2 Samuel 20, beginning at verse 23. And Joab was over all the army of Israel. Benaiah the son of Jehoiada was over the Cherethites and the Pelethites. Adoram was in charge of revenue. Jehoshaphat the son of Ahilud was recorder. Sheva was scribe. Zadok and Abiathar were the priests. And Ira the Jairite was a chief minister under David. Amen. Father, we thank you for this, your word. We pray that you would open up the eyes of our understanding to not only rejoice over your word and its provision, that it gives answers to all of life, but father, that you would help us to have the wisdom to be able to apply it to those who ask a reason of the hope that lies within us. We love you. We bless you. And we commit this continued time of worship as we respond to your word in Jesus name. Amen. George Washington once said, a government is like fire, a handy servant but a dangerous master. And his point was that like fire, when the civil government is kept under control, it can serve a great purpose. But when it gets out of control and it begins to dominate a culture, it is destructive. As far back as we have history, we have seen that most government, civil government, has been a history of destruction because it has rarely kept itself within the stove or within the fireplace or within the biblical proportions that God has called it to. And George Washington knew that history. Very, very well, he talked about it. He knew how civil governments have destroyed lives and the value of money and property and freedom and initiative and moral character and planning, and have not only sought to destroy any other competing governments, but destroy anything that competes with its monopoly. And this destructive nature of civil government, that it is a fire, so to speak, made most of our founding fathers, try to avoid making an efficient government. In fact, they did the opposite. They looked for every way they could think of for having checks and balances that would contain this fire within its sphere. The almost universal belief in total depravity made them fear both a centralizing government as well as anarchy, which means no government. Much as I like George Washington, scripture casts a vision of civil government that is far more limited than even he believed. And I think that Patrick Henry was closer to the truth. And let me read you Washington's statement again, and I'll explain the problematic phrase. He said, a government is like fire, a handy servant, but a dangerous master. Well, Scripture would say, and it would actually go way beyond what George Washington said here, Scripture would say that the civil government is not even supposed to be a handy servant. The Scripture would say the moment the population begins to treat the civil government as a handy servant, it is automatically going to become destructive. And it's going to become destructive because in order to be handy to you as a servant, it's got to steal from someone else. Now, it may not be stealing money. It may be stealing opportunity or liberty or time or something else. But the moment a government becomes a handy servant to you, St. Augustine said that it is no different than a robber or a pirate. And I'm going to very deliberately be starting with a quote from St. Augustine to show that the heart of what we're going to be talking about this morning is not something weird and wacko. This is something that was really the mainstream part of Christianity for many, many centuries. St. Augustine was the and I pronounce it different ways just to irritate people, but some people say Augustine, some people say Augustine, and maybe it's the different parts of the country you come from. So I'm smack dab in the middle, I can pronounce it any way I want to, right? But anyway, Augustine was probably the greatest theologian that the church has ever had. Very, very respected by both the East and the West. He lived from 354 to 430 A.D., and I'm going to be quoting from his most famous book, The City of God. Now, in that book, Augustine said that when a civil government is not built on justice, is not restrained to its biblical proportions, it automatically becomes a society of robbers that pillage and destroy. And let me quote him at length. Remove justice then, and what are kingdoms but large gangs of robbers? And what are gangs of robbers but small kingdoms? The gang, too, is a group of men ruled by a leader's command. It is bound together by a pact of association, and its loot is divided according to an agreed law. If by constantly adding desperate men, this scourge grows to such an extent that it acquires territory, establishes a home base, occupies cities, and subjugates peoples, it more openly assumes the name of kingdom, a name now publicly conferred on it due not to any reduction in greed, but rather to the addition of impunity. For it was a witty and a true response that a certain captured pirate made to the famous Alexander the Great. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, what you mean by seizing the whole earth. For because I do it with a petty ship, I'm called a robber. while when you do it with a great fleet, you are styled an emperor. Okay, Augustine was saying that civil government is actually more dangerous than piracy because it tends to become a monopoly of pillage, control, and destruction, or to use our beginning analogy, when civil government is not restricted to the tiny stove that God made for it, it will consume the whole house. And the thesis of today's sermon on limited government is that if the civil government is to cease being a cancer that sucks the life out of society after society, it must see itself as a humble servant of God that refuses to be a handy servant to you on any issue that God has not given it jurisdiction to do. In other words, this morning I hope to prod you to consider the kind of limited government advocated by Gary North, Joel McDermott, R.J. Rushdooney, Mark Rushdooney, Martin Selbridy, Bojidar Marinov, Augustine, the Puritans, the Scottish Reformers, Patrick Henry, and so many other people. And the first thing I want you to notice in this passage is the small size of David's cabinet. Count them up. Joab, Benaiah, Adoram, Jehoshaphat, Sheva, Zadok, Abiathar, and Ira. Okay, that makes up a total of eight positions on David's cabinet. Now compare that to 23 members of our American current cabinet or 39 on Prime Minister Harper's cabinet in Canada. There are 34 cabinet members in the United Kingdom. So just by itself it gives a little bit of a hint of the small size of David's government. Now we're going to be seeing under Roman numeral II that far more important than the number of cabinet members is the number of departments that they represent and all of the sub-departments that go under that. But in any case, his cabinet was