Human Nature in Its Third Estate

Man’s Highest Good

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Christian Reconstruction

Lesson: 12 - 20

Genre: Lecture

Track: 31

Dictation Name: RR131S33

Location/Venue: Parkview Baptist Church

Year: 1960’s - 1970’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] Our text is from Matthew 6, the 33rd verse, and our subject, man’s highest good. Matthew 6:33. Man’s highest good.

But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

One of the ancient problems of philosophy has always been in the area of ethics or morality, what is man’s summum bonum, or, man’s highest good? This problem of the highest good, or supreme good, was once basic to all thinking in ethics or morality. In the last century it has been abandoned because of evolutionary thinking. Philosophers no longer raise the question of summum bonum, to use their phrase. They have dropped it because of the theory of evolution. If evolution is true, then the world is the produce of blind chance and it is simply a miscellaneous collection of things. It is impossible to look to that miscellaneous collection and say there is a purpose to this, or, here is the dominant theme. There can be then, not only no supreme good, but no absolute good of any kind. Only a relative good. What is good for me at this moment? However. Because philosophy has dropped the idea of the supreme or highest good of man, does not mean that the idea has disappeared. It has left philosophy, they no longer talk about it, but it has gone to politics and to sociology.

What Marxism offers is its idea of what is man’s highest good. And all of Marxist theory deals with this question. The highest good of man. Fabian socialist theory, Deweyism in education, and in various other fields. This philosophy, which has been formally dropped from ethics, has reappeared in other forms. So the problem has not disappeared. It is very much with us. And we are surrounded in our day by all kinds of false answers to the question of, what is man’s summum bonum, what is man’s supreme good? What should be the focus, the goal of his life? In paganism, the ancient world, men had answers to this question and it was usually the state. The state was man’s highest good. And our reviving of paganism has once again given us that same answer. Also, paganism, when it became disillusioned with the state, said the individual and his pleasure was the highest good of man’s life. And again we have that revived answer. When Christianity entered onto the scene, it challenged this. And St. Augustine, in his confessions, in which he describes his long and stubborn battle against Christ, his unwillingness to accept Christ, his flight into every kind of philosophy and thought and conduct, to evade the force of the claim of the Gospel upon him, began in the first paragraph of his confessions, by declaring. “Thou hast made us for Thyself. And our hearts are restless ‘til they rest in Thee.” This is one of the most famous sentences in all of philosophy. Augustine declared that God was alone man’s highest good. And man could find no satisfaction anywhere, in anything, except in God. St. Augustine’s thought here, and the theme of his confessions has been expressed also in the experience and in the poetry of Francis Thompson in the greatest single poem in the English language, ‘The Hound of Heaven’.

In which he describes his attempt to find peace, to find good, to find his own supreme good, in something other than God. And how he is relentlessly pursued by God until finally he comes to the same conclusion as Augustine. Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless ‘til they rest in Thee.

A theologian, Herman Bavinck, in his book ‘A Reasonable Faith’, describes the problem of man’s highest good in terms of Augustine’s phrase. And says, and I quote, “The conclusion therefore is that of Augustine. Who said that the heart of man was created for God and that it cannot find rest unless it rests in its Father’s heart. Hence, all men are really seeking after God as Augustine also declared, but they do not all seek Him in the right way nor at the right place. They seek Him down below and He is above, they seek Him on the earth and He is in Heaven. They seek Him afar and He is nearby. They seek Him in money, in property, in fame and power and in passion. And He is to be found in the high and the holy places, and with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit. But they do seek Him, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him. They seek Him and at the same time they flee from Him. They have no interest in the knowledge of His ways, and yet they cannot do with Him. They feel themselves attracted to God and at the same time repelled by Him. In this, as Pascal so profoundly put it out, consists the greatness and the miserableness of man. He longs for truth, and is false by nature. He yearns for rest, and throws himself from one diversion upon another. He pants for a permanent and eternal bliss, and seizes the pleasures of a moment. He seeks for God and looses himself in the creature, he is a born son of the house and he feeds on the husks of the swine in a strange land. He forsakes the fountain of living waters and hews out broken cisterns that can hold no water. He is as a hungry man who dreams that he is eating, and when he awakes, finds that his soul is empty. And he is like a thirsty man who dreams that he is drinking, and when he wakes, finds that he is faint and that his soul has appetite.” Unquote.

