IBL07: Seventh Commandment

Mediatorial Work of the Law

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Prerequisite/Law

Lesson: 16-20

Genre: Talk

Track: 69

Dictation Name: RR130AL69

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Our Scripture is from Hebrews 8:6-following, the Mediatorial Work of the Law. Hebrews 8:6-following.

“6 But now hath he obtained a more excellent ministry, by how much also he is the mediator of a better covenant, which was established upon better promises.

7 For if that first covenant had been faultless, then should no place have been sought for the second.

8 For finding fault with them, he saith, Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah:

9 Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt; because they continued not in my covenant, and I regarded them not, saith the Lord.

10 For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people:

11 And they shall not teach every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for all shall know me, from the least to the greatest.

12 For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.

13 In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away.”

To speak of the Mediatorial work of the law is to get the backs up of many, many people who are evangelicals and have a deeply rooted anti-nomianism. Let me hasten to say that scripture teaches that Jesus Christ is the only mediator between God and man. This is the doctrine of all of scripture. There is no salvation except through Jesus Christ who is the God-given mediator and redeemer. The mediation of Jesus Christ is between God and man. The law is given as the God-given mediator between man and man. In other words, there is vertical mediation, and there is horizontal mediation; mediation between God and man, and man and man.

Scripture speaks of Jesus Christ in Hebrews 8:6-following as the mediator of a new and better covenant which was established on better promises. These promises are the promises of the law, as summed up in Deuteronomy 28, the blessings to obedient faith.

Now this passage is important for us to understand, therefore let us examine one of the better commentators on it, to realize why so often the church has gone astray. The commentator whose comment on 8:6, Hebrews 8:6 we shall consider is R.C.H. Lenski, a very fine Lutheran scholar. And he writes: “The promises are not better in substance compared with the promises that were made to Abraham, but in the fact that we no longer need to wait for the mediator as Abraham had to wait for Him. They are of course better than the promises that were attached to the law testament which was brought in 430 years after Abraham.”

Now, these are two amazing sentences in that they contradict each other. The first is accurate and sums it up very, very well. The promises of the covenant in Jesus Christ are better, not in substance, but that we no longer need to wait for the mediator. Jesus Christ has come. But, when he goes on to say that the law testament with Moses was not very important, at that point he becomes guilty of dispensationalism. And all those who feel that because we are now in Christ, somehow the covenant with Moses is an inferior and a lesser one, are guilty of dispensationalism. They wrongly divide the word of truth. Because what does the scripture go on to say?

It makes it clear that basically God has one principle of operation age after age, there is one covenant in all scripture. Now, different people enter into that covenant. Why was Israel set apart? The 9th verse says: “Because they continued not in my covenant, and I regarded them not, said the Lord.” God didn’t change. God’s covenant had not changed. The people of the covenant have changed. Originally it was with one man, then with a nation out of that man. Then with another people, now out of all the world. Because Israel, as Saint Paul declared in Romans, was cut off, and we were grafted in to the same covenant. And the law is basic. In fact, all the more basic, because now: “I will put my law into their mind, and write them in their hearts, and I will be to them a God and they shall be to me a people.”

The law will not only now be in scripture, but by the Holy Spirit will be made a part of every man through the atoning work of Jesus Christ, His indwelling presence and the work of the Holy Spirit. So the law will be both now in scripture, and written on the tables of men’s hearts. As a result, the law is not set aside. It is brought to a higher point. Whenever anyone says that ‘With the new covenant the law now is set aside.’ They become dispensational. The newness of the new covenant is Christ’s coming and His atonement as the blood of the covenant. Christ emphasized the sameness of the covenant because He instituted it on the night of the Passover. And as they took the Passover, and celebrated the Passover of the Old Testament, he then continued by declaring that this was His body, broken for you. His body. His blood, shed for you. Declaring the continuity of the covenant, declaring Himself to be the lamb of God, the lamb of the covenant. Choosing out twelve disciples to establish the new people of God, to declare that they are now the new Israel of God, replacing the twelve sons of Jacob, and the twelve tribes of Israel. In other words, emphasizing the continuity.

