IBL13: Law in the New Testament

Law in Acts and Epistles

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Law

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 8

Track: 136

Dictation Name: RR130BW136

Date: 1960s-1970s

[Acts] 15:1-29, “The Law in Acts and Epistles.” Next week we shall begin a study of the law for the church, as it appears in the New Testament. Acts 15:1-29:

“1And certain men which came down from Judaea taught the brethren, and said, except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved.

2 When therefore Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and disputation with them, they determined that Paul and Barnabas, and certain other of them, should go up to Jerusalem unto the apostles and elders about this question.

3 And being brought on their way by the church, they passed through Phenice and Samaria, declaring the conversion of the Gentiles: and they caused great joy unto all the brethren.

4 And when they were come to Jerusalem, they were received of the church, and of the apostles and elders, and they declared all things that God had done with them.

5 But there rose up certain of the sect of the Pharisees which believed, saying, that it was needful to circumcise them, and to command them to keep the Law of Moses.

6 And the apostles and elders came together for to consider of this matter.

7 And when there had been much disputing, Peter rose up, and said unto them, Men and brethren, ye know how that a good while ago God made choice among us, that the Gentiles by my mouth should hear the word of the gospel, and believe.

8 And God, which knoweth the hearts, bare them witness, giving them the Holy Ghost, even as he did unto us;

9 And put no difference between us and them, purifying their hearts by faith.

10 Now therefore why tempt ye God, to put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples, which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear?

11 But we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved, even as they.

12 Then all the multitude kept silence, and gave audience to Barnabas and Paul, declaring what miracles and wonders God had wrought among the Gentiles by them.

13 And after they had held their peace, James answered, saying, Men and brethren, hearken unto me:

14 Simeon hath declared how God at the first did visit the Gentiles, to take out of them a people for his name.

15 And to this agree the words of the prophets; as it is written,

16 After this I will return, and will build again the tabernacle of David, which is fallen down; and I will build again the ruins thereof, and I will set it up:

17 That the residue of men might seek after the Lord, and all the Gentiles, upon whom my name is called, saith the Lord, who doeth all these things.

18 Known unto God are all his works from the beginning of the world.

19 Wherefore my sentence is that we trouble not them, which from among the Gentiles are turned to God:

20 But that we write unto them, that they abstain from pollutions of idols, and from fornication, and from things strangled, and from blood.

21 For Moses of old time hath in every city them that preach him, being read in the synagogues every Sabbath day.

22 Then pleased it the apostles and elders, with the whole church, to send chosen men of their own company to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas; namely, Judas surnamed Barsabas, and Silas, chief men among the brethren:

23 And they wrote letters by them after this manner; the apostles and elders and brethren send greeting unto the brethren which are of the Gentiles in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia:

24 Forasmuch as we have heard, that certain which went out from us have troubled you with words, subverting your souls, saying, ye must be circumcised, and keep the law: to whom we gave no such commandment:

25 It seemed good unto us, being assembled with one accord, to send chosen men unto you with our beloved Barnabas and Paul,

26 Men that have hazarded their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

27 We have sent therefore Judas and Silas, who shall also tell you the same things by mouth.

28 For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things;

29 That ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well. Fare ye well.”

Let us turn back the pages of the centuries and imagine ourselves in the Early Church, in the Apostolic Age, and in the centuries that immediately followed. Let us also imagine that we are members of, say, one of the pagan tribes of Europe, of Britain, or North Africa, or the peoples of Asia, and all of the apostles or their successors come to us and say that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, Jesus Christ, who was born of the Virgin Mary. And He is the king, promised of prophesy, born of the line of David, to be the King of the world, king over all nations, king over all creation, the last, or greater Adam.

