Miscellaneous

The Atonement or the Society of Satan

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Religious studies

Lesson: 2-18

Genre: Lecture

Track: 22

Dictation Name: RR107A2

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Scripture Reading, Genesis 3:7-17

…The word of God as it is given to us in Genesis 3:7-17. Genesis 3:7-17.

“7 And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

8 And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.

9 And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?

10 And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.

11 And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?

12 And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

13 And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.

14 And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:

15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;”

Prayer

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

Almighty God our Heavenly Father, we give thanks unto Thee for Thy so great salvation. For the joy of Thy word, and the joy of fellowship with Thee. We thank Thee for one another. We thank Thee our Father that thou hast called into being this seminary. And we rejoice our Father in men who love to teach Thy word, and in men who delight in studying it. Prosper them both in Thy service, and make them mightily effectual unto Thee. And grant our Father that they might go hence to reestablish churches, men, communities, schools, all things in terms of thy sovereign law word.

Give us ever increasing joy in Thy service, make us ever mindful our Father that we have been called to victory, that greater is he that is in us than he that is in the world, that this is the victory which overcometh the world, even our faith. And our Lord how great Thou art, and we praise Thee. In Jesus name, amen.

Atonement is an inescapable civil, as well as ecclesiastical reality.

Every social order, every state, civil government, inescapably is called into being to reckon with the fact of atonement. This is a truth we have long forgotten. The early church fathers, and church scholars through the reformation era pointed out that one of the central aspects of the life of the state was that the fall of man made it necessary. The state was called into being in part, to reckon with the fact of sin. Sin must be atoned for. We saw yesterday how in the ancient world the annual day of atonement was basic to one society after another. That Rome for example had its annual rites of lustration, and no one could be a citizen who did not partake of the atonement. The state had to reckon with sin.

Sin had to be covered, either through immediate action by the state to punish the law breaker, or by action if the law breaker were not located, to avert the guilt from the social order. The Bible gives us the true, the God given law in this respect. Atonement on the one hand, religiously through the atoning sacrifice of the lamb, atonement on the other hand through the fulfillment of the law, and if the law breaker were not found, the elders of the city had to go through a special ritual to cover that crime, and thereby avert the judgement of God from themselves. Atonement is an inescapable civil, as well as ecclesiastical reality.

Satan’s program for atonement

Church and state as institutions must both deal with it. And they do. But the sad fact is that civil atonement as we have it today represents not the atonement, the covering that God provides, but that which Satan propounded. And as a result today we have a cultural crisis, we have a social crisis, because the kind of atonement that the state provides is one that instead of dealing with sin, compounds it.

When we deal with Adam and Eve, we begin to recognize Satan’s program for atonement. Satan had asked Adam and Eve to accept his thesis, and his thesis was that God is the problem, that God was the bad environment of man, limiting man, hemming him in, making it impossible for man fully to realize himself. That if man would throw overboard the shackles of God, and the limitations God imposed upon him, he would be his own God, knowing, determining good and evil for himself. Adam and Eve bought this thesis, and they then proceeded to apply it as God confronted them in their sin. On that day, modern sociology was born. And as we analyze their answer we begin to understand how society today reckons with sin. It reckons with it in terms of the fall, in terms of the temptation of Satan, in terms of a developed sociology and a program that man bought from Satan on that day.

The Sociology of Satan

First of all, man according to Satan in the temptation to Jesus, which was the continuation of the one to Eve, is not guilty of his sin. “Turn these stones into bread. Give them economic security. Cast thyself down, give them sight instead of faith. Take away their problems instead of creating an environment which leads them into temptation.” This was Satan’s program. “God is to blame. Man is not guilty of his sin. God has created things in such a way that man suffers because he doesn’t have cradle to grave security, he does have economic problems, he does have to walk by faith instead of sight, which would make everything so easy.” Thus the central and cardinal point in the sociology of Satan and in the society of Satan is: “The guilt is Gods.” The guilt is God’s.

Our parents can be blamed, and our environment can be blamed, but since our ultimate environment is God, ultimately the guilt is Gods. Second as a corollary to the first, a society is demanded in which it is unnecessary for men to be good. Everything is provided, there are no problems, all rights and no responsibilities. “Why should they have been tested? How cruel is God.” It was basically God’s fault, they held. As Adam put it, very, very neatly: “The woman THOU didst give unto me, she did give and I did eat.” The immediate cause was the woman, btu the ultimate cause, “It was you God. The woman thou gavest to be with me, if you hadn’t given her, I wouldn’t have been in this trouble.’ In a true society it would be unnecessary for men to be good, there wouldn’t be any problems. “Why didn’t you provide us with a world without a tree of testing, without a tempter? Without a woman to lead me astray?” and so the society of Satan and the sociology of Satan says: “Give us a world in which it is unnecessary for men to be good. A world without problems, a world of total rights, and no responsibilities.”