Moreover as Saint Paul says, that we have been saved, why? That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, in Romans 8:4. The law therefore is the basic condition of our lives. No direct relationship is possible between persons, except through the law of God. Our relationships are in a context of law. Therefore, in Christ we have mediation between God and ourselves, in the law of Christ, in the law of God, we have mediation between man and man. A mediator is a go-between. The go-between between God and man is Jesus Christ. And the triune God has provided His law as the go-between between man and man.

Last week we considered at some length the law forbidding sexual relations with a menstruous woman. And we saw how the law enters even into the privacy of the home, into the privacy of marriage. It is impossible for any man to claim that within marriage a non-theological confrontation is possible. The existentialist wants a person-to-person confrontation in all of life, and he feels that the way to get this person-to-person confrontation is to bypass the law. He declares that he does not need the law as a go-between between himself and his wife, or any woman, or any man.

But every attempt to bypass the law for a person-to-person confrontation without God means the judgement of God. For the law is operative against its violators, and one of the things it does is to destroy every relationship that we attempt to establish, outside the law. Every relationship is circumscribed by law. Thus as we have seen, marriage is ordained by God and governed by His law word. And Saint Paul tells us that ‘Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled. But Whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.’ And the law goes on to give us in every area of life for every possible relationship, Gods law. How we are to deal with animals, with the trees, with the vineyard, with our enemies, with our neighbor, our fellow believer, with husbands wives children. And we are told in brief that love is the fulfilling of the law. Love without law is a contradiction, as is law without love.

Love and law are not identical, but the one cannot exist without the other. For a man to say to a woman: “I love you, but let’s keep our love outside the law. We don’t need to have marriage, we don’t need to pay attention to the law, what we want is a person to person existential confrontation.” The woman in that case is justifiable in saying: “If you love me, you love me in terms of law. The two cannot be separate.”

This means therefore that every relationship must be one in terms of law, it cannot exist in terms of purely personal considerations. Marriage therefore rests, and love within marriage, not on feeling nor our whims; it cannot be contracted in terms of pure feeling, nor broken in terms of pure feeling, it rests essentially and fundamentally upon a law relationship, which is therefore a love relationship.

This means of course that the modern romantic mood is suicidal to man’s relationship. Every attempt to seek a relationship outside the law and in contempt of the law. There can be no person to person confrontation in any area. Children are not loved if they are loved outside the law and in contempt of the law, it is destructive of both parents and children. There can be no employer/employee relationship outside the law, it cannot be strictly person to person. And this is the tragedy of our time in the area of labor. The older, non-Christian free market advocates insist that a master-worker, employee-employer relationship cannot be governed by anything except the market. The socialist says the relationship must be governed by the state, and insists on the right of the state to intervene. Both positions are from the Biblical perspective lawless. One insists on the personal will, and the other insists on the political will. In a godless society neither the person nor the state will act under law, both will operate in terms of sin, and their idea of law will be the exercise of power to increase power. And so the employer will think only of enhancing his power, and the state will only think of enhancing its power.

Under Biblical law, neither the state nor the employer can have a direct relationship with anyone, except through the mediation of law. Law is thus Gods mediator between man and man. Instead of the person-to-person confrontation, there is always the mediation of Gods law between persons. Wherever persons try to meet outside the law, they feel the curse of the law. When their relationship is within the law it is blessed and prospered.

The person to person confrontation that our existentialists, which means just about everybody today, are trying to gain leads rather to a radical impersonalism, to a contempt of the person. A truly personal relationship is one which is mediated only by law.