Now, what was the reaction? It is very easily discernible, because history records it very, very commonly. The reaction of these men on receiving this word and believing it was then to say, what is the law of this king that we might obey Him? And we know that many kings simply ordered every citizen to be baptized. They lined them up alongside of the river, and had the missionaries baptize them. And then they immediately required full obedience to the Law of God or else they executed them. For centuries this is the way many peoples were brought into the Church. Now it may seem very wrong to us, we shall go into this later, but certainly even as late as Charlemagne this was done by Charlemagne to the Anglo-Saxon, especially the Saxons, and Charlemagne did it not because he was saying this was a better missionary method, but because having conquered that area, and insisting that the Word of God apply to that realm, and since the Saxons were disobedient repeatedly, the only way he could end human sacrifice and many, many other abominations was to say, now you’re all going to be baptized, every Saxon among you and after that you’re all under the Law of God, and if you disobey it, your head goes! It’s the only way that he and many other ended human sacrifice and other things in the realms they ruled, by saying Christ is King; His Law shall prevail. God now having sent His Son into the world to be born of the Virgin Mary, He must be obeyed and His Law must be obeyed.

Now this story can be repeated time and time again and documented endlessly. Some of you probably recall some history teachers telling you how awful they were in the Early Church because they converted people this way. Actually, this isn’t the way they converted them. When the king was converted, he thought he had a duty to institute the rule of the King (Jesus) in his realm and to end all kinds of abominations. And this is how they immediately put an end to all human sacrifices and various forms of perversion and other abominations within their realm. And they accomplished a great deal of good thereby. Then they called for missionaries and teachers to go in and evangelize their peoples. And this was done.

But in the last century or two, this kind of thing has been despised. And history teachers because first of all, they deny that God was born at Bethlehem in the person of Jesus Christ, very God of very God, and very man of very man, that He is King of Creation and therefore His Law is binding, have worked to destroy faith in Him and obedience to His Law.

And this has saturated the churches. Few things better illustrate what has happened in theological circles than Richard Watson’s Biblical and Theological Dictionary which came out in 1832. While Watson was until fairly recently, until the 1920s, the great authority in Methodist circles, in his day, Watson was regarded as one who had broken very sharply with Calvinism and with the Church of England and yet Watson still showed the ancient Christian regard for law. Watson, in his Dictionary in a long, long section on law, many pages long, states the ancient position that was held for centuries, that grace did not set aside the law, but brought about the possibility of the fulfillment of the law. Therefore, he said, the law was not superseded, but rather the Christian era called for its more intensive and wider—world-wide application. And he went on to say that the New Testament not re-stated the whole of the Ten Commandments but extended its force and power (this from Watson).

And yet, since then, the Wesleyan tradition has become very Antinomian. Compare what Watson held with the work of a modern Wesleyan, F.F. Bruce, one of the most distinguished contemporary scholars in Britain, who in 1968 was in Pasadena at Fuller Seminary, giving the Payton Lectures. These were published under the title, The New Testament Development of Old Testament Themes. He never mentions the law. He recognizes in the course of his book that the word that is translated ‘salvation’ can also be translated ‘victory’, that both are equally acceptable translations, so that when we say we have been saved by God it means that God is victorious in our lives. When we say that salvation is brought into the world through Jesus Christ, we mean that God’s victory is brought into the world through Jesus Christ. All this, he admits, and it’s a fact well-known to Greek scholars. But he fails to admit the law as the instrument of that victory.

How then is victory to come, according to Bruce in these Payton Lectures? He denies that God’s grace having been manifested the victory is extended through law. Why, he says, victory comes by death or martyrdom. We are victorious as we give our necks to the enemy to be slain. I fail to see any victory in lying down and allowing the powers of darkness to martyr me? What victory is there in that? What Bruce offered at his lectures in Pasadena was a program for defeat.

Now one of the central texts used by these Antinomians is Acts 15:5 in fact the whole of the 15th chapter of Acts as well as Romans 7. So let us examine these and see what they meant to the people them.

