Law in the Old Testament

The Law and the Prophets

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Law

Lesson: The Law and the Prophets

Genre: Speech

Track: 125

Dictation Name: RR130BR125

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Our scripture lesson is Isaiah 8:19-20. The Law and the Prophets. “And when they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep, and that mutter: should not a people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead? To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.”

This passage very obviously speaks about the law. What it tells us is that a nations gone into apostasy and into idolatry, looking everywhere for help except to God, is summoned to look to the law and to the testimony. That is, to the law and to the witness concerning the law and the prophets of the scripture.

Then, we are told if they speak not according tot his word, the law and the prophet, the testimony of the prophet, it is because there is no light in them. They are {?}. They are no better than those who, as they are faced with a national crisis, look to familiar spirits, as {?}. They are like the living who look to the dead for help, and for the living to look to the dead is the essence of futility.

Now, the surprising thing about this passage is that if you go to the commentators, the biblical scholars of the past century or so, they will deny that law here means law. Now, the word in the Hebrew and the word in the English is very obvious. Law. To the law and to the testimony. The instruction. The witness to the law by the prophet. It’s always been understood to mean that through the centuries, but suddenly we are told for the past few generations that it does not mean law. It’s just a vague word for something or other in the way of a witness concerning God, or a testimony concerning God, but the law doesn’t mean the law. This makes clear how far gone we are, that the very obvious meaning of this text has been, in recent generations, denied, but the statement is, “to the law and to the testimony.” To the law and the witness concerning the law by the prophets. There is no life for man apart from this.

When Israel rejected God as their king and showed man as king, God declared it was a rejection of himself. “They have rejected me that I should not reign over them,” and then he went on to declare that certain consequences would follow in terms of Deuteronomy 28. It was not that they called a ruler “king,” but it was because they rejected God as king. It was possible to have a human king, provided God’s law was accepted. What they asked for was “a king like unto the kings round about us,” with a manmade law, an easier law than God’s law. After all, the judges during the period of the Book of Judges were called shofet, just, and the word shofet among the Phoenicians was also their word for king. So you could say the judges of the Book of Judges were kings after a {?}. It wasn’t the title. The point was the rejection of God as the supreme lawgiver, “a king like unto the nations round about us.” A king who has a manmade law, an easier thing, that doesn’t make the demands on us that God’s law makes, and of course, God went on to say, He shall demand ultimately more than God’s demands, because he will lead you into slavery.

The new monarchy was called immediately to obey the law. Saul was chose, but God’s law still remained, that if he disobeyed it, the curses of Deuteronomy would ensue. David was told the same thing, as well as Solomon and all the kings, and when finally the captivity came, Jeremiah beforehand, in terms of the law, pronounced the curses of the law upon Judah, and declared that the land would enjoy a Sabbath in order to fulfill God’s required rest for the land. The prophets, therefore, prophesied in terms of the law. They declared that God, in the beginning, had created Adam to subdue the earth and to exercise dominion under God, and man is held to this past by God in spite of the Fall, and cursed for disobedience; blessed, similarly, for obedience.

One of the greatest of the biblical scholars was Dr. Alfred Edersheim who, about 70-90 years ago, taught in England, one of the greatest biblical scholars the world has ever known. His books are still in print, and his Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, in two volumes, is without equal. This is what Dr. Edersheim said: “The one pervading and impelling idea of the Old Testament is the royal reign of God on earth. Almost a thousand years before Christ rises the longing cry after the future kingdom of God, a kingdom which is to conquer and win all nations, and to plant in Israel righteousness, knowledge, peace, and blessing. That kingdom of God in which God or his vice burant {?} the Messiah is to be king over the whole earth and all generations are to come up and worship the Lord of Hosts.” This is precisely what the scriptures taught. The entrance into that kingdom is through the blood of the lamb in the Old Testament, and through the blood of Jesus Christ in the new. This is the ground of citizenship.

