IBL06: Sixth Commandment

Violence as Presumption

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Prerequisite/Law

Genre: Speech

Track: 52

Dictation Name: RR130AB52

Location/Venue: ________

Year: 1960’s-1970’s.

Our scripture is Numbers 15:30-31, and Deuteronomy 17:12-13. Violence as presumption.

Numbers 15:30-31

“30 But the soul that doeth ought presumptuously, whether he be born in the land, or a stranger, the same reproacheth the Lord; and that soul shall be cut off from among his people.

31 Because he hath despised the word of the Lord, and hath broken his commandment, that soul shall utterly be cut off; his iniquity shall be upon him.”

Deuteronomy 17:12-13

“12 And the man that will do presumptuously, and will not hearken unto the priest that standeth to minister there before the Lord thy God, or unto the judge, even that man shall die: and thou shalt put away the evil from Israel.

13 And all the people shall hear, and fear, and do no more presumptuously.”

These texts speak of presumption, and acting presumptuously as a capital offence. In the first passage, Numbers 15:30-31, we are told that anyone whether a foreigner or a native who does ought presumptuously is to be cut off. The second passage makes it clear that cutting off means here not excommunication but the death penalty. And it has reference to the appeal to the supreme court and in the Hebrew supreme court there were not only judges but a priest of the number of the court and if the man then continued his presumptuous position he was to be executed.

Now what is the offense that is referred to here? What does it mean to act presumptuously? The marginal note probably will inform you that this means acting with a high hand, but it has reference to a denial of law and a defiance of it. Today we would call it revolutionary violence, a revolutionary or an anarchistic position that denies the validity of all law. That says we are the law and we will refuse to obey al law and order that is contrary to our wishes. This was of course the essence of Amaleks position. A defiance of God, a religious lawlessness whereby God was challenged and denied. It is acting presumptuously or with a high hand. Raising one’s hand in defiance of the Lord, taking aggressive action against God and his law order.

One scholar has said of this passage in particular, Deuteronomy, Waller, a church of England scholar of a century ago that acting presumptuously means and I quote: “A proud self-assertion against the law. The penalty of death arises necessarily out of theocracy, God is the king of the nations, rebellion against his law is treason, and if it be proud and willful rebellion the penalty of death is only what we should expect to see inflicted. Unquote. As we saw two weeks ago in analyzing the passage with respect to Amalek, Exodus 17:16, this was Amaleks position. The marginal reading there brought this out. Because the hand of Amalek is against the throne of heaven therefore the Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.

That is, because Amalek is presumptuous, its hand is against the Lord, therefore God is at war with Amalek in every generation. Now, the Amalekites are those therefore who raise their hand against all law and order. Who deny it in principle, because they deny in principle that there can be any transcendental law, that is, any law of God governing them. Today this is increasingly the dominant position of our society. After all it is taught in the schools. So that, increasingly, this contempt of the idea of law appears on all sides.

In the past month a rather unusual episode occurred here in this state, an organization which was uncovered which has offices or rather groups in various countries and across the United States in one urban center after another. It is a church which uses narcotics as a part of its religion and it is also a school; it calls itself a free university movement which teaches courses to further the general approach to life, total lawlessness which characterizes them. This movement has existed for several years apart from one man being picked up in Modesto for ordaining soldiers in this movement, the movement has gone untouched all this time and so it went into one smaller county, that is, smaller in population, here in this state. San Luis Obispo county, to be nearer some of their members who were at Camp Roberts they located themselves in the Paso Robles area.

And of course, this was their mistake, because with a conservative county they were immediately raided. It was found that they had a tremendous cash of narcotics, that they had a vast amount of leftist literature, they had a free university catalog that came from one of the major urban and education areas of the United States and among the courses listed in this catalog was a course on cannibalism. Let me quote from the course prospective: “The participants in this course should be willing to help obtain some freshly killed human flesh, and or prepare it, and or eat it. We will meet weekly at a communal Sunday evening meal that we will all help prepare together, everyone cooking their own creations until we can obtain some human flesh. We will first consider the historical and legal status of cannibalism and then go on from there. The first meeting will be February 16, 1969, at 5:30pm. Call the Redbook at the Midpeninsula Free University.” And it gives the phone number for information. Unquote.

