Who is this King of glory? The Lord, strong and mighty, the Lord, mighty in battle! – Ps. 24:8

In these days of renewing war, many a man feels himself equipped with the secret to military success, the tech or reform which would make his nation’s military absolutely top-tier. More exercise, stricter discipline, more drones, less drones, more tanks, more missiles, hypersonic weaponry, laser weapons…. The list goes on and on and on, and I have opinions, mildly informed, about all of those proposals. None of these, however, are the true key to a military fit for legend. The secret to that, if you’ll forgive me pointing it out, was given way back when, in Deuteronomy 20. You see, the secret to a winning army isn’t super-tech or Advanced Training Methods, however helpful those both are. The secret to a winning army is consistent obedience to the army ordinances laid out by the Lord of hosts.

Now, parts of Deuteronomy 20 are clearly local to the Israelite conquest of Canaan, and our military theology must be based on the whole of Scripture, not just this one chapter. Whether implied or explicit, however, we can here find several key commands to apply to modern militaries.

First, we should take care who we recruit. The stereotypical modern recruit is a young fellow, hardly formed, ideal blank-slate for the military to beat into form. Many get married shortly before or during their training or while home between tours (on pointless wars or to foreign bases America really doesn’t much need), leading to the well-known cavalcade of infidelity and broken marriages which stain the military. The Biblical command discourages this course: the man who has a new business (a new vineyard), who is betrothed, or who is new-married (Deut. 24:5) is instructed to lead.

Plausibly, we could read this as directing our recruitment to prefer older, steadier men, 25-40, rather than 18-25. Such men, of course, are typically less interested in prolonged absence from their homes and families, which is a definite downside for lovers of forever-war and foreign entanglements (a.k.a. 95% of DC). This reluctance is all upside to sensible people, though; if the government can’t persuade such men to fight in a war, that war was usually a bad idea in the first place. (This is also why we should make the draft illegal. Thirteenth Amendment, looking at you.)

Second, military discipline must be modeled according to God’s model, not man’s vagaries. The restrictions on rape¹ and pillage in Deuteronomy 20:19-20 imply as much. God has rules, and we must follow them. We cannot expect Him to bless our armies if we let them become festering cesspits of adultery, theft, lasciviousness, blasphemy, and unjustified brutality. As a rule, though, that’s precisely what armies are. Adultery, prostitution, fornication, substance-abuse, blasphemy, crude language, theft, extortion, these are the side-effects of having the army around. Some of them our modern militaries put at least token effort into combatting. Some, like fornication, are to our culture considered just a normal part of military operations, at least until we mix women into the military and make both sides of the abuse our problem.

The army God blesses can conquer, sticks vs M16s (Lev. 26:8). The army God curses will accomplish only ruination; even in victory it will be a curse to itself (Prov. 28:1). Armies are breeding grounds of vice, many men thrown together under great stress, forced to confront fear and death and deprivation, given great power, and told to kill. An army is all but led into evil, except by the greatest caution in its regulation and leadership, and then when it returns home it disperses those wicked habits into the population. For every man who learns self-discipline and virtue, at least one other learned the ready use of violence, learned habits of easy pleasure, and more. The results are predictable. But we should not desire that grievous degradation of public morals which Washington (if my memory serves me) deplored after the American War for Independence- and that was, relatively speaking, a Christian society fighting in a Christian cause, as wars go in history.

One special note here: military discipline poses a peculiar danger not uncongenial to tyrants. Men who learn to obey in the military often keep that habit up in other matters related to the government and institutions. Aside from the significant fraction who are disaffected as a result of their lives in and out of the military, therefore, veterans have an ingrained and taught tendency to be less discriminating in what authority they assign government, meaning they often slot easily into place in the establishment when given public office, often encourage trust of those establishments in private life. Virtuous military discipline must account for this and require regular exercise of moral fiber in scrutinizing commands, not just in following them.

