Human Nature In Its Third Estate

Time

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Doctrinal Studies

Lesson: 10-20

Genre: Speech

Track: 30

Dictation Name: RR131R31

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s - 1970’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] …worship God. Put on the whole armor of God than ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

Let us pray. Almighty God our heavenly Father who hast called us to be Thy people, and to wage war against the powers of darkness in Thy name. we give thanks unto Thee that Thou hast called us, armed us, and assured us of victory. And so our Father, we come into Thy presence to be armed afresh by Thy Word and by Thy Spirit. We pray our Father for Thy saints the world over, the suffering saints behind the Iron Curtain, those who are troubled of heart, those who are weak and fainthearted, that Thou would strengthen them, those who are strong and courageous in battle, that Thou wouldst bless them. We thank Thee our God that Thou art a very present help. Bless us now by Thy Word and by Thy Spirit, and prosper us according to Thy Word. In Jesus name, Amen.

Our Scripture is Ephesians 5:15-16. Time. Ephesians 5:15-16.

See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.

Time is a very important aspect of man’s life. Man’s psychology determines to a great deal how he views time. The modern perspective with regard to time is largely existentialist. And some years ago, an American poet who died in 1904 at the age of thirty, expressed the existentialist death of God view of time.

Writing long before the death of God school was formulated, Trumbull Stickney, an American poet, had, after Nietzsche and other philosophers, come to the conclusion that God was dead. And therefore time to all practical intent was also meaningless. And he wrote, rather beautifully, this perspective in his famous sonnet. The sonnet reads, “Live blindly and upon the hour. The Lord, Who was the Future, died full long ago. Knowledge which is the Past is folly. Go, Poor child, and be not to thyself abhorred. Around thine earth sun-wingèd winds do blow And planets roll; a meteor draws his sword; The rainbow breaks his seven-coloured chord And the long strips of river-silver flow: Awake! Give thyself to the lovely hours. Drinking their lips, catch thou the dream in flight About their fragile hairs’ aërial gold. Thou art divine, thou livest,—as of old Apollo springing naked to the light, And all his island shivered into flowers.”

The poem has a very important point. If man has no future but only a very fleeting present, then Stickney’s point is right. And Stickney is right in saying that man has no past and no future. The Lord who was the future, he says, died full long ago. And so he summons us to forget knowledge which is the past, because it is folly. Why? If there is no God then there is no sovereign decree and counsel which gives purpose to all of time, to all of history. So that there is no future, there is no way of planning because there is no law which says that in terms of doing that which is right you will be blessed. That in terms of pursuing a certain course, cause and effect will guarantee certain things to you in the future. Moreover if there is no God knowledge of the past is foolishness because there is no law that says that anything in the past will teach you anything concerning today and tomorrow, so all you have, according to Stickney, quite logically for an atheist, an existentialist, is the moment.

So, live blindly and upon the hour. Then he says, give yourself to the lovely hours. Drinking their lips. Enjoy yourself, live it up, in other words. He is right of course, if there be no god. Because the psychology of man being what it is, if man has no future, and only a very fleeting present which passes rapidly, then what ever he wants requires instant gratification. Since God who is the future died full long ago, why save up now or plan now to enjoy something tomorrow or the next year? Instant gratification is the only thing. There can be no waiting, no patience. An instant gratification means revolution. This is why existentialism and the God is dead movement has produced a revolutionary temper. Because the essence of revolution and the revolutionary mind is, that I will not wait for something tomorrow. I will not believe in progress and in maturation. What I want, I want now, and if I don’t get it now I will destroy whatever there is. Now of course this is the essence of criminality. The criminal mind is the mind that is unable to work and to plan. It cannot postpone gratification. The criminal mind wants things now, and crime’s the shortcut to realization.

It’s not surprising that we have had the criminals made into heroes and revolutionary heroes, in the last few weeks. You can expect this sort of thing because the criminal’s always been, in every age of history, the existentialist mind at work. A society which demands instant gratification is a society denying the necessity for maturity and growth. Growth means development. It means patience. It means waiting for the time of readiness and maturity. A child cannot expect the privileges of maturity.

