IBL06: Sixth Commandment

Amalek and Violence

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Prerequisite/Law

Genre: Speech

Track: 51

Dictation Name: RR130AB51

Location/Venue: ________

Year: 1960’s-1970’s.

Our scripture is Proverbs 4:14-19. Proverbs 4:14-19. We began last week with the study of Amalek and God’s law concerning Amalek. We shall return to the law as it deals with Amalek next week, but for the present, Amalek and violence as Solomon in his Proverbs comments on the violence.

Proverbs 3:14-19

“14 Enter not into the path of the wicked, and go not in the way of evil men.

15 Avoid it, pass not by it, turn from it, and pass away.

16 For they sleep not, except they have done mischief; and their sleep is taken away, unless they cause some to fall.

17 For they eat the bread of wickedness, and drink the wine of violence.

18 But the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.

19 The way of the wicked is as darkness: they know not at what they stumble.”

We saw last week that the essence of Amalek is it’s violence. It’s war against God and therefore its war against man. It’s desire for violence for the sake of violence, its belief that it can play the role of God in the pseudo omnipotence of destruction. Our scripture today gives the comment of a law giver, Solomon, who spoke of the feverish desire for violence on the part of wicked men. He declared that they cannot sleep unless they do violence, it is their life, their joy, to do harm. Unless they do evil, Solomon declares, their sleep is taken away. They eat the bread of wickedness and drink the wine of violence. A very graphic and forceful sentence. Their food is violence! It sustains them. They hunger and thirst after it... and work to create it.

Now there are some people who would radically disagree with Solomon. In fact, the majority of men today in our universities and in jurisprudence as well, see it all simply as displaced righteousness. The attitude is that instead of having evil men we have basically good men whose very sound impulses are misdirected. That all that’s needed with a basically sound humanity is to redirect their impulse, and the worst thing that you can do to them of course is to treat them harshly, because you only misdirect their basically sound impulses further.

Thus whether they are criminals or perverts of robbers and looters their impulses are basically sound and basically healthy. They are merely misdirected. Now the biblical point of view, Solomon’s premise, is man’s depravity. The wicked, Solomon declares, enjoy their evil. It is their life and their way of life. A prominent current doctor and psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, with whom I do not agree, has been accurate in stating and I quote “If we do not start from sound premises we leave the door open to false ones.” A very true conclusion. In fact, if we do not start with sound premises we leave the door open to very dangerous conclusions.

Today as we face the fact of growing violence it is important for us to have some sound premises concerning it. Biblical premises. For if we do not we wind up in some very dangerous conclusions. Let me cite now a couple of examples of contemporary violence. These are the more plentiful repeatable ones.

The first to quote, this is from a doctor’s report. “Recently two middle aged women in Brooklyn on a summers evening were walking on a side street toward one of the larger avenues after visiting a friend nearby. They intended to take a taxi home. About two hundred and fifty feet from the avenue a group of boys came up, crowding the sidewalk. The women drew back to let them past. The last boy grabbed the right arm of one woman to take her purse and knocked her down on the sidewalk and jumped on her again and again. Once taken to the hospital it was found that she had a broken shoulder, broken elbow, broken arm, and a compound fragmented fracture of a right thigh bone, for which an elaborate operation was necessary. She needed three nurses around the clock and when she recovered she will have to wear a brace from her hip to her heel and will be permanently crippled with one leg shorter than the other. In my professional contact with this case I learned what terrible pain and shock were caused, and that the expenses involved wiped out a family’s savings. There was no sexual connotations to this attack; since the boy had the pocketbook there was no reason for pure gain to explain him pounding the woman so mercilessly.

Twenty-five years ago this would have been an exceptional case and would have caused a sensation. Now it did not raise a ripple and was not even reported as news because it happens too often. The boys were never caught. If they had been caught the authorities would have not known what to do with them. This is today’s violence in pure culture. I have known of a number of similar cases which are as a rule not fully reported, far less solved or resolved.

“Those who used the fashionable explanation for violence, that it is due to domineering mothers or inadequate ones to pent up aggressive instincts or revolt against early toilet training do not know the current facts of life in big American cities. They try to reduce ugly social facts to the level of intriguing individual psychological events. In this way they become part of the very decadence in which presently violence flourishes.” Unquote.

And to cite one more example from the same doctors report: “A boy of thirteen was walking home from school in a suburban area. A short distance from the house a car rolled up and several boys jumped out; they attacked and beat him unmercifully, then they jumped back into the car and rolled away. Their victim was taken to the hospital with severe facial lacerations and concussion of the brain. He did NOT know his attackers and had never seen them before.” Unquote.

