Studies in Early Genesis
Whose Infallible Word
?Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony
Subject: Pentateuch
Genre: Speech
Lesson: 5 of 11
Track: #50
Dictation Name: RR11C5
Date: 1960-1970’s
[Rushdoony] Lets begin with prayer.
Almighty God our heavenly Father we come again in Thy presence mindful of all Thy mercies, indeed they are new every morning. Thou has beset us before and behind with Thy mercies, Thou hast led us all the days of our life, Thou has fitted good to us who so often cannot be good to ourselves, and so our God we thank Thee. We come together to commit ourselves afresh to Thy word and to Thy Holy Spirit, bless us and minister unto us in Jesus name, Amen.
Genesis three verses one through six.
1Now the serpent was more subtle 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.
The Garden of Eden was not without its testing, there was always the choice that man had to obey or disobey, he could enjoy life in all the bliss of the garden of Eden, but he had the responsibility to decided always whether his life was to be one of obedience or a life of self-ascertain. Now into this picture where man had from the very beginning this choice Satan enters and makes his statement. And the essence of his statement is first of all, a doubt upon God’s word, “yea hath God said?” Why live by authority? You’re accepting God’s word and you are assuming it is true. On what ground do you make this tremendous assumption? Do you have any reason to believe that you will die? Do you have any reason to assume that what God says has any substance behind it, have you experimented; have you put it to the test? Is there any real scientific knowledge behind this statement? After all, how can you accept something just on faith, on sheer authority? And so the first statement Satan makes “yea hath God said?” strikes at the very heart of all law and order by destroying authority.
Authority is inescapable in human life, it has to rest somewhere. And what Satan is saying is that there is only one authority ultimately, each man. “Ye shall not surely die, 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.” The verb “knowing” here has the force not merely of understanding but more properly in the Hebrew of “determining” so that when Satan says “Ye shall all be Gods in your own right knowing” that is, “determining” good from evil, every man will set up his own law, and if he says “I believe it’s good to steal” then stealing is legitimate. If he says “I believe adultery is a good way of life” then for him it is, there is no law outside of himself. And the only law that governs his being is the law of his own making.
“Ye shall be as Gods,” every man determining his own law. Establishing for himself what he considers to be good and evil. In the current Pageant magazine some of you no doubt noticed that this was in essence precisely the sermon of an Episcopal rector at a girls college, where he told them that there was no law with regard to sex, that as long as they did it out of love, that is they wanted to and they were sincere about it, there was no law that could condemn them and say that that which they did was wrong. They were to determine for themselves what was good and evil, each one was a law unto himself. Thus the first premise of Satan’s temptation is, “let man be his own God, knowing” that is determining “good and evil for himself” and this is experimental knowledge, try it and see for yourself, there’s no harm in it, don’t take things on authority, be scientific. Experiment, determine what you like, and live your life in terms of that. Thus man is to establish his own righteousness in terms of his own authority and his own experiments in living.
This leads us to the second point with respect to Satan. Man’s true way of life therefore is to oppose his own righteousness, to God’s righteousness. His self-righteousness to the righteousness of God and this Satan says is the only true way to live. How do you know what is good and evil for yourself? God is trying to keep you from the true paradise, so that here you sit in the Garden of Eden and your big enemy to real happiness, to really fulfillment is God. God’s law is preventing you from being the God you could be in your own right. God’s law is blocking you from self-fulfillment, from self-righteousness. And third, this means that he implies that God’s way is both slavery and falsehood. “Yeah hath God said?” God is seen as seeking to limit man and trying to prevent man from knowing he is a God with God like potentialities. So Adam a creature is tempted into assuming that he is of God, and God is trying to hinder him from self-fulfillment.
Ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil. This is the original sin of man, this was the great temptation and this is the sin of every man apart from Jesus Christ. Now many people who are outwardly fine citizens, moral people, are nonetheless sinners in the sight of God, as all men are apart from Christ. Because for all their outward conformity to Christian standards they are guilty, unless they be Christians, of this fundamental sin to be as God, knowing good and evil for themselves. Determining what is the proper course. There was an article a few years ago in Esquire which was very, very revealing. What this article did was to state that having a mistress or committing adultery was not good, why? Well first a mistress could be very expensive, and it would lead to all kinds of complications. And second committing adultery on the side with some other woman could lead to very serious other trouble with some man, you might get shot, you might end up in a law court, and so they added up all the pleasures and all the displeasures and they concluded that morality made sense for purely pragmatic reasons. That you wanted to enjoy life, he wanted to live life to its full, and the best way you could do it was to avoid trouble, and therefore you stayed put with your wife. Not because that was the best possible life, but because anything else was somewhat messier.
Now such morality is an offense against God, and all kind of morality that is man centered and does something because man feels this is the way for me, is meaningless in the site of God, it’s an offense. God requires us to obey His law because it is His law, because He has declared that it is holy a righteous and true, not because we have proven it to be so ourselves. Because if we wait until we prove everything then the whole world will fall apart. If I say “I will obey God when He makes a commandment, only when I can prove to myself it’s good,” first I am saying “it’s my conception of good that is more important than God’s” and second “there is no law until I establish it,” an what I have done is to destroy the very foundations of law.
When you destroy the foundations of law society rapidly disintegrates to total anarchy. You either have God’s authority and His infallible word, or you ultimately have the authority of man and man’s infallible word. You cannot get away from an infallible authority and an infallible word, this is inescapable. Every time people have tried to destroy the authority of God and have ridiculed the idea that this book inspired and infallible they have done it only to sneak in some other infallible word. They don’t label it as such because they don’t want you to see the trick their pulling on you, but they do it nonetheless. The Communist party speaks of Opium as the religion of the masses, but for world Communism the Communist international is infallible. It cannot err, and they word of the international has for them the binding power of scripture. There was a crisis a few years ago when Khrushchev denounced Stalin. And immediately the Peking communist said “What have you done? You have taken the previous head of the international and you have denied that he is infallible!”
And so there was a second speech with regard to Stalinism by Khrushchev who then proceeded to say “For our time Stalin is wrong, and if we were to have Stalin and his actions today in the Soviet Union it would be the cult of personality and these things would be wrong, but for his time he was infallible and true” this in effect was the gist of the second speech of Khrushchev. The infallibility of the international had to be preserved. And those who like Bendetto Croce the philosopher make art the true of voice of man, developed inescapably as he did a concept of the infallibility of the aesthetic experience. And every form of Statism, whether it be Fabian or Marxist or any other inevitably makes the state the infallible voice of man, and there is no appeal beyond the state. It would take hours to go through history and site the various theories of statist whereby the state has become infallible. It is impossible to have authority without infallibility and the issue is, “whose infallible word?”.
And Satan said “Not God’s, yeah hath God said?” “Can you trust him? He is trying to deny your own infallible word, every man his own god, every man setting up his own law standards, his own moral code, every man doing as he pleases.
But long ago De Maistre {?} a French political theorist very wisely said “There can be no human society without government, no government without sovereignty, no sovereignty without infallibility and this last privilege is so essential that its existence must be assumed even in temporal sovereignty where it does not reside in fact, as an essential condition of the maintenance of society” In other words there can be no society without an infallible word, and the question is “where is the infallible word, in God or in man?” and if it’s in man it’s either in the state or on the individual of the total anarchist. And hence it is that when this country was established, because they believed this they refused to use the word “sovereignty” in the constitution. And the word sovereignty, as I have pointed in a chapter in This Independent Republic was alien to all American political thinking. Because they denied not only the sovereignty of the state, but any infallibility to any instrument of state; sovereignty and infallibility belong to God and to His word. And so the word “Sovereignty” is missing from the constitution. But now we have a federal government claiming sovereignty and since the War of Independence the states have developed a doctrine of state sovereignty and the word which was once taboo in American political thought is now commonplace because we have progressively denied God’s infallible word for the infallible word of man.