A mature person realizes that what he wants sometimes takes years to realize. And instead of living blindly and upon the hour, the mature person builds today on the past inheritance and for the future. But the goal of Stickney and all existentialists is a graveyard society. A society in which everything is destroyed for instant gratification. And this is the dream of our day. It is the dream of Marx and of {?}. What they dream of is an unchanging society of an eternal present, where instant gratification is the rule. Now this may seem preposterous but both Marx and Angeles{?} said that it is modern society, capitalism, Christianity, which frustrates man and prevents him from realizing himself. That if and when we have the communist society the world over, a man can be whatever he wants at any moment of the day. In the morning he can go out and ride cattle and be the perfect cowboy. At noon he can be the perfect surgeon, in the afternoon he can be the perfect fisherman, and in the evening, the perfect critic for concert violinists. Instant gratification. All you need to do is to clear the ground of all of this idea that comes from the Bible, that you build on the past in terms of the future. Instant gratification, and then instant realization.

The appeal of the discovery of America to people in Europe was two-fold. There were those who as Christians, like the Puritans, who came here because, they said, we can build. We can build there a godly society and a godly order. but there were others to whom the appeal of the New World was to escape from time and history. Who felt, well, we’ve made a mess here, we can go over there and, according to the reports, you have everything when you want it. Food on the hook, timber everywhere, everything you want. And this is the temper with which they came. And this is why the Jamestown colony had such a very difficult time.

Everyone came to realize, and nobody came to work. And as a result the situation was desperate. Today the attitude of many people towards space travel is the same. Somehow, by escaping the world they will realize a new civilization, a new society, instant paradise. And one scientist, Arthur Clark, has said, and I quote, “The dullards may remain on placid Earth, and real genius will flourish only in space. The realm of the machine, not of flesh and blood.” Unquote. They don’t want a world of flesh and blood because flesh and blood is tied to time, to history, to the necessity for growth. But somehow, out there in outer space, perhaps on the moon, they’re going to build a world, they dream, where everything will be realized instantaneously by machines.

Last night we dealt with the chaos cults. And the chaos cults try to escape from time by revolution. By return to chaos. And by this ritual chaos the consequences of cause and effect and of time are supposedly wiped out. Thus it is that when St. Paul went to Athens and spoke there, the philosophers listened to him. Philosophers whose background was precisely that kind of thinking. He declared, God hath determined the times before appointed, He hath appointed a day in the which He will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom He hath ordained. Whereof He hath given assurance unto all men, in that He raised him from the dead. And at this point they turned away. Instead of an escape from time, he was telling them that time was the place of testing and time was ultimately the place of judgment.

It is interesting to see the difference in calendars. Outside of the world of the Bible, all pagan calendars are geared to a nature cycle. For them time means the equinox and the solstice, and nature festivals. All their holidays are nature festivals. But, in biblical faith, holidays are not nature festivals, but historical dates.

The birth of our Lord. The Resurrection. Times of celebrating things that godly men have done in history. And each year is A.D. Anno Domini, the year of our Lord. Time therefore has particular meaning for us as Christians. Whereas the whole drive, the whole impetus of the ungodly is to escape from time, to try to find refuge from time in the existentialist moment and to destroy time by revolution, to make time stand still in a perfect world where everything is realized, where everything is instant gratification. It is important for us therefore, as believers, as Christians, to understand why there is a war against time. Why the existentialist mentality will always hate the fact of time. Resenting it. Study the great poets who are not Christian. From the time of the ancient Greeks to the present, to Trumbull Stickney, for example, and they have this hatred of time because it requires work, testing, maturity, and judgment.

Now our text tells us that it is our duty to walk circumspectly. Not as fools but as wise. Redeeming the time, because the days are evil. What does the word time mean? There are two words for time in the Greek. One is chronos, which refers to quantity. We have chronos in chronological. It just means the quantity of time. The other word is kairos, and this is the word the text uses. What is kairos? Kairos means a meaningful season of time. Time that has meaning, not just one minute after another. And when the Bible speak about the times and time that we live in, it uses the word kairos, because our time is not just one minute after another, but it is Anno Domini, the year of our Lord. It is a meaningful season, it is the days of our years as they come from the hand of God, with a purpose for us in them.

And so the word that is used kairos. Time that has a purpose. Time that has a meaning. And we are summoned to redeem the time.

