Miscellaneous

Every Word of the Lowest Common Denominator

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Religious studies

Lesson: 1-18

Genre: Lecture

Track: 21

Dictation Name: RR107A1

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Scripture reading from Genesis 3:1-5

Hear now the word of God as it is given to us in the 3rd chapter of Genesis verses 1-5, or verses 1-6.

“3 Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

2 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:

5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.”

May this reading of scripture be to the glory of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, let us pray.

Glory be to Thou oh Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, who in Thy sovereign and omnipotent wisdom doth make all things work together for good to them that love Thee, to them who are the called according to thy purpose. We thank Thee our God that in our lives Thou hast taken our sins and our short comings, our failures and our humiliations, and has made them all work together for good in Thee. We thank Thee that Thy hand is upon us, that Thou dost beset us before and behind with Thy mercies, that all the days of our life we have the blessed assurance that Thou dost go before us to prepare a place for us, in time and in all eternity. And so our God with joy and thanksgiving we commit ourselves afresh unto Thee by Thy word and by Thy Spirit, beseeching Thee that Thou wouldst so enlighten us that we may behold wondrous things out of thy law, and may go forth, to serve Thee, to rejoice in Thee, and to magnify Thy Holy name. In Jesus name, amen.

Only the Lamb of God is fit to be the executor of the estate

In one of the most awe inspiring passages of scripture, Revelation 5, we are given a vision of heaven and of the great testament or will, man’s inheritance. Like every last will and testament of that day it was sealed with 7 seals, and only the executor of the estate could open it. But there was no man, no man fit to be the executor of the estate, and John wept, for the estate was the kingdom of God, a glorious world under God. And then he rejoiced as the word went out that there was an executor, the lion of the tribe of Judah, the lamb of God. But no man was worthy. Only the incarnate son of God. All through history men have dreamed about that inheritance, it has haunted the mythology of every culture. Every political philosopher and religious philosopher has spoken one way or another about that dream of man, the longing in his heart for Gods order, for that fullness of life, for that world in which man truly lives as God created him to live.

And the whole attempt to offer that inheritance on its own terms, it offers the true will concerning the kingdom and said: “Here it is. What God offers is not the way, here is the way, walk ye in it in terms of what we declare.”

The first such statement was in the garden of Eden. Satan came declaring that they were cheated. That God was defrauding them of the tremendous potentiality, the possibility of life. If they only followed his way, then indeed they would know the fullness of life, that what they were experiencing there was an illusion, that it was hemmed in, that God somehow had cheated them, however wonderful it appeared.

The Temptation of Satan

And so Satan as he spoke to Eve gave us his declaration of what the true will is. How man is to gain his estate, his inheritance. It was a three point program. Let man be his own god, knowing, that is, determining good and evil for himself. “Ye shall be as Gods. Every man his own scientist, by experiential knowledge establishing, determining good and evil for himself. What God declares to be good and evil is just an illusion,” Satan said, “He is hemming you in, he is preventing you from realizing true happiness, true possibility and potentiality. But let us be scientific about it. In terms of the experiential method. Try. Taste and see for yourself.”

The second point in Satan’s program is that man’s life is to oppose his righteousness to God’s righteousness. That God’s righteousness is a (bald?) thing, that man’s way should be that which is best suited to himself. “Know, determine good and evil for yourself, it may be that God’s idea of good is what you like, but it may be God’s idea of good is tyranny for you. If you follow the experiential method and determine for yourself what constitutes good and evil, your own righteousness may be the best way, the finest way of realizing life, of having true happiness.”

And third the implication was that God’s way is both slavery and falsehood. “Yea hath God said?” God is portrayed as seeking to limit man, limit man whose potentialities are presented as God like. “Cast off the shackles, seize the inheritance, enter in to your estate.”

The answer first given by Eve was a sound one. “God hath said.” God hath said. As our Lord in the second great temptation faced again as the representative man the tempter declared: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” The principal of life is every word, the totality. Every word means the whole of Scripture. What a sorry thing it is that churches boast that they are New Testament churches. And are proud that they have swept off the old. How sad that so many ministers in the pulpit progressively end up over the years with a very limited Bible.

Man must live by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God

Little by little they drop overboard most of the Pentateuch, and then only have a few of their favorite psalms left, and certain passages in the prophets, and certain passages in the epistles and most of the Gospels, and they have a Bible about as Greek as that of the modernists. And they have a deformed gospel. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Every word. And the only sound context of all preaching is in terms of that every word, the totality of the Scripture. But it has become a routine thing in the church today, from men who believe they teach God’s word to teach only half a word, a partial word.

Sometimes the illustrations that one can cite of the partial preaching are ludicrous. Perhaps the classic example comes from Lorenzo Dow, the old Methodist circuit. A very charming, a colorful figure, but sometimes given to performing monstrosities where preaching was concerned. A brilliant man, and incidentally his great granddaughter and great, great, grandchildren are very good friends of mine. But Lorenzo Dow in his revivals sometimes in the course of winning souls or bringing people into line, butchered scripture. On one famous occasion when a new hair style came out where women coiled up their hair into a top knot, and he felt that this new style was offensive and vain glorious, he preached a sermon against it. He said that the word of our Lord and of our Savior was: “Top knot come down.” This was a literal word of our Lord. And women were taking the hair pins out of their hair all over the camp meeting. But there were a few bold women who cornered him afterwards and asked him where that passage was, where our Lord had said it. And Lorenzo Dow referred them to Matthew 24:17 and dashed off before they could look it up and read: “Let him which is on the house top not come down to take anything out of his house.”