De Maistre said further “every true philosopher must choose between two hypotheses. Either that a new religion will come to birth or that Christianity will renew its youth in some extraordinary manner”
And of course the obvious fact is that either Christianity will be renewed, will be revived or the world will move progressively into total Statism and from there to total anarchy. Every society that has established its own infallible word, that has been built upon Satan’s temptation and upon the doubt “Yea, hath God said?” has descended into the gutter. And every culture that is based on that, as the cultures of Africa are, is crawling on all fours. How thoroughly the disintegration becomes we seldom appreciate because our anthropological textbooks are no longer real descriptions of primitive, of so-called primitive, society; but are idealistic accounts, and most of the real accounts are unattainable or put on bookshelves as not fit for public consumption because they are fearful reading as they describe the realities of these societies. Because when man denies God’s law and says “I am my own god and I choose for myself what is good and evil” then he loses all sense of reality, he loses all contact with the other world, he loses any sense of any need to improve himself, and the culture declines as far as it is humanly possible.
I was interested some time ago to do some reading on the Jivaro Indians of South America. It’s a little safer in some circles to talk about the Navarro’s, not because I’m unwillingly because I shall talk about the African peoples a little later, but it doesn’t get you onto extraneous issues. But the Jivaro’s can only count up to three. They don’t know how to count beyond three; they don’t feel any need to learn. No one else, and nothing in the outside world, has that much meaning. The Jivaro’s live in the most abject kind of degradation. They are unspeakably filthy, they live on anything they can kill and make no provision for tomorrow. A French anthropologist who worked among them for a while said that one Jivaro had as his wife a captive woman from a much more advanced tribe, every Jivaro woman resented her and was envious of her because she was clean. But none of them felt any desire to conform to any kind of standard ever to clean themselves, or to rid themselves of vermin. They simply resented the presence in their midst of one person who had even so primitive a standard as being, after a fashion, clean.
What happens, does it stop there? When a people say “I am my own god, and there is no law outside of me” they live finally not only with no reference to the outside world but in a dream world. And it is not surprising that they take to narcotics. Not too long ago an anthropologist from the University of California spent some time among the Jivaro, who are best known as you perhaps recall, for their shrunken head. And he reported that the Jivaro use drugs extensively, the children start using them at the age of six. Everyday existence is merely the outward manifestation of reality, and not reality itself according to the Jivaro’s. They believe the great events of life are profoundly influenced by things that take place in these drug caused visions. The Jivaro think the drugs help them acquire immunity from death in a land racked by disease, warfare, and deadly nature. They see apparitions, such as giant boa constrictors, or jaguars which they believe are ghostly manifestations of immunity; but occasionally even drugs aren’t enough and the Jivaro must make use of the unreal waking world to kill someone else and shrink the victim’s head; this aide’s longevity according to Jivaro logic. The real world gives way to a dream world when men forsake God’s infallible word for Satan’s temptation “ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil”.
We are beginning to see the signs of the Jivaro world all around us. As men, whether in the courts of law or in the council of the state take their leave of reality, and pass laws that have no relationship to anything around us, who dream their dreams of a paradise on earth, and work creating a hell on earth in the process. Take away the reign of God’s fundamental law, his infallible word, and substitute for it anything else call it democracy or what you will, any of man’s works and ultimately you destroy everything; because the reign of the common denominator takes over and the lowest common denominator prevails.
Some years ago A.A. Hodge, one of the great theologians of America, called attention to what was happening as the public schools came into existents, and he warned of what they were doing, that were taking education away from parents. And while they were promising that they would keep the faith in the schools, they would ultimately destroy it. And he wrote “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, that 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 agnostic 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, it will be” he said, and this statement was made to some women’s groups 80-90 years ago, “the rule of the lowest common denominator.” Because take away God’s infallible word and replace it with man’s infallible and it becomes progressively integration downward. And he who believes the least is the most powerful, being the lowest common denominator. And today because we do not obey God’s word it is the lowest common denominator in our society which is increasingly the most powerful. The worst element in Los Angeles or in Washington D.C. or in New York City that carries the most weight, it is either total submission to God’s word or it is a progressive submission downward to the lowest common denominator.
