Lux Lucet

Jeremiah 5:31 The prophets prophesy falsely, And the priests rule by their own power; And My people love to have it so. But what will you do in the end? (Jer. 5:3)

It’s long been popular to compare the obvious decline of American society over the past 100 years to that of the Roman empire. Perhaps some of this owes to the influence of Edward Gibbon’s famous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Some purport to draw lessons from the Roman experience that can be applied in our day. Some will spot similarities between events in the Roman empire and those of contemporary times, and drawing from these likenesses the idea that America is in terminal, inevitable decline. Others of a more optimistic point of view hope to drawn lessons from the Roman example on how to stop or even reverse the decline.

But long before Rome famously declined and fell, for that matter, long before the city of Rome was even founded, two other kingdoms passed through experienced their own decline and fall. I speak of Israel and Judah. The books of Judges, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, and the prophets could rightfully be called The History of the Decline and Fall of the Hebrew Republic. In them, we read how a nation originally founded as a constitutional republic, first devolved into a monarchy, next split into two separate kingdoms, and then following independent, centuries long glide paths of decline finally met their ruin.

If we want to examine the decline of American society, it is to these examples, rather than that of Rome, to which we should turn our attention. The experience of Israel and Judah are much more helpful in assessing out current condition as a nation than Rome ever could be, chiefly because we do not have to speculate as to why things happened as they did. Unlike even the best histories of Rome, the Scriptural record provides us not only a perfectly accurate account of the key events in the history of Israel, but also an infallible commentary on why these events occurred as they did. Let us now turn to God’s inspired history to see what lessons we may draw about the condition of the United States at the beginning of the 21st century.

The first major inflection point in the decline and fall of the nation of Israel was the occasion of the people’s asking for a king. This event is chronicled in I Samuel 8, where we read,

Now it came to pass when Samuel was old that he made his sons judges over Israel. The name of his firstborn was Joel, and the name of his second was Abijah; they were judges in Beersheba. But his sons did not walk in his way; they turned aside after dishonest gain, took bribes, and perverted justice (I Sam. 8:1-3).

In a remarkable turn of irony, Samuel makes the same mistake that his mentor Eli the priest had made, that of putting unqualified sons in positions of authority. As it was not the practice Israelite judges to name their sons as their successors, Samuels decision is noteworthy. Perhaps he this was an attempt on his part to build a dynasty of sorts, but since Bible does not comment on the Samuel’s reason for taking this step, one cannot be sure this was the reason.

At any rate, his sons clearly were not up to the office of judge. By their behavior, they showed themselves possessed of a spirit of tyranny rather than justice. The contrast of their behavior with that of their godly father was not lost on the Israelites, who called a meeting with Samuel and said to him,

Look, you are old, and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now make us a king to judge us like all the nations (I Sam. 8:5).

The people of God, having been blessed with a constitutional republic, what E.C. Wines called the Hebrew Republic, made a common, short-sighted mistake. Instead of doing what they should have done, placing the blame where it belonged, on the corrupt government officials who perverted justice, and seeking to have them removed from office, the Israelites, apparently without any recourse to the will of God, foolishly thought they could solve one problem of governmental injustice by adding to it the further injustice a monarchy, an inherently ungodly form of government. In modern parlance, they wanted a strong man who could make the trains run on time. The limited, constitutional republic set up by the law of Moses was, at least in their mind, not up the to challenges of the times. Something more robust was needed.

Without getting too far ahead of myself, one could cite this as an early example of foolish idea common in our own time, the regulatory state. Scarcely a crime or misfortune occurs but that some group or another calls for new laws designed to create new governmental agencies all which are set up for the purpose of writing new regulations that supposedly will prevent X tragedy from ever happening again. Of course, it never quite works out that way. And when X tragedy inevitably occurs once again, this is never taken as evidence of the failure of the regulatory state, rather it is cited as proof of the need for more and stricter regulations. The original laws, we are told, just left too many loopholes. More regulations and more regulators are needed. Or as Dr. Seuss would put it, “the thing we need is a bee-watcher-watcher.” Thus does government grow, and liberty, privacy and justice shrink.