fairly small. And if you compare the cabinet at the beginning of David's reign in chapter eight with this one during the last years of David's reign, you'll only notice two changes. The first change was that David added a new department, the Department of Revenue. It was headed up by a dorum. Now, though we'll see under Roman numeral II that this department actually had no relationship whatsoever to an internal revenue service. It was only dealing with the restitution from other countries that had attacked it. It was dealing with tribute from outside the nation. Still, this was a new department that was added in, and this tends to be the trajectory that almost every government goes with. There tends to be growth, growth of departments, growth in the size of departments, and this particular department grew way out of biblical proportions under Solomon, and even worse under Rehoboam. And so there was this trajectory of growth. But in any case, because all of the nations that had tried to wipe David and wipe Israel off the face of the map, And they had won those wars. It was very biblical to do exactly what David was doing here. It was hard to keep track of all of the different tributes that were coming from these nations flowing into the country. So he set up this department. I think it was a very innocent and legitimate thing that he was doing to take care of that and to make sure that this tribute only went so far as biblical law would allow it to go. So at some point between chapter 8 and this chapter, David needed to add adorum and not make the military take care of that function. Now the other change is that David replaced his sons with one cabinet member, Ira. All of his sons previously had been cabinet members and so David somewhat downsizes his cabinet. We aren't told why he removed his sons. It may have been because, you know, after being burned by Absalom that he just thought that wasn't a good idea. It may have been trying to convince the nation that nepotism is no longer going to be a part of his administration. It may be that he thought the positions on this council need to be governed by who is qualified rather than who is related to me or who was a friend. Who knows? We're not told in the passage. Maybe even the states told him, we don't want your sons on this cabinet any longer. We simply are not told. But in any case, the cabinet was just slightly downsized. But the point is that it remained small throughout David's entire reign. And that is hugely significant. It is significant, first of all, because God approved of such a small government. In fact, if you take a look over at chapter eight, 2 Samuel chapter 8 and verse 15. This begins the list near the beginning of David's reign as a king over the whole nation. And it says, so David reigned over all Israel and David administered judgment and justice to all his people. And then begins the listing of David's earlier cabinet. Now here's the point. That passage, that verse indicates no sense of lack or inadequacy whatsoever to David's administration. It's not like David needed to have a huge government in order to function. This is God himself speaking through the narrator. And as far as God was concerned, that cabinet and what it represented is all that was needed for David to be able to do what a national government was supposed to do according to God's law. That's God's declaration. You don't need a huge government. in order to do what God wants a national ruler to do. Now, of course, if you study the Pentateuch, you'll see all David's doing is restricting himself to what the Pentateuch allow. And if you want a great modern author on outlining some of those parameters, Joel McDermott's books and his blogs have been very, very good. OK, the second thing that is significant about the continued smallness of government in the latter years of David's reign is, wow, with all the trouble he went through, it would have been very, very tempting to grow his power. When you've had a couple of rebellions on your hand, almost lost the nation a couple of times, it'd be very tempting to add an NSA, a Homeland Security, an FBI, a BATFE, and to keep the nation from falling apart. So he was living in a very, very stressful time, and it would have been tempting for David to hugely centralize the civil government just like King Saul had done before him. just in order to protect himself. And so it would take faith for David to trust God with limited government the way God calls kings to trust him in the book of Deuteronomy. They were not supposed to multiply horses or chariots. or other instruments of war. They were not supposed to multiply gold or wives. 1 Samuel 8 says they were not supposed to institute a civil service or have taxation or income or property. In short, Israel was not supposed to be like the massive bureaucracies in the nations that were all around them. They were to be completely limited to what God's law allowed the civil government to do, which was virtually nothing. It took faith for David to have almost as limited a government as existed under the judges. But under point two, you're going to see that David's government was actually far more limited than what might be implied by the size of his cabinet. These are not eight massive bureaucracies in contrast to our 23 massive bureaucracies with numerous sub-bureaucracies. No, half of these men didn't even head up a department. He had eight advisors on the council, but let's break it down in terms of what they actually did. The passage starts with by far the most important department. First two advisors oversaw by far the biggest, the most significant aspect of biblical government, the Department of Defense, verse 23. And Joab was over all the army of Israel. Benaiah the son of Jehoiada was over the Cherethites and the Pelethites. So Joab was the general over all of the state armies, and by state armies I mean all of the tribal units. They were set up as states, not as provinces. There's a big difference between a province and a state, okay? So the tribes were like states. And you'll remember from 1 Samuel that the armies were pretty decentralized and they were under the authority of the local clans. And so we're not talking about a massive standing army that Joab was constantly overseeing. There was no standing army other than Benaiah's army of 600 men. That's it. Joab was a general who was ready to pull the reserves together at a moment's notice. So he was the general over the army reserve, he did not oversee a standing army. And people wonder, well man, how could you protect a country without a massive standing army? easy, have every citizen armed to the teeth. If you do that, there wouldn't be a single neighborhood that the enemy could enter without stiff resistance. And we looked at a bunch of scriptures