Pocket College: Recent Episodes
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Professor: Rushdoony, Dr. R. J
Subject: Prerequisite/Law
Genre: Speech
Lesson: 5 of 5
Track: 7
Dictation Name: RR130D7
Date: 1960’s-1970’s
[Rushdoony] Romans 13 verses 1-6, the law as power and Discrimination. Romans 13:1-6
1Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.
2 Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.
3 For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same:
4 For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.
5 Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake.
6 For for this cause pay ye tribute also: for they are God’s ministers, attending continually upon this very thing.
The first commandment declares “Thou shalt have no other God’s before me”. This can also be paraphrased “Thou shalt have no other powers before me, independent of, or prior to me”. Now one of the central violations of the first commandment is precisely this, to set other powers and independent to, or prior to God. And the central power which is made independent of and prior to God is the state. So it is that when Saint Paul in Romans is dealing with the doctrine of justification by faith, and deals with a priority, the absolute priority of God in salvation, that we are saved, not by our works, nor by our faith, though we are justified by faith, but we are absolutely saved by the sovereign act of God, which manifests itself in our faith. He then proceeds to the doctrine of predestination and then as he deals with the world at large he declares that all power is ordained of God. Because God is the absolute law, the absolute power, therefore there could be no other power then God and all the powers that be are ordained of God.
Now as we analyze the fact of power we must realize that first of all power is inseparable from law. Law is not law if it lacks the power to bind, to compel, or to punish. The law is more than compulsion. But without compulsion the law is not law. Power is basic, similarly to empty God of absolute power is to deny that He is God. When Karl Barth therefore argued against God being power, he is arguing against God being God, He is denying that Godhead to God. Similarly to separate power from the law is to deny that it is law. God repeatedly identified Himself as the almighty, which can be also translated as the all powerful. It is because He is the almighty, because all power is His that He can claim total sovereignty over all heaven and earth and demand absolute obedience.
Now, power is a religious concept, where your power is there is your God, and there is your law. Law and power derive from a common source, and that common source determines what is your God, what is the God of your system. This is an elementary fact but it is a fact that is lost on many people in our generation because we have been filled with so much liberal nonsense. Some of this liberal nonsense characterized the French government at the moment that Napoleon was seizing power. The revolutionist that had earlier seized power and had a reign of terror, were now face with someone else seizing power. But they had come to believe in the few years that had passed so much of their own liberal nonsense, that as they were hearing the news that Napoleon had command of Paris with his troops and was seizing the government, one of the members of the government said, “`but it is impossible for him to seize the government, we have the official seal.”
But of course Napoleon had all the power; and therefore he was the lawmaker, and he was the government.
Similarly the God of any system is the source of power and law. And hence it is in modern democracies and in modern Marxist states and in Fabian Socialist states, the state becomes the God, becomes the source of law and the source of all power, and hence it is idolatry and violation of the first commandment “thou shalt have no other Gods (no other power, no other law) before me”. Power thus is a religious concept. In antiquity the king, or the emperor was a God because he was the source of power, in the modern world when the democratic state gains power it claims religious prerogatives, it rejects Christianity, it works against Biblical faith because it is now in process of making itself a God. In communist countries this is openly done, and hymns are sung to Stalin or to Mao Zedong or to the state, it is the new God, it is the new source of all power.
Power is jealously guarded in every anti-Christian state, and the one thing that an anti-Christian government will not permit is a division of powers. And hence it is that our establishment is progressively anti-constitutional because the constitution reflects the old Christian, the Biblical, the Old Testament and New Testament insistent on the division of powers. All human powers must be divided; there cannot be a concentration because this leads to idolatry, to a state playing God. And so it is the division of powers is the worst of all offenses from the governmental perspective, of every modern state. Law is applied power, although it is more than power. Those who object to coercion are really objecting to law, and our modern left wing student rioters who object to coercion on the part of the university and on the part of the state are actually objecting to all law, because you cannot have law without coercion. Can there be any law in the family if there is no power to coerce the children on the part of the parents? Can there be any law in the schools or anywhere else in society if there is no power to coerce? Then every man is his own law.
Saint Paul declares, in Romans 13 verse 4 that the purpose of law is to be a terror to evil doers. Now Paul meant exactly that, and it is interesting that every modern translation does away with the word “terror” they’re all infected with the liberal mentality they don’t like the idea that the law can throw fear, terror, into the hearts of evil doers. But this is precisely what Saint Paul declares the purpose of the law is, and what the purpose of the Civil government. Of those who rule should be, it is to be a terror to the evil doers. But today the evil doers are a terror to the government, they have become the law of the land. Hoodlums march into Washington in the name of a “poverty march”, and what does the terrified government do, which subsidizes them to begin with? It gives them another hundred million dollars. It was a profitable march. Who is the terror in this case? The evil doer.
But scripture declares “The law, the civil authority, power, ordained power, should be a terror to evil doers”. For power has been so ordained of God, for there is no power but of God, the powers that be are ordained of God; God is absolute power, all subordinated powers derive their office, power, and authority from Him and must exist under His jurisdiction, and they must therefore be a terror to evildoers.
But our modern world is distrustful of power even as it concentrates power unto itself. One of the great liberals of the last century, Lord Acton declared, in a saying that has become quiet famous “all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. The sad fact is that many conservatives have made this liberal half truth their favorite sayings. But let’s analyze it, first of all, all power does not corrupt, Godly power does not corrupt, the power of a Godly husband, a Godly father to govern does not corrupt Him. If He uses it properly under God it does not corrupt him, it blesses His household and it blesses him. The power of a man to administer that which is his, his property, his money, his life, does not corrupt him. It blesses him and society at large when he uses it properly under God. Power does not corrupt when it is used properly.
Today we are faced with a twin evil with respect to the use of power, on the one hand there is the fear of using power on the part of our liberals, and on the other hand there is the immoral ungodly use of it to the destruction of society. One leads to lawlessness and anarchy and the other leads to totalitarianism. But power does not corrupt when power is properly used. What we need is a return to the proper use of power to the respect for power, and the ability to use it under God. Second Lord Acton said “Absolute power corrupts absolutely”. If absolute power corrupts absolutely, then God who is the only absolute power is absolutely corrupt, and this is nonsense. Acton was wrong, man cannot have absolute power, he may strive for it, but he always remains under the absolute power of God. Not only is all power derived from God and decreed by His absolute power but it is also decreed and bound by His absolute righteousness. Law, when it is true law, is not only power it is also righteousness, therefore it is a terror to evil doers, but Saint Paul declares “it is the praise of the Godly” that is, it is their security, it is their praise, it is their reward, it protects them, it establishes them in their powers and in the liberty of their power.
Moreover the very nature of the entire universe is to work to uphold its Creator and His law. So it is that in the song of Deborah we read, when Deborah hails the triumph of God against Cisera she says “They fought from heaven, the stars in their courses fought against Cisera” the whole of nature, the whole of creation worked against those who fought against God. Law is either righteousness or it is anti-law masquerading as law. Today all your legal philosophies are anti-law. Marxism, legal positivism, Fabian socialist law, democratic doctrines of law, all deny that law is an approximation of ultimate order and truth. And their doctrine of law is total humanism. They are the power, they make law, there is no truth beyond themselves, and whenever law is severed from righteousness and truth it leads to anarchy and totalitarianism. Law therefore is not only power, but it is righteousness, and it must be derived from absolute power, absolute righteousness, God, or it becomes inescapably totalitarian.
Moreover, Saint Paul declares, that law is ordained of God and it is called to be the minister of God for good. The law is required to be a ministry of justice under God. Now this concept is humility to law, it is ministerial law, it is under God. It has limits to its power; it has limits to its jurisdiction. But all your modern doctrines of law from your modern democracies to Marxism have no limits to their power, to their jurisdiction; the state is its own law. There is no sense of humility, no sense of limitation, and so your modern states with their doctrines of law are proud and arrogant. They are inescapably totalitarian because they deny God.
Finally, law is always discriminatory. It must discriminate against lawbreakers. Saint Paul declares that it must be a terror to evil doers, and the praise of the Godly. Now this is discrimination, terror to one, security to another. There can be no equality and at the same time law. Law always discriminates; it creates a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate. This means a fundamental inequality in society; now the sentimental, the softhearted, do not like this. They’re always trying to break it, and as we shall see later one of the points of entrance into breaking this is through children. They begin to say there must be no discrimination between illegitimate and legitimate children, they must have equal rights. After all it’s not the child’s fault. This is a half truth. What is the implication of this sentimental stance? It breaks down the family, if any illegitimate child can present himself as an heir, what has it done to the rights of the wife and of the legitimate children? It has destroyed them. Anyone can then appear under law and claim a right to an estate. And this of course has, as its purpose the breakdown of the family, the destruction of inheritance. The law is always discriminatory, and when it places a so called “equality” between the legitimate and illegitimate child it is creating an inequality for the family, it is destroying the family, it is discriminating against the family.
It is impossible to have any kind of legal system without having a fundamental inequality. And what today the law is creating in the name of “equality” is a new kind of inequality, in other words it is the Christian, it is the conservative, it is the law abiding, it is the hard working who are discriminated against, who are now the inferior. Any law that is passed, the minute it becomes law creates a discrimination, a distinction, an inequality. And even if you remove all law and return to the so called state of anarchy you will then have inequality also, in that some will survive and be more powerful than others. Equality is an impossible concept. Attempts to use the law to establish equality are contradictions, they are either self-deceived who dream of equality, or they are more commonly attempting to deceive others in order to gain power.
And today because men will not believe in God, they seek to make themselves gods, “thou shalt have no other gods (no other powers) before me” and today men are creating themselves and the state, their concept of the state, as those other gods and other powers. The goal of the revolutionary activities of our day is power, it is not equal rights, it is not anything that they talk about, but power. The civil rights revolution is the case in point. When we analyze for example the Negro tradition as it goes back to Africa, we find that Africa, the whole goal of man was power, pure unadulterated power through magic, through killing, through voodoo, whatever it was. IN the country the whole goal of the Negro both as a slave and afterwards through voodoo was power. Incidentally the voodoo songs have passed into the culture at large in the form of jazz, jazz is voodoo music.
Now, the purpose of voodoo was always power. And it is simply the old savage desire for power without any responsibility, without righteousness, without God that still motivates the civil rights revolution. There is nothing that will stop it short of total power or short of Godly power becoming a terror to these evil doers. The same is true of the student revolution. What has happened again and again as they have created revolutions on campus and demanded concessions from the administration. When the administration has conceded, they have demanded more, they have refused to agree to the concession, because the concession, however exorbitant the demands were previously, were a front for a demand for total power. And so, in whatever direction we turn, the revolutionary demands, whatever they are, are a front for the demand for power, anti-God power, attempts to become the other powers, the other gods who were set before God. And they cannot be dealt with until there is a return to Biblical faith, to the belief in Godly power, the exercise of Godly power by ourselves and the demand that there be Godly power exercised by the state, that it becomes a terror to evil doers and not to the Godly.
Until we recognize that the root of all of this that we face is precisely that great idolatry of our day, the state has the power and is the god, and against this the scriptures declares “thou shalt have no other gods before me” Let us pray.
Our Lord and our God we give thanks unto Thee for this Thy word and we thank Thee our Father that in this day and age when men and nations seek to become gods Thou alone hast absolute power, Thou art the only and the absolute true God, and no other powers, no other gods can exist before Thee, and we await oh Lord Thine action, Thy judgment against these powers that be, confound them oh Lord and destroy them. Protect, defend, deliver, establish, and give victory unto Thy saints. And grant that we may be delivered from the enemy, confirmed in Thy freedom, and established in Thy power, and that we may flourish and abound unto Thy praise and glory. Grant us this we beseech Thee in Jesus name, Amen.
Are there any questions now?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Legal positivism is a philosophy of law which states that there is no law apart from the actual enacted law of the state. In other words there is no absolute law, there is no truth, there is no justice, nothing. The only law that exists is the law that the state passes, so that you cannot appeal against the state and say “but this is wrong” there is no right and wrong, you cannot appear to a higher law because there is no law except what the state orders.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Terror of, well, yes [interrupted] if your association with God is that of a sinner who is in high handed action against God, there should be terror, so if God says that we should be in terror of his ministers, the ministry of judgment, the civil magistrate, how much more so in relationship to God, if we are in violation of His law.
[Same audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] We all loved our parents as children, but there were times when we were terrified of them we had done wrong, and we had cause to be terrified because they were going to come after us with righteous wrath. Now, it’s the same way with God. The scriptures tell us repeatedly that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, we are also told that perfect love casteth out fear, now when we in heaven become perfect, by the grace of God, then we will not be afraid. But now because there is still sin in us we have cause to be afraid of God at times, and we have cause at times to even be in terror of God, so there’s nothing wrong with terror or fear, it’s a very healthy emotion in many cases [interruption]… terror is a greater thing than fear, yes I think it’s entirely healthy, I think we need a little more terror in our days in the right places.
[Same audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, of course
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Well of course, yes, I don’t know, I would have to see the passage and the usage and check it with the Greek original before I could comment on that.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] The proper meaning is that you pledge it, the loyalty, and the obedience which is its due, under God. Just as you give to your employer, the loyalty, and the allegiance, the obedience which is his due as you do the work, but it is not a total thing, you are more than an employee, you are many other things besides and it can never be an allegiance above and beyond the requirements of the work.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] A very good question; this is a question which has concerned people again and again over the centuries. Now when Saint Paul wrote these words he was writing when Nero was on the throne. And Nero was the kind of man we have to deal with in Washington today, he was a moral degenerate, he was a fuzzy liberal who gradually more and more a tyrant, and he was a totally irresponsible man. And yet Saint Paul, at that point, was speaking of allegiance to Cesar, within bounds. The answer to that is this, first of all let us go back to saint Paul, what if saint Paul had said “You cannot serve Nero or give him any allegiance whatsoever because this is the kind of man he is”? What he then would have been advocating would be revolution would it not? And what could have been more futile to advocate revolution in the Roman Empire when practically every person in the country was another Nero? You just didn’t have the same opportunities that Nero did.
And of course your situation today is not much different, practically most the people in the United States are little Nero’s today, the only difference between themselves and the people in Washington is that the people in Washington have more power. So what could you do if you tried over throw such a government? You’ll only get another one of the same sort. And this was of course the futility of the situation in Rome. A lot of people did try overthrowing the government, and did over and over again, there was a change of government finally every few years, and it only went from bad to worse. You can’t make a good omelet with bad eggs; this is why therefore Saint Paul in Corinthians as he was dealing with this situation told people that he required Christians to remain in the condition and they were, in other words they were not to try revolution. This did not mean they were to surrender, but it meant that the basic faith was first of all in conversion.
Now as we face the world’s situation today, and the situation in this country, one of the things we have to recognize is precisely this; that actually we’re not getting what we deserve. If we got what we deserved as a people we’d be a lot worse off. One of the sickening facts when I was in Washington D.C. recently was to be told by people there that the situation is a lot worse since they had the rioting and things began to become more and more dangerous for anyone around the city. Why? A lot of people were on the borders of conservatism or were more or less conservative are now unwillingly to identify themselves with it. They are unwilling to admit what is happening around them. They haven’t the moral courage. What are you going to do with a people like this? There isn’t you see anything with which to build, as an old Dutch man remarked some years ago as he saw what was coming in this country and he said it was futile to start anything now, he said “You can’t build a building with rotten wood”. So this is the reality.
Now our course of action then, as we try Christian reconstruction is to began first of all with the recognition “this is going to collapse”. Since it is going to collapse we have to prepare ourselves realistically in terms of the fact that everything is going to fall apart around us, and second for reconstruction. We begin by preparing ourselves. We try to get the faith to others, and step by step to rebuild out of the ruins.
Now at what point do we refuse to obey the law? We’ve come back down to that question again. The law is ungodly, there’s no question about that. The law is so much anti-law that the law itself is breaking down progressively around us. We are the most law abiding element in the country today. The very liberals and radicals who are today ramming through the laws are the ones who are the last to obey it, so that law is crumbling around us. Now the law cannot compel us to destroy ourselves, at some point or other each of us in our conscious must recognize that the law is no longer to be obeyed, we must obey God rather than man. This is a point where each of us in our hearts, in terms of our conscious must determine where we will disobey. Where we will make a stand. The scripture doesn’t draw a fine line here because it can’t be done, this is to be done in terms of the situation, and we cannot say today or tomorrow when the time will come when we will say “we have to make a stand against this or that law” Certainly when the law compels us to deny God or to renounce Him then we have to make a stand, but where apart from that in terms of the legislation is a matter for each person and their conscious.
[Rushdoony]
[Audience member] Was this denial of the official law a consequence, the reason that there were so many martyrs during the Roman times? {?}
[Rushdoony] The martyrdoms in the early church hinged upon this, the state was ready to recognize Christianity as an official religion if Christians would say “yes we will take a position and be recognized as a legitimate lawful religion in the empire by recognizing the priority of Cesar, but they refused to do that. They said “How can we recognize the priority of Cesar?” This is to say that Cesar is greater than Christ, greater than God. And so we are ready to be a law abiding citizens, and they did declare “we are the best soldiers, the most faithful taxpayers, the most law abiding citizens, but we cannot recognize the priority of César to God.” And so this was the essence of it. And this is still the essence of the issue; this is why progressively the state will be hostile to those of us who hold to this faith. Because they want to be the power, the law, the god, and they will not tolerate anything which denies their priority. So this is the point at which the challenge will come again probably, if it lasts that long.
Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Now the principle of conscientious objection is a very thoroughly biblical one. It declares that the law of the state is not absolute, and therefore a man can by appeal to higher law, argue his case; however these people do not believe in any higher law, they are simply using and abusing this fact. We can be conscientious objectors, but we have to recognize that increasingly it is precisely our conscientious objection that will be the least valid one in the eyes of the state, because what the modern conscientious objector is objecting to is the idea that there is any absolute truth, any absolute law, and he is working to destroy a law that is premised on Christian principles, even as he uses it. So theirs is a part of a revolutionary program.
Now of course the future largely depends on this, whether the breakdown will come before the modern totalitarian regimes are able to accomplish their desire to blot out everything we represent. A breakdown I trust will come before they accomplish their purposes. But it is significant that in the Soviet Union today there are a lot marketeers operating in terms of old fashioned free enterprise, that is they are actually becoming millionaires by engineering all kinds of black marketing schemes. Occasionally some of them are caught and punished, but the punishment is mild. In other words, they are ready to tolerate quite a bit of capitalism as a black market illegal operation, but they will not tolerate a black market church. Because this is the essence, to them, of everything that is counter revolutionary. The black marketeer who becomes a millionaire and is bringing in stuff from out of the country, buying stuff from their own factories and selling it illicitly is a criminal, but he is not a counter revolutionary, which is interesting. So the revolution is against God, rather than against capitalism.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] No, no it isn’t, I think we all should be burdened with the failure of Christians to see the issues and to commit their children to anti-Christian schools. There’s nothing presumptuous about it, if you had a headache you’re going to feel it, so that when we have a very unpleasant condition it is natural to be burdened about it, all we can do sometimes is to pray and to continue to work.
One final question because our time is up.
