The Ninth Commandment

Perfection

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Prerequisite/Law

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 7

Track: 114

Dictation Name: RR130BK114

Date: 1960s-70s

[Deuteronomy] 18:13; our subject, “Perfection.” Deuteronomy 18:13, “Thou shalt be perfect with the Lord thy God.”

The tapes of these studies of course, as some of you know, circulate across country. And from time to time, I get letters from the people who listen to the tapes and more than once one of them has said ‘I wish I could be there to ask some questions.’ And sometimes they ask questions by mail. A few weeks ago, a very important question was raised, and I’m answering it today, because it has to deal with the law. And the question was, ‘you say that God expects us to keep the law. How can we when he commands us to be perfect? How can we be perfect?’

Now let’s rephrase that question a little more bluntly. Is God bearing false witness when He asks us to be perfect? Is He asking something that is impossible? In Matthew 5:48, our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount repeated this commandment, declaring, “Be therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect.”

First of all, we must say that the law does not command us to do what we cannot do as men. Having said that, next, we must ask, how shall we understand this requirement? And wherein can we be perfect without bearing false witness concerning ourselves?

What does perfect mean? Very obviously when we begin to examine the word, it has changed its meaning. I’ve heard more than one person state that their English teacher in a public high school has told them that when the Constitution was written, the founding fathers used bad grammar, because they said that they were gathered together, or that we the people of the United States were trying to form “a more perfect union.” And that was bad grammar supposedly because how could a thing be more perfect than perfect? They were not using bad grammar. Obviously, the meaning of the word has changed. We will not take time trace (because it’s irrelevant to our subject), the meaning of the word as it has changed in English. Our concern is with the biblical meaning of the word perfect. Very clearly, it has another meaning than we think of now. When we examine the Bible, just to cite a few uses of the word perfect in the Bible,

         We are told in Genesis 6:9 that Noah was perfect

         In Genesis 17:1, Abraham was called to be perfect

         In Psalm 37:37, there is a reference to perfect men as though they were an everyday fact of life

         Again, in Psalm 101:2, David declared, “I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way; I will walk within my house with a perfect heart,”

Very obviously, therefore, when the Bible says, as our text declares in Deuteronomy 18:13, “Thou shalt be perfect with the Lord Thy God,” it is commanding something that was not an impossibility, something that was a fact of life from before the flood, from the days of Noah at least.

What does it mean? There are several words in the Old and New Testament which are translated as ‘perfect.’ These words mean in the original Hebrew and Greek, ‘upright, having integrity, blameless, mature,’ and also the sense of ‘complete.’ They do not imply sinlessness. The addition of sinlessness to the idea of perfection is something done by Pietism in the modern church. In other words, to be perfect in the biblical sense was to have integrity before God and to be mature, to be blameless. It did not mean sinless.

Let us examine, for example, the comment of R.C.H. Lenski, a very prominent Lutheran scholar, in his comment on Matthew 5:48 where our Lord summons us to be perfect. He says, “The English translation ‘perfect’ is largely responsible for the idea of absolute sinlessness often given as the meaning. And it is unfortunate that we have no derivative from G{?}, adequate to render the Greek. G{?} is another translation that is acceptable. The fact that absolute sinlessness is not the thought expressed here, we see from Matthew 5:6 where the blessed disciples still hunger for righteousness and from [Matthew 5] verse 7 where they still need mercy and are blessed by continually obtaining it. Perfectionism may imagine that it is able to attain sinlessness in this life. This goal we shall not reach until we enter glory. Equally incorrect is the idea that in these expositions of the law, Jesus offers only counsels for the perfect, which are unattainable on the part of lesser Christians. Christ has no double standards. His greatest saints are found among the common believers who by grace have become pure in heart.”

In other words, perfection in the biblical sense means uprightness. It means maturity in terms of a goal or purpose, an end established by God. Now our maturity in Heaven will include sinlessness, but our maturity here is of a different sort. It is interesting that the Berkeley Version, in translating our text, Deuteronomy 18:13, renders it, “Thou shalt be blameless before the Lord thy God.” In this life, we can be perfect in the sense of blameless, in our faithfulness to God’s purpose and maturity in terms of it. When we are blameless, we are not necessarily faultless.

