Human Nature in Its Third Estate

Confession

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Christian Reconstruction

Lesson: 17 - 20

Genre: Lecture

Track: 37

Dictation Name: RR131U38

Location/Venue: Parkview Baptist Church

Year: 1960’s - 1970’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] Oh come let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker. Know ye that the Lord He is God, it is He that has made us and not we ourselves. We are His people and the sheep of His pasture.

Let us pray. Almighty God our Heavenly Father, who with Thy coming is light in the world and brings forth joyous salvation to Thy people. We beseech Thee that in these dark days that Thou wouldst bring Thy light to shine upon those who sit in darkness behind the Iron Curtain. Bring the joy of the Christmas feast into their hearts. And make them ever mindful, our Father, that Thou art He who dost overcome all things. We come into Thy presence mindful of all Thy blessings with which Thou hast surrounded us. Joyfully we acknowledge that indeed Thou art God, ever gracious, ever merciful. And so our Father, in gratitude we praise Thee, and we open wide our mouths that Thou mightest fill them, and our hearts that Thou mightest flood them with Thy grace. In Jesus name, Amen.

Our Scripture is Matthew 10, verses 32 and 33. And our subject, confession. Matthew 10:32 and 33. Confession.

Matthew 10, verses 32 and 33. Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven.

We saw last week as well as Wednesday night that the essence of Mohammadism is summed in Mohammad’s statement, he is a Moslem who is one outwardly. Whereas St. Paul declared, he is a Jew who is one inwardly. The difference is between a religion of pure externalism, and one which calls for faith from the heart, and works from the heart out. Mohammad let man free from God’s claim except with regard to limited, external rites.

And as a result Islam has had no inward restlessness, no discontent, as with Orthodox Christians with sin, with evil. No desires to improve oneself and to change the status quo. The inwardness of biblical faith comes to focus, not only in the doctrine of conscience, as we saw last week, but also in the doctrine of confession. The two verbs which are translated in the New Testament as confess are homologeo and exomologeo. Both basically the same word, only the one is the intensive of the other. They mean to confess or agree with, to speak the same thing, to acknowledge a truth, to thank, or to praise. We will return subsequently to the meaning of the biblical words for confession.

Turning now to confession in relationship to the psychology of man, we must say that it is a necessary aspect of man’s psychology. If there’s one thing that can be said of virtually all men it is that they talk too much. They are constantly, or let us say, we are constantly expressing ourselves, confessing ourselves. Man was created by God a confessing creature. Called to confess God in all his activities, in his research, in his science, his studies, education, his family life, in all things, including his speech. In every area man makes a religious confession, in all that he is and all that he does. Man’s life is a constant confession of the faith and purpose of his heart. Every thought, every motive in man is naked and open before God. This is a joy to the godly. It means that we are not alone. That the all wise, the all seeing, the forgiving God sees and understands every thought and impulse of our being. And He reproves and blesses as the case may be. The godly man flourishes in terms of his confession.

For the unregenerate the God of Scripture is a prying god who must be barred from the mind of man. The sinner resents God. His thoughts seem to be to him totally private property, and he resents the claim of God to title over a single thought. The ungodly want to have their mind, their thinking, as totally private, closed from the world, so that there they can give reign to their imagination and imagine every conceivable thing, and play God in their imagination. Thus they refuse to confess God or to confess their sins to God. They refuse to confess Christ. But this does not mean that the sinner has no need for confession. Man was created a confessing creature. And when men refuse to make godly confession, they make an ungodly one. They will confess with their lives, in word, thought and deed, their rebellion against God.

It is significant that when true faith begins to wane, in every age of civilization you’ve had a rise of ungodly confession. We’ve seen this in our time. In the last century or so, as faith began to wane, there came into very rapid prominence psychiatry and psycho-analysis.

Now in a journal of psychology, not too long ago, it was demonstrated that there really is no healing in psycho-analysis and in Freudian psychiatry. In people of similar mental conditions, healing was actually retarded in those who in to psychiatrists and psycho-analysts. That there was a natural remission of the condition, in many cases, of those who never went. The verdict thus was, that instead of being a therapy, it was a detriment. Now this kind of study has been made previously, and yet it has not slowed down the impulse of people to go to psycho-analysts and psychiatrists. Why? The need for confession.

Especially confession made scientifically respectable. And so they will go and confess endlessly, because of the urge to confess. The humanistic confession is in fact an evasion of sin. A very curious and perverted form of confession has become extremely popular in the past decade, and a number of psychiatric studies have been made of it. It is of group sex. And the confession that goes along with it.