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, law keeping is seen in merely a negative sense by too many Christians. For example to take the, to one commandment “thou shalt not commit adultery” many Christians feel that they’ve kept the law just by not committing adultery. But if they exam the commandments behind that it has reference to a whole world of commandments concerning the family. Now what are these commandments concerning the family? Well they have to do with the responsibility of the father and of the mother concerning covenant training for their children which deals with Christian schools, with respect to a whole world of constructive activity you see. So although the ten commandments sums up in one statement the protective commandment, the other commandments that are behind it have to do with a whole world of reconstruction, of establishment, of institutions. Now the law says “thou shalt not kill” when we come to it we will see what it has to do with the protection and furtherance of life, which extends even to laws with respects to fruit trees. So most people take the law at the barest minimum, which is not to except it really, which is try to get by rather than to believe and to uphold the law. Well, we shall deal with these things in due time. We are adjourned now.
Professor: Rushdoony, Dr. R. J
Subject: Prerequisite/Law
Genre: Speech
Lesson: 4 of 5
Track: 6
Dictation Name: RR130C6
Date: 1960’s-1970’s
Malachi three verses seven through twelve. In this scripture we have summed up some of the essentials of the law concerning the tithe. Malachi three verses seven through twelve.
7 Even from the days of your fathers ye are gone away from mine ordinances, and have not kept them. Return unto me, and I will return unto you, saith the Lord of hosts. But ye said, Wherein shall we return?
8 Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings.
9 Ye are cursed with a curse: for ye have robbed me, even this whole nation.
10 Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.
11 And I will rebuke the devourer for your sakes, and he shall not destroy the fruits of your ground; neither shall your vine cast her fruit before the time in the field, saith the Lord of hosts.
12 And all nations shall call you blessed: for ye shall be a delightsome land, saith the Lord of hosts.
Our subject today is the tithe. To most people this is a humdrum subject, but in reality it is a very explosive one. In the Soviet Union, for example, there is technically a law guaranteeing freedom of worship, and there are a number of churches, a limited number, permitted to operate. But even though the law specifically guarantees freedom of worship it prohibits, pointedly, any discussion of the things that I shall treat this morning. There is a reason for this. While most people in our country have no awareness of the explosive significance of the tithe, the Marxist do.
The tithe was once a requirement of all Christians, from the days of the early church. As a matter of fact it was through the centuries paid in produce in farming communities, so that a routine part of the landscape in earlier days was the tithe barn in farming communities, where the farmers brought their tithe. The council of Trent, as far as the Catholic Church was concerned required the tithe on pain of excommunication, it was required in protestant circles, Lutheran, Reformed or Calvinist, and the Church of England, as well as the Church of Scotland. It was universally required, but towards the end of the eighteenth century it began to be dropped as a requirement, and from the French Revolution on it has been largely dropped. The very fact that the dis-occurrence of the tithe and the French Revolution tend to coincide in dates should make us sit up and wonder “what is the connection?” In this country it was required in many states by law and when in 1785 Virginia passed a law abolishing the requirement of the tithe George Washington wrote to George Mason expressing his distress at the new legislation.
Now to analyze the tithe first before we go into its significance. The tithe of course appears very early in scripture, Abraham tithed a tenth to Melchizedek and it was nothing new in his time, so it quite obviously went back to the direct revelation of God to Adam and to Noah. The laws of the tithe appear in Leviticus twenty-seven verses thirty to thirty-three and Numbers 18:21-26, Deuteronomy 14:22-27 and Deuteronomy 26:12 & 13. There are other references to it.
Now there are three kinds of tithes referred to in the law. The first is the Lord’s tithe; this went to the Levites who tithed a tenth of it to the priests. Second there was a festival tithe. This festival tithe was to be spent by the family in rejoicing before the Lord. The only amount of it that was not spent upon themselves was that which included the Levite, in that the Levite in their midst was to receive some portion of it. This depended on the individual; he was to include the Levite in his rejoicing before the Lord. We would call this a vacation tithe, except that the significance then was not merely rest and recreation, but a religious rest and recreation. It was not only to be used in pleasure, but pleasure that had a religious overtone. It was to be a means of rejoicing in God’s goodness. The third tithe, which was ever third year in a cycle of seven, so that it was the third and the sixth years, was to be a poor tithe, to be shared with the local Levite and in particular helpless foreigners who were stranded in their midst, orphans, and needy widows.
Now as we analyze these tithes first of all, the tithes set forth God’s sovereignty. God is absolute Lord and Creator as landlord, so to speak, of heaven and earth, required for Himself a tithe as His tax on man. Now as the tithe was taken God was gracious to man so that a man, if he tithed his produce or the flocks of his field was to tithe every tenth, literally, thus if he had 16 cows, he was to run the through the gate, or allow them to come through the gate, and to mark the tenth one, let us say with red paint. And the tenth one was the Lord’s. This meant if he had 19 cows, or 11 cows, or 10, only one was the Lord’s. SO that actually it amounted to less than a tenth. If however he decided to make the tithe a monetary one, that is to sell and to give in the form of money, or to retain it and to give the price, then he had to add a fifth to the price, but even then this did not equalize it fully, so that God in computing the tithe was generous to the farmer or to the cattle. If it was a monetary tithe it was strictly a tenth, but if the farmer retained it for his use he added a fifth of the cost of the tenth cow or the tenth bushel or the tenth box of fruit.
The second tithe which was to be used in rejoicing before the Lord actually involved no additional tenth, in that it was to be given of the first fruits of the flock, that is the firstborn of the flock, and of the first fruits of the field, which were to be consecrated unto God, and then he was to use them, either the produce or the money that came in from it, to rejoice before the Lord. The poor tithe, as we have seen, came every third year of a cycle of seven. This seventh year for the farmer was to be a sabbatical year. There was to be no pruning, no sewing, and no gathering. However in the seventh year there could be a gleaning, that is the widows and the orphans could be permitted to go into the field and take what they wanted. But the purpose was that the earth be rested and refreshed, it had an invaluable purpose in so a conservation in allowing the land to lie fallow. It also is specified as helping the beasts of the field so that the birds and the wild animals prospered thereby, and the whole balance of nature was furthered and retained.
Now tithing meant proportionate giving. As Deuteronomy 16:17 says “every man shall give as he is able”. Now Saint Paul quotes the same verse when he specifies Christian giving. Now a lot of people have said “Where do you see Saint Paul,{?} obviously does not want Christians to tithe or require them because he says “let every man give as he is able”” But people who say this do not know that Saint Paul was quoting the law of the time. The whole point of the tithe was that it did not put an undue burden on the rich, or on the poor. In other words the tithe, a tenth, was required of all equally. This meant then that the burden of the Lord’s work did not fall simply upon the rich or upon those who were zealous in giving. In this respect it is significant to look back a couple of centuries to the beginnings of Methodism. John Wesley did not believe in tithing, he spoke against it. And he could point with pride to the fact that the average follower of his movement which became, after it broke with the Church of England, Methodism, gave far more than a tithe. But what was the consequence? And some of the evangelicals within the Church of England called attention to it in his own day. It soon meant that those who were zealous and thoroughly dedicated were giving far more than a tenth and the burden was falling upon a handful in each congregation and the rest were not giving their share. So that the burden of the giving fell upon a handful of the rich and a handful of the poor, in other words those who had faith, rich or poor. And every time there was a need for funds these were the people who gave, and the rest did not give but a very small fraction.
This of course meant unfair giving, it meant that the church was carrying a great number of parasites, and the law of the tithe prevented this, it meant proportionate giving, it meant rich and poor gave on a proportionate bases. It established a fair pattern for all. Moreover the tithe established a concrete lawful basis for dealing with God. As Samuel Rutherford, one of the great Scottish church men said “I am persuaded that Christ is responsal and Law abiding”. What does this mean? He declared “I believe that Christ will be respond to those who keep His law, and He will keep His law in relationship to them”. Now those who will honor God will not rob Him of His tithes and offerings. God says “I will open the windows of heaven and pour you out a blessing that there shall not be room enough to receive it”. Again as G.H. Pember, an Anglican rector said some generations ago, and I quote “We know generally that the grace of God follows every act of direct obedience on our part, if we search out even the most minute commands of His law and do them, if we show that we would not have a word uttered by Him fall to the ground, we testify both to ourselves and to others that we do in very deed, and not in word only, recognize Him as our God and our King. Nor will He on His part be slow in acknowledging us as His subjects, as those who have a claim upon His aide and protection”
It is important, finally, to add this point. The tithe was not regarded by the law, as a gift to God. No man could say he was giving a gift to God until He gave above and over the Lord’s tithe. And these were called “free will offerings”. The free will offerings then were only the gifts above and over a tithe. Deuteronomy 16:10-11, Exodus 35 verses 3-7, Leviticus 22:21 and other passages refer to free will offerings, and this means more than the tithe.
Now why is the tithe such an explosive subject in Iron curtain countries? Why is that after guaranteeing, technically, freedom of religion, they prohibit anything that points to the old Biblical tithe? This would be illegal preaching by even the most licensed of the Soviet preachers, it would immediately mean the concentration camp. The reason is a very obvious one, once we recognize a fundamental principle; the tithe took care of the basic social functions of any society, education and welfare. As long as you had the tithe faithfully observed and required, whether it was the Old Testament period in the early church, in the colonial period, or in Europe, medieval Europe or Reformation Europe, the basic social functions were taken care of without the state having anything to do with it. Education was taken care of by the tithe. Welfare was taken care of by the poor tithe. Every important social function was met by the tithe, and the state therefore had only a limited area of jurisdiction. And as a result the tax of the state was so insignificant that it was scarcely felt. Is it any wonder that God in I Samuel eight in speaking to Samuel and Israel said that the tithe which acknowledged His kingship would be replaced when they cast aside His kingship and His tithe with a totalitarian regime? Now God speaking through Malachi says “Bring ye the tithes to the storehouse” so that the law of the tithe place a responsibility upon the people of God. When God says “bring the tithes to My storehouse” He meant literally this, first of all bring them to the appointed place whether it be in food and produce or cattle or in money. That it has to be My storehouse, it cannot be the store house of Baal, or of false prophets, or of those who are not faithful to their responsibility in the use of the tithe. So that the tithe was first of all required and second it had to go where it would be used for the Lord’s work. This places the responsibility therefore on the people who tithed to see that their money went to the Lord’s work, to education, to welfare, to various social functions under God. So that they were not tithing therefore if they took it where it was not properly used, it had to be truly God’s storehouse. It is not a tithe if it is misdirected.
A few generations ago Landsdale of The Church of England said “That the person who is against the tithe is a spiritual anarchist.” This is quite a bold statement, but if we analyze its significance we will see that it is right. He is a spiritual anarchist and a political totalitarian, we might add. Today the state has assumed the basic social functions of society, and it is requiring for more than a tithe to maintain them. The state has moved into education and welfare not in order to fulfill a responsibility under God, but in order to use them as stepping stones to power. Totalitarianism is the result. It is not enough to be against the states interference in education and welfare, it is not enough to oppose the states control of these basic social functions, these functions are necessary functions, they are not being discharged by the state. The state is not performing its duty in education, we are having miseducation, it is not producing a true welfare program, it is not helping widows and orphans, it is destroying them. It is creating a pattern whereby the breakdown of character and dependence on the state, is the goal. When I was in the pastorate I saw what welfare was. Those who are independent have nothing but trouble, when through need a widow or orphan is dependent on state welfare, federal welfare. Everything is done to breakdown those who have character. The preference is for those who are immoral, dissolute, totally dependent. Upon those who will look to the state as their God, not to those who briefly and temporarily want help and feel somehow they could get on their feet. The basic social functions are not met by the state, and the state has no intention of meeting them. The state is after power, and although it does lead to economic breakdown ultimately for the state there is no answer to the problem other than a continuing social crisis, anarchy, totalitarianism. Until the people of God cease to be spiritual anarchist and recognize the basic social functions must be met, God has provided a law whereby they can be met, we must meet them under God, and step by step strip the state of its pretensions, of its power, of all its claims, until it becomes again what it was intended to be, a ministry of justice and no more.
The law of the tithe therefore is an important one. It is an area of great neglect, and yet of tremendous social consequences. Not until the people of God are ready to reconstruct society in terms of a Godly pattern can we undercut the totalitarian pattern. Let us pray.
Our Lord and our God we give thanks unto Thee for the sufficiency of Thy salvation, and Thy word, and of Thy care. Thou hast provided a way for us, teach us to walk therein. Grant that we as Thy people may begin day by day by our living and our giving the reconstruction of things, and to conformity to Thy word. That we might strip the present totalitarian regimes that surround us, of their pretentions, of their arrogations, and of their power, that we might render Thee Thy due praise and power, and under Thee have a new birth of freedom. Grant us this we beseech Thee in Jesus name, Amen.
Are there any questions now?
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?} …and you keep it, and you don’t tithe {?}
[Rushdoony] This is what Malachi says [audience member interrupts] yes, Malachi makes it clear that we are robbing God if we do not give him the tithe. Now the tithe is to be computed on our income, this is the basis of the tithe. It is not computed on anything else, not on wealth. This is an important point because several times the church has misinterpreted the tithe. The tithe therefore is not to be computed on an inheritance; an inheritance is not a part of our income you see. A tithe was paid if we inherit something from our parents, or our relatives; they paid a tithe on that. There is no inheritance tax on it as it were, that is not a tithe, but income is to be tithed.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] No, that is not a tithe then because the tithe has to go to God’s storehouse. In other words, it is not a tithe if it doesn’t go to the proper place. And you see this is where the tithe puts the power back into the hands of the people. [Audience member interrupts] Exactly. You see, in other words, you are maintaining the basic program. Now it is significant that when the tithe was practice most people don’t realize how extensively it was practiced until recent years. It was people through their tithes who maintained schools from one end of the country to the other, maintained the churches, maintained orphanages through their poor tithes. But now of course those orphanages have been abolished as supposedly not conducive to the welfare of the child, but the purpose has been to destroy the whole of the Christian tithe and its social program. And some years ago I had an opportunity briefly to do a little bit of, to have a little insight into the work of the orphanages which originally were started with the gifts of Captain Dollar, The Dollar Steamship Lines, do you remember that firm? A very fine Christian, he established some orphanages and these were further maintained with a poor tithe of Christian people until not to many years ago. Now those tithes were everything the state regarded as horrible and were ended finally, as far as any of their historic function was concerned, they were converted into social welfare agencies. The boys had, I think, one matron to about 50 or 60 boys, they slept in dormitory rooms, about 20 to a room. Everything that the modern welfare social agency says is all wrong. But captain Dollars boys, as they were known, all turned out to be outstanding citizens. And California from one end of the state to the other, a generation ago was blessed captain Dollar’s boys, because they were trained in terms of character, maybe they weren’t picked up by a mother or a foster mother and maybe they didn’t get all the love and attention because each matron had so many boys to take care of, but they did get character.
Now this is the kind of thing that has been abolished you see. It’s much better, we are told now, to pay a mother who is breeding illegitimate children on a state subsidy, leave the children there, they get love and attention, or they’re getting something that is better for them. But in those days you could take your poor tithe every third year and say “now I’m going to give it to this and that cause because they are doing something, or to this individual” and similarly with the Lord’s tithe you could say “I am going to give it to a church and a school to things that I know are definitely doing the Lord’s work” you have the control, it belonged to God but you appropriated it and you had to be sure it went to God and His work or it wasn’t a tithe. This meant therefore that you had a check against misuse of your funds.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] No, it has to go to the Lord, and very often now days the organized ecclesiastical bodies have no connection with the Lord except by name only.
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] No, definitely not. We are responsible for the tithe even if there is no church existing that can be called by the name of the Lord. We still owe it to God.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes he would give the tenth and the twentieth and he could not choose, you see, he was to take the tenth and the twentieth, irrespective of the fact that the tenth and the twentieth might be crippled cows or his best cows. It had to be as they came. In other words he was not to choose out the best or the worst.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Well of course this is a problem that many people have concerned themselves over and there have been different kinds of answers some have said your actual income is only your net income, not your gross income because the state is taking that. We have no answer to that in scripture. I think we’re safer if we figure in term of a gross income, as I say there is not clear cut statement in scripture on that. But we still should figure in a way to be on the safe side.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, of course if the blackbirds steal it, he can’t harvest it, it’s what he has actually harvested [interruption] I think that’s a good argument and I accept it as valid as mine because as I said the scripture doesn’t speak on this point. I simply prefer to lean over backwards to be on the safe side, but they are blackbirds and there are crows or worse, these various governmental agencies because they are robbing us. So I would say there is no sin in computing it on that basis, we do not have any guidance as far as I can see at that point, it is up to our conscious. Actually you get what is your check, if you want to figure it out on that basis, fine.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, that’s a good question. Again it’s one of these difficult ones and there is no set answer. Now some Christian schools have re-organize so that you pay, to be specific, I visited one school which required, I believe, ten or fifteen dollars tuition and the rest was by donation. And it expected its parents to tithe. And to give a major portion of the tithe to the school, this way it got around the problem of a double burden on the parents with regards to taxation, they had a tax benefit from their tithing. It did not intend to rule on the matter as far as “did it constitute a portion of the tithe”. Here again I have to say that we cannot go beyond scripture to lay down a law, we have to go in terms of our conscious in a situation. Again I would lean over backwards in the other direction but if anyone has anything to contribute on the subject let them speak up now.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] I agree the Christians are doing far more than most of the churches are doing, they are doing the Lord’s work, but again I say it has to be a personal decision. I can’t speak for God.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Well there’s this today. If the people who are truly Christian would tithe, and see that the tithe went to the right place, the social impact would be tremendous.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, you see we don’t realize the tremendous social power of the tithe. If you have fifty families, the likely hood is that that out of those fifty families some having a larger income, some less, and just an average collection of people, you will have perhaps fifty thousand in tithes. Now this is an amazing fact. You can see how that much money in every fifty people, or every fifty families, put together, would have a social impact on the country if it were properly used. And this is why the power that is in the hands of the Lord’s people is not properly used or not realized. This is why of course in the Soviet Union there is nothing more deadly then to give the kind of sermon I have given this morning, and it is specifically spelled out, it cannot be done, you cannot even say to a congregation, supposing we were in the soviet union and if I were to say “one of our group is sick, unable to work and desperately in need supposing we take up an offering and give it to this person” it would lead immediately to the concentration camp for us. Because they realize the minute you do something that person cannot look to the state, you see, for help. And they’d rather have that person die waiting for the state agencies to come around and help them then for us to do something; because it would immediately say there is another power afoot in the land. And the minute you started that and then started talking then about a poor tithe periodically every third year, and a regular tithe to be used for religious and educational work in the community, you would create a rival power. Even in the Soviet Union with the limited amount of means those people have. That would overthrow the regime, this is their feeling. They realistically are aware of the potential in the tithe.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Well first of all most people in the churches you can’t tell them they’re dead, and you can’t the corpse hear you. But those that are still alive to a faint degree you have to tell them exactly what scripture says. We will get into the pattern of giving some months from now when we get into the laws of gleaning and so on, but of course the pattern there was, except in extreme cases they were to work for what they received. Now in the early church we know that if someone lost his job the church gave him one days income, that was all, the next day he was to go to work, and if no-one in the congregation could take him into their shop or place of business, the church helped pay for it so that on a very limited daily income he had a job with someone in the group. Now there was no incentive to stay on that job because he worked hard for much, much less, but he had to work, he had to earn it. This goes back to the Mosaic law, we’ll go into it as I say later, but it goes back also to the fundamental principle “if a man will not work, let him not eat” in other words, let him starve. That’s exactly what scripture was saying. Only elderly widows and orphans or people who were incapable of working physically were to be given direct charity.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Alright, a good question. Now it was a Levitical storehouse, was it not? You tithe to the Levites, the Levites tithed one tenth of the tithe to the priests. Which meant that one tenth of the tithe went to the sanctuary, so only one tenth actually went for the maintenance of the place of worship. The other nine tenths of the tithe went for the Lord’s work in a broader sense, did it not? And the Levite’s, in ancient Israel, as we studied the scripture, we find that they had the educational responsibilities, they also functioned as judges, as a kind of civil service very often, as lawyers, as musicians, and sometimes as artists. So you see what broad functions the tithe covered, now it went to the storehouse, the place where Christian work, or Godly work of a broad nature was then supported and furthered. That you can see why, for example, Kind David had very small expenses as far as taxation was concerned. Because he made use of the Levites, he made use of an already appointed group of people supported by the tithe, who thus had an independence from him, but he used them as a kind of civil service, so the functions of the tithe were very broad.
