Law in the Old Testament

The Law as Direction and Life

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Law

Lesson: The Law as Direction and Life

Genre: Speech

Track: 127

Dictation Name: RR130BS127

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Our scripture is Proverbs 13:13-14. The Law as Direction and Life. Proverbs 13:13-14. “Whoso despiseth the word shall be destroyed: but he that feareth the commandment shall be rewarded. The law of the wise is a fountain of life, to depart from the snares of death.”

In our study of the law in these past three years, we have seen that the law has a central place in the word of God. Justification is by faith. Sanctification is by the law. The law is God’s way of holiness, of righteousness, whereby man grows in terms of his salvation. The law is a sentence of death, a handwriting of ordinances, that is, a death sentence to those who are unregenerate. The law then condemns them. But to those who are alive in Christ, it is a way of life. By analogy, we can say that even as today in our civil society, the law to a criminal, a wanted man, is a death sentence. So the law to us is our protection against the powers of darkness, against evil.

Thus, to the godly, both in the religious realm as in the civil realm, the law is the way of life. It is a protection. We saw also a few weeks ago, as we reviewed the meaning of the word “law,” that the word “law” in Hebrew, Torah, means direction. It is a direction, a way. That lawlessness is to be anti-way, anti-direction, anomia, in the Greek. The lawless, therefore, are those who have no way and are against the way. Sin is, for the Christian, hamartia, missing the mark. It means that they are on the way but they are falling short of it. Persistence in hamartia, according to John’s epistle, is anomia, lawlessness, and the believer cannot be guilty of anomia. It proves that he is, therefore, unregenerate.

We saw, moreover, that our Lord identified himself as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The Way, in Greek “hordos” means not only direction but ordinance, or law. Now, as we look at the book of Proverbs, we shall see some further meanings of the word “law.” The word “law” also means instruction, teaching. Thus, law is the God-ordained direction and teaching concerning life. The lawless life, therefore, is not only directionless, but untaught, or refusing to be taught, refusing to be instructed. The book of Proverbs, therefore, is a book concerning the law, the direction, the guide, the God-given instruction concerning life.

When it speaks of law, Proverbs means God’s law. When it speaks of my or thy mother’s law, it means the law as it is mediated by the authority of the mother, as taught by the mother, or by the father. Moreover, the law or the commandment is equated with the word. In our text, Proverbs 13:13, “Whoso despiseth the word shall be destroyed: but he that feareth the commandment shall be rewarded.” Here, the words commandment, or law, and the word, are cognate. Scripture is one word. That word includes the word of grace and the word concerning the law. It is one word in all that it says. On one side we see it as judgment. On the other side as grace.

Moreover, we are told that “The law of the wise is a fountain of life, to depart from the snares of death.” So that the law is seen also as a fountain of life, as a means to furthering life. The commentator Dalich{?} summarized the significance of this passage saying, “The proverb is designed to state that the life which springs from the doctrine of the wise man, as from a fountain of health, or the disciple who will receive it, communicates to him knowledge and strength, to know where the snares of destruction lie, and to hasten with vigorous steps away when they threaten to entangle him.” So that we can understand why, when our Lord said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” he was referring in the Way, to the law, declaring, “I am the Law,” and also when he said, “I am the Life,” he was not introducing a thought alien to the law. The law is a fountain of life, when the wise teach it in faithfulness to the law. It is direction, and a direction provided by the law is the way of health, knowledge, and life.

Moreover, in Proverbs 28:4-5, we are told, “They that forsake the law praise the wicked: but such as keep the law contend with them. Evil men understand not judgment: but they that seek the Lord understand all things.” Now this is a very interesting passage because we have this echoed in 1 John 2:10, “That ye have an unction from the holy one and ye know all things.” Now what was John saying? He was not saying that the believer has a totality of information. He was not referring to information. There are more facts in the universe than any man can ever know in a million years. What he was saying, that when we have an unction from the holy one, when we are believers, justified and sanctified, we have the principle whereby all things are penetrable. We have the principle whereby all knowledge becomes open to us.

