Human Nature in Its Third Estate

Patience And Experience

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Christian Reconstruction

Lesson: 15 - 20

Genre: Lecture

Track: 33

Dictation Name: RR131T36

Location/Venue: Parkview Baptist Church

Year: 1960’s - 1970’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] Let us worship God. We have not a high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need. Let us pray. Almighty God our Heavenly Father, who of Thy sovereign grace called us together as a people and has blessed our nation in the days past and has set Thy favor upon us, grant that in this season we be truly thankful. Recall, O Lord, this nation unto Thee. Grant that again Thy word prevail in the counsels of state. That we be thankful again unto Thee first of all for Thy grace and then for all Thy material blessings. Guide our steps, we beseech Thee, in the way of righteousness, truth, and peace. That all the days of our life we may serve Thee, rejoice in Thee, and magnify Thy name. In Jesus name, Amen.

Our Scripture is Romans 5:1-5, and Revelation 14, verses 9-12. And our subject, patience and experience. Romans 5:1-5, Revelation 14:9-12. First of all, Romans 5:1-5. This is the text we’ve been dealing with the past three weeks, and we conclude our study of it this morning.

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 Revelation 14:9-12.

And the third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice, If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand, The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb: And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name. Here is the patience of the saints: here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus.

There is a similar verse in Revelation 13:10, we can briefly call attention to. He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.

Repeatedly, Scripture speaks about the importance of hope, and of patience as related to hope. St. Paul says, for example, in Romans 8:24 and 25, for we are saved by hope. But hope that is seen is not hope, for what a man seeth, why does he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.

In other words, when we hope, we have a confident expectation. And that hope gives us the patience to wait for it. Thus hope is very emphatically, over and over again in Scripture, associated with patience. A loss of hope means impatience. Hope means patience. Without hope, both waiting and tribulation become meaningless to us. And we cannot then, when we are hopeless, patiently endure tribulation.

In the Greek, the word for patience is literally, an abiding under. It can be passive, in the sense of enduring trials, or active, in the sense of persistent persevering action. It is used in both senses in Scripture. When we understand the meaning of patience, it becomes clear to us that the word patience as Scripture uses it is very different from the way the world uses it. It is not stoicism.

Stoicism is a blind submission to meaningless events. It is submitting blindly, hopelessly, to things we do not understand. Biblical patience is radically different from a hopeless submission to a meaningless universe. It is this kind of hopelessness that marks the so called patience of the Far East, of Oriental religions. It’s a waiting for death. It is also different from the stoicism of Roman society, and of humanism. Biblical patience is inseparable from hope. It means waiting with confidence, or moving ahead with confidence, that the future holds an assured reward for our patience. So it is the waiting for that reward. In biblical patience there’s always hope. The two go together, they are inseparable, it is the confident expectation and the confident waiting for that, and the submitting for things because you know there is something far better ahead.

Twice in Revelation, as we saw from our text, we are reminded that the patience of the saint is inseparable from victory and justice. Revelation tells us that of a certainty God’s judgment shall strike all those who have the mark of the beast, all those who follow the false prophet, all those who are a part of the system of the world. And it describes their judgment. And says this is the patience and the faith of the saints. Their confidence that these things will come to pass, that God is in His judgment will wipe out the enemies of Christ, and that in eternity and throughout all eternity God’s judgment will be upon them and His victory manifest in the lives of His saints. This is called the patience of the saints. The certainty of victory.

Moreover, Revelation tells us in 14:9-12, those who have patience are those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus. This patience therefore means that they believe in God and His Son.

Patience is also the certainty that God’s total judgment will be meted out to all offenders who shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God. We are not left in any doubt as to what patience means. It is spelled out for us by Revelation.

We’re told about the patience of Job.

But too often people think that to be patient like Job is just to grin and bear it. But Job cried out in his suffering. He cried out to God for his vindication and he said I know my Redeemer liveth. And at the last I shall stand before Him, vindicated. And the latter end of Job was blessed more than the former. So that the patience of Job was, not that he liked what he had, he cried out against it, but that he was certain that he would be vindicated. That the God of righteousness should establish him in righteousness. There was much that Job did not understand, and complained to God about, but this he understood. And that was his patience.

Thus the psychology of biblical patience is radically different from pagan patience. And we must beware that when we use the word patience, and other people use it, that they’re not being pagan.

