Eighth Commandment

Fraud

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Restitution & Forgiveness

Lesson: Fraud

Genre: Speech

Track: 84

Dictation Name: RR130AT84

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Our scripture is Leviticus 19:13, and our subject: Fraud. “Thou shalt not defraud thy neighbour, neither rob him: the wages of him that is hired shall not abide with thee all night until the morning.”

On this, the last Sunday of the decade of 1960’s, the subject of fraud is a very fitting one to describe the decade we have just lived through. It has been a time of political fraud, of economic and monetary fraud, for inflation is a form of fraud and robbery. It has been a time of religious fraud, a time indeed of fraud.

This week, I was talking with a business man in another part of the state, and our subject turned to a threat to his business, which is arising, a very serious one which will curtain his activities. It is the Mafia. I was concerned for his sake, but then he made a statement that was quite startling at first, and he said, “The Mafia is bad, but I am more afraid of government bureaucrats,” and I said, “Well, they’re bad enough, but what of some of the things we’ve been hearing about Mafia murders, for example,” and I referred to one horrible case where the Mafia hung one man on a meat hook for three days while they tortured him, and he said, “There is a difference. The Mafia knows that it is an outlaw agency, that it is evil,” but he said, “The fearful thing about bureaucrats is that what they do to me they do in the name of helping me and saving me,” and he said, “I can take it a lot better when it’s an outright and open evil than when it is something supposedly for my salvation.” Then he said, “Then it is not only evil, but it is evil fraudulently presenting itself as righteousness. It is a fraud.”

This ties in with our text, very closely. “Thou shalt not defraud thy neighbour, neither rob him: the wages of him that is hired shall not abide with thee all night until the morning.” What does this mean? We saw, when we began the study of the law, that the law is case law. That is, it take a minimal principle, if thou shalt not muzzle the ox, for example, which treadeth out the corn, then is definitely true that you must reward the laborer. The laborer is worth of his hire.

Now, what is the principle in this particular case law? Let us glance at some of the statements by commentators. First of all, C.D. Ginsburg, the Anglican divine of a century ago. He declared, “Here oppression by fraud, and oppression by violence are forbidden. It is probably an illusion to this passage that John the Baptist warned the soldiers who came to him, and he said to them, ‘Do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely and be content with your wages.’ From the declaration in the next clause which forbids the retention of the wages overnight, it is evident that the day laborer is here spoken of as he is dependant upon his wages for the support of himself and his family. The law protects him by enjoining that the earnings of the hireling should be promptly paid. This benign care for the laborer and the denunciations against any attempt to defraud him are again and again repeated in scripture. Hence, the humane interpretation which obtained of this law during the second temple. He who treats a hireling with harshness sins as grievously as if he had taken away life and transgresses five presets{?}.”

Again, another commentator of a century ago, Clarkson, declared, “’Ye shall not steal nor deal falsely. Thou shalt not defraud thy neighbor neither rob him.’ Nothing could be more explicit than this. Nothing more comprehensive in suggestion. No member of the Hebrew commonwealth could deliberately appropriate what he knew what was not his own, or rob his neighbor in the act of trading, or deal falsely or unrighteously in any transaction or in any relation without consciously breaking the law, and coming under the displeasure of Jehovah. The words of the law are clear and strong, going straight to the understanding and to the conscience. Every man amongst them must have known, as everyone amongst us knows werll that dishonesty is sin in the sight of God.”

Now, these two commentators make it clear that this has reference to fraud in business or in any kind of transaction, but there is also another element they have cited, and Fredrick Gardner, another commentator of a century ago, summed it up in one sentence. “Leviticus 19:13,” he said, “deals with faults of power, the conversion of might into right, the particulars mentioned are oppression robbing an undue retention of wages.” In other words, what this has reference to and what fraud generally refers to is the abuse of power, the conversion of might into right. This brings us to the heart of this law. This is legislation against theft, but theft of a particular kind. Theft where there is an abuse of power, when men use their superior power to rob those who are under them.

Now at this point, we come face to face with the fact that there are many liberals today who would say, “Of course, this is precisely what we are concerned about, the false, the abuses of power, and this is what we’re trying to do. Therefore, why are you opposed to our position? Are we not trying, through a variety of legislations, to correct abuses in every area of life?” and the answer is that, seemingly, they are. In reality, they are compounding the abuses. How? We can agree with the intent behind many laws that deal with conservation, with pure food and drug legislation, with regard to labor legislation, and a great deal more, and yet say they are pure, unadulterated evil, because they are a violation of fundamental law. The create special administrative agencies which enhance the central power of the state and create a great evil than the evils they are trying to remedy. Whereas, in biblical law, these are matters of criminal law.

