More than is generally recognized, the answers to some live questions facing the Christian today depend on a right view of some “dead” Old Testament history. In recent articles, for example, two writers seeking to define the roles of family, church and state, have, in our judgment, erred in so far as they have founded their conclusions on the history of Israel, because both misconstrue the nature of Israel’s Theocracy.

Fresh from their experience of divine deliverance out of Pharaoh’s tyrant hand, Israel at Sinai entered into a covenant with the Lord. This covenant was pursuant of the earlier covenant promises made to Abraham, and in terms of it, the seed of Abraham which had meanwhile multiplied to national proportions was now organized as a nation whose king was the Lord. Directly from Him would Israel receive both Law and Land. It is to this unique arrangement that the name “Theocracy” has been given.

To what shall we compare it? Was it a state-church like the Church of England? Or were it better to call it a church-state? These answers are equally inaccurate. For when we work with the ordinary concept of church and state and family we do not have the materials out of which the Theocracy can be constructed. It is as though we tried to construct a three-dimensional object out of two-dimensional elements. The conjunction of two or three or a thousand depth-less planes will not produce a solid. So no combination of family, church and state can produce the theocracy, for they do not have their being in the same “dimensional” sphere as the Theocracy. They exist in the sphere of common grace; but the Theocracy in the sphere of Consummation. As G. Vos points out: “The significance of the unique organization of Israel can be rightly measured only by remembering that the theocracy typefied nothing short of the perfected kingdom of God, the consummate state of heaven” (Old and New Testament Biblical Theology, 1942, p. 80).

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Meredith Kline | “The Relevance of the Theocracy” | February 1953

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