Now the word redeem, again, is very interesting. It means buying up opportunity. This is the Greek word that is translated as redeeming. And Arthur Wade renders Ephesians 5:16 very literally, as he translates it thus. Grasp at each opportunity like merchants who eagerly buy up a scarce commodity. For the evil days are upon us.

What does this remind you of? Why the parable of the pearl of great price, does it not? The merchant who learned, or the man who learned of a pearl and gave everything to buy it, knowing the tremendous value. And so, we are told in this text, like a merchant who is eagerly buying up a scarce commodity, grasp every opportunity to buy up time, for the evil days are upon us. The days are evil. But these days must be redeemed as a season of great value and meaning. Instead of flight from the evil days, we are to buy them up as a pearl of great price. Time is of great value, a scarce commodity. It is also a promise, for all times point ahead to the Lord of time, to eternity and to His kingdom.

As a result, the Puritans, like all Christians in every age, have been highly conscious of time and the clock. The ungodly as well as people from pagan nations are very much given to ridiculing Christians and those of a Puritan background, because they’re always so conscious of the clock. And sometimes Christians are made to feel that there is something wrong with them because they are clock conscious.

How ridiculous this is. It is a virtue on the part of Christians that they are clock conscious, they know the value of time. Time is a precious commodity and it is their godly duty to redeem the time, for the days are evil. This does not meant that they are not to rest, they are commanded to rest one day in seven. They are commanded to have times of rest and refreshing apart from the Sabbath, Sabbaths of rest. But always to remember that time is a valuable commodity and not to be wasted. It is kairos, it has meaning. It is a time of purpose, of treasure.

But when man loses faith in God, time becomes a burden. Something to run away from. Because every moment is a reminder to him of the emptiness of his life. As the poem by Trumbull Stickney with which we began declared, for the unbeliever the Lord, who was the future, died full long ago. And so what can he say? Live blindly and upon the hour. In terms of the moment only. And though Stickney tried to make a virtue out of this and say how glorious it is, yet he had to begin by saying, live blindly, blind yourself to reality, because actually you are of all men most miserable. Without faith there is no meaning, there is no purpose, there is no past or future for you, and so live blindly because even the moment is pain and punishment, it is an agony, it is a reminder to you of how empty your life is, unless you deliberately blind yourself.

But the believer, redeeming the time, is summoned to have his sight set on the future. And I, John, saw a new heaven and a new earth. I saw the new Jerusalem, God wiping away all tears from our eyes, no death, no sorrow nor crying. For the former things are passed away. Our eyes are to be set, our vision of time, on the glorious fulfillment of time.

And the past which is knowledge is not folly to us but a guideline to the future. And as we look at the past we see the glory that was man’s in the Garden of Eden. The great life that was his before the Flood. And the judgment of God upon an ungodly world and the curtailment of his lifespan. And the glorious promise of length of days so that a sinner dying at a hundred will be accounted to have died as an infant, according to Isaiah 65:20. The renewal of God’s blessing, of time within time, and finally the glorious fulfillment in the new creation. Time for us therefore is something that, while it is in a world where the days are evil, is still a treasure to be redeemed and used. Because every moment of time brings us one tick closer to the glorious fulfillment towards which the whole creation moves.

Let us pray. Almighty God our Heavenly Father, we give thanks unto Thee that we live in time. Thy time. Time that is in an opportunity and time that is a wealth. And we thank Thee that not only is time ours but eternity as well. So that in all things everything works together for good unto us. And we have a glorious destiny in time and eternity in Thee. Make us mindful of our wealth, that we may be good stewards thereof. Ever rejoicing in Thy grace, serving Thee in thanksgiving, and ever refreshed by Thy Word and by Thy Spirit. In Jesus name, Amen.

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

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. It does in a graveyard.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] I can’t quite hear you.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Are we in one sense what?

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] We are citizens of eternity now, yes. So that we already have a state in eternity. But we are not yet in eternity.

Any other questions? Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. The name goes back much earlier than 451 B.C, it goes back to the ninth century, eight or ninth century B.C, and in the same place, the same family.

[Audience] {?}

[Dr. Rushdoony] What?

