The Ninth Commandment

Witness of the False Prophet

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Prerequisite/Law

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 2

Track: 98

Dictation Name: RR130BB98

Date: 1960s-70s

Our scripture is Deuteronomy 18:9-22, studying again as we did two weeks ago, this particular section on the false prophet, this time the witness of the false prophet. Deuteronomy 18:9-22. We will continue our studies in the Ninth Commandment next week with a study of corroboration. Those of you who want to study the scriptures in advance, our scriptures then will be Deuteronomy 19:15, 17:6, Numbers 35:30. Then on the 19th, our subject will be perjury, Leviticus 19:12, Deuteronomy 17:6, 7, and Deuteronomy 19:16-21 and then the following week our subject is False Witness, Exodus 23:1-9.

This morning, Deuteronomy 18:9-22:

“9 When thou art come into the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations.

10 There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch,

11 Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.

12 For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord: and because of these abominations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee.

13 Thou shalt be perfect with the Lord thy God.

14 For these nations, which thou shalt possess, hearkened unto observers of times, and unto diviners: but as for thee, the Lord thy God hath not suffered thee so to do.

15 The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken;

16 According to all that thou desiredst of the Lord thy God in Horeb in the day of the assembly, saying, Let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God, neither let me see this great fire any more, that I die not.

17 And the Lord said unto me, they have well-spoken that which they have spoken.

18 I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him.

19 And it shall come to pass, that whosoever will not hearken unto my words which he shall speak in my name, I will require it of him.

20 But the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of other gods, even that prophet shall die.

21 And if thou say in thine heart, how shall we know the word which the Lord hath not spoken?

22 When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him.”

The whole purpose of the false prophet, as this text reveals, is prediction. The purpose of the magic, the sacrifice, the divination, the talking with spirits, in false prophecy, is prediction. Now why do men go to these channels to seek prediction?

We saw previously that the law is the God-given means whereby we can predict the future. Because there is law in the physical and the moral world, we can predict the sun will rise tomorrow, that if you put your hand in fire, that it will burn, that if you jump off a building, you will fall. Similarly, we can predict in the moral realm that the wages of sin are death and that the nation that does not make the Lord its cornerstone will perish. But men, when they seek prediction, information about the future in other sources, are saying whether they will admit it openly or not, that power resides elsewhere than in God. Ultimately, power must reside someplace. If it is not in God, then it is in man or in nature or in Satan. Now Satan offered himself as the source of power to Jesus. He took Him up to a high place and showed Him all the kingdoms of the earth and said, all these will I give Thee; all the kingdoms of the world, if Thou wilt bow down and worship me.

Now, in making that offer, that temptation, Satan had two basic ideas in mind: first, he was saying, admit to the rightness of my rebellion. Affirm that the creature has a legitimate right to independence from the creator. Had Jesus offered in the slightest degree, any excuse for man’s sin, if He had conceded at all to the environmental excuse, or if He had felt that man was entitled to some degree of independence from God, He would have conceded moral justification to Satan. But His answer was, “thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and Him only shalt thou serve.” Second, Satan claimed a world power that was not his to claim or to give. Scripture declares over and over again, the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. Satan neither rules it, nor holds title to it, nor can give it to anyone. So at this point, Satan was (as always), a liar! The kingdoms of the world were not his to give. He is called ‘prince of this world’ only in that people acknowledge him, not that he has any power. At this point, many people are seriously in error.

Today more than ever, people resort to the kind of thing forbidden in this chapter. They go to divination, to spiritualists, to astrologers, to every form of false prophecy here cited in order to know the future. They seek prediction apart from God. They are saying that something other than God determines and governs and guides all things.

In Genesis 3 we see the origins of this kind of attitude. Adam and Eve were guilty, they had transgressed God’s Law; they were in rebellion, in apostasy. They compounded their sin by blaming someone else. Now, the guilt of Satan did not remove the primary and the essential, the ultimate responsibility of Adam and Eve. There are many now who justify the position of Adam and Eve. It is amazing the number of Christians who take the attitude that, well, the environment is responsible. It was bad companions that led my boy astray, not that he himself chose to do evil.

