Salvation and Godly Rule

The Certain Word

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Doctrinal Studies

Lesson: The Certain Word

Genre: Speech

Track: 08

Dictation Name: RR136D8

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Our scripture lesson is Matthew 24:35, and our subject, The Certain Word. “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.”

Salvation is the saving grace of God manifested by and through Jesus Christ, who by His perfect keeping of the law and through His vicarious and atoning death for sinners, effected our salvation. God had declared in the beginning that sin would lead to death. Man chose to doubt that word. All the rest of scripture proves the certainty of God’s word. God’s absolute word both requires death for sin, but also makes salvation certain.

To understand the significance of the relationship of God’s certain word, God’s assured word to salvation, let us examine an entry in the diary of Rabbi Martin Siegel, recently published, a very interesting yet totally humanistic document. The entry for June 24, 1969 reads, “Several months ago, I talked to a couple who were feuding over whether to have a fifteen thousand Bar Mitphah for their son. The father said he could not afford it, and didn’t want it. The mother said she wanted it whether the father could afford it or not. I urged her to have a small, modest affair. “That will take courage, Rabbi,” she said, “but I’ll try.” She called me today to tell me that she had decided on a gala $15,000 spectacular. “You’ll drive your husband to bankruptcy,” I said. “But at least we’ll be able to face our neighbors,” she replied.

The library in the community has been running a film called The Answer, and one man’s attempt to solve it. The riddle embodies all the problem of mankind and its solution, we find out in the end, is no less than the Ten Commandments. Tonight, I was invited to speak after the film. I told the group that I did not believe in abstract universals like the Ten Commandments. The librarian was very upset.

Now rabbi fails to see the connection between the his denial of the Ten Commandments and the attitude of the mother towards the son’s Bar Mitphah, which he condemns, but there is a relationship between the two. He has denied the Ten Commandments. He is a rabbi of a very well-to-do congregation in suburban New York. The congregation is totally governed by pragmatic everyday considerations, and why not? All they have ever gotten from any rabbi in that congregation is a denial of any absolute word of God. Now, if men are not governed by God, they will be governed by men and the opinions of men. Man’s life can never be without an assured certain word, a principle of action, a guarantee of salvation. For all too many in our time, this word is the word of man.

In a situation very much like that which Rabbi Siegel records, a woman justified a similar extravagance because she said it helped her husband and her daughter. Her justification was existential. Her whole attitude was, “What can my action do for me here and now and what can it do for my daughter or for my husband here and now?” Salvation for her was not a divine transaction, but a means, any means of deliverance from evil and ruin, and evil and ruin meant anything that endangered her position and her family’s position in the community. Salvation is a passion with men, but not necessarily a holy passion. There are as many men for whom salvation means deliverance from the necessity of righteousness as there are those who look to be delivered from sin and death. The cry is for deliverance, for redemption, for release, for preservation, for salvation, but very often into evil goals.

Our Lord himself taught in one parable that the idea of salvation for many men was that they faced the son of God simply this: “We will not have this man to reign over us.” Salvation for them meant the death of the Son of God. Many demand salvation from the certain word of God, to the open word of man. Remember that the temptation was, “Yea hath God said?” Is there a certain word, an infallible word of God, and Adam and Eve grasped the fact as their salvation. They would be delivered from the certain word of God, the certainty that when God spoke certain consequences ensued, that the wages of sin, in every age, are death, that in every age, God’s law is binding on man. “Yea, hath God said?” That was the thing they grasped at. For them, it was salvation to be delivered from that certain word, to be delivered into a world of open possibilities which man can remake at his will, at his word, in any time in terms of the situation, into a world in short, of existentialism and situational ethics, governed by the word of man.

In such a world, they have removed God’s word, and they hold that there is no word above and over men to judge men. Men resent God’s infallible word. For simple men, the cut-off point of a tolerable world is themselves. I read just recently a report on prostitutes and homosexuals which was very interesting in that the writer, very definitely, to the left and an atheists, described homosexuals and prostitutes as the true existentialists because they, more than anyone else, live only in terms of the moment. He did not say this in condemnation.

Moreover, the writer added, “Most seem to feel that it was not terribly different from any other job. Some made the point that everybody hustles and that everybody has a price. The difference, they say, in wholly in degree.” Now, this is a very interesting statement and when you analyze that statement, you see why we have had a rise of occultism and Satanism. What were these people saying as they rationalize their way of life? First of all, they were denying that any higher law exists. They were taking the essential existentialist position, if there be no God, everything is possible, but second, their guilt had not disappeared. They still felt guilty in spite of all their attempts to deny that there was any God, any law, and so their alternative then was to say everybody is guilty, everyone is equally sinful. In other words, everybody hustles, and what does the thief say? Everybody steals. This is their rationalization. Indeed, I am guilty. I deny God, but I still feel guilty so I will project my guilt on everyone and say everyone is the same as I am. We will not have this man to reign over us. No higher word, no higher authority, no higher law. The only reality which is tolerated is that which is below, and this leads to occultism, to Satanism.