Now in the period of the judges about all the tax supported was the judge who was the governor, judge or governor is the same word, the governor of the country or the president you might say, and it supported the army that the army was often a volunteer army called together for the occasion, so the cost there was very little. And it supported a few officials, so the actual need for taxation was very, very limited. The Lord’s tithe had such a broad function and only one tenth of the tithe actually went for the maintenance of worship, now that proportion was not maintained in the new testament period but it gives you an idea of how broad the function of the tithe was, one tenth actually you might say went to the church, of the tithe in the Old Testament period.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes you’ve raised the case of the corruption of this in the medieval period. Lets take it at its worse. The amount of corruption in the use of the tithes by the medieval church doesn’t equal to the corruption you’ve had in one year in the poverty program in the United States. What did the tithe do, even at the worst periods of medieval corruption? It provided all the charity, it provided all the hospitals, until fairly recent times hospitals were religious organizations, a part of the tithe. It provided all the schools, it provided courts also, so that the people went to the courts for most cases, only in certain types of cases did you go to the civil court. And it provided a variety of other social functions. So granted that in the Medieval period there was corruption and it was real, yet those lands provided that the church held for all these functions through their incomes. The country was still living very cheaply, and the amount of taxes people had to pay was very little. So they were better off, as far as any drain on the society, then they are today. Today the amount of tax you pay is at least forty five percent of your income to all causes. It was never anything like that, that was just a tithe then. Today in Italy if the government landed on everybody with all the tax laws they’ve passed it would amount to 110% of their income. It won’t be too many years before we reach that point, because with the new taxes I wouldn’t be surprised if by next year it will be 55% of your income, which directly or indirectly will go for taxes. So granted, the medieval church is corrupt and we don’t want to reproduce that, it was still far superior to what we have today.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Of course there are advantages to modern life because we have all the technological advance of many, many centuries. But roads were being built in those days, very good roads in terms of the day. It’s interesting in this country for a long time to any state funds or federal funds for roads and the first time in this country when in Rhode Island the state tried to appropriate money for road construction the people rose up in revolt against it and they had to drop the program after they began it because the citizens said ‘this is like the establishment of religion, it’s a state subsidy to a particular group of road users, let private enterprise build it and charge tolls”. So they had to drop the program.
One more question, our time is up.
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] No, no it doesn’t. But you see it isn’t any drain on your pocketbook because you’re using it on yourself. And I said it was a part of the first fruits, well I won’t go into now, there isn’t time, but the first fruits and the first of the flock were to be dedicated unto the Lord. Then they were to be used in rejoicing before the Lord. Well our time is up now, we stand adjourned.
Professor: Rushdoony, Dr. R. J
Subject: Prerequisite/Law
Genre: Speech
Lesson: 3 of 5
Track: 5
Dictation Name: RR130C5
Date: 1960’s-1970’s
[Rushdoony] Exodus 12, the laws of covenant membership.
1 And the Lord spake unto Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt saying,
2 This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you.
3 Speak ye unto all the congregation of Israel, saying, In the tenth day of this month they shall take to them every man a lamb, according to the house of their fathers, a lamb for an house:
4 And if the household be too little for the lamb, let him and his neighbour next unto his house take it according to the number of the souls; every man according to his eating shall make your count for the lamb.
5 Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year: ye shall take it out from the sheep, or from the goats:
6 And ye shall keep it up until the fourteenth day of the same month: and the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it in the evening.
7 And they shall take of the blood, and strike it on the two side posts and on the upper door post of the houses, wherein they shall eat it.
8 And they shall eat the flesh in that night, roast with fire, and unleavened bread; and with bitter herbs they shall eat it.
9 Eat not of it raw, nor sodden at all with water, but roast with fire; his head with his legs, and with the purtenance thereof.
10 And ye shall let nothing of it remain until the morning; and that which remaineth of it until the morning ye shall burn with fire.
11 And thus shall ye eat it; with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and ye shall eat it in haste: it is the Lord’s passover.
12 For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the Lord.
13 And the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are: and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.
14 And this day shall be unto you for a memorial; and ye shall keep it a feast to the Lordthroughout your generations; ye shall keep it a feast by an ordinance for ever.
15 Seven days shall ye eat unleavened bread; even the first day ye shall put away leaven out of your houses: for whosoever eateth leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that soul shall be cut off from Israel.
16 And in the first day there shall be an holy convocation, and in the seventh day there shall be an holy convocation to you; no manner of work shall be done in them, save that which every man must eat, that only may be done of you.
17 And ye shall observe the feast of unleavened bread; for in this selfsame day have I brought your armies out of the land of Egypt: therefore shall ye observe this day in your generations by an ordinance forever.
18 In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month at even, ye shall eat unleavened bread, until the one and twentieth day of the month at even.
19 Seven days shall there be no leaven found in your houses: for whosoever eateth that which is leavened, even that soul shall be cut off from the congregation of Israel, whether he be a stranger, or born in the land.
20 Ye shall eat nothing leavened; in all your habitations shall ye eat unleavened bread.
21 Then Moses called for all the elders of Israel, and said unto them, Draw out and take you a lamb according to your families, and kill the Passover.
22 And ye shall take a bunch of hyssop, and dip it in the blood that is in the bason, and strike the lintel and the two side posts with the blood that is in the bason; and none of you shall go out at the door of his house until the morning.
23 For the Lord will pass through to smite the Egyptians; and when he seeth the blood upon the lintel, and on the two side posts, the Lord will pass over the door, and will not suffer the destroyer to come in unto your houses to smite you.
24 And ye shall observe this thing for an ordinance to thee and to thy sons for ever.
25 And it shall come to pass, when ye be come to the land which the Lord will give you, according as he hath promised, that ye shall keep this service.
26 And it shall come to pass, when your children shall say unto you, what mean ye by this service?
27 That ye shall say, It is the sacrifice of the Lord’s Passover, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, when he smote the Egyptians, and delivered our houses. And the people bowed the head and worshipped.
28 And the children of Israel went away, and did as the Lord had commanded Moses and Aaron, so did they.
29 And it came to pass, that at midnight the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle.
30 And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead.
31 And he called for Moses and Aaron by night, and said, Rise up, and get you forth from among my people, both ye and the children of Israel; and go, serve the Lord, as ye have said.
32 Also take your flocks and your herds, as ye have said, and be gone; and bless me also.
33 And the Egyptians were urgent upon the people, that they might send them out of the land in haste; for they said, We be all dead men.
34 And the people took their dough before it was leavened, their kneading troughs being bound up in their clothes upon their shoulders.
35 And the children of Israel did according to the word of Moses; and they borrowed of the Egyptians jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment:
36 And the Lord gave the people favour in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they lent unto them such things as they required. And they spoiled the Egyptians.
37 And the children of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand on foot that were men, beside children.
38 And a mixed multitude went up also with them; and flocks, and herds, even very much cattle.
39 And they baked unleavened cakes of the dough which they brought forth out of Egypt, for it was not leavened; because they were thrust out of Egypt, and could not tarry, neither had they prepared for themselves any victual.
40 Now the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years.
41 And it came to pass at the end of the four hundred and thirty years, even the selfsame day it came to pass, that all the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt.
42 It is a night to be much observed unto the Lord for bringing them out from the land of Egypt: this is that night of the Lord to be observed of all the children of Israel in their generations.
43 And the Lord said unto Moses and Aaron, This is the ordinance of the passover: There shall no stranger eat thereof:
44 But every man’s servant that is bought for money, when thou hast circumcised him, then shall he eat thereof.
45 A foreigner and an hired servant shall not eat thereof.
46 In one house shall it be eaten; thou shalt not carry forth ought of the flesh abroad out of the house; neither shall ye break a bone thereof.
47 All the congregation of Israel shall keep it.
48 And when a stranger shall sojourn with thee, and will keep the passover to the Lord, let all his males be circumcised, and then let him come near and keep it; and he shall be as one that is born in the land: for no uncircumcised person shall eat thereof.
49 One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you.
50 Thus did all the children of Israel; as the Lord commanded Moses and Aaron, so did they.
51 And it came to pass the selfsame day, that the Lord did bring the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt by their armies.
The commandment “Thou shalt have no other God’s before Me” the first commandment is the basic, the root commandment of all laws. Those who obey this commandment are members of God’s covenant. The two basic rites or rituals of the covenant are, in the old testament, the circumcision and Passover and in the new baptism and communion. It is important for us to understand the meaning of these covenant rites. First of all, circumcision, circumcision was instituted as the sign of the covenant with Abraham. And at the same time that God ordained circumcision He made it clear that the requirement of the covenant is obedience to God’s moral law. Circumcision is required by the law of Moses in Leviticus 12:3 on the eighth day. It was required of all who took the Passover. And we cannot understand circumcision apart from the fact that although circumcision was common in antiquity and into relatively modern times of all cultures around the world it differed radically from what you find in other cultures.
Now anthropologists, as they analyze Biblical circumcision, they say “Of course this was a common rite in antiquity and in modern times of every civilization we encounter”. Now this is true, but of course they do not tell us the origin of it. And we cannot understand this, apart from the fact that apparently all nations in the beginning had a general revelation from God, which made clear the fact of circumcision. They cannot account for the fact of circumcision and its universality. We believe of course that it was ordained by God, and it was established with Abraham. How it passed to other peoples, or whether it had been a sign previously to Noah and disappeared in Abraham’s family, we do not know. But we do know that its beginnings in the Bible are with Abraham. Its meaning was made clear from very early years from Abraham’s day. That what it signified was this, that even as the foreskin of the male organ was cut off, so man was to realize there was no hope in himself or in generation, or any act of man as far as saving himself was concerned. That there is no hope in generation or in any generation of man, but man’s hope instead is in regeneration.
Moses repeatedly speaks of the symbolic meaning of circumcision. He says for example “circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiff necked” that is rebellious against God. And he declares “The Lord will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thine seed, to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, that thou mayest live”
Another basic difference between pagan circumcision and Biblical circumcisions appears in the fact that Biblical circumcision was required on the eighth day. If circumstances prevented it, it was to be as soon thereafter as possible. Now this in of itself is a remarkable fact which indicates clearly revelation. Required on the eighth day, why? Why not on the first or the second through the third day? Well the answer is that recently we have discovered that the blood of the child, the first seven days of its life after birth does not permit coagulation, so that any operation runs the very, very great risk of bleeding to death. So that circumcision during the first seven days would probably resolve in the bleeding to death of the child, but beginning on the eighth day the blood coagulates.
Now all pagan circumcisions were performed at the onset of maturity, when the boy was about 13 or 14. Here is a remarkable difference. In all pagan circumcisions the meaning of circumcision was that now that the young man was reaching maturity, he now had adult capacities, and was able, in effect, to save himself. Because pagan cultures also recognize that there was something wrong with the race of mankind, that mankind was tainted, it did have propensities to evil, so that mankind was faced with a problem, it needed saving. But the basic thesis of mankind in all paganism, as well in all humanism today was that man was able to save himself. And so with this act of circumcision of the boy when he reached maturity, or began his adolescents, there was signified his initiate into the male fraternity of those were now going to rule and save mankind. It was a doctrine of self salvation. But as administered to child on the eighth day, in such an act the child was wholly passive; the child did nothing except to receive the rite. Except for the total, the sovereign grace of God, that this covenant rite which set forth salvation, represented not an act of man, it was not man who saved himself, that it represented the fact that it was entirely of God and all man does is to receive it, and his reception of it is passive. Circumcision therefore signified justification, regeneration, and sanctification.
The sign of the covenant in the New Testament was very early set forth to be baptism. In the Old Testament the priests were symbolically baptized when they put on their garbs, to set forth that which was to come, when the great high priest, Jesus Christ, came. And so the priests were symbolically washed, that is they were sprinkled or aspersed. And in Ezekiel 36:25-26 we have the sign of the new covenant set forth as baptism and as sprinkling. And so it is that Biblical baptism, being patterned after circumcision as the sign of the covenant, the membership in the covenant is to be administered to children. To adults only when they become converts late in life. But children of believers are to be are to be baptized even as in the Old Testament they were circumcised to indicate their membership in the covenant to indicate the fact that salvation is the act of God, not of man. It is entirely of grace.
Now the other great covenant rite is Passover, the communion of the Old Testament. And the Passover was to celebrate the redemption of Israel which was from Egypt. Nine plagues had been passed against Egypt, these nine plagues had laid each a blow but Egypt was still unwilling to surrender the Israelites, to release them from their slavery. And so came now the culminating judgment, the culminating plague against Egypt, the death of all the firstborn of man and beast. Only those who placed themselves under the blood of the lamb, signifying Jesus Christ the Messiah who is to come, and who killed the sacrificial lamb and sprinkled the blood upon the side posts and the lintel of the door were spared from the death of the firstborn. And so it was that night all Egypt found death striking every household, the firstborn. Now the firstborn symbolically represents in antiquity and until fairly recent times the totality, in that the firstborn represented the head of the household that was to take the place when the father passed, he was the head of the clan as it were. And so the death of the firstborn represented the death of the whole, as Saint Paul echoing this declared in Romans “If the first fruit be holy, then is the lot (that is the totality) holy” in that the first fruit, you see, represents the whole. So the death of the firstborn represented God’s judgment against all of Egypt.
Now this was a literal salvation. They were slaves; they were released from bondage by this judgment which the Passover set forth. So that when they ate it, that is the Passover lamb, “thus shall ye eat it, with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand and ye shall eat it in hast” ready to move. Ready to move how? Ready to move in terms of the terms of the fact that before the night is over, and before you have finished the meal if you dawdle over it, you won’t be able to eat because your salvation will of come. And we read that in the middle of the night, they were all ready on their way because Pharaoh said “Get out of the land! We have been destroyed by you and your God”.
So they ate with their staffs in their hand, with their sandals on their feet. And in those days people took off their shoes at the door (oriental fashion) when they came in, but they ate in the house with their sandals on their feet, their loins girded, that is belted up, ready to move. It was not only a spiritual salvation, it was a physical redemption, they were literally slaves. With this eating they were to free men. “For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast. And against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment, I am the Lord.”
Now the salvation of Israel was their deliverance from slavery in Egypt. It was spiritual, it was physical. Our salvation is the cross of Christ and His resurrection. It is for us also a physical as well as a spiritual redemption. It declares that God is able to overthrow and to destroy our enemies. To deliver us from the bondage of sin and death, to redeem us from all our enemies, unfortunately the sacrament has been made to spiritual. Its meaning has been limited to the spiritual aspect, but if we are to see it as exactly what the Passover was, the new Passover, we must therefore as we partake of the sacrament recognize that it declares unto us that the God who destroyed Egypt is able to destroy the tyrant and the enemy today.
We take it therefore to signify that we believe that Jesus Christ has died to redeem us from sin, that He is the Lamb of God, our Passover lamb. This all of the New Testament declares. But he is also our deliverer from the enemies around about us, and that we are to take it in this faith and in this confidence. But this is not all, what is the meaning of the Passover as it is declared? “It shall come to pass when your children shall say unto you, “what mean ye by this service?” and ye shall say “it is the sacrifice of the Lord’s Passover who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt when he smote the Egyptians and delivered our houses and the people bowed the head and worshipped”
Now, the whole of the Passover was geared to teaching the children the meaning of God’s salvation as well as celebrating it as a household, so that the youngest male child in family was old enough to talk and to understand, was to ask at the Passover this question “What ye mean ye by the service” and the father as he officiated was to make known to that child the meaning of the service. This meant therefore that the children participated, did they not? Now at this point I have very few in any branches of church who agree with me, but I have found none yet to tell me where-in I am wrong in my interpretation of scripture. But when we come to the New Testament we find that the Lord’s table was celebrated by the people of God Sunday evening, Why?
Because Sunday was a workday for them, it was not legal holiday in those days. So when did they meet? In the evening, in the home, and what does Paul tell us in Corinthians as he deals with the sacrament? It was in those days a potluck dinner because these men came from work, long hours, the woman folk brought the food there, they had the service and then they ate. Now the children all ate, did they not? And we have from the records of the early church and the early church fathers that the children did eat.
Now even after in terms of the injunction of Paul, it became a symbolic meal, the bread and the wine instead of a full meal, as in the very early years. The children still partook of it, and the service was geared to making known to the children the meaning of the Lord’s redemption. We cannot understand until we go to the origins of the Lord’s supper in the Passover. The totality of its meaning, it sets forth the whole salvation of our God. And if we take it only believing that we are saved from our sins, and that is all, important though that is, we are neglecting a basic meaning. It means salvation from sin and death on the one hand, and that God will destroy our enemies materially on the other hand. This is the double aspect of the Lord’s table.
But there is another aspect of the original celebration which we have in the thirteenth chapter of Exodus and must be discussed in connection with it. Briefly, because our time is short, in the thirteenth chapter we read that first two verses and verses 11-16.
“1And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, 2 Sanctify unto me all the firstborn, whatsoever openeth the womb among the children of Israel, both of man and of beast: it is mine.”
What does this mean? Now the Passover was a witness to blood in a double sense. The term “blood” is a common one in scripture, we cannot understand the bible without understanding the meaning of blood. Now the idea of blood is of life taken violently, of death. And as we read the various passages of scripture as they deal with blood we find first that there is no greater act of love, or of sacrifice, or of service than a sacrifice unto blood. Greater love hath no man then to lay down his life for his friend. Second, the greatest evil is to take life against the law of God. No life can be taken apart from the law of God. Third, the penalty for taking life unlawfully is death, and fourth the only possible atonement is life for life, blood for blood.
Now the Passover was a double witness to blood. On the one hand it was required of Egypt for unbelief. So that on the night of the Passover, the blood of the firstborn of Egypt was shed, it was taken, God killed them. Now what does this tell us about communion? Communion therefore is life to us because it is death to the ungodly. So that the act of communion has a double meaning, does it not? It is life to the people of God, it signifies their salvation by the law. Because it is at one and the same time a sentence of death upon the Egypt round about us.
Now how can we partake of the Lord’s Table without setting forth its meaning? It becomes a superstitious rite if the meaning is not proclaimed and understood, it is death to the world round about us when it is properly celebrated, when we affirm its meaning by faith. But Israel was no less sentenced to death for its sins because it was unbelieving, and doubting, and stumbling to the last moment. There was no merit in them to save them, it was of the grace of God, because they were the covenant people of God. And so when the sentence of death passed against Israel, who assumed the death? The lamb, the Lamb of God who set forth the Messiah who is to come, so that when John the Baptist first saw Jesus as he began his ministry, he pointed to him and said “Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the world”. And what did Jesus Christ do as he prepared the last week His disciples for the cross, for His death? He declared at the same time the sentence of death upon Jerusalem, upon all Judea, did He not? He pointed to the temple and He said “Not one stone shall be left standing upon another” He passed a death sentence upon the whole land, so that His atoning death was at the one and the same time life to the people of God, death to the enemies of God. This then is the double meaning of the Passover and of the cross of Christ of the Lord’s Table.
