The Ninth Commandment

Judgment of the Court

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Prerequisite/Law

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 8

Track: 113

Dictation Name: RR130BK113

Date: 1960s-70s

{?} are from Deuteronomy 1:17 and Psalm 82, “The Judgment of the Court.” First, Deuteronomy 1:17. Deuteronomy 1:17, “Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; but ye shall hear the small as well as the great; ye shall not be afraid of the face of man; for the judgment is God's: and the cause that is too hard for you, bring it unto me, and I will hear it.”

Psalm 82. Psalm 82:

“1God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods.

2 How long will ye judge unjustly, and accept the persons of the wicked? Selah.

3 Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy.

4 Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the wicked.

5 They know not, neither will they understand; they walk on in darkness: all the foundations of the earth are out of course.

6 I have said, ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most high.

7 But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.

8 Arise, O God, judge the earth: for thou shalt inherit all nations.”

Our subject this morning is “The Judgment of the Court.” Now in Biblical Law, there are two kinds of judgment: first of all, there are judgments of money and property to make restitution, and second, there are judgments upon the person from corporal to capital punishment. All judgments of whatever kind are called, according to Deuteronomy 1:17, “the judgments of God.” This is an important statement. It is, moreover, reflected in Psalm 82. Judges are called gods. This is not a reflection of their person but of their office. As judges, the office of judge is an exercise of one of the functions of God. It is God’s prerogative to give law and to make judgment, and He delegates this responsibility to men. The office of judge therefore, is an exercise of the powers of God. The Berkeley Version has for verse 1 of Psalm 82, “God stands in the congregation of gods. In the midst of the judges, He gives judgment.” Thus, the congregation of God is an assembly of men called together to act as judges in the name of the Lord. If they fail to represent God and to act faithfully for God, they are to be judged by Him.

Now this makes clear that a fundamental aspect of God’s kingdom can only be manifested in and through a court of law. Courts are thus either godly (faithful to the Law of God) or they are satanic. When judges forsake the Law of God, according to Psalm 82:5, “...all the foundations of the earth are out of course,” or ‘out of course’ can be rendered ‘are shaking.’ It is as though an earthquake has hit the entire nation when the judges abandon the Law of God, as indeed they have today.

Judges by their office, according to verse 6, are made into gods, the sons of God. “I have said, ye are gods, and all of you are children of the most high.” But failure to render justice means that they shall perish, “but ye shall die like men…” The plea of Asaph, who wrote this psalm, as he faces the fact of false judges all around is, “Arise, Oh God, judge the earth, for Thou does possess,” (or in the King James, “Thou shalt inherit”) “all nations.” It can be read in the present tense. God is Lord of all the nations and ultimately shall rule them all fully and therefore every false judge in particular merits the judgment of God.

Now this psalm is of especial importance to us because our Lord in the Gospel of John 10:35 following, comments on this psalm. And He speaks of judges as those unto whom the Word of God came and scripture cannot be broken. This is a very important statement. It has all the authority not only of scripture, but of our Lord. In other words, the Word of God today is seen as a church book, as a book of personal piety and devotion. But our Lord said that the Word of God came to judges. In other words, the Bible in large part was primarily addressed not to preachers, but to judges. This gives us a radically different picture of the Bible and of what a godly society is. If the Word of God was delivered essentially and first of all to judges, before it was delivered to every church member, it means that judges have a central responsibility. They are, as we have seen, called in a special sense ‘the sons of God’ and gods, in virtue of their office, of their responsibility to further God’s law order. Judges, our Lord said, are those “unto whom the Word of God came, and scripture cannot be broken.” (John 10:35)

Now, it is breaking the Word of God therefore, to deny its civil application, to fail to declare that the Word of God came first of all to the judges and ordered them to reorganize the world in terms of God’s righteousness. To reduce the Bible, then, to a book of personal piety, is to do an injustice. There is much in it for personal piety, but it goes first of all to judges, and it goes to authority in Church, home, school, in every area.

Moreover, our Lord, in that same chapter, verses 37 and 38, “37If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not. 38 But if I do, though ye believe not me, believe the works: that ye may know, and believe, that the Father is in me, and I in him.” Now why does our Lord at this point, drag in His office and the test of His office? What He is saying is, whether it’s the judges or the Messiah Himself, the test of whether they are true judges (or the True Messiah), is do thy do the work of their office? And our Lord said I am, in effect the Messiah because I do the work the Messiah was sent into the world to do, according to scripture. And a true judge is one who does the work that God has established that office for—to rule in terms of the Word of God, to declare in every case, the Word of God as it applies to the situation. Thus, the test of judges, and of the Messiah, and you can say, of anyone in any area, whether it is in a school or in a home, the civil government, is do they do the work of their office according to the Word of God? If they do, the results will indeed be godly and they will magnify and glorify God.