The Marxists, of course, had their answer. The classic statement of it some years ago was made here in Los Angeles. At the beginning of this century, Lincoln Steffens, the Marxist, was speaking to a group of very distinguished citizens of this community in the Jonathan Club downtown. Those who were there included John R. Haynes, William Mulholland, the episcopal bishop who was sitting up there at the platform, right next to Lincoln Steffens. And Lincoln Steffens, in the course of his speech, declared, “You want to fix the fault at the very start of things. Maybe we can, Bishop. Most people, you know, say it was Adam. But Adam, you remember, he said that it was Eve, the woman; she did it. And Eve said, no, no it wasn’t she, it was the serpent. That’ where you clergy have stuck ever since! You blamed that serpent, Satan. Now I come and am trying to show you that it was the apple.”

Now, Steffens stated the matter very, very clearly. The Marxist thesis is economic determinism. It was, it is, the apple. But he was right in telling the bishop and others, ‘you say it was Satan.’ And unfortunately, this has been too often true in Christian circles and in Conservative circles. And Satan has been blamed for the sin of man. But God condemned man for his sin and Satan for his sin. None can pass the responsibility to anyone else. We cannot affirm a doctrine of satanic determinism. It is no alternative to the Marxist economic determinism.

This point is of critical importance. Because today we find that virtually the entire Conservative movement, of which large portions are Christian, supposedly, has become satanic. It affirms satanic determination. Now, Psalm 2 tells us the reality of conspiracies. It declares that the heathen (and the word heathen there is better translated ‘heathen nations, heathen world powers) take counsel together and conspire, take counsel against the Lord and His anointed, so that the psalmist declares that conspiracies are a basic aspect of history. They are always there. But it also declares they are futile. They imagine a vain thing, a futile thing it could be translated. And He that sitteth in the circle of the Heavens shall laugh. The Lord shall have them in derision.

Conspiracies only prosper when moral order declines. There has never been a society in the history of the world that has not had thieves and murderers, that has not had its share of criminals. These criminals gain ascendency when moral order decays. As Rome declined, you saw the rise of all kinds of conspiracies dedicated to Communism, to homosexuality, to free love, to every kind of abomination. When the Middle Ages began to collapse, you had the same kind of cults and conspiracies. One historian, Schmidt, has observed, and I quote (in writing about Calvin), “the whole of Europe around Calvin was polluted by fraternities, some spreading enlightenment, and some skepticism.” And he goes on to deal with these secret organizations and fraternities and conspiracies that had every kind of dream that simple man has ever had. The Libertines in Geneva stood for Communism, for free love, for every kind of abomination. These same groups are rising up again. You always have these evil elements in the world. But when you have moral order, they are nothing. They are virtually non-existent. But when moral order decays, they rise to the top. The key is not these evil elements, it’s the impotence of the godly—the disappearance of moral order!

But today the false witness of the false prophet, whether he’s a Conservative or a radical is that power lies elsewhere than in God. And those who so believe hold that conspiracies have a moral order and discipline which enables them to conspire and to plot every last detail of history. This is a moral impossibility. This is ascribing to Satan a power to construct and to create. But Satan is merely a destroyer, a murderer. He has power only to the extent that we forsake God.

And yet it is amazing the power many people ascribe to him. The number of people as I travel and as I’m here in Los Angeles who collar me or try to corner me or telephone me to try to persuade me that I am a menace because I do not believe that there is a secret group of plotters who have every last detail of the world and its affairs plotted for generations to come. And everything that happens every day is a product of what they have planned. And some have actually told me that Satan is in the world today—in person—meeting in the inner counsel of this group, whether they call it the Illuminati or whatever else they choose to name it. But the power of evil is weak. It is limited. It is totally under God’s control. He uses it to scourge, to punish the nations when they forsake Him. Evil is weak and it can only occupy a vacuum when there is moral decay and decline.

The key therefore to overcoming evil conspiracies is not a concentration on evil but godly reconstruction. Now this concentration on evil, on conspiracies is demonic! Our Lord condemned it specifically. In the Book of Revelation 2:24 in the letter to the Church at Thyatira, our Lord condemned those who were studying the depths of Satan, or as it can also be translated (and is by some), exploring the deep or hidden things of Satan. What were some of these people at Thyatira doing? Oh, they were spending all their time studying the conspiracy we would put it in modern language, trying to understand what Satan was doing and charting and plotting all the workings of Satan and his cohorts; and were becoming Satan worshipers. They were so overawed by the power of Satan that they were giving themselves over, not to the worship of God and the study of His Word, but studying the depths, or the deep or hidden things of Satan. This was a belief in satanic determination—predestination by Satan. This is what the conspiracy advocates hold to—predestination by Satan. Everything that happens, happens because Satan and his cohorts have determined it in advance. And the secret planners are planning every detail and executing it.