Now, as Dr. Van Til has pointed out over and over again in his works, the believer does not have the principle of knowledge. As a result, for him, all facts, are brute facts, that is, meaningless facts. He denies by his atheism that there is any sovereign decree, any sovereign counsel over all law of God. Therefore, all factuality is brute, meaningless, unrelated factuality.

As a result, the modern philosophers of science can have no science. They refuse to speak about law as we’ve seen before. They offer only a probability concept. As a result, for them, knowledge is truly impossible. This is why the most recent writers in the philosophy of science say that truly, there is no meaning and no science, but their scientific theories are myths whereby they deal with reality, workable myths, and no more, so that truly, nothing can be known, but when we accept God, the sovereign God as our Lord and Savior, we have then the principle whereby we can know all things, because we have accepted that which makes everything understandable.

Now, when Proverbs declares that, “they that seek the Lord understand all things,” and relates this seeking of the Lord with seeking him through his law, keeping the law, contending against the wicked, understanding the meaning of judgment. It is understanding law in its full meaning, as the God-given direction, the way, the teaching, the instruction concerning reality, and ultimately, that law or Torah, is the whole word of God. It is the sovereign decree of God whereby meaning is given to all reality.

Turning again to the commentator Dalitsch, he writes concerning Proverbs 28:4-5, “They who praise the godless turn away from the revealed word of God. Those, on the contrary, who are true to God’s word, are aroused against them. They are deeply moved by their conduct. They cannot remain silent and let their wickedness go unpunished. He who makes wickedness his moral element falls into the confusion of the moral confection{?}, but he whose end is the one living God, gains from that in every situation of life, even amid the greatest difficulties, the knowledge of that which is morally right. Similarly, the Apostle John, “Ye have an unction from the holy one and ye know all things.” That is, ye need to seek that knowledge which you require{?} and which ye long after, not without yourselves but in the new divine foundation of your personal life. From thence all that ye need for the growth of your spiritual life, and for the turning away from you of hostile influences will come into your consciences. It is a potential knowledge, all comprehensible in its character, and obviously that is here meant.”

Forsaking of the law, therefore, means forsaking life. It means forsaking direction and instruction, and a society which does it and men who do it lose all direction and all wisdom. The consequence is relativism, and moral paralysis. Without revelation, all is soon relative. Without God’s law, there is no meaning. With moral relativity, nothing is good and nothing is bad. Nothing merits attacking or defending, and the world very quickly disintegrates. The law, therefore, is direction, for men and for nations.

Now, men want to walk by sight. Men, through the ages, have sought for foresight in terms of forbidden ways, even as Saul sought from the witch of Endor, knowledge concerning the future, forbidden knowledge. Scripture, again and again, condemns all such efforts, but as we have seen, the law of God gives us sight. “The wages of sin are death.” “This is the way, walk ye in it.” Curses for disobedience. Blessings for obedience, all clearly spelled out in Deuteronomy 28 and elsewhere. Obey the law of God and ye shall be blessed in your going out and your coming in, in the fruit of your body and the fruit of the field. Disobey God and ye shall be cursed. The law, therefore, gives us sight. In Psalm 119:105-106, indeed throughout that Psalm which speaks of the law, we are told, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. I have sworn and I will perform it, that I will keep thy righteous judgments.” The law of God, therefore, is a light to give us sight. As Proverbs 6:23 says, “For the commandment is a lamp, and the law is a light, and reproves of instruction are the way of life.”

Here we have the fullness of the meaning of the law brought out. It is direction. It gives us vision. It gives us instruction. Moreover, reproofs from parents, from teachers, from pastors, from superiors, where based upon the law of God are the way of light as against death. To walk without law is to walk in the way of darkness and the way of death. This mediated law, mediated by parents, teachers, pastors, superiors, must be the divine {?} law. Solomon declared in Proverbs 1:7-9, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction. My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother: for they shall be an ornament of grace unto thy head, and chains about thy neck.”