Then the requirement of citizenship, the test of true citizenship is obedience to the law of God. The prophetic word throughout the Old Testament was that the nation had forsaken its king and its law, and without a covenant with God, there is no law. A covenant requires a law. “They have forsaken thy covenant.” Therefore, the people are disobedient. To renew the covenant was to renew the law, so that whenever the covenant was renewed by any of the kings they, at the same time, read the law, because to renew the covenant, was to renew one’s law keeping, to declare that they were under the blood of the sacrificial lamb, and therefore, bound to obey the law of the Messiah, of God the King.

This was done by Josiah, for example, and we read, “And the king stood by a pillar and made a covenant before the Lord to walk after the Lord and to keep his commandments and his testimonies and his statutes with all their heart, and with all their soul, to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this book, and all the people stood to the covenant.” And our Lord, at the Last Supper, said, “This is the new covenant in my blood.” He not only renewed the covenant in his blood by his atoning work on the cross, but he renewed the law, and he placed his people both under his blood and therefore, under the law, duty-bound, to live in obedience to God, to serve the Lord their God with all their heart, mind, and being. Notice the echo of Josiah’s words, that the people would serve with all their heart and all their souls, and to love their neighbors themselves, to keep the whole law.

The covenant law declares God to be the sovereign Lord who “hath his way in the whirlwind and the storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet,” Nahum declared. God uses all things to weather every event to bring judgment upon a people that violates his law, and over and over again, the testimony of the prophets was to the law of God and the judgment of God.

One of the greatest witnesses to this is the life of the prophet Elijah, and you remember on the Mount of Transfiguration, it was Moses and Elijah who appeared to strengthen Christ as he went to the cross. An English Old Testament scholar, Dr. H. L. Ellison, has written, with regard to the struggle of Elijah against the priests of Baal, “As the excavations at Uber{?} have shown, Baal was above all the god of the {?}, but let Jezebel, her priests and prophets {?} Baal as they would. There would be no reign in Israel, no not even dew until Jehovah Ja{?}, and he would announce his giving beforehand through his servant Elijah, lest any should give the glory to others. There is no suggestion that the famine was punishment, though punishment it was at the same time. It was, above all, an undeniable proof of Jehovah’s power and Baal’s impotence, precisely in that realm which was considered Baal’s specialty,” if I may pause a moment to give you the background.

God had declared in the epilogue to the law, Deuteronomy 28, that the heavens would be as brass, and the earth like iron, to a people that violated God’s law to a certain point, and so in terms of that, Elijah declared that there should be no more rain because of their apostasy, and the earth would not yield to them.

To continue, “He allowed the lesson to sink in thoroughly. Three winters passed without rain, and three summers without harvest. We can easily imagine how the worshipers, prophets, and priests of Baal were reduced to despair. Only then did God tell Elijah to come out of hiding, and tell Ahab that Jehovah would have mercy on a land that must have been near its last gasp. It was not enough, however, to give rain in the name of Jehovah. The war had to be carried into the enemy’s camp. This Elijah did by challenging Baal on his own ground. Not only was the seaward end of Carmel claimed by Phoenician, but it was considered especially sacred to Baal. Here on Baal’s own ground, he was challenged to send his lightening flashing from heaven, for his worshipers looked on him as the controller as the thunderstorm. How successful Elijah was in his purpose may be seen by translating the cry of the people literally. ‘Jehovah, he is the mighty one. Jehovah, he is the mighty one.’”

Thus, the prayer of Elijah for a drought was a prayer in terms of the law of God, and in terms of the curses for {?} by the law in Deuteronomy 28, and James in his epistle 5:16-18, cite Elijah’s prayer as an example of true prayer. In other words, true prayer is always in terms of the law of God, not in contest of it. Thus, the prayer that I cited some time ago of the man who prayed when he was stealing some money and was a prayer that he might get caught, that if the Lord were to help him steal, he would give him a sizable share, if he helped him get away. That’s not true prayer. It is blasphemy. True prayer, like Elijah’s, is in terms of the law of God. It asks for judgment in terms of the law and for grace in terms of the law, which means through the blood of Jesus Christ.