Sometimes there’s not a week that goes by that someone doesn’t call me to tell me that this is the reality and when am I going to wake up to it? But the Word of God says they imagine a vain thing. They that conspire, that take counsel together imagine a vain thing. They who follow after the diviners, who are observers of times, enchanters or witches, who follow after familiar spirits or wizards or necromancers, who in any way prophecy concerning the future apart from God, apart from the fact of His sovereignty, are guilty in terms of this commandment. They have forsaken the Lord and they have become Satan worshipers.

There are laws of power. And power rests on the human scene on faith. And when men forsake God, they forsake the source of true power. And when a culture loses its faith, it then falls into the hands of evil men. Recently, a very long study of power was made by a man who is not a Conservative, in fact very definitely a Liberal. Most of his book is nonsense. But when he deals with the five laws of power, he is simply summarizing what every Christian should know and believe. The man is Adolf Berle. And in his book on power, he says of the five laws of power,

“One: power invariably fills any vacuum in human organization. As between chaos and power, the latter always prevails.

“Two: power is invariably personal. There is no such thing as class power, elite power, or group power, though classes, elites and groups may assist processes of organization by which power is lodged in individuals.

“Three: power is invariably based on a system of ideas or a philosophy. Absent such a system or philosophy, the institutions essential to power cease to be reliable. Power ceases to be effective and the power-holder is eventually displaced.

‘Four: power is exercised through and depends on institutions. By their existence, they limit, come to control, and eventually confer or withdraw power.

“Five: power is invariably confronted with and acts in the presence of a field of responsibility. The two constantly interact in hostility or cooperation, in conflict or through some form of dialog, organized or unorganized, made part of or perhaps intruding into the institutions on which power depends.”

Now this is what Christians should have been saying all along, and what we’re saying—power is personal, because God ultimately is personal and this is a personal world. And it is governed by people. And when a culture loses its faith, then its power ceases to be effective and the power holder is displaced. An anarchy takes over for a time, but between anarchy and power, the next group that comes along that has any kind of faith or philosophy will tend to govern; any group that offers an organized power. And so the answer is what? In faith, in trust in the sovereign God—because if it is not by His power that we govern then anarchy takes over and the powers of evil mend ascend. They take over by default.

When the faith of a civilization dies, there is a shift of power. And today, the Christian faith is antinomian, anti-law. It pays no attention to the Law of God. It denies it. And you can never have a society, a social order, a civilization without a law. And as a result, Christians today cannot maintain or create a law order.

I’ve stated this before and I’ll state it again today and in the future. When you realize that 30-40 million Americans, the largest single group in the United States, claim to believe the Bible from cover to cover and yet are impotent in the national life, whereas 1/10 of one percent of the population, Communists are so powerful. It tells us there’s something wrong with those Christians. Add to those, out of the 45 million Catholics, 10 or 15 million who are good, staunch Conservative Catholics and you have an imposing number of Christians. And their impotence becomes all the more shocking.

And yet it’s quite natural. Being antinomian, they cannot create or maintain a society. As a result, the ancient criminal impulses, and ancient groups again grasp for power. The answer for us is not to study the deep things of Satan, but Christian reconstruction; for God alone is the almighty one. The false prophets believe that power lies elsewhere than in God. And all who believe this will ultimately face the only successful conspiracy in history, the conspiracy of Almighty God against His enemies, against all who deny and forsake Him, for He shall break them in pieces like a potter’s vessel, like a ceramic pot struck by iron. They shall be smashed.

The Ninth Commandment requires us to bear a true witness about all things; if about our neighbor, then certainly about God and about Satan. And we must bear true witness concerning Satan by denying to him the power men ascribe to him and by acknowledging the sovereignty of God as we must. Paul in the face of all the persecutions that he underwent, and in full knowledge of the coming persecutions that would so bitterly assail the Christians, wrote in Romans 16:20, “and the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly.” And I John 5:4 declared, “This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.” John 11:47 and following tells us that at the moment when the worldly conspiracy was most confident of victory and congratulated itself that they had this man and would have him soon put to death, tells us that at that precise moment, they were most totally in the hands of God and being used by Him to fulfill His prophecy, His prediction, that by this man the sins of many would be put away. It is always God who reigns, never Satan. Any other faith is a false witness and an especially false one. And when we encounter any such a man and his claims, let us remember that these false prophets have spoken presumptuously. Thou shalt not be afraid of them.