Is there a violation, for example, of a pure food and drug principle? Then it is not a matter for an agency. It is a matter for the criminal courts, for a procedure, as in any case of killing of stealing. Here is a fundamental principle. Everything that the modern liberal tries to accomplish, he accomplishes in a way that does not effect the desired goal, but instead creates an agency with power over everyone. We have had a generation of this kind of legislation, and it has cured nothing. It has compounded the evils by creating super-governmental agencies, which add to the fraud, because remember, fraud in the biblical sense, is the false of power, the conversion of might into right.

As a result today, fundamental law has been nullified rather than furthered by the liberal legislation. There are specific legislations required in order to effect these ends which create agencies, not biblical common law. Now in terms of biblical common law, a man who sells you something which is not what it should be should be prosecuted as a thief. It should not be in the hands of a government agency which has absolute discretionary powers in the situation, and which ultimately lines up with power against the people. Fraud then is the conversion of might into right and is one of the false of power used in an ungodly fashion.

Fraud, therefore, can be perpetrated in a variety of ways. Property can be alienated or stolen by expropriation, by injury, by restrictive legislation, by taxation, and by a variety of other means. Moreover, a man’s property is more than his land. It is more than his home and his material possessions and his money. A man also has property in his ideas and in his inventions. Patent and copyright laws should be a part of criminal law, not a special agency law, and because today they are a part of a special agency, patents are becoming progressively worthless, because today the government has decided that if you have a good idea, it belongs to everybody, and so today, the federal government is, since this is a matter of agency law, not criminal law, destroying patents. Ruthlessly destroying them, and the effect of this will be to stifle invention, because it has only been when men have been able to protect their property and ideas and in inventions, that inventiveness has flowered in history, and this is being destroyed.

The Berkeley version of the bible translated the first clause of Leviticus 19:13 as neither use extortion toward your neighbor.” The idea of extortion is also involved. The Torah translation reads, “Ye shall not coerce your neighbor.” Coercion and extortion are both ideas involved. The reference is to any kind of oppression, legal and illegal, whereby a man is deprived of his property and possessions. There can be legal fraud. In fact this is the most deadly like of fraud, when men are given to lawlessness, their society will be lawless also, and finally their courts, and their laws, and then the laws are used to perpetrate fraud. In a number of passages, the law speaks of the abuse of power, and the various forms of legalized robbery. Proverbs 22:22-23 read, “Rob not the poor, because he is poor: neither oppress the afflicted in the gate (in the gate meaning in the courts, because in those days, the court and the town council met in a public meeting place near the gate of the city to be available to everyone): for the Lord will plead their cause, and spoil the soul of those that spoiled them.” The reference here is to the legalized defrauding of the poor. Again, in Proverbs 28:24, “Whoso robbeth his father or his mother and said it is no transgression, the same is the companion of a destroyer.” The reference here is to the legal defrauding of parents. The guilt is compounded by the very fact that it parades as a legal act.

Men who use fraud create a social order which will finally destroy them also. Jeremiah 17:11 says, “He that getteth riches and not by right shall leave them in the midst of his days and at his end shall be a fool.” Modern civil law foresees only civil enforcement. These passages of scripture which I have been reading bring out another aspect of biblical law. Biblical law sees two kinds of courts. One is the civil court, the courts of a God-ordained society, and the other is the Supreme Court of Almighty God. Almighty God is mindful of all that which is done against his law, and in due time, requires payment of all men to the last penny.

It is interesting that one of the most prominent of criminal attorneys in the State of California, Jake Ehrlich of San Francisco, has commented on the difference between our modern law and biblical law, that it is precisely at this point, from Ehrlich, “It is difficult to compare biblical sins with statutory crimes, since in the former, all are based on moral and spiritual values, whereas in the latter, only that is a crime which fits into the structure of the statute sought to be enforced.” In other words, biblical law declared that everything was a crime which was covered by, for example, Thou shalt not steal, and Thou shalt not kill. It was not necessary to have a statute covering a particular form of murder.