when we covered how exactly this army was composed in 1 Samuel chapter 23. I'm not going to go through all of those scriptures because you've had that in the past, but let me at least give you a review. And we'll start at the local level. Since every adult male was part of a militia, and there are a lot of scriptures that indicate that, if there were problems in a local neighborhood, the neighborhood militia would take care of it. They didn't need the government to do that. They for sure did not need a police force to take care of that, okay? Just think of that as an armed neighborhood watch of which every household was a part. It became a very polite neighborhood, okay? Now, on the other hand, If there was an invasion of the tribe of Dan, the Danite leaders would instantly mobilize the militias in that area on behalf of the state or the tribe. A militia didn't have to join, but generally they would. They would join together and fight under the tribal leader, and they would stay together until the problem was dealt with. By the way, when the clans fought for their particular state, yes, they fought under a state banner, but each clan would fight under their own clan banner as well. Numbers 2 through 3 is quite clear on that. Much like the counties in America would fight under their own county banner in the first wars in America. Just read the history on that and you will see that they were not kind of mixed up into a generalized army. No, there was these local loyalties that continued to exist within the militaries. And our founding fathers would have been horrified at the modern concept that the army is just composed of a bunch of individuals. No, they thought of it as being composed of all of these different units. So each clan continued to fight under their own banner, but the clan heads were organized under the leadership of the tribal leader. And once the conflict was finished, the tribal army disbanded and the militias went back to their neighborhoods. But because they were constantly trained, they could mobilize instantly. So where does Joab fit in? Well, if it appeared to be a conflict that would jeopardize the nation as a whole, Joab would talk to the tribal officers under him to get as many of their tribal and clan militias together as possible. Because the militia system functioned so smoothly, you could get a fairly large army gathered together at any point in Israel within three days. I mean, history tells us that. In fact, verse four tells us that. That's what David expected. uh... emesa to do bring the whole army this is the whole reserves mobilize the reserves within three days and and bring them here now chapter twenty four tells us that the reserves were one point three million strong okay that's pretty remarkable for a small nation their reserve is almost identical in size to our active duty military from all branches And yet it functioned as a reserve. And those 1.3 million could come together in one place within the nation within three days. That's verse four. Now, why is this system significant? Well, it made for a small, non-invasive government, even when it came to the military. Okay, loyalties were generally local. though people and militias could always uproot and they could follow their heroes like David or any other person on a local or a national level. This generally kept the military out of business that was none of their business. It kept the army from being used to expand territory around the world. It also kept the king very polite. If the king began engaging in tyrannical wars, Militias could say, fine, go fight your own war. We are not going to risk the necks of our men in this thing. And the states could do the same thing. They could say, no, we are not joining in this cause. We do not think it is a godly cause. So it kept the civil government itself polite. Though Sheba created a rebellion earlier in the chapter, we saw that he wasn't able to get much of a following because, generally speaking, Men don't want to join an army unless they know that it is a just cause, right? There's got to be a good reason for doing so. So that's the first bona fide department on David's cabinet, the reserves of the army of Israel. Now compared to America, we're going to be seeing it still speaks of very limited government. Take a look at the second half of verse 23. Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, was over the Cherithites and the Pelophites. Who were they? Well, we've seen in the past they were David's personal militia. and they served as his bodyguard. They were composed of 600 men who went into battle with David. They were concerned about protecting their king. This is the closest you could get to a standing army in Israel, a group of 600 men who were more devoted and dedicated to David than they were to the nation as a whole or to any regional interests. Now, if you understand the significance of what I just said, you'll understand why our founding fathers did not want a standing army. Let me repeat that again because it is really significant. This standing army, this group of 600 men, were more dedicated to David than they were to the nation as a whole or to any regional interest. And that's why it's so imperative that the army be kept small during times of peace. Huge standing armies can be used to subjugate the citizens as many of our founding fathers feared. And of course, Saul had done that, hadn't he? He used the army against his own citizens. So David's bodyguard was about as close as you could get to a standing army, but they weren't really a separate department. We saw earlier in the chapter, they fought under Joab when he went to war. Okay, so they acted just like any of the other militia units, and during times of war, they would have been subject to Joab, but because of their devotion to David, there was a check and a balance within the military. But to be honest, in terms of per capita ratio, David's reserve army is larger than our active and reserve forces from all branches combined. According to chapter 24, there were 1.3 million in David's reserve, Today there are 1.369 million, just a little over 1.3 million, in our active duty military with another 850,880 in the reserves. But granted, Israel was a lot smaller of a country, so let's try to compare apples with apples. Israel's population was 31 times smaller than our population, so this is a massive reserve. Well, it's everybody, right? Reserve was everybody. Cool thing about Israel's army is that it always stayed home when there was no conflict other than the 600. And in this, George Washington's approach to the military was almost identical to David's. George Washington had no standing army, but he did have a massive reserve of the militia, which, of course, constituted every able-bodied man 18 years or older. In