G. Campbell Morgan told a story years ago here in Los Angeles incidentally, in the early 20s to illustrate this point. It was his first trip, I believe, to this country. He left his family in England, in London, while he came here to preach for several months. And in dealing with the distinction between blameless and faultless, he cited the letter he had just received from his little son, who had just started school. And the letter said, dear daddy, I love you. I miss you. When are you coming home? Your loving son. Morgan pointed out the serious errors in the letter. The boy didn’t know anything about punctuation. His spelling was very bad. He spelled ‘love’ l-u-v, ‘when’ w-e-n, and there were many other errors. He still didn’t know capital letters, so everything was written in small letters, uncapitalized. But, said Morgan, the letter—while not faultless, in fact, very faulty—was blameless.

What is blameless in a child is not blameless in an adult. What is blameless in an adult at a certain stage of growth is inexcusable 10 years later. Maturity means continuous growth towards God’s appointed purpose, and we are summoned to be mature, blameless, perfect before the Lord our God.

The greater the responsibility, scripture says, the greater the maturity required to be blameless. As a result, the greater the position given to us, the greater our responsibility and what would be blameless in others becomes blame-worthy in us then. A minister, a doctor, a judge, a civil officer, as well as their wives, have responsibilities which require more maturity of them, so the things that are blameless in others are blame-worthy in them. Thus, in England, until not too long ago, in the foreign office, the Labor Government had a man who was very blame-worthy because of his injudicious remarks. Now many of the things that Brown had to say were things that the average Englishman felt. He expressed opinions that sometimes were very blunt, forthright and honest opinions. But in a person holding high office, they were so indiscreet that they created international repercussions almost every time. And finally he had to be replaced.

We have seen something very similar in this country in the last year or two in Mrs. Mitchell, wife of the Attorney General of the United States, John Mitchell. Now as a totally bystander, I can enjoy what she has had to say and I can’t think of anything she has said that I really disagree with. She has spoken out time and again very plainly, very bluntly and very wittily. But she has caused the administration a great deal of harm. Why? Because her opinions, coming from a person in high places, have created deep rifts in Washington, hurt feelings, lost votes for the administration at key points. And as a result, they have been very injudicious. Millions of people have enjoyed them, but they have done damage. She was back in the papers again just this month, after her husband had told her to shut up and say nothing in the public, and if she were asked to say anything, to say it in Swahili! Because he had come close to losing his job because of her outspokenness. And just the other day, this item appeared. “For months now, the lady’s outspoken statements have been conspicuously missing from the press in obedience to an injunction from U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell. Henceforth, he has decreed, if his wife Martha must speak out in public, it must be in Swahili. But what husband has ever silenced his wife? Administering the oath of office to the new president of the American Newspaperwomen’s Club in Washington last week, Martha Mitchell spoke in near faultless Swahili, administering the oath. Ruled the Attorney General, who was present, the oath in Swahili is perfectly legal.” Now you can’t help but love a woman like that. She’s irrepressible, she managed to get into the headlines, or the news, in spite of the injunction to keep her mouth shut, and talk only in Swahili. But that kind of determination can be very dangerous. So we have to say, in spite of a very real regard for a woman of that wit and intelligence, that she is blame-worthy.

Maturity requires of us—and that’s the meaning (basic meaning), of perfection, that we consider the total picture. Pietism has thus borne false witness concerning God’s requirements, because it has turned the command to perfection to be sinlessness and to be a sweet, pious, simpering kind of idiocy. As someone told me, a Christian never hurt anybody’s feelings. That’s not perfection. When men expect sinless perfection as the goal for the Christian, they are not being true to the requirement of scripture, because this is an impossibility in this life. But more than that, it creates the wrong kind of situation. What happens if husband and wife expect perfection of each other? Let’s put it on a very personal level. They’re bound to have problems. Any time you expect your husband or your wife to be perfect, you’re going to fight with them because they are not perfect in the sense of being sinless and faultless. So that kind of expectation creates problems, and when the Church teaches sinlessness is to be required of us (and some churches have members who claim they are sinless), the net result is hypocrisy which masks a veil of trouble. Moreover, when people expect sinlessness and faultlessness of one another, it leads to being disillusioned with people, disappointed in them. We expect them to be more than mortal men. And we become intolerant of them. We find people impossible.