Now whether or not they actually did this or not is by the way. The significant fact is that this kind of teaching which stresses the fact that our society has no binding law. The total lawlessness, the total contempt for all of the concepts that undergird our culture, this is what is stressed by this movement and many other movements. It could be added this was characteristic of the cynics and ancient Greek also. They advocated similar ideas and cannibalism. Most significant is that twenty-five years ago had such a movement been uncovered, and from the documents seized there at Paso Robles it became apparent that it was in every major city across the United States and outside the United States in other countries, it would have hit the front pages in every newspaper across the country.

But outside of being in the San Luis papers and in the Santa Maria papers, there was no notice of this anywhere. Which, in itself, is a most remarkable fact. But the thing that appears behind the ideas of this group and others is a religious principle. A humanistic concept of liberty. The word liberty as well as libertine comes from ‘liber’ the Latin ‘free’, and the concept of freedom involved in this new idea of liberty is freedom from God. It is not surprising that these groups are very close to the Marquis de Sade. Basic to the position of the Marquis de Sade was this, his ambition, and I quote: “To be innocent by dints of culpability. To smash what is normal once and for all, and smash the laws by which man can be judged.” Unquote.

To be innocent by dint of culpability. In other words, for everyone to break the law so totally that the only guilt is to be innocent! To smash totally the ideal of what is normal so that the normal, the Godly man, is abnormal. So he is the criminal as it were. And to smash every law by which such people can be judged, and turn judgement against the moral and the Godless. Blanchot has commented regarding the Marquis de Sade and his concept of man, and I quote: “Sadian man denies man, and this negation is achieved through the intermediary of the notion of God. He temporarily makes himself God so that there before him men are reduced to nothing and discover the nothingness of being before God. It is, is it not, (prince?) true that you do not love men?” Juliet asks. “I loath them, not a moment goes by that my mind is not busy plotting violently to do harm. Indeed there is no race more horrible, more frightful, how low and scurvy, how violent and disgusting a race it is!” “But”, Juliet breaks in, “you do not really believe that you are to be included among men? Oh no. No. When one dominates them with such energy it is impossible to belong to the same race.”

To which then San {?} replies, “Yes, she is right. We are God. Still the dialect evolved to a further level, God’s man, who has taken unto himself the power to set himself above men, the power which men madly yield to God never for a moment forget this power is completely negative! To be God’s could have only one meaning: to crush man. To reduce creation to nothing. I should like to be Pandora’s box”, San Fon says at one point, “So that all the evils that escape from my breast might destroy all mankind individually, and if it were true that God existed, would we not be his rivals since we destroyed us which he has made?” Unquote.

Thus the goal of the presumptuous man of these Amalekites, these violent ones, is total destruction. The violent one loves perversity because it is perverse, they love a lie because it is a lie, their pleasure is power is deception and destruction. I recall one time when a person who had been trusted with some responsibility and then been caught in outrageous lies whereby he had done a great deal of damage, when he was confronted with the fact that he had been lying, said with relish and triumph that I had you all believing it, didn’t I? That was the pleasure of the whole thing! To trifle with man, to lead them into illusion, so that for them the ultimate victory is to grind down man and to proclaim the death of God.

As Sade said, “And if it were true that God existed, would we not be his rivals, since we destroyed thus what he had made?” So this is key. The triumph of humanistic God over man, ‘So you created this whole wonderful universe, God? Well, we’re going to be better than you are, we’ll wipe out what you have made.’ Man must be reduced to nothing to prove that the Amalekites, the violent one, is the new God supposedly supplanting the dead one. Now, scripture declares as our text made it emphatically clear that these violent ones, these anarchists, these lawless ones are to be executed.

To deny this law of God and to support the anarchist is to murder the whole of society, then. In other words, God’s law faces us with an alternative. You either, destroy those who are out to destroy society or you’re destroyed! You either, commit suicide, or you execute... and there is no other alternative. Anarchy denies the principle of transcendental law. And therefore God is at war with Amalek in every generation.

Now every Amalekite, every violent one, every anarchist hates God therefore he hates life also. As Proverbs 8:36 declares “He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul. All they that hate me love death.” This hatred of life colors all living with humanistic man. It manifests itself in every area and the thing we must recognize today is that the humanistic civilization around us, while it talks about loving and about loving man, hates life and hates man!