What is the theory of group sex? It is a development out of the old wife swapping cult. Only it does not believe in things being as private as swapping and going into separate bedrooms. Everything has to be public. They don’t keep any sins from one another. Not only so, but after such adulteries, husband and wife then confess their most intimate reactions and thoughts one to another. Shared guilt and total confession. And somehow they claim that they feel cleansed and purified by this confession. Of course it rests also on the ungodly kind of emphasis on experience that we were dealing with just a few weeks ago. Because one of the thesis’s of these groups is, don’t ever knock anything unless you’ve tried it. Now, in their belief in confession, each plays God to the other, the husband to the wife and the wife to the husband, and so with a full confession one to another, supposedly, each as playing God over the other gives absolution. But the result, we might add parenthetically, is not a cleansing but a burning out, such as St. Paul described in Romans 1:18 through 32. Because all these groups move on from perversion to perversion, from homosexuality to sodomy to bestiality, bestiality to incest, and whatever more their minds can devise.

But it is significant that the urge to confess becomes an article of religion with these people. And they speak of confession and cleansing.

A covenant man confesses his sins to God, and he confesses Christ before men. The covenant breaker confesses to men. He must confess. God has created him a confessing creature.

And if he denies confession to God, he will confess to men. For this reason confession is a major means of apprehending criminals. The major means used is informers. The criminal will, sooner or later, confess to someone else. In fact, not infrequently he will, in effect, drop his calling card at the scene of the crime. Some identifying material.

The need to confess is basic to man. Every man’s life is a long confession. The question is what, and whom, are we confessing? Our Scripture is very important in this respect. Because it brings out very clearly the biblical meaning of confession. Confession is usually thought of as confessing sins. Some will say yes, but Scripture says it is confessing Christ. It is both. How are the two related? Our Scripture makes it clear, and it is imperative to any understanding of the meaning of confession. Our Lord said whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before My Father which is also in Heaven. But, whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in Heaven. Now very literally what our Lord said in the first part is, whosoever therefore shall confess in me before men, him will I confess in before my Father which is in heaven. And Greek scholars tell us that you can supply, in effect, the words, confess in my case. Now what does this mean? Whoever confesses Christ before men in the things concerning his Kingdom and his Word, Christ will confess that man before God in the things pertaining to his case.

Thus the two meanings of confession are tied together. Men are to confess Christ before men in word, thought and deed. Their lives and works must set forth Christ and his kingdom. It is Christ whom they must represent before men. His word, his law, his kingdom, his person. When men therefore are faithful in representing and confessing Christ, Christ is faithful in confessing them before God. He intercedes for them in their confession of sin, and in their hopes, in their prayer. He summons God’s prospering hand upon them for their faithful confession of him. Thus as men set forth the claims of Christ before men, so Christ sets forth their cause before God. This is the fullness of confession. Before men we confess Christ, we set him forth and all his claims, his saving power, his law, the meaning of his coming, the meaning of his word for education, for the family, for every sphere of life. And then in our relationship to Christ, feeding upon his word, confessing our sins to him, he in turn confesses us as we have confessed him. So that he summons God’s forgiveness upon us. God’s blessing and prospering hand. This is what Scripture means by confession.

Now there is another aspect of confession which is referred to in Scripture and in the Law. The confession of sin to men as an aspect of restitution. This is an important, and a necessary aspect of confession. It is a secondary aspect, and it is a dangerous aspect when over stressed or misused, but, if we quarrel with someone and sin against them, we not only must make restitution but we must also confess the wrong we have done them, to them. But this can be carried to unhealthy and very, very sick extremes. Our sin is always primarily and essentially against God. And our confession must be primarily to God. As David said, against Thee, Thee only have I sinned and done this evil in Thy sight.

To carry this confession to people too to great an extent can sometimes be an excuse for sin. Let me cite an example. I once knew a very malicious and very sanctimonious woman who prided herself on being very prompt about confessing. And very scriptural, she said. And this is the kind of thing she would do. She would go to another woman and say, please forgive me, my dear, but I said something very unkind about you to Jane yesterday and I’m very deeply ashamed of myself. Or, my dear I’m so ashamed of myself, but I listened to Betty say something very nasty about you last night and I kept quiet. Please forgive me. Now what was she doing in all this? First, somebody who never knew that anything had been said about her, was informed of things and disquieted. As a matter of fact, what she was doing was to slander every woman in the church to their face, and act sanctimonious all the while and demand that they forgive her. So what she maliciously accomplished in the name of faith was to slander people to their faces, involve other people, and then require the person to who she was talking, to prove that they were Christians, by saying I forgive you. This was sin compounded. Sin masquerading as faith. I have encountered the same things at times in the confessions of adultery by husbands, who’ve used it in a way that is no different, not leading to any change of life, but in a sense to cleanse themselves. This morning, just five minutes before I left the house, while I was going through the paper waiting for the womenfolk to get dressed, I picked up Ann Landers column and I found an example of this.