In verse 9 there, “an ornament of grace unto thy head” is rendered by some translators as “a crown to thy head.” Solomon here connects three things. First, the fear of the Lord and his instruction is law, it is direction. Then, this same law is applied by the parents to their children, and third, the consequence of obedience to this law is an ornament, or crown, of life. It is moreover, the beginning of wisdom. The term “beginning of wisdom” does not mean merely the A, B, C. It does not mean, this is the starting point, Los Angeles, and you leave here to go to San Francisco, and you leave it behind. Rather, it means the first and the controlling principle, that which governs us all the way. It is the motive for us, the power that takes us all the way on our journey so that we do not begin and then depart from it, but it is that with which we begin and travel all the way. It is the beginning of knowledge. It is the Alpha and the Omega, the totality of that which guides us into knowledge, into instruction, into wisdom. It is spoken moreover, as both the beginning of knowledge and the beginning of wisdom, and the difference is an important one. Knowledge is the accumulation of information about the world around us, or about a particular thing. Wisdom is insight into these things. Our universities today are full of knowledge, but they are radically lacking in wisdom, but here we are told that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of both wisdom and knowledge, and this fear of the Lord is inseparable with abiding, by cleaving to the law of God as it is given by thy father, and by thy mother.

Thus, the centrality of law to life is stressed by Proverbs. Proverbs 28:9 declares, “He that turneth away his ear from hearing the law, even his prayer shall be abomination.” God will not hear those who say, “Lord, Lord but despise his law word.” In Proverbs 29:18, we are told, “Where there is no vision the people perish, but he that keepeth the law happy is he.” The word “vision” is also translated by some as “revelation.” “Where there is no revelation, the people perish.” Vision, or revelation, is made cognate with the law. He that keepeth the law, the vision, the revelation, happy is he.

Thus, there is a unity of the way, or law, of direction, of instruction, of the word, of revelation, and of law. We must not, therefore, be guilty of wrongly dividing the word of God, of opposing God’s grace to God’s law, of opposing that which is given for justification to that which is given for sanctification. The law of God is the divine instruction, the teaching, the direction given unto his people that they may live. “This is the way, walk ye in it.” Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee that through Jesus Christ thou hast set our feet upon the way, and that by thy law word, thou dost instruct us in thy way. Give us grace, day by day, to walk therein, to grow in grace and in knowledge of thee, to manifest thy righteousness unto all nations, and to bring all things into captivity to Jesus Christ and his law word. Grant, O Lord, that we may be instruments of thy righteousness, unto the end that the kingdoms of this world may become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ. We thank thee, our Father, that thou hast called us unto victory, and that this is the victory which overcometh the world, even our faith. In Jesus name. Amen.

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

[Audience] {?} Talmud {?} to the Old Testament?

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes. Judaism has replaced the law of God with tradition. We shall come to this in a few weeks when we deal with the conflict between our Lord and the Pharisees, because you see, our Lord presented himself as the champion of the whole word of God, including the law, and said to them, “You have made the word of God to none effect through your traditions.” Now, the Talmud is an important source of knowledge when we are studying the scriptures, but the whole point of the Talmud is that the law of God is taken and reinterpreted in terms of the tradition of men, so that what the Talmud does to the law, and what Judaism has done to the law is comparable to what the Supreme Court is doing to the Constitution, the same principle. Now, when we get to the New Testament, as we shall in a very few weeks, we shall see how our Lord takes some particular laws and then illustrates exactly what the Pharisees had done to them, and Talmudism is Phariseeism, and Judaism is Phariseeism. Yes?