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] I have a brother and a sister, yes.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] No. The old forms of the name were with an y, and that is with the original form as you find it in the inscriptions that archeologists have dug up way back to the eighth and ninth century B.C and the Assyrian inscriptions and the {?} inscriptions and so on. But most Armenian names were regularized to ian by the Turks so they would be able to identify all of them when they saw their name in any passport or document.

Any other ques.. yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] I couldn’t catch the last sentence.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. The question is with regard to the ideas of the universal fatherhood of God and universal brotherhood of man. Now these ideas have been very prevalent in recent years and they are a thoroughly modern product. It is an attempt to read humanism into the Bible. In other words, in earlier years, men could not openly attack Scripture. If they wanted to be humanist they had to somehow say they were Christians and their humanism was somehow part of the Bible. So that they began to insist on the universal fatherhood of God. Now at the same time they insisted on the universal salvation of all men. That there were many, many doors to heaven, and you could get there as a Buddhist who believes in nothingness being ultimate, or a Hindu who believes that nothingness is ultimate, or as a Shintoist, or an animist and a cannibal in Africa, all roads were equally good roads because God was the father of all men and of all religion.

And of course the analog to that was that all men are therefore brothers since they have one father. Then, the next point of course is that they of one nature, so all men are potentially gods. Now it’s a good Mormon idea. And that’s where you wind up. So the idea really is thoroughly anti-Christian, it has been and still is extensively taught in churches, but those churches are not Christian, they are humanistic. No Christian can subscribe to those concepts.

Any other questions? Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] The issue of love, as we saw when we studied biblical law, cannot be separated from law. For love is the fulfilling of the law, St. Paul declared in Romans 13. Since it is the fulfillment of the law, which means that you love your neighbor or your enemy or your brother by keeping the second table of the law. You do not kill, nor commit adultery, nor steal, nor bear false witness nor covet. You keep the law in word, thought and deed. And to talk about love apart from the law is to say that a feeling can replace the law in human relationships. And sometimes it gets very absurd. It’s like the son who robbed his mother, widowed mother, of several thousand dollars which she could ill afford to lose. And then claimed that I love you, you can’t turn me over to the police, you can’t throw me out, or anything, you see. Or the wife who not only committed adultery but had a child out of wedlock, or an illegitimate child rather, but still maintained she loved her husband. She didn’t give much evidence of it. Now that’s what happens when you divorce love and the law. You say it’s a feeling. What is a feeling that doesn’t show itself in action? By their fruits shall ye know them. And the whole talk about love today is an insistence that feeling, or a {?}, is a substitute for reality.

And the people who talk the most about love for our brothers are the ones who are most insistent upon pushing us around by force, and saying we must do things or we are unloving. If we don’t submit to their force. So it becomes a mockery. Love is really an excuse for total hatred today.

This past week I heard about one denomination which had sunk a great deal of money into trying to start a church in a new community where there was every opportunity, this was in Northern California, and the thing was a total failure. Because they had a young social activist minister who taught endlessly about love and was one of the most hate filled persons imaginable. He would practically, well, he would corner people and he was almost ready to beat up on them if they didn’t submit to his grilling as to, did they love their black brothers or they did love this person and that person, and did they love Caesar Shavez{?}, and if you don’t you’re a hateful person. To the point of being psychopathic on it. So a sizable group that was gathered together to start a new congregation of a major denomination, wound up with less than a dozen people. And yet this person is quite convinced that he’s a great prophet of love and he’s being persecuted by hate mongers.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. Yes he is.

This past week I was out of town a good deal of the time speaking, and I learned of one thing which I think is very revealing. Most of you know that at Claremont College they had some trouble a year ago, with regard to black revolutionaries on the campus. They already had a black studies program that they had set up to satisfy these people. Now Claremont College has a few conservatives on the faculty, but it is predominantly made up of liberal professors. The board of trustees is made up of predominantly conservative wealthy business men, most of whom were Goldwater supporters. But they are not men of faith and they are therefore without any conviction. And as a result the school does not reflect what they believe but what a lot liberal professors and administrators feel it should stand for. When the black revolutionaries created a disturbance a year ago, the victory they won was not fully publicized but this is what it was, I was told by a professor. The black revolutionaries gained full and total control of the black studies program. No supervision.