Just parenthetically, let me add, I learned something this week that to me was amazing as to what can be done when men discharge their office under God. In Northern California, under the auspices of Chalcedon, this past week, the Rev. Robert Thoburn of Fairfax Christian School was speaking. He cited one little episode of this past year in Fairfax Christian School. A military officer was transferred to the Pentagon, and he came there with his four children, three very bright very capable children, and one very obviously retarded. They were new to the area, and they asked if Bob would accept the child in the school until they could do something to find a special school for him. And so this retarded child was placed in the school. Near the end of the school term, they took him to a psychologist for testing, preparatory to trying to find another school, if there were one someplace. They found to their amazement that this child, whose IQ tested 67 (and 100 is average)—very subnormal, was in the testing up to grade or ahead of grade in terms of the national averages; and this in a school where the children are by and large very much advanced. This is one little evidence of how, when men in whatever their calling, obey the Word of God and apply it, the results are amazing!

Now according to our text, judges are true judges only if they are faithful to God’s Law. They are then gods, or the sons of God. But if not, God judges them as sinful men whose destiny is death. This raises a question: what shall we then think about Romans 13:1-4 which says that all civil authorities are ministers of God, whether it is Nero(as it was when Paul wrote those verses), or a Christian monarch? What do we do in the way of obedience? How do we regard any officer or any judge who is in terms of the Word of God, satanic? The answer is that we must make a difference between legitimacy and integrity. This is an important distinction.

A man may be a legitimate son of his father, but he may lack the integrity and respect his father commands. In character therefore, he is a false son. And we’ve all heard some father say of his son, “He’s no son of mine!” Why? Simply because the son has forsaken everything the father stands for. Now similarly, a judge or a minister may be legitimate in terms of his right to his office, but unfit in terms of his discharge of the office. God requires that we recognize the legitimate office—and honor the office—and yet use godly means to change the situation.

Now reform, therefore, which is the responsibility of the godly, involves more than a recognition of evil and a distaste and a hatred for it. Too many people feel that this is all that’s necessary, to be able to point a finger and say, he’s a bad judge, or a bad president, or a bad king; to denounce. But this is nothing. This is a cheap kind of self-righteousness.

Perhaps I can illustrate what I mean by a very important article. Some of you may recall it. It created quite a sensation when it appeared in October of 1931 in Liberty Magazine. Do you remember that? The old Liberty Magazines? It was an interview with Al Capone. Almost the entire article was just a verbatim quotation from Al Capone, October of ’31. Very interesting.

Al Capone was full of righteous indignation. He was very, very vocally anti-Communist. He attacked the easy money mentality. He attacked stock market speculation and the amalgamation of wheat companies to form large corporations, in other words, what today we would call conglomerates. He said they were a fraud on the public. He was very shrewd in forecasting what would happen in ’32. He said almost certainly the Democrats would nominate either Roosevelt or Owen Young, and they would win in a landslide no matter whom they nominated. He claimed, incidentally, that he had fed 350,000 people a day in Chicago during the previous winter. Then he went on and I’ll quote from this interview, his words, “Graft is a byword in American life today. It is law where no other law is obeyed. It is undermining this country. The honest lawmakers of any city can be counted on your fingers. I could count Chicago's on one hand! Virtue, honor, truth, and the law have all vanished from our life. We are smart-Alecky. We like to be able to 'get away with things. And if we can't make a living at some honest profession, we're going to make one anyway. The home is our most important ally. After all this madness the world has been going through subsides, we'll realize that, as a nation, very strongly. The stronger we can keep our home lives, the stronger we can keep our nation. When enemies approach our shores we defend them. When enemies come into our homes we beat them off. Home breakers (adulterers) should be undressed and tarred and feathered; as examples to the rest of their kind.” All very good! Al Capone was all for righteousness. And he was sincere, too. We don’t have to doubt that. He was for law and order, as long as he was not bothered. And as a Sicilian, he was very much against adultery by wives.

And Al Capone’s statement, I think reflects the failure of most reform movements. Evil is recognized and opposed everywhere except in ourselves. Hence, the cry of every political reform movement is to throw out all the rascals—except ourselves! Reform everybody except ourselves!