Today, the wording of the statute has to cover the specific offense, or there is no offense. Within the last few years, one federal official in the state of Michigan murdered several people, confessed he did, and escaped prosecution. Why? He had studied the revision of the criminal code in the State of Michigan and realized that that particular type of crime had been omitted in the new statutes, and therefore, he was free to commit those murders and nothing could be done to him.

I read just the other day that although almost every state except about six has laws against hitchhiking. There is not much they can do about them. They have found that hitchhikers are largely criminals. In Kingman, Arizona, a check not too long ago by a police of one hundred hitchhikers found only fourteen that did not have a criminal record, who are not dangerous people, only fourteen out of a hundred, and yet, the laws read in most cases as they were originally passed, that anyone who is soliciting a ride on a public highway is subject to arrest. The law is rootless if the man is not on the highway, and so they stand on the shoulder of the highway and solicit a ride.

This is the kind of thing that statute law represents. This is why modern cases are tried, not in terms of “is the man guilty or not.” We saw some time ago, some months ago, that about 99 out of 100 men who are taken to court on criminal offenses are probably guilty. About 80% of them plead guilty to a lesser charge and are given a lesser sentence so they won’t tie up the courts. The real question in most cases is does the crime fit the statute? And here is the problem of conviction. The modern law, statute law which replaced biblical common law which existed in this country through the Civil War, requires that the crime, even if it has been committed and has been confessed, fit exactly the wording of the statute.

As a result, law now has become an esoteric matter for judges and lawyers. The whole of biblical law, as it existed in this country and in Western Civilization, to a hundred years ago rested on the fact of general biblical principles, the Ten Commandments. Was it theft? Was it fraud? Was it murder? If so, then it was punished. Therefore, the jury decided in terms of certain basic moral principles. First, was the man guilty, and second, how shall be punish him? And therefore, the jury system was able to function and function ably, because it rested on the common moral knowledge of the people. This is why the jury system used to require that the jurors be Christians. In other words, that they know scripture, fundamental, moral law, and out of fundamental, moral law, to make a decision. Biblical law is the word of God. It represents an ultimate moral order which is written into the texture of the universe. It is written into the heart of man, so that every man in his heart knows the truth of that law. Hence, the jury system is valid, but when you invent civil statutes which represent only the will of the state, not an objective, absolute moral order, then law begins to break down because there is nothing real there, as you apply it to the moral scene{?}.

And thus it is that modern man does feel a frustration whenever he has any faith, because he feels a moral indignation at the violation of fundamental law, and yet the law of the state does not seem to apply to it, and with reason. The law of the state no longer represents God’s fundamental moral law.

Thus, we must conclude that the law of the state today comes under the condemnation of our text. It is a form of fraud. We began by calling attention to this decade having been a decade of fraud, because society is no longer governed by an absolute standard of justice, but rather, by the fiat will of the state. Like fiat money, fiat law lacks substance. It quickly destroys itself and all who rely on it. Thus, when we declare that this law condemns fraud, we must conclude also that it condemns modern law. Since it deals with false of power, the conversion of might into right, does it not condemn then thoroughly, what law has now become? Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we come to thee as people oppressed by the fraud round about us. For men, O Lord, have made fraud into law, and the courts of the land hear of fraud and not righteousness, and therefore, we cry ‘O Lord,’ unto thee from the courts of the state unto thy supreme court. We thank thee, our God, that with thee is power, with thee is all righteousness, and in thy righteousness unto power thou shalt bring to judgment the workers of fraud. Condemned therefore, O Lord, all fraud in our time, fraud on the part of the state and of citizens, fraud in high places and low, in church, state, and school, and make us again a people of righteousness, established on thy law and thy saving power. Bless us to this purpose, we beseech thee, in Jesus name. Amen.

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

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] This is a difficult question, but we can always grasp the matter if we begin with basic principles. First of all, resistance cannot change evil, unless first of all, you have a corps of righteousness, plus the scripture makes it clear that our alternative as Christians is not revolution, because you only replace fraud with fraud then. this is the weakness of all revolutionary movements. They begin by saying how monstrous is the evil we face and the end by replacing it with a more monstrous evil, because their whole perspective is based on violence as the cure for fraud, but the fraud has arisen because there has been a recession of biblical faith, and of biblical standards. Well, fraud cannot be healed until there is again a return to this, and that’s our problem. Just as last week I read a statement in a journal which supposedly represents the most conservative kind of thinking and one of the central points made was to deride biblical laws any kind of standard. I received an invitation to lecture at a southern school, perhaps the most conservative school of higher education in the South, and to lecture there for a week this spring, and I had a letter which came from a member of the faculty which was very disheartening, because I held out some hopes for the school, because they do not have a fundamental principle of moral law grounded in scripture. They’re drifting, and so their attitude has become (and this is in the Deep South), “well, maybe the NAACP is right, and maybe we ought to go along with these things. There is probably a lot of truth in them. So, where we don’t like the extremes they go to, but perhaps if we take a moderating position, some good will come out of all of this.” In other words, they’re just a weathervane.

