Chapter 9 of Genesis introduces a new, momentous chapter in the life of mankind.
Up until now these early chapters have shown us the dawn time of our race, and traced the spiralling course of humanity downward from its original innocence into sin and universal judgment. Out of that judgment God has fashioned a new beginning; and now we are shown our human life as God in the face of man's sin has made it to be. These chapters now no longer speak of distant primeval things, but of present contemporary things. The entire history of the world, from the days of Noah to the Day of the Coming of the Son of Man, is embraced under the conditions of life God here enunciates. The real world in which we live every day of our lives is their theme - life now - our life in society as we live it before the face of God. We live it under a Covenant which God established, as we have seen, and we live it under a Constitution which God has established.
We live it in fact, as we have already noted, under The First Amendment to the Constitution God promulgated for our race.
Recall the First Draft, given before sin entered upon the scene: Genesis 1:28: "God blessed them and said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.' Then God said, 'I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree with its seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground - everything that has the breath of life in it - I give every green plant for food.' And it was so." Fruitfulness, dominion and sustenance: they were the blessing.
Now hear the revision of it which God announces when the clouds of cleansing judgment have cleared away: Genesis 9:1: "God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air, upon every creature that moves along the ground, and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hands. Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything. But you shall not eat flesh with its lifeblood still in it. For your lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning. Of every beast I will require it, and of man; of every man's fellow I will require the life of man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in His own image has God made man. As for you, be fruitful and multiply; bring forth abundantly on the earth and increase in it.'"
God's blessing is still upon our life: fruitfulness, dominion and sustenance are still the substance of the Mandate, but they are not the same.
The creation of the animals and man took place on the same day, the sixth day. The creation of both was all of a piece, so to speak - there was a deep harmony between the two so that the dominion man exercised over the animal creation was a benign rule, wisely administered by man and willingly received by the animals.
Now, in the order of reconstituted humanity under the ægis of judgment the mandate given to Noah is different from that given to Adam. The key signature has been changed, as though the thrilling creation symphony which first pealed forth in a brilliant A major has been transposed into a sombre D minor. Dark and sinister undertones are heard now that were not heard at the first. God says - and this not what He said before - "The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth ..." Now wherever man exercises his dominion, all creation will go in fear of him. God knows that the harmony in His creation has been shattered: raucous discords will now disturb it for as long as mankind survives on the earth ... and man, not nature, is the source of this disharmony, as we have seen. The strident tones of violence and injustice and enmity and vengeance will reverberate through the world. So the text says menacingly, "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed." This is not what was said at the beginning. The world that was intended at the first to be held in strength and beauty by the power of wisdom and the sweet persuasion of grace must now be held precariously together by the rule of Law and the deterrent of fear. The fabric of creation has a great tear in it and must be patched.
These affirmations mean far more than they appear to say on the surface - that we are not bound to a vegetarian diet and that we are committed to capital punishment. We have learned by now that our author's style is evocative, not propositional, and what he means goes fathoms deeper than any such superficial reading of his words. What he is enunciating is the basis upon which God's government of the world now rests.
And the two factors that shape it are respect for life and the institution of government. Here are the answers to questions we all are bound to ask: "Where is the evidence that God rules the life of this world? On what principles, if He rules it at all, does He do so? Is man in control, or is God in control? Does the command to have dominion still hold, or has that been abrogated?"
The answer is, "Yes,
God has renewed His command to man to have dominion over the earth
and its creatures, but he must understand that he is answerable for
the way he exercises it:
• he must treat his fellows with a lively awareness that each of
them belongs wholly to God. For his attitudes and actions toward them
God will hold him accountable.
• and he must organise his life in society in a way that
acknowledges that accountability: government must be
instituted."
Man is to rule still,
but under God; and the two ordinances God imposes upon all mankind
are:
i. Respect for life.
ii. The institution of government.
Understand the basis upon which reverence for life is here said to rest. It is not said that we are to respect the fundamental dignity of our fellows because they are worthy of it, either in virtue of their good behaviour, or even purely in virtue of their being human as we ourselves are, but in virtue of the fact that the gift of life which is in them is God's gift to them; it is God's interest in their life we are to respect because His interest in them is a proprietary interest. (See Note 1 below)
Just as you will have the father to answer to if you do his child a mischief, so we shall have God to answer to for all that we do to our fellows - any of our fellows - because every last one of them is His. We will answer to God for the attitudes we show to our marriage partners and our children, to our friends and our neighbours, to our playmates and our workmates, to our bosses and our workers, to our pastors and our fellow church members - rich and poor, wise and foolish, good and bad alike. We will answer because, as God has said, "All souls are mine," and where we touch them we touch God; the way we touch them we touch Him.