Now the command “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me” requires that a man know that his only hope of salvation is in the blood of sacrifice, the Lamb of God, to live in grateful obedience therefore to God, to recognize that all blood is governed by God and his law word and to eat, or drink, or do nothing, apart from God, “for whatsoever is not of faith is sin” Saint Paul declares. Now in this Chapter, the thirteenth, Moses called for the redemption of the firstborn of Israel. He said “Every firstborn of man and beast” Verses 11-13 as well as verse 1 & 2. The law was to me, because I have spared your firstborn by the sacrifice of my firstborn. Symbolically set forth in the Lamb, therefore it must be given to me, signifying that the whole must be given to me, so that every firstborn child had to be redeemed, that is a payment had to be made to God, signifying that the child was bought back from God. Every firstborn of the livestock had to be redeemed, or had to be killed if it was not redeemed, because it belonged to God the man could not keep it. Its set forth therefore the fact that they recognized that God had given His only begotten son to do for them rather than passing the sentence of death upon them. So in the redemption of the firstborn, they confirmed that which was set forth in the covenant, in circumcision. It was the Old Testament rite of confirmation.
Now Christ is declared by all of the New Testament to be our firstborn and our first fruit. Christ our first fruit is sacrifice for us, ourselves also which have the first fruits of the Spirit, “even we ourselves groan within ourselves waiting for the adoption” to whit, the redemption of our bodies. And so Saint Paul declares “Our salvation in Christ being therefore of soul and body, the culmination of it will be in the new creation, the resurrection of our bodies as well as of our soul” so that we shall live in the new creation in perfect redemption, in a physical life, in a glorified body as well as a resurrected soul, for that which the Lord’s table sets forth, as well as the Passover, is a total redemption, body and soul. Let us pray.
Our Lord and our God we give Thanks unto Thee for Thy so great salvation. And we pray our Father that Thou wouldst make the people of God in this generation mindful, that the sacraments set forth not only the salvation of our souls, but the judgment of death against Thine enemies. Grant that in this faith of the confidence we may move to prepare ourselves in the days ahead for the judgment that shall fall upon thy enemies and for our triumph and our redemption, in and of Thee, through Jesus Christ our Lord. In His name we pray. Amen.
Are there any questions now?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, well the first question, that this ordinance is to continue forever. That is, the end of time [audience member interrupts] right, this is true. But the ordinance is continued today in the Lord’s table, because you see our Lord at the last supper began the supper as the Passover, and then as the service came to a conclusion He said, now, in effect, this is the new Passover it is my body, and it is my blood, shed for you. So that the whole meaning of the last supper as our Lord instituted the last supper on that night in the upper room was to declare, here it is, to continue forever do this in remembrance of Me, the Passover so that the sacrament of the Lord’s Table used to be spoken of as the Christian Passover. It is continued, and it is to be continued until the end of time because also according to the New Testament we are now the Israel of God. Why did our Lord call twelve disciples? To indicate that, because the old Israel, the old twelve tribes were now apostate, and were no longer the chosen people of God, He was calling out of them 12 to indicate this , the church, is the true Israel of God. Thus, we are now the true Israel, and this was pointed out some years ago in a very fine statement by Pope Pious the 12th when he declared “Spiritually we are all (that is we Christians) are all Semites” in other words, we are the true Israelites.”
Oh, let’s see, the other answer was with respect to saint Paul [audience member interrupts] yes, except it doesn’t work that way and the fact is that Saint Paul did persecute Christians and was responsible for their death. But it was God who redeemed Him. Now those who say “I will do thus and so” are saying that “I am my own savior now or in the future, so it makes no difference, I will take care of the situation” They are thereby affirming themselves in effect to be their own God. They will manage their own salvation in their own good time, but God took and saved Saint Paul, even as He did the thief or murderer on the cross, by His own sovereign grace.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, “why the emphasis on unleavened bread?” First of all you find, if you go to Scofieldian interpreters that leaven is said to mean sin. This is not true, because otherwise why were leavened offerings required for certain offerings if you took to the temple, or to the tabernacle. Leaven signifies corruptibility, it signifies that which can bring, for example, mildew or spoil, or get rotten. Now, the offerings that man took to God were leavened offerings, to signify that which man did could pass away. Our leavened offerings, for example, are building churches which can in time decay, or be torn down, or be taken over. Our offering is work for the Lord which passes away, which changes. But when it is God’s offering, as it is you see in the Passover, what does it signify? The body and blood of Christ, the unleavened bread the body, and the meat the Passover lamb, the blood. Now signifying Christ, whose work is incorruptible and does not pass away, it therefore could not be with leaven, it was incorruptible.
[Rushdoony] Yes, Jeanette, you had a question
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] This is a good question, about the celebration of the sacraments here. We are not formally a church this is the reason why we have not observed any of the sacraments. But in the very near future we are going to ask to get a committee together to see what answer we can come up with, with respect to this. So we are planning to take a step, since so many of you have raised the question, to remedy this problem one way or another.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] No, this, that in Israel, every believer, everyone who was faithful to the covenant, had to first of all circumcise their child, which we do in baptism, the same basic rite. Then to confirm this they went to the sanctuary the first available opportunity and they redeemed the child, that is they made a payment so that they could take back the child, otherwise the child belonged to God and legally was under sentence of death. [Interruption] What? [Interruption] Alright, this way; since every Israelite had to redeem his child, and the firstborn of all his crop, we similarly are under the same law, that is we are under the sentence of death and this is symbolically passed against our firstborn. How is it fulfilled, literally? Our first born is given over unto death, in that we are now the household of faith, the family of God. And God gives His firstborn you see, and the sentence of death is passed against Him. So that Saint Paul speaks of Christ as being our firstborn, and we are called by Saint Paul the church of the firstborn. This is one of the terms used for the church, one of the names, the church of the firstborn. So that Christ dies as our firstborn
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, firstborn in that he represented the head, and it was the firstborn of the woman, or of the female with the livestock. So it was not the man’s firstborn, it was the woman, because it specifies “whatsoever openeth the womb”. So it was the firstborn of the female, of man and beast.
[Audience member] It could be a girl than…{?}
[Rushdoony] No, of the beasts it was anything and everything, but it was the male of…
[Audience member] What happened if they didn’t have any sons…{?}
[Rushdoony] They just had daughters then. [General laughter]
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] This symbolism has been drawn by the church fathers, now [interruption] yes, it’s a good symbol. And there’s nothing wrong with it. All we have to say is, it isn’t a part of a Biblical symbolism. So that while we can say it is a useful and a beautiful symbol, we cannot read it into the Bible since we’re not given any grounds for it.
[Same audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, as I say it’s a beautiful analogy, and I think it’s a good one.
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes the fact that the resurrection came on the eighth day after the full week, that circumcision signifying regeneration, also came on the eighth day as an analogy to resurrection. It’s a beautiful one which the church fathers drew. So there is a beautiful analogy there, but since the scripture does not itself draw out the analogy we must distinguish between the fact that it is a fitting one, it’s a good one, but the scripture doesn’t tell us there is this analogy, so there is a line of distinction there we must recognize.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, now here we have a problem with words because Exodus says they borrowed and they lent. Here you have older meanings of the word that we don’t recognize. For example to us “borrow” and “lent” has the strict idea of a temporary loan, something that is to be returned. But when the King James Version was translated it had the meaning of taking and of giving. Now what happened was this, they had been slaves you remember; now they said we are demanding wages pay us off, we worked for nothing, we are entitled to wages. And the Egyptians gave it to them, to get them out of the land, they didn’t want them around “Okay, here we’re paying you off tonight, get out” this was the meaning, so that this is a part of the changing nature of language which we encounter several times in scripture. I’ve cited before the fact that Paul says “Quit thee like men” which means “acquit yourselves, perform like men” and during World War II, when a tract was passed out by an Episcopal chaplain with this across the front “quit thee like men” blew his stack, because he read the word “quit” in a totally modern sense, which was not that intended by Saint Paul.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] Well after all the excitement that they had suffered and it came up to this moment where they were going to leave, did the Egyptians know that the Passover was coming, or had they already told them “take your wages and get out”?
[Rushdoony] Good question. The Egyptians knew this death sentence was coming because Moses made the witness to all of them and then you read that it was a mixed multitude that left. In verse 38 “and a mixed multitude went up also with them” So six hundred thousand men, which means about two million Israelites, plus foreigners, that’s what meant by the mixed multitude, Egyptians, and other peoples who believing what Moses and Aaron had declared, had preserved themselves by celebrating the Passover themselves also.
[Audience member] Do we have any evidence in the Bible that a mixed multitude that followed them became merged in the end? {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, very definitely, even in the wilderness journey we have references to some of the people from this mixed multitude, they were now Israelites, so they were actually a part of the people, and in a generation or two they had mixed in with them. Now when you actually estimate the blood of Abraham and Israel it was a very small strain, because first of all in Abraham’s household we read that he had a few hundred fighting men, did he not? So that when he went to battle and he took a few hundred men to battle with him, which means that he left the boys and the old men back at home tending the flocks. So, if you estimate the men of fighting age at about a third, you would have to estimate he had twelve hundred males in his house hold, and perhaps a household of twenty-four, twenty-five people all told. Now this was the family of Abraham, the chosen people to state {?}, Isaac represented therefore within Israel of the day, one/ two hundred twenty five hundredth {?} Abrahamic blood. Now when they went into Egypt, there were about one hundred and twenty with the blood of Abraham, of Jacob and his sons, but all the rests numbering a number of thousand of all this household you see, were not of Abrahamic blood. So hence the importance of the genealogies you see because the genealogies helped trace those who were strictly of Abrahamic blood in terms of knowing the line of the of the Messiah who was to come
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Well it was Egyptian; it was say Ammonite, Moabite, and so on. We know for example that David had a Moabite grandmother, Ruth, and we know that several other foreigners were married into the line of David, quite a few, so that it was a very slightly Jewish blood, a good deal of the time. In fact David was a red head according to scripture.
[Audience member] I was wondering whether real dark people, where were they exactly, you know the people who are supposed to be decedents of Ham. Where were they?
[Rushdoony] Well the Hamitic people, in antiquity, were not dark in the modern sense. We have all kinds of inscriptions and reliefs on the walls of the Hamitic peoples. Now the Ethiopians are among the Hamitic peoples of today and so are the Arab’s, some of the Arabs, the Egyptians. But even though the Ethiopians to this day reveal very strong, and non-Negroid features they have been so mixed with Negro blood that they have become very dark. But actually the strict Hamitic features in Ethiopia have very and beautiful lines, and they still maintain a difference. You have three groups in Ethiopia today that have very little to do with each other, the Ethiopians, the Arabs, and the Negroes. And there’s quite likely to be extensive civil war between the three when Haile Selassie dies, and already the Negroid peoples are in warfare against the others so at night there is another law that prevails. The…[Audience member] Where does the Negroid race come from?[Rushdoony] Well the Negro peoples, their origin, we don’t know from the Bible, except that this is the thing we must realize, as people separated, after the days of Noah, and went into various parts of the world, they began to breed in terms of certain standards that the different peoples considered to be beautiful, so that over the centuries, you had a pronounced development of certain tendencies that a people considered to be ideal. Now the Negro peoples went into the central part of Africa, there were no Negros in South Africa when the Dutch settled there about the same time that New York was settled, they settled in an un-inhabited area. The Negro peoples of that period were not very numerous, they increased under white man’s rule. They were a very small people in population, in terms of the world population. Rhodesia had only a handful of Negroes when the white man went there.Alright, these were peoples who have bred in terms of certain standards and had developed in that direction you see, by selective breeding you see just as plant, animal, breeders can breed and breed and in time develop a particular strand. For example your Western peoples are just beginning to change their tastes so we are not, we who represent the Western peoples, we are changing very rapidly in our looks. And the most conspicuous way in which we are changing is that what was once regarded as a sign of great beauty, from the Middle East to the North of Europe is no longer so regarded, and this is the eagle beak nose. Now the eagle beak nose was always regarded as a sign of tremendous beauty, of virility, of health, of strength. Well in the last hundred years this has been a liability rather than an asset. And yet actually our ancestors, in fact it used to be the case that if a child when it was born, had a small nose, I’ve called this to your attention before, what the parents did was to take and to work it, to make it eagle beak in shape, and longer. Now there was a good reason for this, the larger nose is able, because of the multitude of fine blood cells inside the nose, to take the air that you breathe, to render it sterile, to warm it to the exact temperature, so that it goes to your lungs as good, healthy, clean air. So that, you see people with the eagle beak nose had a better ability at survival.Whereas because in African the standard that became (and inscriptions and carvings reveal this) increasingly the ideal, the flat broad nose doesn’t have the same ability at preparing the air, and with a warm climate who needed it? This is why the Negroid peoples in climates like ours, in America and especially in Canada, have a low survival rate when they’re not in a welfare economy, they die off, they have a high susceptibility to disease, especially respiratory diseases. TB and other things, colds, pneumonia, so you see our ancestors knew what they were doing when they said that an eagle beak was a sign of virility, of health, of strength, and a strong man was a man with a masculine eagle beak. They knew more than we, in this respect.[Rushdoony] Yes?[Audience member] If you look at the matter of the and compare them to the a…{?}[Another audience member] {?}[Rushdoony] Yes, but they do have a long nasal passage. Well our time is really up, we’ve wandered far adrift [general laughter] but we’ll continue next week with the law of covenant membership.
Professor: Rushdoony, Dr. R. J
Subject: Prerequisite/Law
Genre: Speech
Lesson: 2 of 5
Track: 4
Dictation Name: RR130B4
Date: 1960’s-1970’s
[Rushdoony] Deuteronomy eighteen verses nine, following, God versus Molech. Deuteronomy eighteen verses nine following.
“When thou art come into the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations.
10 There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch.
11 Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.
12 For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord: and because of these abominations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee.
13 Thou shalt be perfect with the Lord thy God.
14 For these nations, which thou shalt possess, hearkened unto observers of times, and unto diviners: but as for thee, the Lord thy God hath not suffered thee so to do.
15 The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken;
16 According to all that thou desiredst of the Lord thy God in Horeb in the day of the assembly, saying, Let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God, neither let me see this great fire any more, that I die not.
17 And the Lord said unto me, They have well spoken that which they have spoken.
18 I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him.
19 And it shall come to pass, that whosoever will not hearken unto my words which he shall speak in my name, I will require it of him.
20 But the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of other gods, even that prophet shall die.
21 And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the Lord hath not spoken?
22 When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him.”
In Deuteronomy eighteen, verses nine through twenty-two, a variety of practices are cited as forbidden. All of which are with respect to knowing and controlling the future of man and the world. There are a variety of practices; there are necromancers, that is those who speak to the dead, spiritualists, trying to get a message from the dead, there are those who are diviners who through various forms of divination attempt to know the future, witchcraft or magic and so on. Virtually every particular form of attempting to know the future is here cited except one, which did not as yet exist in that part of the world, Astrology. But astrology is later cited by the prophets as being covered by these regulations.
Now at the head of the list is one particular form which sums up in essence all these attempts to have power over the future. “There shall not be found among you any that maketh his son or daughter to pass through the fire.” This of course is dealt with in numerous other regulations and it is defined for us very specifically as Moloch worship. It was Moloch worship M-o-l-o-c-h, sometimes spelled “Molech” that this and other scriptures had reference to.
Now we cannot begin to understand the significance of Molech worship with its demand of children as sacrifice until we begin to analyze the meaning of the word Moloch. The word Moloch is the same as the word which still appears in various of the middle Eastern languages as “Melech, Malik, Malec, and in various Western European countries as Milcom, Melcolm, Malcolm. Its meaning is “king”, it’s a very common word, it very often appears in various legitimate forms, but here it has reference to a Baal, a god. And the name of this god “Melech or Malec or Moloch meant king.
Moloch worship was state worship. The state claimed to be the true and ultimate order and religion was a department of state. The Moloch state claimed to have total jurisdiction over man and was therefore entitled to total sacrifice. It had absolute right over the life of man. Now this of course makes it very telling in terms of our modern culture, because the modern state is a Moloch state, it claims total jurisdiction over the life of man, over his income, over his life, over his property, and feels it can claim his right to live to expropriate his life at will, apart from the law of God.
But, the scripture makes it clear that no man has any right over another man’s life apart from the word of God. One of the related commandments is in Leviticus 19:26. This is a single sentence, and listen to it. “You shall not eat anything with the blood: neither shall ye use enchantment, nor observe times.” Now to the modern American as he hears this sentence it seems as though two completely unrelated ideas are brought together and so this is an illogical sentence. First it forbids eating anything with blood so that whatever animal is eaten has to be bled first. And then it says you shall not indulge in spiritualism or astrology or anything that involves an ungodly probing into the future. What do the two have in common?
Now the ban concerning eating anything with blood in it goes directly back to a number of commandments in the Bible which we will deal with more next week. Now these commandments required that whenever a man killed to eat, he did it only in terms of the law of God and by the permission of God so the animals which were legitimate food were specified. The laws had the help of man, his life in mine. And so certain types of animals were forbidden.
Then because all life comes from God, life can only be taken on God’s terms and therefore as man kills to eat that blood must be spilled upon the ground, and then covered over in order that it might be returned unto God by his permission and then the food eaten with thanksgiving. So that every partaking of meat constitute, according to scripture, an act of thanksgiving, a kind of communion meal with God, and hence the necessity that it be eaten with thanksgiving. This is specified in scripture, Saint Paul makes it emphatic. So that any attempt to take life or to govern life apart from the word of God is therefore Moloch worship. This is the connection. It constitutes an attempt by man to play at being God, to say “life is to be taken on my terms.”
Moloch worship claimed total jurisdiction over the life of man. Over his todays’ and tomorrows’. Just as today the state claims the right to take and conscript young men and send them to Asia or elsewhere at will, a violation of our constitution, the provisions of which were established on Christian grounds. Similarly it claims the right to take your income, in contempt of the law of God. It claims the right to govern you from cradle to grave in contempt of the law of God. In other words it claims total right to your life, and this is Moloch worship. Total jurisdiction means that the state is entitled to total sacrifice. And therefore this had to be set forth symbolically in worship in Moloch worship periodically, in that people would be called upon in a time of great national crisis to bring forth their children and offer them their firstborn son on the altar to Moloch. The Moloch state comes when people reject God as king for man or a statist king. And the first commandment declared “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me’
When Israel rejected the leadership of Samuel, Samuel went in dejection to God and God said “They have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me that I would not be king or “Moloch” over them” and so he told them the consequences of their course of action, their rejection of God. What would happen now that the state was being made king? And in I Samuel 8 verses 11-18 God declares the consequence of this rejection. And He says because they are choosing another king, in effect by implication another god, even though they claimed they are not; first He says there will be conscription. Second there will be compulsory labor battalions. Third there will be conscription of young woman as well as men. Fourth there will be an expropriation of property and livestock. Fifth the state will demand a tithe like God as its tax.
Now this is an interesting point. God declares that when a state demands as much as ten percent of anyone’s income, in support of self, it is challenging God, it is denying God, because God alone has the right as the absolute Lord and Landlord to demand that much of man. But today the state requires far more than ten percent, it is well over forty percent that all state, federal, and local taxes take of one’s income. And sixth God declares He will not hear a people who complain about paying the price of their sin, that the day will come He says, that the consequence of having abandoned Me will bring upon you all this oppression and when you reach the ultimate of this oppression you shall cry out to Me and I will not hear you. You will pay the price. The Moloch state therefore represents man’s supreme effort to command the future and to play God, to have himself as the other god before God.