Now, what’s the cure in such a situation? Well, to fight it by resistance would be ineffectual, because who would grasp the principle in terms of what you’re fighting? So, our first task has to be to reeducate people in terms of the word of God, in terms of the fundamental principle. This school has decided that the answer is love. They’re going to love everybody, including the revolutionists in our midst, as though that were the answer. So, in the absence of a sound, law principle, evil will come in, but when you reestablish that sound principle, then you will begin to overturn the other.

In the mid thirties, a person who was commenting on the economic scene, in describing very ably what was going to come to pass, and has steadily been coming to pass, said, “Inflation cannot work until the people have larceny in their hearts,” and so he said every attempt now by President Roosevelt to inflate the economy is failing, because there’s enough basic soundness in the people that they aren’t buying larceny as a way of life, but he said give a couple of decades and the people will all be larcenists, and then they’ll buy it, and that’s what’s happened, and the pay-off is ahead. Any other questions? Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] What was that?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Oh yes, you could not be a voter in the United States, in the Colonial period and in the Early Constitutional period unless you affirmed the infallibility of scripture and the doctrine of the trinity. As a result, you could not even testify in a court of law unless you believed in scripture, because what was your word worth if you didn’t believe that it was a sin to lie, to bear false witness?

Now, some people will answer, and I have dealt with this question before, “What about men like Thomas Jefferson who we know from his writings, was basically a Unitarian?” Well, the truth of the matter is Thomas Jefferson never expressed his Unitarian ideas in his day. He wrote these things and we read them now, but if he had dared publicize those ideas then, in the State of Virginia, he would not only have lost his vote, and would have been ineligible for office, but his children could have been taken from him for their own welfare. That was the way the law read in Virginia. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] What?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] I don’t know. In fairly recent years, in the last generation or two, it’s only now that all the papers of Jefferson are being published, within the last ten, fifteen years. Some of the Jefferson papers, for the first time, have seen light. There may be a few more yet which are not published. Any other questions? Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] A very good question. When we bless God, we use it in the sense of praise. When God blesses us, the meaning of the term there is to prosper, to make happy, to further, so that when we ask for God’s blessing, we are then asking that he prosper us, make us successful, and protect us, as we serve him. The term blessing, or blessed, is used in several senses. There’s also the blessing by a father upon his children, which invokes then God’s protection and prospering upon his child or children, but when it refers to God, then you could also translate it just as well to praise. “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me. Bless his holy name.” Or Praise the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me. Praise his holy name. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Very good question. When the original oath of office was administered, it was administered with reference to Deuteronomy 28, which is a very interesting chapter to read, and it does deserve attention because the oath has reference to the whole of the Bible, but especially to this chapter. What Deuteronomy 28, the whole chapter, has reference to is this. That the one who takes an oath on the Bible asks that God bless and prosper him as he is faithful to the Lord, and that all the blessings that are, for example in verses 3 following, be upon him, but if he is faithless to his {?} and to his oath of office, and to the Lord, then all the curses that are in the same chapter, “Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field. Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store. Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep. Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out,” and so on. All these are invoked by the oath of office. Now, when George Washington took the oath of office, he knew what it was intended to mean, and all our early presidents did. This is why the oath of office on the bible was instituted. To bind the conscience of men in terms of scripture and this chapter. Today, of course, it’s just a formality. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] What’s that?

[Audience] {?} nobody’s doing it {?}

[Rushdoony] I think it’s mostly just agnosticism and atheism, and they’re making a protest against any use of scripture. I doubt that they know the Bible that well. Occasionally, you’ll read about some officer taking the oath on 1 Corinthians 13, the chapter about love, which ties in with the modern mood. Even there, they don’t know what love means in that passage. Any other questions?

Well, if not, our hour is just about up, and a very happy and prosperous and blessed New Year to all of you.

End of tape