The Bible is not a lowest common denominator book

I cite this verse because Lorenzo Dow is dead, I could cite some living preachers who have done worse. But it is every word, the totality of the word that we are to preach, and man’s freedom is in total submission to the whole word of God, it is his means to power, to liberty, and to righteousness. The every word of God is the true testament or will of revelation, the terms of our in inheritance. It is only as we regenerate in Jesus Christ abide by his every word, that the inheritance is opened up for us progressively and we enter in to the glories that scripture promises for those who walk faithfully in terms of His word.

What is required of us is total submission, and the logical alternative is finally total anarchy.

But increasingly in our day, men have preached no the every word which opens up the inheritance, the every word in which man can stand against the tempter, but a partial word. A lowest common denominator word. This is one of my objections to the various movements that have captured youth in the past century, beginning with Christian endeavor which progressively deteriorated, and became weaker and weaker in its theology, to recent movements like campus crusade, which cuts off denominational lines, which don’t want to get into theology, they just want to present the simple gospel, and it becomes a lowest common denominator gospel, nothing to offend the Methodists or the Baptists or the Presbyterians, or the Reformed, or the Lutheran, so let’s throw overboard anything which might offend, and the result is progressively the lowest common denominator kind of thinking, and the Bible is not a lowest common denominator book, it is a book that insists on every word. And only by every word shall man live.

God’s Word or Anarchy

A. A. Hodge in his lectures of a Century ago analyzed what would happen to the public schools which in that day had the Bible. He said that because they were no longer Christian schools committed to the every word of God, the principle of the lowest common denominator would take over, and he wrote and I quote; “It is capable of exact demonstration that if every party in the state has the right of excluding from the public school whatever he does not believe to be true, then he that believes most must give way to him that believes least, and then he that believes least must give way to him that believes absolutely nothing, no matter how small a minority the atheist or the agnostics may be, it is self-evident, that on this scheme, if it is consistently and persistently carried out, in all parts of the country the United States system of national popular education will be the most efficient and wide instrument for the propagation of atheism which the world has ever seen.”

Hodge made that statement a hundred years ago. We have seen its fulfillment. Every lowest common denominator faith means that he who believes the least is the most powerful, being the common denominator. Therefore it is that our Lord declared in terms of the law: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word, the totality of the word. Every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.”

We either have every word of God, or in terms of the principle of the lowest common denominator, following Satan, it becomes man’s word, total anarchy. Every man his own God, every man choosing for himself that which is right and wrong. Thus it is that a century ago De Meister writing in France declared that ultimately the western world would founder on the doctrine of infallibility, because there is no sovereignty without infallibility, he said. And if God and His word are not infallible, you wind up with the infallible individual or the infallible state.

Sovereign God or Sovereign Man

Remove infallibility from God, and you remove sovereignty from Him and His word, and it accrue to man and the state. And so he said finally and I quote: “Every true philosopher must choose between two hypothesis, either a new religion will come to birth or Christianity will renew its youth in some extraordinary manner.”

The only other alternative was total chaos, the total collapse of civilization in Anarchy. Take away the reign of fundamental law, the every word of God binding every man, and substitute for it Democracy or what you will and the reign of the least prevails, and the new and infallible word either becomes the law of the pack or the law of anarchistic man. And in such an order every man’s word is equally valid, and then there is hatred for the good because it is good.

I was interested not too long ago in reading a book about the Jivaro Tribe, in the jungles of Brazil near the source of the Amazon. Here is a lowest common denominator people. So degenerate, their minds so numbed by their depravity that they have no ability to count beyond the number three. Filthy all their lives, never bathing. The author (Bertron Pornoi?) said that there was one Jivaro wife who was a captive woman from another tribe and she liked to bath periodically, and all the other women were filthy, lice ridden, hated and despised her with a passion, because they could not entirely bring her down to their lowest common denominator, they were as low as a people could get, and the principle of the lowest common denominator prevailing amongst them, they resented anything which was an implied criticism of them.

“For all they that hate me, love death.”

And more recently Doctor (Honner?), Anthropologist at the University of California in visiting the Jivaro’s, indicated there further flight from life, seeking the lowest common denominator through drugs. And he reported that the Jivaro use drugs extensively, the children start using them at the age of 6. Every day existence is merely the outward manifestation of reality and not reality itself according the Jivaro’s. They believe that the great events of life are profoundly influenced by the things that take place in these drug caused visions. The lowest common denominator is taking them out of life itself.

As our Lord says, speaking as wisdom, ages ago: “All they that hate me love death.” And today progressively we see mankind turning downward, suicidal in its course, having rejected the every word of God, it has rejected life. “For all they that hate me, love death.”

Thus, Christ having opened up for us the great inheritance, he having been worthy, we enter progressively into the glory of that estate as sons of God, citizens of His kingdom, to the degree that resisting Satan’s temptation: “Yea hath God said?” We say with our Lord, when he resisted Satan: “Man shall not live by bread alone, nor by his word, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.”

Let us pray.

We thank Thee that Thy Son was worthy

Our Lord and our God, we thank Thee for Thy every word. Thy word is truth, give us grace therefore our Father so to walk that thy every word may be obeyed, thy every word put into action, Thy every word be made the government of our lives, our churches, our states, our homes, and our schools. That we might as Thy people become inheritors of the glory of Thy earth, and of Thine eternal kingdom, and might rejoice before Thee all the days of our life. Oh Lord our God, we thank Thee that thy son was worthy. That the lion of the tribe of Judah has opened up for us Thy Kingdom, and that Thou hast summoned us to enter therein. And by Thine every word, to possess it. Our God we Thank Thee, in Jesus name, amen.