Studies in Early Genesis

Created Very Good

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 2 of 11

Track: #47

Dictation Name: RR115A2

Date: 1960-1970’s

[Rushdoony] Let us turn again to Genesis one this time reading Genesis 1:1 and verses 26 following.

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Verse 26

26 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.

27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

28 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.

29 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.

30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to everything that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

31 And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Some years ago during the 1860’s during the course of the war between the states there was a man living in border country who was hard put to keep his neutrality, he didn’t want to be involved in the war, he wanted to continue his farming. And so he decided to show his unconcern, as well as his neutrality by wearing grey trousers and a blue coat. This way he would indicate that he wasn’t against anyone and he was in favor of both. However one day he was caught in between two rival army patrols and the confederates shot him in the coat and the union patrol shot him in the pants. [general laughter].

This is what usually happens to people who try to be neutral or people who straddle both sides. There are a lot of people doing that these days, a great many are doing it in the church also as they try to be on both sides of every issue and try to believe both in creation and in evolution, and the result is a sorry one. It does not square with the scripture, and the obligation of the pulpit is to proclaim the word of God. This Sunday, as every Sunday, five hundred thousand sermons are being preached, but one is inclined to wonder how many of them are concerned with the word of God. This scripture tells us that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Now when the doctrine of creation is not held, and to any degree, the concept of evolution is affirmed then you operate with what philosophers call “the continuity concept”. You affirm that all being is one, as Christians we believe that there is “created being”, created being means us and everything in the universe, we were made, we are not eternal or immortal as of ourselves. “Uncreated being” is God, so this is the great line of division in being; “Uncreated Being” God, “created being” the universe, including ourselves.

Now outside the Bible every religion and every philosophy holds to the concept of the continuity of being. And therefore salvation for a man in all these pagans religions becomes a question of rising on the ladder, or the scale, of being. And this concept of being, the concept of continuity, the idea that all being is one says that down here at the bottom of this ladder is pure matter, up at the top is pure spirit. Therefore the man who wants to rise and become more and more divine, because the idea of salvation in all paganism is for man to become progressively more and more of God. The way he does this is to forsake material things and become more and more spiritually minded. Now this sounds familiar and if you’ve had this sort of things in the churches you realize how much we’ve been infected by paganism. Because the purpose of being a Christian is not to be spiritually minded in this neutral sense of all being, being one, and pure being, being pure spirit, but to be spiritually minded in the sense of being conformed to the Holy Spirit. And between the two there is a world of difference.

Now in Hinduism for example, which is a classic example of this continuity concept, the man who wants to be holy seeks to be pure spirit progressively. And the ideal of course is ultimately to abandon entirely this material world and to abandon identity, to enter into Nirvana, as Ghandi said he hoped he was now holy enough that he wouldn’t be reborn again, because he believed in reincarnation, and that he would lose his identity and become pure spirit. To do this you forsake this material world, Ghandi for example not only gave up what in his awful student days he had adopted in England, the eating of meat, but he also forsook his wife, he ate as little as possible and periodically fasted for any number of days to divorce himself from this material world. This, he felt, was the way to become a saint, and he believed he had become one. And of course millions of Hindu’s believed the same.

Now apart from the bible and whenever so called Christians depart from the Bible, this becomes to them their way to holiness; to rise on the ladder of being from the world of matter to the world of pure spirit. But the Bible says nothing about this, it tells us that God created us and the very word for Adam the first man is “earth” Adam, or “adama” in the Hebrew means earth, dirt, topsoil. And man was created to live in this earth according to the law of God and when he made him a body he made him God says, “very good” he surveyed the whole of the creation and pronounced it very good. It was not evil because it was material, it became evil because it disobeyed God. And the world is a fallen world, not because it is a material world but because it is disobeying God law, and the destiny of the universe therefore is not to become pure spirit, but in the resurrection again to put on matter, this time perfectly good and without either sin or death. And our destiny as Christians is at the end of the world to put on resurrection body and to live forever in the site of God, in a world that is a glorious material world, totally possessed by the Holy Spirit and without sin or death.