For example, a pastor I know gave counsel to someone, that all we can do is to be patient until our life is ended or we are Raptured. Now that is not godly patience. To grin and bear attitude until the end. Or someone else, who receive counsel from a pastor, when a loved one had died, a child, that well, we too shall be dead and freed from this sinful world, and we should wait with patience for the release of death. This again is not godly counsel. Patience concerning death means the glorious assurance that even now those who die in the Lord share in His victory and reign with Christ. It means those of use who are alive have ahead of us, or our children, or our children’s children, sometime in the distance, a lengthened life span like unto the early days of this world.

And man shall live a long, full and free life under God. It means, moreover, at the end of the world, the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. And that even now, all who live and believe in Him have everlasting life. Some might say, well what good is such counsel to someone dying of cancer now? A great deal. Even as a soldier dying on the battlefield rejoices when victory is reported to him, so the Christian has this joy. Victory for him in heaven, victory for those who are living, victory for the dying. At all turns, victory. Patience thus, as Revelation defines it and as all of Scripture declares it, is associated with hope and with victory.

The other word that is important in our text is experience. Two weeks ago we referred briefly to experience and pointed out that it means proof. The word that translated experience can be translated as experience, experiment, or proof. The three words are basically the same. When we come to this idea of experience, experiment or proof, we are, as it were, stripping bare the humanism of our day. Because here we come face to face with something that is at the heart of modern education, at the heart of modern religion, at the heart of the ungodliness of our day.

In Romans 5 we are told that patience worketh experience, and experience, or proof, worketh hope. The proof that it means is not man testing or proving God, but God who tests and proves man, that man, as he is brought into the household of God, is then tested and proven by God.

And as he is tested and proven by God, he is confirmed in hope, in the confident expectation of those things which God has promised unto him.

Now the humanistic conception of experiment or experience or proof, is to subject God and His Law to the test, to regard all things as an open question. A scientific experiment, if it is conducted without faith, by one who denies God’s moral law, is offensive to God. We have many such experiments now.

The Scientific American recently had a description of a series of experiments in abortion. There are experiments today in the implanting of electrodes in the human brain. There are experiments conducted by masters in Johnson as well as others into sexual response. All these are sinful. A scientific experiment conducted be faith in God’s law order and within the bounds of moral law, is a godly experiment.

But today the way to know something, we are told, is to experience it. To test it yourself. Never to take God’s word for anything. And as a result, today, to live is to experience. Let me cite a very concrete example of it, which is a very ugly example but I think it’s a very revealing one, because it lays bare the essence of the belief in experience today, a religious belief.

Kate Colman was, until recently, a staff write for News Week. Now a free-lance writer. Thoroughly a modern person, intelligent, capable, but totally a humanist. She made a report on prostitution. she felt that in order to make it a valid report, to get us the truth, she had to free herself from any moral judgment. So what was her report? Just to interview as many prostitutes as possible, and, with a tape recorder to take down their exact words and give the exact words, to get as close to first hand knowledge as possible.

But, before it was over, one of the prostitutes whom she interviewed, said, dearie, you aren’t going to get firsthand knowledge until you try it yourself. This shocked Kate Colman at first. But being a good humanist and a product of modern education that believes in experiment or experience as the road to truth, she finally decided she would be a dishonest reporter unless she tried it herself. And so she went to this house where she had been interviewing the prostitutes, and took on one of the customers, a very carefully selected young man whose good looks she found appealing. And she found it, she said, a pleasurable experience. Then on leaving the room, a paunchy unpleasant man demanded her services next. And she wrote, “The other hookers urged me to go with him. But I was adamant. The whole idea of going to bed again with anyone save my john was at that moment most repulsive. And this man was flaccid, gross and wore an American flag pin in his lapel, a complete turnoff. One of the hookers chided me, but you see, that’s the point. Your research is unreal. You do not have the right to refuse. You don’t have that kind of freedom of choice. Had I any vestigial doubts, she had dispelled them. The full implications were clear. I took my 25 dollars from Claire, red-faced I had bolted for the door. Heigh ho, the phony hooker. The following day I somehow managed to blow the money on a huge and ridiculous plant with furry leaves for an apartment I did not even live in.” And so she was disappointed with herself, she hadn’t been able to stand up to the test. To the last, she was a good humanist.

