Human Nature in Its Third Estate

Peace

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Christian Reconstruction

Lesson: 14 - 20

Genre: Lecture

Track: 32

Dictation Name: RR131T35

Location/Venue: Parkview Baptist Church

Year: 1960’s - 1970’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] One thing have I desired of the Lord that will I seek after, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life. To behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in His temple. Wait on the Lord, be of good courage and He shall strengthen thine heart. Wait I say on the Lord.

Let us pray. Almighty God our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto Thee for the blessings of the week past, the certainty of Thy government, the blessed assurance of Thy grace. And the everlasting arms which are under girding us in all our ways. And so our Father, in this faith we come into Thy presence, to commit ourselves afresh to Thy Word and to Thy Spirit. Speak to us the words that we need. Strenthen us, minister to our every need, bless and prosper us, that we may praise and magnify Thy holy name and serve Thee in all our activities. Bless us to this purpose, in Jesus name, Amen.

Our Scripture lesson is again Romans 5, verses 1-5, and also John 16:33. Our subject, peace. We shall continue this week and next with our analysis of the meaning of Romans 5:1-5, for the doctrine of man and his psychology. The meaning of some of these concepts or ideas that are presented here. And our subject this morning is peace. Romans 5:1-5.

Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ: By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope: And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.

And from the Gospel according to St. John, the 16th chapter, verse 33, the last verse. St. John 16:33.

These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.

War and hatred are chronic in our world, yet men claim to be longing for peace and for a world of love. Inspite of their claims to want peace and love, we must say that their claim is questionable. When men’s actions make for war, we are entitled to doubt whether they are peace loving. When men who profess to be champions of love spit hatred in our faces, we can question their profession of love.

Winston Churchill wrote as a motto for the last volume of his memoirs of World War 2 these words. How the great democracies triumph and so were able to resume the follies which so nearly cost them their life. A very telling motto. They were not fighting for peace, they were fighting to preserve their follies. And men today are not lovers of peace or advocates of love, but of war and hatred. They do not want peace. They simply use the word for a coved up for their crimes.

What is peace? Well, the English word comes from the Latin word pax. And it has two cognate words in Latin, to make an agreement and to fasten. Thus, basic to peace is an agreement, a unity. It means a tying, literally, of people together. That’s the Latin word for peace. However, it must be more than a mere tying of people, because then an unhappy marriage would qualify as peace. A tyrant ruling a country could say that he has peace, because he has compelled people to live together. But peace means a mutual assent, and a contentment. The New Testament word is eirene. We have it in the name of the girl, Irene. The name Irene means peace.

And peace, in the Greek sense of the New Testament, means a harmonious relationship between men and nations, freedom from molestation, rest, order, and above all, peace with God. So that the word that is here used means, basically and ultimately, peace with God. Peace is inescapably a religious conception. Peace means a unity, an assent, an agreement, even when you’re talking about peace between men and nations, that rests on principles. If it does not rest on principles it’s merely a truce in which two powers or two people are jockeying, waiting for a proper position to give them an advantage over the other. That is not peace. There has been no peace between the nations of the world since Word War 2. What did prevail was called the Cold War. That was an honest term. It wasn’t a shooting war, but it was war. They talk now about the Cold War being over since we have decided to let Red China into the U.N. but it’s just a balance of power game. Which is another form, even more dangerous form, of cold warfare.

Peace is a religious concept. It presupposes a unity which is principled and fundamental. Not surprisingly, those who have gained some kind of peace are always giving religious testimonials. There is a series published by a periodical some years ago, ‘How I Found Peace in Christ’. Recently a book was published which said the same thing, only about psycho-analysis. ‘How I Found Peace on The Couch’. The psychiatrists or psycho-analysts couch. It was a series of testimonials. It was fundamentally religious. Not Christian, but religious. Peace thus is a religious concept. And it is more than a mere transitory or changing state of mind. If it were something temporary, we would have to say that narcotics and liquor give peace.

A person can feel quite blissful if he’s high on narcotics or has had a few slugs of whisky. But this is not peace in any true sense. We find something more of what peace means when we go to the Old Testament word for it, shalom, which means, we have it as Salem, Jerusalem. Wholeness, health, and it’s basically salvation as well. Peace that is wholeness, it is health, it is salvation. And this is why peace with God is at the heart of true peace. Peace is individual and it is communal. It is an aspect of the covenant, it is a salvation, the righteousness and the blessing of the covenant. Peace in the New Testament is opposed to strife, it means serenity of mind. It means the restoration of right relationship between God and man.