Eve had the right answer at first, because in answer to Satan’s temptation, her answer at first was “God has said”. And as long as we stand in terms of that we are superior. God has said “it is written” and each time Jesus Christ as the representative man. Your next of kin and mine was confronted by the temptation of Satan, this was his answer “it is written, it is written, it is written” the first temptation of Satan came to Adam in paradise and to Eve. And when they submitted to that temptation they turned this world which had been created to be a paradise into a wilderness. Christ was tempted in the wilderness symbolic of what the world had become. And He met it with the answer “God has said, It is written man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” The principle of life for us has to be every word. There are many people who claim to believe the infallible word but in effect do not. Because you cannot believe the Bible if you take just the beatitudes and first Corinthians 13 and a number of favorite passages and forget the rest. And many Christians will read a smaller and smaller Bible of over the years, just their favorite passages. And is it any wonder since they do, as one elderly woman once told me, confine themselves to passages like first Corinthians 13 becomes so easily misled by the modernist and their talk of universal love.
Man’s freedom is in total submission to the word of God. It is his means to power, and to liberty and to righteousness. And the whole word of God must be studied by man in terms of that which God declared it; a fundamental principle of exegesis that is the interpretation of the Bible is that a text without its context is a pretext. A text without its context is a pretext. It has to be read, it has known in terms of the whole passage and the whole scripture so that the Bible is its own interpreter. And people very often have made nonsense out of scripture by taking isolated passages. I think one [audio interruption] is the story concerning a Methodist revivalist and circuit rider about 150 years ago Lorenzo Dow, who was much given to some rather wild preaching on occasion. And on one occasion when he was holding some camp meetings he noticed the prevalence of a new style of hair-do which offended him a great deal. The woman were coiling their hair into a top-knot, and he preached a sermon against it, declaring that Jesus was against such hair-do’s and had declared “top-knot come down!” it was a fiery sermon, we have excerpts of it to this day, and while he was preaching there were woman quietly taking their hair down all over the huge open area where the meeting was being held, but fortunately there were several woman with a little more knowledge of scripture and some gumption who corralled him afterwards and asked him where that statement was in the Bible. And he told them it was in Matthew 24 and hurried on to get away. They found it in Matthew 24 in the verse which read “let him who is on the housetop not come down”. [General laughter]
A text without a context is a pretext. And this is done extensively today. And there are all kinds of preachers today that are getting up in the pulpit week after week and talking about “god is love” without any reference to the fact that before God is love to us he is judgment. And we must accept the judgment of God upon sin in order to know the love of God in Jesus Christ. Only this week when I was speaking during the questions period, one very prominent minister in Grand Rapids got up and insisted that because God is love we must love the homosexuals. A text without a context is a pretext and our liberty is in the whole word of God. And we are faced with total submission or total anarchy. In Revelation five we have a magnificent picture of heaven and the great testament, or will, man’s inheritance waiting for someone to open it up. And John wept because there was no one to open it up. Here was the kingdom of God, paradise, man’s inheritance which he had lost through sin. And how was he to inherit it? And it is written “man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” Let us pray.
Our Lord and our God we thank Thee for Thy every word. For the word that judges us, for the word that revives us. For the word that directs us, and for the word that comforts us. We thank Thee our Father that we can rest in Thy word. That Thou art are strength, our shield, and our defender. And according to Thy word we can both lay us down in peace and sleep, for Thou Lord only makest us to dwell safety. We thank Thee our Father that Jesus Christ is even now waging war unto victory against Satan and his hosts, to disposes them, to make us heirs of Thy kingdom. Our God we thank Thee in Jesus name, Amen.
Are there any questions, yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes that is limited to the Catholic priest, usually they do as a requirement pray “In Jesus name’’ but many, many prayers in modernist churches today are not in Jesus name.
