Studies in Early Genesis

The Society of Satan Part I

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 7 of 11

Track: #52

Dictation Name: RR115D7

Date: 1960-1970’s

[Rushdoony] Let us begin with prayer.

Almighty God our heavenly Father we come again into Thy presence mindful of all Thy mercies, mindful our Father that our times are in Thy hands and Thou doest all things well. Bless us this afternoon by Thy word and by Thy Spirit, speak to us the words that we need that we may go hence refreshed and strengthened, knowing that because Thou art God we shall prevail in Thee, that if God be for use, who can be against us? Strengthen us, bless us, and minister to our every need. In Jesus name, amen.

Our scripture is Genesis 3:7-13

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.

This afternoon we shall analyze the implications and the meaning of the society of Satan. All society is organized to cope with the problem of sin. It organizes itself through various institutions and through the state to deal with the fact that there is sin in the world. That there is evil and it has to be coped with, that man needs protection that man must in some way or another reckon with sin. Historically until the modern revolutionary movements began every society was clearly and openly religious because it dealt with the fact of sin through religion. Very often these religions however were essentially and almost always were, essentially statist religions; and so the state was an organization of society whereby man dealt with the fact of sin.

In Rome for example citizenship rested on the fact of atonement. No one could be a citizen of Rome unless he found atonement through the religion of the state. If a man were in the military service he could be exempted from the annual lustrations or atonement services, at which time his name would be read; a roll call of all men in armed forces sufficing to make up for their absence. But a business man could not be away during the Roman lustrations, he would lose his citizenship. Because every many had to say that he had personally dealt with the fact of sin, that he was with the state in dealing with the fact of sin, or he was an outlaw.

Now the Hebrew word for atonement means literally “covering” and atonement is a covering for sin. And a covering for sin can be one that truly blots it out, or it can be one that simply masks it. The state can provide an institutional atonement or covering for sin whereby it seeks to neutralize the fact and the state is the major institution in antiquity and again in our present world which seeks to neutralize sin; to neutralize sin without changing men. Sinful man, united by the state, is somehow to produce the good society; this is the thesis. It’s the same idea as trying to make a good omelet out of bad eggs, it won’t work. Bad eggs will always produce a bad omelet, and you cannot take bad men and produce a good society simply by organizing them according to a certain pattern. And this is the thesis of statist atonement. Somehow if you come up with a right combination by means of the state and social organization you are going to create a good society. This is the answer of Statism whether it be conservative or liberal, because there are many conservatives who give a statist answer to the fact of sin. If you only change certain piece of legislation, and we can grant them that these legislations are bad, they assume that you are going to usher in a good society. In other words you’re going to have a good society out of bad eggs, bad men. If you change laws with regard to business or with regard to money or with regard to a variety of other things then the good society will have arrived. Or will it?

This is the premise of modern Statism, and Christianity, Biblical faith is at war with all such faiths. The UN is the epitome of this belief that you can take bad men and by acts of re-organization of social structures create a good society. This was the thesis at the tower of Babel; this is the thesis of Babylon the great, the world state of the book of Revelation. The premises of this society of Satan we find first of all set down in scripture in Genesis 3:7-13 as Adam and Eve answer God. Man’s sin is to be as God, and the satanic temptation was “Ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil”. That is, determining good and evil for yourself; establishing the ultimate concepts of right and wrong for yourself. Adam and Eve succumbed to this temptation to be as God. The consequence was they were unable to be men, unable

to meet responsibility. And when God confronted them with their sin they evaded responsibility and their answers reflected the kind of world they wanted.