Third, the army must be God’s at the core. Virtue is all very well, but virtue stands only a split second against vice unless God stands behind it and within it as its brace and its strength. The army which does not fight for God’s cause fights against God (Matt. 12:30), and none shall stand long when they stand against Him (Ps. 24). The army which fights in His cause, though, and under His banner, that army can claim the promise of Deuteronomy 11:25: “No one shall be able to stand against you.”

The solider who knows God, moreover, knows that though he dies, yet shall he live (John 11:25). What fear has such a man of death? He knows stewardship, so that he will not be foolhardy, but he will have the strongest argument against fear (and therefore against panic, against recklessness) which is available to man: God is on my side, of whom shall I be afraid? (Ps. 124). He can say with the prophet, “Do not be afraid, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them” (2 Kings 6:16).

The two components of this command are crucial. The army, all the way up to its wielder, the statesmen sending it into battle, must honor God from the heart and in all their lives (Matt. 22:37; Rom. 13:10); and they must fight in a cause He supports- namely, self-defense, without cupidity or vengeance. Each brings blessing, of course, but the lack of one weakens the other immensely. A vicious army will not refrain from fighting for wicked ends, even if the war is justified on the facts; a righteous army will not gladly or wholeheartedly fight for a wicked war. Both are critical. All of these principles, of course, reinforce each other; a virtuous army is sustainable only if its members have faith in Him.

History tells of relatively few militaries which worked along this method. Some of the examples, of course, were not given victory; countless small militias or attempts at defense have been crushed in history, including many Christians. God received them in heaven, no doubt, but their example seems a discouragement. We have, however, several examples of armies God blessed, whose obedience to Him in even a part of these principles produced legends. I’ll stick to three for now.

We have the Ironsides, Cromwell’s legendary army. The New Model Army, as its makers dubbed it, was established under rules promulgated by Parliament at the start of the English Civil War. These rules reflect a strict adherence to the second point stated above. Rape, theft, murder, ruination of the land, assault on civilians, all are forbidden, often on pain of death; adultery and fornication are also forbidden, with discretion in the officer to match the punishment to the severity of the crime. They also enforce that the army shall be an army pious before the Lord, giving the officers explicit command to see that their men engaged in regular worship of the Most High.

Moving a little on in history, we have the small American army which fought against Tarleton and his cohort on Kings Mountain. The British fortified themselves at the top of a significant hill, amidst the woods; the Americans conducted an assault up the hill against superior numbers. The result, in contradiction of all military sense, was a shattering defeat for the British. The Americans who dealt that defeat were led by men of faith, acting explicitly with regard for God’s law.

The third and final example is the army of Israel itself. Across the Old Testament, the armies of Israel achieve remarkable, implausible success- so long as they honor the Lord. Apostasy brings disaster (or thoroughly mitigated success), as Ahab discovers to fatal effect in 1 Kings 22 and Joash (less dramatically) in 2 Kings 13:14-19. Regardless, Israel itself, when it acts according to the Lord’s command, triumphs- and falls terribly when it rebels, as it does most thoroughly in the gospels, leading to A.D. 70 (Mark 12:1-12, 13:1-37).²

Following God’s law isn’t easy, as a rule, but it does bring results. Will a military forged according to His command win every battle, every war? No. But it will have a much better track record than its physical statistics justify; it will be blessed by the Lord, just as a righteous family is blessed by the Lord, without being preserved from every suffering. The topic of why suffering is too large for now, though- go read Job and the Psalms for more. For now, stick this idea to your ribs: the Lord of hosts, the God of armies, “the Lord, mighty in battle” (Ps. 24:8), has given us prescriptions for how to run our armies. Shouldn’t we listen?

God bless.

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Footnotes

1. Incidentally, ‘rape’ in this phrase refers to theft, not just sexual rape. That’s not to say the more modern meaning of the word is inaccurate to history. ↩︎
2. Among Israel, also, we find David’s mighty men, among whom we have a few who performed what are frankly absurd feats. Winning a melee at worse than hundred-to-one odds is just short of impossible for a single man, but Josheb-basshebeth and Abishai both accomplish it (2 Sam. 23:8,18). ↩︎