"The Commandments of [Government] Men"

The message of the Bible is deeply political. This has become more apparent to me than ever in recent months. I have understood for a long time that the Bible speaks to politics, i.e. that some of its teachings concern the political sphere. What has become more apparent to me is how central politics is to the whole Biblical message.

This was brought home to me most recently by an NASB footnote to a well-known verse in Isaiah that Jesus applied to the Pharisees. The political aspect of this prophecy is obscured by our translations.

Jesus said of the Pharisees, quoting Isaiah 29:13,

This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their
lips; but their heart is far from me.
But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. (Mt. 15:8-9, KJV)

According to an NASB footnote, the literal translation of the second line in the orignal passage in Isaiah is "their fear of Me is commandment[s] of rulers." What the people were condemned for, then, involved not simply the commands of men, but the commands of government men.

There are two possibilities for the basis of the condemnation. (1) The people were worshipping God only because rulers required it, i.e. in the right way externally, but lacking the right motivation. This seems to be how the NASB text takes it, rendering the literal "commandment of rulers" as "tradition learned by rote." (2) The people were worshipping God in the way the rulers required, and not in the way God required at all. I favor the second of these two readings because it is weightier--it finds deeper significance in the literal wording, an approach I think is warranted by passages such as Mt. 5:18 and Ps. 12:6, and the nature of Biblical literature in general. The second reading encompasses the first, and draws out more instruction.

Here is what I mean by drawing out more instruction. The context of Isaiah 29 is God's judgment on Jerusalem. Its people observed the festivals of God's Law (v. 2), but were not instructed by it: they could not understand the prophets (vv. 10-12), they worshipped with their lips and not their hearts (v. 13a), their wise men were a sham (v. 14), they were intent on doing evil (vv. 20-21), and they erred and did not accept instruction (v. 24). From v. 13a especially, it is clearly true to say that they lacked the right motivation for keeping the festivals, as reading (1) has it. What I draw further from the literal "commandment of rulers" of v. 13b is that their wrong motivation expressed itself not only in the sins they committed apart from observing the festivals, but in the way they observed the festivals also. They did according to the commands of government men rather than God. To put it another way, their wrong motivation took a specific form: they were moved by their allegiance to human government rather than to God.

Understood this way, the passage begins to resonate with other events and prophecies in Scripture. God was to be Israel's king, but they rejected his kingship and chose a human king (1 Sam. 8:7). Psalm 146 tells us not to trust in princes, and compares what they cannot do with what God does. The gospel is an announcement of the reign of God (Is. 52:7). Here in Isaiah 29, then, we have another expression of the political dimension of the Biblical message. Man's alienation from God expresses itself in his politics: he worships, fears, loves and obeys men with political power, rather than God.

We are often blind to this reality because we think in impersonal terms. We refer to "the government" and offices in it, and to "rights" and "freedoms," and most of the time we separate "political" matters and "spiritual" matters. The Bible speaks simply of men, their power, ambitions, and allegiences. We do not see that often, "men" in the Bible means men in their political or governmental roles. When Peter told the High Priest, "we must obey God rather than men," he expressed the political aspect of the Biblical message.

This is why Jesus' alteration of the second line of Isaiah 29:13 does not change the meaning. The Pharisees whom Jesus condemned ultimately had the same political motive as the subjects of Isaiah's condemnation, and their elevation of their tradition above God's law expressed it. Though they rejected the present Roman political authority, they wanted to replace it with their own, rather than trust and obey God. They wanted for a Messiah a human Davidic king of the same kind that Israel had in Isaiah's time; they did not want a Messiah who would restore God's reign over the earth through his people apart from a geopolitical human kingship. They may have even thought that their resistance to Roman authority put them on the right side of Isaiah 29:13. Jesus exposed the fact that it did not.

We see the same thing today. Our bitter political division between right and left is like that between the Pharisees and the Romans. We can even say that both then and now, one side is in many ways much more in line with what God considers good, while the other is more openly hostile to religion. Both are condemned by God, however, to the extent that human political ambitions and allegience move them. Or, to put it another way, to the extent that governmental matters comprise their hopes and fears, and direct their energy. For to that extent, "their fear...is the commandment[s] of [government] men."

An example of this that stuck out to me recently is he way Michelle Bauchman handled Jay Leno's questions about her husband's counseling services to homosexuals. Bauchman apparently is an evangelical Christian, and is a favorite of evangelical Christian voters. Yet she would not answer Leno's questions directly. She tried to make a joke, and used obviously scripted rhetoric, but she would not or could not explain why she opposes instituting homsexual marriage. Clearly, it has become part of her political strategy at this time to avoid that issue. And so it appears that she has sacrificed witnessing to the truth, to political ambition. The instruction she is following in terms of strategy is a human derivation from political goals.

But it is easy to point the finger. We are all prone to this error, and our society is flooded with "commandment[s] of rulers." Political correctness and redifinitions of "marriage" and "hate" are only the most explicit examples of this. In truth, the components of our food, water, air, medicine, clothing, housing and more are regulated by the government, by "the commandments[s] of rulers." How often do we blindly trust the goodness or safety of these things? Just today I learned that when a food package lists "natural flavors" as an ingredient, this very likely means some form of glutamate, the toxic component of MSG, even if the same box proclaims "no MSG"--and our government has explicitly allowed this. (Excitotoxins by Blaylock)

Since the commands of government men permeate our lives today, we need to give careful thought to how we live. The greatest truth and the most important commands are God's. It is as easy as ever to give lip service to this, while following a myriad of politically-originated instructions to guide our thinking and behavior.