It is a significant fact that at the end of every age, this kind of demand tends to flourish. As Rome began to decline, what happened? The problems that Rome faced were impossible. Rome’s economy had reached the point where it was beyond all recovery. The bureaucracy had grown and grown to the point where it was now the government and the emperors came and went and it made little difference. The bureaucracy was the reality. And people began to realize that everything was too big—beyond solution. So what did they do? Parents began to require their children to be perfect and became intolerant of them, impatient with them when they were not. Husbands and wives began to be intolerant of each other. They wanted everything to be right and the world around them wasn’t right and so in the home they began to demand perfection, and of course, they didn’t get it. They began to demand it of their friends, of their organizations, and they didn’t get it.

And so what happened? The result was that long before Rome fell, Jews, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and others were forsaking the society of men to become hermits in the desert. This is a fact we’re not often told. We’re told about the Christian hermits. They came later. They picked this up from the Romans. It was a part of the paganism which had infected the Church. And what happened when these Jews, Greeks, Romans and later Christians went into the desert, running away from man? They found they couldn’t live with themselves. A whole world was out of kilter, true. They were making demands on mankind and on their friends and loved ones that could not be met. And they had forsaken them and now they were making demands of themselves which could not be met and the result was total frustration. This kind of sick perfectionism, anti-Biblical perfectionism, instead of solving problems, only aggravates them.

This was already beginning to appear, this kind of mood, in very limited fashion—but appearing—in our Lord’s day, and in St. Paul’s day. And St. Paul, commenting on this in Galatians 6:1-5, referred to the faults, the sins, the frailties, the weaknesses of all believers. And he made two statements which seem contradictory: everyone shall bear his own burden (in other words, we are responsible for our own faults), and also bear ye one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. Now what do these contradictory statements mean? Bearing one another’s burdens means forbearing, being patient with, and every man shall bear his own burden, every man has his own responsibilities. Thus, our maturity, being mature, perfect, blameless before the Lord our God comes from seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.

Biblical perfectionism, if we use that word (which it would be better to drop) means maturity, the ability to grow in terms of our experiences, to use them to draw closer to God’s goal. When a civilization, when a people loses maturity, and it turns on itself, at the end of an age, when a civilization begins to lose its mature ability to deal with new experiences, what does it indulge in? Why, it indulges in a witch hunt. Or, it concentrates on subversives.

Now this is a very significant fact. It doesn’t say very much for the Conservative Movement today because the Conservative Movement, like every end-of-an-age group that has lost its maturity, its ability to grow, to mature in terms of experiences, is concerned with subversion. Now this does not mean we tolerate subversion. But societies which concentrate on the problems of subversion are near death. They have lost the capacity of growth, the capacity to cope with their problems.

Every age in history has had its subversives. Never in all our history as a people, were there more subversives in this country than the years from 1774 – 1812-15, years of the War of Independence, the formation of the Constitution, and the War of 1812, when we were a young country. I mentioned a few weeks ago, that newly-discovered evidence, in fact, the opening of the British Archives indicates that Benjamin Franklin was a British agent all through those years. We do know that in Washington’s cabinet, one cabinet member was unveiled as being a foreign agent. We do know that under Adams, when the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed, every boat that left the country for a few days before the act went into effect was loaded with known agents who were leaving the country. The acts were repealed almost at once and they came back. We know that they were in high places, right up into the White House; every kind of office, virtually. Did the country go under? It was very weak in those days. No. Why? Because in spite of the subversives, there was leadership that had a capacity for growth.

Just as you and I are exposed at the moment and have within us, and/or around us, all kinds of germs so that we could come down with any number of ailments if we were weak, so too with a society. It always has within the body politic all kinds of infections. The key point is its basic health. And this is what biblical perfection is about. It means the capacity to mature in terms of a goal, to absorb experience and profit by it.

Without the ability to grow in terms of a goal, no cause can endure merely by rooting out its subversive elements. The salt that has lost its savour, our Lord said, is good for nothing but to be cast out and to be trodden under foot of men. There is no divine protection for men and nations who lose their calling and savour. In fact, there is then no escaping judgment. The scripture tells us it is, as if a man did flee from a lion and a bear met him and went into his house and leaned his hand on the wall and a serpent bit him. There is then no escape. It is a sick society. Its destiny is death. But God summons us, “Thou shalt be perfect.” Blameless. Mature. Upright, having integrity, with a capacity to grow, before the Lord thy God. This, the law requires of us. This we can do. God has not borne false witness in summoning us to be perfect before Him.

Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God, Thy Word is truth and we rejoice in Thy Word. Give us grace, our Father to be mature, to have the capacity to grow in the face of all experiences, to be blameless before Thee. We thank Thee our God, that as we gain maturity before Thee, so we gain strength in dealing with all enemies, with all problems, with all sicknesses, and we are more than conquerors then through Him that loved us. We praise Thee for Thy prospering and protecting grace. We thank Thee for one another. We thank Thee our Father that Thou hast called us to be a people in Thee and by Thy grace has brought us together and knit us one to another in Jesus Christ. Prosper us in our fellowship, in our obedience, and in our thanksgiving, in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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

Yes.

[Audience] When you {?}

[Rushdoony] Let’s see; the attitude of a Christian toward a nonChristian should be one of keeping the law to them, because to love our neighbor means to fulfill the law in relationship to him, to be charitable as occasion requires it, to speak, to provide him with knowledge of the Gospel, that if he rejects it, then we shake off the dust off our feet, as it were, to be blameless in our relationship with him before God.

[Audience] That’s {?} Not only that, but… {?}

[Rushdoony] No.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No, because we stand before God as sinners saved by grace, not of ourselves.

Yes.

[Audience] What’s the progress on {?}

[Rushdoony] Oh no. Oh, no. It does not mean what the Pietists have taught us to mean, that you’re nice to everybody and never hurt anybody’s feelings. Maturity means taking a stand in terms of God’s Law, for ourselves, and to others; obeying God’s Law.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Because she is speaking out in such a way that she is doing harm rather than good. It’s for her husband to speak out, not for her. And her husband is not speaking out, because in those cases it would do no good, you see.

Her speaking out has been entertaining and a delight. I’ve enjoyed it, frankly. But of course, I am not involved. If I were up there in Washington in a high place, I’d probably want to boot her for what she’s said.

When I was back in New York and she was speaking out and it was on T.V. news, I, I was listening at the home of a man who was a former editor and knows Washington well. And he said, there’s no question, phones were buzzing all over the place in Washington while people are calling up to apologize for her, because she could lose them a lot of votes. So you see, it was irresponsible for her to speak out. It was just, as it were, self-expression. Now you can do that. It’s not blame-worthy in you. You’re just expressing your opinion on a public issue. But it’s blame-worthy for her.

Yes.

[Audience] We know from the Constitution, {?} … but even if they do {?} principles {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Now, the question of course, in a sense answers itself. The Constitution is a dead letter, because law doesn’t mean anything to anybody today. God’s Law means nothing, and therefore American Constitutional Law means nothing. Today it’s a philosophy of do-it-yourself law in terms of the immediate situation.

Now on the face of that, there’s nothing that will change the picture until men themselves become law-abiding. You cannot have a national situation of law if the people are lawless. So you have to begin by placing yourself under law and working to place more and more people under law, which is the slow way, but it’s the only way that works. You can only put up a building, a brick building, a brick at a time. So, you start putting up bricks. It just doesn’t fall into place, and so this is what we’re doing here. Each of us by coming here, each of us by trying to live in terms of God’s Law, we’re putting up a few bricks at a time. It’s the only way it will be done. It’s the only way it was done in the Roman Empire by the Christians.

Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. It is saying that the law cannot function unless it is totally faultless. The whole process of appeals is to try to remove the defects from the law. But you don’t destroy something because it’s flawed. You don’t tear down a building because you find that a cabinet doesn’t fit properly. You try to get that cabinet door to fit properly. You work within the structure, not by tearing down the structure.

Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Right.

[Audience] {?} … break the law. {?} found the … {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. But you see, we are first of all, born again as new creatures in Christ and we are babes in Christ. Now a thing is tolerable in a baby that is not tolerable in an adult. That’s why we put a bib on a baby. We don’t put a bib on an adult, although there are times when I’ve needed one, but what is tolerable in a child, we cannot tolerate in him 10 years, 15, 20 years later, you see.

So it is, when you first become a Christian, you begin to grow, little by little. And therefore, you are maturing. In the process of that maturing, your ability to obey the law matures also. Thus, at a certain point, you obey “Thou shalt not steal,” to take a concrete example, by not stealing something from anyone. But then you begin to realize all the ramifications of what that commandment means, how it applies to society and to the State, you see. You begin to penetrate the meaning of the law deeper, progressively.