How did they answer God? First of all God spoke to Adam, and Adam answered “the woman Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree and I did eat”. Answers of this sort are commonplace everyday sometimes even in our own lives. What Adam said was “it’s not my fault God, my wife is responsible she got me into this, I wouldn’t of been in this mess if it hadn’t of been for that woman”. And you know what woman are like, they’ll nag and they’ll harp and they know we love them and they’ll use their influence and they’ll take advantage of the fact that we are fond of them, that we love them dearly and before we know it we’re in a mess, and it’s just because out of the goodness of our heart we listened to them. So “it’s not my fault God, it’s the woman’s fault”. But more than that Adam said, “The woman Thou gavest to be with me.” “It’s your fault God, You gave her to me. And if you hadn’t made her and given her to me I wouldn’t be in this mess.” So Adam says the fault is ultimately God’s, not his; it’s the woman’s and then God’s.

And Eve is no different. And the Lord God said unto the woman “What is this that Thou hast done?” and the woman said that the serpent, or literally the shining one, “beguiled me, and I did eat”. “Lord you know how innocent I am…just so easily beguiled, and that sweet talking serpent came along and I listened to him, and I thought it was something good I was going to get out of it all because he said after all, wonderful things were going to happen if we ate of the fruit, so it was my innocence that led me into this and it wasn’t I who was to blame but the tempter.” Not I, but my environment, my surroundings, the world about me. On that day began sociology. On that day the social scientist were born whereby man goes through a great deal of talk and a great deal of statistical research and scientific mumbo jumbo to prove one thing, that he isn’t responsible for his predicament. It was his school, or his parents, his heredity, his environment, God who made the world, anything and everything except himself. And so guilt is denied to the individual in the name of social forces, juvenile delinquency is blamed on the parents; crime is blamed on the environment. The Negroes and other minority groups blame the white man for their failures, and the white man blames his parents and other things and ultimately everyone says “why did God made the world this way?” All these excuses involve the basic thinking; the premises which undergird them are the basic premises of the society of Satan.

Let us break down the premises that are implicit here in Adam and Eve’s answer and in the answer of all the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve; all of us in so far as we are in Adam, and certainly the unregenerate world which knows nothing of Christ. The premises are fourfold. First- man according to Satan in the temptation to Jesus which was a continuation of the one to Eve, is not guilty of his sin. God is to blame. “If Thou be the Son of God” Satan said to our Lord, “Turn these stones into bread” “How dare you as God avoid using your power to solve men’s’ problems?” God is to blame because he has not made everything so that there would be no problems. Thus the first and ultimate premise of the society of Satan is that man is not responsible, that man is not guilty, the guilt is God’s.

The second premise of the society of Satan is this, it demands a world in which it is unnecessary for men to be good. And this is the goal of every society of Satan; this was the goal of Satan in the garden and Satan in tempting our Lord. “Turn these stones into bread if Thou be the Son of God” everything should be provided. There should be no problems, and there should be no responsibility on man’s part, all rights and no responsibilities. Is it not the society of Satan that we see around us today when men talk about their “rights” and demand more and more rights without promising first of all or delivering in terms of responsibilities? They are demanding a society in which it is unnecessary for men to be good, and they are trying to create such a world. The first premise thus of the society of Satan is that the guilt is God’s, and the second that the world should be remade so that will be impossible for men, unnecessary for men to be good.

The third premise follows, they are demanding not only a society in which it is unnecessary for man to be good but one in which it is impossible for man to be bad. That is the logical corollary. There should be no testing. How cruel of God to test Adam and to test us? To put us through trials and temptations, to put us in a world where such fearful prospects often confront us, where we can be and often are frightened or troubled and afraid, and tested; tested in terms of our moral caliber, tested in terms of our faith, tested in terms of our willingness to work, to fight, to be men. The trouble free world is demanded, cradle to grave security or to use the newer English expression “womb to tomb security”. Communism, socialism, and our own welfare economy all offer us this kind of world. This is the kind of world most of the politicians offer us in election after election. A world which is, and always has been and will be under God’s damnation, but it is their goal a world in which it is impossible for men to be bad.