In Acts 15:5, “…there rose up certain of the sect of the Pharisees which believed, saying, that it was needful to circumcise them, and to command them to keep the Law of Moses.” This had reference to the Gentile converts. What is the meaning of this? Now there is no evidence that after the Council of Jerusalem of Acts 15, the Ten Commandments were abolished and the Law of God superseded. The epistles were all written after Acts. And in the epistles, as Watson said, you find all the Ten Commandments and all the subordinate laws cited as still binding. The first chapter of Romans concludes with Paul’s statement concerning homosexuality, that it deserves the death penalty. Paul in Ephesians 6:2 restates the Fifth Commandment and says it’s the first commandment with promise, indicating that all the promises of the law and all of the law is still valid. But Judaism had misused the law. It had called the law, ‘the traditions of men.’ And the law had been made into the way of justification rather than sanctification. Paul at Antioch declared Jesus Christ, in Acts 13:38, 39, “38Be it known unto you therefore, men and brethren, that through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins: 39 and by him all that believe are justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the Law of Moses.”

You see, St. Paul was there not only preaching salvation through Jesus Christ, but contrasting it with a false doctrine of justification through the Law of Moses, “from which ye could not be justified by the Law of Moses.” This was the great evil. The law, from a way of sanctification, as God had given it, had been converted into a way of justification, and against this Paul waged war as did the entire church. The Judaizers continued as a couple of sects, notably the Ebionite Sect to hold that justification was through the law. But the rest of Church said no, justification is through the blood of Jesus Christ. Sanctification, a way of righteousness and holiness, is the law.

This then was the issue: justification by Rabbinic Law or justification through Jesus Christ. And this was the issue at the Council of Jerusalem. Some Gentiles had been converted, and immediately the Pharisees, the Judaizers within the church, wanted to compel these converts to obey the Rabbinic Law and tradition and to treat the law as the way of justification. The issue therefore was justification. How were men justified?

And as a result, the Council of Jerusalem was called to deal with this issue. We know that this was the issue not only from scripture, but we know it from the early records of the Church. We know that the Judaizers, the Pharisees continued to maintain the position that justification was by law. Neither party was against the Law of God, although the Judaizers were substituting men’s traditions all-too-often for that law.

Now [Acts 15] verse 21 of the Council of Jerusalem reads, “For Moses of old time hath in every city them that preach him, being read in the synagogues every Sabbath day.” Now this is an interesting verse, because the word ‘synagogue’ obviously means the Jewish congregations, but it also meant and was used for a couple of centuries (and we encounter it in the New Testament) for Christian assemblies. In other words, the Early Church was also called a synagogue or an assembly. That’s the meaning, ‘to the assembly of the Church,’ in that house. And the custom of reading the law continued in the Church. We still have it in many churches, where the Ten Commandments are read at every communion service. And in many hymnals, it is still retained at the beginning of the hymn book.

Moreover, [Acts 15] verse 20 says, “But that we write unto them,” (the Gentile believers; this is their decision) “that they abstain from pollutions of idols, and from fornication, and from things strangled, and from blood” Now what is the meaning of this decision of the Council of Jerusalem? Did this mean that this was all from the law that was required of the Gentiles? Did it mean that they were free to have other gods and to blaspheme, to dishonor their parents, to murder, to bear false witness and so on? Very obviously, this does not mean this. The issue was not was the law to be retained, but how was it to be retained—as a means of sanctification or of justification? Now the instructions in this chapter of verses 20 and 29, “that ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well,” clearly presupposes the law and it emphasizes how far the law was to be retained. Now let’s analyze the meaning of this:

First, salvation is through Jesus Christ and His atoning works. There’s no other way of salvation. The law can save no man. This was clear-cut. But what to do with the law? Two or three things are emphasized, three in particular. They are commanded to abstain from the pollution of idols. Now, this is significant. This was a problem in the Early Church. We’ve touched on it before. All the meat in those days was first of all, throughout the Roman Empire, offered to the pagan gods and then sold in the temple. It was sacrificial meat, it was holy meat, the pagans would go there and buy the meat and take it home and have their food and their meal at home was a communion service with the god at whose temple they bought it. For this reason, Josephus tells us, that the Jews who lived in Rome were vegetarians; not because they enjoyed it, but because they considered all the meat as polluted meat, because it was offered to idols. Now, at this point the counsel to the Gentiles, given by the Council of Jerusalem is that ye abstain from meat offered to idols. In Romans 14, St. Paul says that the strong can eat such meat. Was he throwing the law aside? Not at all. The new converts still treated that meat seriously because they believed that the idols were real gods, and so for a time, they were kept separate from all such meat. But St. Paul tells those who have grown enough in the faith later on, who know that those idols are nothing, so there’s not significance to them, he says if it does not trouble you or make you feel that there’s any religious pull to that idol worship, then you can eat this; because now they no longer have any significance to you and the communion service aspect is meaningless to you. But those of you who find yourselves troubled and fearful and afraid of the old gods, abstain from them. Abstain from the meat. This was the significance of this commandment.

