Eighth Commandment

Dominion

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Prerequisite/Law

Lesson: Dominion

Genre: Speech

Track: 77

Dictation Name: RR130AN74

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Our scripture is Genesis 1:26-28, and our subject: Dominion. “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

Last week in our analysis of faithfulness, we concluded our study of the seventh commandment, Thou shalt not commit adultery. This week we begin our study of the eighth commandment, Thou shalt not steal, and since we are at the beginning of another law section, it is important for us to touch base, as it were, before we begin. We have previously dealt with the subject of dominion and these verses of Genesis. Let us analyze the subject again from the standpoint of the eighth commandment. The law had, through us, a specific function, and it is related to the creation mandate, the requirement of man that he exercise dominion and subdue the earth. Man was created in the image of God. He was commanded to subdue the earth and to exercise dominion. This is therefore, man’s calling, to exercise dominion, but it is not enough to say it is man’s calling. It is also man’s nature to do so. Thus, dominion is man’s calling and man’s nature. God is the absolute Lord, the ultimate and the absolute sovereign. His dominion is total. He has power without limit.

Now dominion and power are related concepts. They are not identical, but they are inseparable. There is no dominion without power, and the true purpose of power is dominion. Men, having been created in the image of God, shares in the communicable attributes of God. Now, there are some attributes of God which are incommunicable. His eternity, his divinity, his absolute sovereignty. These any many more are incommunicable attributes of God, but there are communicable attributes of God, and man was created in God’s image, that is, in terms of the communicable attributes: knowledge, righteousness, holiness, and dominion. The Shorter Catechism of the Westminster Standards, in its tenth question asks: How did God create man? And the answer is, “God created man, male and female, after his own image in knowledge, righteousness, holiness, with dominion over the creatures.” The references given by the catechism are our text, Genesis 1:26-28, Colossians 3:10, and Ephesians 4:24.

Man thus, has as his nature, by virtue of God’s creation, this attribute, dominion. He was created to exercise dominion under God and as God’s appointed vice gerent over the earth. Dominion thus, is a basic urge to man’s nature, to rule, to exercise authority, to extend the sway of his government. Thus, creation was followed by the Fall. Man’s urge to dominion remains but it is now a perverted urge. It is no longer an exercise of power under God and to his glory, but a desire to be God himself. The temptation of Satan was, “Ye shall be as God, knowing,” that is determining “good and evil for yourself.” To exercise dominion even over ultimate things, which is the right of God alone. This was the temptation of Satan, and so man, being fallen, seeks ultimacy in both matters of law and power.

As a result, history is a long and horrible story of man’s perverted desire to have dominion. The result has been vicious, perverted, and bitter. Whether individually, or in gang activities, or in warfare, or as a nation, men have used this perverted desire to have dominion in fearful and perverted ways. Orwell summed it up in 1984. This was the tragedy of Orwell. He saw this urge to dominion in fallen man, but he had no hope of man being redeemed, because he was without faith, and so he wrote, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.” This, in fallen man, is all that the urge to dominion which is so basic to his nature, adds up to. Sheer power used to destroy.

As a result of this, and Orwell, who saw it most clearly, died from the knowledge of the hopelessness of his plight. As a result of this vision of the consequences of man’s urge to dominion, to exercise power, we have had now, a generation or more of frightened men, and what’s the consequence? Because they are frightened of dominion, frightened of the use of power, they want to renounce all power, and they say dominion is wrong. They are hostile to the very idea of it, and so the liberals and the neo-orthodox, and the existentialists, and the neo-evangelicals, and the antinomians, all renounce the idea of power and of dominion, and the possession of it as though it were an evil, and they give us a picture of graves, or of character though it were pacifism, as though it were the renunciation of all power and impotence becomes virtue.