Dear Ann, my husband has been unfaithful three times that I know of. His first playmate confessed by telephone. I had no idea who she was, I’d never heard of her, and was shocked. The second blow came when my husband sobbed out the details of a torrid affair, after we had seen a very touching movie together. He said he felt greatly relieved after having unburdened himself. I nearly had a nervous breakdown. It didn’t change him, though. The third woman showed up at my house and said she wanted me to know what kind of man I was married to. I nearly collapsed. Knowing didn’t help. Why did these people tell me?

Now of course, confession of this sort is not a moral thing, it’s sin compounded. It is trying to cleanse yourself by dirtying someone else. Sin basically is to be confessed to God. And only to another person when they are personally, directly, knowingly involved and offended. Confession basically is to confess Christ before men, our sins to God, and Christ confessing us before the Father.

I pointed out that confession is also praise and thanks. This is another meaning of the same word in the Bible. In fact, the word is often translated, homologeo, or exomologeo, as praise or thanks, as in Luke 10:21, where our Lord said, I thank Thee Father. Sometimes translated, I praise, O Father. And it can also be translated, I confess Thee O Father. It’s the same word. All three words are equally valid translations. I thank thee O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Thy sight.

True confession, biblical confession, is inescapable from thanksgiving and praise. We confess Christ, we rejoice in him, we praise him.

The element of praise and thanksgiving is also present in the word even when it speaks of confessing our sins in any godly sense. We confess our sins to God the Father in Jesus Christ. Rejoicing at one and the same time that there is forgiveness, that through the blood of Jesus Christ we have been cleansed and there is grace abounding to us. So that the scriptural word for confession has even in the confession of sins that note of gratitude, of thanksgiving, and of praise. This is why it’s entirely different from what the world talks about when it speaks of confession, because their confession is something foul and unclean. Thus men not only confess their faith and their sins, but in biblical confession they also confess their values. They rejoice in their thoughts, their actions, their hopes, their calling. They rejoice that the grace of God abounds unto them. A man confesses that which he delights in by the totality of his life. By his every word, thought and deed, and the believer knows that in every confession he makes he stands in the grace of God through Jesus Christ.

Let us pray. Almighty God our heavenly Father, with joy and with thanksgiving we confess that Thou art God. The all gracious, all merciful one to Thy people. We thank Thee that through the blood of Jesus Christ we stand in Thy grace. Strengthen us therefore in our confession, and grant that as we abound in the confession of Thee before men, Christ’s confession of us may abound unto Thee, O God. And that we may be prospered by Thy grace, and abound in Thy mercy. Bless us to this purpose, in Jesus name, Amen.

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

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] I didn’t hear that.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Oh, what did Anne Landers say? Yes, I’m glad you asked that, because her comment, yes, her comment is very discerning, for a change. ‘Dear wife, because they needed to unload, and they did not care who was hurt.’ You see, she caught the point.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. Well actually, the word mysticism has gained a technical kind of meaning which is non-Christian. So this is why I never use it. Mysticism as it is increasingly used, and as it is used by the Oriental mystics as well as the European mystics, means that union with god because you are both divine. Which no Christian can accept. So the Bible also never uses such a word as mystic, or mysticism. What it uses instead is faith and understanding. So we are called upon to know God and to understand Him. And that’s a radically different thing from saying you are God, which we are not. We are creatures. So mysticism doesn’t have much knowledge to it, in fact the mystics call for an abandonment of knowledge, because the essence is just for the two aspects of God, God out there and God here, to get together. This is why their emphasis is on union, rather than on faith, knowledge, or works.

Any other questions? If not, I’d like to hear something with you which comes from the Westminster Chapel bulletin by Malcolm Nygrim{?}, an excerpt from an article. The title is ‘Frogs Are Hard to Mail’. ‘It is very difficult to mail a frog. A live frog, that is. Dead ones pose no particular difficulty that I know of. We found that out this year. We subscribed to a service which promised to further our family’s education, scientifically, by sending us small animals periodically. Not everyone wants small animals mailed to them, but at the time we thought we did. The first creature slated for delivery were African frogs. What we got in the mail were dead frogs. We got a number of dead frogs, week after week they came. (They wrote back, you know, complaining, and all they kept getting was dead frogs) It wasn’t until we had received five that one of them lived. That’s how I know that it is very difficult to mail a live frog. The project had indeed been educational. I did not know a thing about mailing frogs before. The trouble is, although I have learned something, I don’t know what good it does me to know it. I have never intended to mail anybody a frog. My knowledge is not even much good in making conversation. People begin to think you are a little strange if you insist on talking to them about dead frogs. On the whole, I would be better off if I had never learned about this.