Now in an related passage in Deuteronomy thirteen Moses goes into greater detail about the false prophets, and he declares that there are three kinds of instigators to idolatry and Deuteronomy thirteen verses one through five he says there is an instigation to idolatry by false prophets. Second in verses 6-11 by private individuals, and third in verses 12-18 by a city, by a community, and he declares there must be in all three cases the death penalty without mercy. Now the death penalty is not required for private belief, in other words a person can privately, in his heart, be an idolater, or an atheist, but it is for attempts to propagate idolatry, to subvert the social order. Similarly this law is not for a missionary situation, but in a Christian society that has established itself upon God’s law order. Then such a society has an obligation to invoke the death penalty against all those who attempt to subvert it because this is then the basic treason.
Every law order has a concept of treason, of betrayal of its fundamental law order. It either punishes such treason by death or it commits suicide. Now criminal offenses always exact a penalty, every time a crime is committed there is a penalty. It makes no difference whether the crime was great or small, every crime has a penalty. If it is a pencil that’s stolen, the person who owned that pencil is penalized to the extent that they have to replace that pencil. If it’s a million stolen the person who had that million, or the institution that had it is then penalized. The only question is “who is penalized”? Is it the criminal? Or is it the victim? According to Biblical law restitution is the requirement. The criminal is penalized. In our society today we are penalized, we are robbed, and then we have to pay to support the criminal in jail by means of taxation, so that we are doubly penalized. We lose that which we were robbed of and then we lose the price of the support in taxation. Every criminal offence always exacts a penalty. And we live today in such an age that the penalty is almost invariably paid by the victim.
Now, crime also exacts a social penalty as well as a personal penalty. The law order is breached; the peace and health of society are broken. If in a classroom a child cheats, and the child gets an undeserved grade, everyone in the classroom is affected because the whole order and the rank and the grading of the classroom is affected in that someone has of an eminence the position that is undeserved, and the law order of that classroom is broken. Or if a child speaks out of turn and gets away with it the peace and quiet of all is disturbed. Basic to any society is the integrity of its foundations, and if a society allows it’s foundations to be attacked then it perishes.
The Marxist make it clear. But if you’re going to attack Marxism you’re going to die. That is not the sin of Marxism. If this were the only thing the Marxist did we would have to say there’s good sense in their procedure. Because they are simply recognizing this is their foundation, Marxist philosophy, and they can never survive if they allow Marxist philosophy to be attacked and to be denied and for people to try to convert anyone away from it. A society either protects its foundations and declares that any departure from it incurs the death penalty and it perishes, and therefore the first commandment being “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me”. Nothing more totally destroys a society then the breaching of this faith in a Godly society. But of course this is no longer the faith of our society, we are a humanistic society and we are in a missionary situation. We have to convert and to re-establish as against these false prophets, false mediators, from the diviners to the necromancers, to the Moloch state, the false prophets, all of whom claim to be gods and man’s true mediators to salvation an the happiness.
The true prophet is cited in Deuteronomy 18 verses 15-19. God says “I will raise up unto the a prophet from the midst of thy brethren, like unto thee, very man of very man. Like unto Me, like unto Moses, a lawgiver who speaks for God, unto him ye shall harken.” All the prophets spoke in the name of the Lord as forerunners of Christ, and Christ was the prophet. And He comes, according to the promise given through Moses in the fullness of time, to speak unto them all that shall command him.
Isaiah in the eight chapter, the nineteenth verse, as he surveys the apostasy of the people, and their readiness to go to spiritualists, to fortune tellers, to seers and seeresses, to probe the future commented “and when they shall say unto you “seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep and that mutter,” should not a people seek unto their God for the living to the dead?” Or as the angels said, to the women at the tomb, why seek ye Him that liveth, among the dead?
In the concluding passage of the eighteenth chapter Moses turns to the false prophets. The false prophet when he speaks a thing in the name of the Lord, claiming to be a faithful servant god, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass that is the thing that the Lord has not spoken, but the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. Thou shalt not be afraid of him. Today we live in a society that has for some years been given over to Molech worship. The state has been man’s king and God, and we are now reaping the consequence. I referred a few weeks ago to the incidence that had just taken place about two weeks ago at the Sorbonne during the student rebellion in Paris. There was in the auditorium that read “No smoking” and someone had written under it in large letters on the wall “it is forbidden to forbid.” Then someone came along and wrote on the outside walls in large letters a sentence that became the motto of the students “I take my desires for the truth, because I believe in the truth of my desires.” this in anarchism and it is Moloch worship. In which everyman makes himself his own Moloch, and says all things must be sacrificed to me, all law and order, all humanity, because I deem it so.
One of the aspects of Moloch worship that is very significant is that as a part of the paganism it represented, all kinds of strange sacrifices of humanity were required of man, not only the sacrifice of the human, of surrendering ones children to be burned on an alter before this image. But also all kinds of mutilation, all kinds of denials of humanity, and it became a part of this kind of Baal worship to have as well priests that were castrated; it was a denial of humanity, and an attempt to be as God, by surpassing humanity. This was a deep impulse in the ancient world a part of its humanism, because when men deny God the essence of humanism is that it makes man to be God. And there is legend concerning Empedocles the Greek philosopher, that in his old age, he decided to be a god and so he climbed up onto mount Etna and threw himself into the crater of the volcano to become a God, it was his form of Moloch worship. And today all over the world whether it is the Totalitarians or the Anarchists self destruction is the method by which man are seeking to be as gods. Against this we must declare God said “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me”. For apart from Him man cannot live, and his course becomes self destruction. Let us pray.
Our Lord and our God we thank Thee for Thy word and we thank Thee that Thy word speaks to our condition and gives us strength, to live, to overcome, to triumph. We thank Thee our Father that we can face all our today’s and our tomorrows in the supreme confidence of victory. Bless us to this purpose. Grant us Thy peace, and Thy guiding and provident care, that in all things we may be more than conquers through Him who loved us, even Jesus Christ our Lord. In His name we pray, Amen.
Are there any questions now? Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] No, but of course the meats are bled, what little is left in we are not to worry about, this is re-emphasized in Acts 15 in the counsel of Jerusalem, so that it does apply to us.
[Same audience member] {?}…How can you know when you are a Christian?
[Rushdoony] You know that you are Christian when…[audience member interrupts]… we’re not a Christian because we do everything that we are told, we do what we are told to do as our gratitude to God for His salvation. We are a Christian when we accept Christ as our Lord and Saviour, when by faith we accept Him as the only one who can save us. When we recognize that it is not what our hands have done, or can do, but what he has done for us, and then our response is to keep His word to the best of our ability. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, this is the declaration over and over in the New Testament.
[Same audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, well not necessarily, some people have emotional experience, others they find imperceptibly they are moving day by day more and more in the direction of faith and of obedience and as they look back they can see that a great change has taken place.
[Same audience member] Both.
[Rushdoony] Both, yes. This is more commonly the situation, it is a growth that begins. Because growth is not a dramatic thing, you see the seed begins its life underground, it’s growing but you don’t see it, but suddenly you notice it’s there. You go and come and then you notice why it’s really popped up, it’s getting to be quite tall, and this is the way most Christian growth is.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Is it a sin to use divining rod to locate water? This is a question that is often debated, it is not covered by any of the commandments particularly, we don’t really know what is involved in this. Myself I feel a little inclined to be hostile to it until I fully determined in my mind what all this involves. I have gotten a book on water witching to say it’s a historical survey and one of these days I’ll get around to analyzing it and then I’ll know when I know exactly is meant {?} there, a more of what jurisdiction the law here has in with reference to it.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes I know the verse… [audience member interrupts] …Yes, that’s a verse that is very often used “if my people which are called by My name shall humble themselves and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sins and heal their land” II Chronicles 7:14. That’s very true, but, it cannot be read in an antinomian, anti-law fashion. What do I mean by that? Simply this, God does say in I Samuel 8 verses 11-18 “That if you cry out in that day I will not hear you” What does He mean by it? Well namely that when you are crying out against the penalty of your sins, I will not hear you. But if there is true repentance II Chronicles 8:14 says, I will hear you, but this does not mean I will turn away the consequences. In other words, you’re going to pay for it all the same but I will give you an opportunity thereafter. In other words if you have a hundred dollars, a child let us say has a hundred dollars and they waste it, and they go and sorrow and repent to their parents, the parents can say “I forgive you” but they aren’t going to say, unless they’re fools “I’ll restore the hundred dollars to you that you blew”. So God is saying, you’re going to pay for it, but I’ll give you another opportunity, but it doesn’t mean you’re going to get back what you lost, you pay the price.
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] II Chronicles 7:14. Yes, yes.
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, I haven’t read the book yet, but of course I’ve read the little portions of it, and of course this is what he’s talking about apparently, Moloch worship, in The Hideous Strength.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience Member] Would it not be lawful to convict {?}
[Rushdoony] No, because we have a great many passages in the law that deal with this, they specifically cite the kinds of meat you can eat. For example beef, and lamb, and kid.
[Audience member] Where does it say that?
[Rushdoony] We’ll come to that later on. But the law has a great deal, we’ll go into the significance of these commandments later on when we get to it. But it cites the kinds of meats that are given by God as foods for man and then it says specifically that the blood is to be spilled on the ground as an offering to God, recognizing that one takes it by His permission and the food is then to be eaten with thanksgiving. So it is definitely a vegetarian kind of commandment.
[Same audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, unless the practice has been changed this has been in Western society except in a few places in Europe, very much the requirement, it used to be, unless it’s been changed recently, that the laws required the method of butchering and the blood had to be let out. Now it is extensively used I believe for making of fertilizers and other things today.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience Member] {?}
[Rushdoony] We’ll come to this, these are good questions, but we want to deal with that later, we’re going to go into the significance of this. We’ll touch on the blood a little next week but I don’t want to go into the whole of the law at once.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience Member] {?}
[Rushdoony] There is no evidence in scripture that we are only to eat meat at certain times. None whatsoever, it is simply given to man as food. And it depended on the financial means of people, say in the Old Testament times, how often they ate meat. And that was it.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience Member] Would you say that there was specific {?}
[Rushdoony] Oh yes, there was an idol, right, a very definitely an idol
[Audience Member] In which of Marx’s works did he present {?}
[Rushdoony] Well first of all, that’s a difficult question because Marx is such a long winded writer. It sometimes took him forever to say something, and when he said it, it wasn’t clear. But I would say in some of his early writings, which you can get in a paperback entitled “Marx’s Early Writings” you find some of his plainest and best statements. Then of course the Communist Manifesto that’s very important, then in the volume On Religion which is a collection of his various things here, and also on German philosophy. I would say one of the best ways right now to understand Karl Marx is to read an excellent introduction which will give you some choice citations from Marx as well as where to go for them is book that just came out this past week by Gary North, entitled Marx’s Religion of Revolution and I would say this you must get and read, you’ll have a superb analysis there.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience Member] {?}
[Rushdoony] I think it was because he was confused, I really do, I think that some like Lord Keins {?} deliberately tried to be pompous and confuse people, but Marx was a very confused and sick mind, so that there was this tendency to gush, when he wrote it just came pouring out, every kind of badly digested idea.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience Member] {?}
[Rushdoony] It really has no ground in either, the forty days of lent, and the fasting at Lent have been made into a kind of time for spiritual meditation and so on, but according to the entire Bible, the old and new testaments, there was only one day of fasting required on the day of atonement of the Old Testament believer. Now that disappeared, because Christ’s atonement on the cross made the Day of Atonement fulfilled. And our Lord said with respect to fasting, now that the bridegroom was come, He being the bridegroom of the church, the time for fasting was over. So that any mandatory time of fasting it does not exist as far as the scripture is concerned. It is mandatory only by church regulations. Now fasting is not forbidden, it is stated that it can be a voluntary thing for a season of prayer and meditation but even there when Saint Paul speaks of it, neither a wife nor a husbands can partake of a fast without the permission of the other.
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] How do I explain our blindness to the massacre {?} of young men as against..yes well this is a contrived thing to a great degree. I think of course what happened this last week was wicked, murder is always a fearful sin, it is an offense against God’s commandment. But the aftermath of that was even more wicked, because within a matter of minutes you had various dignitaries saying, substantially the same thing, for example Senator McCarthy, he got on the air and said this was the act of a lone deranged man. How did he know? How does anyone know? And how did he know within 3-4 hours that this was the act of a lone deranged man? They didn’t know the name of the man, they didn’t know anything when he so said. This was very presumptive.
Then he proceeded to say we are all guilty, now that was the essence of wickedness, to put the guilt upon us, when certainly we did not do it, and there is no ground in scripture to put guilt upon us for the act of a single man, especially someone who has no connection with us, who is a foreigner, not even a citizen. Then after he finished speaking what the announcers said was that we must not speak of this man as the murder or the assassin, only as the alleged assassin because it would prejudice the case in the courts. He could never be referred to except as the alleged murder. So he’s only the alleged murderer but we are, according to a Senator of the United States and dignitaries from Washington to California, the guilty ones. Now this is wicked, it indicates a fearful depravity when you’ve come to a situation where the innocent people are the guilty ones.
I’ll take just a minute or two more, our time is really up, but I was in Washington D.C. and mostly outside of it, from Thursday until yesterday afternoon, and I did not go into Washington itself except on the outskirts. I had no interest to go and see insurrection city… the names given back there for it [general laughter] I’m using the polite term I ever heard, the only one fit to use for insurrection city [more laughter] but I did not see any sense going in and seeing things of that sort, and of course I was told by any number of people, almost everyone that I met, told me of some experiences they had had in the area. Look, it isn’t safe. Most people who have anything to do in Washington live in the suburbs and work there, go in and out as quickly as possible, they do not go around at all. But to back up a bit, one of the things they stated was that they believed that the march on Washington and on the Pentagon earlier was a marvelously staged production. That platforms are setup in numerous places where the T.V. cameras could be placed, the action was in front of the camera’s. It was in front of the cameras too that the lines of the troops broke and they were able to get through. And one person who works for the government said “I believe they wanted the lines to break at one point, that the lines could have held if it had been so ordered, that they idea was for you to see this and to be terrified that these things have, as part of their purpose, to throw fear into the hearts of the people.”
Then when Martin Luther King died, as soon as word of the rioting and burning in Washington hit all of the various government offices, the thousands upon thousands of people who are working didn’t wait, nobody ever told them “There will be no work the balance of this day or tomorrow” as the word reached them, people began to shut their desks, and put on their coats and the secretaries picked up their handbags and they started to walk out. So without a word from anybody, from every building of the federal government, the crowd started streaming out. The few who waited around wondering “should I stay or should I leave” when they decided to leave, it was too late, the busses had stopped running, and not because they had been told to stop running. And so some people had to walk ten and fifteen miles to the suburbs to get away.
There had been burnings virtually every night and sometimes seven or eight since then, and yet the mayor of Washington, who is of course colored, together with various other officials who are white, call it “a base slander” that there’s anything wrong or that Washington is not now a very safe city. So that they are regularly making statements assuring everyone that it is a safe and quiet place, in spite of the nightly burnings. It’s not uncommon as people drive in and out to have pop bottles, rocks, and what not, come through the car windows. One man I was talking to, a minister, had as he stopped at an intersection had hoodlums come up and try to get into his car. This is the kind of thing that prevails. This is the most federally controlled area of the United States, and it is the most lawless part of the United States now.
Friday I asked to go to Mount Vernon, I had not seen that on my previous visit, we’d gotten there too late. The man who took me, remarked when we went there, he said “this is really amazing,” he said “I didn’t expect to see such few people here, I knew that business men in Washington were saying business was 25% to 50% off” he said “Mount Vernon being outside of Washington, I still thought there would be crowds here” and he said “this time of the year, on a Friday afternoon there would be 500 people just standing at the front door of the house” . There weren’t 50 people all over the place in the house and around the grounds. So you didn’t have to stand in line, you just walked in. Now this is the situation.
One of the interesting things was I spoke at the commencement of the Fairfax Christian school and there was a crowd of a little better than 1000, approximately 1100 for the commencement, but neither there, nor any graduation in the Washington area, wear their caps and gowns. The two big supply houses in Washington D.C. had been looted of every cap and gown during the rioting. Now what in the world they wanted to do with the caps and gowns these hoodlums, I don’t know. But every last cap and gown was taken. This is the kind of thing that went on.
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] No, no I don’t think he represents any special evil as against anyone else. And the time may come when a great many people will be saying that John and Robert Kennedy were fortunate in that they died and others live to go through what may be coming. Our time is up.
Professor: Rushdoony, Dr. R. J
Subject: Prerequisite/Law
Genre: Speech
Lesson: 1-5
Track: 3
Dictation Name: RR130B3
Date: 1960’s-1970’s
[Rushdoony] Deuteronomy six, the first commandment and the Shema Israel.
“1 Now these are the commandments, the statutes, and the judgments, which the Lord your God commanded to teach you, that ye might do them in the land whither ye go to possess it:
2 That thou mightest fear the Lord thy God, to keep all his statutes and his commandments, which I command thee, thou, and thy son, and thy son’s son, all the days of thy life; and that thy days may be prolonged.
3 Hear therefore, O Israel, and observe to do it; that it may be well with thee, and that ye may increase mightily, as the Lord God of thy fathers hath promised thee, in the land that floweth with milk and honey.
4 Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord:
5 And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
6 And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart:
7 And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.
8 And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes.
9 And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.
10 And it shall be, when the Lord thy God shall have brought thee into the land which he sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give thee great and goodly cities, which thou buildedst not,
11 And houses full of all good things, which thou filledst not, and wells digged, which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not; when thou shalt have eaten and be full;
12 Then beware lest thou forget the Lord, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.
13 Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God, and serve him, and shalt swear by his name.
14 Ye shall not go after other gods, of the gods of the people which are round about you;
15 (For the Lord thy God is a jealous God among you) lest the anger of the Lord thy God be kindled against thee, and destroy thee from off the face of the earth.
16 Ye shall not tempt the Lord your God, as ye tempted him in Massah.
17 Ye shall diligently keep the commandments of the Lord your God, and his testimonies, and his statutes, which he hath commanded thee.
18 And thou shalt do that which is right and good in the sight of the Lord: that it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest go in and possess the good land which the Lord sware unto thy fathers.
19 To cast out all thine enemies from before thee, as the Lord hath spoken.
20 And when thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying, What mean the testimonies, and the statutes, and the judgments, which the Lord our God hath commanded you?
21 Then thou shalt say unto thy son, We were Pharaoh’s bondmen in Egypt; and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand:
22 And the Lord shewed signs and wonders, great and sore, upon Egypt, upon Pharaoh, and upon all his household, before our eyes:
23 And he brought us out from thence, that he might bring us in, to give us the land which he sware unto our fathers.
24 And the Lord commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear the Lord our God, for our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as it is at this day.
25 And it shall be our righteousness, if we observe to do all these commandments before the Lord our God, as he hath commanded us.”
The sixth chapter of Deuteronomy is one of the great chapters of scripture our Lord during His temptation quoted it twice in His response to Satan. Verses four and five are the “Shema Israel”, the morning and evening prayer of Israel, and the term “Shema Israel” is the first two words: “Hear O Israel”. This chapter is exceedingly important in an understanding of the law of scripture, in particular of the first commandment. The prologue to the law declares “And God spake these words saying “I am the Lord Thy God which brought thee out of the land of Egypt out of the house of bondage.” Then the first commandment “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.