And the fourth premise of the society of Satan is the logical corollary of the first three, a society is demanded in which it is impossible for men to fail. John Dewey, and his progressivism stand for precisely such a world. In his book A Common Faith John Dewey said that he cannot see Biblical Christianity as compatible with a democratic society or world, because Biblical Christianity says that some succeed and some fail. Some go to heaven, and some go to hell; there is a good and an evil, a right and a wrong, the saved and the lost, the sheep and the goats. And he said “this is incompatible with democracy” and he was right. Hence it is that progressivism was and is hostile to grading in schools. Because progressivism deals in terms of a faith, the faith in the society of Satan which demands that it be impossible for our men to fail; and we have this creeping into every kind of movement on all sides of us.

I was amused two nights ago to hear some speak of a demand made of the leader of a youth group in a very fine and Bible-believing church in this general area, that they work out a plan whereby every member of the high-school age group be an officer. All chiefs and no Indians, all must pass and none must fail. There can be no failures, this is impossible. Failure is not tolerable in the society of Satan only one failure is recognized, the failure of God. God 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 or evil, in which we can and must be men. These then are the premises of the society of Satan, first the guilt is God’s. Second a world must be created in which it is unnecessary for men to be good. And Third this new world must be one in which it is impossible for men to be bad. And fourth it must all be impossible for men to fail.

The society of Satan is the sociology and politics of modern man. And our world today is anti-Christian, and we must wage war against it, and so far as it hold to the society of Satan. And we must ask ourselves this question, “what is our covering, our atonement?” After all society as well as the individual must reckon with the fact of sin, sin has to be dealt with. And it will either be a white wash as with the society of Satan and a trying to obliterate the fact that it did exist by pretending it isn’t there. Or else it can be the regeneration which Jesus Christ offers through His atoning blood. Men are either trying to establish a society of Satan to escape from God, which is a vain hope, a hope and an effort that leaves them perpetually naked and ashamed, or else they are working to further the kingdom of God and His righteousness. In which society are we members, and where-in is our hope?

Let us pray.

Almighty God our heavenly Father we give thanks unto Thee that as we face this troubled world, as we face the fearfulness of the powers of darkness around us feeling so often like we are alone, and easily overwhelmed, we thank Thee our God that Thy word gives us the assurance that we are not alone, that Thou wilt never leave us nor forsake us, that we may boldly say “The Lord is my helper, I shall not fear what man can do unto me”. That we may say “If God be for us, who can be against us?” Nay in all things we are more than conquers through Him that loved us. Give us eyes of faith our Father that like Elisha of old we may see that the very hills are people with the heavenly hosts. That it is the enemy who must tremble, that it is the enemy who is doomed. And all Thy promises to us in Jesus Christ are yea and Amen. Make us bold and confident therefore Father in the day of adversity that we may stand as faithful soldiers of Jesus Christ, in His name we pray, amen.

Any questions?

[Audience Member] I have one, can you except the thesis that there may be things in the Old Testament which are not historically factual, but never-the-less can be God’s word of explanation. I have referenced to such things as, book of Job for example. Which many people believe is drama and I think that has a very important point in scriptures, and incidentally I have some {?} of the first eleven and a half of the book which you begin to exam this. Now is that an acceptable thesis or must you believe, if you believe the scriptures, teach every word there-in what was a factual historical fact?

[Rushdoony] It is a common belief, the belief that you have described but if we are to take the bible at face value we must take every part that reports to be historical, to be historical. And only those parts which are plainly parabolic to be parables. The book of Job is given to us as history as events that occurred in the patriarchal era, I accept it as such. The first 11 chapters of Genesis are given to us as history and in many, many points they have been confirmed archeologically, they have never been contradicted by anything but more than that they are given to us by the Bible as God’s word and as historical, and I accept them as such. I did not always so accept them, but I have found that both intellectually I prospered as I so accepted them, and spiritually I prospered also. I do belive the Bible is the infallible word of God and that we must accept it as such. Our Lord said in answer to the first temptation of Satan that “man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out of the word of God” and that’s the premise in terms of the chapters.

Another question, yes?