Now let’s examine the dictionary of philosophy, and what it has to say about experience, so that we can understand why this kind of thing can happen. Experience, the condition, or state of subjectivity or awareness. The term differs from consciousness by emphasizing the temporal or passing character of effective undergoing. Usage however, is not uniform since its definition involves a theoretical standpoint. Thus Bradley identified it with consciousness, while William James used it to mean neutral phenomenon.

{?} or given, without implications of either subjectivity or objectivity. Now this is a very condensed definition. But what does it mean? To understand it, we have to back up and look at the history of philosophy, rather hurriedly. Modern philosophy began with Descartes. And Descartes fundamental thesis was that everything had to be proven by the test of his inner experience. So that whether it was God or the outside world or any other person, nothing existed, nothing is, unless I myself experience it.

What happened? As a consequence, philosophy progressively, from Descartes to {?}, found it a difficult thing to prove anything. How can you prove the reality of the outside world, it was finally concluded, if what you know about this before me, is only what your eyes report to the mind. So it’s not direct, firsthand knowledge. It is second hand. It comes through the sense experiences. And how do you know that your sense experiences are valid in their reporting? After all, your senses report thing to you in dreams, which are not there. And so it was finally concluded we cannot know the reality of anything outside of us. Ultimately all we have, the world and the universe around us, is within us. The only thing that is true is that I exist, and the universe is an aspect of my consciousness.

This is why {?}, a logical extension, said it is not God who is the problem, but other people. Do they exist? And if they do, my neighbor is for me the devil. Because he’s a rival god, a rival universe.

Thus experience is detached from God and the law and made completely subjective. It is godlike, its proof is purely personal. And this is why the test of modern art is not, does it mean anything, but what kind of an experience did the artist have, and what kind of an experience do I have, in terms of it? Experience is the goal. The whole purpose of the modern novel, of movies, of television, by and large, is to give you an experience, a direct, amoral experience. One separated from any kind of judgment. So you learn to think, not in terms of judgments, but pure experience. And to experiment in every realm.

Now the question comes, what is firsthand knowledge? This is what Kate Colman was after. Firsthand knowledge. She wanted to be a good reporter, a good writer. Firsthand knowledge. First hand experience, a Christian must say, is always and only under God. Godly experience is to view all things in terms of His Word, and godly knowledge, firsthand knowledge, is knowledge under God. As Psalm 36:9 says, for with Thee is the fountain of life: in Thy light shall we see light. For a man to seek direct experience apart from God is to deny God and finally, to deny the object he seeks to experience. It makes man his only universe, and then nothing left in that universe except his own feelings. This is why modern education, modern philosophy, modern art, modern novels, television, movies, all of them, create a totally egoistic person who is only interested in his own experience. And so knowledge, proof, everything, came through their own experience, with a total disregard for God and His moral law, and the world of people.

The experience of the godly man is not something he goes out to seek on his own, but it is his testing and proving by God. Whereby he is established in hope, established in the certainty of God’s Word, established in the confident expectation of victory. And is prepared for that fulfillment which his growing hope is a promise of. It means that man sees all things then in terms of God and His Word. And the result is that he has a hope that maketh not ashamed because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us. Those whom God proves, He delights in, He confirms, and He strengthens.

Thus in our time we have a war on our hands. An ungodly concept of patience, and ungodly concept of experience. And these ungodly concepts have saturated our world. They hit us at every turn, they permeate our education, and our entertainment. And we must self consciously separate ourselves from these things and recognize that ours is a hope that maketh not ashamed. Only because it has as its foundation a patience that moves in terms of victory, and an experience, an experiment in life that is totally governed by God’s word. And one in which God proves us and prepares us for that victory which is our calling.

Let us pray. Almighty God our Heavenly Father, who of Thy grace and mercy has called us, and has given us patience, and art proving us to prepare us for victory, we thank Thee that we are being confirmed in a hope that maketh not ashamed. Strengthen us O Lord that we may establish in our homes, in our schools, in our communities, those standards of patience and experience that are according to Thy word and are blessed of Thee. Grant us this we beseech Thee, in Jesus name, Amen.