Then again, we have the second general heading: fornication is to be abstained from, and the word fornication as it is translated into English does not give the force of the Greek, which means sexual sins in general. For Greeks as well as others, sexual sins were not sins. The body was nothing. Mind, ideas, where everything, and therefore sin was something you did with the mind, not with the body. What you did with the body was nothing. This is why Socrates could be indulging in perversion and talk about virtue, because virtue was something connected only with the mind, with spirit; not with matter. And so the whole area of the law that deals with physical things is covered by this. Fornication is to be abstained from.

The Council of Jerusalem said nothing, for example, about theft and murder because the pagans already condemned these. They didn’t have to restate these things. There were laws in every one of the countries then about theft and murder. These laws have moreover been heavily influenced by Biblical Law. That’s another story, but Biblical Law had influenced the Roman Empire at certain points.

Then the third thing (or you could say third and fourth), things strangled were to be avoided and blood was to be avoided. These are specified aspects of the law, because eating blood and things strangled were common to the Gentiles. As a result, there was a specific mention of them and that they were forbidden. Thus, the Council did not abolish the law, but it emphasized those details which the pagans did not regard as serious or did not regard as any moral concern. Circumcision was dropped because baptism had replaced it. The New Covenant was with the Church and Israel’s right was superseded.

Now, the other great passage which is used by Antinomians is Romans 7 and this passage again has been very extensively misunderstood. And it is important to understanding the meaning of the law and the kingship of Christ. Thus, in verses 1-6, St. Paul says,

“1Know ye not, brethren, (for I speak to them that know the law) how that the law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth?

2 For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband.

3 So then if, while her husband liveth, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress: but if her husband be dead, she is free from that law; so that she is no adulteress, though she be married to another man.

4 Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God.

5 For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death.

6 But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.”

Now what is the meaning of this? Within the last two months someone told me that this teaches very plainly that the law is dead. It never says that! It says that a dead man is dead to the law. What does that mean? That when we are dead in Christ that is, when we accept Christ as our Lord and Savior and His atoning work as our salvation, Christ’s death, the death sentence upon Him becomes the death sentence upon us, the old man in us, the old Adam, so that we are dead to the law. The law is still alive. Paul uses the analogy of marriage. Marriage isn’t dead and finished when the husband dies, it means that the woman is no longer bound to the husband because the husband is dead to the law of marriage. He’s gone, so she can remarry. The law of marriage continues. But the man is now dead to that law of marriage; so we, being dead in Christ, being crucified in Christ, are dead to the law as death penalty against us.

When we were in the flesh, that is in the old Adam, the motions of sin were by the law. What does this mean? It meant being enemies of God. Our reaction to the law was to be sinners, to try to break the law. We were anti-God and therefore anti-law. Therefore our reaction to the law was to bring forth fruit unto the flesh. But now we’ve been delivered from the law as a death sentence and now we serve in newness of spirit that we should bring forth fruit unto God.

So having been raised from the dead and being alive in Christ, whereas once we brought fruit unto rebellion, unto sin, now we bring forth fruit unto Christ. Once the law provoked us to sin, now the law provokes us to obedience and to righteousness.

Thus, St. Paul here is very definitely not saying the law is dead, and as Charles Hodge, one of the greatest commentators on Romans said emphatically, it is not the law that dies, but the sinner.

Then St. Paul goes on to declare that the law is spiritual, in [Romans 7] verse 14. In verse 12, he says, “… the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good.” In verse 1 he says the law was ordained to life. Now the redeemed man, he can say, in verse 22, “… I delight in the law of God after the inward man.” True, the old man is still in me and is against the law, but the new man is the new power, the new life in me and in verses 23-25, he says the new man serves the law of god, the old man the law of sin. The law is the standard for the new man, that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us (in the 4th verse of the 8th chapter [of Romans]).