Now there is another word which is in the New Testament and elsewhere rendered as peace, which is an entirely different word. It means to keep silent. But this is not the same word as Irene, or eirene. It’s a radically different word. And it’s unfortunate the English sometimes is rendered by the same word. St. Paul in Romans 5:1 says that being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We have been justified through the atoning work of Christ. The right relationship with God has been restored. Therefore we are restored to that same relationship that Adam and Eve enjoyed in Paradise. To be God’s people, to serve Him, to exercise dominion under Him. And to obey His every word. Peace means therefore, in the Old Testament as well as the New Testament sense, wholeness, prosperity, well-being of any kind because of a right relationship with God. Christ restores us to this.

He is therefore called over and over again throughout Scripture by names which indicate his function, as the Prince of Peace, the one who again restores man to that peace which God intended for man when He created him and set him in Paradise.

His is, we are told by Isaiah, for example, the covenant of peace. His coming will begin the conquest of the world, we are further told, which will be a time of joy and peace and of the universal knowledge of God, so that the knowledge of God will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. In fact, as his coming was declared, and his birth, we read in the New Testament, Luke 1:79, that he was to be born to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Peace thus is, first of all, restored communion with God. And then the blessings, material and spiritual, of that restored peace. Both in time and in eternity. The hymn we sang this morning, ’Come We That Love The Lord’, makes this point. When it speaks of the peace that Christ brings, that Zion, the true kingdom of God, the true community of Christ, has to offer, as something not only for eternity but time as well.

The hills of Zion yield a thousand sacred sweets before we reach the heavenly fields or walk the golden streets. The harvest is even now. And therefore come we that love the Lord.

We can sing now of the peace that is ours in Christ. The aspects of peace thus are reconciliation with God and then peace with ourselves. We are no longer at war with ourselves. And because we are at peace with God we are no longer at war with other men. We can unite with godly men in peace. It means, moreover, that we begin to rebuild all things in terms of Christ. Christian reconstruction. Moreover, peace does not mean compromise.

The humanist thinks of peace as compromise. In effect, surrender. And so when he talks about peace, he is talking about surrender or compromise. But this is wrong.

Over a century ago, in the early part of the last century, a negro leader, Frederick Douglas, a free negro, made a statement once, which was a very shrewd observation. He said, “power concedes nothing“. Power concedes nothing. It was a tremendous observation. And this is why the word compromise and surrender never appears in the Bible. God as the omnipotent One, never concedes anything to the enemy. And the people of God are never to compromise, never to surrender, because power concedes nothing. And we are the people of power. The people of God’s right hand. And {?} His people stand in terms of that. They are able then to bring the peace of God into a situation.

People talk about the dark ages, which were not dark, because those were the days when the Word of God shone forth and began to remake the world. If there was any darkness it was because of course, there were marauding bands and armies marching everywhere. And yet it is significant, in that time, the people of God, who had no military power, yet by the force of their word and by their teaching, were able to institute some very remarkable things. The peace of God. What was the peace of God? The peace of God was a very remarkable thing. They actually brought about a situation, in a time when there was tremendous turmoil, where all churchmen and all husbandmen, farmers, who were tilling the soil, who were out in fields and defenseless, were immune from attack. And then all merchantmen who were traveling the roads.

In other words, if you’re going to fight, fight amongst yourselves. Leave the rest of us alone. Now that’s a remarkable achievement in a time when there was a great deal of social anarchy. But it was because there were enough people who believed it and the pressure of their opinion, and the force of their disapproval brought about the peace of God. We hear very little about that these days, in fact it’s very difficult, even in encyclopedias to read much about it. But the peace of God was a tremendous conclusion. And it came about because people had God’s peace first of all in their hearts, and having the power of God, because where God’s peace is, God’s power is. They conceded nothing. And in their helplessness as far as military power was concerned, they still had the power to stand up to the warring barons of the day and say, hands off. And the force of their public pressure and disapproval did lead to the peace of God. Peace is thus more than an emotional state. It is not passivism. Passivism separates peace and power, which is a fallacy which is anti-peace in any biblical sense.