Bavinck’s statement is a very beautiful one. But let us ask the question that many unbelievers ask. Can we say that the modern man, or primitive man, feels this way? Do they? They seem to be looking in all the wrong places, and indeed they are, by virtue of sin. They want God, but not as God. They want Him as something of their own creating, they seek after God in everything but His Word. And as it is, they make up everything, whether it be the state, or sex, or pleasure, one thing or another, a substitute for God. And the only result is, that instead of satisfying, it creates a more and more insatiable appetite. Their very gratification increases their insatiability. the more they get of that which they dreamed after as their substitute for God, the less they are satisfied with it, and the more insatiable they are.

William Blake, in an engraving of his, in a revolutionary poem he wrote, portrays a man who has accomplished that which he dreams of. He has pitched a ladder up against the moon, and now he can climb to the moon, and he begins. But even as he does so, instead of saying I have, I have, he cries out, I want, I want. There is no rest in gratification for those who reject God. What was yesterday their hope of paradise becomes, when they gain it, the hell of today. Because man, even as he rejects God, still can be content with nothing less than God.

And when the humanist makes man his god, his next step is then to seek to kill his god-man. And so it is that the humanists of today who have most deified men are now saying that we have to control man absolutely and put electrodes in his brain for his own good. They plan his murder, whom they have made god.

But when we say that God is man’s highest good, we have to be more specific. Because if we simply say God, we can go astray. And this is what happened in the Middle Ages.

The scholastics said that man must seek God as his highest good, and they sought God in mystical visions, in experience. When indeed this only led them further and further away from God. The Reformation as against scholasticism, which declared the vision of God as man’s highest good, said no. Emphatically, the Reformers declared, our Lord has declared that seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. The kingdom of God is man’s highest good. Man’s conception, man’s idea of the highest good, cannot come from man. Even in the Garden of Eden, man had to be instructed by God. Man’s own word has never been sufficient for man. All the more in the state of the Fall, man’s fallen consciousness is that much more less trust worthy. The idea of the highest good therefore must come from God and His Word. And in regeneration a man submits himself to the Word of God. The kingdom of God therefore is declared by our Savior to be that which we must seek first, and our Lord declares that He came preaching the kingdom.

Now the kingdom of God means the realized program of God for man. Man must realize himself as God’s vicegerent, his steward, his vice-king in history. And this means that he has a tremendous task. A task that covers many, many areas of life. In the Garden of Eden man was created and set in a paradise to exercise dominion under God, as God’s vicegerent. To be God’s priest, prophet and king. To be as king to exercise rule over the world. To be His priest to interpret all things in terms of God, and to represent the earth and man to God. And to be God’s prophet to speak the word of God to all men.

And to declare the Word of God concerning all things. This was, very clearly, the task of man in the Garden of Eden. Now, of course, as man seeks to serve the kingdom of God and to seek first the kingdom of God, he has an additional task because man being fallen, first and foremost in seeking the kingdom must come the saving of souls. Man being fallen must be summoned to submit to God and to find his salvation in the atoning work of Jesus Christ. Then having brought men to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, man must bring every area of thought, every are of life, every kind of institution, into captivity to Jesus Christ. And so he has a work of conquest. To go out and to conquer and to bring one area after another into subjection to Jesus Christ. And so there must be a conquest of people, their redemption, a conquest of every sphere of life, their subjection to Jesus Christ, and then, even more.

There must be a task of destruction. Destroying evil. Now this is a very significant fact. Of all the religions in the world, there isn’t a one that talks about destroying evil. Not a one that speaks about the destruction of evil in the world. All of them in effect teach you how to grin and bear it. How to live with. How to accept it in yourself and in the world at large. But only our faith teaches us that first of all, through our redemption, our Lord works to uproot the principle of evil in our hearts.

And our progressive sanctification is the destruction of evil in ourselves. And St. Paul speaks of mortifying the flesh, that is, the old human nature. To mortify means literally to kill. We have the root mort in mortuary. And so we have a task of killing the old Adam in us when we are redeemed and we have the task of destroying, killing evil all over the world. And this is why, that Christianity, wherever it goes, has become intolerant of evil when it is true to the Word of God.