any case, this is a very legitimate function of decentralized government. Very, very legitimate. But Joab and Benaiah serve really one department, the Department of Defense. So keep that in mind. It's not two departments. David needed the advice of the leaders of both the standing army and the reserves, but it's only one department. Verse 24 introduces a second department, the Department of Revenue. It says, Adoram was in charge of the revenue. But there is something unusual about the Hebrew word here that shows an unbelievably limited government. The word for revenue is the Hebrew word mas, and it refers to tribute. It does not refer to income tax or any other form of internal revenue. Same word is used in Deuteronomy 20, verse 11, which says this. And it shall be that if they, and in context he's referring to the hostile city that has declared war against you and has been ravaging your coastline, it says, and it shall be that if they accept your offer of peace and open to you, then all the people who are found in it shall be placed under tribute. There's the word mas. shall be placed under tribute to you and serve you. So this is speaking of a form of restitution to a nation. When aggressor nations attacked Israel and were defeated, they had to pay tribute to be able to pay the cost for what this war had incurred. And Adoram was responsible for collecting those. But I want you to notice there is no mention whatsoever of anyone heading up the collection of internal taxes. The law of God did not authorize that. And so David did not collect it, despite the fact that King Saul did. And if you want a fabulous book on this whole subject of taxation, I would urge you to read Dr. Robert Fugate's book, Toward a Theology of Taxation. I think he very, very clearly demonstrates that the only internal tax, there was an internal tax, but the only internal tax on citizens that God's law allowed was the head tax. And I would add that even with the head tax, there was no mechanism to force people to pay it. You know, they tried to make Jesus pay it in Matthew chapter 17, but the way they worded it, it's very clear they couldn't force him to do it. They just asked, Peter, does your teacher not pay the tax? And Jesus said, well, lest they be offended, pay it. That's the most they could expect from the internal tax collectors back then, that they'd be upset if you didn't pay. And so Jesus told Peter, catch a fish. The coin that you find in its mouth is going to be sufficient to pay your tax and to pay my tax. That's the only lawful internal tax that existed in Israel. There was no property tax, no sales tax, no income tax, no other kind of tax. In contrast, there is an unbelievable number of taxes and hidden taxes in America. But the point of this passage is that while the civil government had a mechanism in place to force tribute from aggressor nations as a form of restitution, it had no mechanism to force a tax from its citizens. There was no internal revenue service. It was unconstitutional for Israel to have one. They had a flat tax, often called a head tax, that was the same for everyone. And early in David's reign, that head tax was sufficient to pay for the minimal services that the national government provided. You see that in chapter eight. With all of the wars that had ensued, they also needed to collect tribute or restitution from our nation. So that's where the difference comes, where a dorum comes into the picture. And I want us to think about that a little bit because I think it really is critical for understanding how limited the government really is. You might think of the head tax as a $100 fee imposed on every adult male. A $100 fee on every adult male once a year. I think the national government's worth about that. I'd be quite willing, I wouldn't complain at all if they charged me $100 once a year, okay? And people think, whoa, whoa, there is no way that the national government could survive on a head tax. Are you sure? Think of it this way, there was no income tax on citizens prior to 1913, and we functioned quite well, thank you. And if you had a $100 per head tax on every adult male in America, we would have plenty to do everything that God expects the national government to do. There are about 118 million adult males in America, but just to be safe, let's round it down to 100 million. Multiply 100 million times $100 and you've got $10 billion. That's a pretty ridiculously low sum of money, $10 billion. What can you do with that? People will point out that you need 75 times more than that $10 billion just to fund our military. You need 90 times more than that just to fund the Social Security. And that's not even barely dipping into the $4 trillion budget that funds everything from pornography to space exploration, OK? So we just cannot live this way. It's impossible. It's ludicrous. It's outdated. We need an internal revenue service to be able to function with all of the modern things that we have in government. But is it impossible? Without making any adjustments to our current budget, Let's add the trillions of dollars of tribute that we should be receiving from nations that we have warred against, assuming, of course, that these are legitimate wars. I think it's a big assumption, a wrong assumption. But let's just assume these are all legitimate wars. If we collected the tribute that those countries actually owed us, we might actually be able to pay our budget. Even though it's an unconstitutional budget, we might actually be able to pay it now. Now I don't believe most of America's wars are godly wars, but let's assume they are. We have enough money between the $100 per head, head tax from the internal side of things, and the tribute that we would be receiving from outside. What we're wanting to do is say, no, we've got to get rid of this bloated government. And these are not constitutional wars. They're not biblical wars. But the point of the exercise is that a study of biblical taxation would actually solve our problems and promote very limited government. If we got rid of all the agencies that are blatantly unconstitutional, got back to the four cabinet positions under George Washington and the four departments that they represent, $10 billion a year would pay for far more, far more than what a constitutional national government would need. Even the huge government that we had in 1900 could be paid for. According to the official government figures, the budget was $520 million back in 1900 with a $46 million surplus. We tended to operate on surpluses back then. Well, if you adjust that $520 million up using the inflation calculators, it's really not that much more than this head tax would pay for. It is a bit more. But that was a way bloated government in 1900. If you go back to the year 1800, the $100 head tax