I think we can illustrate the matter best by turning to medicine. Dr. Han Selye the great researcher with respect to heart conditions and stress and a variety of subjects has written in his lectures in Vivo and I quote: “Life just isn’t the sum of its parts. The more you take these living things apart, the further you get from biology.”

And one of the very interesting things that Selye states in this book which makes it clear why he is so remarkable a man, and why he has so much more respect for the practitioner than most researchers, he states that all his work has been done in terms of the whole man, the living man and with his naked eye. That he has never thought in terms of molecular biology, which he believes is a contradiction in terms.

Now in his book he has a very interesting passage describing his visit with a molecular biologist, Professor Humberto Ferandez Moran, who is at the University of Chicago, in fact he dedicates his book to this man even though he is essentially attacking the man’s position. And he writes: “He is both a physician and a physicist, who not only uses but actually builds high powered electron microscopes. I have read many of his remarkable publications, but since I have never met him, I could not resist the temptation to phone him last time I was in Chicago, and he kindly invited me to his home for dinner, to be followed by a visit to his famous laboratories. My interest in research and in his colorful personality was further increased by our dinner conversation. And it reached a climax at about midnight in his lab, when I began to realize the grandeur of his scientific contribution. There was the latest model of his famous diamond knife, with which he could physically cut Glycogen molecules into smaller sugars. There I could actually see individual molecules of Hemocyanin, under his most powerful electron microscope. He explained to me that this was merely the beginning, because now he was working on a still more powerful electron microscope, which will show objects clearly at a magnification of 2 million times. I was deeply moved by what I saw, and speechless with admiration. But then suddenly my iconoclastic subconscious broke out to the surface, and flashed the terrifying thought through my obsolete mind: ‘Imagine this great genius using all his enormous intellect and knowledge, to build an instrument with which to restrict his visual field 2 million times.’”

Well, of course Selye was right. There is a great deal of amazing and interesting research that is turned up by this molecular biology, which as he says is not biology. It is interesting science, but it is not biology. The real biology is that which deals with the whole man with the naked eye, and this is why Selye’s contribution is so far, far greater than that of a great molecular biologist. He is dealing with the whole man. He knows that life is more than the sum of its parts.

Now, let us apply this, a very telling insight, to our subject. The life of man is more than the sum of its parts. The life of man includes the law of God. Just as a fish has to live in water, and if you take it out of water it is dead, the life of the fish means that environment of water; so for man his life means the environment of Gods law. Man, having been created by God, Gods law is basic to his being. To consider man apart from Gods law is to depersonalize him. For a man to say to a woman: ‘I want a relationship with you, but outside of marriage.’ Is for him to depersonalize her, to say: ‘I want to use you.’ Because a true, personal relationship is within the law.

Man can be considered an abstraction from what he is, but he then ceases to be man. and this is why modern sociology is so demonic, and why modern historiography is so demonic. One of the most brilliant scholars of our day, and I give a chapter to analyzing his position in my forth coming book: The Biblical Philosophy of History declares, at the beginning of his book as he analyzes the south and the history of the south, that the Negro is strictly a white man, a southerner, with a different skin. And he says: “I will not consider anything about his racial background or his intelligence, or his culture, or his environment, I will consider him as a man, pure and simple.” Well now, take away your history, your racial background, your family upbringing, your faith, your character, your intelligence. What have you got? Not you! Just an empty abstraction, a meaningless construct of man.

And this is of course the liberal fallacy. It takes away everything that makes us what we are, and then says somehow, this is the real man. And then it says: ‘You see, all real people are just the same. Hence they are all equal.’ And of course this is a monstrous absurdity. To attempt to approach any man, woman, or child apart from what he is, and apart from the context of Gods law which is basic to the being of everyone, all having been created by God, is to be guilty of nonsense, and to depersonalize man.