In this declaration God identifies Himself as the self existent one, the absolute one, the law. His name which is variously given and translated as “Jehovah” and as “Yahweh” means “I am that I am” that is, the self existent one; the one who is beyond definition, He who is, He in terms of whom all things are defined and created. Moreover God in this declaration reminds Israel that He is their Saviour “Thy God” and that the relationship is therefore one of grace. The law is given therefore to the people of grace, to those saved by grace, and it is their way of life. The first response therefore of grace, as well as the first principle of law is this; “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.”
Now in Deuteronomy six, in the first three words or verses, the implications of the first commandment are cited by Moses, and they are told that they are to fear the Lord and to keep all His statues. Now fear in our day and age is regarded as something defective religiously and spiritually, but it is presented throughout the scripture as something clean, healthy. The fear of the Lord is clean. And we are again and again told that it is the hallmark, not of something that is mentally defective or spiritually defective, but of sanity, of fullness of mind. Since God is God, the absolute Lord of heaven and earth it is the mark of a sane and healthy mind to fear Him. We are fearful of those who have power over us. We would be fearful if tomorrow we knew that an enemy power had sufficient force to destroy us at will and threaten to use that against us. How much more then is it a mark of healthy to fear the absolute and sovereign God and to know that we are totally in His hands?
The fear of God is therefore a healthy thing, and fear we are told by Moses should prompt obedience. And those who fear God and obey Him will move in terms of obedience and their days shall be prolonged. Then in verses four through nine we have first the Shema Israel in verses four and five and then the implications of it. The Shema Israel, “Hear O Israel the Lord our God is one God, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all Thy heart, and with all thy soul and with all Thy might.” This is one of the most central declarations in all scripture. It affirms the unity of the Godhead. The Lord our God is one God.
Now this in itself not only affirms indirectly the doctrine of the trinity but also the oneness of the trinity. Because when it speaks of “the Lord our God” the word “God” there is elohiym, plural. So that plurality of God is used in the very word, the word used is not “el” singular” but “elohiym” plural; God is more than one person, but the Lord our God who is more than one person is one God. One Lord. Thus there is one God and one unity of the Godhead. And the implication of this very definitely is since there is one God there is one Law. Because one sovereign God governs and orders as well as has created all things in heaven and on earth. Therefore there is one law system for the entire universe, one God, one law.
Now the old expression that characterizes polytheism was “lords many, gods many, laws many.” Our modern worldview is polytheistic. That is, it implicitly believes in many gods. Because with our pragmatic relativism what our modern philosophers say is “all religions and all systems are equally good, Buddhism is good for the Buddhism’s and it’s true for the Buddhists. Mohammedanism is true for the Muslims, and it’s good for them, and Shintoism is good for the Japanese and it’s true for them.” And so on around the world. In other words there is no one God, one truth, one law.
Now if you have such a perspective, and this is the modern perspective, how then are you going to have one world order? Because this is what they want at the same time. Not by conversion. We who believe in one God seek to convert others to that faith because we believe it to be the truth. But if you say “all are equal” how are you going to bring all into one? Only by coercion, only by imperialism.
Now the UN charter at one and the same time, because it wants a one world order and also declares there is no distinction between religions, all are equally true and equally false. So how then can it bring about a one world order, except by coercion? If you deny the one true God then you then you deny a one true law, and there is no possibility of converting anyone to truth, since the truth is denied. And the only way you can bring the world together then and people together is by coercion. In terms of the faith given here the world can be brought together not by coercion but by faith, not by an enforced unity but by being one in the Lord.
But our modern world perspective is polytheistic, it denies any one true God. It affirms that all are equally valid, lords many, laws many. One God, one law is our faith. And because there are lords many and laws many in the modern worldview, at the one and the same time that they are talking about one worldism they are engaged on the most fearful program of coercion that the world has ever seen. Now there is no escaping that coercive perspective apart from a return to the faith, hear O Israel the Lord our God elohiym who is many, more than one person, is yet one Lord, One God.
Moreover it follows because God is one, truth is one. It is the same in every age. There is therefore no evolutionary progression. No different dispensation. It is the same doctrine in every age, the same program of salvation in every age. The people of the Old Testament where by the grace of God, which the whole sacrificial system set forth, their salvation depended upon the atonement affected by the lamb Who was a substitute for the One who was to come.
The only difference between the old and new testaments is that which was set forth symbolically in the lamb was openly and fully set forth in Jesus Christ. But the same doctrine of salvation, the same God, the same truth. Because God is one, truth is one. As God declares “I am the Lord, I change not”. And those who set aside the law, who are antinomians, anti-nomos, law are polytheistic and the sad fact is that a vast portion of the Christian church today is polytheistic. It actually worships many gods because it denies the law of God, the one unchanging law, because it falls into dispensationalism which is a polytheistic point of view.
One of the leaders of campus crusade has said that the law was given by Satan! When scripture says: “God spake these words and the law was given” is this not only anti-Christian, but polytheistic? It goes back to the Joachimite heresy which saw the God of the Old Testament as one God and the God of the New Testament as another God. It is antichristian to the core. One absolute God means one absolute unchanging law and one absolute unchanging truth.
Neo-orthodoxy or Barthianism which is sweeping the church today, which governs virtually every protestant seminary, which governs the Vatican counsel, holds to the freedom of God, that is, God can be different tomorrow from what He is today. And so it is inescapably universalistic; because every truth is equally good and equally bad, then anybody can be saved by any idea of truth and by any religion. And so cardinal Bea says: “Everybody is going to be saved their own way.” and so Karl Barth says (the swiss theologian) “Everyone is going to be saved.” They have no truth, every man truth is equally good.
“And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: 7 And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. 8 And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. 9 And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.”
Another point in the Mosaic law the requirement also is for the blue thread on the fringes or tassels of the garments. So here we have a statement that the law is to written upon the posts of thy house and on thy gates, and the signs upon thy hands so that as a tape with the law written upon it it shall be upon thy hand and as frontlets between thine eyes.
Now there are some who say that this statement and the related ones elsewhere in the law are to be taken as spiritual that we are to have them as it were on our gateposts and on our eyes and arms. But this is nonsense; the requirement is very specific and very literal. And this was required of Israel, it was the covenant sign of the Old Testament period. Even as circumcision was then the covenant sign and the Passover. It has been replaced for us by the covenant sign of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.
But this does not mean there was anything wrong with it or ridiculous about it. We conform ourselves to the world regularly we dress as the world requires we should dress. And what was wrong in God requiring that Israel should dress as He required in these points; to show God that they were a people separated unto him and conforming unto Him? There was nothing ridiculous about it, in fact it was a beautiful and a marvelous sign of the covenant. God does not ask it of us, but it does not mean that there was anything lesser or lower about it than our covenant signs.
At the same time the declaration is “Thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children” and the concluding verses twenty through twenty-five have the same requirements.
“And when thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying, What mean the testimonies, and the statutes, and the judgments, which the Lord our God hath commanded you?
21 Then thou shalt say unto thy son, We were Pharaoh’s bondmen in Egypt; and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand:
22 And the Lord shewed signs and wonders, great and sore, upon Egypt, upon Pharaoh, and upon all his household, before our eyes:
23 And he brought us out from thence, that he might bring us in, to give us the land which he sware unto our fathers.
24 And the Lord commanded us to do all these statutes.”
This is a declaration that education is basic to and inseparable from total obedience to the Law and to worship. Indeed it puts education even before worship, that without education we cannot worship God. This means Christian education. It means teaching such as we are having right now because this is education that we might know the law of God in order to worship Him properly. Education is therefore specified as basic to true worship and true obedience. Where there is no vision the people perish, that is vision, sight, knowledge, of God’s law word. Therefore this is to be taught diligently unto thy children.
Moreover in verses ten through fifteen we have a very important declaration, the essence of which is “ye shall not go after other Gods or the gods of the people which are around about you for the Lord thy God is a jealous God among you, lest the anger of the Lord thy God be kindled against thee and destroy thee off the face of the earth.” The jealousy of God; this is repeatedly stressed throughout the scriptures, it is especially stressed at this point and the doctrine of the jealousy of God is one of the most beautiful and one of the most important in scriptures. It declares unto us that God is personal, He is not an impersonal force.
The doctrine of Karma of India sees God as an impersonal force so that everything you do wrong you pay for, and so you spend untold generations in reincarnation to work out your karma. But because God is a person, the whole of our relationship to Him is not an impersonal thing but highly personal. A charge of electricity effects you impersonally, if you touch a live wire certain things happen given certain conditions and it doesn’t make any difference whether the person who touches it is the president of the United States or a criminal. The electricity is impersonal, it moves in terms of the impersonal laws. But God is a person, and therefore He declares unto us that His reaction is one both on the one hand of grace and forgiveness and on the other hand of wrath, because He knows the heart and He moves in terms of His law which governs not only the heart of man but his actions, the totality of man.
And so the doctrine of the jealousy of God is important. It also declares that God manifests a love to His people, because it is impossible to have love without jealousy. An illustration which I’ve used before and is worth using again and again that it might stay in your minds is the one of a husband who after being out all night turns up at seven o’clock when his wife is at the breakfast table and says to his wife “my dear I’m sorry to be late for breakfast but I spent the night with Mrs. Jones” and she says “Well sit down dear I forgive you, quickly sit down that you might have your breakfast before it gets cold”. Now this illustration illustrates the absurdity of love without jealousy, it’s an impossibility. Any woman who so responded would have no love, because love is jealous. And God is here declaring “I am a jealous God” because having called you by My grace and having put my love upon you I am jealous where my love is manifested and therefore you shall be of both My love and My jealousy at anything that transgresses against Me and My relationship with you.”
Then in verses sixteen through nineteen. The declaration ye shall not tempt or try or test the Lord your God as ye tempted Him in Massah.
“Ye shall diligently keep the commandments of the Lord your God and His testimonies and His statues which He has commanded thee, and thou shalt do that which is right and good in the sight of the Lord that it may be well with thee. That thou mayest go in and possess the good land which the Lord sware unto thy fathers, to cast out all of thy enemies from before thee, as the Lord has spoken. Thou shalt not tempt, test, or try the Lord your God.”
What does this mean? It means putting God to the test. Why is this so fearful a sin? Because God is God, and we cannot test Him, God tests us by His law, the whole law is given as a test, the trying of man. And therefore man cannot presume to be God and put God and His law word on trial saying “Lord here is my law and I’m putting you to test in terms of my law” this is turning the whole order upside down. Man declares himself to be God and God his creature, therefore ye shall not tempt the Lord your God. This is our Lords answer to Satan, because this is the great temptation. The temptation to Eve, “Ye shall be as God, knowing (that is determining for yourself) what is good and evil” every man his own God.
Then putting God to the test, to make Him jump over the hurdles you’ve established, this then is the great sin. It’s against this the people of God are commanded “Hear O Israel the Lord our God is one Lord, and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all the soul, and with all thy might” at this point an interesting play of words appears in the Talmud because with the simple transposition of a single letter the word “might” can be rendered as “money”. And so as the Shema Israel loses [thump covers speakers voice] the Rabbi said the test is “with all thy heart, soul, and money”. An amusing but none the less good point. Because the requirement is that with all our being and with all our substances we love, serve, and magnify the one true God. Let us pray.
Our Lord and our God we thank Thee that Thou hast called us to be the people of the law. And we thank Thee that by Thy grace Thou hast made us who were law breakers, law keepers. Bless us our Father in Thy service and in Thine obedience and grant that day by day we show forth the greatness of Thy grace, and that we bring all things into captivity to Jesus Christ and subject all things to Thy law word in Jesus name, Amen.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, and of course our modern perspective is polytheistic, everything is equally good and equally false, so from our polytheistic point of view we are intolerant of our older American dependence upon scripture as the common law of the land.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] Elaborate a little bit more on…{?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, the dispensational point of view is polytheistic because first of all it says there are completely different dispensations in which, for example, God has requirement of the law in one dispensation and in the other the law is a horrible thing, you don’t dare read it or use it because it’s practically a blasphemy. Now this is to turn the whole order of God upside down and to say that God is one thing one day, and another in another. You are in effect saying there are different Gods. And you use the word “God” but then you end up ascribing the part of what God once declared as satanic. For example I cited campus crusade with respect to the law, saying the law as given by Satan. Now, since the scripture clearly says it was given by God they are saying it was another God in the Old Testament, are they not? Only they are not honest enough to say it. Now this is what dispensationalism amounts to Scofieldism is dispensational. Now Scofield says there was one plan of salvation in the Old Testament, another in the new and there will be another plan instituted after the rapture, all of which is rubbish. It is a polytheistic perspective. There is no one unchanging God, or an unchanging truth, an unchanging grace.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Abbot Joachim of Flora. During the middle ages propounded one of the most deadly heresies that have ever infiltrated the church and which still persists, in fact it is powerful today, in both catholic and protestant circles. You don’t hear much about him because this is the reigning thing and they’re not going to identify themselves. Now what did Abbot Joachim say? Abbot Joachim said that the first age of the world was the age of the Father, the Old Testament period, when law was God’s purpose. Then along came the age of the Son, another God, and this was the age of grace and of the gospel and so on, and he said now there is dawning the age of the Holy Spirit when all men now realize they are the true gods because the God of the old testament and the God Jesus of the new testament are dead, so that all men are now gods.
Now, Abbot Joachim was the founder of the death of God school way back in the early part of the middle ages. And this is what took over the student movement in the middle ages and brought about the collapse in large measure of the medieval period. That would be the troubadour students and others of the day, the wander folk singer revolutionaries who went from campus to campus had this Joachimite perspective. This Joachimite perspective appears for example in Dante who is full of all kinds of heresies and who is a communist incidentally. This is the basic thrust, common ownership of property is the glorious destiny of man according to Dante. It appears also in your modern death of God school. It is governing today in virtually every branch of Christendom. The Joachimite heresy is an extremely powerful underground force for centuries.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, the Vatican radio does have a popular song program which does include this song “God is dead”.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Very well, now of course you are sacrificing lambs and cows and steers every day of the year.
[Same audience member]
[Rushdoony] Yes, but you did it. As long as you’re eating it, you’re doing it and it’s Godly because God says that the animals are given for meat.
[Same audience member]
[Rushdoony] It makes it clear in Genesis to Noah and it makes it clear throughout the Mosaic Law and it specifies the kinds of meat that are to be eaten. We will come to this later in the law.
[Same audience member]
[Rushdoony] No, they weren’t put on the fire alive.
[Same audience member]
[Rushdoony] Now, in the Old Testament period all the meat that was killed was a part of the sacrificial system as a result whenever you are going to fix dinner and you are going to kill, say, a cow, or a lamb, or a kid, or some doves, you had to butcher it in a particular way. The blood had to be spilled upon the ground or at the altar as a sacrifice unto God because the life is in the blood, this is in the Mosaic Law, it’s stated. God gives life, life is to be taken only under the terms God establishes, whether it is animal life or human life. Therefore when you take it you are acknowledging that you are doing this under God and with a good conscious. Also, certain types of animal sacrifices were sacrifices either of atonement or of a peace offering, a thank offering, unto God.
Now, as I say we’ll go into this in greater detail when we come to that part of the law. Some you left there, these were gifts to God, they went to the priests, and the Levites, the (Kurans?).
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, this was their portion. Some you offered, and then you took and you ate. But this was simply the method whereby all things as the animals were butchered for eating, were also a part of the religious worship. It was a very wonderful system.
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] No, no. The artist there obviously didn’t read the text to carefully.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, how do we reconcile this with the sacrifice that was required by God of Abraham, the sacrifice of His son Isaac, a very good question. Now God had called Abraham to be His servant, to be the head of the covenant people and declared that through him the whole world would be blessed, through him the Messiah would come. After many, many years, and after giving up hope finally Isaac is born. And God then tells him to take Isaac, his only son, and to offer him up as a sacrifice. Now Abraham with a heavy heart proceeds to do this, he does not question God he obeys, and God stops him and blesses him mightily for this.
Now, what does this set forth? First of all, it does set forth in a very real sense that God does require the sacrifice of the firstborn, the firstborn signifying the whole. And God says, I’m not asking this literally of you, but I’m asking it symbolically, so that in the Mosaic laws we shall see all the firstborns have to be redeemed of God. The firstborn of every child, every male child, the firstborn of the flock, these either must be given to God or must be redeemed from Him because God is saying (the first fruit representing the totality) everything is mine. And your life is by grace; because you are a sinful people judgment is upon you but by grace you stand. Moreover God is saying that which I’m not literally requiring of you I shall fulfill Myself. My only begotten, my firstborn, I shall give as the sacrifice that I do not ask of you. This is the meaning. We’ll come to it when we come to the patter of the first fruits, which we shall before too long. We have time for just one more question.
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] I didn’t get the last part… Yes, the church by and large today is apostate, it is busy denying God. It is busy giving itself over to revolution.
[Same audience member]
[Rushdoony] Yes it is not a Christian church; it is a Satanic church basically because it is given over to an anti-Christian program by and large. Well our time is up, and we shall next week as we continue the first commandment, we shall deal with Deuteronomy 18 verses 9-22. We stand adjourned at this time.
Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony
Subject: Prerequisite/Law
Lesson: Direction of the Law
Genre: Speech
Track: 02
Dictation Name: RR130A2
Location/Venue:
Year: 1960’s-1970’s
[Rushdoony] 1 Corinthians 9:1-14, and our subject is Direction of the Law. “Am I am not an apostle? am I not free? have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord? are not ye my work in the Lord? If I be not an apostle unto others, yet doubtless I am to you: for the seal of mine apostleship are ye in the Lord. Mine answer to them that do examine me is this, Have we not power to eat and to drink? Have we not power to lead about a sister, a wife, as well as other apostles, and as the brethren of the Lord, and Cephas? Or I only and Barnabas, have not we power to forbear working? Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock? Say I these things as a man? or saith not the law the same also?
For it is written in the law of Moses, thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen? Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope. If we have sown unto you spiritual things, is it a great thing if we shall reap your carnal things? If others be partakers of this power over you, are not we rather? Nevertheless we have not used this power; but suffer all things, lest we should hinder the gospel of Christ. Do ye not know that they which minister about holy things live of the things of the temple? and they which wait at the altar are partakers with the altar? Even so hath the Lord ordained that they which preach the gospel should live of the gospel.”
We began last week a study of the Mosaic law, a biblical law. As we continue our study this week, we shall deal with certain basic characteristics of biblical law.
First of all, the law gives us certain basic premises for all the basic principles. The Ten Commandments are such declarations. The Ten Commandments are not law among many other laws of the Bible, but they are a summation of the basic principles of the law. To understand what the law means here, let us examine very briefly, later we shall spend a few months going into each of the laws, one of the commandments; “Thou shalt not steal.” This, we find in Exodus 20:15 and in Deuteronomy 5:19. Now, as we analyze this commandment, a basic law, there are certain things that appear. As we analyze it, we find, and to enumerate them under the broad heading of 1) Basic Principles, a) The commandment, Thou shalt not steal establishes positively private property, and negatively it declares that there are punishments for offenses against property. So, we have here an area, a basic area of life declared to be under the protection of God’s law, to be a law area, property. Property is thus of the ordination of God himself. It is not something that man chooses and says, “Now, I like the idea of private property, therefore, I’m going to have laws respecting private property. On the contrary, the law says this is of God’s ordination. Therefore, the laws that govern it must be from God, because if man himself says, “I establish private property because I like the idea,” then man also, or some human institution such as the state, can also say, “I abolish private property, because I have now decided I don’t’ like it,” but biblical law says, “Thou shalt not steal.” This is God’s law. Therefore, anyone who tampers with private property is tampering with what God has ordained.