This means therefore that people who are trying to be God, and that’s the meaning of this pseudo-spirituality, are not good Christians, they are anti-Christian basically. Or else they’re very seriously misinformed people, we often find such people. I know of having grown up in the church and in the manse, how many, many, people felt they were holy when actually they were of no earthly good. And their idea of being holy was pretending not to like food and material things, they didn’t care about those things, they claimed to be somehow superior and dressing very plainly, but as expensively as possible in the process, and making a show of being disinterested with material things. This is nonsense. There’s nothing in the Bible that tells us that we are to despise material things. We are not to set a false value among them, and make them the be all end all of our lives.

You find sometimes some people quoting Peter that the Godly woman doesn’t set her store on the plaiting of hair and gold ornaments and so on, as though this means these things are to be forsaken. But if you read the passage it also says clothes, is she to be a nudist, the Godly woman? By no means! It does not say that she is to forsake gold ornaments, or that she is to forsake her hair-do’s or dress, but that her primary purpose must be Godliness. Now if Godliness become foremost in our purpose, to live according to the word of God, we are then able to enjoy material things, and they are the blessing of God to us, and are to be used according to His word. For us our glory is to be human. To be men and women under God, to rejoice in the things that God has given us, we are to thank Him for our daily bread, to consider our food a blessing. We are to thank Him for our home and shelter and loved ones, for the everyday material things. And our Lord commanded us to pray for these things “Give us this day our daily bread” because these are blessings. And the saints whom God loved He rewarded materially, because these things are a blessing.

Thus we have a false aestheticism which denies that man is a creature; which affirms this continuity concept and says “man is to be pure spirit, he is to be a god ultimately, and so he is to despise material things”. This is one way, the material way. The individual, the personal way, forsake personally all these material things and try to become a God. But there is another in which our world today is attempting to be as god, and this as we shall see in Genesis three, is the great sin of man. And this is by attempting to transcend his humanity.

What is sin for the Christian is a virtue for the evolutionist trying to transcend their humanity. It is astounding to read some of the literature of contemporary scientist as they plan the future. I picked up a book just Friday at the library by a contemporary scientist speaking of evolution today and tomorrow, in which he says of course religion is with us now because we do not have total control, but the day that science is able to control all aspects of life and death itself then religion and the idea of God will be obsolete, man will have arrived, he will be as God. If this sounds fantastic let us remember that our scientist who have said “we will not only conquer every aspect of life, but we will conquer death, we will be able without anything, without any rocket ships ultimately, to travel throughout the universe if and when the sun dies we will create a new sun and establish it in the heavens” these things are very, very seriously discussed. It’s not surprising.

Almost ten years ago I began to collect books in this field, containing statements of this sort by scientist, when I saw an advertisement in the November 12, 1956 issue of Time Magazine. A very interesting one, a doctor holding up a spaceman as though he were a newborn baby. “The cord has been cut. Man at last severed the tie that bound him to mother earth. There {?} stable platforms and inertial navigation systems can now free him from all terrestrial sources.” And so on.

Man is free from the earth, in other words, free from matter, man has cut the cord. But the Bible says “dust thou art and unto dust shall thou return”. And this refers not only to death but to more than death, to the whole life process of man. Man is tied to the earth, because man, Adam is made of the earth, and it is his glory to be human, to be a man under God, and it is his sin to attempt to be more than that. And when men try to be as God, their sin over and over again in scripture is a hard binding to the earth through plague and disaster and trouble. And wherever man in history has grown high handed in his sin and imagined himself to be more than man, God has turned him back to the earth by his judgment.

As Christians we need always to read History in terms of the word of God, and we need to recognize that God’s judgment is on the world today and will be progressively, because man believes and boasts that he has cut the cord to earth, that he is no longer a creature, that he can transcend his humanity. The judgment will follow, and men will either be destroyed by it, or they will under God look upon life as humans as a very good thing, under God.