There was a very interesting statement that was passed around during the Kennedy years, which I think is very telling, because it put its finger on this same thing, about the critics of Kennedy then. And one of the administration’s men said of the typical critic, “He went to public schools, go there on a county bus, riding on a public highway, went to college on the G.I. Bill, bought a house with an FHA loan, started a business with a loan from the Small Business Administration, made $1 million and retired on his Social Security. And now he’s criticizing the welfare programs of the New Frontier and urging that the freeloaders be put to work.” Isn’t that the truth? Everybody is for reform of everybody else, a la Al Capone. But in terms of God’s Law, where does reform begin? It begins with our regeneration and then our submission to the whole Law-Word of God. The degenerate pretenders to reform want to reform the world by beginning with their opponents. That’s a very popular custom: reform the people you don’t like. But true reform begins by submitting our lives, our homes, our calling to the Law-Word of God. The world then is recaptured step-by-step as men institute true reform in their own realms. Any other kind of reform has got the same integrity as Al Capone’s.

Every sinner wants a better world to live in. only the Christian wants to grow in sanctification, in the rule of God in his life. The sinner wants a better world, but not at the price of his own surrender to God’s Law-Word.

The judgments of God in His Word must therefore become our judgments on ourselves and on the area we govern. Only as a people are recalled to God and His order can they expect the benefits of that order. Solomon in Proverbs 29:18 says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Or you can translate the word that is rendered as perish as ‘run wild.’ In other words, anarchy prevails. And in terms of the scripture, anarchy and death are about the same thing. But, Solomon went on, “But he that keepeth the law, happy is he.” That verse is an important one because it tells us something that what a vision is. Where there is no vision, the people run wild and perish, but he that keepeth the Law, happy is he—in other words, vision and the law are equated. People who have no law, and who do not move in terms of law, have no vision. They only have daydreams. God’s Law is a total law. When men in terms of God’s Law deliver the judgments of God on themselves, their homes, their churches, their homes, schools, and vocations, and in the State, then too the courts will deliver the judgments of God’s total law. Then indeed, because of the people, we keep the law. Happy shall we be.

Let us pray.

Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, we give thanks unto Thee for Thy Word. Thy Word is truth. We thank Thee our Father, that Thy Word gives us vision.so that we can see and prepare and chart our course in a dark and troubled world by Thy Law-Word. Give us grace therefore, so to ground ourselves upon Thy Law that we may be more than conquerors through Him that loved us, even Jesus Christ our Lord. In His name we pray, amen.

Are there any questions now, about our lesson first of all?

Yes.

[Audience] Are the present{?}

[Rushdoony] The religious training they get in Law School is pure Humanism because that is the only foundation of the law. There is no knowledge among them of the Biblical Law, nor do they get any training in Common Law, which is the old Christian law, as it applies. So they are ignorant, totally ignorant here.

[Audience] How would you qualify {?} a lawyer? {?}

[Rushdoony] Being a lawyer and getting elected. At one time it was not necessary to be a lawyer to be a judge because if you knew the Common Law and scripture, you were qualified.

Some of our greatest lawyers in the early days just read a little bit of law, took their examinations and became great lawyers; Patrick Henry, for example, one of the greatest lawyers in America. Law schools are fairly recent.

Any other questions?

Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, the words, yes. A good point. The statement of our Lord, ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s,’ is often used to say we’ve got to separate Church and State and so on. What our Lord there said, was designed to stop revolutionary thinking. What they were trying to get Him to say is since this is Caesar’s coin, Caesar is an outsider, we ought to have a revolution and throw him out. And His attitude was, Caesar is the one right now who is providing the law and the government here and the coinage. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; but unto God, the things that are God’s. Your basic problem is that you have forsaken God and therefore all these evils have come upon you. The wrong course is to revolt against Caesar. The right course is first to submit to God. You can have no freedom in the political sphere if you are slaves spiritually, unto sin. So render to God the things that are God’s and Caesar will be taken care of in due time.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Right. They are misinterpreting the passage; radically.

Yes.

[Audience] {?} and ah, another point… {?}

[Rushdoony] Trials were held in the gate, not in the synagogues; in the city gates. Then, as I’ve pointed out a couple of weeks ago, there had to be a Levite, someone trained in God’s Law (we would say a minister) on the bench to be an expert in defining the law as it applied to the case, not in dealing with the evidences and the procedures of the trial. So there would be, on appeals courts, a panel of judges. I believe Josephus said 7—5. Five judges, just as today on a Supreme Court we have a panel of judges.

Yes.

[Audience] {?} to appeal the … {?}

[Rushdoony] That, we don’t have too much evidence about appeals in the ancient times. We know that a great variety of appeals existed. In fact, the Talmud is simply a collection of commentaries on various cases on appeal. So the Talmud is not academically written, it is simply commentaries by legal experts, Jewish lawyers, on cases on appeal.