Let us pray.

Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, we give thanks unto Thee that Thou art God, that the government is upon Thy shoulders and of the increase of the government, there is no end. We thank Thee our God that we can come to Thee in the confidence that Thou wilt overturn, overturn, overturn until He come whose right it is. And so our God in this confidence, we face all our todays and our tomorrows, knowing that Thou shalt prevail and that we shall bruise Satan under our hells shortly. Our God, we thank Thee. In Jesus’ name, amen.

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

Yes.

[Audience] {?} Satan apparently has no power at all where the {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes

[Audience] What does the Bible tell us about … his purpose in …. {?}

[Rushdoony] His purpose in the world?

[Audience] The Bible tell that…?

[Rushdoony] Yes. His purpose is given in the temptation. Ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil. Let the whole creation unite din rebellion against God and assert its independence and then we can just say to God, ‘go your own way and we will have an independent world.’

[Audience] And yet he had … power over the outcome {?}

[Rushdoony] Even what Satan does is predestined by God. Of course the more men obey Satan, the more they destroy themselves. I brought something to read and I think this is a good time to do it, because it ties in with your question. It’s in the March, 1970 Natural History Magazine. And it’s a review of a book by a scientist, Gunther S. Stent, published by the Natural History Press. The title is “The Coming of the Golden Age, a View of the End of Progress.” And the whole point of the book is that now that we’ve gotten what we want, now that we’ve junked God, what’s ahead of us? The end of the world and the end of man.

Let me quote just a portion from a very long review of several pages. “Gunther Stent holds that we have reached the heat death of the spirit. Not only are science and art at the end of their progress. but the force that drove them, the will to power has played out, read out, drained out. His description of our present state is faultless. No practiced eye could miss the symptoms. The plucking of the coverlet, the disconnected mumbling, we all noted at the America Association for the Advancement of Science this last Christmas. Stent argues form the apathy that today afflicts any of son of a dogma. For who will deny that genetics and molecular biophysics have run their course, now to mummify as an engineering sub-specialty? But he sees too the decay of {?} spirit in physics and mathematics, those archetypes of all science.” And then he goes on to say, is, that what has happened is that the goal of science has become unclear, and the reason for it he points out later is, “the death of aesthetics lies in the conviction that it makes no difference which note is where and which word follows another.”

And then he says, this is the problem in the sciences. We’ve eliminated God, we know that He no longer exists and therefore nothing now has any meaning. If everything is the same, then every picture is the same, every act is the same, every fact is the same, and so everything is equally meaningless. Therefore, there can be no progress, no meaning, and what’s the point of it all? So, he says, the result is a progressive surrender of decline and the very top men see no point in anything they are doing.

And so, he says (the author), we are entering a dark age which is going to lead ultimately to the death of humanity. We’re just going to go down in anarchy. The reviewer says, “I am not convinced by his optimism.” He feels it’s going to be worse.

Now, you see, this is the end result of Satan’s temptation and Satan’s program. Every man his own god, every man his own law. Then there is no standard, no meaning. And you end up in the world of Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher who has said, to me, hell is other people; because if I am a god, how can I admit the existence of all these other gods? And who ends up his major book by saying that man is a futile passion. And when he’s asked, well why don’t you commit suicide? Well, it’s not important enough to decided one way or another, to live or to die. You see, this is the end result of the satanic temptation. It leads to total impotence, ultimately. Its only power is to destroy.

Yes.

[Audience] In I Corinthians 13: 13, “and now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] Is this ….. faith…. {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. But this is not, ah, in this it is dealing with the virtues of the Christian, not those that make him a Christian. Faith is basic in justification. But here as it deals with sanctification, it’s dealing with other aspects, faith, hope and love. We are to persist in faith. We are to be confirmed in hope that God is triumphant, that He shall prevail. And we are to see all things in terms of charity, or love, and neither is a good translation, because the word is almost untranslatable in anything we have in English.

Which means, basically, this: the person who’s ahead, who’s rich, can afford to be generous. And so you deal with the world with a love and a charity and with facts, not with a frenzied tension and impatience and fearfulness, but with grace. The element of the word grace is definitely there.

[Audience] Could that mean also my {?} understanding {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes.