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

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. This is the quietism that is closely associated with mysticism. And it is really a philosophy of surrender to the world. As though the Holy Spirit could be disassociated from God’s commandments. Now we have the Spirit and the Spirit works in us, simultaneously with our obedience to God and His law word. We can no more separate the Holy Spirit from the Word than we can separate it from God’s commandments. The fallacy of quietism is ultimately, it divorces the Holy Spirit from Scripture. It divorces the Holy Spirit from God’s law. And then it gets into very, very sinful vagaries very often, and it has. So the answer to that is the Holy Spirit cannot be divorced from God’s Word, and God’s Word commands us to do certain things. Is the Spirit then, supposedly according to these people, commanding us contrary to God’s Word? And was the work of our Lord, in protesting the money changers in the Temple, not of the Spirit then? Was our Lord in objecting to the Pharisees and the scribes and their works, then sinning, because he said something instead of taking this not a word attitude? This kind of thing is really a retreat from Christianity, into a pagan quietism and mysticism, with a flavor of stoicism as well. It’s not Christianity.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] I can’t quite…

[Audience]….{?}….

[Dr. Rushdoony] I don’t recall the particular text, but the whole point of Ecclesiastes, as it says itself towards the last, that these are the goads and nails. And what he is doing there is to take some of the humanistic ideas and then to counter them with Scripture. Vanity of vanities, or futility of futilities, all is futility. This is the conclusion of a humanistic perspective. But then, as he develops this, he counters with a nail, to answer this position, you see. So he is dealing with a humanistic faith, generally. And the humanistic experience, and then countering it with the godly one.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] The question is, will I comment on the Jesus movement. Now the Jesus movement, I believe, has lead to some genuine conversions. But by and large its emphasis is humanism. It’s God for the benefit of man. And it wants to give people a kind of a humanist experience with God, as it were, under girding it. The idea that they have, well, if you truly experience Jesus and the Holy Spirit, you won’t get killed in an accident, the Lord will take care of you, you won’t get shot as you go to Vietnam, you’re always safe. In other words, God is kind of the insurance policy. For a humanistic emphasis. This is very often the character of many of those who are in the Jesus movement. Now, the term covers so many people that there are some in it who are genuinely Christian. But by and large, it emphasis’s a kind of humanism with God as an insurance policy. It has no theological substance and it is really very hostile, sometimes, to any emphasis on the doctrines of Scripture. There have been so many movements like that that have come and gone in the past thirty years, that for a time have been a sensation with youth and then have faded away, precisely because they do not develop a sound biblical doctrine. They do not emphasis the priority and the sovereignty of God.

This is why people flock to these movements and then flock away. If you are truly committed to the Lord, it is not what I experience and the glow I have, but that God be sovereign. And you don’t pray just when you feel like it, you pray faithfully.

I heard somebody once, who was some years before the Jesus movement, but was in another youth group like it, who said we should pray only when the Spirit moves us. Not by rote. Not by schedule. Well that’s nonsense. We have an obligation to pray faithfully. And we shouldn’t pray just when we feel like it, which is what it amounts too. We bow out heads in prayer whenever the food is set on the table because that food reminds us of God’s care. We may be hungry, and we may feel rather unhappy and not ready to give thanks, but we should. It’s not our feeling that should govern the situation, but the fact that whether we think we have something to be grateful for at the moment or not, we have an obligation to be grateful. And so we bow our heads and we acknowledge God’s bounty, and we humble ourselves before Him, and if our feelings have been a little unhappy, God hasn’t given me what I wanted lately and I’m praying for something, we pray about that, and we acknowledge our sinful rebelliousness. You see.

Now, if you follow these experiential movements, you don’t do that. What you do is just when you feel bubbling over, then you pray, whether it’s five minutes or an hour. You just bubble over with prayer. But in a disciplined faith, you do it because God requires you in everything to give thanks. That means in the moment of adversity, when you’re rebellious. You thank God for this situation because God is sovereign and He’s going to bring some good out of it. So what you do, you see, is to acknowledge the sovereignty of God even in that which you are at the moment rebelling against. That’s when you have a mature faith. In everything to give thanks. Not just when you’re bubbling over.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Well of course I said there is a great variety of people within the movement, so it covers quite a spectrum. But, basically, I stand by what I have said. And I’ve seen a great many of these movements come and go. And nothing much left of them. I can recall a previous movement, 15 years ago, which was filling some civic auditoriums regularly with youth. And supposedly great things were being done in the lives of these youth. But after the enthusiasm subsided, I saw those young people back in the same practices that they had before. It was enthusiasm, not the Spirit of God.

