Liberating Planet Earth
by Gary DeMar by Gary DeMar
10 THE INEVITABILITY OF LIBERATION And you shall remember the LORD your God: for it is He who gives you power to get wealth, that He may establish His covenant which He swore to your fathers, as it is this day (Deuteronomy 8:18). This verse is crucial to understanding the relationship between Biblical law and Christian progress over time. God grants gifts to covenantally faithful societies. These gifts are given by God in order to reinforce men’s confidence in the trustworthiness of His covenant, and so lead them to even greater faithfdness, which in turn leads to additional blessings. Visible blessings are to serve as cony’irmatiom of the covenant. God therefore gives men health and wealth “that He may establish His covenant.” When men respond in faith and obedience, a system of visible fiositivefeedback is created. Biblical history is linear. It has a beginning (creation), meaning (sin and redemption), and an end (final judgment). It was Augustine’s emphasis on linear history over pagan cyclical history that transformed the historical thinking of the West. 1 But the Biblical view of history is more than linear. It is progressive. It involves visible cultural expansion. It is this faith in cultural progress which has been unique to modem Western civilization. This optimistic outlook was secularized by seventeenth-century Enlightenment thinkers,z and by the Communists, 3 and its waning in the 1. Charles Norris Cochrane, Christtinig and CLarsical Culture: A Study in Thought and Actionfiom Augustus .@ Augustiw (New York: Oxford University Press, [1944] 1957), pp. 480-83. 2. Robert A. Nisbet, “The Year 2000 and All That; Comnwztag (June 1968). 3. F. N. Lee, Communist Eschatolo~ (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1974). 129
130 Liberating Planet Earth twentieth century threatens the survival of Western humanistic civilization.4 Dominion Theology vs. Pessimism Victory in history is an inescapable concept. There can be no question of victory, either of covenant-keepers or covenantbreakers. The only question is: Who will win? If covenantbreakers rebel against Biblical law, and they become externally consistent with their own anti-God and anti-Biblical law presuppositions, then they will become historically impotent. There is no neutrality anywhere in the universe. But since there is no intellectual and moral neutrality, then there can be no cultural, civic, or any other kind of public institutional neutrality. So which kind of worldview produces productive people? The liberation offered by Jesus Christ or the liberation offered by Karl Marx? Which offers positive blessings from the hand of God? Which will produce judgment from God? Some Christians argue that it is the reprobate who will be nearly victorious in history, not Christians. Only at the end of time do the covenant-breakers have to face the fact of their defeat, when God brings His final judgment. Consider what this means. It means that Christianity does not work. Here is what the pessimists are saying “As Christians work out their own salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12), improving their creeds, improving their cooperation with each other on the basis of agreement about the creeds, as they learn about the law of God as it applies in their own era, as they become sktied in applying the law of God that they have learned about, they become culturally impotent. They become infertile, also, it would seem. They do not become fruitfhl and multiply. Or if they do their best to follow this commandment, they are left without the blessing of God– a blessing which He has promised to those who follow the laws He has established. In short, 4. Robert Nisbet, Htitoy ofth Ia!ea of Progrsss (New York: Basic Books, 1980), eh. 9 and Epilogue.
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10<br />
THE INEVITABILITY OF LIBERATION<br />
And you shall remember the LORD your God: for it is He who<br />
gives you power to get wealth, that He may establish His covenant<br />
which He swore to your fathers, as it is this day (Deuteronomy 8:18).<br />
This verse is crucial to understanding the relationship between<br />
Biblical law and Christian progress over time. God grants gifts to<br />
covenantally faithful societies. These gifts are given by God in<br />
order to reinforce men’s confidence in the trustworthiness of His<br />
covenant, and so lead them to even greater faithfdness, which in<br />
turn leads to additional blessings. Visible blessings are to serve as<br />
cony’irmatiom of the covenant. God therefore gives men health and<br />
wealth “that He may establish His covenant.” When men respond<br />
in faith and obedience, a system of visible fiositivefeedback is created.<br />
Biblical history is linear. It has a beginning (creation), meaning<br />
(sin and redemption), and an end (final judgment). It was<br />
Augustine’s emphasis on linear history over pagan cyclical history<br />
that transformed the historical thinking of the West. 1 But the Biblical<br />
view of history is more than linear. It is progressive. It involves<br />
visible cultural expansion. It is this faith in cultural progress<br />
which has been unique to modem Western civilization. This optimistic<br />
outlook was secularized by seventeenth-century Enlightenment<br />
thinkers,z and by the Communists, 3<br />
and its waning in the<br />
1. Charles Norris Cochrane, Christtinig and CLarsical Culture: A Study in Thought<br />
and Actionfiom Augustus .@ Augustiw (New York: Oxford University Press, [1944]<br />
1957), pp. 480-83.<br />
2. Robert A. Nisbet, “The Year 2000 and All That; Comnwztag (June 1968).<br />
3. F. N. Lee, Communist Eschatolo~ (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1974).<br />
129
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