An educated man is not just one who has learned a lot of things. He must know which things are worth learning. Education is the process of separating the trivial from the important. To know everything about almost nothing is no better than knowing almost nothing about everything. That’s why there’s more to education than mere learning and teaching. I’ve spent almost all of my life in academic communities. I have observed that the real giants in the learned world are not mere repositories of information. They are men of solid commitment, who know what is worth knowing, and to what service it should be put. That’s why Jesus Christ is critical of the whole academic enterprise. God does not offer a shortcut to knowledge that makes learning unnecessary. He offers a new life to men who learn, that makes their knowledge relevant. God’s revelation does not consist of principles of economics, biological theories, or new insights in physics. God reveals Himself. It is only when we know the one who made the world that we know that to what service it should be put, and can distinguish between the vital and the trivial.’

I would say that many people on our world are like a man who has nothing much to confess, except that he knows something about how difficult it is to mail a live frog. Most people are about that limited in their confession.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Well….

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. In my book, ‘The Foundations of Social Order’, there’s a chapter on Chalcedon. It was the counsel of 451 which defined the orthodox doctrine of Christ as against the ideas of the day that the ruler and the state were divine and salvation was political. And because in our day so many people, in fact most people, look for salvation through politics, we felt that Chalcedon was a fitting name for our day, because it sets forth the victory that was gained. Salvation only through Christ, who is very God of very God, and very man of very man.

I’d like now to pass on a little other item from the Don Bell Report, number 47, for year 1971, in which he has a summary of wage and price controls through the ages. And, as he titles it, ‘Control Through the Ages, or Tales of Perpetual Failure’. And he goes back about two thousand years ago, per one example, to {?} of China, who called his reform administration the new dynasty. And the archives, of which some exist yet, have some of the laws surviving of his new deal, or new dynasty. And here are some of them. ‘Each directorate shall use the second month of each season for the determination of the equitable price of the commodities under its management.

It shall note down the highest, lowest and the mean price of each commodity in each district. The mean price shall be the equitable price of that particular locality and shall not be applied to the places where the other directorates are situated.’ The whole thing was computerized also with the Chinese computer, known as the abacus, so that they had all the data about gross national product, cost of living index and everything, figured with their abacus. Another of his edicts read, ‘Poor people who need capitol to start productive work may also secure loans from the commissioner credit who shall charge them a moderate rate of interest.’ So they had their small business administration and its loans. Then, to read another passage from the edict, ‘the object of price stabilization and banking is to protect the people and supply their needs. Money and coinage furnish the necessary medium of exchange. None of these {?}, salt, wine, iron, mines, horse, credit, can be operated by the average citizen, (that is, by the free sector of the economy) who must depend upon the professional trader for the satisfaction of these needs. Therefore he becomes the victim of economic exploitation and must accept whatever price the rich and the strong are pleased to dictate to him.’ The sages of the ancient times realized all this evil and resolved to check it by means of government control. So, apparently long before Wang Mang{?}, there was another new deal. What happened to Wang Mang’s{?} new dynasty? Fifteen years after he instituted it, the nation fell apart into civil war and Wang Mang{?} died at the hands of an assassin. However, that didn’t stop them, because they continued trying more and more new deals, all of which ended the same way, and the Chinese, long before the Western world, went Wang Mang{?} one better and they introduced paper money to make it easier. And of course Emperor {?} introduced one which destroyed Rome. And so, as he points out, the history of all these measures has been a failure.

It is interesting that one of the most forthright condemnations ever made of wage and price controls, was made by one of the early Church fathers, {?}. And {?} ridiculed the Romans for their unbelief and for their trust in the state and in politics as the way of salvation, and in their wage and price decrees. And he commented on one of the decrees of Rome. “And when he had brought on a state of exceeding high prices by a different act of injustice, he tried to fix by law the prices of articles offered for sale. Thereupon, for the various trifles much blood was shed. And out of fear nothing was offered for sale. And the scarcity grew much worse, until after the death of many persons, the law was repealed from mere necessity.” It isn’t for lack of knowledge from history that men are going into what they are doing today. It is for lack of faith in God and that there is any law which governs the universe.

Now, just before we are dismissed, a reminder that next Sunday and the Sunday after, December 12 and 19, we shall meet those of you who are interested in hearing Handel’s Messiah, on a particularly beautiful recording, from 9:30 to 10:45, before each morning meeting. Next Sunday and the week after, 9:30 to 10:45, to listen to Handel’s Messiah. So make a note of that in your calendar.

Let’s 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.