Thus, true prayer can never ask us for God to bless apart from his word, or to sustain people who despise the atoning work of Jesus Christ, or to bless people who claim to be believers and then despise the law of God. Prayer, therefore, has both the atonement and of the law always in mind.

Thus, this was the concern of the law and the prophets, that God reign in the hearts of men, in their homes, families, churches, schools, the whole of their lives, to be established, for the law and to the testimony that they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no life in them. This was the message not only of Isaiah who spoke these words, but of Elijah and Elisha, of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, all the prophets. The law can no more be separated from the prophets than wetness can be separated from water, for it is then no longer water but something else, but this is not all. One of the great sins of people today is that they separate law, not only from the prophets, but from God. You cannot separate law from God because it is his righteousness, his nature which he declares to us. To try to separate the law from God is to destroy it. Now, this is the sin of conservatives. They want law and order, just by paying lip service to God. They’re for God and country, but don’t press me on the subject. They’re for God, of course. They’re good conservatives. They’re not atheists like the communists, but don’t talk to us about the tithe.

On all my trips lately in the last year, as I’ve spoken to conservative groups, I’ve talked about biblical taxation, which means the tithe and the centrality of it. It’s strange how {?}, because they want private property, yes. Oh, they’re all for private property, and the Bible is for private property, right, but the Bible says “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” and man is a steward of the earth and the tax that God requires for our use of the land is a tithe, and you can’t have private property, which is God’s law, without God, so then you’re under the curse, and so the contrast between private property versus socialism, which the conservative makes, is useless. Both are under the curse of God if they are separated from God. The socialist, obviously, so they’re atheists for the most part. The conservative? Well, they want private property without God’s law? Now, what’s the consequence? How are they going to have their private property?

I was in Virginia and Washington DC this last week. It’s a sorry place, Washington DC. It’s gone to seed, the most beautiful city in America. The only time I’ve seen of late, drunks lying around on the street, so that at times, we had to step over a couple of drunks, two of them that were lying flat across the sidewalk, and we could look around and see others. It’s a city gone to seed, and people live on their private property of {?}, beautiful homes, magnificent homes, like prisoners. It used to be that it was not safe to walk your dog out in the street after dark. Now it’s not safe to walk your dog increasingly in your own backyard. They’ve got private property, and what good is it to them? Every man an island. No longer able to trust his neighbor, or anyone. His neighbor’s children may be on LSD and as bad as somebody out of the slums, and so he sits there in an island, his house, nursing his private property which can be burned out any day, and is the answer communism? The communists sit together, supposedly made one people, one land, each silently distrusting the other. Both are under a law order that is no law, because they are divorced from God.

Some years ago when I was a student, I did a long study of the Hutterites. Now, the Hutterites are a Mennonite group, very common in the Dakotas and Canada, who hold the land communally. They are called a communistic group. They don’t think they are. They are very successful. As a matter of fact, there’s a lot of resentment against them in the Dakotas and in Canada because they are so successfully, and they are buying up more and more land all around them. They are very, very intensely strict Christians who follow the law of God very strictly. Now, there are points where we would differ in their interpretation, but they have not separated the law from God, and they have prospered. I said they could not be called communistic because it’s entirely voluntarily. The Bible does favor private ownership, but remember private ownership can be sole ownership or multiple ownership, and neither is any good without God. Condominiums today, I know of some that are beginning to be a problem to the people in them because there are too many children in the condominium, young people, who are on narcotics. So you have a guard at the door of the person next to you in the other apartment, is within that guarded door, and you have a private home, but there are so many families who live today in real fear of their teenage children. There is no property arrangement that gives us anything. It is not an arrangement of peoples or of properties. There is no law ultimately, whether you call it socialistic or capitalistic, where there is no God, because when the law is separated from God it dies, and when a people are not regenerate, they are lawless. They can only create a lawless order, chaos.

Thus, we cannot go to the Old Testament and say, “We like this and that law. We like private property and the Bible teaches property, so let’s have a rally and say we are for God and country, and we are for private property.” It doesn’t work. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.” Be first a regenerate people. Be first a people who honor God, who believe in him, and obeys him, and then all these things shall be added unto you. The law cannot be separated from God without destroying it, and the conceptions of law that people have today are divorced from God.