Our Lord said in the Gospel of John, the 14th chapter, the 22nd verse, peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you, not as the world giveth give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled neither let it be afraid. Why? All power is given unto me in heaven and on earth, he was to say to them soon. Having overthrown the power of death, and in the concluding verses of his discourse at the Last Supper he said, these things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.

Peace is thus not merely inner and emotional, although it is that. What comfort or peace is there in suffering and seeing no hope of victory? That’s not peace in any biblical sense.

Our Lord said peace I give unto you. Why? Because I have overcome the world. I am destroying the power of sin and death. And I am subjecting all things to myself. And so it means, peace means assurance in the midst of the worst trials and griefs. In the midst of the worst persecutions, it means the certainty of Christ’s power and victory, and the redress of every wrong.

I thought it was significant that last night when Dr. {?} was dealing with what is ahead of us, a severe depression, a great deal of trouble, the collapse of things, possibly, an inflationary depression as prices go up and shortages increase, he added that it was not a time for pessimism and despair, but a time when we were to withdraw to the true resources. That we were not to see our hope political, but follow the example of the early Christians. Who survived over 250 years of persecution and came out victorious. I do not feel that we have any such long trial ahead of us. But I do feel that there is no peace possible for us or for our time or for the days ahead, unless we realize that the peace of God and the power of God are inseparable. And both the peace and the power of God are ours in Jesus Christ. And that we must move in peace and in the confidence of His power.

Let us pray. Almighty God our Heavenly Father who of Thy grace and mercy hath through the atoning blood of Jesus Christ made us to be at peace with Thee. We thank Thee that with that peace Thou hast given us the assurance of Thy power, so that we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. Strengthen us and make us bold O Lord in Thee, unto the end that we may conquer in Christ’s name and may prevail. Grant us this in Jesus name, Amen.

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

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. Very good. Matthew 10, what was the.. 34. Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.

The idea there is that the kind of peace that was desired was the kind of peace that people today want when they say, oh let’s forget our differences, let’s compromise. Let’s have unity, at the cost of faith. And our Lord was saying I’ve come to make a division, and only in terms of this division can there ultimately be peace. So the false peace wants a unity at the price of faith. Its conception of peace is compromise. But he is going to divide, in terms of himself. And of course this is a familiar fact, divided families because of the faith.

Does that help answer the question?

Yes. Any other.. Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. Blessed are the peacemakers, the Beatitudes declares, because of course those who make peace in terms of the Beatitudes are those who make peace in terms of Christ. The ninth verse of Matthew 4, blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God. And peace here is in terms of the restoration of communion with God. And then in terms of that, to do the kind of thing I mentioned. It involves Christian reconstruction, it involves moving from a position of strength and power, it means peace with others, peace with ourselves, always in terms of Christ.

The fundamental concept of peace in the New Testament is wholeness with God, and therefore wholeness in all our lives in every area. So that peacemakers are those who set forth that wholeness.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Well, this. When a man is at war with God, the unregenerate man is at war with God, the carnal mind we are told, is at enmity with God. He is warring against himself also, because God made him. And as St. Augustine said, our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee. So that having been made by God and for His purposes, we are warring against our very nature when we are not in communion with God. So that the minute we are restored to communion with God in Jesus Christ, we are then at peace with ourselves. Because now we are doing that for which we are created and we are in our place. Now this doesn’t mean this peace is perfect, there’s still elements of sin in us that rebel against God and fret at His Word and become impatient because what we want is not granted to us. So it is not a perfect peace in this life because we are not perfect. But we are progressively more and more at peace with God, the more and more we serve Him faithfully. We are not any longer schizophrenics warring against our own being because our being was made to serve and to magnify God.

Yes.

[Audience] …{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. We have dealt with that before, but turning the other cheek comes in the Sermon on the Mount, in the context of compulsion. And what he is there saying is that, in a situation where there is no opportunity to be anything but a captive, as it were, of a conquering people, as they were of the Romans, then we are not to resist. But in principle always we are not to be pugnacious and warlike.

So turning the other cheek has both a pragmatic aspect, where someone has the power to compel you to go a mile, go twain, go two. But also, resistance in a physical sort, is not our way. It is to change the hearts and the minds of men.

