Human Nature In Its Third Estate

Our Advocate

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Doctrinal Studies

Lesson: 11-20

Genre: Speech

Track: 31

Dictation Name: RR131R32

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s - 1970’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] Our Scripture is from the 1st epistle of John. The first chapter, verse 8, through the second chapter, the 5th verse. Our advocate.

1st John 1:8 - 2:5.

“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments. He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoso keepeth his word, in him verily is the love of God perfected: hereby know we that we are in him. “

A week ago, I spoke several times to college and university students in another part of the state. And at one of these meetings one of the students, who did not believe in God, said with respect to the universe, that yes, there are evidences of order and of design and pattern, but what if all of this has behind it an ultimate perversity? And it’s all an illusion. Perhaps a deliberate illusion? And that there is nothing to life except mockery and an ultimate twist of destruction. I told him that his answer presupposed that there was so absolute a perversity in the universe that the only logical step for him was suicide.

Because to assume that behind all the order, behind everything, there stood a perverse spirit, or being, whose intention was to mock everything he had created, involved not only so staggering a disbelief in any validity in life, but also an unwillingness, really, to live.

This of course is precisely where man’s hope has always been in every age, that instead of an ultimate perversity there is an ultimate justice, an ultimate court of justice. That man always has an appeal. In every era of civilization, when men have lost faith in an absolute god and his absolute justice, and they have seen no justice but that which comes from men, men have lost the will to live.

Recently I read a book by McFall{?}, who is one of the experts on the history of Chicago in the twenties. He has written a number of things on the period. And he gives us a very ugly picture of studied lawlessness, murder and contempt of law and order, under the Capone’s. The key to their power was that they had control of the law. Of the police, and of the courts. And as a result Capone and his henchmen could walk in and out of a court, knowing that the judge was their henchmen and that the good citizen was bound to be a loser against them. The courts, in other words, had become instruments of oppression. Instead of being a terror to evildoers, as God requires, the courts then were a terror to the godly in Chicago.

Our Scripture speaks of Christ as our advocate. Advocate is an old-fashioned word for lawyer. It’s a very remarkable, a very beautiful word, as we shall see. John uses it deliberately. He speaks of Christ as our lawyer before the court of Almighty God the Supreme Judge.

And therefore the certainty of our cause. First of all, John says, the idea of the sinlessness of believers is a heresy. For if we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. Thus, before the court of Almighty God we are all guilty. But, although the sin in us is obvious, it does not make fellowship with God impossible. As a matter of fact, if we say we have not sin, we make Him a liar and His Word is not in us, and there is no possibility of communion with God. Thus the ground of our fellowship with God is precisely that we know ourselves to be sinners. But sinners who stand before his court in the atoning work of Christ. Only then do we stand at all. We are to avoid sin. But, if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father. Jesus Christ the Righteous. And he is the propitiation for our sins.

Now, our advocate does not plead our innocence, he acknowledges our guilt, John says. But he offers his vicarious sacrifice as ground for our {?}. We know that he is our advocate, he goes on to say, if we keep his commandments. Keeping his commandments means being vigilant, means being watchful to discover and to observe them strictly. To grow in our observance. We are thus on the side of the law even as sinners.

Now in the third chapter, the fourth verse, St. John goes on to define precisely what transgression of the law means. Whosoever committeth sin transgresses also the law. For sin is the transgression of the law.

More literally what he is saying, whosoever persists and continues practicing sin, because the verb there has a particular tense in the Greek which means the persistent, continuing, habitual practice of sin, transgresses also the law. The word rendered as transgression is anomia, which means without law. Lawless. Thus there is a distinction between sin and sin. Between sin, hamartia, which is literally, missing the mark, and sin as anomia, which means lawlessness.

We are not guilty of anomia as believers in Christ. We are guilty of hamartia. We are practicing the law, but we have our sins, that is our shortcomings. We don’t meet the full requirement of God. But once we are in Christ we are no longer guilty of anomia, lawlessness and anti-law attitude. So that our sins are missing the mark, it’s falling short of the requirement, but it is an attempt to meet the requirement. And thus, because we are trying to meet the requirement, in our sins we have an attorney for the defense. Jesus Christ our advocate.