would bring in 75 times more money than the federal government brought in in 1800. Just the head tax would give them 75 times more money than they had back then. Well, our population's only 60 times greater than it was back at that time. And we're talking inflation-adjusted, okay? We got 60 times bigger population, so let's divide that figure by 60, and you're still going to have an incredible surplus. And let me just show you what my calculations are. A $100 head tax today would be worth $7.52 back in 1800. Compliments to government-induced inflation, another reason for limited government. But anyway, $7.52. If you subtract all the females, all the children from the census, you are left with 2,295,112 adult males who could pay a head tax. Multiply that times $7.52 head tax, and you get a budget for the federal government for $17,259,242. What were their expenditures? $11 million. Okay? That meant they would have had, with that $7.52 head tax, nothing else, they would have had a $6 million surplus in 1800. Don't let people try to convince you that the federal government could not survive on a head tax. It certainly could. In 1800, they survived with far less revenue than that $7.52 per adult. But more importantly, if we look at how the free market functioned in 1776, it dealt with virtually everything that the federal government today is trying to deal with, and for that matter, what state governments and city governments are dealing with. You'll see that there is no reason that the Feds need a more expanded revenue than David had. Put virtually everything that the government does back into the free market, and the free market would actually do it far more efficiently. And just to give you a perspective on this, let me read from an essay that Leonard Read wrote. Just a little section. He said, during recent years, men in free and willing exchange, the free market, have discovered how to deliver the human voice around the earth in 1 27th of a second, how to deliver an event like a ball game into everyone's living room in color and in motion at the time it is going on. How to deliver 115 people from Los Angeles to Baltimore in three hours and 19 minutes. How to deliver gas from a hole in Texas to a range in New York at low cost and without subsidy. How to deliver 64 ounces of oil from the Persian Gulf to our eastern seaboard more than halfway around the world for less money than the government will deliver a one ounce letter across the street at one's own hometown. Yet, such commonplace free market phenomena as these in the field of delivery fail to convince most people that the post could be left to free market delivery without causing many people to suffer. His point is, we have gotten so used to an omnipotent, omnipresent government intruding into every level of our lives, we just can't conceive of it even being possible for government to be able to be limited to the tiny size that it was limited to for the first hundred years of America's existence. But it is doable, it is biblical, and it must be done. This is an imperative of God's law. This is not something that's an optional thing. We must be working for limited government. The cabinet position of Adoram implies a kind of civil government that is vastly smaller than anything I have experienced in my entire lifetime. But it is my hope that we will get back to those levels of spending within my grandchildren's lifetimes, and you may be a part of the process of achieving that. Then come two departments related to records. Verse 24 says, Jehoshaphat, the son of Elud, was recorder. Notice it doesn't say he was over anything. He was just a recorder. Okay, one man apparently was able to handle things. Now in our modern government, the Office of Records has to deal with so much information from so many agencies and committees that it is literally composed of a huge army of people. Anyway, the Hebrew is maskir. It refers to a clerk or a secretary. Clark's commentary describes this office as being equivalent to a registrar of public events. recorder of official actions, and a correspondent within the nation. Now, he may have needed some help, okay? I'm not denying he may have needed some help, but this office does not constitute much of anything. Secondary related to records is in verse 25. It speaks of Sheba the scribe. Now, the word scribe is the Hebrew word sofer, and it refers to an office that kept a history of events and also had a few of the functions of the modern secretary of state. The scribe probably would have maintained official records, overseen election results, may have been involved in some diplomatic issues with foreign countries, would have managed Israel's official seal of office, and would have had a few other functions. Now this too may have required a few people to help him, but nothing like the massive bureaucracy that functions under our Secretary of State, John Kerry. It would have been equivalent to the function occupied by Thomas Jefferson, who was the first Secretary of State under George Washington. But it would be a big mistake to assume that these two divisions of Israel's records department is even remotely like the records departments in Washington, D.C. the spider web of records departments in Washington D.C. is astonishing. It's bewildering when you try to dig into it. And actually we don't even know the half of the record keeping because a lot of those records are secret. They're confidential. Not even the Congress knows what is in those records. But just in terms of the official record keeping, The government itself estimates that we spend more than $1 billion every year on publishing and records. Now that gives you just a tiny insight into the incredible bureaucracy that has evolved in our country. Now, don't get me wrong. Our founding fathers believed in good record keeping, but they would be stunned by the records that we are keeping today. And Obama wants to expand on that because he wants records on every one of you. on your medical life, on your history, on your interests. He wants records on any of you. Because the state pretends to be divine, it also has to be omniscient. In George Washington's day, filing records was very tedious because it was all done by handwriting. And the view of government that they had back then, that was just fine. Handwriting was just fine. But with the advent of the computer, There has been this temptation, this greater incentive for civil governments to grow out of control, as has been happening in America for quite some time. Okay, let's move on to verse 25, second part. And we see that there are two men listed here who are actually not representatives of any department of the civil government. They're part-time advisors sent by the church. Verse 25 says, Zadok and Abiathar were the priests. Every king