Today, the only ground of appeal is on a technicality in the procedure of the trial. This is an innovation. I don’t know specifically what the various grounds of appeal were in times past. But they were not on the limited technicalities. They were on more basic matters. There had to be some legitimate ground for appeal.

Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, new—

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] …today it still is, and that’s one of the older grounds, but I don’t know in detail what the older grounds were. I can look that up later.

A couple of interesting items in the news the past week. One in Pacoima. An officer went into a bar to make an arrest of someone that was there, who was wanted on a child molesting charge, and he was immediately attacked. And he needed help and he asked the bartender and the bouncer to summon help for him and they just laughed and refused. As a result, in terms of what it calls a nearly forgotten statute, which goes back to scripture, they were able to get indictments against the bartender and the bouncer and, I believe, one other man, for refusing to aid the officer. This goes back to the police duties of every citizen and the fact that if you see a crime being committed and you do not render aid, you are you are a partaker, an accessory after the fact. So the police are very happy that the fact that Section 150 of the penal code, which makes it a misdemeanor for a male over 18 to refuse to join a posse or decline to aid officers making an arrest, has been put under the test, as it were, and stood up. And they feel that this will be more and more necessary in the days ahead and they are going to use it, which is a very happy fact.

Then, no doubt you’ve notices that in Salinas, a Rocky Mountain hippie was arrested, a devil-worshiper who had cannibalized a benefactor at a campsite along the Yellowstone River in Montana. Now, this fact of cannibalism is an ugly one, of course, but there have been hints of this in the papers for the last two years, that this is associated with some of the hippie practices. And in the Free University Movement, they have actually found recipes that are cannibalistic recipes among their literature. This is the first arrest, and there is a confession along these lines. I do believe we’re going to find more and more of this kind of thing. It is actually being advocated as a part of the anarchism of our day. If there is no law, then anything goes. This was advocated several centuries ago by Diogenes. Remember Diogenes who lived in a jar, went around with a lantern looking for an honest man? He advocated cannibalism, among other things. It is a part of the logic of anarchistic thought. And people put into practice what they believe. We have no reason to be surprised at this, nor at other things which are increasingly being manifest.

Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, it used to be very common not too many years ago, but since World War II it’s been neglected, and the feeling had been that the courts would not sustain it, but they were able to get the indictments through the courts in this case, and they do plan to make full use of it in the future, because in too many cases now, the police are not only assaulted, but the men standing by aid and abet, or encourage the men doing the assaulting. In this case there were 25 men standing around encouraging those who were assaulting the officer.

I mentioned earlier, and I’d like to give a brief report on this, something of what Robert Thoburn had reported concerning his Fairfax school in Fairfax, Virginia, a case of this retarded child who did at grade and above grade work in school. I think this is a very, very telling vindication of the Christian School Movement that a child could do so well in a school where so many of the children are so superior and advanced.

The article in The Review of the News on Fairfax Christian School is creating quite a deluge of inquiries. Bob Thoburn is at work now on a book on how to establish Christian schools on a free enterprise basis and make them profitable. He’s going to put it out in mimeograph form; it’s going to be a very practical, down-to-earth, how-to-do-it book. And he says, it isn’t going to be of interest to people who are just, ah, curiosity-minded. And he said he’s going to sell this mimeographed book for $100 to the serious-minded who mean business because, he said, if anybody is ready to put out $100, it means they mean business with respect to a Christian school and they are going to learn something from it, which I think is very sound thinking.

His school is doing very well, as I’ve indicated, he has three buildings now with a total of 17,500 sq. feet of floor space, and he can pay for a new building now in five years’ time. So that although money was hard to get this last year, he found the banks ready to offer him money because they knew it would be a very short-term loan, paid in advance. He now has 34 acres. He is turning away students, because he’s not interested in growing too rapidly now. He prefers to take the children in kindergarten or the first grade, and then work them up through the school, so he takes very few. He hand picks those who transfer into the upper grades.

There have been about, as I have mentioned on other occasions, 12 or 15 new schools started as the result of his influence. One of them is only three miles from his school. And he says it hasn’t hurt him in the slightest. He says the only ones we are hurting are the public schools, and he said that doesn’t upset me in the slightest.

He has worked hard to establish this school and to put it on a sound financial footing. This school completed its ninth year this June. During those nine years, it meant that he had to tighten his belt and make a lot of sacrifices, himself and his family (he has 8 children, 6 boys and 2 girls). But it has paid off and he said he’s only owned his own car in the last 2 ½ years. He was using one of the school buses for the family. But he said, now I can take home a better pay than the county Superintendent of Schools. So, he said, as a free enterprise project, it has certainly proven itself. And in poor times, we are doing exceptionally good business.

Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] He has, yes, some students in the 9th grade who were with him at the very beginning. He goes through the 12th grade and he starts kindergarten in the 4th grade [4th year], two years of kindergarten. As a result, when they finish two years of his kindergarten, they are so far ahead, that it’s an impossibility for them to go to a public school. They’ve gone through the 3rd grade reader, and they are indulging in easy conversational German as well, in their German class.

Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No, no schools have been started in California to my knowledge, or trying his approach. A number have been started in Virginia and adjacent states and as far West as the Midwest.

Yes.

[Audience] {?} Carol Wilson?

[Rushdoony] Yes, Carol Wilson, of course, is starting one, and she has visited, this spring, Fairfax Christian School. So you’re getting one in California.

[Audience] Is that… {?} How is... {?}

[Rushdoony] How does it differ from other Christian schools?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, first of all, there are more Christian schools being started in Californian than in most states. However, most of them are church-owned or Parent/Teacher Association controlled schools. And the difference in Bob Thoburn’s case is that it’s a free enterprise school, which he and his wife own lock, stock and barrel. And this has made it more efficient.

As he said, he started out 10 years ago teaching in a board-controlled school and he said, it would take all year for them to decide whether they could afford to buy another blackboard. And every little thing took forever going to the board meeting. He said that was a major handicap. So he thought the way to run a school was to start one on your own, and he decided to start one in some nearby community. When the school board learned that he was going to do that at Christmas, they fired both him and his wife. So they made a living the rest of the school year by tutoring six pupils in a basement room, the only place they could locate, where they could rent a facility. And then they started their school the next September.

And Rosemary had her baby on the 1st of September and started teaching on the 15th and the two of them taught the 36 or 38 children, grades 1 – 8. And the next year they had more than twice as many and added a teacher and they’ve been growing fast since then. But it’s the free enterprise aspect that has enabled them to advance so rapidly. He makes the parents do the sacrificing, not the teachers. And he says, in most schools, the teachers are under paid and are expected to sacrifice so that the parent can send their children there. The minimum pay in his school is over $6,000, the maximum right now is $14,000. And he has assistants to help teachers in all his grades. These are parents who are helping to work off their scholarships.

[Audience] What is the tuition?

[Rushdoony] The tuition in kindergarten is $500 and in all other grades, it’s $800/year. This includes all the textbooks, it includes the busing to and from school, it includes everything except their lunch. I believe it includes milk.

Yes.

[Audience] How … {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, at the very beginning, Bob Thoburn was taking any pupil, because he had to, financially. Each year, he has progressively upped the requirements, and at present, he will not take children who have problems. His attitude is, you’ve known I’ve been here and there have been Christian schools almost anywhere you can locate it. If you didn’t have the sense to put your child in one at the beginning, I’m not going to pay the penalty now for your negligence. So he turns them down. As a result, he does get a very superior kind of child. He can pick and choose and the result is, of course, his school gets better and better every year and right now some of the principals of the public schools, teachers, superintendents, are bringing their children to his school. He has a fair percentage of the personnel of the public schools who have their children there. As a matter of fact, he said it’s created a little embarrassment when they dedicated the new public school in his neighborhood, a very {?} establishment, the retiring school board member, who had served, I think for about 20 years, and it was only after they had the unveiling and all of the facts came out that this school board member had put all his children in Bob’s school. But the public school was named after him.

Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes. Yes, he has many of them. John Schmidt who was just elected, his assistant is already back there and has put his children into Bob’s school, and I could {?} John there. Philip {?} has his children in Bob’s school. There are a great many who do.

Yes.

[Audience] How can… {?} The public.. {?}

[Rushdoony] Right. He pays better than the public schools do. And his teachers are very happy about teaching there. A fair percentage of the best teachers he has, those who are in the upper income bracket, because he paid not in terms of seniority, and because there’s no such thing as seniority with him, he pays in terms of their abilities. And he has doubled one teacher’s salary who has been there only 3 years, going into the 3rd year, because he feels this teacher is outstanding.

Now, a fair percentage of the new schools that have been started as a result of his work have been started by ex-teachers. They learn the ropes there and then they go and start their own.

Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, there is no relationship between money, well, there is a relationship between the money spent and the accomplishments of a school.

When I lived in Nevada in the 40s and early 50s, at that time, California was spending far more than twice as much as Nevada per pupil. But California pupils transferring to Nevada were put back a grade because they were that much behind. Very often if a state is not spending much money on schools, you have a more basic curriculum, and the pupils are better off for it.

Well, our time is up. 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.