Part III: The Old Testament vs. MLK

 

THE HISTORY of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life itself is proof that he was a demagogue and an agitator of the first rank. His supporters hate to be reminded of the King of history, as they have supplanted him with a romanticized ideal that we frankly do not recognize. But the real MLKof the 1960’s was a destructive agent of an anti-biblical theory of human rights that emerged from the rationalism and atheism of the French Revolution. The sentiment of the Jacobin is a thread woven through and through King’s rhetorical flourishes and his poisonous writings. With his great swelling words, King targeted public institutions of all kinds, and even whole state governments. Last time we discussed the history of the origins of Jacobinism in American history up until the time of King.

But suppose there are still those unconvinced by this. Perhaps there are some that believe despite all the evidence that we have failed to treat King fairly. In his repeated attempts to stir up strife against public officials that opposed his views, maybe he was somehow justified. Perhaps the dark path upon which his Jacobin and communistic views forged through human history is not dramatic enough to shake their admiration of King. Granted that all this could be true, we appeal finally to the Bible itself. It is here that King is finally and convincingly proven to be wrong. History can be mistaken. Facts can be misconstrued. For these reasons, it is the book of God that must reign supreme.

Space will only allow us to consider here just the Old Testament witness against the principles and tactics of King. Next time we will consider the New Testament.

Civil Rights in the Old Testament?

It is maintained by King and his followers that the Bible too teaches that all human beings are absolutely equal in every respect and must be legally treated all the same. Maybe they had never read about the Levites:

But the Levites shall perform the work of the tabernacle of meeting, and they shall bear their iniquity; it shall be a statue forever, throughout your generations, that among the children of Israel they shall have no inheritance, (Numbers 18:23).

The Old Testament explains that all the tribes of Israel were to divide the land of Canaan as an inheritance promised to their ancestor Abraham. But those born into the tribe of Levi were not allowed to acquire such property in the land. Now if those fawning over the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. were consistent, they would argue that this was discrimination of the greatest kind. For a government to prohibit a whole group of people from owning land simply because they were born into a certain tribe seems to be exactly the kind of “evil” that would set King to marching over. Yet in Numbers 18, this is what God expressly commanded Israel to do. That is because it is not a sin at all.

In another place, God commanded that a people called the Gibeonites be forced to occupy a lower, menial state that suited their status as a conquered people:

And that day Joshua made them woodcutters and water carriers for the congregation and for the altar of the LORD, in the place which He would choose, even to this day, (Joshua 9:27). 

Throughout the Old Testament, God frequently assigned different distinctions to various people groups based on their ethnicity. The descendants of Amalek were to never be allowed into the nation of Israel. For the descendants of Ammon and Moab, permission was granted after the tenth generation. The Egyptians and the Edomites had only to wait until the third generation. The reader of the Old Testament that believes King’s view of rights could only be disgusted by these constant contradictions of his “righteous” view of human equality. That is because God never stated these views. They are from pure human philosophy.

But there is even greater evidence against those that would still insist that the modern concept of civil rights is consistent with the Bible. Take for example the penalty executed upon the children of Daniel’s enemies. After he emerged unscathed from the lion’s den, those that plotted Daniel’s demise were not thrown into the den by themselves.

And the king gave the command, and they brought those men who had accused Daniel, and they cast them into the den of lions — them, their children, and their wives; and the lions overpowered them, and broke all their bones in pieces before they ever came to the bottom of the den, (Daniel 8:24).

Perhaps this was simply the cruelty of the monarch Darius that is here explained. But if so, he is no more cruel than God when He commands that the children of Israel do the same thing to the descendants of the Amalekites:

Therefore it shall be, when the LORD your God has given you rest from your enemies all around, in the land which the LORD your God is giving you to possess as an inheritance, that you will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven. You shall not forget, (Deuternonomy 25:19).

 The Bible is full of circumstances where children of wicked individuals are punished for the misdeeds of prior generations. In Genesis 9:25-27, the descendants of Ham were cursed for their father’s failure as a son to Noah. In Exodus 20, God prohibits idol worship in the Ten Commandments. But before moving to the Third Commandment, He pauses and declares:

For I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children of the third and fourth generations of those that hate Me, (Exodus 20:5).

Again, we read,

The LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and fourth generation, (Exodus 34:6, 7).

If these things are such great crimes in our time, when did human beings acquire such rights? God does not recognize them in the Old Testament. Did human beings gain them in the New Testament? Did Jesus grant them? We will quote only one verse to disprove that here because we intend to deal with the New Testament in a separate study. To the Pharisees Jesus said:

Therefore you are witnesses against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your father’s guilt… that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Assuredly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation, (Matthew 23:31-32, 35-36).    

 If Jesus came to change God’s policy in the Old Testament, He Himself was not aware of it. The reality is that the Old Testament proves abundantly that God does not acknowledge the modern delusion that every individual is vested with equal rights along with his fellowmen. It is purely a product of American arrogance for a man to presume that God should view him as just as good as anyone else he meets. We could continue proving our point by showing that women also did not have equal “rights” with men in the Bible, but we will save this for our examination of the New Testament. There is more proof of that there.

The OT Verdict Against Nonviolent Demonstrations 

 Public protests, marches, and nonviolent demonstrations are 20th Century inventions unknown in Bible times. Yet the Old Testament has a few things to say about the spirit of such endeavours. “Confronting racism” might have been a stated purpose of such rallies, but the effect of them was clearer: it antagonized those with whom King and his supporters disagreed. The Old Testament explicitly condemns this as a tactic emanating from pride and urges another course for the righteous:

   He who is of a proud heart stirs up strife, but he who trusts in the LORD will be prospered, (Proverbs 28:25).

Demagoguery too is vividly portrayed by the Old Testament as the activity of the ungodly:

An ungodly man digs up evil, and it is on his lips like a burning fire. A perverse man sows strife, and a whisperer separates the best of friends, (Proverbs 16:27-28).

The Old Testament asserts the real source of strife and the desire to initiate confrontation:

Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all sins, (Proverbs 10:12).

These texts make plain that even if we were to grant that King contended against great evils in his time, his tactics of marches, rallies, and demonstrations were still improper. While some ignorantly give credit to King for his denunciations of violence, this credit is more properly given to the Lord that restrained the passions of King’s enemies until He finally relented and permitted King’s untimely death in April 1968.

Next time we will show from the New Testament that King’s relationship with authorities was inappropriate and more combative than the Scriptures permit. We will then further proceed to show that the New Testament denies King’s great moral theories about the existence of radical equal rights, and that it teaches just the opposite.