Now next week, we shall be beginning our study of the commandment, the Tenth, “Thou shalt not covet.” And I think we’ll all see something of the meaning of that law that we perhaps have not seen before, and therefore, we’ll grow in our mature ability to obey the law. Haven’t you grown in your grasp of the law in the last year? Hasn’t it been growth, you see? So there is this continual process of growth.

Our time is just about over and I’d like to share a few things with you. I have mentioned many times the fact that history today is often a case of false witness. This last week, a couple of things I read were examples of history bearing flagrant false witness. And in the one instance, it was in a summer, 1970 issue of Horizon (a hard-back magazine that comes out in book form four times a year), an article by a prominent English scholar, Frederic V. Grunfeld, in a study of the troubadours. And in it he cites Clement of Alexandria, to the effect that, “every woman ought to be overwhelmed with shame at the thought that she is a woman.”

Now this and other passages are often cited from the Church fathers as though they were very, very anti-woman. And this is very commonly cited, and others like it which indicate they hated women and the like. Now, this is totally a mistranslation and a very obvious perversion of what he had to say, because what Clement of Alexandria said in Stromata, and I have it and it’s available in English to almost any scholar anywhere in any library of any consequence, was very, very different. It was in a chapter on drinking. And the point that Clement of Alexandria made was, that a woman who was drunk ought to be especially ashamed of the fact, because she is a woman and is being immodest in her drunkenness. He did not say that being a woman was a shameful fact.

And yet, scholar after scholar reproduces that by dropping out key words and mistranslating in order to present the Church fathers as nasty people who had a horror of sex and a horror of women.

Then, a very competent scholar who’s done extensive research in the Vatican archives in a book I read this week, refers to Henry VIII as having been seriously ill with syphilis. Now again, this is pure slander. I’m not championing Henry VIII. He can be severely criticized and {?} with a number of things: his economic policy, his religious policy, his moral policy. But he was a very intelligent man and he definitely did not have any venereal disease. We have his medical history, we have very competent medical historians who have diagnosed his condition, and there’s no excuse for that, and yet this is about the third time in the past year I’ve seen such reference, all of which is pure slander.

Then, applicable of nothing, I ran across a statement in a book I picked up just yesterday. It’s a Dictionary of American Proverbs. And I thought this was very choice, one of the proverbs on husbands: One good husband is worth two good wives, for the scarcer things are, the more their value.

Then, this item in The News in Case You Missed It. This is something that happened just this past week in Ventura, and I think that, important items in the news like this ought to be shared. At any rate, “Louis Chauchon no longer has a boa constrictor in his toilet, and thereby hangs the tail. It all started for Chauchon two weeks ago when a tenant moved from his home at 368 B{?} Street, Ventura. Chauchon didn’t want to see the house remain empty, so he decided to move in himself. What he did not know is that the former tenants had flushed a 6’4” snake down the commode before departing. It was only a matter of time before Chauchon lifted the commode lid and to his horror, found himself face to face with a grinning boa. The snake was pretty, as snakes go, green with large black spots. But Chauchon didn’t stop to admire the reptile. He slammed down the commode lid and flushed the toilet. Badly shaken, Chauchon went to his home’s second bathroom and gingerly raised the commode lid. Sure enough, the snake was waiting for him with glittering eyes and the same macabre grin. It had slithered through the pipe system and it had beaten Chauchon to the bathroom. This began a two-week ordeal, when animal shelter men stalked the snake from toilet to toilet in vain. Chauchon very quickly stopped using the bathroom. When the snake popped out again at Chauchon yesterday morning, he decided he had enough. He called the Ventura County Sheriff Department this time, and deputies rushed to his home. A deputy with a broom tried to stuff the snake back down the toilet, but the reptile coiled around the broom handle and quickly disarmed the officer. James Norton, Animal Control Supervisor, was called this time, and the snake fled down the pipe. “We had to unbolt the commode from the floor in order to get him,” Norton said, “He was a tricky customer. He is a water-oriented snake and really knew that pipe system. But we finally got him with a snare. The snake is in a cage now at the animal shelter in El Rio and Chauchon can go back to his bathroom with confidence again. But he’s trying to locate the former tenants who flushed the boa constrictor down the toilet. He can have his snake back again.”

Now, if you think you have trouble, think of poor Louis Chauchon and the two weeks of troubles he had.

Let us 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.