John Murray, in commenting on these passages says, “The Law of God has the fullest normative relevance in that state which is the product of grace. To construe the relation of law and grace otherwise is to go counter to the plain import of the text.” That one sentence is especially telling: the law of God has the fullest normative relevance in that state which is the product of grace. This is what Watson said in 1832, that the power and the scope of the law was extended by grace, not curtailed.

Now do you understand why the Christmas story had the meaning it did for those who heard it? As the Church carried the Gospel into Asia and northward into Europe, why when the kings were told, and the chieftains were told, that at Bethlehem, the Son of God was born, Jesus Christ, who died to redeem men and rose again from the dead to destroy the power of sin and death and their reaction was, what is his law that we might obey Him? And then to apply it zealously—sometimes ruthlessly—but zealously. They understood: the King had come. Therefore, He must be believed in and His grace having been received, his law had to be obeyed. This was the meaning of the Christmas story, and this was how Europe was converted.

Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto Thee that Jesus Christ is come and we thank Thee our Father, that He shall prevail, that His grace shall overcome and His Law shall conquer, and the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. Our God, how great Thou art and we praise Thee! In Jesus’ name, amen.

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

Yes?

[Audience] Is Josephus useful in {?}

[Rushdoony] Josephus is very useful; not always trustworthy, but far more trustworthy than many modern scholars. He is a gold mine of all kinds of insight and information, so Josephus makes good reading, always to be corrected by scripture, but often giving us valuable insights into the background of scripture.

Yes.

[Audience] Something you said has been {?}

[Rushdoony] Calvin and Luther were at times strong on the law and at times weak. They did not overcome the decline of the latter part of the Middle Ages. On the doctrine of justification, they were sound. This was the point at which they corrected what had happened as a result of scholastic teaching. On sanctification, they gave some of the strongest statement on the law as the way of sanctification but at times they would fall back, in some passages, to the Medieval position, the late Medieval position. The Puritans were the ones who corrected them on this, very clearly.

Yes.

[Audience] The law stated {?} … and the law {?} be ignored, although {?} Why is the {?} the great appeal {?}

[Rushdoony] Well first of all, the sovereignty of God has been denied, you see, and if God is not sovereign, then His Law is irrelevant.

Now, if a man is just pleading with you, he cannot rule you. In other words, I might try to tell someone over whom I have no power, you ought to do this and you ought to do that, and I can say it would be a good thing, but I cannot command him. Now if God is not sovereign, and if His saving grace is not sovereign, so that election, {?} prevails, then all God can do is to say, now wouldn’t it be nice if you’d come over to my side—you see? Having accepted that, very quickly, the Church departed from law, because God had no law. All God could do would be to say {?} please, won’t you join me? There’s no law left.

Yes?

[Audience] When you think of the, when you read the Bible {?} view, {?} hymns, is that not {?} … in relation to the law? Could this … {?} you were predestined to be chosen by God. Is that correct?

[Rushdoony] When we accept the Lord, it is our free choice, but our freedom is the secondary freedom of a secondary cause. But God is the first cause. In other words, we are free to be what we are, but what we are is what God has made us.

[Audience] … {?} is not, does that mean then that I have chosen to follow the law? {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes… First, when you accept Christ it means that you’ve accepted the Law of God, which means that you deserve the death penalty, and you accept Christ’s death. This is what it means. You believe that Jesus Christ has died for you. But that the Law of God has a just claim against you in terms of the death penalty. So when you say yes to Christ, you’re saying yes to the death penalty against you. So you die in Christ and you’re alive in Him because now you’re alive to keep that law which before you had despised and broken.

Not perfectly in this live, but progressively as you grow in your sanctification.

Yes.