Thus, when Isaiah declared, “To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them,” the law and the testimony which we have referenced can never be separated from God. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, give us the spirit of faith and obedience that we might seek those things which are of thee, that we might not, like foolish men around us, {?} slogans and phrases from the law which reflect our desire, and not thine order. We thank thee, our Father, that thou hast blessed us with property, with material goods, but grant that we know that in all these things, we must serve thee, that all these things have come from thee, and out of thine own must we give unto thee, and in all things acknowledge that apart from thee, O Lord, there is nothing. Make us therefore, wise stewards, that we might begin with the only foundation, Jesus Christ. Grant us this, we beseech thee. In Jesus name. Amen.

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

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] I didn’t {?}

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] A very good question. When New England was first settled, the whole point of that settlement, and it was communistic unlike the Hutterites, was that these people had been hired, as it were, by the company in London, and they were simply to be workers. In return for their passage to America, they were to work for this corporation and they were like hired hands, as it were. So the company had laid down some rules and regulations for, you might say, a communistic society, with them as the state taking all the profits, and naturally this didn’t work. It was not a voluntary arrangement. It was involuntary. It was a very, very unhappy one. No one enjoyed it. The women, we are told in the accounts, didn’t want to work in the fields. They ad every kind of excuse. Their baby wasn’t feeling well, when it was planting, or hoeing, or harvesting time, or they were feeling poorly. They made every kind of excuse to avoid working, and the men didn’t work well, and they almost starved to death, and so they said, “This won’t work.” So they junk it, and said, “London’s a long ways away. What London wants is some profit. Well, we can make more profit if we abandon this,” and then at once, of course, the women were out there, since it was their land and their husband’s land, helping their husband with the planting, and they made sure the kids did, and they spanked their bottom if they didn’t. They really worked, and they had a rich harvest. However, they did not thereby say, “Well, I’m on my land and I’m not helping you.” The extent to which they worked together then was amazing. As a matter of fact, in New England for many generations, let us say there was a little village. Let’s call the village Bedford. If you were one of the people in Bedford, you worked together with your neighbors to take care of any and every need. You took care of the hills round about. Then what else did you do? If you decided to sell your land, you could not sell it without the permission of the village, and if a newcomer came and wanted to settle in some of the adjoining properties, he had to have permission of the town council, because they said, “We want people of faith.”

Now, it was a strong community. It was an intensely strong community. There were rules and regulations on every member that we would consider appalling today, and yet it was private property. But they said it has to be first in terms of faith. Every one must believe in the scriptures as the word of God, and must be ready to worship with us as fellow believers. We don’t want to destroy a Christian community, and so they had some very strict rules, and it worked beautifully.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Very, they were a thoroughly religious group. They were people who were trying to get to this country, and the only way they could do it, they didn’t have money to hire a ship and come over here, was to work with this London group of shareholders who had financed them in return for the profits, but they were to work there, governed from London, and that was the thing that did not work. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Sweden nominally is a Lutheran country. In reality, it is humanistic. The church state is a mere formality, and the people who have visited there or who have lived there, I knew a very fine Swedish scholar some few years ago, testified that the churches are rarely ever attended. In some of the smaller towns, people have served as pastors for ten, fifteen years, and never had anyone in the church except their wife and children. The clergy, moreover, are mostly very, very liberal. Thus, the percentage that attend church in Sweden is practically nil. In England, it’s 5%, and in Sweden is far, far less. Churchgoing in Europe is at an all-time low. Here it is still about 60%, so you can see the difference. The advantage of Sweden is two-fold. First, Sweden has not been in any war since the Napoleonic era. This has given it an economic edge in spite of its socialism. It does have serious problems, and the conservatives made some real change in the last election, because these problems are growing. These years at peace have not only meant that it has not had a tremendous war debt such as other countries have had hanging over them, but during the war it has profited tremendously. Every war, because it has been able to sell to both sides as a profit, a considerable profit. In other words, it’s been a time of land office business. That’s been one advantage. War is one of the costliest and most destructive of things to a nation’s economy, and in this respect, they have been very sensible. They’ve minded their own business.

