Salvation and Godly Rule

The Daysman

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: The Daysman

Lesson: Mercy

Genre: Speech

Track: 61

Dictation Name: RR136AG61

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Our scripture lesson is from Job 9:30-35, and our subject: The Daysman. “If I wash myself with snow water, and make my hands never so clean; yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch, and mine own clothes shall abhor me. For he is not a man, as I am, that I should answer him, and we should come together in judgment. Neither is there any daysman betwixt us, that might lay his hand upon us both. Let him take his rod away from me, and let not his fear terrify me: then would I speak, and not fear him; but it is not so with me.”

This very remarkable passage in the book of Job comes from a key chapter which begins with the statement, “Then Job answered and said, I know it is so of a truth: but how should man be just with God?” The book of Job was a most remarkable one. There are many who believe that it is one of the very first books of the Bible written, if not the very first, that while the records of the family, from Adam on were kept and then Moses later put them together in the book of Genesis. Yet long before Moses, apparently in Abraham’s day, Job wrote his book, and Job, as he considers the problems that face him, the evils that have befallen him, have wiped out all his family and his possessions, save for his wife and himself, very plainly declares salvation is by grace, but the question in his mind is justice. Where is justice? And what is the relationship of justice to grace?

Centuries later, David declared in Psalm 50:7, “Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” Our scripture shows us Job struggling with the other side of that thought, and he says in the text as we read it, “If I wash myself with snow water, and make my hands never so clean; yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch.” Job recognizes the absolute sovereignty of God. He recognizes that God can do as he pleases and need answer to no man, that salvation is of grace, but does the sanctification, does the purification of the godly mean nothing? Does it have no standing before God? Does grace eliminate justice, and why should a man’s righteousness be crushed by the contradictions of the world? These are the questions that Job is raising.

Then, he comes to his central point. God is so great, he declares, and so far beyond man, that there can be no comparison. True, God is great. He is omnipotent. He is omniscient. He knows all things, but can God feel the agony of Job in his grief and misery. If God is all these things, all seeing, all knowing, all wise, he is still not man, and so Job, in this situation, trusting God, he has said earlier, “Thou he slay me yet will I trust him,” believing in salvation by grace, appealing against his friends to the righteousness and the justice of God, still cries out, “Oh, that there were a daysman, who might set his hand upon us both.”

What is a daysman? It’s too bad that the word is not familiar to us, because it is so important in scripture. We use a more familiar word which doesn’t say as much, and therefore, we have toned down the doctrine, as it were. The Greek word in the New Testament is mediator, but the Hebrew word, which we have as daysman, is far more telling. There are numerous references, Hebrew and Greek scholars tell us, to this word indirectly throughout scripture, references to the office, but this is the only time the word is very plainly and forthrightly used and is translated into the English.

When there was a conflict between two parties, the daysman, in ancient times, exercised a very important role. The daysman was a man who was a friend of both parties. He might indeed be related to both. He had very close connections to both and both trusted him. Both felt that he represented their interests, so that he came and arbitrated the differences, and placed his hand upon the heads of both and gave his decision, and reunited them in terms of justice and with harmony and love.

The daysman, therefore, was a most exceptional person. He was a man who could accomplish something when no one else could, precisely because he was a figure in whom both trusted and both felt, “This man represents us, our best interest, our justice, and he can be fully trusted.”

Now, the Bible gives us other examples, such as role of mediator. We shall study these next week. The priest who represents man before God, the prophet who represents God before men, and the king who mediates God’s law order and administers it. Now, the daysman’s work is {?}. It has reference to law, to disputes, to conflict, but it goes beyond law while it is grounded in law. It reestablishes not only justice in a relationship, but harmony, peace, and love. It reestablishes communion, and this is why Christ is the daysman, and was once so described by the older {?}, and it’s a word that needs to be revived. First, because it is biblical, and this is clearly a longing by Job that was fulfilled in Christ, and since Job’s words here are part of the inscribed scripture, the longing that he here expresses came from the Holy Spirit. Christ came as our daysman, to restore us to communion with God, and to reestablish us in the kingdom.