Any other questions? Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Well of course basically, what he was doing most of the evening was to avoid commenting on anything except what is ahead of us in ‘72 and ‘73. He tried to limit it to that. And he wouldn’t go beyond that, except in his concluding remarks when he described what happened in Germany. When everything collapsed and when people were taking their wealth, their silver plate, their Persian rugs, to the farmers for food, so that the saying was, and you recall he said, the pigs of the farmers walk on Persian rugs. Because that was the ultimate wealth, finally. Now, he was not saying it was going to come to that, but he has been through that twice. This is why he does not like to talk about that. He always avoids anything in that area because it’s a very ugly thing to live through that twice.

Yes. And you’re right. You could feel the intensity of his emotions as he discussed that complete break down of life in cities. But, what he was saying was, in terms of 1972 and ‘73, all he could see was no change, that we were going to have, with wage and price controls, growing socialism, the market would decline, shortages, rationing, would gradually come in in two or three years, possibly, maybe sooner, depending on what the politicians do, and things would get worse and worse.

Prices would go up and jobs would be scarcer. It would be a inflationary depression.

And in view of the fact that most Americans applauded on August the 15th, when President Nixon converted us from a free country into a slave country, to a fascist economy, not to a fascist political order but a economic fascism, he couldn’t see any immediate hope. But he did point to the area of hope when he said it has to be a change in the heart and minds of men, and revert us to the early Christians and what they accomplished.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Well, we didn’t advocate just doing absolutely nothing in politics, but that you do not pin your hope on politics. Politics cannot change men. He made that emphatic Friday night in {?}. And he said politics are not going to change men. And he said all the efforts in politics have only led to a further decline. So you cannot pin your hopes on politics. Now this does not mean you do not try to alleviate the situation with regard to property taxes. But you recognize that the future is not in politics. It is in religion. It is in our faith.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] I think it’s futile, really. I think it’s futile and I also think it is wrong too, because we are saying that by a tax strike we can change men, we can change the country, and you don’t. let’s suppose you have a tax strike, and it’s all over. Is it going to change the basic socialism in the heart of men? That’s our problem. So if they don’t take it from you one way, they’re going to take from you another way. So what will a tax strike accomplish, when people are basically socialistic in their hearts, and when, as he pointed out, Nixon’s popularity soared when he told them they were going to be slaves. Which is what he said on August the 15th.

Supposing the Christians in the days of Nero had decided on a tax strike. What would have happened to the cause of Christ? Where would it have gotten, you see? But they knew that they were living in a corrupt empire. And that the only hope was the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.

{?} was telling me at the, {?}, a number of people I know also, very wealthy men, and how many millions they have poured into politics. And they get disillusioned, but he said, but along comes a congressman or a senator who tells them we’ve got something going, and if you put your money up for this we’re going to change things. And out comes the checkbook again. It’s the same old rat race, the same old drain, and it gets nowhere. And he said it just gets worse and worse, inspite of all the money they pour into it. And he said, it’s reached the point where I’m sick of politics, I don’t like to look a politician in the face, I don’t want to talk about politics. Because, he says, this is where everybody wants to put their hope.

I’d like share something with you that just came in the new university bookmen{?}, and it’s an article by Dr. {?}, a political scientist who was with the state department, and a rather conservative man, whom I know. He says, by and large, universities have long since ceased to dedicate themselves to the pursuit of academic excellence. In this state of academic demoralization, higher education has rapidly shed its pose of intellectualism and has declined into a {?} of emotionalism, relevance and democracy. Students have long known that if they parroted back the liberal views of their professors in courses in the social sciences, they would receive A grades. But grading practices have now become so lax that even in the so called hard sciences, the physical sciences, students almost never receive failing grades, and even in large introductory lower division courses in such subjects as physics and chemistry, students who rank in the lowest ten percent of their class are given passing grades of C.

In the course in South American Indians that the university of California, Santa Barbra, students received a final mark of A, for dyeing pieces of cloth. In another course the professor, for his final examination, handed out blank sheets of paper to the members of his class and said, write your names on this paper. I will put two words on the blackboard. If you answer true, you will get a grade of A in the course. If you answer false, you will get a grade of A-. And those who helped me distribute papers during this quarter will receive A+’s. On this campus the grade point average for all students has risen to a substantial B grade, or 3.133 on a basis of 4.0. Is it any wonder that under these conditions, approximately ¼ of the members of the entire senior class qualify for membership Bi Beta Capa{?}? And so he says, education is dying. We might add that it is dead.