Sinful men are masochists, they are sadists. They punish themselves or seek to punish others because of their guilt feelings, and whereas occultism and Satanism masquerade as cults of power, which they are to a superficial degree, they are in essence a cosmic defeatism. For the occultist, for the Satanist, the universe is dark and meaningless, it is empty, it is perverse and twisted if it is anything, it is a place of darkness and devious powers. Man’s only hope in such a universe is not victory, but advantage, an advantage over others, and so the place to go for that is below.

Perhaps the most influential and important Satanist and occultist of modern times was the man who wrote under the name of Elephas Levi. He was a Frenchman names Alphonse Lewis Constant. He said of Satan, “According to the cabalist, the true name of Satan is that of Jehovah reversed, for Satan is not a black god but the negation of deity. He is the personification of atheism and idolatry. The Devil is not a personality for initiates, but a force created with a good object, so it can be applied to evil. It is really the instrument of liberty.” Now this is a very interesting point that he makes. God is Satan for him, and Satan is a force who is the instrument of liberty by being the negation of God. Liberation, freedom, means freedom from God and he declares it is the question for omnipotence, the secret of omnipotence. He says, “The secret of the occult sciences is that of nature herself. It is the secret of the generation of angels and world, it is that of God’s own omnipotence. ‘Ye shall be as the Elohim, knowing good and evil,’ so testified the serpent of Genesis, and so did the Tree of Knowledge become the tree of death. For six thousand years, the martyrs of science have toiled and perished at the foot of this tree so that it may become once more the Tree of Life. That absolute which is thought by the foolish and found only by the wise is the truth, the reality, and the reason of universe equilibrium. Such equilibrium is the harmony which proceeds from the analogy of opposites. Humanity has sought so far to balance itself as if on one leg, now on one and now again on the other.” In other words, between good and evil. Equilibrium, by this he means the equality of all good and evil. “Light is the equilibrium between shadow and brightness. Motion is the equilibrium between inertia and activity. Authority is the equilibrium between liberty and power. Wisdom is equilibrium in thought. Virtue is equilibrium in the affections. Beauty is equilibrium is form. Whatsoever is true is beautiful. All that is beautiful should be true. Heaven and Hell are the equilibrium of moral life. Good and evil are the equilibrium of liberty.”

Omnipotence thus, is the goal, and equilibrium means reducing all things to an equality and a balance. There is no meaning, there is no dominion, there is no real objective truth in Elophas Levi’s world, only advantage. There is no quest for anything except power, omnipotence, in fact, and it is sought in occultism and demonism. Levi says further, “It is by conformity with the rules of eternal power that man may unite himself with the creative energy and become creator and preserver in his turn.” Now, since in an evolving universe, Levi sees that creative power and energy only in that which is below, that which is primitive and even primeval. He looks below, and he seeks his salvation in power, in occult, demonic power.

Now, it is interesting that the more humanistic a state becomes, or a person, the greater its emphasis on power of a demonic sort. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Marxist states are terroristic power states, and the most brutal kind of terror takes over wherever you have a radically humanistic social order. This is the consequence of the denial of a certain word of God, and is seeking a salvation in man’s work, and then, inescapably looking below.

Now, as against this, our Lord said Heaven and earth shall pass away but my word shall not pass away. This is a very important statement. When our Lord says my words, Greek scholars who studied the text closely, tell us that it is a generalization. He is not talking about what he is saying at the moment, but every word that he has spoke, the application is total, so that our Lord is saying All heaven and earth, all things shall pass away, but never my word, any word, because my word is always the fundamental, the creative, the authoritative, the infallible word. The gospel of John declares John 1:3, “All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.” Heaven and earth were a product of his word. He said and they came into being, and therefore, they can pass away but never his word.

This means moreover that, because His word is the creative word, it is the predestinating word, but as the second person of the trinity, Jesus Christ declared the word and all things were declared, ordained, predestinated by his infallible word. He declared himself not a sparrow falls apart from the will of God. The very hairs of your head are all numbered. The government of God is that total. The world is a battlefield but it is not a meaningless battlefield. It is one that is ordained unto victory.

Moreover, in this chapter in which we find this declaration, “Heaven and earth shall pass away but my word shall not pass away,” our Lord was talking about the defeat and the destruction of Judea. These things happened about 33 years later, to 35 or 7 years, when the Jewish/Roman war broke out in the year 66 – 70AD. His words were fulfilled. Jerusalem was destroyed. Not one stone was left standing on another, and because He had predicted these things so meticulously in this chapter, not a Christian died. We have this from the records of the early church. They saw the signs of these things and every last one of them left. They were preserved.

Moreover, in this chapter, he spoke, looking ahead to the end of the world. Thus, in this chapter, he spoke predictively. The future is absolutely determined by him. Nothing can alter his decree and all things have meaning and reward in relationship to Him. Earlier, he had declared, in Matthew 10:42, “And whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones (that is, the humblest of his followers), a cup of cold water in the name of the disciple, verily I say unto you he shall in no wise lose his reward. Now that’s an amazing statement. We receive a great many things that we forget about and nobody is rewarded for doing them to us. We’ve had many a cup of cold water, but here our Lord says that a cup of cold water given unto us in the name of Christ, the smallest favor done unto us because we are a believer, is done unto Him. Verily I say unto you he shall in no wise lose his reward. There is an absolute, a total accounting. There is total blessing. So total is the government of our Lord, and so absolute is His word, so certain is His word that He can speak of the very hairs of our head and to the smallest favor, a cup of cold water, and declare that His word is so certain that these things shall not pass away. They stand.