And this of course is what the person to person, existential confrontation does. On more than one occasion I have talked to these people who have supposedly established a truly personal existential relationship, and what happens? In no time at all they find themselves unable to speak to each other or to live together. Why? Because there was no desire ever there for any really personal relationship, they just wanted to use each other sexually, and when they wearied of one another, what was there? Nothing. They had nothing they could talk about. It had never been a personal relationship, because a personal relationship is always governed by Gods law.

Thus there is a basic depersonalization is all person to person confrontations. A person outside the law is not a real person, man cannot live without law. Man did not learn to fly by flapping his arms and jumping off a cliff, we fly by utilizing law. Similarly man cannot neglect law which is the reality of life in any other sphere of creation. Law is basic to man’s life. The law does not separate people, the more lawful we are in our relationship with one another in society at large, in marriage, in the family, in any religious community, the more we are boxed together by out faithfulness to the law. It is lawlessness which divides men, not law.

Jesus Christ as the only mediator between God and man, brings man to God; then by His law, brings man to man. He establishes communion above with God, and communion between man and man by His law word. Let us pray.

Almighty God our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto Thee for Jesus Christ, our mediator; who has given us communion with Thee and made us Thy people. And we thank Thee that by Thy law word, through Jesus Christ now communion between man and man has been opened up. Make us ever faithful to Thy covenant oh Lord, that Thy word may be established in and through us, Thy saving grace proclaimed to all men, and Thy law mediating between man and man. Bless us to this purpose in Jesus name, amen.

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

[Audience Member] ...?...

[Rushdoony] That is exactly right. You cannot have communion where there is no salvation and no law. This is why for example in a radically atheistic society such as the Soviet Union, one of the most noticeable features on the streets is the lack of conversation. There is no communion between man and man. You don’t trust anyone. Because there is no basic law, there is no communion between man and man. And in non-Christian society the lack of communion between man and man is very marked. One of the reasons for example that people often forget, that capitalism has grown up in Christian society is precisely that there is a possibility of trust between man and man. When this breaks down, the possibility of the operations of a free-market economy break down. Because so much of it depends on trust, and when that disappears, as it is beginning to disappear now, the market collapses.

[Audience Member] ...?...

[Rushdoony] Right, and as that is breaking down, through lawlessness, the whole of the market economy will collapse.

[Audience Member] ...?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, Israel was called as a nation to make the word of God and the law of God known to all nations, and this is as I pointed out on other occasions, made clear throughout the Old Testament, it was emphasized at the dedication of the temple in Solomon’s prayer, that this was to be a house of prayer for all nations, and Solomon asked in particular that the foreigners that came there, that God would be especially mindful of their prayer, that would become mighty witnesses as they went back to the far corners of the world. And one of the indictments of our Lord was: “God has declared that my house is to be a house of prayer for all nations, but thou hast made it a den of thieves.”

So Israel was called, in order to serve. In order to become a missionary nation to all the world, and they refused and were cast aside, and we were, as Saint Paul says: ‘Grafted in’ Into the same shoot, into the same root or trunk. Yes?

[Audience Member] ...?...

[Rushdoony] No. God chose Israel, even as He chooses us, out of His sovereign mercy and grace. So it was not Israel’s merit, but God’s grace. In fact He tells them through the prophets: ‘Could I not have chosen the Ethiopians? But I chose you. And it was my sovereign, electing grace that led me to do so.’ Yes?

[Audience Member] ...?...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience Member] ...?...

[Rushdoony] No, very good point; in Romans 1 we are emphatically told that Gods witness is in the heart of every man and unbeliever, but they hold down the truth in unrighteousness, whereas with the believer it is now held in righteousness and in joy, it is now a part of our nature. The unbeliever knows it, but he suppresses it, it is not his nature. Yes?

[Audience Member] ...?...

[Rushdoony] Oh, I see. yes. Everyone has the law written in the tables of their hearts, but they suppress it and hold it down in unrighteousness. Thus they have basically the knowledge of God, and the general outline of Gods law. But we are sent out to proclaim the whole word of God, in full detail, to make it known. They either accept by the grace of God, or they reject it, in which case we are innocent of their blood. But we have the duty to teach the law and to bring them up into maturity, those who will hear. So that they will be mature, knowledgeable and acting believers.