The average evangelical and the average liberal today gives us a picture of virtue as though it meant impotent, and yet God created man with this basic to his nature: dominion. Has redeemed man that he might exercise dominion, but today we are told that there’s something nasty about it, and as a result, because men will not exercise dominion, and because Christians and pseudo-Christians act as though dominion were something perverted, we are drifting into totalitarianism, state dominion, where men have renounced dominion and turned it over to the state. You see, dominion does not disappear when a man renounces it. It is simply transferred to another person. If a man does not exercise dominion, then maybe his wife will, or maybe his children will have dominion in the home, and in the community, or the faith. Dominion is a fact of life. It does not disappear. It simply shifts its locale. So where it is renounced in one area, it goes to another. Can you see the consequence therefore, of the absurd preaching of our day which says that to be a true Christian, you have to be a mousey character, who is meek, who never opens his mouth, who takes punishment, who is a complete pacifist. This is a product of neo-Platonism in the church. Dominion is renounced and the earth is regarded as the Devil’s realm, and the body is despised in a false humility and a false meekness are cultivated. In terms of this, pietism gives us a picture of Jesus, meek and mild and pacifistic.

Now, the word meek does appear. Our Lord applied it to himself. Moses, we are told by God, was described as meek. In fact, meek above all the men which were upon the face of the earth, but I say that we would have right to feel sorry for the man who tangled with Moses. There is nothing of a pacifist about him. He was a very fiery character, very, and a part of that meekness was shipping his wife home, booting her out, when she would not submit to God’s direction. It was breaking with his sister and brother. It was standing up to the entire nation. Somehow, we’ve misunderstood what meekness is, haven’t we?

Meekness refers to our spiritual relationship to God. Meekness means tame, harnessed. Now a horse may be a strong and a high-spirited horse, but when he responds to harness and can be used, he is meek. “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.” Inherit? Why, that means to exercise dominion over it. Who then are the meek? They are those whom God has tamed and harnessed and put to his use. Strong men. Able men who now, because they have the driving power which has been harnessed, are able to accomplish something. They are not the mousey{?}. Our Lord, when he described himself as meek and lowly in spirit, said this of the relationship to the Lord and to the suffering. “All ye that labor and are heavy laden,” all you who are shoved aside by the Pharisees and the Sadducees, “come unto me and I will give you rest.” What was he in relationship to the Sadducees and the Pharisees? He wasn’t meek in our sense of the term. They found him a very difficult character to deal with, did they not? When he tackled a temple full of them with a whip in his hand, did they dare stop him? They were afraid of him. Time and again, they fell fast before his word, then the ran for cover. This is not the modern idea of meekness. Meekness in scripture has a relationship to our spiritual relationship to God and our ability to be used, to be harnessed by him, in our submission to him. It does not refer to pacifism.

Thus, meekness in scripture is not the surrender of dominion, but the ability now to exercise it under God. Therefore, “blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” The Gospel, at this point, has been sadly perverted. Man, who has been given by God this urge to dominion as a calling and as his nature, has been regenerated by God to reestablish dominion, to subdue the earth under God.

The call, therefore, throughout scripture to obey the Lord is a call to dominion. Obey. Harken unto my word. Give heed to my commandments. Why? Because as you are harnessed to my word, to my law-word, then you are able to exercise dominion. How absurd it is for preachers to demand obedience constantly in the church without a goal. Obey. But what for? What’s the answer? There is none. Obey, so you get to heaven, but that’s in the future. Obey for what? Now. Everything in scripture has a reference to time and eternity both, and so man is constantly being summoned to prepare himself for no purpose. To harness himself, as it were, to the Lord, but with no place to go, in harness, and nothing to pull. And the result is the ministry become trifling and the life of the believer frustrating, but the urge to dominion does not disappear simply because the church does not speak of it. It then reappears as an ugly, sinful, struggle for power, and this is why when the church does not harness people to the godly call to exercise dominion, each in their appointed realm, and over the earth, dominion reappears as a sinful struggle for petty power in church politics, and today, the churches which are preaching meekness are full of sinful pride, as men try to exercise dominion in sinful, wicked, perverted ways. The urge to dominion is godly.

A basic aspect of this dominion is property. Hence the commandment, Thou shalt not steal. This is a commandment to the state as well as to individuals, to take property away from man, to weaken a man’s right to property, to endanger a man’s property by exorbitant taxes is to whittle away at man’s dominion, but isn’t this what taxes are doing, what inflation is doing? A man should feel confident and security in his dominion, and how can he when his wealth may be here today and gone tomorrow? Man requires dominion. It is essential to his nature and property is basic to it, and today, because of the wickedness whereby men, as men and men as the state are stealing, men are frustrated in their urge to dominion, and they work frantically, hopelessly against overwhelming odds, not knowing why they’re killing themselves over their work, trying to establish dominion, because everything in the nature of man summons him to exercise dominion, and the joy a man feels in dominion is a godly joy.