[Audience Member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, in my paperback on Freud I call attention to the fact that Freud is not primarily a philosopher of sex or of psychologist or psychiatrist but with the problem of guilt. Because Freud said that man could not hope ever to abolish religion, and he felt this was desirable, as long as men were guilty. And he said “all men feel guilty, all men are guilt ridden” and you can never hope to cope with this by any treatises scientific studies which say there is no God and proving this endlessly scientifically and philosophically. So Freud said “The only way you can abolish religion is by converting the problem of sin or guilt from a religious problem to a scientific problem so that it is not a matter any longer for a minister, a Biblical minister, but for a mental health specialist.” And this he did by going to anthropology to the primal chord myth, according to which mankind having evolved out of the primal chord, a group of half human or subhuman creatures who ran in a pack with the strongest man ruling them and possessing all women and driving out all the sons. They said that finally the sons banded together and killed the old man and ate him and possessed the mothers and sisters. So he said the three basic instincts of mankind are incest, patricide, and cannibalism and the three basic counter instincts are the prohibitions of these three things. And so he said this is why man feels guilty, he has these three basic instincts and these three counter-instincts.

Now all your modern psychologies and your modernistic churches with their mental health programs and the whole mental health program is based on this Freudian premise. They may disagree with Freud in everything else but they are agreed with him that guilt must be transferred from religion to science and must be made a biological problem instead of a spiritual problem. This is the essence of Freud’s approach to this. So Freud would agree with me that of course society is geared to deal with the problem of guilt and to make atonement for guilt. But his answer is through the mental health program and total control and mental re-conditioning of men.

Another question, yes?

[Audience member] This is not in reference to the lecture. I understand that you have a similar lesson this Sunday night, is this going to be picked up Sunday night?

[Rushdoony] Yes I’m in Santa Ana Sunday mornings and in Santa Reno Sunday nights of the Pridnoff {?} home in Santa Reno so that if you miss here in the afternoon you can catch it there. It is beginning this week, up until now there’s been a different one each place but I’ve done a little juggling and gotten all three on the same schedule so it will be the same one each week hereafter.

[Audience member] So we can just there if we didn’t hear any part?

[Rushdoony] That’s right, also tapes of all these can be secured. Every one of these each week are taped and they can be secure through Mrs. Flannigan {?}

Yes?

[Audience member] Will you define what you mean when you use the word religion?

[Rushdoony] The word religion is a noun which in a sense has no substance. We commonly use it to define a faith, but you cannot speak of religion per se. In other words there is no religion behind all the religions so that you can use religion as a substitute for the word faith. The “faiths” of man, the “beliefs” of man, but you speak of it as a substantive kind of noun is invalid because there are religions, Buddhism, Confucianism, Darwinism, Mohammedanism, and so on, that there is no such thing as religion per se. What can you define as a religion? Well you can’t say it’s a belief in God that’s common to all of these because Buddhism doesn’t believe in God. And many religions are atheistic, humanism is an atheistic religion. SO that in this sense of religion as representing something common to all, the word is invalid, there is no meaning there.

[Audience member] Well is man a religious creature by nature?

[Rushdoony] Yes, adjectively the word has very real meaning. It means that man is inescapable religious, he must worship something. He is either a covenant keeper with God or a covenant breaker. So man is inescapably religious.

[Audience member] Would it be a devotion to something or someone or..?

[Rushdoony] Yes

[Audience member] {?} Would you agree with the Veritas foundation that the {?} which is a modern day Satanism would be Einstein in the scientific realm, Freud in the religious, and Marx in the political?