We are told in scripture, in Mark 1:14, that Christ came preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God. In Luke 22:29, we read, “I appoint unto you a kingdom as my Father hath appointed unto me.” Moreover, in terms of the fact that Christ was the daysman, he spoke of himself throughout scripture, and this type he applied to himself more than any other, the son of man. He declared emphatically, “I and the Father are one,” and John tells us that the Pharisees planned his execution because he made himself out to be God. True, but he also emphatically described himself as the son of man, and as the son of man came preaching, the kingdom of God.

The theologian Bavinck said of this, “The kingdom of God will, in the true full sense, be a dominion, but that dominion will be a human dominion, the dominion of the son of man.” Bavinck says further of Christ, he is the perfect fulfillment of the whole Old Testament law and prophesy, of all the suffering and all the glory which were preparatory and foreshadowed in Israel. The counterpart of the kings and priests in Israel, the counterpart of the people of Israel itself which had to be a priestly kingdom and a royal priesthood. He is king-priest and priest-king, Emmanuel, God with us. Hence, the kingdom which he came to preach and establish is, at the same time, internal and external, invisible and visible, spiritual and physical, present and future, particular and universal, from above and from below, coming down from heaven and yet existing on the earth, and Jesus will return. He came to preserve the world, to save it. He will return to judge it.

Now, Christ, in declaring himself to be the son of man, and also God, was declaring himself to be the daysman, related to both God and man, able wholly to identify himself with the claims of either God or man, and both at one and the same time. The mediator represents both parties. The daysman is one with both parties. This is the significance of being the daysman. For a daysman to exist between God and man, there had to be the incarnation. How else could any daysman be related to both? How else could the daysman take the part of both? So that, when we speak of him as mediator, mediatorship does not necessarily require the incarnation. We can speak of the law as, in a sense, having a mediatorial role between man and man. We can speak of men as mediators in certain negotiations, but when we speak of a mediator between God and man, he has to be a daysman. The mediator between God and men is the one who can be both, and represent both. He is able to represent the justice of God, God’s claim against man, and to declare that man indeed must die for his sins and transgressions. He is able also as man to represent man and to offer himself as the perfect sacrifice for sin. So he both knows the justice of God and the need of man for grace and mercy.

Moreover, we are told that he is a surety for the covenant. This is emphatically stated in Hebrews over and over again. He is a surety for both God and man. He can act as bondsman, because he represents both. Moreover, when he brings God and men together, he can do it as the perfect daysman, knowing that what he does cannot be undone. As God, he can assure his elect that God’s salvation is assured from all eternity, so that he speaks with authority as God and tells us, “My sheep hear my voice and I know them, and they follow me, and I give them eternal life and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father which gave them me is greater than all, and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand. I and my Father am one.” So that as our daysman being God of very God, he can assure us that our salvation is secure, that no man can undo what he has done, because he is one with God, and this very man of very man, who having identified himself with his elect, and having declared that no man shall pluck us out of his hand, he can assure God the Father as the daysman, that he are secure. We shall persevere, with that which God has called us to do, we shall accomplish.

Christ thus, is the mediator of the covenant, and even more, the daysman. The covenant is a law treaty between God and man, and when man fell, he was cursed. Christ took the curse upon himself to restore man to the right legal relationship to God. He regenerated man as well{?}, and he intercedes for us. So that, as our daysman, he speaks to us continually, and directs us saying, “This is the way, walk ye in it,” and he intercedes with God for us, so that all our petitions and prayers are taken to the very throne of God, and God {?} the daysman.