had access to priests that they could consult. In Deuteronomy chapter 17, verse 18, it called the priests to teach the king and to oversee the fact that he's writing out the Pentateuch. He understands what the Pentateuch is all about. Verses 8 through 12 of that same passage indicate that whenever tricky civil issues came up that the magistrates weren't able to figure out, well, they would go and they would consult the priests. And those priests were experts in the application of biblical law to every area of life. Now, wouldn't it be great And every presidential administration had two pastors on it who were just there to give theological consultation and make sure everything the president did was biblical. Have a rush to have a Bonson on every presidential. Man, that would be cool. That would be so awesome. Well, that's what David had. And to show that these two priests were not overseeing vast departments, all you have to do is look elsewhere at what these two men did. They were not employees of the government. They were employees of the temple. They were overseeing the church work at the temple. They were part time giving consultation to David. Now, why was it that they were not paid by David? There's a good reason. So that their consultation would not be unduly influenced by David. They wanted to be free in terms of their consulting to give exactly what God's law would say needed to be given. So it's a check and balance that promoted limited government. And then there is one last department on David's cabinet. Verse 26 says, And Ira the Jairite was a chief minister under David. Now, if you look at the margin, you'll see that an alternative rendering is David's priest. And that is a possible interpretation. If he was David's priest, and this is actually not a department at all, It would be David's pastor. A second interpretation of this word is that it refers to a civil advisor. They would say that this word in verse 25, it's exactly the same word priest in verse 25, is talking about advisors from the church. Ira is an advisor from the civil government, as part of the civil government. That's a possibility as well. The third group of commentators believe that it should be translated as our version does, chief minister, and that it is possibly equivalent to the attorney general. And as I said, the reason there's controversy over this is that the Hebrew word is Kohen. means priest. It's the same word that's used in verse 25 and is translated priest there. But I want to give you the evidence of why I believe that this is David's chief liaison to the other civil magistrates or more probably he was the attorney general heading up a department. And for this you've got to turn back again to 2 Samuel chapter 8 and take a look at verse 18. This is part of the listing of David's cabinet at the beginning of his reign. It says, Benaiah the son of Jehoiada was over both the Cherithites and the Philithites, and David's sons were chief ministers. And if you look at the margin there, you will see that the last phrase can be rendered, David's sons were priests or were Kohens. Now, the problem is everyone agrees that it's impossible for David's sons to have been priests in the temple, part of the church, because only the Levites were allowed to be priests in the temple. And so it's a conundrum that people have puzzled over. But several dictionaries have pointed out that just as the New Testament Greek word for minister can refer to pastors like Gary and Rodney and me, and it's used that way in Romans 13. It calls them ministers of God. OK, civil magistrate. He's every bit as much a minister as I am accountable to God. So just as the New Testament Greek word for minister can refer to both that this Hebrew word Kohane is a religious term that can refer to both church pastors in the Old Testament as well as to civil magistrates. It's equivalent to the term minister. It's a religious term for those who judge according to God's law, whether they're in the church or in the state. They minister to God. So either David had a personal priest who was on his cabinet, or he had a civil representative of God who was a judge over other judges. And I believe that 2 Samuel chapter 8 forces us to believe the latter interpretation. So I agree with the I agree with the translation in the new King James version here. So, Attorney General, he'd probably have similar functions to those exercised by Edmund Randolph, the Attorney General appointed by George Washington. Now, if you take a look over the listing that I gave under Roman numeral II, you'll see that the functions of all of these officials can be summarized as defense, revenue, records, advisors, and Attorney General. And since the advisors did not head up a major department, what is left is the four departments I have pictured for you in your outline under George Washington's administration. Secretary of State, Secretary of Treasury, Secretary of War, and Attorney General. And that's not by accident. It's not by accident. There is a book that shows that every level of early American government was very deliberately copied from the Bible, from the scripture by our founding fathers. They did not follow the Roman Republic at all. They did not like the Roman Republic. Don't let people hornswoggle you on that. They were copying from the Hebrew Republic. The book written was by E.C. Wines. It's titled The Hebrew Republic. Now Patrick Henry argued that the Scripture called for even more limited government than what our Constitution put together, but almost all of our founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton being one exception, argued that the Christian conception of a republic was much more limited government than anything in Europe or Britain. And so our Constitution was a huge advancement forward in civics, in civic philosophy. And none of our founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton included, would have dreamed that America could have become such a bureaucratic monstrosity as it has become. I was reading on Thursday in the Congressional Record And there were references to the fact that no man, woman, or child is outside the reach of one or more of our agencies on a daily basis. That's pretty astonishing. Now, prior to World War I, you could go for years without even seeing a civic officer or being influenced by a civic officer other than the sheriff and the post office. You'd see those two. But very rarely would you see much of anyone else. And yet our own government today claims that it daily touches the lives of every man, woman, and child. Obama's cabinet has 23 members besides the president. They oversee 23 massive departments, which in turn oversee numerous agencies, boards, commissions, and committees. I went to the federal government's website this past Thursday just to count up how many boards, agencies, commissions, committees are listed under the executive office page. Now, I may have miscounted. I was counting very, very quickly, so I might be off by, you know, two or three numbers. But I counted on Thursday 157 massive groups, organizations listed under the executive office. That's astonishing. 