Volume 2, Issue 7
5 Jan 2017
 In the last issue of Piecing Together Bible Prophecy, we observed a curious characteristic about Nebuchadnezzar’s nightmarish image. It decreases in value from the top to the bottom. It goes from gold (head) to silver (breast and arms) to bronze (stomach and thighs) to iron (legs) to mud (toes and feet). This curious characteristic of Nebuchadnezzar’s nightmarish image presents us, much to our chagrin, with a divine evaluation of human governments. Whereas most Christians in the world today believe that God’s preferred form of human government is a representative government; that is, government by the people and for the people, Nebuchadnezzar’s nightmarish image reveals that God’s most valued form of government is a despotism, not a democracy.
Nebuchadnezzar, the head of gold, was a despot. He exercised absolute authority over his realm and its subjects. The law was whatever Nebuchadnezzar said and commanded. No questions could be asked and no disobedience was allowed.
Contrary to popular opinion, Scripture teaches us that we the people are always wrong. Majority rule in this fallen world is always contrary to God’s will, since the majority of people in this fallen world live independent of God and at enmity with Him. God’s Word and will are intolerable to them. It is the wants, wishes and whims of the people, not the Word or will of God, that serves as the governing factors in any government by the people and for the people in today’s fallen world.
Surprisingly, the depreciation in value of the form of government in history’s succeeding Gentile world powers reveals to us that God’s preferred form of government is not democracy, the rule of the majority, but theocracy, the rule of God. Despotism is preferred by God when God’s man is on the throne. As is clearly foretold in the Scripture, when God’s Son, Jesus Christ, returns to rule on the earth He will rule with a rod of iron (Revelation 19:15). There will be no questions to His commands and no option but obedience. There will be no public opinion polls or ballot boxes. His Word will be law and the subjects of His kingdom will subjugate themselves to His Kingship and Lordship as the King of kings and the Lord of lords.
Although today’s average American is ignorant of it, much to the detriment of modern-day America, our Founding Fathers actually understood something about the need to suppress the passions of the common people, lest the unbridled passions of the populace plunge the nation into anarchy. They attempted to insure the suppression of the common man’s passions, which they believed essential to the success of any representative form of government, with a couple of censors.
First, they established our government upon a belief in God. Yes, contrary to today’s separation of church and state propaganda, our Founding Fathers saw government’s acknowledgment of God as essential to the survival of our representative republic. This is why they carefully and clearly depicted our “inalienable rights” as being endowed to us by our Creator. Our Founding Fathers believed that our representative form of government could not possibly succeed unless the American people practiced moral self-restraint. To practice moral self-restraint, required the American people to believe in God, the judge of all the earth to whom every American would one day give an account. This explains why our Founding Fathers insisted that God, not government, be recognized as the final arbiter of our rights and freedoms. It also explains why John Adams, one of our Founding Fathers and America’s second president, said the following: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
The second censor applied by our Founding Fathers to bridle the passions of the American populace was law and order. As the Scripture clearly teaches, it is government’s God ordained role to protect the innocent law-abiding citizen and to punish the guilty lawbreaker (Romans 13:1-7). The fear of swift justice being administered to the lawbreaker was believed by our Founding Fathers to be the best deterrent to crime. This is why they established the rule of law, a law and order American society within which everyone was equal before the law and no one was above the law.
Returning at this point to Nebuchadnezzar’s nightmarish image, we observe that Mido-Persia, history’s second great Gentile world power, is represented by the image’s silver breast and arms. We can safely conclude from this that the form of government practiced in Mido-Persia is second best in God’s estimation to a God-ordained despotism, which is represented by the image’s head of gold. The question then is what form of government was practiced in the Mido-Persia Empire. The answer is the absolute rule of law. In Mido-Persia, the law, not the king, was supreme. Not even the king was above the law or a law unto himself.