Job’s longing and hope for a daysman betwixt us that might lay his hand upon us both is ended. This is a remarkable hope on the part of Job, a remarkable longing. He expressed sorrow that there was none then. This was what was needed, and yet the image of a daysman, even as he uttered it, was a staggering one. Someone who was both God and man, related to both, able to place his hands upon both and bring them together in peace. Even the modernist scholars have said of this passage in Job that it is one of the most remarkable in scripture, that anyone from far, far centuries back, should have expressed a hope that so clearly pointed to the incarnation, that Job spoke out of the Holy Spirit, and because Job’s hope for a daysman was fulfilled, and because we have a daysman who is our mediator, we have this confidence. We can speak and he will hear us. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee that Jesus Christ is our daysman, that when we speak, thou dost hear us in Christ, and we thank thee that Christ speaks to us through his word and by thy Holy Spirit to direct us in all of thy ways. We thank thee, our Father, that in Jesus Christ, our daysman, we have been reconciled to thee. The barrier of sin removed, the curse of death destroyed. O Lord, our God, how great and marvelous thou art, and how marvelous are thy ways, and we praise thee. In Jesus name. Amen.

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

[Audience] {?} seems to be able to accept anyone {?} In other words, {?} everyone of them {?} now {?}

[Rushdoony] Right. There are two reasons why today you have a problem, and daysman is more difficult to conceive of. One is that life has become more atomistic. People no longer submit to authority in their own family, let alone outside the family, and the atomism of our day, therefore, makes it difficult to get any kind of authority except the authority of a gun, brute force. This is about the only thing that’s holding the world together, and even that is failing. The second thing is that the increased mobility of our time, added to the breakdown of authority, and the rampant anarchism, atomism, the mobility of people makes them less ready to put up with anything. Now I’ve referred to this in some group before, maybe some of you have heard this, but this is a very important point. To illustrate, one of the things that used to mark American life was that people stayed put in the same street, the same town, or the same farm year in and year out, and one generation after another. When you did this, you got along with people, because it would be very difficult to live in the same place with people who you wouldn’t speak to or you were offended against, you see. I know that when I went to Nevada, this was strong enough in the farm community where I lived, but when I went to Nevada, I realized how much stronger it had once been, because out on the ranching areas where you might have a total of twenty or thirty neighbors within an area of say thirty or forty miles, your life might depend on those neighbors, and so while you didn’t like a great many things they did, you put up with them. You got along with them. It didn’t mean you compromised, but you didn’t have the luxury of refusing to talk to them or having anything to do with them, you see. Now, that made a difference, and this was once commonplace.

For example, up until a few years ago, in the Netherlands, in the smaller communities if there were two people who were very angry at each other, on market day once a week when everybody went to the village, it was mandatory for those two people, before market began, or any other two people who were angry at each other, to come together and to shake hands and say, “Hello,” and then lock arms and walk up and down the whole length of the marketplace chatting. If they didn’t, they were kicked out of the community. No one would have anything to do with them. They had to maintain peace, whatever their differences were, you see.

But today, what happens? Well, take Los Angeles, or this area, almost any major metropolitan area of the country. If you don’t like the people you’re with, you can afford the luxury of a quarrel with them because there are “umpteen” million other people that you can go to to find a new set of friends. So people, first, become very uppity this way and they can be more contemptuous, more arrogant, and break off ties, or push you to break links because, “I don’t need you, the world is full of other people and maybe I’ll be moving away in a year or two,” and the result is a contempt for people and for personal relationships.

Now, this is the kind of thing you have in the last days of any civilization. It isn’t the first time we’ve had this, and it marks the last days of a culture when you have this breakdown of personal relationships. This is why there is no daysman now, and it’s only as Christ again becomes the daysman for people and there’s a sense of individual responsibility that you can again reestablish something like this. You know, outside of the Bible, the idea of a person is non-existent. Do you know that in the Greco/Roman world, there was no idea of a person? The very word “person,” the church fathers took from the Latin and changed its meaning to give us the idea which is biblical to the core. Previously, people were just people en masse or they were anarchistic individuals bent on their own pleasure, but the idea of individual responsibility, and the person, the Bible has fostered, and it requires personal relationships. Now, that imposes a responsibility and a burden. In an anarchistic world, you’re responsible to no one, and in an anthill type society, again, relationships are not personal. Any other questions? Yes?

[Audience] Where does the word “ombudsman” come from?