157 massive boards, agencies, commissions, and committees. It looks nothing like what God calls the national government to be. Instead, it looks more like the empires of Egypt, Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome. In fact, I would say because of technology and because the rapid advances that have happened in just the last few years, our government has finally come to a position that it is bigger than any empire in world history, including the Soviet Union. It's just a massive, massive monstrosity. And of course, none of this is authorized by the Constitution. But you know where it all started? It all started with Alexander Hamilton opening the stove door that had been constructed by our founding fathers and allowing a few coals to fall onto the living room carpet. It's not a big deal. Just a few coals on the living room carpet. He deliberately took a non-original intent. We can prove that. He deliberately took A non-original intent interpretation of the general welfare clause and it opened up a Pandora's box or to use George Washington's image of a fire. Once the fire gets out of the fireplace that the Constitution had built for it, it begins to grow and grow until it has consumed most of the house of our economy and threatens to destroy everything. We have got to get back to limited government. We've got to stuff the civil government back into the limits of its constitutional fireplace. Now, to make this a three-point sermon, I have one more thought. I've always got one more thought, right? But verse 23 shows that David continued to work with Joab. And this is remarkable. He did not like Joab. He believed Joab should be executed for murder. And in 1 Kings he tells his son to try to figure out a way to deal with Joab, but David's power to deal with him was limited and as tempting as it may have been to grow his own power to protect himself, David did not do so. As tempting as it may have been to use unconstitutional means to achieve justice against Joab, David did not do so. As tempting as it may have been for David to grow his own militia into a massive standing army, he did not do so. As tempting as it may have been for David to use Saul's techniques of redistribution of wealth to curry favor, to manipulate Joab out of influence, he did not do so. It took faith for David to follow God's law that mandated limited government. It took faith. And in our own day, We may be tempted to allow agencies like David, excuse me, emergencies like David faced to cheat and to cut corners. We may be tempted to allow civil government to expand because it's more convenient. We may be tempted to see the civil government as a handy servant, but I would urge you not to do so. The moment compromises are allowed on this principle of limited government, the fire gets out of the box and it grows and it grows until it's completely out of control. Back in February, Nelson Holtberg wrote an essay that described our national government completely out of control and why the covenanted federalism of our founding fathers and the Constitution is so important to hold it in check. And near the end of the essay, he said this, how important is federalism? By the way, you guys are familiar with what the word federal means, right? Just covenanted. It's a covenant theology that was applied. It's the old Latin word fedos, which is a translation of covenant. But anyway, how important is federalism, he asks? If it hadn't been sabotaged by Abraham Lincoln and his massive centralizing agenda, the Federal Reserve and the income tax would not have come to America in 1913. Without the Federal Reserve and its engine of inflation, Woodrow Wilson would not have possessed the monetary capacity to drag us into World War I. Without our entry into that grisly war, the nations of Europe, so dissipated in both morale and manpower by 1917, would have had to sue for peace and go home. There would have been no Versailles Treaty and thus no fervent Nazi movement in Germany. Without Hitler, there would have been no World War II. Moreover, without a Federal Reserve in America, there would have been no inflationary 1920s boom and therefore no devastating 1930s depression. No depression, no Roosevelt-Keynesian New Deal. What a different 20th century it would have been if we had remained true to federalism. If we who advocate a free political order are to challenge today's liberal, neoconservative destruction of the American experiment, then we will have to coalesce around this most important legacy of the founders. Federalism is the only means to unite libertarians and conservatives, and a unity of these two movements is our only hope to defeat the enemies of free civilization that rule us today in such an insufferably tyrannical way. Well, I would actually disagree with that last statement, that last sentence. The answer to the dilemma is not man. It will require spirit-given national repentance. a return to the limits imposed by the law of God. A strong national conviction that the civil government is not a handy servant, but is a dangerous fire that must be contained within the stove of the regulative principle of government. Now the Constitution approximates that, but it's still not there. The biblical regulative principle of government. Let me just explain that to you very quickly. This was a principle that was held to by all of the Puritans and the Scottish Reformers It's a principle that believes that the civil government is the most dangerous of the four governments out there. And that self-government and family government retains all rights, all powers, privileges, ministries, actions, anything else that God has not explicitly given to either church or the civil government in the scripture. R.J. Rushduni, whose brilliant mind had sifted endlessly through the biblical content on what the nature of civil government should be, said this. Few things are more commonly misunderstood than the nature and meaning of theocracy. It is commonly assumed to be a dictatorial rule by self-appointed men who claim to rule for God. In reality, theocracy in biblical law is the closest thing to a radical libertarianism that can be had. In other words, the biblical Prescription for civil government is that virtually everything belongs to the free market and is within the jurisdictions of self-government and family government. According to the Bible, the destructive power of the civil government's coercion is restricted to those sins that