tour, and he comes back and says what a blessed glorious time he had visiting with the Christians. So the people in this country began to get the idea that it's not so bad really in Russia even though they do stand for atheism.

Christianity in Communist Countries

The second incident took place in Moscow where a group of American tourists met with several professors from the University of Moscow and some 100 students, half of whom were graduate students from the United States. "Held in the Institute for Soviet American friendship, the meeting was to discuss civil and religious liberty in the Soviet Union. 'Is it possible for any Russian citizen to purchase the works Engels, Marx, Lenin, and other communist leaders?' an American editor asked. 'Of course,' a Russian professor replied with a quizzical look. 'And what about the Bible?' the editor continued. 'Can Soviet citizens purchase Bibles?' 'Yes, yes' the Professor replied. The American editor who knew better reached into his inside coat pocket and drew out a book of American travelers checks. 'I'll give 100 dollars to anyone here who can purchase a Bible anywhere in Moscow or anywhere in the Soviet Union,' he said. The conversation was quickly switched to juvenile delinquency."

The American and British Bible Societies, the article goes on to indicate, have consistently tried to distribute Russian language Bibles in the Soviet Union and have been forbidden to do so. Tourists who have gone to Russia carrying Bibles usually find their Bibles confiscated. Scientific advances are used to combat spiritual ideas. When the Russian cosmonaut Titov went out into space, he made a dramatic statement, "There is no God for I didn't see him." Radio Moscow, after it sent up the Sputniks said, "Now that the first two Sputniks have appeared in the cosmos, it is possible to say that we have visited heaven, and we have been where the eyes of believers are directed with religious awe." Remember that the Soviet view of religion either is that it has to be destroyed or it is an instrument to advance the cause of the state. The lot of Christians is a hard one in Russia.

The article goes on to say that no meetings may be held outside a registered church building. No religious printed matter can be distributed. Teaching religion to minors, like your own children, is strictly prohibited with fines and prison terms up to three years as the consequence. Some 250 Baptists alone are presently in prison for this offense. Meetings of Christian leaders are subject to government approval. Refusal to work on a holy day for religious reasons may mean loss of job. No Christian schools are permitted.

In 1937, the communists thought they had done such a good job of eliminating any religious feeling on the part of a new generation and on the part of the Russian people. In the census of that year, they included a question concerning whether a person was a believer or a non-believer. The reason for it, the article says, was to demonstrate the triumph of atheism in the Soviet Union after almost two decades of communist rule. This question, incidentally, is illegal on the basis of the communist constitution. Anyhow, the article says the census became an opportunity for believers of all religions to demonstrate attachment to their faith. Even many who no longer attended church could not bring themselves to write "Unbeliever" on the census form. According to reliable evidence, about 50 million Soviet citizens proclaim themselves as believers. The statistic caused such embarrassment to the authorities that they scrapped the census returns and arrested the census officials. No subsequent Soviet census has ever repeated the question about whether you are a believer or an unbeliever.

One more thing: The article closes with an incident which seems to show that the Russian Christians live under harassments that are unbelievable and unknown to us, yet they are not intimidated by their circumstances: "An American tourist group was steered to a Moscow bookstore." This is what they do with religious leaders from this country. "Here in this bookstore, confiscated Bibles were put on display to show that you can too buy Bibles in the Soviet Union. But somehow the news got out, and as the American tourists were ushered in the store, a score of Russian Christians burst by them, rushed up to the counter, and bought every Bible. The Russian government reports a Moscow Christian has not repeated the sale."

So let's get over the delusion, dear friends, once and for all, that communism is not out to destroy national entities for the purpose of destroying access to the Word of God. And incidentally, in a previous session, we have learned how communism uses the nationalism of a people. They desire for national entity to bring themselves to power and then to destroy that nationalism once it is in power. So don't be confused when communism speaks about the nationalism for the people of South Vietnam and so on.

What have we said here? Beginning next time, we go to principle number one concerning warfare. We've established, as background for that, that the disorientation toward war and toward the youth groups of the day begins because of a problem in the conscience. The thinking side of their brain has been disoriented by the fact that the conscience side has been blanked out. The conscience is blanked out because they lack Bible doctrine. We are going to share with you the Bible doctrine of warfare. You may blank out your spirit. You may put a short-circuit in your spirit and thus blank out your values and standards so that you have no basis of thinking on this subject when it comes up. We have indicated that it is the will of God that people should exist on this planet in national groups, as national entities. Now you must go positive or negative toward that because that's at the heart of this. If you accept the Bible teaching that God has divided people into nations, and He intends them to stay within national groups, then you will understand the Bible's doctrine of warfare. If you reject the idea that people should stay as national groups but should be under certain international influences, then you will reject the Bible teaching on warfare.

Dr. John E. Danish, 1970

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