I recently heard someone lecture who, for years, has been working hard to get a book published. It’s been an ambition of his, and his book, a splendid one, was published recently, and he was twice as dynamic a lecturer as he had ever been before. Why? Because this was a way in which he had finally exercised his dominion, and it had set him up as a man in a tremendous way, and this is what our modern life is killing in men, or driving them to a wild goose chase, trying hopelessly to exercise dominion where the foundation of everything is on sand.

Property, therefore, is basic to godly order. The liberals tell us, when they argue in the churches against private property, they very piously believe the earth is the Lords. That means that man doesn’t have title to property. Well, if the earth is the Lord’s, what right does the state have it? The state has no right to property if the earth is the Lord’s. The state is not God. The earth is indeed the Lord’s. He is the transcendental and absolute Lord of all things, and he has the transcendental and absolute title to all things, but God has given a presence, a historical title to the earth to man, not to the state, to man, and therefore, man must have it or the society is against God. Property in the Bible is, as we saw some months ago, vested in the family, closely tied to the family. If the doctrine of dominion in and under God, and the security of property in terms of it is weakened, then all law is weakened. God grants dominion to man under his law. He does not grant his sovereignty. God alone is absolute Lord and sovereign. To deny God’s sovereignty as the state today does, is to transfer sovereignty from God to man, or to the state.

When this country was established, the word “sovereignty” was not used in any constitution. It belonged to God. When Thomas Paine talked about sovereignty in The Rights of Man, he wrote echoing the words of the French Revolution: “The nation is essentially the source of all sovereignty nor can any individual or any body of men be entitled to any authority which is not expressly derived from it.” Isn’t it an ironical thing that he called his book, The Rights of Man? What rights does man have if the state is God, if the state is sovereign, if man has no rights apart from the state? He should have titled his work The Slavery of Man as Proposed by Thomas Paine. Totalitarianism is what he advocated, and whenever the sovereignty of God is denied, then man’s dominion disappears because the state as God on earth claims all sovereignty then, all dominion, all power, all property, and this is our problem today. The state as God, the source of all law, dominion, and morality. It is not surprising that the French Revolution and Thomas Paine, although they began by talking about the rights of man, ended up instituting an order which was a reign of terror, a boot, grinding down the face of man, but by the grace of God then and now, not forever. For it is God alone who is sovereign. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto thee that thou hast called us, created us, and made us to have dominion. Make us therefore, our Father, meek in relationship to thee, but bold and strong in relationship to the ungodly, that we might indeed subdue the earth and exercise dominion over it, in thee, unto thee, and to thy glory. We thank thee, our Father, for the glory of thy law word, and of thy calling. Make us every strong in thy service. In Jesus name. Amen.

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

[Audience]{?} created {?}

[Rushdoony] A very good question. I think you already know the answer to have asked so perceptive a question. The whole of the earth was created as an area where man was going to exercise godly dominion. Therefore, the earth, nature, animals round about us are suffering because man is fallen and he is using a perverted urge to dominion, and thereby, laying waste the earth. Therefore, the entire bent of creation is one of waiting for this fulfillment, just as a plant waits near a window doesn’t look at you but towards the sun, so the whole of the creation, animate and inanimate, has an urge to find fulfillment in this dominion under God which man is to exercise. Now, you might say how can the ground have an urge? Well, there’s the law of gravity, and God says there’s the law of dominion. So, it groans and travails, waiting for the redemption of the Sons of God so that they can exercise dominion. It’s a marvelous passage by St. Paul. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, very good point. The scripture reads in Genesis 2:16, “And God said let us make man in our image after our likeness.” The reference is clearly to the Trinity. God there is Elohim, which is the plural of God. The singular in Hebrew is El. Elohim is Gods, but it takes a singular verb, so Gods says, let us make man. Now, this means that there is one God but there is a plurality in the godhead. That is as clear-cut as can be from the text of the Hebrew. The answer of the liberals to this is to store it {?} and sneer at this and say, “That’s the plural of majesty. After all, didn’t Louis XIV say, ‘We ordain thus and so,’ and doesn’t an editor say, ‘We feel thus and so,’ the plural of majesty.” The answer to that is the plural of majesty is a modern concept. It did not exist in the ancient world. There was no such thing as a plural of majesty.