[Audience] {?} I was wondering {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. The law was given in written for with Moses, but that same law existed from the beginning, and some scholars have gone through Genesis and pointed out how you have all the Ten Commandments there, in Genesis before Moses, that God gave an oral revelation to Adam and his successors, and then it was given in written form through Moses, but the Ten Commandments was God’s law, always. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes. Excuse me. Yes. After Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden, their relationship to God was dependent upon whether they were regenerate or not. The indications are that they did repent and become regenerate. Their relationship therefore, was first, one of grace through the sacrificial system which was established at the very beginning, so that before Christ’s coming, salvation was through the blood of the lamb by atonement, in that which was to be transacted in Christ’s coming. Their sanctification therefore, was in obedience to the law of God. So the relationship of God to man has, in every age, been the same. To depart from that is to be guilty of dispensationalism. Yes?

[Audience] You said that salvation’s by grace and sanctification by the law. {?} there, would you also say that sanctification is also by grace in the ultimate sense in that our ability to {?} to the law comes from the means of grace and {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, you’re getting into theological question now of considerable abstraction, because you’d be getting into the ultimate decree and predestination and all, but in the practical sense, salvation is by faith, and as both Luther and Calvin said in their catechisms, the rule of faith is the law. Sanctification is by law. True.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Right. Ultimately, God’s decree of predestination governs all of them. Yes?

[Audience] In the days of the week, I’m not certain of this, are most nations or all nations observing the Sabbath on the seventh day of the week, {?}?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Briefly, to summarize what we’ve gone into earlier with respect to the Sabbath, there was no Sabbath observance outside of the Bible. It did not exist. No other nation had a day of worship, because no other nation in Antiquity really had worship. Their relationship to the gods, or whatever god they worshipped, although you can’t call it worship, was a business relationship. You went to the temple and offered a sacrifice any day of the week as a business transaction. It was insurance. So what you did when you went to a pagan temple was to offer up so much money, or an animal, and to say, “I’m going on a trip,” or “I have a sick child,” or I have this and that, and “I am buying insurance,” or protection. It was thus simply a business transaction, not worship. Thus, there was no day of the week for worship. Wherever worship came in, it was borrowed from biblical faith, from Christianity. Thus, Buddhists today have worship services. This is not Buddhist, really. It’s borrowing from Christianity, even as they borrowed the hymn, “Jesus Loves Me,” and they sing now, “Buddha loves me, this I know.”

Now, in the biblical faith, the day of salvation was the day of worship. Therefore, in the Old Testament, the day of the first Passover, their deliverance in Egypt was the first Sabbath, and all Sabbaths were patterned after that. Now, the Sabbath was the day of the month, not the day of the week. In other words, it was not Saturday. It fell on a particular date in the calendar, just as your birthday is on a different day of the week every year, but on the same day of the month. So, in the Hebrew calendar, the Sabbath fell on a different day of the week every six months. It changed regularly, because in terms of the Hebrew calendar, it was a day of the month, or certain days of a month. The eighth, the fifteenth, and so on.

Now, in the Christian era, the Hebrew calendar was revised, and their day of worship made to conform with the Christian observance, only Saturday was the day they arbitrarily chose, but apart from that, there is no Sabbath anywhere in the world. This is why revolutionary regimes have tried to destroy the Sabbath. Thus, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, both tried to do away with the seven-day week. They wanted a ten-day week, or to destroy the Sabbath, because it inescapably witnesses to the Creation Week of God, and to the fact of redemption. It is the redemption calendar. Hence, the hostility to it. Yes?

[Audience] On that basis, I think it’s {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, there are a number of attempts proposed through the U.N. and through various congresses all over the world to alter the calendar radically, to dispense with the Christian year. Now, this matter of a monthly rest day, there are also proposals that there be staggered rest days.