The attitude of the world is, let it alone. Tolerate it. Why seek to abolish it or to destroy it? Let alone, of all the religions that have entered into the life of man, our faith not only regenerates man and uproots evil from his heart, but then works to uproot evil from out of every area of life. This goal is fully realized in the Second Coming, when the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. But we are told that it must be our goal even now, as far as we are able, to destroy evil in ourselves and around us.

But this is not all. Our faith is unlike all other faiths in that, not only does regenerate man, and sanctify him, and work to destroy evil, but quite naturally in view of these things, it gives us hope.

We shall deal in a few weeks with the fact of hope. Hope is a central aspect of our faith. Again it is unique to our faith because no other religion offers hope. Every other religion only offers a grin and bear it attitude, at best, if not total pessimism and a resignation and a readiness to die in the face of the lack of hope. But not only are we told we have a lively hope in Jesus Christ, but in terms of that hope, even in tribulation we are told rejoice, and again I say unto you, rejoice. Because ours is a hope that is not merely a futile wish, but a certainty. A living hope.

Then it means also applying the Law as a means of recognizing and setting forth God’s kingdom in every area of life. So that, when we are told seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, it means our regeneration. It means bringing every area of life and thought into subjection to Jesus Christ as King and Lord, by means of the Law. It means destroying evil in ourselves and in the world round about us. And it means living in terms of a lively hope in Jesus Christ. When man deflects his heart from this faith and from this purpose, he is then possessed by a restlessness and an absence of peace. The modern scientific socialist state, the great community, is now man’s highest good. Or else, with others, the individual and his pleasure. And the modern dream of the highest good is destroying, not saving, man. And we live today in a generation when men are plunging to their own destruction and feel no hope about the future. One historian has commented that men have, in the past, been disillusioned about politics, but not about government. They have said the politicians we have are rascals, but a good set of politicians will save us. And he said now men are disillusioned everywhere, with both politicians and the government. They have no hope. All of their dreams of the highest good, to be achieved humanistically, are destroying their hope, and they are destroying man. But our Lord said as men concern themselves with the highest good in various ways, if God so clotheth the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall He not much more clothe you, oh ye of little faith? Therefore take no thought, saying what shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or wherewithal shall we be clothed? For after all these things do the Gentiles seek. For your Heavenly Father knowest that ye have need of all these things.

But seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you.

Now there are those, as they face this passage, and I reserved the reading of the rest of it until now, to bring out the force of it, that what our Lord is saying is that we should be indifferent entirely to the things of material concern, clothing, eating, housing and so on. And our Lord is saying these things don’t matter. Not at all. He is saying seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, regeneration. Bringing every area of thought and life into captivity to Christ through His Law. The destruction of evil, living in hope. And what will this mean? Because you sought first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, His law order, His saving grace, His power working in and through you will then give you an order, a society, in which you will have food and clothing and raiment, housing, all these things which the Gentiles seek apart from God and cannot realize, or having gained, have no peace. The way to seek them is through these things that make up the kingdom of God.

And so the vision of the kingdom of God as it is given to us over and over again in Scripture, is everyman under his vine and fig tree. And no man saying to his neighbor, come, and let me teach you the Word of the Lord, for all men shall know Him. That is the vision. He is not saying that these things are unimportant. He is saying that only when we aim at the highest good, do all these lesser goods become realized. When we aim at the lesser goods we create a world in which sin reigns. In which man tears at man, in which man destroy everything and gains nothing. But seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things, which our Lord feels are important in their place, shall be added unto you. Not maybe, but they shall be.

Because God regards them as good. But they are goods that are only realized when we seek the highest good, the kingdom of God and His righteousness. The absolute rule of God in our hearts and lives and in our world.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient to the day is the evil there. When you have an order that is under God and His Law, when men are regenerated, it will be an order which takes care of tomorrow. Just take care of the problems of today, the basic outlines are all provided for by God’ regenerating power through His people, and through His law order. Thus we are given a glorious picture of life when we seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, for it is then that all these things that the Gentiles seek, and which our heavenly Father knows that we have need of, shall be added unto us.