Any other questions? Yes.

[Audience Member] ...?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, right. This looks ahead to the great era of history when the whole world will have come under the dominion of God’s word, the whole world will be Christian. So, the work of evangelism will be ended, it will be a time when man will be developing the earth under God. That is the vision of verse 11. So, this is his point with regard to what the covenant of Christ will become; a glorious thing in which everyone knows God as his lord and savior, or everyone has heard the gospel, most of the world will be believing, and there will be glorious society and every man will dwell at peace under his vine and his fig tree the prophets declare. Yes?

[Audience Member] ...?...

[Rushdoony] Yes. The word primitive with respect to tribes is a term coined by anthropology some generations ago to indicate that these people are closer to the original ape man. That is the meaning of the term primitive; coming from ‘Primo’ prime, first; that is, they were the first man as he… yes, primates… as he left the animal stage.

Now this of course we do not believe, and it is our belief that what we… what?

[Audience Member] ...?...

[Rushdoony] Backward peoples or savages, if you use the term meaning that they are deliberately so. These are people who have deteriorated, who have gone downhill. They have never stood still. They are people who have degenerated, and have sought the more isolated areas in order to find peace as it were from competition.

For example, the evidence would indicate that the Eskimos by and large were people who were pushed into the Northern most climates because they were an inferior group and could not stand the competition in other areas. So they went there and adapted themselves to extremely difficult conditions, and have survived. But they were basically people who could not compete, say, with the Indian tribes or other various tribes in their particular areas. So it is that the so-called primitive peoples of the world are people who had gone downhill, deliberately.

For example, we find among the peoples of Africa evidences of civilization in their background. Incidentally, the Negro peoples of Africa did not extend into South Africa. A few wandering bushmen and Hottentots sometimes journeyed into that area as they were shoved out of central Africa. But South Africa was an undeveloped, uninhabited area, until at about the same time as the Dutch landed in New York in early colonial days they landed in South Africa and began to develop that country. They have made it habitable also for the blacks. But, we can find traces of Egyptian influence among the Negro’s, which would indicate that Egyptian or Neo-Egyptian cultures dominated them at one time when they were further north. We also find and know of course, of the Arab empires that were established in Africa. So that the Arabs did establish very powerful kingdoms among the Negros, and ruled them.

When they talk incidentally about the great African civilizations, they are talking about the Arab civilizations in which the Negros were slaves.

Now, in both cases, what happened? As soon as these civilizations disappeared, the various tribes and peoples went downhill immediately. In other words, they deliberately took a downward turn. They didn’t attempt to reestablish or to maintain the civilization they overthrew, they went downhill, and have gone progressively further downhill, from what little evidence we have. The same is true in some parts of Asia. We do know that earlier they had a high degree of civilization, but they deliberately took a downward turn.

Some time ago you remember I referred to the evidence of J.D. Unwin, an English scholar, who spent his lifetime trying to prove that there was no relationship between sexual standards and cultural achievement, and he found that there was a very strict, mathematical correlation, and that within three generations of total sexual license a culture could come from a high level down to the point where the knowledge of Arithmetic would be limited to the ability to count the ten fingers. The idea of a number beyond that would be beyond them.

Now this has happened repeatedly, so that these primitive peoples so called, are very often people who give indication of a high degree of civilization somewhere in their background. This is especially true in South America.

[Audience Member] ...?...

[Rushdoony] Oh yes, they are going downhill progressively. Some of the people in the jungles of South America give evidence of having come from the Orient. They have customs that you find nowhere else, but consider the difference between the two peoples. Yes?

[Audience Member] ...?...