[Same audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] That is new, I’m not familiar with the dropping of the amen. Now the significance of that is, of course, that they do not recognize the mediation of Jesus Christ. We come to God not in our righteousness, but in the righteousness of Christ. So that when we approach Him He doesn’t look at our Righteousness, if He did He’d see us in all our problems {?} but every time we pray in Jesus name we come to God in the total perfection of Christ. Now Christ whose member we are knows our weaknesses and our frailties and because we are members of His body He is dealing with us to heal us, to correct us and so on, because just as our body takes care of an infected finger if there is any infection of sin in us Christ is dealing with that. So day by day in our sins and in our griefs and burdens Christ is ministering to us as a member of His body just as we deal with a sick finger or a hurt finger. But as we approach God the Father we approach Him always in the perfect righteousness of Christ, hence we can be bold when we pray Paul says, because we come in Christ, in Jesus name.
Now there’s one prayer alone we can pray without using Jesus name, the Lord’ prayer, why? Because the words are our Lord’s words, we don’t have to pray it in His name because we are praying it in His words. But with that singular section we pray in Jesus name or else we are presuming we can come to God apart from Him. Now I think there is some excuse for simple believers who haven’t been instructed to pray without using Jesus name, because the intention is Christian, and it simply is the lack of the knowledge of the expression “in Jesus name”. But for any clergyman to do it is a grievous offense because he knows the significance of those three words and he is dropping it deliberately without anything but a total disrespect for Christ.
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] About as perfect an illustration as you can give, thank you, because the whole premise of the meaning of the international monetary fund is precisely this lowest common denominator; so that they are going to reduce all of us to the level of the least. And while they dream that this is somehow by this reduction going to raise us all, it doesn’t take more of the most elementary logic to realize that it is going to destroy all of us. It’s like pouring water through a leaky vessel; it’s going to go out. You’re going to have no water. So that if you have water in a canteen that’s sound and then you have an empty canteen that’s full of holes you are not going to equalize things and you’re not going to preserve anything by pouring all the water into the leaky vessel, you’re going to lose it all. And the IMF is of course going to be precisely that with all world currencies.
Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes Pope’s Paul visit was quite a shock to all conservatives and especially to conservative Catholics because what he did most emphatically was to put his seal of approval on the UN. He said it was the political parallel to the Roman Catholic Church. He said that it was a thoroughly moral body, that it was the peace making body, and point after point he gave it I think the finest defense that has yet been made of the UN. The most thorough one, I think however this was expected. Certainly many Catholics who had spoken to me of their feelings about it felt that everything that Pope Paul had said pointed to it. I think more tragic was the fact that Cardinal Ottaviani’s, the leader of conservatives in the College of Cardinals came out shortly thereafter with an equally strong statement in favor of world union. Thus there is no question that the UN has gained immeasurably in strength at a time when it was faltering badly. It has been propped up very, very, powerfully, and I think now every attempt will be made to increase its powers and its strength with this kind of support.
Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Very good point, yes, the significance of Eve’s temptation rather than Adams is this. Satan had a position of subordination in heaven and he rebelled against it, he did not want to be a subordinate. Now Eve had a similar position she was subordinate to Adam, and so Satan psychology and that of Eve were analogous, and he knew how to appeal to her. Why shouldn’t she be a god in her own right, why should she be under god or under Adam? Although he never put it that way, so that when he tempted her he knew already that she was in a position of fretting at her subordination. Which involved another fact that Adam was weary of having authority, and being in the responsible position, and Paul tells us that Adam sinned with knowledge. In other words he was weary of being responsible and he knew what he was doing and did it with knowledge.
Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, the fact that it is very vivid in her mind, “this is forbidden” she has thought about it. But the more she’s thought about it the more she’s drawn away from it. So that their not to eat of it, she’s afraid to touch it lest she be tempted. So there’s a fine psychological nuance there. We have time for possibly one brief question and answer.
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Who made the statement that the only acceptable {?} [Interruption] for all three, is that the idea?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] Oh I see, in the temple of understanding, yes. That would be simply because Christ’s name is not mentioned there. Now it is interesting that in some of the books that deal with the one world order that ostensibly is to come they list three holidays that are to be observed by the one world state as legal holidays. The first is the Feast of Wesak, a Buddhist festival. The second is Easter, but not in the sense that Christ rose again from the dead but in a humanistic sense that this is to celebrate the renewal of life, a kind of a spring festival. And the third and the great holy day will be the festival of humanity day. Well our time is up and we stand adjourned.