These are NOT extreme cases, in fact, they are the more repeatable and printable ones. There is increasingly a greater perversity and a more startling imagination exercised of this kind of violence and depravity. Moreover, increasingly the young hoodlums who are involved in these cases come from supposedly good homes, permissive homes which from the modern psychological point of view are ideal homes! On top of that you must add the fact that apart from this unorganized spontaneous violence there is the planned violence, the rioting, the looting, the demonstrating, the warring against the police. The roots of this as we saw last week as we studied Amalek was the desire to be as God, and since man cannot be God in any creative sense in any true sense to create life, goodness, righteousness, truth, holiness. He plays at being God with the sudo omnipotence of violence and destruction.

Milton caught this in his Paradise Lost when he has his Satan say “To reign is worth ambition, though in hell. Better to reign in hell then serve in heaven.” This means, of course, war against the God of scripture and this is the essence of revolutionary violence. We do not realize it today, but the soviet union after gaining it’s power after the revolution did repeatedly state that it was at war with God, and it termed it’s attack on the churches and on Christianity “the war against God”. They proclaimed, for example, and I quote from a proclamation of 1923 “We have declared war on the the denizens of heaven.”

In 1924 this proclamation: “The party cannot tolerate interference by God at critical moments.” As a matter of fact, to make sure that God was denied and the Bible disproved -this you will not find in any books on the soviet union by our liberal professors- in the mid-twenties about a year after this declaration of this war on God they sent an expedition to Africa, a scientific expedition, to capture apes and artificially inseminate the female apes to produce a new race and prove that evolution was true and that the scripture was a lie. Of course, you can see why that whole expedition has been hushed up by people everywhere because not only do the scientists of the soviet union have no desire to confess that they were completely wrong but the various scientists around the world who welcomed the experiment have no desire to call attention to it because it was such a failure.

But this war against God was also proclaimed in the area of law in the soviet union so that right and wrong as objective values, as objective standards, were abolished. For example, (Prelenco?) the state prosecutor of the Soviet Union said, and I quote: “Urge the judges to remember that the soviet in the soviet state there decisions must not be based on whether the prisoner be innocent or guilty but on the prevailing policy of the government and the safety of the state. And he wrote a book to develope this point of view Court and Justice which, in other words, whether a man committed a crime or did not commit a crime, or whether he is actually guilty or not guilty of what he is accused is irrelevant. There is no objective standard of right and wrong, the truth and the lie. Therefore the prevailing policy of the government and the safety of the state is the criteria. Thus, perversity and violence replace God’s law and justice.

When men begin to free themselves from God’s law order and to manifest to their violence, certain elements appear. First of all, violent men. Because their violence is a religious act, an expression of their claim to be as God with omnipotence try to provoke religious awe by means of shock. This means, fresh new acts of violence to provoke fresh shock. The violent feed on this fresh shock or awe, degenerate hoodlums want a shocked response and they work to get it! Repeatedly I have found over the years that these degenerates like to confess. They will seek out a minister or a priest to confess, not because there is any repentance but because they enjoy the shock. They delight in the response they get. It feeds a religious aspect of their being. And I have found by investigating that these people are not only telling the truth but they are actually thinking at the same time, ‘what can I do to step up this which I did?’

Acts of incredible perversity are the sort that never get into the press. But they feed on this shock, it makes them feel all the more omnipotent, all the more Godlike, to have created this shock. And very often if a person whom they are torturing does not respond they intensify their actions to get that shock. They feed on it.

Second, a very obvious need for fresh shock means a continual stepping up in the intensity of perversity and of violence! Violence thus leads to greater violence, and this of course is contrary to what many are teaching today that: “let them work it out of their system it leads to a catharsis. They purge themselves, so that if you let them indulge in their violence then they will stop being violent because they will have worked it out of their system.” But violence does not cure itself; it either destroys or is destroyed. It wants continually greater violence to create greater shock and to enjoy what it is doing.

Third, those liberals and socialists who believe that the answer is a change of environment by legislation or social planning or by means of love are taking, of course, the wrong approach. Rather than the basic character of the person, the basic character of the person, they make it the responsibility of society. On the other hand, those pietistic Christians who say that the answer is conversion are oversimplifying the matter. This is to reduce the problem to a simplistic level; certainly conversion is necessary, but love, conversion, and a law order can never be substitutes for one another, each has its place and function.

You need a law order in society in large, you do need love in a family situation and in community relations, you do need conversion and the work of proclaiming the gospel by the church. Nothing in and of itself is sufficient, the totality is needed. Not one of these things can be considered therefore a substitute one for another.