[Audience] You mentioned the {?} the last couple of weeks {?}

[Rushdoony] It is true. The Puritans abolished for a time the celebration of Christmas. They did it because Christmas had become a thoroughly pagan holiday. It had ceased to have much to do with the birth of our Lord and had everything to do with pagan, English customs. The yule log, and that sort of thing, and had become a time of debauchery. What we speak of now as “the office party” is a pale thing compared to the yule celebration. They didn’t even call it Christmas, they called it yule, y-u-l-e, and the yule celebration was simply the old pagan winter festival revived. And so the Puritans said, we can have nothing to do with it. And so for a few generations, they abolished it. They would have nothing to do with it. And when they re-established it, it was as a church holy day, and it was not until Dickens’ Christmas Carol that Christmas again began to resume its non-Christian character, this time a Humanistic humanitarian character of love and peace and being nice to people. So this is the history of Christmas and the hostility was very, very well-merited. We simply have no appreciation of how thoroughly pagan yule was.

[Audience] So {?}

[Rushdoony] Right. It is again reaching the same thing and I know of some churches that have again abolished certain aspects of Christmas. I know of one congregation of Northern California, an independent church with a Christian school, very good group, where they will not observe Christmas. Now they may have carried it too far, but their feeling is that it has become a pagan festival again. We’ve not gone anywhere near as far as the English had with their yule.

Yes.

[Audience] {?} theme of {?} Puritans {?}… Harvard and Princeton, two schools … {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, very interesting.

Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. And Christmas is being separated from Christ increasingly and to the extent that Christ is mentioned, He is mentioned as a kind of patron saint of Humanism.

Yes.

[Audience] Would the name Jesus Christ at first {?}

[Rushdoony] The name Jesus was a common name. We meet it in the Old Testament as Joshua. Jesus and Joshua are the same names. Jesus is the name, as it has come through the Greek and the Latin through us. In our Lord’s day it was pronounced Yeshua, probably. And it was a very common name meaning ‘Jehovah save.’ Christ is not a name, but a title, “Christos” in the Greek, and messiah as it is translated from the Old Testament, it means ‘the anointed one.’ So, messiah is His title, it means the King, the anointed, and the prophesied king.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] So you’re saying, ‘Jesus the King,’ when you’re saying Jesus Christ.

Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No. The kings of the line of David were anointed because they were fore-runners to Christ. During the Middle Ages, kings and emperors were anointed because they believed they ruled divinely and this is where the Divine Right of Kings came from, from the fact that they’re anointed.

Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Virtually all Judaism today is Humanistic, so it does not look to a personal messiah. Some few of the Orthodox Jews do.

Our time is just about up, but I’d like to read a passage from a book by Hal Lindsey, The Late, Great Planet Earth, and I think this sums up the tenor of the book, which isn’t much. This paragraph, page 176:

“There used to be a group called post-millennialists. They won’t even admit that we exist any longer. They believed that the Christians would root out the evil in the world, abolish godless rulers and convert the world through ever-increasing evangelism until they brought about the Kingdom of God on earth through their own efforts. And after 1,000 years of the institutional Church reigning on earth” (Where he got that, I don’t know) “with peace, equality and righteousness, Christ would return and time would end. These people rejected much of the scripture as being literal and believed in the inherent goodness of man. World War I greatly disheartened this group, and World War II virtually wiped out this viewpoint. No self-respecting scholar who looks at world conditions and the accelerating decline of Christian influence today is a post-millennialist.”

Now, the only thing you can call the author is a liar. He knows, if he knows anything, that no one who has ever held this position believed in the inherent goodness of man. Calvin certainly did not, or to name some of the great American scholars of the past: Warfield, Hodge, Alexander, and all the others, the greatest commentators this country has ever seen, none of them ever believe in the inherent goodness of man. In fact the usual charge of the pre-mils against them is that their doctrine of total depravity is unfair to man, nor do any of the post-mils of today, myself, or Dr. J.M. Kick or Roderick Campbell or any of the others, O.T. Allis, and innumerable other, J. Gresham Machem, hold to the inherent goodness of man. He knew when he wrote that it was a lie. And according to the laws of evidence, if a man lies very blatantly and plainly in one point, his testimony at every point is to be disregarded.

And there’s not much about scripture in this little book. It’s mostly contemporary affairs, well, see how bad things are. Therefore, the Rapture is the only answer.

Well, with that, 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 Spirit bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.