The Bible presents us with two good illustrations of Mido-Persia’s “silver” rule of law. The first is in the book of Daniel, where King Darius, after being tricked by the Prophet Daniel’s enemies into signing a law that made himself god for a month, was forced by the unchangeable law he signed to throw Daniel into the lion’s den (Daniel 6:1-28). Daniel’s enemies, being unable to find any grounds of accusation against him, knew that he would never worship or pray to any other god besides the God of Israel. Therefore, they hatched this plot to get Daniel thrown into the lion’s den for his refusal to stop praying for a month to his God and to bow in prayer during the month to King Darius alone. Although Darius realized, after the fact, that he had been played the fool by the prophet’s foes, he was still unable to change the foolish law he signed or to spare Daniel from the lion’s den, since the law was not only supreme in Mido-Persia, but also unalterable.
The second good example is found in the book of Esther. Here, in the scriptural story behind the Jewish holiday of Purim, we are told about a plot hatched by the evil Haman to eradicate the Jewish people living throughout Persia. Haman, because of his hatred of Queen Esther’s cousin and adopted father Mordecai, convinced the Persian King Ahasuerus that the Jewish people in Persia were insurgents threatening his throne. As a result, Ahasuerus signed a law designating a particular day as a day for the Persians to attack and eradicate the Jews living throughout Persia. However, upon discovering his beloved queen was a Jew, her adopted father Mordecai’s former role in saving him from a plotted assassination, and Haman’s evil motive for eradicating the Jews, which was fueled by his personal hatred of Mordecai, King Ahasuerus signed another law permitting the Jews to defend themselves against their attackers.
As a result of the second law, the Jews were able to defend themselves and defeat their attackers rather than being eradicated by them. Still, it took a new law to protect the Jews from their enemies, since the previous law allowing their enemies to attack them could not be rescinded or changed. Once again we see the supremacy of the law, not of the king in Mido-Persia. No one in Persia was above the law, even the king was subject to it and unable to alter it.
According to Nebuchadnezzar’s nightmarish image, the rule of law is second best to God’s man on the throne when it comes to government restraint of fallen man’s sinful passions. Whereas a divinely ordained despotism is golden, the rule of law is still silver. It is certainly better than any arbitrated and alterable restraint imposed by subjective public opinion in a representative form of government.
Like Lord Acton, our Founding Fathers believed, and for good reason, when one surveys the horrors committed by despotic potentates throughout the annals of human history, that power tends to corrupt and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. For this reason, our Founders designed three coequal branches of government so that absolute power could never reside in any one of them. Furthermore, they created additional checks and balances by dividing and diffusing governmental power between federal, state, and local governments. In the end, they hoped to have eliminated the possibility of any man ever usurping the place of the rule of law in our land.
America is suppose to be a land governed by laws, not by men? If one disagrees with the law of the land his only recourse is the legislative branch of our government, which is responsible for making, changing, and rescinding laws. If one feels that the law of the land is not being enforced his only recourse is the executive branch of our government, which is responsible for executing the law. And if one believes that the law of the land is being misinterpreted his only recourse is the judicial branch of our government, which is responsible for interpreting the law.
Unbeknownst to most Americans today, our country has drifted far from its original moorings. Far from being a country governed by laws, we have become a country governed by lawyers. The law in today’s America is no longer a thing set in stone, which requires the proper petitioning and combined efforts of all three branches of government to revise or rescind. Instead, the law can now be reinterpreted, rewritten or rescinded by a lone black-robed judge wielding a single gavel.
Thomas Jefferson, the architect of the Declaration of Independence and our nation’s third president, once issued this solemn warning to our nation: “To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.” He went on to warn that granting the judiciary alone “the power of declaring what the law is” makes it into “a despotic branch” of government, makes judges into “despots,” and makes the Constitution into “a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.” According to Jefferson, this notion of judicial despotism must be rejected, lest the judiciary “slyly and without alarm” accomplish “what open force would not dare attempt”, namely, the undermining of our Constitution and the overthrow of our government.
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Don Walton
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