Let us pray. Almighty God our Heavenly Father, who of Thy grace and mercy has called us to be Thy people and has given us so glorious a Word to be a lamp unto our feet and a light upon the way. We thank Thee and we praise Thee that we are Thine. Use us O Lord, enlighten us, make us effectual each in our several places, unto the end that the kingdoms of this world might become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ. In Jesus name, Amen.

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

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. The question is as to the right mode of baptism. As it is taught in Scripture. Now, the argument that is usually given by Baptists is that the word baptisto means to immerse. And the answer is that, originally, it did have that meaning. The word, however, had changed its meaning over the centuries, as words do. The word farmer, as I pointed out before, in English once meant tax-collector. But when we say farmer now, we do not mean tax collector. The word silly once meant beloved. It doesn’t mean beloved now.

So, the word baptisto, which originally meant, to immerse, did not, when the New Testament was written, mean immerse. It meant sprinkling, aspersion{?}, or immersion. It had a various use.

The only reference to the mode of baptism in Scripture is in Ezekiel 36:25, when it speaks of the new covenant and declares, then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean from all your filthiness, and from all your idols will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put with in you. And I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh and I will give you an heart of flesh.

So the mark of the new covenant there, baptism, is spoken of as sprinkling, very definitely.

In the New Testament, when we meet with it in John the Baptist, it was neither sprinkling nor immersion, but aspersion, that is, it was wading out into the Jordan River, about ankle deep, and then water being poured over the head. In all the early pictures we have from the catacombs and elsewhere, concerning baptism, show it as aspersion. Which nobody practices nowadays, so if you’re going to say the method used then is the only binding one, you’d have to say it was wrong. Now it is not the form of baptism that is the important thing. It is the meaning of the rite of baptism.

So that it would be possible to say that the form is not as important as the fact that it is done. And in the Reformed tradition, it will be accepted if it is by aspersion, immersion, or sprinkling, as long as it is done in the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. The chief point of division, really, between the Baptists and the other churches is with respect to infant baptism. And the question there is, of course, is it a baptism only of those who make a profession of faith, or of those who are in the covenant? And the position that we hold is that, because baptism is that rite which succeeds circumcision, which was performed on children as the mark of the covenant on the 8th day, so baptism is similarly the mark of the covenant, means covenant membership outwardly, which is confirmed when the child reaches a more mature age, by their profession. And the fact of circumcision makes clear that the covenant was one which included the children of believers. This was so clearly true that in the early Church, as I pointed out when we were studying the law, it became necessary to have a special Synod to discuss the question, can we baptize children before the 8th day? Since they baptized them normally on the 8th day. And since many children died within a day or two after birth, parents were troubled about their status with respect to the covenant. And so to deal with this problem, first they refused to, they took the Old Testament analogy so strictly, and later they permitted baptism earlier than the 8th day.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. Right. A very good question. How does christening relate to baptism? Christening, originally, was a part of the baptism service, and is properly so. It was the naming of the child, originally, because so often the parents were pagan. They had a different name than their Christian name. So a child would very often have a family name and a given name in terms of his pagan background, and then a Christian name. This was still true to an extent among the American Indians when I was among them. The child would have a Indian name which you couldn’t very well use as a Christian name. I recall one sweet little baby girl who passed away, whose Indian name was {?}. Little Hummingbird. Now that would be a very difficult name to use in English, and I’ve forgotten what her English name was when she was christened, but it was a Bible name, you see. So the christening was a part of the service, and it gave the child a Christian name.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] I don’t think so. I think it stems back to the fact that originally there were these different names of people, because of their cultural background. There’s a lot more to it, but that was one very important aspect.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] I can’t hear you.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. Yes. And you see, it used to be commonplace for people to have more than one name because they spoke more than one language, as well. Consider the fact that in the Bible times, in the New Testament times, Thomas also had the name Didymus.