A second thing that has given them an advantage in recent years is that, about the end of the thirties, beginning of the forties, the computer industry was beginning to show signs of being born, and by the sixties it was underway, and there were a few very superior engineers in Sweden who saw the potentialities of the computer movement, that it would be of tremendous importance to the economy in not too many years, and these few men set themselves to developing certain key aspects that would make the computer (they had the basic know-how) to make it more useful. As a result, their control of some of these patents, and in Europe their manufacturing, has been the major single economic asset to the Swedish economy since World War 2. So, while they have had very severe problems, and economically they have unrest in the country, they have a great advantage in these two respects.

The second, of course, is clearly due to what free enterprise there is. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] With what?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes. He’s free to leave.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No, he either stays in terms of the law or he leaves. These are Hutterites. They’re different and have a different name than the Amish or other Mennonites.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No, he can stay there on their terms. That’s just all there is to it. If he wants to leave, he’s free to walk out any time, but if he’s there he works and conducts himself in terms of the law. I might add that a few years ago, a study was made of the Hutterites which was quite interesting. It showed that there was a greater mental health among the Hutterites than any group in the United States, that even the retarded children were made socially useful, and were able to function well and happily in Hutterite society. So that their achievement has been quite remarkable. A Christian context, you see, does make these things possible. I cited an example of that not too long ago, at Fairfax Christian School. I was there all this past week, but I cited this example of this fourth grade boy with an IQ of 67, won the Standard Achievement Test, tested out at grade and above grade in every subject, and he’s doing very well this year. Now, that shows what a Christian community (they’re a school in Fairfax) can do. It’s really amazing, and it is a school that is, by and large, made up of very superior children. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Most certainly they do. They very definitely,

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Along those lines, I was very much amused. Wednesday night I was at Leesburg, Virginia, and I was speaking there to a community group, and one parent came up and said, “My child had felt underprivileged until today, and he came home feeling that at last he had achieved status, because he was the only child in his class who hadn’t had his behind paddled,” and for the slightest infraction of rules, if they talk out of turn they get their behind whacked, and he was the only boy in the entire grade, I think it was the fifth grade, or sixth, who hadn’t had his behind paddled, and now had been, so he felt he was part of the class. Yes?

[Audience] I don’t know if you {?} or not {?}

[Rushdoony] When?

[Audience] Tonight.

[Rushdoony] Tonight. What time?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Oh, very interesting. 11:00 tonight. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] They maintain their own schools, very strictly, yes. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] I know that one of the men I {?} has, but I’m not sure whether it’s the Hutterites or not. Before we adjourn, I’d like to share with you a couple of little items from a book on {?} American presidents by Doris Faber, and these are a couple of passages from letters by Abigail Adams, the wife of John Adams and the mother of John Quincy Adams. During the long, long years that the War of Independence was being fought, almost ten years, most of the time she didn’t see her husband. He was either in Philadelphia, or Spain, or France negotiating, and so the total period of time for ten years, was a few weeks, and they were a very loving pair, and this from one of her letters when, on one occasion, she felt especially lonely, and she wrote to John:

“Dearest of friend, my habitation had {?} looks. My table, I sit down to it, but cannot swallow my food. Oh, why was I born with so much sensibility, and why possessing it have I so often been called to struggle with it? I wish so to see you again.” And then, however, she wrote again to her husband, “’If you had known,’ said a person to me the other day, ‘that Mr. Adams would have remained so long abroad, would you have consented that he should have gone?’ I recollected myself a moment and then spoke the real dictates of my heart. ‘If I had know, sir, that Mr. Adams could have effected what he has done, I would not only have submitted to the absence I have endured, painful as it has been, but I would not have opposed it even though three years more should have been added to the number which {?}. I feel a pleasure in being able to sacrifice my selfish passions to the general good, and in imitating the example which has taught me to consider myself and family, that as the small dust of a balance when compared to the great community.’” Now, there was a wonderful woman.

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.

End of tape