In other words, you look at it in terms of God’s standards. That’s the implication. You don’t see it fearfully as a cowering, potential victim. He that sitteth in the circle of the Heavens shall laugh. The Lord shall have them in derision. You see it in terms of God’s perspective.

[Audience] Here’s another question…

[Rushdoony] Yes…

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, go ahead.

[Audience] Would it be possible for the Church to {?}

[Rushdoony] No. No. This is the error the Roman Catholic theologians have made, because they have adopted the Greek view of being. They’ve said God is total being and we are partial being and evil is nothingness. But their view is that everything is to some degree being and to therefore to some degree God and evil is non-being. Now our view is that there are two kinds of being: the created being of everything in the universe and the uncreated being of God.

Now, Satan is not nothing. He is a creature, a creature who is evil. And evil is not merely a negation, it is as actual, moving, active force. And yet, God being on the throne, evil itself is a part of His predestined plan and government, and it can do nothing apart from Him. Even the wrath of man shall praise Him.

Yes, your question now.

[Audience] I want to actually … {?}

[Rushdoony] Uh, what? I didn’t get the…

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, ah, there are first of all many Christian Conservatives who hold that Satan and satanic forces are conspiring and planning and doing everything. And then, on the practical level, there are many, many Christians who (as I cited a case of parents), ‘oh it was evil companions that led my boy astray,’ it’s not that he was responsible, but the evil companions, (ultimately Satan did it), and I’ve heard some say ‘this was entirely the work of Satan, my boy was a good boy, he never would have done this on his own.’—which is a fearful thing for them to say, because they are denying the basic foundation of our faith. They are denying that God has created man in His image and made him responsible. That’s satanic determinism.

[Audience] {?} … hear about Christians who say … {?} event was an act of Satan … {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Right. The Christian attitude is summed up, the godly attitude, by David in Psalm 51. “I, even I have done that which is evil in Thy sight.” In one of the old liturgies, there is a phrase, it’s an old English liturgy, which somehow has dropped bout, but I’ve forgotten the exact wording, but in the confession, ‘my sin, my own sin, my very own sin,’ and then it goes on to emphasize that this is entirely my work, that I have nursed and cherished the sin. This is the point of the prayer of confession. To bring home to the person who repeated it that this sin was something they nursed along and cannot blame anyone else for it.

Yes.

[Audience] I heard a little while back …. A couple of weeks or so ago, and … {?} and I saw {?} And, that’s the problem. Our whole faith … a demonstrative faith … {?} one looked at me and said, I grew to live better, even though you say it may be wrong. Well, when I got to thinking about it over a period of two weeks, why, if he’s not predestined, if he is predestined to go to Hell, why should he not live in the lust of the world? Why should he not {?} … why should there be… [?} Why should he not do all the sinful things which he had thought to be {?} two months ago {?} Why shouldn’t they do it when they know that they themselves are not old enough to know that they are going to go to hell … {?}

[Rushdoony] A good question. The answer is this: man is not made in the image of Satan but in the image of God. And so even Lucky Luciano (some years ago I read three or four different books on him), wanted nothing more than to give the impression of respectability. So that everything he was, he was trying to live down and claim to be something else. And he spent fantastic sums to try to build up respectability for himself, as all of them do—the entire mafia. In other words, man has within his own nature built in the total condemnation of what he is as a sinner. He is not made in the image of Satan and therefore no matter how much he tries, he cannot be content in evil. He finds in it progressive frustration and death. So he becomes more and more suicidal in his course.

Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Right.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No, ah, yes… yes… there are only two things that have ever been done along these lines. One is Ingraham’s The World Under God’s Law. The other is Frederick Nymeyer’s Essays Against Organized Sanctimony; some studies in the Ten Commandments from the standpoint of an economist. I don’t have the address now, but if you’ll give me a ring, I’ll be gone all this week back East, but the following week I’ll give you the address and perhaps it’s still available. But it is excellent. But this will be the first study of the law in depth for a few centuries.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, as a matter of fact, I’m writing as I go along and this morning’s lesson for example is already written up, and that for about the next four or five weeks. And there are over a hundred chapters now, and it’ll be the rest of this year before we are through. But it will be available in book form, and Dorothy is already typing it out as we go along so she has about 300 of the 950 pages thus far written, typed.

Well, our time is up now. Let’s bow our heads for the benediction.

And now, go in peace. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always. Amen.