People would sometimes, in New Testament times, have three names. A Hebrew or Aramaic name, a Greek name, and a Latin name, you see. So that this was not unusual. And in some parts of the world today, where people grow up bilingual and tri-lingual, this is still true. People will have more than one name. So, in terms of, say, in such a culture if you were being christened, you select a particular name and this is your Christian name then.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Before God, when we are saved, we are innocent. We are cleansed of all guilt. All sin. So we have a judicial innocence. In other words, our record is clean. It remains clean with God. But Christ knows that we are not perfectly sanctified in this life. So that he continually intercedes for us, and his atoning blood covers all our sins. So that we are in principal innocent before God on our regeneration, but in reality we are still living in the practice of sin, but these are being mortified now by the new man in us. So, yes. So you see, one is a legal status, and the other is the fact. So our relationship to Christ does not see us in our innocence, he sees us as sinning saints. But God the Father only sees us covered through the blood of Jesus Christ, as our judge.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Definitely not. Children are born in sin. In the state of depravity. They are in the covenant, but being in the covenant does not mean that they are innocent. Rather, they have to be brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, and accept Christ, be confirmed in the faith of their fathers, and mortify the old Adam in themselves.

But we cannot speak of children as being born in innocence. That idea is a product of the enlightenment and of humanism. John Locke, with his idea that the child is born with a clean slate, as it were, and it’s education that can mold him either for good or evil, and he said, the Church molds him into evil, it makes him think he’s a sinner and therefore he sins. So we’ll educate him into believing he’s innocent, and we can mold him whichever way, and he will be innocent. That is one of the most dangerous, the most vicious myths that has been propagated by anti-Christian forces. Because if the child is innocence at birth, he has no need of a Savior.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] What?

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] No, Freud as a humanist in a sense spelled the death knell of the old humanistic faith. Because what he set out to prove was that the humanistic idea, he was one of the great humanists and a great figure of humanism, and he produced a particularly ugly picture of man. Not the Christian picture of man as a sinner, but a picture of man as sinner from a humanistic perspective that is a very ugly one. So the basic faith of humanism has been undercut. The tragic fact is that this faith which the humanists themselves more or less discarded, too many liberal Christian have picked up. They’re feeding on the husks of humanism.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] I can’t quite hear you. I’ve got a cold and it’s affected my ears.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] The doctrine of innocence would not apply to what?

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Oh, yes. Only those how are regenerated by the atoning work of Jesus Christ are innocent before God.

And it’s a legal innocence. We are not innocent in an actual sense. You see. It is in a legal sense. This is not a good comparison, but in a sense it portrays it. A man may have committed a number of crimes out here, but he is innocent before the court because he’s never been caught and arrested. Well in a sense, our situation is an {?} under God, in that while we are still sinners, we are redeemed sinners, and while we are before the court, there has been restitution made by Jesus Christ. So that we have a legal status of innocence, and Christ meanwhile is working in our hearts to cleanse us of the works of the remnants of the old Adam, so that in eternity he will present us faultless and innocent before God.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] If they despise Trinitarianism, they’re despising Scripture, and they are despising Christ. Yes. A Christian is a Trinitarian. In fact, the Old Testament believers were Trinitarian’s. Judaism was Trinitarian until the end of the first century. This is why, in the New Testament, wherever you read in the book of Acts, or in the epistles, the preaching and the writing of the apostles, you find them appealing to the Old Testament. Because all they had to do to prove all the prophesies, to prove everything that our Lord taught, was the Old Testament. Well, you’ve always believed the Old Testament, this is what it teaches. Now after the fall of Jerusalem, beginning in the second century, the rabbinic leaders began to destroy and to rewrite all their interpretations of Scripture. To make them Unitarian. Because Christ so obviously fitted the Trinitarian requirements of their Old Testament teaching. And this is why very large segments of all of Judea and of {?} of the day were converted. Hundreds of thousands of Jews in the first century, were converted and were the backbone of the early Church. And to prevent this from continuing, they began frantically to change their entire faith, so that the Judaism of the second century on, is not the Old Testament faith, nor even the defective Pharisaic Judaism of the first century, which was still Trinitarian.

Yes.

[Audience]….{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. Well, they didn’t get around to that ‘til our day. And now, both the newest Jewish translation, and this didn’t happen until the last few years, and the newest modernist version speak of let us make man in our image as simply the plural of majesty. Just as a king says we. But that has no basis in antiquity. There was no such thing as a plural of majesty in antiquity. That’s modern. In antiquity a monarch or an emperor always said I. So, they’re just deliberately falsifying the Scriptures there.

Well our time is up. I’d like to remind you of our history class this Wednesday at 1216 Hill Dr. in Eagle Rock. And of the {?} seminar on November the 13th, Saturday.

Let us bow our heads for the benediction. And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, Amen.