The word translated as advocate is parakletos. We have in the English in the word paraclete. Which is often used as another name for the Holy Spirit. The word is a very, very important one. And it tells us a great deal of what a lawyer is, in terms of Scripture, in terms of the historical meaning of the word. Advocate, parakletos, in the Greek, literally means what we mean by lawyer, and at one and the same time, comforter.

Thus, when our Lord says at the Last Supper that I will not leave you alone, or comfortless, I will send a comforter, the word can also be translated as a lawyer. It’s the same word. It has both meanings. And it is rendered alternately in Scripture as comforter and advocate.

Now this tells us a great deal both about Christ and about the true function, in terms of Scripture, of a lawyer, an advocate. He is the one who in relationship to the law and the court, is our defender and our comforter, who puts us in a position where in time of trouble we have comfort. We have a defense. We have an assurance of security. And when Jesus Christ is called our advocate, he is then our attorney for the defense, who’s perfect in his defense. And our comforter, who is perfect in his comfort. So that as we face the Supreme Court of Almighty God, we have one who is perfect in his comfort, perfect in his defense, and who is our propitiation, the means whereby our sin is covered, expiated, and remitted.

In terms therefore of the doctrine of man, the doctrine of Christ as our advocate, our attorney for the defense and our comforter, is very important. It means that our favorable standing before the Supreme Court of Almighty God is predetermined. That as Christians we have a perfect, a certain, an absolutely assured position. The result is not a freedom to sin but from sin. Because our advocate is also our regenerating, cleansing power in us, the new man in us.

We thus have a predetermined release, a concomitant freedom. And by God’s renewing grace a concomitant power. The man who pleads guilty in a human court gets a sentence. But the man who pleads guilty in God’s court has release and the power to conquer in His Name. Because our advocate, our comforter, is also the one who renews us and gives us power to overcome that sin or shortcoming within us. The Christian therefore is the only free man. The Christian alone can undertake and sustain the true reconciliation of society. Because he alone has the freedom and power to accomplish that task. He alone knows himself, knowing himself to be a sinner, knowing himself to be a new man in Christ. And knowing that the regenerating power of God is in him to overcome his sins and shortcomings. He therefore can cope with crime because he knows the roots of it in himself, and he knows the cost.

{?} has said of crime, very aptly, and I quote, “The first and primary cause is spiritual. It is the expression of a wrong heart condition. According to Matthew 15:16-20 (which we dealt with a few weeks ago) nothing short of a radical change of heart wrought by the spirit of Christ Jesus in the persons involved will meet this need. But we are told it is not in the province of the state to deal with morals. But we shall find out before we solve this problem that this is a most fundamental issue. When we get ready to equate crime and sin as the same, and deal with this matter of sin and not just sickness, we’ll solve the problem.” Unquote.

A few weeks ago we dealt with that passage to which {?} referred, when we studied our renewing nature. And you will recall that at that time I dealt with the fact of the societies that Christians established to deal with every kind of problem in their day.

The sermon that I quoted from the Reverend Elias Cornelius before the Salem Society, which was dealing with the problem of immigrants in their community, was dated 1824. A decade later, and many more immigrants later, Alexis de Tocqueville, a French scholar and nobleman, visited America. The tide of immigration was greater. Many of these immigrants, as I indicated, were the dregs of Europe being put on board ship and shipped to the United States, now that it was an independent country, to make it a dumping ground. And Tocqueville was alarmed by what he saw in the cities. And I quote. “The United States have no metropolis, but they already contain several very large cities. Philadelphia reckoned 161,000 inhabitants, in New York, 202,00, in the year 1830, the most recent census. The lower orders which inhabit these cities constitute a rabble even more formidable than the populace of European towns. They consist of freed blacks in the first place, who are condemned by the laws and by public opinion to a hereditary state of misery and degradation. (let me state parenthetically here, these freed blacks would be freed by southern owners and they would head North, and they became a major problem, many of them in the North, because they became leaders in criminal syndicates. And they would, many of them, go to the docks and wait for the ships to land, and watch for pregnant women who were unaccompanied by men. These would be, very often, girls from very good families in England, Germany, or France, who were a disgrace to their families because they were pregnant out of wedlock, and they were put on board ship and shipped to America and forgotten. And of course they would be picked up by these ex-slaves and made into prostitutes very quickly) They also contain a multitude of Europeans who have been driven to the shores of the new world by their misfortunes or their misconduct.