Fourth we must say that it is not surprising today that we have a violent generation. Everything has been done to flout God’s law order, we have statist non-Christian education, discipline has given way to permissiveness, the church has replaced the doctrine of regeneration with social revolution, instead of executing incorrigible criminals society subsidizes them. A violent generation has been fostered. As a result today the younger the child the greater the evil.

A state educator commented recently to me that the problem with narcotics on the college level is not as great as on the high school level! The younger the child the greater the problem and now the expectation is that the problem will be greater on the junior high school level then on the high school level, because each new baby crop is reared more and more in terms of this total violence as their basic nature, this self-indulgence. There is an increase in the prevalence of violence as well as its intensity and perversity with each on coming year.

Fifth, we can observe moreover that the 1960’s has seen more talk of love and more hatred than perhaps any decade for centuries. Popular music is a very interesting indicator of this. Recently an anthropologist wrote a volume analyzing a great deal of our popular music and its significance. He spoke of the fact that we have, and I quote, “The virtual disappearance of idealized romantic love as a guiding principle.” Unquote.

In words he says twenty years ago, and thirty years ago, talked-- sang a great deal about romantic love. Now whether one agreed or not with the concept of romantic love, nonetheless love was genuinely the theme in some fashion of popular music. Today it has disappeared. And when the word love appears it doesn’t normally have reference to love. For example he cited among the popular tunes of the last decade, the song Careless Love which has no reference, as he pointed out, to love; it simply has reference to an unexpected pregnancy.

Moreover he comments concerning the two most popular songs of the past ten years and I quote from Charles Winick: “One of the most successful phonograph records ever released was Hound Dog, a paean of hostility and a representative early rock and roll number with traditional chord progressions. The Marquis de Sade would have been thrilled by Boots, a more recent favorite. Nancy Sinatra is sure of a wild surge of applause when she grinds her heels into the stage as she triumphantly exults that her boots will ‘walk over you.’” Unquote.

As he points out the sure fire formula for a popular tune today is the expression of concealed and very powerful hatred. All such music clearly, clearly points to the Marquis De Sade. Thus it is not surprising that his works after having been almost from their conception banned are now printed and popular and regarded as very profound. The number and work being written about De Sade as a great philosopher and psychologist are numerous. Violence thus is now seen after the Marquis as man’s fulfillment. The humanistic remedies therefore are about as effective as putting out fire with gasoline.

Sixth, and we must further point out that as we look around the world we find that societies that breed violence have a phenomenon that’s known as “running amuck”. The word is spelled either amok or amuck. What is “running amuck”? Well, until now running amuck has been a characteristic of the Malaise, the Fuegians, the Melanesians, the Siberians, and some peoples of India. What happens? It is a manic and homicidal condition, we are told, following a state of depression. When these people from a culture with a background of violence face a new environment and problems beyond themselves and people superior to themselves their reaction is one of total violence. They go into a trance like condition and run amuck killing everything in sight with frightening violence, and only with difficulty are they brought down.

Now a generation brought up permissively and given to tantrums, to violence, and dedicated because of its humanism to a belief in its own righteousness is a generation which has been bred to run amuck. It will do so because it is it’s fulfillment to do so. Amalek is thus very much with us and must be dealt with. Education which breeds Amalek must be replaced with Christian education. Churches which have congregations of Amalekites must be replaced with Christian churches which believe, teach, and apply the whole word of God.

The state must become Christian and apply biblical law. The permissive family must give way to a Godly family, and only so can Amalek be destroyed. In 1948, George Orwell, as he wrote his book 1984 saw the future as a boot stamping on a human face forever, and the sight of it was one of horror to him and led to his death. But what to Orwell was a horror, became a hope within twenty years, with Nancy Sinatra grinding her boot heels onto the stage as she sang that her boots will walk over you. And all over the United States and all over the world this tune swept and was welcomed as a vision of delight. Orwell’s horror has now become a popular hope. Amalek is reborn, we shall therefore have violence and more and more violence. And the only answer is Christian reconstruction. Let us pray.

Almighty God our heavenly father, we thank thee that the government is not in the hand of the government but in thy hands. That even as Solomon declared of old inspired by thy spirit, that they who drink this wine of violence and the bread of wickedness shall stumble and fall. That the path of thy people is as the shining light that shineth more and more unto the perfect day. So our Father, we come to thee in this continence beseeching thee to strengthen us so that in thy life we may see light. And by thy law ward we may establish thy rule, thy law order. Bless us to this purpose and protect us in thy service, in Jesus name. Amen.

Are there any questions now first of all with respect to our lesson?