Whenever you go back to the ancient writings, whether Hebrew or Egyptian, Assyrian, and so on, there was the singular of majesty. “I ordain.” The plural here clearly refers to the godhead. Now, it is interesting that our modern translations, the most recent ones, are dropping the plural there. They are mistranslating deliberately. Some would say, in a footnote, “this is simply the plural of majesty.” This is what two or three years ago you would find. Now, it reads, “And God said I will make man in my image.” Now that is as obvious a mistranslation as any. If you go through the first chapter of Genesis in some of the most recent translations, it is appalling to find how many deliberate misrepresentations there are, mistranslations. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Right. This text, of course, and then I cited Colossians 3:10 and Ephesians 4:24. There are other passages, but these are the central ones that are cited. Colossians 3:10, Ephesians 4:24. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. The gap theory, with regard to Genesis 2, is a theory which says that first, God created the heaven and the earth, and then there was a long period of countless ages in which somehow the world fell into ruin, and so on. This theory is a modern theory. It is a product of the attempt of some people to give long, geological history to the earth. It became prominent through the Scofield Bible toward the latter part of the last century. So you find it appearing in the latter half of the 19th century as a reaction to Darwin and geology. It is not a valid theory, and it only is an attempt to cope with evolution. Any other questions? Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. In fact, I brought this to comment today, and the advertisement for this Royal Hunt of the Sun reads, “The Incas had everything. Wealth, beauty, honor, and innocence. Pizarro brought them Christianity.” The reality is the Incas were the most totally communistic or socialistic state the world has ever seen. There is a large volume, if you want I’ll try to remember to get the title of it. I have the book if it isn’t somewhere in the garage. It’s a powerful study of the socialism of the Incas. It was cradle-to-grave, absolutely. This is why the Incas were so easily destroyed. All that was necessary for Pizarro to do was to knock off the Inca and the whole thing collapsed, because initiative, independence, the ability to do something on their own was lost by the people. They had, for a long time, been systematically bred as it were to be artisans or ditch diggers, or whatever the case may be. They were frozen in a particular class. To this day, the surviving Incas are kind of a “blah” people. Inca civilization was something that was fearful.

While we’re on the subject, take the Aztecs. Again, you get a lot of talk about how these horrible Spaniards came in and so brutally destroyed Montezuma and the Aztec civilization. Well, there was just a handful of them, what was it, forty or eighty men, that went to Mexico City and knocked over the empire? Now, they couldn’t do that against the highly skilled Aztec army if something had not been wrong, and the reality is that it was a fearful, oppressive regime. It was a cannibalistic regime. We’re not told this because they’re so bent on promoting it as such a high civilization and culture. Human meat was sold apparently in the marketplaces. Human sacrifices, a regular thing. It was so oppressive that when this handful of Spaniards appeared, there was rebellion all over the Aztec empire. Everybody was ready to overthrow this fearful power. Now, there’s no question there was some real abuse by the Spaniards, but the reality is they were welcomed. It was a lot, lot better at its worst than what they had.

Again, you hear a great deal about how we have abused the Indians. I’m sure I could spend an hour or two because I worked among the Indians and I know a great deal of Indian and tribal history, more than the average person. I could tell you a great deal about some very ugly things that happened. Very ugly, and of broken treaties and so on, but it’s not justice to take one side of the picture. When you balance it up, you have to say that the treatment by the United States of the Indians has been a story of remarkable kindness. In fact, too much kindness. They’ve been destroyed by having too much given to them, and the idea that the Indians were given very poor land is nonsense. They were given choice land as reservations. If they look poorly, it’s because they haven’t developed them. In fact, if you were to ask me my choice of some of the land in the United States that I know, rural land that I’d like to have, I could name several reservations that I’d grab if I could in preference to some very wealthy ranches, because it is some of the choicest country in the United States, and when you realize, this Inca thing prompted me and I picked this up and put it in my briefcase, here’s a map of the United States. Now, this map shows you the reservations in yellow. Look at it. It’s just a handful of Indians in the United States, and they have a very sizable portion of the United States, have they now? A few hundred thousand people and they’re not all living on the reservations. A lot of them are here in Los Angeles and New York City, and a lot of the reservations don’t appear because they’re only five or ten miles in size, they’re just a dot on the map, but look at that. They own a sizable portion of some states, and it’s choice land, choice land. I’ve been on many of these reservations.