That is the basis on which we must work out our response to our Aboriginal brothers and our Asian immigrants and our Moslem communities ... and the baby seals in the Arctic and the kangaroos in the outback. We are to respect God's interests in them all, and where we treat them on any other basis we commit a fundamental injustice and brew mischief.
Wherever we leave God out of our reckoning in the way we behave toward one another, we twist our life together out of shape and bring down judgment upon ourselves. To disregard His interest in our neighbour is always a blasphemy. In our private lives and in our life in society we stand - always and in all ways - under the judgment of God. Three times over God says it here, "I will surely require a reckoning."
And it is not simply in our responses to one another that we are accountable but in the initiatives we take. A profound statement is made in v. 6: "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in His own image has God made man." That means not only that when we assault a human being we are guilty of an offence against God, because the person we assault is 'God's body' (to say it the way the Scots would say it); it also means that because we are made in the image of God we qualify, sinners though we are, to act for Him in bringing the offender to justice. The image of God is not so far obliterated in even unregenerate men that they are totally incapable of acting responsibly for Him. God holds us responsible, despite our sinfulness. Always God dignifies us with responsibility for our actions. I have yet to find in the Bible some of the arguments put forward by lawyers and psychiatrists in courts today to relieve offenders of responsibility for their actions.
Now this statement that man is to act for God in bringing offenders to justice leads us to the second of the two ordinances we identified.
This reference in our text to the rule of law is a foundation stone of the Biblical understanding of the state.
Said Martin Luther, "Wherever there is a state, there a miracle occurs." There is a sign that God is still at work in our fallen world, keeping faith with His faithless children, providing ordinances to contain our impulse to mutual destructiveness.
Ponder the fact that up to this point in the Genesis narrative there has been no hint of anything remotely resembling the state. I hear it said that the state, like the family, is a 'creation ordinance of God.' I find no evidence for that. To the institution of family there are clear references, but to the institution of human government, none. To be sure humanity is to have dominion - but over nature, not over itself. Of a rule of Law to govern human life not a word is said ... until after the Flood. (See Note 2 below)
In the matter of government God's original intention for all mankind, I believe, was the same as He desired for His people Israel when He constituted them as a nation: He desired that He alone be recognised as King and Ruler over them; no human regent was to represent Him. Only with great reluctance did God yield to the pressure His people put upon Him to appoint them a king after the manner of their neighbour nations.
This is how Martin Luther understood it. In his splendid book, 'How the World Began', Helmut Thielicke summarises Luther's understanding of it very succinctly:
"Originally," says Luther, "God was able to rule the world with a mere flip of His finger, for then men kept their eyes upon His finger, and observed the look in His eye. They experienced His rule the way the psalmist wished to know it: Ps. 32:8, 'I will instruct you and teach the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you.' But after they had declared their disobedience to God, and thus turned their eyes away from Him, this possibility of naturally accepted direction and responsive, mutual understanding ceased to exist. Then," says Luther, "God was obliged to rule the world with His fist and thus no longer with His finger ... with the restraint of force, and therefore no longer with the look in His eye. Therefore He called the state into being. For then there would be criminal law and police and magistrates to keep men in check. Then the wicked would be punished and the good rewarded. A superior force, the power of the state, would compel the rebellious to observe order and decency." (Helmut Thielicke, "How the World Began", James Clarke, p. 292)
The Bible's is a very different philosophy of the state than any found in other religions. In almost all of them the state is presupposed in even the most ideal conditions. Not so in the Bible. The Bible goes one better in fact even than Marxism! Marxism envisages a classless society: the Bible envisages a stateless society, where only God is King. The state, on this view, is not regarded as anything higher than a regrettable necessity, which is required only because man is a fallen creature. Only redeem him, and all need for a state will disappear.
This indeed accords with the view of society which the Bible sets before us in its last chapters: there is only one throne in the entire universe, the Throne of God and of the Lamb. No more than there is a Temple in the City is there a Law Court or Council Chamber in it.
"The throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall worship Him, and they shall see His face, and His Name shall be in their foreheads" ... which means the same thing Luther meant when he said that God ruled men with his little finger or with the look in His eye. It means the same thing as we find expressed in yet another way in Ez. 36:26, "A new heart I will give you and a new spirit I will put within you ... I will put my Spirit within you so that you walk in my statutes." There is no need of institutional government because everyone responds to the one God directly from the heart with spontaneous and wholehearted obedience.
The state exists only because without it men will rend and devour one another in a war of all against all. The state is a merciful provision of God to shore up the tottering walls of the world until men at last are ruled by grace - for only then are its defences safe and its foundations sure. It is an interim measure, a makeshift contrivance to which God has resorted because without it man's folly will know no bounds.