Moreover Genesis one tells us, by declaring that God beheld His creation and pronounced it to be very good, that sin and death are unnatural things, that they are an invasion of this world, that they are not normal. Normal life means life without sin, without death. Man was created by God for this normal life, man departed from it and his whole life today is abnormal. When normality is restored to this world, and when we become Christians we’ve taken the first step towards normality, then sin and death are progressively abolished. This is never done of course, perfectly in this world, but in the general resurrection and the world to come sin and death are totally abolished and we live a glorified eternal life in our resurrection bodies. Now to believe this is to separate ourselves from all others, because the unbeliever, the evolutionist sees sin and death as natural things; as the background out of which man is evolving and progressing and growing. IN other words sin and death are mans natural state. And he must transform this through controlled evolution. But we cannot believe they are mans natural state but an abnormal state.

This means a different approach to the body and to healing. When we believe that sin and death are abnormal we have a different conception of medicine. For unbelief the body is first of all an imperfect mechanism or organism, it must be improved on and made into a better model. On the other hand for the believer, health and life are the natural states of man, we were born to live and to enjoy life and to find our fulfillment in and through our bodies they are the gift of God. And under God’s law we will rejoice in this material life and delight in it, and find in it our fulfillment under God. TO be regenerated is the beginning of the restoration of this life as man, as a human being, as a material creature. And this beginning is accomplished in eternity. The Christian thus because he sees his life as essentially a material one, to be lived in terms of the law of God, and sees sin and death as abnormalities, has not only a more realistic perspective towards himself, but a healthier life.

I was very much interested some years ago to be asked by a Doctor to attend a medical society meeting in San Francisco to here at the time one of the prominent specialist from England speak. Who, in the course of his talk, made the remark, he said “certainly we do not have the definitive evidence, but” he said “there is a higher rate of recovery for the same types of surgery for earnest Christians than for non-Christians, the recuperative powers are greater.” And he went on to deal with this subject at considerable length. The Christian is the healthier person on the whole because he knows that health is his destiny and his natural state, he knows that he has been created to enjoy life, under God. And it is his destiny to have a glorious resurrection body. His principle of health therefore is from within and Jesus Christ is the new life is His principle of health. When we talk about salvation, what are we talking about? Health. Salvation comes from the Latin “Salva” which means “health” and salvation means, in the Christian sense, the fullness of bodily and spiritual health. The spiritual health begins with our regeneration. It is accomplished when we are totally sanctified after death, and our entrance into heaven. Our physical health is totally accomplished with the resurrection from the dead. So that our fullness of salvation is the fullness of health.

Thus when we are saved as Christians our new life, Jesus Christ the perfect man, is now the principle of health within us. And we can survey the world as God’s creation. Fallen? Yes, but under the government of God, and a good world, as Paul declared “To the pure all things are pure” because he puts them to a holy use. Paul further says in Hebrews that “Marriage is honorable in all and the bed is undefiled, but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge”. The world tries to reach purity of nature by lawlessness, by cutting the cord that ties us to earth, and it only renders everything impure because the unbeliever is himself impure. But for us our principle of health and purity is Jesus Christ who is now the law of our being. Thus when we read that God created the heavens and the earth in six days and God saw everything that He had made, and behold it was very good, we can rejoice. This was our world in the beginning, this is the world to us in Jesus Christ, in the face of all the evils that surround us because He is still on the throne, and the overwhelming fact about this world is not what the conspirators are trying to make of it, but what God created it to be and what He will in the end declare it to be. And these things which are an infection on the surface of God’s creation He, the good physician, will deal with in his own good time. And we shall, I believe, live to see His surgery, His removal from history the cancer of this evil and disease which has infected our generation. Let us pray.

Almighty God our heavenly Father we thank Thee for Thy word and for Thy truth, we thank Thee for Thy so great salvation. We thank Thee that Jesus Christ is our principle of health and that in Him we have the blessed assurance that not only our being, soul and body, is destined for perfect health, but all heaven and earth shall be made anew and very good. Our God we thank Thee, in Jesus name, Amen.