As a matter of fact, the reservation I lived on for 8 ½ years, most of the land round about it was bought up by Bing Crosby and wealthy people from Santa Barbara and elsewhere, and they had the crumbs, I think. The choicest was what the Indians have, and if the surrounding territory looked beautiful and the Indian area looked badly, it was because they were living in shacks, because they were not utilizing the property. Yes?

[Audience] {?} and the Indians {?}

[Rushdoony] I could see when I was on the reservation in the forties, that the worst element was being encouraged by the liberals and by the government to take over and to make demands, and the progressive Indians were having a hopeless fight against this desire to beat them down and to make them line up for handouts as it were, rather than to be independent. It’s a fantastic thing that so small a minority should have so vast a portion of the United States. What other minority group of about 300,000-400,000, half a million at the most if you take all those that are off the reservations, own so sizable a portion of the United States? It would amount to a few states all put together. Nobody has any rights like that in the United States except the Indians, and if they can’t do anything with that, what are they going to do if you hand them the rest of it? They had it long enough and didn’t do anything. Now, I’m not against the Indians because I like them. I’m just dealing with the facts. I think they have a tremendous potential. When we Christianize them and when they overcome their alcoholism and some other faults, they’re going to be excellent in what they can offer to this country, but not until then. But we are fed progressively what amounts to a systematically anti-Christian bit of propaganda, and the reality about the Aztec and the reality about the Incas is very different from that which we are now told.

As a matter of fact, let me state one further thing. All the time I went through grade school, and high school, and the university, I was fed this story about all the precious and marvelous records of the Aztecs and the Incas that were destroyed by these crude Christians that came in. Well, do you know that more records of France were destroyed by the Revolution, and more records of Russia by the Revolution than were ever destroyed by the Spaniards in Mexico and Peru? Do you know that if you go to the Versailles now, the furnishings now are not the original furnishings. They are replacements. They don’t know what was there. It was all destroyed. Do you know that the greatest composer of France in the pre-Revolutionary period, of whom we have two little minor pieces of amazing beauty, all his work is gone, and he was someone who was regarded of rank comparable to Bach and the others, a German. It’s all gone, but we’re not told this, you see, because this would be calling attention to what revolution in the modern world is. It’s an attempt to blot out and it has blotted out a great deal more than the Spaniards did, and I’m not apologizing for or defending the Spaniards. I’m just calling attention to the reality of the situation. We have been fed propaganda. Yes?

[Audience] Virtually all your Islanders from Hawaii on down were cannibalistic. Their chiefs and kings ruled them with an incredible savagery. They were slaves of the most abject sort. It was liberation for them when those social orders were overthrown. So, the descendants of the missionaries made money. They settled there. They developed the country. They brought more prosperity to the natives than they’d ever had under the kings, and some of the islands, when a chief or a king moved some place, the people had to lie down so that he wouldn’t soil his feel by walking on dirt. He literally walked on people, and the cannibalism, yes, that was just about universal on all the islands. So, the Hawaiians really had it good when they were delivered from that, and the missionaries and their descendants and the others who settled there, for a long time, tried their best to be as good to the natives as possible. They gave the kings a status as rulers over the islands, and maintained a native culture as far as possible. They pampered them.

One or two books have dealt with this fairly, but most books are out to create propaganda against Christianity and against the White Man.

Well, our time is up. We have an announcement concerning our Christmas Festival now, from Mrs. Flannigan.

[Mrs. Flannigan} {?}

[Rushdoony] I’m not sure of the location. It is in the Coral Room of one of the Glendale Savings & Loan buildings. We will have the exact address, and it is a very lovely place, very attractive room.

[Mrs. Flannigan] {?}

[Rushdoony] Thank you. We’re adjourned.

End of tape