[Rushdoony] Oh, good question. In China for example. we see a number of very interesting illustrations of this. Very early China had a highly developed civilization, but very early with Taoism it developed you might say an existential philosophy, a philosophy of total relativism, that there is no truth, that all things are relative. Well if all things are relative there is neither good nor bad, nor progress nor decline, because you have no criteria for judging anything.

So, through the centuries, China has been characterized by stagnation and decline, and another invader comes in, and ceases this civilization which has attained a great deal and is now going down the drain. And they, because they have a background of some kind of vitality and faith, and character, develop it for a time. And they take it to a new high, and then they get caught up in this existentialism or relativism of China, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, all the philosophies there are relativistic, and then they go down. And then another one comes along. So it has been a succession of foreign powers that have taken over China, and then become Chinese in their philosophy and their outlook, and have declined. So that, China has always tended towards this anarchy, and has been rescued by a foreign element through the centuries. Yes?

[Audience Member] ...?...

[Rushdoony] Right.

[Audience Member] ...?...

[Rushdoony] Yes. First of all, this was a sin of Judaism, it wanted to preach the law without Christ, without salvation. And of course this was a radical failure, and their own Talmud has proven that this does not work, because the Talmud is a gigantic exercise in subverting the law. And it is anti-nomian to the core.

Then second of course, Jesus Christ had to be preached to all the world. To preach Christ meant also preaching the whole word of God, and Saint Paul makes it clear that the penalties of the law and the law still stand, over and over again. We saw a couple weeks ago with regard to homosexuality, Saint Paul concludes the 1st chapter of Romans: “They that practice these things are worthy of death.” In other words he says of course, the laws still stand.

Now, if you have a relativistic point of view, your eschatology, your doctrine of last things is going to be one that, if you logically carry relativism to its end conclusion, your eschatology is going to be Nirvana. Annihilation is the logical goal. And so in Eastern philosophy by and large, this pessimism has taken over. What’s the goal of being? To disappear, never to be reborn again, to die eternally, to be annihilated. And of course Mahatma Gandhi repeatedly said that he hoped that he had reached a sufficient stage of holiness that he need never again be reincarnated, that he would be dead eternally.

As a result you see, the eschatology of such a position is totally hopeless. The future is death, this endless cycle of reincarnation if you are continually a sinner, but if you are holy then you escape and you die. But, Mahatma Gandhi at the one and the same time, having been educated at Oxford, with many Christian tutors, in those days still abiding, not many but some, imbibed the western eschatology, that is the western doctrine, the Christian doctrine of last things. So there had to be progress, so at one and the same time he was trying to bring progress to India, and declaring that the goal was death for everybody. Now this is the contradiction that the non-Christian world is caught up in. It has imbibed enough from our teaching to have the one idea, while proclaiming the other. But in our society what is happening? As man is becoming existential, and I will be coming to this in a few weeks, so I shouldn’t get into this, but in a sense it fits in too neatly… and with this I will have to end because our time is up… the reigning school of thought in church circles and outside the church today is the death of God school of philosophy, which is logical in terms of modernism.

But, what is the next step which that is now being taken, and is the most popular school at the moment in France, and it is going to creep into this country in a few years? The logical conclusion of this existentialism and death of God school, it is the death of man school of philosophy. And what does it proclaim? That man should die, and that very soon whether he likes it or not, man kind will be dead, hallelujah.

Well, they are logical of course, and I am glad to see this school come around, I would like to draw up a list of names of people that should join it, and stop cluttering up the earth. But you see, this is their eschatology, if they forsake Jesus Christ. First you have anti-nomianism, you abandon the law. Then you have existentialism, then you have the death of God school, and then you have the death of man school. It is the logical conclusion.

And of course, whether they like it or not they are headed for judgement. And as far as we are concerned they are going to stop cluttering up the earth. They are going to commit suicide one way or another.

Well, our time is passed, so we will continue this when we come back to that subject in a couple of weeks.