the Bible itself has clearly described as being a crime. Okay? No more. You may want the civil government to make a war on drugs because of all of the devastation and damage that drugs have done to people, but that is none of the civil government's business because the law of God has not authorized the civil government to be involved in there. So I don't care how much you hate drugs, don't go to the civil government to fix the problem. I don't care how much you hate the cost of medicine, do not go to the civil government to fix it. God has not authorized them to mess around that. Numerous essays on Mises.org, which is a fabulous website, by the way. Some humanism in there, but... Numerous essays there have shown that it's actually the civil government's involvement right from the beginning that has raised the cost of all of these medical things. And why would we go to the very cause of the problem to solve the problem? Don't go there. There are many Christians who wanted the civil government to make alcohol consumption illegal. But God never gave that power to the civil government. And as soon as the BATFE, and actually its predecessor, was established to deal with alcohol, government tyranny began growing at an astronomical rate. Christians were stooges and stupid, both, when they supported that. And all that we have talked about may lead you to ask, well, then how do we know what is a crime and what is not a crime? Well, here's the simple answer. Any sin that the Bible gives the civil government a penalty to punish it with is a crime and nothing else. That's how you define a crime. Any sin that does not have a penalty attached to it in the Bible is not a crime. And I don't care for how sinful that sin may be. It is none of the government's business. Now, it may mean that that person will come under church discipline or come under family discipline. You know, the child may be sinning and get a discipline for it, but it's not the government's business. The only thing that is trusted to the fire of government is what God Himself has said is a crime. And that's true whether it's at the city, county, state, or federal level. Now, it's not enough to know what constitutes a crime. We also need to ask if God has given the authority to fight against those clearly biblically defined crimes, has he given the authority to the city government to do it, to the state government, or to the federal government? You look through the scripture and you will see there were very few crimes that God allowed the national government to be involved in. In fact, there were very few that he allowed the state level to be involved in. Most crimes were punished in the city gates, and it was at the area of local control and local accountability, and it had to be publicly done. But most of them were at the city level. Why? Because civil government is a fire that always wants to burn out of control, and the bigger the government, the more dangerous the fire. Just keep this in mind. The national budget in 1800 could be fully paid for with a head tax of less than $5 per adult male. Now, of course, with inflation, that $5 is now $67.46, but you get the point. They didn't believe in big national government. They wanted the army to be dismissed as soon as the war was finished. They didn't want huge armored police departments or drones. They wanted every home to be well-armed, every man to be well-regulated and trained in the militia, and for this involvement in any cold war to be up to the individual's free will, the county's choice and the state's choice in whether to pursue the national objective. In other words, they wanted a mature citizenry. with character, strong families as the backbone of society, churches that would instruct others, including kings, in what God's law meant, just like Abiathar and Zadok and other priests instructed the kings. They wanted to maintain states' rights. But above all, they wanted all fires, whether city, county, state, or federal, to be contained within the stove or the fireplace of the regulative principle of government. Now let me give you five quick additional applications in the conclusion. First, the fires of civil government are not contained right now, but we can start at least teaching our children what that stove looks like. In other words, educate your kids on what biblical civics is all about. Teach them what civil government looks like. Don't buy either party's lame excuses that you can trust their party's fires to be on your living room carpet. Government must be contained. Second, this calls for self-government. If you do not restrain your own desires for something to do, someone to do something for you for free, you're part of the problem. You are bringing coals out of the fire and playing with fire. So do you take food stamps? Quit it. Get off of food stamps. Talk to the deacons and get them to counsel you and help you with your finances. Do not go to the government for those kinds of things. Don't take subsidies and benefits from the government unless you are forced to do so, as old-age pensioners are forced to do. You paid into that, you can get the money out of that. But if you're able to get out of the slavery to Egypt, try to do so. Citizens must embrace the risks, responsibilities, and the hard work of freedom. Don't be like that first generation of Jews after they left Egypt who are constantly wanting to go back to Egypt. Why? Because they love the garlics and the lakes of Egypt. They did not like the risks of freedom. They wanted the security of slavery. We cannot have liberty if we do not have self-control or self-government. Third, this takes faith. Faith that God's ways are better than man's ways. It takes faith to believe God's civil laws are better than humanistic civil laws. People complain all the time. Christians complain all the time about the Old Testament laws. Oh, that's so mean. Yeah, it was so limited. But when it came out, it was a fire. Of course it's a fire. Fire is destructive. Yes, it is mean. Those were tough penalties that were given there. It's a destructive force, but when it is kept within the confines of the tiny stove that God has given to it, it becomes a blessing and brings liberty and warmth to the whole society. In fact, by faith, we believe the Bible's promises that when nations once again implement God's laws as they apply to family, business, church, and civil government, those nations will be so blessed, they'll be so prospered that other nations will say, what did you do? We want to have the same blessings too and they will imitate by following God's laws. And so have faith that God's stove for fire works and is a blessing. Don't overreact to modern tyranny by throwing out all stoves and all fireplaces. Have faith that God's way works and promote it. Fourth, pray for