Third a society is demanded in which it is impossible for men to be bad. No testing you see. “How cruel of God to test us. He should give us a trouble free world. It should not be a world in which there are juvenile delinquents. In which there are people who are poor, and people who are rich. Give us womb to tomb security.”

And fourth, the sociology of Satan says: “Give us a society in which it is impossible for men to fail.” Unnecessary for men to be good, impossible for men to be bad, and impossible for men to fail. And of course this is what we are working towards is it not? Increasingly in one educational system after another, failure as a possibility for a child is being dropped. In many states it is impossible for a teacher to say to a child: “You’ve got to repeat the 3rd, or the 4th, or the 5th grade, or any grade.” There is automatic passing. Impossible to fail.

John Dewey: “All men must be saved”

In one state it has been reported that there are people graduating from the high schools today who cannot even read their names on the diploma. Is it any wonder that we have the problems we do? And we are told: “We must have a world in which it is impossible for anyone to be poor. We must have therefore a guaranteed annual income for all.” John Dewey who was the author of Progressivism in Education, and who opposed any kind of failing in schools, in his common Faith wrote that the sin of Christianity was its anti democratic belief in division and in failure, in haven and in hell, in the sheep and the goats, in the saved and the lost.

“All men must be saved” he said. And Christianity he declared to be hopelessly aristocratic. Which it is. Christianity believes in an aristocracy of grace. But for Dewey no failure was tolerable, except one. The only failure which is recognized in the Sociology is Satan is God’s failure for having dared to create a world in which we can suffer for our sins, in which we can be tried and tested, in which we can be good and evil, in which we can and must be men.

Thus there is a doctrine of atonement today. It is the doctrine of atonement which Adam and Eve sought as they tried to cover themselves from God, to hide their nakedness in His sight, as with their words they tried to cover themselves also from God by saying: “Not I, but you Lord. The guilt is thine, the woman Thou gavest to be with me, the serpent did give me and I did eat.”

It is impossible for Democracy and Biblical Christianity to co-exist

The world today gives us a developed doctrine of atonement in the social order. A state cannot exist today anymore than it could in the days of Rome, without having a doctrine of atonement for the civil order, a means of coping with evil. Because the very nature of the state, its reason for existence to a large degree involves coping with evil, making some kind of atonement for the fact of evil.

But the modern state declares that we represent evil, in so far as we represent God. And therefore, if a sacrifice is to be made, who is to be offered up in sacrifice? The people of God. We are expendable. Because somehow we are a roadblock, and Dewey said: “It is impossible for Biblical Christianity and Democracy to co-exist. If we are to have Democracy, Biblical Christianity must go.” Their sociology requires it. To deal with evil they must eliminate God. And when they proclaim the death of God, are they not also proclaiming, listen carefully to what they have to say, read between the lines, are they not also proclaiming the death of the people of God?

Have they not in effect said that we are the outlaws? That sin cannot be properly dealt with, evil cannot be dealt with as long as these Christians are here defining it improperly, as long as they pollute the minds of the children with the wrong idea of what is evil, and do not face the fact that it is the Bible and the God of the Bible.

We must proclaim the atonement that is of God

The battle cry of the enlightenment was; “Wipe out the shame, blot out the shame of Christianity and the Bible.” This is the evil. ‘Create the true society, establish it on a sound sociology, on a true covering of sin, by blotting out that which is responsible for the evil, and then remake society so that it is unnecessary for men to be good, impossible for men to be bad, and impossible for men to fail, and then man will again have paradise.’

When our Lord was tempted, he was tempted fittingly in the wilderness. Adam and Even in the Garden, in Paradise. The consequence of the sociology of Satan was symbolically there set forth. The Garden of God has been turned into a wilderness by the sociology of Satan. And today it is being made even further into a great, worldwide wilderness, and we who believe in the sociology of God are called upon to proclaim the atonement that is of God. Jesus Christ is our Redeemer from sin, and the law of God through the state to make atonement for sin, by covering it with the justice of God. The sociology of Satan must be opposed by the sociology and the atonement provided by God. Let us pray.

We give thanks that by Christ’s blood atonement has been made.

Our Lord and our God, we give thanks unto Thee that, Jesus Christ is our savior. For by his blood, atonement has been made. And we thank Thee our Father that Thou hast given us Thy law word, that in our social order we may make atonement for sin. That we might restore Thy order. Bless us oh Lord as we seek to undo the work of Satan, and prosper us in the service of Thy Son, our King, that His kingship may not only be established in our hearts, our homes, and in our churches and our schools, but in our work, in our state, in our every relationship. And that we may see the joy of the Lord in every realm, and Thy peace in our hearts and in our communities.

And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, amen.