The Bible is completely realistic in its view of the state. No way, if we see it the way the Bible sees it, could we ever deify the state as other religions and political philosophies do. And only because the Bible clings to this cold and incorruptible realism are we ready to take it seriously when it speaks to us of the wonderful Light that shone into the world at the first Christmas, when "unto us a Son was given unto us a child was born, upon whose shoulders government would rest."
Ever since we cut ourselves off from God and declared that He is no longer the measure of what we do in our marriages, the rearing of our children, the running of our industry, our commerce, our agriculture, our laboratories or our technology, the world has been an alien, haunted place. The implacable hostility between Jew and Arab, between Moslem and Moslem, between Irishman and Irishman, between Serb and Croat, the lunacy of the arms race, the racism and the violation of human rights which goes on all over the world and makes life a monstrous nightmare for millions are all symptoms of what lies in wait to brutalise all life unless the rule of law somehow checks the arrogant lawlessness of the human heart.
"Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed" means: "Wherever man brutally asserts himself against his fellow there God mobilises His ordinances against that rebellion, there He sets the penal power of law against the revolt, there He directs the power of the state against the divisive egotisms of individuals and interest groups." As Tillich said, "Law is the form love takes when we are estranged from it."
Behind the scenes, by these means, God rules the world. He is in control - in, with and through these human agencies that He Himself has caused to be set up, and in the long term they fulfil His will in spite of their follies and excesses.
The rulers and the statesmen and the rich men think they lead the world by the nose and are making it serve their interests; but all unrecognised by them God leads them; it is they who fulfil His purposes in spite of themselves.
The Fitzgerald Enquiry (A Commission of Enquiry into police corruption in the State of Queensland, Australia) was a demonstration of that. None of those embroiled in it who had been misusing powers of state entrusted to them to serve their own selfish interests wanted such a relentless exposure of their corruption. They fancied they had all that moral nonsense well and truly buttoned up and battened down; but one after another, under a combination of pressures and necessities to which they believed themselves immune, they found themselves compelled relentlessly to face the music. The power of justice and right prevailed, in some measure at least, over the big battalions and the almighty dollar. "The rich are in process of going, and the Rule of God is in process of coming."
By these means, which find expression precisely in the human governments men fancy they set up in place of God, God Himself pursues His purposes in the world. To quote Helmut Thielicke again, God is saying, "I calmly pursue my course through all the convulsions and derangements of your life. And just as I direct the rhythm of the days and the seasons, so I encompass the islands and the continents, the men of faith as well as the atheists, the constitutional states and the tyrannies. Don't ever think that anybody will ever be able to break away from serving Me, though he renounce me ten times over. Even in the extreme perversions of authority, as in the tyranny of a totalitarian state, men are compelled in spite of themselves to preserve a remnant of My order; they can never succeed in wholly devilising and ruining my world."
Paul stated the Biblical understanding of the meaning and the place of the state in the purpose of God when he wrote:
"Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. For he is God's servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. He is God's servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience. This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God's servants, who give their full time to governing. Give to everyone what you owe him: if taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honour, then honour." (Rom. 13:1-7)
And if Paul had lived under a democratic form of government, which he did not, he would surely have added: "If support, then support; if protest, then protest," for the state, being an institution ordained of God, is a thing in which His people have a responsibility to be involved.
Note 1:
The point about blood is that it is reckoned to be the essential
carrier of life ("the life of the flesh is in the blood," Lev.
17:11), and life is God's; He may bestow, withdraw or end it at His
own good pleasure, as man - who is merely its recipient - may not.
The prohibition against eating blood is unique to the Israelite
tradition; it will later be seen to have a profound bearing on the
meaning of sacrifice in relation to atonement for sin. As Kidner
rightly observes (p. 101): "Belonging to God, it is to be seen as His
atoning gift to sinners, not theirs to Him."The passage has much more
to say about the sanctity of life (both animal and human) than about
capital punishment. If, to satisfy the demands of justice, man is to
take life, he may do so only on God's authority, not of his own
choice, for the man whose life is taken is "in God's image" - to shed
his blood without God's authority is to impugn His prerogative.
Answerability is the prime concern. Verse 6 clearly implies that man,
because he is in God's image, may act as His 'authorised agent' in
exacting justice, just as the reason he must answer to God for what
he does is that the man he does it to is in God's image.
Note 2:
More than mere legal 'statutes' are implied - inherent in the passage
is the institution of human government, by order of God. Life in sin
and under judgment requires that wayward human impulses be curbed,
controlled and judged; it is by means of the state that this is
achieved. No 'model' of the ideal state (democracy, dictatorship
etc.) is offered.
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