This, of course, leads us to our second point. First, we have seen or a), that this commandment establishes an area of life as God’s ordination, private property. B) the establishment of property issues now from man or the state, but from God, because all commandments have their origin from God to govern his realm because he is the king, and as king, he declares, “My law has jurisdiction. I do not tolerate other laws.”
It follows from this, c) that since God issues the law, any offense against the law is an offense against God. Now, when David committed both murder and adultery, and confessed it in Psalm 51:4, he declared, “Against thee, thee only have I sinned and done this evil in thy sight.” In other words, first and last, the offense was against God. Indeed, he had committed adultery and he had killed a man and David was fully aware of the damage he had done to human beings, but he knew that because it was the law of God, first and last, the offense was against God. So that when a man steals, he is offending God, first and last. It is he who is offending you also, but in offending you, he is also offending primarily God.
And finally, d) it follows that lawlessness is thus sin. Any civil or familial, or ecclesiastical, or other social action of disobedience is also a sin, unless the prior law of God requires us to disobey, because we have been commanded to disobey God by obeying church, or state, or any other institutions. So that all civil disobedience is not only lawlessness, it is also a sin, unless a prior obedience to God requires it.
Now, we have seen our first basic characteristic of biblical law, that certain broad principles are declares, and one of these that we are dealing with very briefly today is the commandment, “Thou shalt not steal.”
Second, the major portion of biblical law is case law, and when we go through the law, we are dealing almost entirely with case law. Now, what is case law? The idea of case law comes from the Bible. We do have case law in the courts of the United States. Today, the case law has become lawless, but in origin, in the American legal tradition, case law stems from the fact that the biblical law was the common law of the land. Now, case law is illustrative of the basic principles of the law in terms of specific cases. Case law takes a minimal example, and says, “Now, this principle applies here. Therefore, it applies anywhere above this.” It does this to prevent us from misunderstanding the law.
Now, let us examine a case law from the Bible. First, we have the basic law, “Thou shalt not steal.” Next, a case law illustrative of this. There are hundreds of case laws with reference to theft, but here is one that we’re going to deal with, Deuteronomy 25:4, “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treddeth out the corn.” Now, this is an illustration. It is a case. In other words, if you have an ox and you are using it to tread out the corn, that is, to thresh it, the ox is entitled to some feed out of that grain. In other words, you are robbing the ox if you are not feeding it properly. This is what the law means. Now, if theft involves denying an ox his wages, and an ox has a property in his wages, in his labor, it follows that man does too, doesn’t he? So you have a basic principle illustrated.
Now, in our scripture, we saw a further application of this case law by St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 9:9, 10 and 14, he declared, “For it is written in the law of Moses, thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen? Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes (in other words, wasn’t he talking to us when he said it?), no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope. Even so hath the Lord ordained that they which preach the gospel should live of the gospel.”
Then again, St. Paul deals with this in 1 Timothy 5:18, “For the scripture saith, Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn, and the laborer is worthy of his reward.” Now, St. Paul has cited two case laws. One, “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treddeth out the corn,” and the other, “Thou shalt not defraud thy neighbor neither rob him the wages of him that is hired shall not abide with thee all night until the morning.” This is from Leviticus 19:13 and Deuteronomy 24:14. “Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy, whether he be of thy brethren, or of thy strangers that are in thy land within thy gates.” So, how is the commandment, “Thou shalt not steal,” illustrated. There are, as I’ve said, hundreds of case laws. You have a right to your property that is ordained of God, this applies to your land. It applies to your possessions, and as we shall see, the right to your land includes the fact that it is immune from taxation or confiscation. Now, that’s the biblical law. We shall see later why this is so important some few months hence.
But, it also says you have a right to your labor. It is your property. You cannot defraud the ox without robbing it, and you defraud it if you do not feed it properly. Your ox still has a property right established by God. “The laborer is worthy of his hire.” Now, Jesus quoted that, thereby himself putting his stamp of approval on this law. He quoted it in Luke 10:7. So, Paul says, if the ox has a property right in its labor, how much more have I as an apostle of God, of Jesus Christ? I have full title to be paid and to be paid well by the churches I serve.
Now, let’s go a step further. We have seen that what applies to the ox applies to man. You cannot rob the ox. How much less have you a right to apply man? This is the minimum instance, the ox. It isn’t, we shall see it applied even to birds later on when we come to the commandment. What right do birds have? God says he is mindful in my law through my servant Moses of the least of my creatures. Now, and the ground, we cannot rob the earth. We must use it under God. The law, you see, through case laws, has such a total application, but if we cannot rob the earth, or the birds, or the ox, we certainly cannot rob man. How much less can we rob God? And Malachi makes this point. In the third chapter, the prophet Malachi, verses 8-12, “Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings. Ye are cursed with a curse: for ye have robbed me, even this whole nation. Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it. And I will rebuke the devourer for your sakes, and he shall not destroy the fruits of your ground; neither shall your vine cast her fruit before the time in the field, saith the Lord of hosts. And all nations shall call you blessed: for ye shall be a delightsome land, saith the Lord of hosts.”
So, it applies to the ground, to the bird, to the ox, therefore, to man and certainly to God.
Now, we see the necessity of case law, do we not? It’s not enough to say, “Thou shalt not steal.” The Buddhists believe that it’s wrong, the Muslims do. Every culture has laws against theft, but these are humanistic laws. So first, it’s defined by the culture and the state, and it can be redefined to take away your rights, and all it means basically is simple theft, taking what somebody has, and even that can be changed by laws. But when God defines it, first to the basic principle, then the series of dozens upon dozens of case laws, we see the extent of the law, and the full meaning of it, and those who deny biblical case law, who say, “Well, the only part of the law that is still meaningful is the Ten Commandments,” and up with no real knowledge of what God means when he says, “Thou shalt not steal.”
Thus, first, the law gives us a basic premise or principle. “Thou shalt not steal.” Second, it gives us case law to illustrate this. First, we have seen “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox,” and second, “Will a man rob God?”
Now third, what is the purpose of the law, the direction of the law? The purpose and the direction of the law is the restitution of God’s order. Now, this is very different from what the law sees as its purpose now. I took down one of the better, I would say one of the very best of modern legal philosophers, to see how he would define justice, and this is what he declared. “Justice, in its true and proper perspective, is a principle of coordination between subjective beings.” Now you can see the total relativism there, can you not? It is a principle of coordination between subjective human beings. In other words, there is no objective law. There is just a coordination, and when 99 out of 100 define coordination as expropriating what you have, and they say, “Well now, you’re not coordinating,” and you are the lone troublemaker. “Why don’t you get with it? Why don’t you be a good boy? After all, coordination is what we want,” and this is exactly what’s happening today, and those of you who don’t like a property tax, and who don’t like expropriation, and who don’t like the fact that people can come in and rat and rob you, and what are the policemen there for now? To protect the robbers, not you and your property. Isn’t this what the attorney general has made clear? Isn’t this what they have done? Well, you’re not coordinating, you see, with the trend of the {?}, but when we hold that God has ordained law, and law either comes from God and his word or it is not law, we are saying there is an objective order, an absolute order, and it’s not what we like. We may like communism, or we may like private property, but that is totally irrelevant, because the law has nothing to do with what we like or what our preference is. The law has to do with the absolute righteousness, with the justice of God, and God ordains private property. “Thou shalt not steal,” and God doesn’t care whether you like it or not. He says, “This is the law,” and so the law and the justice of God’s law deals with a basic objective order, with a law that doesn’t change because men change.
Now, humanism can have restitution, and we said that the third basic characteristic of biblical law, which gives us the direction of law is restitution. Now you can have restitution in humanistic law, but it still is not sufficient. We do have restitution in our laws today, incidentally. We’ll come to that later also, but since the law today is the law of the state, if you rob do you have to repay? Only if you’ve robbed the state. In other words, somebody can pass a bad check on you. The state may send him to prison, but you don’t get your money back, but if somebody robs the federal government, they have to repay. Restitution is required, because the state says, “It’s our law and you have to restore to us.” So you see what the state is saying? “We alone have private property. We alone have rights,” but biblical restitution is of God’s order and everything God’s order covers, and because God has said, “Thou shalt not steal,” if anyone steals $100 from you, according to the biblical law, they must restore that $100 plus $100, the exact amount they were going to profit by, so they restore $200. If they steal a cow because the cow can increase, they restore not only the cow but four, because the cow can increase and multiply, and so restitution must be at least double, and it can be fourfold and fivefold according to the law of God as given through Moses.
According to the biblical law, restitution must be required by courts of all offenders, and the purpose and direction of the law in its entirety is the restoration of God’s order, of glorious and a good creation which serves and glorified the creator. God’s sovereign law, moreover, moves at all times in terms of restitution, and so there is judgment in history, and God declares, “I will be patient more than most are patient, but I will bring a curse upon that nation which violates my law.” We saw in Malachi, did we not, if a man robs God and if a nation is given over to the robbery of God, what happens? I will curse their field. “Cursed shall be their going out and their coming in. Cursed shall be the fruit of their basket and the fruit of their body, and the fruit of their cattle,” but if a man gives God his due, what happens? “Blessed shalt thou be and the fruit of thy body and the fruit of thy field. Blessed shall be thy going out and thy coming in. Blessed shalt thou be from this time forth and forever.”
And did you notice the expression used by Malachi? He declares that God says, “If ye obey my commandments I will open the windows of heaven and pour out unto you a blessing,” but you’re not able to receive it will be so great. Open the windows of heaven. Now, where do we encounter that expression in the Bible? It’s the same word used in the English and in the Hebrew as in the {?}. “And God declares that the windows of heaven were opened in judgment,” in a flood, in total destruction upon the world of Noah’s day, so will be the blessings. Like a flood, it will be forced out upon us.
Now, to return to the basic law, the basic premise. “Thou shalt not steal.” Property rights are established. Basically, God’s property right over his whole creation as the Lord, the property right which extends as God gives it even unto the earth, to the ox. The property right of man, and second, the case law, and third, restitution. Restoration of God’s order as the purpose of the law. We’ve seen this illustrated in the New Testament. Remember when Zacheus became converted, and he invited Jesus to his house, and Zacheus stood up and he said, “Everyone I have defrauded I will restore fourfold and fivefold,” and then, when he made that statement, Jesus said, “This day is salvation comes to this household.” Then, did Jesus pronounce him to be saved. Restitution is referred to in the Sermon on the Mount. In Ephesians 4:28, Paul declares “To those who stole let them steal no more, but labor honestly with their hands,” and how was this understood by the early church? There was no mistake in their mind. The thief had not a work {?} in order to restore, and if he couldn’t restore to those whom he had robbed because they were dead and gone, and there was no one to restore to, what did he do? He gave it to the poor. That’s what Paul said. It was given in charity to the deserving poor, in terms again of the law of God.
And the word “restitution” appears in relationship to God in the New Testament, is calling for the restoration of God’s sovereign law by proclamation. Thus, what I am doing now is an act of restoration, restitution. What is being restored? The proclamation of God’s law word, and so it is that when Jesus himself interpreted the coming of John the Baptist, he said, “Elias{?} truly must come first and restore all things, but I say unto you that Elias is come already and they knew him not.” Now, what was the restoration? The proclamation of the law word of God had been absent from the land, and John the Baptist came and restored it, and second, it speaks of it as restoration or restitution by subjecting all things to Christ and establishing a godly law order, and in Matthew 28:18-20, our Lord said, “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” What does that mean? Bring them all unto the law order.
1 Corinthians 10:5, Revelation 11:15, “The kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ.” And finally, on the day of Pentecost, Acts 3:21, how does St. Peter speak of the last days of the earth of the Second Coming? He calls them the times of restitution. The restoration of God’s law order.
Now, we saw last week that man was called by God in the beginning to exercise dominion over the earth, and to subdue all things. This was God’s covenant with man, God’s basic commandment to man, in Genesis 1:26 following. This commandment has never been revoked, and God declares and our Lord affirmed, scripture cannot be broken. The declaration is in John 10:35. Scripture cannot be broken. Therefore, what is our function and our calling? To exercise dominion over the earth, and to subdue all things to Christ in terms of his law word, hence, the necessity of studying and of knowing the law word of God. This shall be our purpose in the months ahead. Let us pray.
Our Lord and our God, we give thanks unto thee for this, thy law word, and we thank thee that thou didst create us to exercise dominion over all things unto thee, and having fallen away from this purpose in Adam, though hast restored us to it in Jesus Christ, and commissioned us to be king, prophets, and priests unto thee in Jesus Christ our Lord. Bless and confirm us to this most holy purpose and calling by thy word and by thy Spirit, and grant that we may exercise dominion in thee and unto thee, in Jesus name. Amen.
Yes?
[Audience] {?} I think there’s a word, Existentialist, {?} and would you say that {?} all things to all people, but would you say that {?} would be the people who are {?} our society today {?} and yet {?} Existentialism, and then my other question was, how was David able to make restitution {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, two very good questions. First, our society today is Existentialist. To be an Existentialist means, by their own definition, to live in terms of the biology and dictates of your own being. In other words, whatever you want is your own law. Now, in Paris this past week one of the inscriptions painted on the walls by the rebelling students at the Storbon{?} was, “It is forbidden to forbid.” In other words, there can be no law that prevents us from doing anything because every man is his own law. This is Existentialism. Second, how could David make restitution? Well, first of all, it was impossible to make restitution for murder, except by death, and that’s the restitution, but in this case, God did not exercise it against David. He did {?} about the death penalty in a secondary sense, on the newborn child, born of that adultery, whom David loved deeply. So he brought punishment upon him, and because the whole nation had been involved in even greater offenses, judgment upon the nation in the form of a plague, so that David had to see judgment called upon the child whom he loved and upon the nation, whose king he was, in judgment against himself. Now, this was a special case. This was an act of God, but the normal requirement for such a crime, the restitution would be death.
[Audience] {?} wouldn’t you? {?}
[Rushdoony] Oh yes, very definitely.
[Audience] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience] {?}
[Rushdoony] They are. Your farmers today are sinning against God, because when they go into the store bank, they are robbing you. They are taking your money in order to plant nothing. Now, this is theft. They are also guilty of theft when they mine the soil without taking proper care of it, and God makes clear his judgment upon this. Now, we know, of course, from the scriptures, that God, because of the variety of offenses against him and against the soil required the land to remain idle for seventy years by taking the people into captivity, into Babylon, so that the land might recuperate{?}. Yes?
[Audience] {?}
[Rushdoony] Good question. When to taxes cease becoming taxes and become theft? Well, God dealt with this in Samuel’s day, because when the nation decided to choose a king and Samuel was quite upset, because he was, you might say, the president of the commonwealth. In those days, the terms was judge or governor, it means the same thing. God said, “They have not rejected you but they have rejected me that I should not reign over them,” and he went on to say that what would a monarch do now that they had rejected God as their king, they would have a monarch and he would play God over them, and one of the things he would do would be to take a tenth, in the form of taxes, and that constituted robbery. Anytime a state took as much as God requires, a tenth, it’s robbery. Well, you can see what that makes governments today. They’re robbers. In the sight of God, they are offending because they are claiming as much right to your property as God requires, and the tithe, of course, is God’s rent. He is the basic landlord. We hold title in him, on a trust, it’s a kind of a trust agreement. We have an absolute right to that property as against men. We do not have an absolute right to anything in relationship to God. So, if the state takes ten percent or more, it is guilty of theft. We’ll get to that and the various implications, what the Bible has to say about taxation, later. Yes?
[Audience] Then maybe I {?} concerning the {?} of taxes. You said {?} taxes on property. You said that there would be no taxation on property. {?} the premise the problem when {?} and learned that the motive for taking the tax off the property is not God’s law, but to tax the {?} power to a more remote power, such as {?} and therefore, it’s the federal government, because this is the real {?} of taking the tax {?} off, and those who want to restrain government feel, though the burden is too heavy, that the {?}. Now, what way is property tax is taken off {?} the federal government?
[Rushdoony] Yes, first of all, the property tax is immoral. It was brought in, in this country, by Deists and Unitarians who were trying to overthrow a godly law order and make man subject to the state. Now, they wisely restricted, at the beginning, the conservatives or Christians of the day, the vote to only those who own property, and of course, Karl Marx said the easiest way to communism is to give people who do not have property the right to vote, because then they can vote taxes against property and communize it. He said that’s the easiest route. Now, we still have to say whatever the motives, a property tax is immoral. We should be against it. Certainly, at it stands, because local government has tied itself to a tax that’s basically wrong, it still doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t vote it out. Otherwise, we’re facing confiscation in the near future. Then, we need to reorder the whole of taxation in terms of what God requires in the way of taxes. We’ll deal with that later, because this is a big area to get into, but by neglecting the biblical law, you see, we simply have no standard as we confront the present situation. We know what we don’t like, but we don’t know what should be. So we’re helpless. Yes?
[Audience] {?} common law {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the common law properly is biblical law. In other words, in the English tradition, and to a degree in the Germanic tradition, all of the biblical law was simply made the law of the state, and I have, for example, at home (I’ve cited this before) a New Hampshire court decision from 1834 in which the judge simply goes to the Bible and cites the appropriate passages and then gives his decision. Why? Well, because this is common law. This was the law recognized as the basic law, the basic premise for everyone.
Now, common law has this validity, and this is why, since the Civil War, it has been steadily subverted. Supposing someone steals from you. You don’t have to have, under common law, an exact statute covering that kind of theft, or that kind of murder, you see. So, you simply take the case, it goes to a jury of men who are your peers, who in terms of the basic principles established by God and the case laws that illustrate the extent of the principle, give a decision, but in the last year, a man in Michigan was set free when he not only murdered two boys but admitted it. He was a federal official, but he knew the law well enough to know that that particular type of crime had been not covered by the statute provisions. So, there was no law under which they could convict him, and men have actually robbed and have gone free, because the crime didn’t fit the statute book. So, every time there’s a new act of criminal aggression by these rioters, they figure, “How can we pass a law against this to cover it?” Well, then they come up with a new variation and it isn’t covered by it. When you get to the kind of law that we are moving it, the humanistic, Roman law, you have to cover every jot and tittle, or else the man goes free.
Now, it is impossible to right enough wrongs to cover every particular variation of theft, or murder, and so on, and so the law begins to break down, but when you have the common law, you have the broad principles and case laws which illustrate the minimal principles, so it certainly applies to anything else, and you go in terms of that. Now, common law is still, technically, a part of the law of the land, but you don’t have any attorneys who know common law, because they’re not taught it, they can’t practice it, the judges wouldn’t know what to do with it. Do you think that’s a fair statement, Bill?
[Audience] {?} Now there is no {?}
[Rushdoony] This is the consequence of departing from biblical law, which was the common law of the land. This departure began, as I say, after the Civil War when the radical republicans began their devastation of our land. When Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. went to the Supreme Court, this was made a part of the basic decision of the courts. Today, because all our law schools have been teaching it for two generations, or more, it is now the law of the land. The new humanistic statutory law.
Well, our time is up and we are adjourned.
End of tape
IBL00: Introduction to Institutes of Biblical Law
(Craig Press)
Introduction to the Law Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony
Subject: Prerequisite/Law
Lesson: Introduction to the Law
Genre: Speech
Track: 01
Dictation Name: RR130A1
Location/Venue:
Year: 1960’s-1970’s
[Rushdoony] Genesis 1:26 following. We begin today our studies in Biblical Law. “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.”