Listen to the commercials sometime. For example, there’s a baby oil commercial that repeats this sentence over and over again. “It isn’t easy being a baby. It isn’t easy being a baby.” Now analyze the mentality behind that commercial... if it isn’t easy to be a baby, what a horrible thing it is to be a teenager facing a world of responsibility, and how much more horrible to be an adult with responsibility! And if it isn’t easy being a baby then aren’t you justified going into a tantrum of being young facing maturity? To tear everything down because before long you’re going to have to go out and work, and face responsibility and face a world that says you can’t have your own way.

Now, a generation that listens to that kind of clap trap, to give it a polite term, is certainly headed for trouble! If it isn’t easy to be a baby, and people listen to that and are conditioned by it day after day. And they get it in education today! What a hard cruel world. It isn’t easy being a baby. How hard it is being a kindergartener, or a first grader, or for a junior high or a senior high student, why, it’s probably traumatic!! And a generation that accepts this idea as it is being accepted today is a generation geared for revolution. It’s going to destroy, because it will not accept a world where there are any responsibilities. Where work is required of man. Thus the violence is bred into our culture today with this kind of philosophy.

It is also bred into our generation by the churches. A week ago yesterday someone reported to me a statement made in a bible study group, a women’s bible class, in what is supposedly an ultra fundamentalist group, and it was baldly stated that human needs come before God’s law. Human needs come before God’s laws. Now if you grant that then you have granted everything the Marxist and the anarchists hold too! So, if you have a group which claims to be ultra fundamentalist in teaching the word of God affirm this, what’s left for the anarchists and the Marxists to teach?!

We might as well turn the world over to them because after all if we believe that in the church then we had better join the Marquis de Sade and Karl Marx and {Bakunik?}. But our text says that those who are guilty of presumptuous sin must die. When they take the law and declare that it is no law, when they feel that they have no right to be above and beyond the law, either the society exacts the death penalty or God will exact the death penalty finally on that society. You cannot allow total revolution against God and man and survive! Moreover, scripture tells us all who are guilty of presumption are hated by God. For example, Proverbs 8:13 declares the fear of the Lord is to hate evil. Pride and arrogancy and the evil way and the froward mouth do I hate.

God says emphatically that he hates the evil and he expects us to hate them. The fear of God is to hate evil, Proverbs tells us. To love evil therefore is to hate God. The humanistic mind today tries to be wiser than God and is going to save everybody by loving everyone and it views the God of scripture as rather nasty because he talks about hating the evil. Well, he very emphatically does. And in Proverbs the 1st chapter verses 24-33 God declares:

“24 Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded;

25 But ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof:

26 I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh;

27 When your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you.

28 Then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me:

29 For that they hated knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the Lord:

30 They would none of my counsel: they despised all my reproof.

31 Therefore shall they eat of the fruit of their own way, and be filled with their own devices.

32 For the turning away of the simple shall slay them, and the prosperity of fools shall destroy them.

33 But whoso hearkeneth unto me shall dwell safely, and shall be quiet from fear of evil.”

From this passage finally certain things are apparent. God not only hates evil, he laughs at the downfall of the wicked. Now, the humanist would say that that’s very nasty of God... but I prefer God to the humanist. Second, God says that when these people call upon him he will not answer. God says, I refuse to be used as an insurance policy or a spare tire! Now, an insurance policy is something we keep just for an emergency, a spare tire just the same way, a spare in the trunk that we hope we never have to use.

Very unpleasant to use a spare tire. And many people feel that way about God, he’s a spare tire and I’m better off if I never have to call upon him at all, but if I have to, okay. I’ll just carry him along as a spare tire. And God says, NO I will not be so used. They will call upon me then and I will not hear them. And finally, whoso hearken unto me shall dwell safely, and shall be quiet from fear of evil. We live in a world of presumptuous men, violent men, who with a higher hand seek to destroy all law and order... but in the face of this, our security is the Lord. Let us pray.

Almighty God our heavenly father we give thanks unto thee for thy word. We thank thee that as we face a world of Amalekites, of violent men who seek to destroy all law and order that thou art our refuge and strength, our very present help in trouble. Make us strong in thee, fill us with holy laughter when the time of destruction comes and make us ever mindful our Father that thy destruction has as it’s purpose to prepare the way for thy word, thy kingdom, thy holy government. Make us ever mindful that thou art on the throne. In Jesus name, Amen.

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