[Audience] {?} religious faith {?}

[Rushdoony] Right. Now, when it’s on a monthly basis, the premise has been in terms of the birthday of either the king, the religious divine human king, or the birthday of Buddha, or someone like that. In the Roman Empire, for example, there would be an annual rest day on the birthday of the Caesar, and some Caesars or emperors would make it once a month now and then, on their birthday, because they were the god of the state. They were the divine human king, and so it is in some pagan countries you’ve had occasional days of rest more and more as Christian influence has been noted, precisely to commemorate their religious figure, but it’s all patterned after the biblical standard. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. The calendar reforms that are proposed have precisely that function. You see, the calendar today is a religious calendar, and the proposals that you get are to make it a commercial calendar, to alter it and unify it in terms of business practice rather than religious faith, and so the arguments they offer for calendar reform are always commercial reasons, but ostensibly, if you have twenty-eight day months, or something like that, even months and big holiday ever so often to make up the extra days, it will be easier to reckon paychecks, but now it’s a problem because you pay, if you pay by the month, more one month and less the other month, it supposedly leads to a lot of complications. I don’t take those arguments too seriously, but the point is significant that it is directed against the calendar that is essentially religious. Yes?

[Audience] I’d like to hear you discuss {?} some people think this is {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, we have to say that St. Paul was not blessed if it were an unruffled life, because certainly he lived the life of a very wealthy heir prior to his conversion. There is some evidence which Jewish scholars today, like Rabbi Klausner have dug up that St. Paul came from a multi-millionaire family, exceedingly wealthy. Now, what happened to his wealth, whether he was disinherited or what, we don’t know, but we know that after his conversion, he certainly was subjected to beatings, to persecution, to shipwreck, to trials of all kinds. Now, the answer to that, I think, is in Hebrews where we are told that if we are not subject to the chastening of the Lord, then we are not sons but bastards. Thus, scripture emphatically says that God’s blessing does convey various material and spiritual blessings. Whether we get the material or the spiritual blessing, of course, depends on God and what he has in mind for us, but it does very definitely add up to our eternal glory. Therefore, we cannot say what kind of blessing we are to choose. We know that when God blesses us, it does add up to very real benefits for us in terms of time and eternity, spiritual and/or material, or both.

Now, very definitely, what is promised for a nation, if it obeys God, is material blessing. Deuteronomy 28 spells this out emphatically. It declares that when we, as a nation, abide by the law of God, we create a law order which furthers peace and prosperity. It declares moreover, that when a people as a whole tithe, God opens the windows of heaven and pours out very great blessings unto them. In various passages we are told that individually, these material and spiritual blessings are poured out upon us, but at the same time, when we are in an age that is contrary to God’s law, defiant of it, while we as individuals may be abiding by God’s law, our blessing is not as great because we have the whole world pitted against us as it would be in another era. Does that help explain it?

[Audience] Well, what I wondered about the meaning of the word “blessed” itself, {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Blessed can also be translated, and sometimes is, as happy. “Blessed are ye,” “Happy are ye.” Now, of course, you then have to define happiness. What is happiness? Happiness is more than laughter, although laughter is spoken of as one of the things that characterized the blessed, but happiness is something deeper than mere laughter. It’s an inward condition. It is being at peace with God, and at peace with ourselves. It is having a confidence that maketh not ashamed.

Our time is just about up. I’d like to pass on one little item which was in the paper recently. We spent some time awhile back discussing the Seventh Commandment. The question of divorce has come up in Italy as you may have noted. Italy, for a long time, has had no law permitting divorce, and now, for the first time, a divorce law is being passed. It has been passed by both houses, but it has to go to the lower house, because amendments were made in the upper house, so the chamber of deputies has to ratify the amendments. This will be done any day now. It is interesting to note that there is a great deal of horror in Italy over this divorce law among adulterers, because very, very many men have been taking advantage of the no-divorce situation there to maintain a mistress or one or two mistresses on the side, and they have forestalled trouble by promising them, “Well, of course, no divorce is possible in Italy, but when it is I’ll marry you,” and now with the divorce law likely to be passed, they have an angry wife ready to take advantage of it, and to sue them for everything they’ve got, plus one or more mistresses who are also planning on getting married to them. So again we see that the wages of sin, if not death, are certainly a lot of trouble.

One announcement before we close. If any of you would like to be on the mailing list for our monthly Chalcedon Report, be sure to give me your name and address after the meeting. Let’s bow our heads now 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.