And these men inoculate the United States with all our vices without bringing with them any of those interests which counteract their baneful influence. As inhabitants of a country where they have no civil rights they are ready to turn all the passions which agitate the community to their own advantage. Thus, within the last few months serious riots have broken out in Philadelphia and in New York. (One can add parenthetically that riots were a major threat to the life of the cities. And during the Civil War of course the draft riots lasted a week to ten days and almost destroyed New York. It was completely out of hand, block after block being burned down and the city in the hands of the mobs.) Disturbances of this kind are unknown in the rest of the country, which is no wise alarmed by them, because the population of the cities has herewith to exercised neither power nor influence over the rural districts. Nevertheless I look upon the size upon certain American cities and especially on the nature of their population, as a real danger which threatens the future security of the democratic republics of the new world. And I venture to predict that they will perish from this circumstance unless the government succeed in creating an armed force, which while it remains under the control of the majority of the nation, will be independent of the town population and able to repress its excessives.”

Now here the comment of a very astute political observer.

All the Eastern cities, to places as small as Salem, then 78,000, were being overwhelmed by this tide of immigration. And it was not until the end of the century that we passed laws that restricted immigration to people of good character. Our standing army, in that part of our history, except during time of war, was usually down to 100 or 200 men. Just a handful of officers to utilize a militia when it would be called. And as a result, because of the utter lawlessness in many of these cities, Tocqueville predicted that the country would perish, unless a large standing army were created to patrol the cities. This was not done.

And the country did not perish. Why? Because of the work of these Christian societies, establishing Christian schools, instruction for immigrant women, for men, on the job training for immigrant men, English lesson, and so on, so that these people were, within two generations, made into god-fearing, law abiding citizens who were a credit to their communities. In other words, the problem of crime was dealt with from the standpoint of Scripture. The renewing power of Christ, and Christ is their advocate before God the Father. The consequence was a change in the character of the country.

The Christian man sees the relationship of things because he is not blinded by sin. And as a result he is able, through Christ as his advocate, not only to face his own problems, his sins and his shortcomings, but able to cope with those in world round about him. Because he has an omnipotent advocate and comforter. He is a free man and a powerful man. And because he knows the source for the problems of his age he is able to minister to the problems of his day. Just as a century and a half ago a problem in the United States which a foreign observer, who was one among many, felt would mean the end of the republic in revolution, meant instead a new lease on life and great power. And a population with which to people the continent. So today, as we face again a revolutionary temper and a rising tide of crime, we who have Christ as our advocate have the key to the problems of our day. He alone can answer our needs and the needs of all men.

Let us pray. Almighty God who of Thy grace and mercy has called us to be Thy people and given us Jesus Christ as our attorney for the defense, our advocate and our comforter, we give thanks unto Thee that we are free men in Him. And covered by Thy grace and renewed by Thy Spirit. Use us Almighty God to proclaim Thy saving power, the advocacy of Jesus Christ, his comfort and his power, to an age that again is in dire need and precarious straits and losing heart as it faces its problems. We thank Thee our God that Thou art our sufficiency, and we wait on Thee. In Jesus name, Amen.

Are there any questions now with respect to our lesson? Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] I can’t hear.. Then how did it get started what?

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. A good question. The idea that we need the advocacy of priests and saints comes directly out of Pharisee-ism. This was the belief of the Pharisees. The Pharisees within Judaism had made themselves the mediators between God and man. You will recall in the book of Acts we are told that many of these Pharisees did become members of the Church. Now the point at which the Pharisees were attracted to the Church was the doctrine of the Resurrection. The Sadducees disbelieved in the Resurrection and they had gained power over the nation.