[Rushdoony] The ombudsman is from the Scandinavian countries, and the idea is not a mediatory, but a troubleshooter. The ombudsman can only expedite red tape. There’s a great deal of misapprehension in this country as to the meaning of an ombudsman, and the idea is here is somebody who can act as a court and bring about justice for the common man, and so on and so forth. The reality is that he can do none of those things. Because the Scandinavian countries have become so socialistic, and people are endlessly tied up in red tape, they have created the office of ombudsman, and you can go to him, not to alter a decision but to unsnarl red tape, essentially. It’s a very different kind of thing. He is a servant of the state, and his interests are essentially the interests of the state to try to protect the state against criticism. Yes?

[Audience] Would it be wrong to {?}

[Rushdoony] With what?

[Audience] With {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Some of the people are like Velikovsky and others have used this and other verses in Job. As a matter of fact, Job, one of the reasons some people believe it’s the earliest book of the Bible, has so many things that seem to refer to very, very early times in the history of the world. As a matter of fact, it’s a highly debatable fact, but there are some scholars who believe that the reading of the Hebrew at one point in Job seems to indicate a time when there was no moon, which ties in with one of Velikovsky’s theories. So, you are right. Job is a goldmine for that type of thing, and many of the creationists have worked very heavily in Job, studying the original texts for references of that sort. Yes?

[Audience] I was talking to {?} at work, a fellow about {?} Christian nation {?} and about the Indian, and he was saying the Indians were the true Americans and all this, and we’re just trespassers, and I was talking to him about that, and I wonder if you could explain {?} white man, we were correct in coming over {?} and then maybe further, just how do you {?} question {?} well, we’re going to liberate {?}

[Rushdoony] Alright, when a person raises that type of statement, tell him, “If you believe that you’re a trespasser, get out. Get out.” Now, if you are honest about that opinion, you see, this is just a way of clobbering those of us who believe that there is some kind of heritage here that is important. So, it’s a dishonest type of statement, because if I believed our trespasser in the United States, I believe it would be necessary for me to leave. Now, the answer to that is, “Well, of course the Indians were trespassers, too. They were latecomers.” We know, not only from Indian legends, and I’ve listened to the Indians tell of stories, but also from archeological evidence, that the prior inhabitants of North America, before the American Indians, were a pigmy people. The Nevada Indians have all kinds of stories about how they cornered the last of the pigmies after a long series of battles in some caves in Nevada, and finally killed off the last of them after a long series of battles, and not too many years ago, they did locate this cave, and the skeletal remains of the Pygmy people. In more than one way, the story has been confirmed. So, this and many other pieces of evidence indicate that the Indians were latecomers and trespassers, too. So, what you have to say is that this kind of sentimental story that tries to clobber the white man in the United States is nonsense, because if you try to say who had it first, you have to rule out one group after another as latecomers, and there may have been people here before the Pygmies, some very superior people. We don’t know for sure. So, would you have to say, we’re going to have to clear the country of the Indians and the Americans because it isn’t their property?

Well, obviously, this kind of thing doesn’t hold water. You would have to clear Europe of all the present peoples except, well, you’d have to say most of Europe, Western Europe, was Celtic or Gaelic, so it was the Scotch and the Irish and the Welsh, but they took over most of Western Europe and the British Isles from a previous people, the Basques, and they pushed the survivors of the Basques into the Pyrenees Mountains, but before them, there were evidence of some other peoples who survived for a long time in the hills of Ireland and Britain, and some parts of Europe, who were known as the “Little People,” and from whence you get the myths about the fairies, and you have reports of some of the fairy people before they became the kind of fairy type of thing, as being a shorter people who, well into the Middle Ages, some of them were intermarrying with the Irish, and the English, and so on. Now, the argument, in other words, wherever you go, falls apart as far as who is entitled to the land. So, you have to say the idea of being there first falls apart. Before man was there, there was nobody there. “The earth is the Lord’s,” and God does make it clear that people are judged, and he uses one nation or another to judge and to disinherit a people who are faithless to him. Now the common saying is might makes right. We believe that right, ultimately, makes might. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, in terms of that argument of the original inhabitants, you’d have to say the Boers are the original inhabitants of the lower part of South Africa.