No one in the administration or the treasurer’s office can pass on anything they do, they have an absolutely free hand to grant degrees, to spend money, to do as they will. To make all appointments. They are autonomous and they are guaranteed half a million dollars a year, no strings attached and no questions asked. And it is headed up by a young revolutionary in his twenties. What they are doing is to push around all black students on the campus so that the serious minded just give up. There’s no point in going to college. Now this is what happens when men are without faith, because the trustees knew the issues, this professor said they had all promised to make a stand, but the minute the black revolutionaries got to threatening them, they all folded, in fact they couldn’t move fast enough to give them everything they wanted. It wasn’t a lack of knowledge. It is not a lack of knowledge that keeps people today from seeing the issues and voting properly, it’s a lack of faith and moral courage to make the right kind of stand.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] They really don’t do much of anything there except put in some time, and they have a degree. After all, what point is there to doing any studying, even if there were some subjects they could study, if there is no compulsion? You have what you want, as it were, at the point of a gun, although you don’t even have to have the gun. You’re going to be accepted because this is mandatory. Now in some states in the East the order from boards of education to teachers is, you will under no circumstances flunk a black student. The reaction now is that so many of the black students know it, that some of them don’t even bother, grade school students, to show up for class. They’re going to be passed, they’ve got their name on the roll at the beginning of the year, they’re going to be passed. So why bother to appear? And of course this has upset a great many black parents, and in Harlem today they have started some store front schools to teach their kids.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] To teach them the three R’s.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] The source of the funds is from the alumni, from federal sources, from any and every source where they can raise money. And the trustees are going out to make sure they get that extra half a million dollars a year, which they have guaranteed. If they cut in the budget it won’t be there.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Of course the young revolutionary who heads up the black studies program is making more than fine scholars in the graduate school.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] I wish more would do that.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. As a matter of fact they can grant advanced degrees in some cases in these black studies programs.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] They are guaranteed jobs, as it were, because a certain percentage have to be given jobs, by any corporation. As a matter of fact, what you are now seeing in Aerospace is very interesting, because of the tremendous layoffs. There is an organization of unemployed engineers that started recently in Orange County. And almost immediately they had fifteen thousand members. Many of them will never be re-employed. Why? Because there are orders from the Federal Government to hire blacks. Which they are doing. And because these men represent WASPS, white Anglo Saxon Protestants, they are automatically excluded.

As a matter of fact, I know in one of the Aerospace companies, one of the top men, a very brilliant man, was laid off, and I asked another man who’s quite high up, was it likely, after the first year, when their new contract was going, whether he’d be put back on, and he said no. It just isn’t likely. He said for what they pay a man like that they can hire a black, which they have to, and then they can hire a white graduate, and still have some money left over. So they have to do this on government orders, and besides, it’s an economy move. And they’ll figure maybe the young white they hire will have the ability. You see, what is happening is that you are having the disestablishment of a level of leadership, scientific know-how, in American history and this may have serious affects.

Now, this doesn’t mean that some of these blacks who are hired are not competent. Some of them are. But too many are being hired just because of their color. And you cannot add men like that in plants of a specialized nature, without serious effects.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] No way of knowing, but certainly it’s a city that is decaying.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] It’s a city that is decaying.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Very interesting point.

Well our time is just about up. I’d like to call your attention to a couple of announcements.

First of all, a pair of black rimmed glasses were left at the dinner last night. They were left by the coffee makers. So if you lost your glasses, please see Gloria {?}.

And second, the Chalcedon prayer meeting will be held this Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, October the 23rd, at the home of Jack and Gloria {?}. 1339 Romulis{?} Dr. in Glendale. So if you’re planning to go there and do not know the way, check with the {?} for the way to get there.

Then, this Wednesday the World History seminar, which will be twelve sessions on successive Wednesdays, which I shall teach, will begin at 7:30 at the home of Dick and {?} {?}. At 1216 Hill Dr. in Eagle Rock. A seminar in World History. What have been the basic movements, the motifs, and the directions.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Very good. 7:30. This Wednesday and each successive Wednesday, and the cost will be one dollar per session, or twelve dollars for the entire seminar.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. We will not meet the weeks of Christmas and Thanksgiving. So we, it won’t be quite successive.

Let us 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.