They ruled the politics of the country as well as the religion. As a result, because the Sadducees in part ridiculed the early Church for its belief in the doctrine of the resurrection of all believers, the Pharisees said, oh, we believe in the resurrection, and they aligned themselves in many cases with the Church. They became a problem. The Judaisers{?} who were continually making trouble for Paul were Pharisees. Who had a thin veneer of Christianity, who did not really see Christ as a Savior and saw the priestly caste, the Pharisees, as the Savior. As a result what you have today in all such theologies which hold that a priest is the mediator, as it were, or the church is, is simply a continuation of Pharisee-ism.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Could you repeat that?

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Well, the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers is of course a biblical doctrine. We are priests, or under priests in Christ, who is our great High Priest. Therefore when we pray we always pray, in Jesus name, or in the name of our Lord. Because we have no priesthood apart from him. Now, there are various cults that have sought an independent priesthood. Which are really not Christian. Mormonism is a classical example of an attempt to establish a priesthood which is really independent of Christ. Which claims to precede Christ, as it were.

And paganism has always had a priesthood which claims to control God, as it were, and the word control I use advisedly. Because paganism in its idea of god has always been humanistic. God is some kind of power nature which you manipulate. And the priestly class is the manipulator thereof. They do not have a conception of an absolute god.

So you do have this kind of priesthood in many of the cults today. And sometimes there’s not even a concept or the word god used in association with it.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. Yes. A good question. Not everybody was converted in New York City or in Salem or in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, all these eastern seaboard communities. But basically, so extensive a change was made and so many were won for Christ in these communities, that the forces of law and order prevailed in every part of the community so that even those elements who were lawless either conformed or moved westward. And of course they were pursued westward continually. You get a lot in the movies and television about the wild west and the wild towns in the west where there was no law and so on. Dodge City, Tombstone and so on. A very interesting fact which they always forget is that these wild towns were wild only for two or three years usually, occasionally for about five to ten years. And that was rare. They had a short history. A very short history. Because they would be moving westward to escape the law. But the law and the influence of Christians would catch up with them and they would continue to move west. Well, then they concentrated themselves in San Francisco, and San Francisco had a tremendous influx of the Sidney {?}, in other words, the hoodlums from Australia. The gold rush in Alaska drained some of them off there, but by Word War 1 they had been pretty well wiped out across the country, and after that you had a new tide of lawlessness coming, and unbelief and so on.

So that you had the creation of a new problem as children, grandchildren of law abiding families began to get lawless. So the picture of the lawless west is a very deceptive one. It takes something that happened on the frontier, on the edge of the frontier, for a brief period of time, but always had to keep moving, always running away. So there was a tremendous impetus of reform that began about 1795 in the days of Timothy Dwight that was going full force to 1850, but began to wane thereafter to World War 1.

Now of course I feel that we are on the threshold of such a tremendous wave of reform again. And that the Christian school movement is in the forefront of this.

Any other questions? Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. A very good question. Now, Salem was settled by Puritans very, very early in the history of New England, in the sixteen hundreds. But the very interesting thing about New England and of course the rest of the country, was this. Within twenty years, of course, New England became very prosperous. Their difficult years were in the 1620’s and the very early 1630‘s. One of the ways whereby they became prosperous, because these were town folk who didn’t know anything about farming, they were white collar workers, and here they were in a wilderness. With no know how. So they did not know how to build a house, and the first shelters they built were not much more than horse corrals with a roof thrown over them. And this is how they lived in the very earliest years. So that their life was very difficult the first five, ten years. But they broke drastically with many of the European practices, and one of them was taxation.