[Audience]

[Rushdoony] Well, they were further north. Yes, the Hottentots and the Bushman were not in the furthest area. They were mostly further north. Occasionally they would drift down that way, but they were basically to the northern part of what is now South Africa. Yes?

[Audience] Well, what’s the key point in Christian nation or something like that, {?}

[Rushdoony] First of all, our responsibility to any new area is to Christianize, and to go in and under a kind of a free trade situation, you would have a right to go in and develop and they will develop progressively at the same time. Now, one of the reasons that you do have Imperialism is when you don’t have free trade and free travel, you see. The more the world becomes collectivistic, the more imperialistic it becomes because the only way you have access then is by force of arms. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, first of all, we have to crawl before we can walk, and then we stumble when we first crawl, and we must recognize that those who truly have a biblical faith are, first of all, new on the scene and a very small minority, and we’re stumbling, but we’re growing, you see, and it is going to be a painful thing when you see the opposition so strong and so aggressive. What we’re experiencing now is not unlike what the early church experiences in the face of the Roman Empire. When you look back and you see the troubles, and the conflicts, and the heresies, and the divisions that beset the church, all while it was being persecuted, but it was a part of their growing pains. So that they could mature in terms of the problems they had to face, and it is interesting to realize that how after a certain point, things moved so rapidly. If you had looked five or ten years before Christianity was recognized as the religion of the Roman Empire, you wouldn’t have given a nickel for their future. Every attempt was being made to wipe them out. They were as discouraged and disheartened as could be. It looked like it was the end for them, but they won, and no one would have dreamed a hundred years before that that the Christians would ever become important enough so that they’d be persecuted to the point of trying to exterminate every last one of them to preserve the Empire. Well, today we are having similar growing pains and the persecution is beginning. I have cited a case in Maryland where the Christian school is being persecuted on the grounds of endangering the mental and physical health of children for teaching them Bible verses. We’re going to see a lot of that in the next decade, but it’s also because we are getting strong enough so they’re afraid of us. So, our weaknesses are very real, and they’re sickening, but we need to recognize that against the world, we are very strong, because they have nothing but disaster and death ahead of them, and this is why, with all our weaknesses they are afraid of us and they’re turning their guns on us. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No, they do not by and large. The underground church, we don’t know too much about it, does not seem to have much eschatology. The weakness of the old church in Russia was that it was totally other-worldly. As a matter of fact, it’s doctrine of Christ was the theory of Kenosis, that Christ had utterly emptied himself of his deity and made himself totally man, and therefore, the Christian way was to empty yourself of any position of any authority, of any responsibility, and the ideal of the Christian was the wandering {?}, or the wandering pilgrim who had forsaken all, because the material world was nothing, it was heavily infected by Neo-Platonism, and this is why a country that was so thoroughly Christian outwardly had no resistance to the paganism that overwhelmed it. Well, the underground church is little by little showing signs of overcoming that. It has a long ways to go, but it isn’t as other-worldly as it was in the old days. It’s being forced, slowly but surely, to work out things in terms of responsibility for educating the children, however secretly. So, it’s a testing time for the underground church, and we ought to be in prayer that they develop the right kind of theological perspective, because the kind they had in the old days when almost everyone was a believer, made them totally impotent in the face of revolution. They had no answer to it because they were so radically other-worldly.

Well, our time is just about us. Let me remind you that this Thursday at 8:00 at the Gutierrez home, our study class will begin, and our subject will be Biblical Theory of Knowledge. If you don’t know the way to the Gutierrez home, get the directions from Dick or Secora after the meeting. As last year, there will be a $1 charge per meeting and your checks or gift can be made out to Chalcedon. It will be on a donation basis of $1 per person, beginning this Thursday at 8:00 and we will conclude promptly at 9:00 so that you can get home at a reasonable hour.

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.

End of tape