As we begin our study in the meaning of biblical law, we shall deal with the law, first of all, as revelation and treaty. Before we begin our study of biblical law, however, it is important to recognize certain general facts concerning law. First of all, law in every culture, in every civilization is religious in origin. There is no place in the world where we can go where we can find law that is not religious. Law reflects what men believe to be is basically right and wrong in a society. It reflects the ideas of culture, of justice, of ultimacy.
As a result, law is inescapably religious because your idea of justice, your idea of morality is a religious idea. Now, this does not mean that these various concepts of law are congenial to scripture. The religion they represent may be Buddhism, Mohamedenism, Animism, Hinduism, and increasingly today, humanism, but law is, in every culture without exception, inescapably religious.
Second, in any and every society, the source of law is the god of that society. The easiest place to locate the god of any system is to look to the source of law. If the courts are the source of law and there is no higher law beyond the courts, the courts have made themselves god, as is increasingly the case in our society. If the monarch rules absolutely and makes himself the ultimate lawgiver, then he is a god. If it is the people according to the theory of democracy, who are the source of law, then the people are the god of that system. In Marxism, it is the people as they find voice in the state. Mao Tse Tung has said our god is none other than the masses of the Chinese people, but the voice of this god can only be the communist party. In any and every law system, the source of law is the god of that society.
Third, it follows from this that any change of law, any change of law that affects the basic law structure of society is a change of religion, and this is exactly what we have been undergoing for the past generation or more in this country, a change of religion, and very steadily, our law system has been changed in order to provide us with another religion while we are assured that there is total toleration for all religions, but humanism is now the religion and provides the law system of our American society as it does of virtually every country in the world.
Fourth, it follows from this that there can be no disestablishment of religion in any society. You can disestablish a church, but you cannot disestablish religion. A society must either have the Christian religion established, or it will have a humanistic religion, or Buddhism, or Mohammedenism, or something else, because it must have a basic faith to provide the concept of justice, the moral code, the law system for that society. The attacks you find today in our courts on capital punishment, on restitution, on the idea that the criminal is guilty, or that the alcoholic is guilty, all these constitute an attack upon the biblical law system, and the biblical law system is being disestablished, together with Christianity, as the religion and law basis of American society as well as English, Canadian, French, German, all Western society.
Fifth, it follows from this that there can be no toleration in any law system for another religion. You can tolerate various churches of a particular religion, various interpretations, but you cannot tolerate another religion, because then you are saying that you are tolerating total revolution. You are tolerating the overthrow of your law system, of your political order, of everything. By tolerating humanism, this is exactly what we have done. Humanism is, at present, in the mopping up stages of its revolution against Christianity.
Now, with these five points, with respect to law in mind, let us turn to our law system, biblical law. Biblical law made possible with tremendous growth and progress of Western culture. In particular, because biblical law was so basic to the establishment of this country, it made possible the tremendous growth of this country.
In analyzing biblical law, therefore, it is important, first of all, to note three characteristics of biblical law. First of all, for the Bible, law is revelation. The very word for law in the Bible is Torah. Now, the Jews used the word Torah for the Mosaic law, but in the Bible, the word Torah is used for the whole of the Bible, for the prophets as well as for Moses, for the books of history, for everything. It means divine instruction, the divine word, the divine teaching. So the whole of scripture comes to us as the one word, the one law of God.
It is not possible to distinguish between the Old and New Testaments as one giving law and the other grace, because the very premise of the giving of the law to Israel was the grace of God, because God was gracious unto them, therefore, he was giving them his law, and this is definitely stated, both in Exodus and Deuteronomy before the giving of the Ten Commandments, that this is an act of grace. The law and grace are inseparable. The Bible never speaks against law in the sense in which the Bible intended. That is, in the Bible, the Mosaic, the Christian meaning.
When our Lord and St. Paul spoke of the law as misused and attacked the law, they were not attacking the law in itself, but the false concept of law which had developed among the Pharisees. The law had been made into a mediator, into a savior, and so Jesus Christ, because he came as man’s mediator and savior, attacked the idea of the law as mediator. In other words, the false idea of the law, but he said from the beginning that he had come not to destroy the law but to fulfill it, and to make known the fullness of its meaning. Jesus never set aside the law. He only attacked the misuse of the law. The law was so seriously taken by the early Christians that when St. Peter received word from Cornelius to go into his home and baptize him, because it involved a break with something that he believed with respect to the law, it required a special revelation from God for Peter to go, and only the fact of revelation made his baptism of Cornelius acceptable to the church. In other words, the Christians, instead of being against the law, were so strongly for it that it took a revelation to move Peter when he felt it might involve a violation of the law. This is how seriously the law was regarded. The law, for scripture, is a revelation.
Second, the biblical law is treaty or covenant. This is an important fact. It is a contract. It is a contract which God enters into with man as an act of grace. Man does not deserve anything from God’s hands, but God, in his sovereign mercy, gives man his law and summons him to be his people. Now, in Sunday School picture books and Bible story picture books, when Moses is shown wit the two tablets of stone coming down from the mountain, one tablet will be pictured as having five commandments, and the other five. Sometimes four and six is the arrangements, and this is altogether wrong. In reality, each of the tablets had all ten commandments written. Perhaps on both sides, but all ten appeared on each of the Ten Commandments. Why? Because this was a treaty, and a contract, a covenant. Now, when you enter into a contract with someone else, there are two copies of that contract, one for each party. So that each party might know the terms thereof. Now, the Ten Commandments, as the summary of the whole law of God, was given to Moses in two contracts, two copies so that both, as they were placed in the most holy place would be there as a witness. There was the meeting place of God and his people. There, the two copies of the treaty, one for each party, were kept, as a reminder to both of the terms of the treaty, of the covenant.
The language of the giving of the law is exactly the same language that you find in the ancient world in all treaties. In this case, the sovereign, the suzerain, was God. When his mercy gave to those whom he took under his protection, even as an emperor entered into a treaty with a small powers around him, and declared that if they would obey him and yield him tribute, he would protect them. The law gives a sovereignly dictated order of life. It governs the total life of man. For the law, there is no distinction between the inner and the outer life of man. Both are governed by the law.
This appears, for example, in the Ten Commandments. For example, in the tenth, “Thou shalt not covet.” Here, the inner life of man is governed, as it is in a wide variety of laws. It is a treaty, and the terms of the treaty affect the total life of man. Every fiber of his being, every thought of his life, and because it is a treaty, there are very definitely blessings that follow obedience to the treaty, and curses that ensue for disobedience to the treaty. If the treaty is violated, judgment follows.
The third aspect of biblical law is that is constitutes a plan for dominion under God. In Genesis 1 when God created the heavens and the earth, and he created man, he created him to have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. This is the foundation of biblical law. God created man to have dominion over the earth. This is stated emphatically, not only in the first chapter of Genesis, but in the second and throughout scripture. When after the flood God called Noah and made a covenant, or renewed the original treaty with him, he summoned Noah to exercise that which he had called Adam to do, to govern the earth, to subdue the earth, to have dominion over it. This was again renewed, this treaty, in Abraham, in Isaac, and Jacob. Through Moses, with all Israel, with David and Solomon, with Hezekiah and Josiah, and in Jesus Christ we have the New Testament, or the renewed covenant.
The only thing new about it is that a new people are now called to be the people of the covenant. The old people are cast aside because they have rejected the Lord of the covenant. They have broken the covenant, but God retains the covenant, and calls a new people, and even as there were twelve tribes in old Israel, and the new Israel, that is, the new chosen people of God, twelve apostles are summoned to represent the continuing people of God.
What is it that we celebrate in the sacrament of the Lord’s table? As we partake of the elements, the words of our Lord are repeated as the cup is offered. “This is my blood, the blood of my covenant,” or testament, “shed for you.” What does this mean? It means that Jesus Christ says that, “I, by my atoning work, take you who are fallen and sinful and unable to do that which God called you, to exercise dominion over the earth, and I reestablish you by my justification and my regenerating work in your calling,” and so what does the Lord’s Supper do? It reestablishes the law. It summons man again to exercise dominion over the earth under God. It declares that the purpose of Christ’s coming is to restore God’s purpose, that man, under God, should exercise dominion over the earth. The people of the law are now the people of Christ, and Christians are called now to inherit the earth, to exercise dominion over it. The biblical law is therefore, the law for Christian man and Christian society.
The biblical law was applied very early and it made very possible the growth of Christian Europe. Feudalism was an application of biblical law. The words feudalism and federalism are closely related, and feudalism simply meant a decentralized, local kind of government, with very little authority at the top. There are all kinds of varieties of local government under feudalism. There was the local lord and his manor, there was the local township, there were the local alords{?}, or owned by the farmers who governed themselves. There was a wide variety of forms of local self-government, but it was an application fundamentally of biblical law. What the Puritans did was to revive this and apply it to this country, and the Bible was the law of this country for the first two centuries or more.
Yet, as a result of Scholasticism, a revival of Greco-Roman, especially Roman concepts of law came in and these exercised throughout the latter Middle Ages and on the Reformation a preponderant influence. For example, Calvin, who otherwise was so perceptive of his analysis of scripture, nevertheless says in his Institutes, that nations need not follow biblical law, but the common law of nations. Now, the common law of nations was Roman law, natural law, but if you do not follow biblical law, you disestablish the Christian religion, and the Roman concept of natural law is a humanistic idea, is it not? It assumes that nature as it is, is normative, that it is not fallen. That it is good, and therefore, truth flows naturally out of it. As Christians, we do not believe there is a law in nature, but a law over nature, and to follow this idea of the common law of nations, or natural law, is to go astray and to become humanistic, and since both Catholic and Protestant scholars did this so extensively in modern times, is it any wonder that they find society around them becoming humanistic? And is it any wonder when they go out in the mission field, their pupils turn out to be humanistic revolutionaries?
For example, two European theologians have written, concerning the state, “It is to be God’s servant for our welfare. It must exercise justice.” That sounds fine and it’s biblical, but if you deny biblical law in favor of natural law, how can the state be God’s servant without God’s law? They say that the state must exercise justice, but what is justice? There are as many definitions of justice as there are religions. Our problem today, is it not, is that we have the humanistic idea of justice being rammed down our throats when we deny it. We believe in the biblical doctrine of justice. It is no wonder that these two European theologians then go onto say a little later, “A static legislation valid for all times is an impossibility.” They just parted company with God, have they not? Because God says, “Thou shalt not kill” is valid for all time, and “Thou shalt not steal” is valid for all time. You either stand in terms of revealed law, or you do end up in relativistic law, where nothing is valid for all time, and the law can change because truth changes. The law, for the state, therefore, must be revealed law. It is the only means whereby man can fulfill his creation mandate of exercising dominion under God. Apart from revealed law, man cannot claim to be under God but only in rebellion against God. Let us pray.
Our Lord and our God, we give thanks unto thee that thou didst create us to be thy people, and to exercise dominion over the earth under thee, and we thank thee that we, having gone astray in Adam, have been recalled in Jesus Christ, and the mandate has been renewed to exercise dominion. Give us grace, therefore, to do these things in thee and of thee, to proclaim the glory of thy law, and the certainty of the judgment as well as of the blessing of thy law. Make us strong in thee by thy Holy Spirit, that we may be more than conquerors through him that loved us, even Jesus Christ our Lord. In his name we pray. Amen.
Are there any questions now? Yes?
[Audience] {?}
[Rushdoony] Could you speak a little louder?
[Audience] {?} before the law {?} totalitarian {?} against the law {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, there are times when we must obey God rather than man. So that God’s law has primacy over the law of the state, and we do have instances in scripture where men chose to obey God rather to obey man. Rahab, of course, is cited together with Abraham as one of the two great examples of faith, because what she did was to harbor the two Israelite spies and refuse to surrender them or to even admit that they had been there or were there. This was an act of obedience to God but of disobedience to the state, and God commends it.
[Audience] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes. We shall deal later on, as we come to the law, because we are dealing with God’s law, you see. Not the law of the state basically, but God’s law for the state, and since God is the law-giver to the state, God also limits the extent of obedience to the state. It is at all times qualified by a primary obedience to him. We shall deal with this later on at very great length. Yes?
[Audience] Under Christian reconstruction, do you see any practical {?} or individual {?} Christians could secede from humanistic society, and {?} and is there {?}
[Rushdoony] You cannot secede from existing society, but a society or a state can secede from life. This is exactly what the various governments of the world today are doing with their humanistic law. They are seceding from life. They are committing suicide. Just before I left, there was a phone call telling me of a telegram from {?} about what’s happening financially in Europe. You may not know it, but we are on the brink of a gold embargo and devaluation, gold shot up rapidly in Europe. It passed $50 an ounce yesterday morning in Europe, and $60 an ounce in Asia, and the dollars are increasingly regarded as worthless, as are the Eurodollars. What’s happening? We are seceding from life. We are committing suicide, and the various nations are doing the same thing because they are violating God’s laws for economics. What we must do therefore, is to step aside from the course of suicide, and prepare ourselves for the future, because as things stand, the various countries of the world have no future. Yes?
[Audience] I apologize. I wonder about the {?} a new law {?} and if the old laws still apply and who to, and if they {?} created a new law {?} new order {?} also that which {?} Dr. Van Til {?}
[Rushdoony] Well, there’s several questions there. I’ll try to get all of them. If I forget any, remind me. First of all, the Bible does not introduce a new law. It introduces, in a sense, a new people of the law. In other words, Israel is set aside and we are put into their place. We are the new people of the law. Now, it sometimes speak of a new law, the of love, but it makes it clear that love is the fulfilling of the law. It is the keeping of the law. So it simply gives us a new sidelight on the law, a new look at it, but the same law stands. Then, civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is legitimate only if it is in terms of obedience to God. Now, a society can have civil disobedience in terms of its basic premises. For example, in feudal society and in early American and Colonial society, a man could legitimately have grounds for civil disobedience if he said what the courts or what the authorities are doing is contrary to scripture. It is contrary to the canon. Canon law means rule law, the rule being scripture. Therefore, I appeal to the fundamental law, scripture, as against what has been done, or enacted. So, you are appealing from a lower law to a higher law that was recognized by the society. Now, what is civil disobedience in our society? We are humanistic. Therefore, what is ultimate with us? It is man. Man is God. So, what do those who are guilty of civil disobedience do? They appeal from the law of the state to the higher law, which is man, and they say, “I refuse to obey any law which is not of my making. I appeal to the higher law of our society,” and this is why, of course, in part, our college authorities and our civil authorities are so helpless in dealing with these people, because these people are appealing to that which they believe in, and their only recourse is, “But we’re trying to do all these things. We’ll get there. Just be patient with us,” but these young radicals have them over a barrel. They’re pursuing the logical implications which is anarchy, because the end result of humanism, as Karl Marx clearly saw, he said, “The logical result of humanism is anarchy, total anarchy, it’s the only logical thing you can believe in,” but since anarchy is not practical, we will say the only thing we can do is the most practical step, which is total dictatorship.
[Audience] What can the Christian do?
[Rushdoony] The Christian, in this situation, must stand in terms of God’s higher law, but our Lord says “Be wise as serpents and gentle as doves.” In other words, we are not to sacrifice ourselves foolishly and needlessly. We are to make a stand only when it really counts, unless, of course, it means renouncing Christ or betraying everything we believe, but we’re not to throw ourselves away foolishly on causes. Yes?
[Audience] I can’t tell what Bible {?} that they fall back upon, but these civil rights leaders, followers of Martin Luther King, are so many of the people, Negro people, who are nominally Christian anyway, that they are appealing to the higher law, and of course these people interpret it as being God, and I am not sure. {?}
[Audience] We have a friend who told us about {?} who has been very {?} and now he says that according to the Bible, Martin Luther King was right in appealing to the Bible {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, right. We are in a period of transition, so that although these people, King and others, are basically humanists, in order to delude people, they appeal also to our higher law, but abusively. King has made it clear that he did not accept the Bible as the word of God, he does not believe in the miracles, he does not believe in any of the fundamental doctrines, he was congenial to the Death of God School of Theology, he was basically Marxist in his thinking. He was a humanist to the core, but to mislead a lot of the people, he would throw out appeals to our higher law as well as to his. Now, these appeals were completely hellacious, but the whole point is you move basically in terms of the new higher law, but you use the other in order to delude the opposition. Yes?
[Audience] Do you think there is a legitimate natural law in {?} law of nature, like you said, over nature, and particularly {?} in Europe where John Locke talks about natural law and everything, and it seems compatible with the Christian tradition, but yet to reject presupposition, to reject the presupposition {?} to reject the validity of the natural law that can be seen as a rejection of God’s {?}
[Rushdoony] We must reject John Locke’s natural law as well as his presuppositions, because his natural law was designed to supplant God. In other words, the idea was that now there was a new source of power, of sovereignty. This was nature. So that natural law, in effect, makes nature God. This is its fallacy. We must believe in a law over nature, not a law in nature. The very concept, nature, is a myth. There is no such thing as nature. I don’t have time to go into that now, but in my book, The Mythology of Science, the first appendix deals with the concept of nature as myth. What is nature? There is no entity such as nature. There is simply a vast world of natural objects, but to personify nature, and see this personification as a source of law is a religious approach to this world as though this world were God, and this, of course, comes out of paganism. It was not the Christian idea. Through St. Anselm, Medieval Europe had a very different concept. It was only with Abelard, who was thoroughly heretical, that this was introduced into the heart of the church, and today it has the odor of sanctity, unfortunately. Yes?
[Audience] In the first chapter of {?} men without the revealed law {?}, they will be held responsible for {?} to them {?}
[Rushdoony] Because all men have been created by God, they unmistakable have the testimony of God written into their being. This comes not from nature, but from God. So that they reveal, at every point, everything that God created them to be. So that their own nature testifies against them when they put themselves to any other function than God created them for. So that they are unmistakably called to testify to God to glorify them, to serve him, and so their heart, mind, and being cries out against them when they put themselves to any other function. This has nothing to do with nature. It is the mark of the creator. Yes?
[Audience] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes. We have had no real news as to anything in the papers since Thursday. Our news is out of date with respect to what’s been happening to gold.
[Audience] {?}
[Rushdoony] We were given Thursday prices, you see. The whole fact has been kept from us so that, and then when we were told what happened Thursday night, there was no reason for this new gold rush, supposedly, it was just a freak. Actually, it’s a total loss of confidence in us and in all the various governments, but especially in us. Yes?
[Audience] {?}
[Rushdoony] I’m not an investment counselor, I don’t know about that, but we are in the midst of an economic crisis. Our time is virtually up, and this is something we should welcome, even though it hurts us, because it is the judgment of God. It does demonstrate the validity of God’s laws, and these people have been operating on the basis that there is no God and therefore, the economic laws that men have always recognized would not work. Well, in spite of everything they can do, it is working. They’re conspiring right now to break the price of silver in order to shatter public confidence. What they’re going to do is to deny collateral on silver to banks. Banks, in other words, cannot hold silver as collateral, which means all the bullion in coins held as collateral by the banks, which is millions upon millions, would have to be dumped overnight, which would depress the price, and then they could turn around and say, “See, we told you gold and silver are worthless, and you’d lose your shirt speculating on it. It’s dropped because it’s worthless,” and it would drop to $1.70 or less from $2.53 or better now, spot price, but it would only climb back up, but the idea would be to shatter public confidence. The whole point in all of this manipulation of the markets by the various governments is this: they want to prove there is no law, no economic law, because they want to prove there is no God that gives that law. IN other words, the only god is the state. This is a religious battle. This is why they are meeting, and all these governments are really working together. Sometimes they have their differences, but they are basically working together against God to prove that there is no God by destroying law, but the law will destroy them.
Well, our time is up, so we stand adjourned.
End of tape