And I submit that until we see otherwise, we have a right to say that they have not yet demonstrated fully all that which they claim. The Jesus movement very, very definitely thus far has not proven itself. A handful of people indeed have been converted. But I know people who’ve been converted by outright frauds. There was a man in San Francisco when I was a student in college, who was a racketeer, a religious racketeer. And yet through his use of Scripture, and he milked the community during the Depression of thousands of dollars, and laughed about it subsequently, yet, by his reading of the Word, some were converted. And St. Paul said the same thing was happening in his day. That some were preaching the Gospel with false motives, and yet it was the Word itself that was bearing fruit. Now there’s no denying, as I said earlier, there are some who are truly converted as a result of this movement and are going on and growing. But I submit that basically the movement is at the very least, defective, if not often simply humanistic. Its emphasis is on man, not on the glory of God.

Now the whole purpose of the Gospel is not the salvation of man, important as that is, it is the glory of God. It is humanism that puts man first. And every kind of preaching that comes along and emphasis’s above all else the salvation of man, is defective.

Not too long ago we were at a meeting in Orange County, and someone else, who is of this group but is not here today, was telling one of the leaders at that meeting of Billy Graham and how disappointed they were over a statement he made, which was really outrageous. And the man answered, who was leading in the meeting, yes, that’s true, I don’t say I like that and other statements he’s made, but think of the souls he’s saved. In other words, a humanistic test, rather than the Word of God. So our test cannot be that somebody is being saved from drugs, because then we could go to some of the worst psychiatrists in the country who are ungodly men to the nth degree, and say well, they’ve taken some people off of drugs. Shall we approve of them? The test is faithfulness to the whole Word of God. Nothing else. And if we make anything short of that, we’re going to have to approve of a great many defective things. And a great many sinful things.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. The test is not what he’s done for himself, it’s what he has done for the Lord. Has he, without reservation, committed his life to the Lord.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] It’s not Billy Graham or anyone else who saves souls. It’s the working of the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit very often has used the very humblest and the frailest, and sometimes very sinful men. I’ve known of people who’ve been saved because of a burst of profanity, in one case, a very reprobate man, which so jarred this person that it led him to reconsider his associations, his situation, and to become a Christian. The shock of that. Well you can’t say that then profanity is justified.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Of course it’s inseparable from that. Remember in Revelation, the text we read. It says, who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus. Those who have patience are those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. Very well put. And the idea of experiment and experience has been carried to such absurd lengths that many Christian schools feel that they can’t afford to start a high school because they have to set up laboratories for experiments in physics and chemistry and so on. Well there never has been an experiment conducted in any high school laboratory. Those are not experiments, they are demonstrations. And it has been demonstrated that in schools where they don’t waste the kids time doing things that are already proven facts, but concentrate on the kids studying the books and learning something, where they don’t have the labs, the students do better in colleges and universities, {?} chemistry and in physics, than in the ones where they waste their time, where a teacher could make a demonstration before the class. So there’s a lot of nonsense propagated here.

Our time really is up, one or two haven’t had a chance to…yes.

[Audience]….{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. Very good point. By and large, in Scripture when it talks about experience or proof, it is God testing man. And when it says prove me with regard to tithing, He’s saying here, I am setting up the experiment, test and see that I am indeed right. The only areas of godly experiment are those that God permits by His law word.

Well our time really is up now.

I’d like to share with you one brief thing from the NATA news from Nebraska, called the parable of the white rat. One day a scientist who was experimenting with white rats created an intricate maze, and in it he placed one of his choice white rats, name Theo. Short for theologian. For days and weeks Theo was puzzled about the mysteries of the scientist’s creation. He said to the other white rats in the laboratory, how great is our scientist. Then one day, after weeks of experimenting, Theo was able to solve the baffling network of the maze.

With arrogance he turned to the other white rats in the laboratory and said, our scientist is dead.

We have some announcements. First of all, Ken Thurston has an announcement.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Two other announcements. Our history seminar will not meet this Wednesday because it is the night for Thanksgiving, but we will meet a week from Wednesday. Then next the Chalcedon prayer meeting will be held of Saturday, November 27th at 7:30 pm at the home of Dick and {?} {?}. The address is 1216 Hill Dr., Eagle Rock. A time of fellowship follows after each meeting. If you have any prayer requests, please contact Dick {?}.

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.