[Rushdoony] Not quite I think the great triangulate of modern thinking is Darwin, Marx and Freud, and this is not merely my opinion but I think one commonly subscribed to by scholars. You occasionally have such opinions which give variations. I’ve seen one Darwin, Marx, and Vogner {?} which seems to me a peculiarly combination, Jacques Bondon made that study. But it is clearly Darwin, Marx, and Freud. And Darwin to provide the basis for the other two because when Darwin’s book came out Origin of the Species in 1859 Karl Marx was delighted and he said “This has saved socialism, now we can have scientific socialists”. And Freud built on Darwin also so the three had their fountainhead so to speak in Darwin and the reason for this is a very simple one. Darwin by the evolutionary hypothesis made man not a creature of God but a product of evolutionary force. Therefore, and he also gave a picture in the process of a world that was not only without God but which was a blind struggling force so there was no law above man heads, God. No law in nature, natural law that abolished. So where does law come from? Man, so the only source of truth is man and the only source of control and direction is man. So man controls his own evolution in the future.

Now, this invalidated Marx and Freud believed religion and therefore the way to control the future was through science and scientific socialism was therefore guaranteed and it supplanted utopian socialism. Now what does scientific socialism mean? Well the essence of Science is that it is experimental. Now a thing is truly scientific according to the people, if it is experimental and to be experimental all factors must be controlled. Now scientific socialism and the scientific state and scientific planners are planners and socialist who believe in the total control of all factors. SO that when they visualize the scientific order in the future they are visualizing an order in which everything is totally controlled because it cannot be a valid experimental situation otherwise. I shall be speaking this weekend at the Creation seminar which there are some fliers here for those of you who would like them, on man in 1984. What I shall be doing in essence is to be reviewing several publications recently by scientist including one two volume study by an American and British scientists The World in 1984. As they planned the world in 1984, just to give you a mild taste of some of the things in the book, there will be no longer any area of nature which is not controlled. There will be no wildernesses left because they’re at a scientific state. You must control not only every bit of man, but every bit of the world. So the wilderness will disappear, there will be planned areas like park reserves but far more strictly controlled, would be plant there allowed to live in terms of census and killed off when they have seeded because it has to be absolutely scientific. So that everything, including the animal life of the world, is going to be strictly governed in terms of this total scientific control. Now this idea of the scientific state, the scientific control of all things is basic and Darwin was the foundation, Marx built upon it and Freud kept it.

Yes?

[Audience Member] {?} Don’t they believe that they are the victims of nature? Or in others word, they’re underneath nature, so how can they control…?

[Rushdoony] Except that they believe the elite will now control nature totally. And they will not only control nature but will remake nature. One British physicist has gone so far as to say that in a few million years if the sun should die that they will remake a son, build another son and put it in the heavens. Some of the thinking in these recent studies as they visualize the future are truly fantastic. I think you got a taste of it in the four issues of Life recently in which they talked about breaking the genetic code and governing mans heredity before he was born so that it would be possible, they said, to make man who would be able to live on the floor of the ocean or on Jupiter. This is wild imagination.

Yes?

[Audience Member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, archeology has done a great deal in recent years to confirm the Biblical record and I think it is significant that at no point. No point, although once or twice they thought that they had found something that would contradict the Bible, have the found anything that did. We don’t realize how much our history has been affected by the Bible and how far afield the people thought the Bible was.

For example it was once adjudged that all of the Old Testament was fantastically full of mythology because it talked of a great empire, Assyria, which everybody knew never existed. Now it seems hard for us today when you can go to any library and get volume after volume on Assyria and we have recovered Ashurbanipal library, or a portion of the, I think about a third to a half of the hundred thousand volumes he had in his library. And we thus have a great deal of information about it. There was a time when the memory of Assyria was gone, when Alexander the Great and other conquers marched over the ruins and didn’t know it existed. So that people treated the Bible as mythological because it talked about Assyria. And today of course Assyriology is one of the established branches of study in universities.