So that’s the reality. And you can see why, when this is the kind of person you’re turning out in your colleges and universities, and the bigger and the better they have been, the worse they are today. What kind of future do you have unless you say I’m going to forget about the whole political order, with all its schools and colleges and universities, and we’re going to have to begin anew. Or there is no future. But there is a future with God. They’re killing themselves off. What kind of engineers are they going to have, who get an A grade for saying true to a question when the professor says, if you say true you get an A, if you say false you get an A-. Now that’s a joke.

Yes. Did you have..?

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes, that’s the tragedy there. He’s very much dedicated to it.

But this is the situation on the campuses, and the ignorance of the students is appalling. The plain fact is, a person who graduated with an 8th grade education 40 years ago knows more than many university graduates today. He’s a better educated man. You are not getting education in the universities. It’s political indoctrination. And that’s all they’re getting. And the consequence is, of course, going to be apparent before too long. There will not be the engineers, the scientists, to maintain an advanced technology if this continues very many years. You have to have knowledgeable men.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Too many of them are products of the public schools. And as a result it’s only a minority that is discontent. The rest go along with it. It’s a very sad fact, but even in some of the more conservative colleges it’s a very difficult situation. Now Dr. {?} at Grove City College, this I have not from him but from someone who was a student there, he has not question and answer period in his classes. It’s useless. Because most of the students are so set against the sound economics that all they want to do is to waste the hour with a lot of heckling. So they’re there, they take it or leave it, and they answer the questions, and they shut up. That’s it. He’s doing the teaching. Now he would like to have a question and answer period, if he had a class that was made up of students who were ready to ask intelligent questions, to understand. But in a more conservative college than most, this is the situation.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. A very good question. As political power increases and spreads, what hope for survival is there, and for any increase or development of Christian education? The answer to that is a rather grim one. As political power increases, it also tends to break down. And this is what we are already seeing. The ability and the power of the state to enforce its own laws is declining. So what you have is more and more repressive laws, and less and less ability to enforce them. You have to have a population that is law abiding, to have a truly tyrannical state. Thus, under Stalin, when most of your population had grown up in a Christian atmosphere, with Christian training of a sort, although very defective, he could have better law and order, and better production, poor as it was in the plants, than they can today. Because now the workers are their own products. And as a result, it is increasingly difficult for them to enforce their requirements, their quotas, and everything.

Now, it was much easier, in a sense, for this country to have a tyranny in the 1930’s. To have a dictatorship. Why? Because you had a highly disciplined people. Consider the problems of the depression years and the fact that you didn’t have riots. And even in the big cities you were safe walking anywhere. And you could walk away and leave your house unlocked in most smaller cities, during the Depression. Because the people still had a home discipline and enough church discipline, even though the theology was gone, that was of moral character. Now that’s gone. So you see, the ability of the state to enforce its laws is disappearing.

The number of laws that are being passed, for example, as repressive laws with respect to Christian schools, are tremendous. One just got through the Governor’s desk, was signed Thursday evening or Friday morning. I believe it’s Senate Bill 1574. And creates a licensing board which will license all colleges, vocational schools, seminaries, and the like. A fifteen man board appointed by Wilson {?} will have complete charge of this and it’ll set guidelines for all lower schools. But even before it was signed, some of us who had been hours fighting it, by telephone, and I spent quite a bit of money on the long distance phone trying to get the thing vetoed, we already had figured out ways of beating it, so it’s going to be nullified.

You see today, the problem is the courts themselves have so messed up the law that enforcement is virtually impossible. And you can always work technicalities to get around the law. And there’re so many loopholes that in a sense I’m ready to say that this law is dead before it begins. Now, this is the way it develops. You have to become, as it were, an expert at using the law against these people. So, the answer is, we are getting a growing tyranny on the books. But a growing breakdown of the ability to enforce things. Already, for example, internal revenue is not able to do what it was doing two and three years ago, to make as many investigations of individuals. And it is the best organized branch of the Federal Government. The best organized. The most efficient. And yet they’re have their problems too. So you have a growing breakdown. The direction thus will be increasingly, a legal tyranny. And because of wage and price controls, more and more shortages. But it’ll create a growing black market. And it’ll create a growing breakdown of law.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Right. One of the things you’re going to see also is, that the public schools will continue their breakdown. And their continued breakdown will only work to further the Christian school movement. So in a sense what we have to say is, that our best hope is the breakdown of what is today. If it were not going to breakdown we would be doomed. But the very fact that it is going to breakdown is our best area of hope.

Well, our time is up, let’s bow our heads now for the benediction. 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.