Chapter 2. Abraham Uncivilized
Part 1 The City State
For what saith the scripture? Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness. Romans 4:3
As man became civilized by the creation of City-States, he entered into social contracts that made use of at least two legal concepts or structures. One can be called a trust and the other is a corporation.
Concerning corporations in the most general sense, it is when two or more people are gathered together for a particular purpose, as one person or one body, under a preexisting authority.
This precept is fundamental in all early City-States. The elements of greatest concern should be the purpose and under what authority is the corpus of the City-State established.
The first example of the concept of a corporation was undoubtedly in Genesis 2:24 with Adam and Eve coming together as one person under the authority of God. Matrimony was the union of Man and Woman as one flesh, for God’s purposes, under His original authority. The principle of incorporation extended to the whole Family under the offices of Husband and Wife. They are no more twain but one flesh, one body, one corpus under God
If Holy Matrimony is the incorporation of a Man and a Woman in the first estate or State or dominion under God, then subsequent marriage under that original authority is merely an incorporation under that preexisting divine authority from generation to generation. The Family could grow by new members being generated, e.g. being born or adopted. Anyone who opposes that union opposes God.
This was being righteous in their generations.
“The union of a man and a woman is of the law of nature.”
Men formed the first city-state by expanding the concept of family to an unnaturally large scale. The first citizens of these city-states were like adopted children or domestic servants in a civil family, which was ruled by the patriarch of a new and unnatural family.
“Man is a term of nature; person, of the civil law”
Marriage under the authority of the Civil State, giving the State original jurisdiction and authority over that union, may have a purpose altogether different from God's purpose or plan. The living family tree is replaced by the civil family tower. The ruler and benefactor of the tower of Babel became the Father of a nation.
The City-State is a national menage with the leaders sitting in the position of Father. The City- State adopts the people by their application and certification into a civil family. The State becomes the Father of the people with patrimonial rights that was originally invested by God in the Families of everyman from generation to generation. Emperors, kings, and presidents receive all their legitimate power, called the imperium, from the people by consent through application, participation, or acquiescence. “Excise (tribute), in its origin, is the patrimonial right of emperors and kings.”
Under this new management which emulated God’s institution of Family, the potestas, or power and authority once inherent in each individual or individual Family, is now vested into a more centralized system. Choice in the family is diminished as power of government increases. As responsibility is relinquished and rights become privileges. Duties of society are dictated by rulers instead of our God given conscience. Love is neglected and virtue is vanquished.
The body or corpus of the organized State acts like a giant family with the Patronus in the position of Our Civil Father, able to demand, Parens Patria, obey the Father. These Conscripted Fathers were vested with the jurisdiction of the corporate state. That State could incorporate other institutions, bringing all within its jurisdiction to abide under their corporate authority as children, or persons, or members of the State. Howard Scott defined a criminal as, “A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.”
The first City or Civil State was not an institution of God, but the corporation of Cain. God granted man dominion over the earth. He has an unalienable God-given right and responsibility to “dress it and keep it” or he may choose to contract, grant, or relinquish that responsibility to another. Therefore, those rights and responsibilities of dominion may be incorporated into the body of the State contrary to the will of God.
Rights are responsibilities, and responsibilities are rights. They are inseparable. To the degree you neglect the one, you will be barred from the other. An unalienable right is one, “Not to be separated, given away, or taken away; inalienable:” But we know that because God told us to keep it, we can lose access to that right by creating obligations to a third party by consent, error, or sin.
If you commit yourself to a contractual agreement or damage another individual’s right, by accident or by design, then you create an obligation that may bar you from pursuing your inherent rights to happiness. You may become snared and bound in obligation and debt.
A City-State is both a trust and a corporation. To fulfill the elements of these concepts, there must be more than a mere promise, pledge of future donation. It requires that some substance of present value be included as a deposit into the corpus or body of the corporate entity or State. A pledge of allegiance imparts an understanding of an actual exchange of some real substance or estate. That substance is often the members themselves. But, “The body of a freeman does not admit of valuation.”
The “social contract, agreement, or covenant by which men are said to have abandoned the ‘state of nature’ to form the society in which they now live.... Assumes that men at first lived in a state of anarchy where there was no society, no government, and no organized coercion of the individual by the group… by the social contract men had surrendered their natural liberties in order to enjoy the order and safety of the organized state.” This is done at the cost of liberty.
“Puritans in Massachusetts vowed ‘to build a city of God on earth’. The ‘city’ they built, however, required conformity to the temporal and religious standards dictated by them. Although persecuted themselves in England, Puritans in Massachusetts persecuted those who did not abide by their strict beliefs.”
A social contract is when a man casts in his lot with other men, abandoning his original Natural State under God, in exchange for the social security offered by an organized corporate State. With the surrender of his “natural liberties”, he becomes part of a larger whole with certain advantages and disadvantages. Through his trust in this larger body politic, he becomes a partaker of the whole body or nation. He has created this new State with his own hands. By striking hands with that corporate State, a man goes under a new authority, abandoning his natural liberty, to be captured in the web of his own creation, often in hope of gain.
In 1620, the Pilgrims attempted to establish the “City of God”, ironically based upon a social contract, the Mayflower Compact. Once they had given power to exercise authority through contract, those that did not fit this artificial mold were sometimes punished. Because they could not forgive the persecution by the king and church, they began to persecute others in self-righteous hypocrisy.
What they thought would guarantee their freedom became their trap. The Bible warns in Proverbs 1:10-19:
“My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not… If they say, Come with us,… Cast in thy lot among us; let us all have one purse: My son, walk not thou in the way with them; refrain thy foot from their path: For their feet run to evil, and make haste to shed blood. Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird. And they lay wait for their own blood; they lurk privily for their own lives. So are the ways of every one that is greedy of gain; which taketh away the life of the owners thereof.”
In Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), the word “allegiance” is defined as, “The tie or obligation, implied or expressed, which a subject owes to his sovereign or government; the duty of fidelity to one’s king, government, or state.” The meaning was influenced by the Latin word ligare, meaning “to bind”, and even by lex, legis, often translated as “law”.
The trust of one's substance by pledge or oath denotes some mutual faith or trust in the Patronus, or ruling power, and a corresponding subjection to that created State or Status. A corporation is a fiction. It has no life of its own. It is entirely dependent upon the life of its corpus. The corpus is the flesh and bone, the life and breath of those who are bound as its members.
“Which say, [It is] not near; let us build houses: this [city is] the caldron, and we [be] the flesh.” Ez. 11:3
In the City-State, one of the most common things of present value to be contributed for the benefit of the corporate State, as an equitably converted asset, was the individual corpus of the people themselves; the subject citizenry. This merging of the rights of the corpus of individuals into the corporation of the State was established or constructed by contracts or other deeds or acts of allegiance. A portion of their labor, the estate of the family, even their gold and silver of their purse, were all held in the repository of the legal State. All became as one body, one flesh with, ultimately, one central head who was a god and appointed many gods. But God in Heaven did not like or desire that way for men.
“And all the people brake off the golden earrings which [were] in their ears, and brought [them] unto Aaron....These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.” Ex. 32:3
In a City-State the social security, national defense, common welfare, and the benefits brought a repose, avarice, and apathy to the general virtue of the population. There was a growing loss of personal choice, liberty, freedom and actual wealth and a corresponding corruption, bureaucratic abuse, and waste as power was centralized. The people were devoured by their own beast appetite.
“Who also eat the flesh of my people, and flay their skin from off them; and they break their bones, and chop them in pieces, as for the pot, and as flesh within the caldron.” Micah 3:3
Is the Bible talking about cannibalism? Is it talking about brutal torture and mutilation? The statement was made to the “heads of Jacob” and the “princes of the house of Israel”, the government officials of that time. The text goes on to speak of the “prophets that make my people err, that bite with their teeth, and cry, Peace; and he that putteth not into their mouths, they even prepare war against him.” The word “prophet” just means those who speak for the prince or government of Israel. Somehow the government of Israel had caused the people to “err”. The word “peace” is from the Hebrew shalowm and is also translated “welfare” and “prosperity”. The people had listened to the words of the leaders of Israel, who were now rulers taking pieces of the people like a beast biting off chunks of their corpus and devouring the people as they were in the flesh pots of Egypt.
We see the same metaphor of a cauldron in a book written about the formation of welfare program in the United States where the government offers social security to the people in exchange for a portion of their labor: “one could look into a caldron in which the Government and the people of the United States were moving around in response to a new idea…”
“And the children of Israel said unto them… in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, [and] when we did eat bread to the full…” Exodus 16:3
The phrase, “sat by the flesh pots” can literally be translated “inhabited the body of the cauldron of Egypt” and means the corpus, or corporate state of Egypt, where the individual dominion of each man was joined with that of the whole state. The state obtains its power and dominion from the people, who, by their application, merge with the state.
The creation of City-States also created a need to belong to a City-State. Like the gangs of the inner city today, the youth often feel compelled to join a gang in order to find protection from other gangs.
All these systems rely on some voluntarism at first, but also a compelled contribution. Entitlements work both ways. A betokened benefit reciprocates a compelled contribution. The repose that comes from relinquishing God-given dominion and responsibility brings an addiction that calls out for more and more. One group in society is often depleted to supply the growing demands of another.
Though there is an appearance of affluence in early stages of such civil systems of social welfare, there is always a shortfall between receipts and expenditures. As apathy and avarice grows, this deficit increases addiction and fear. The corpus of the state dissipates as it is pilfered, robbed, and squandered by both the people and their princes. The ensuing deficit compelled the creation of innovative ways to sustain the feeling of affluence and security at any price.
Thus, the addicted citizen of the city-state loses sight of any other way, as he becomes trapped in an endless cycle of corruption, depletion, and a vain hope of reform. To awake to the delusion of his dilemma often means total collapse and chaos.
“And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch.” Genesis 4:17
The first City-State we find in biblical text is Enoch, which was established by Cain who defied God in its making. Cain was told to become a wanderer after the ultimate oppression of his brother’s life. This was not so much a punishment, but a way back and a guard against his selfish nature of oppression and abuse.
“When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.” Genesis 4:12
Instead of following this direction, Cain sinned against the will of the Creator and established a civil power that bound men to his own will and control. By offering them a social state of security, he secured his own position of power and authority. He became the forefather of the first corporate State and unnatural civil Father of the people within it.
There was a different branch of the family of man who continued on earth. From Seth to Noah, they were faithful to God’s plan and did not enter into the family of the City-State, remaining righteous in their generations. They did not enter into a social contract walking with the civil fathers of the corporate State made by the hands of men, but abide in a State of Nature, walking with God, their Father in Heaven.
“These [are] the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man [and] perfect in his generations, [and] Noah walked with God.” Ge. 6:9
The grandsons of Noah did create many City-States and their civil power reduced men to possessions, human resources, and subject citizens held by the organized state. The family of men became the family of the civil state. Civil law supplanted the ways of God. The leaders of these Civil powers held their office as trustees, protectors, or benefactors of their respective corporate kingdoms. These offices and positions of exercising authority transformed the people. The law of the Father became the despotic centers of civil tyranny and terror.
The word for “city” in Hebrew, `iyr [rye], actually means “excitement, anguish, of terror.” The City-State offered protection, but often became a threat to those around it as the people in it became slothful, rapacious, and covetous. The people within even became victims of their own lust for gain.
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