Or again you still hear people talk about the book of Daniel as myth and written in the Maccabean period, rather than by a person named Daniel. And yet this is what we have found in recent years. No one believes it could be possible accurate, it talked about things that we didn’t know in history. That obviously were not true, it speaks of Belshazzar as the king on the night that Babylon fell. Nobody had ever heard of Belshazzar, it was obvious that Nabonidus was the emperor at the time. That was what all the historical records told us. Well not too long ago they discovered in the course of excavations that actually Belshazzar the step-son of Nabonidus was the vice-emperor, a common thing in the empires of that day. And Nabonidus was at that time elsewhere with the armies and he had Belshazzar the vice-emperor in his absence. And so when Belshazzar offers Daniel that if he will make known the meaning of the inscription on the wall he will make him third in the empire, he was saying after me, because he was second. Now this is one of dozens and dozens of details that recent studies and excavations have turned up with regard to the book of Daniel. And you could go on to book after book which has been confirmed in amazing detail as a result of excavation. I think one of the most amusing things in archeological studies was one in ancient Ur of the Chaldea’s a few years ago. They did some excavating and came down into this large room; I believe it was about the size of this room without this office area knocked out of it, including a hole. And they picked up some objects and well here was one from a particular century, and here was another next to it about ten centuries before, and here was one five centuries before that, and they were completely befuddled; until, as they began to read some of the inscriptions they realized they had stumbled into an archeological museum in Ur of the Chaldea’s.

[Audience Member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Not to be Martyrs, right. Our Lord indeed asks us to be sensible, and He counseled the disciples as they went out and spoke and He said if they will not receive you in the one city, go to the next. And Paul when he found opposition arising he left, he was not called to make a fool of himself by sacrificing himself needlessly. He was not afraid when opposition confronted himself, he didn’t go out and create it. He witnessed boldly and then he passed on, if he would not hear him he shook the dust off his feet and went out.

Now anyone can prepare themselves to live in the world of 1984 but they’ve got to recognize this; they’re not going to get along with God. They may get along with the world of 1984 but not with God. And I think of the two God is going to be around a lot longer. I don’t think the world of 1984 is going to be with us more than3-4 years, very briefly so I think it’s up to people to make their choice. And I’m a lot more confident of God’s world than I am of 1984 and I’m a lot more afraid of God than I am of the powers of 1984.

[Audience Member] So what will you tell your children?

[Rushdoony] I believe that we must stand in term of our faith, and that’s it; that we really don’t have a choice.

Yes?

[Audience Member] {?}

[Rushdoony] That’s a good illustration. All illustrations are limited because they are limited by our experience and our knowledge. And the trinity which is the heart of our faith is in a sense beyond our imagination. We would have to have the mind of God to understand God. And we have to take him on faith, so that we have to recognize indeed God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit indeed represent the three persons of the Godhead, three persons one God. And the Holy Spirit indeed is the power that works in this world and among us, and God the Son is He Who descended into our midst and whom we saw. But beyond that we have to say these illustrations are often, and this one is a good one, valuable but ultimately has to be an act of faith. We take electricity on faith, actually scientist don’t know what electricity is. It’s a power that they’ve learned to harness and to work with. We don’t know for example some of the elementary things about digestion, we give names to the process but we really don’t know how a cow can eat green grass and make white milk which you and I can drink to produce a brown or red or grey hair. We give names to the process but we don’t understand it really. The world around us is fully of things that are beyond our understanding.

One of the things I recall when I was still quite young I was interested in being an astronomer. That was one of my first ambitions and I was reading this book on astronomy and I came across this sentence on the last page or two. It was dealing with some of the modern astro-physics and it said “space is finite yet infinite” well that staggered me. That just didn’t make sense, and then as I began to read a little further that the more they dealt with this universe the more it was impossible to use language and they were simply using mathematical formulae to describe what they were dealing with. Now if the world is so great, how much greater is God? And so the imagination staggers before it all and we simply have to say “I believe”. And I think that’s the beauty of the creed. The creed is personal, the creed does not say “We believe in God the Father Almighty Maker of heaven and earth and in Jesus Christ His only begotten Son” and so on, when we repeat the creed, even though we do it in unison we each say “I”, that’s the only way you can believe. “I believe”. And so ultimately we all most say that with respect to the trinity as well with respect to the scripture “I believe”.