Which would be a good point for our present administration to study. Because what they did, for example, was to realize, well, off the coast of New England we have tremendous fishing. There are people coming from England and France in boats to fish and go all the way back there. Why don’t we fish it? And why don’t we have ships going to China and to India and bringing back things here to Europe? So, they said, and they passed a law to the effect that there would be an immunity from any tax for a given number of years to anyone who built a ship and operated it successfully. Well of course there were very real promises for prosperity there, so immediately everybody tried building ships. And they sent for people from Europe who could give them a hand in that. For then five or ten years they were on the seas, all over the world. And of course you had the beginning of the command of all the world by Yankee traders. And Yankee ship builders being the best ship builders in the world. Well this meant by 1635 to 40’s, instead of doing and being a place for a lot of religious freaks who had left England because they were such fanatics about the Bible, a lot of people were coming over whose attitude was it’s a good place to make a living. A lot of these people were very thoroughly pagan in their beliefs. And immediately, when you had the civil war in England, between Charles the First’s forces and Cromwell’s, many of these pagan elements began to make themselves quite vocal. This meant the revival of ancient fertility cult practices and sexual worship and so on. Incidentally, the most recent book by a scholar who is by no means Christian, writing on the Salem witchcraft trials, says that they were right. These people were practicing a number of things which were clearly against the law. These people were definitely subversive of the law and order of the community.

So what you had was this continual immigration. After 1640’s the Pilgrims, the Puritans, were continually troubled by the fact of relatives and fellow Englishmen coming from England, who were hostile to their faith. And when you go to the court records you find that suddenly you are dealing with crimes that they didn’t have before. But, they were able to cope with the situation, they had very strict laws on the requirements for attendance to church, the requirements for Christian education of children and so on, and they taught, by sheer requirement, these people who came over, a different kind of life. So they had the situation in hand. Now they had a problem again with the French and Indian war. Because the British brought over troops. And Timothy Dwight who I quoted tells us a great deal about the effect of those troops on the colonies in New England. Because these troops were very ugly characters, they were drafted by force, press gangs drafting them, out of the slums of London and Liverpool and elsewhere. And to unleash these people on a community was devastating. And especially when the men folk were away because they were fighting the French and Indians on the frontier. So you had a period during the French and Indian war, in the middle of the 18th century, where you had a great deal of moral depravity unleashed on the colonies, and it took a decade or two to bring things back in line.

But it’s an interesting story that traced all these immigrations. Now some of these people who came over, for example, were often of very superior stuff. For example, those who followed the Puritans. But they were, while genetically of superior stuff, morally of a very depraved character. So America represents one successive wave of reform after another. Whereby the basic Puritan character of the country was preserved.

And Puritanism moved south, that is a story that is rarely been written. About the time of the War of Independence, Puritanism was moving southward and conquering the south. So that by the time of Civil War, the stronghold of Puritanism and the leading Puritan thinkers of that day were in the south. Stonewall Jackson’s Puritanism is very well known, and his chaplain, Dabney, was a tremendous thinker. One of the great thinkers of our country, and it’s too bad that when they reproduced recently his collective work, they reproduced the first two volumes but not the third volume, which has some tremendous things in it on politics and economics. And the reason they did was that he had some unkind things to say about the character of negroes and they couldn’t reproduce that.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. Now the Puritans are not Presbyterian. You can’t… yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. This was the problem in England, not in this country. In England the attempt of the Presbyterians and the, we would say, the Episcopalians, or Anglicans, was that both wanted an established church which would dominate the country and permit no other religious sect. This they were at one in wanting. And it was a struggle between the Presbyterian party and the Anglo-Catholic party, within the Church of England, which would dominate. Now the Anglo-Catholic party was predominantly in those days, pro-Rome. And under Charles the First and Arch Bishop {?} they were making secret moves in that direction. So it was a struggle between the Calvinists, you might say, and the Tomists{?} and Roman Catholics for control of the established Church of England. They both lost. First, when Charles the Second came back, he kicked out the Presbyterians, using the others as his help in so doing, and then having got rid of the Presbyterian party in 1662, a few years later he got rid of the Anglo-Catholics.

And he just created a church of political hacks for a few generations. Which had very few rectors who actually carried on the services. Most of them were political appointees who hung around the court. So the church was virtually killed for quite awhile. Now, the Puritans were Calvinists. Sometimes they were Presbyterians, sometimes they were Anglicans. More and more, especially those in this country, were congregational. And sometimes they were Baptists.