Christ’s word is thus the certain word, the word of true power because it is the word of dominion. “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth,” he declared. His word is therefore, clearly the saving word. Over and over again, He declared men to be saved. “This day is salvation come into this house.” “Rise up and walk, thy sins be forgiven thee.” He never said, “It is possible you will be saved. It is possible your sins are forgiven, but He spoke absolutely because He knew what was in the heart of man. His was the certain word. Even on the cross and the agony of the cross, and I think all of you who heard Dr. Truman Davis a couple of weeks ago at the Chalcedon Guild dinner will never again forget the reality of the crucifixion, even in the agony of the cross, He spoke the certain word. Turning to the thief he said, “Verily, I say unto you, today, thou shalt be with me in paradise.” Before the agony of this day has given way to darkness, you and I shall be together in paradise. The certain word. No hesitation, no doubt. Even in His agony, the certain word.

Salvation is only possible in a universe in which God, our Savior, speaks an unchanging, a certain word. Only He who pronounces a word which will not pass away, and whose every word has total authority can be man’s Lord, and savior. The world around us is running away from that certain word, but they cannot run. The word surrounds them. The word is written into every fiber of their being, and to us who love that certain word, it undergirds our every step, and all our days are numbered and blessed by that certain word, which overlooks not a hair of our head, nor a cup of cold water. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee that of thy grace and mercy thou hast saved us, and of thy grace and mercy thou hast ordained so great a reward for us, even for a cup of cold water given to the least of thy disciples, to thy followers. O Lord, our God, how great and generous are thy provisions and thy government, and therefore, with glad hearts we praise thee. We thank thee that thou art on the throne and that the victory is thine, for thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory. Teach us, therefore, so to walk with our eyes firmly fixed on him who is our Lord, even Jesus Christ, that we may in all things, be mindful not of the powers of evil, but of the power of Him who is our Lord and our redeemer. In His name, we pray. Amen.

Are there any questions now, first of all, on our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] How could Christ be in paradise and {?}

[Rushdoony] A very good question. The question is this: How could Christ be in paradise, and the creed says He descended into Hell. Now, what it literally says in the Greek, in which the creed was written, “He descended into Hades.” We don’t have an exactly translation of Hades in English, and what it means literally is, Heaven and Hell, or the condition of death. So when the creed says “He descended into Hell,” which it gets from scripture, it literally is talking about into the condition of death, and in the world beyond. It is unfortunate that our English word is limited there, and we should use Hades which has become, more or less, English, too, in the creed. There are several points where translation fails us, and another one as I have mentioned before is the fact that in the Koine Greek of the New Testament, there are three words for love, and we only have one. There is Agape, which is the loving, gracious gift of God, which is holy without our merit. Then there is Phileo, which is brotherly love, human love between one and another, and Eros, which refers to sexual or erotic love, and we have one word to cover three meanings. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No, very good question. When Christ descended into Hades, did he not preach to the souls in Hades? No, that verse from St. Peter is one which has lead to a great deal of misunderstanding in its English form. Yes, in 1 Peter 3:18, “For Christ also hath once suffered for sin, the just for the unjust that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but quickened by the Spirit, by which also He went and preached unto the spirits in prison which sometime were disobedience when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was preparing wherein few, that is eight souls, were saved by water.” Now, the preaching is to the souls that were in prison in the days of Noah, and how by the Spirit, by the Holy Spirit, in other words, the reference is to the fact that, through Noah, at another time before judgment came, our Lord preached to those who were about to perish through the person of Noah, by his spirit, not in person, and of course, now again there was to be a judgment that was to destroy Jerusalem and Judea, and then of course, the Final Judgment, and the preaching by the Spirit, or through the Spirit in all these cases. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] If means everything, the heavens of God, the earth, the sky, totality of all creation shall pass away at the end and be recreated, but His word shall never pass away. It has the same force, the same meaning always. Yes, any other questions? Yes?

[Audience] I remember {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, there are many variations of that, and one of the variations is repeating the Lord’s Prayer backwards. It’s taking it and reversing it, and doing the same with the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt commit adultery, thou shalt kill, thou shalt {?}. In other words, taking and reversing it, one way or another. Thus, the essence of their position is negation, negation of God and His certain word. This is why they depend so heavily, in Satanism, on the Bible. They’re basically fighting it. They’re trying to eliminate the certain word, so they take it and play games with it, and this is what is involved in reading it backwards, or sideways, up and down. There are all kinds of variations, but the essence is to take the very words and negate its meaning. Yes?

[Audience] Is that blaspheme, I don’t suppose it is.

[Rushdoony] It could end up in blaspheme, yes. Very easily. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Oh yes, well, of course, there is nothing there that survived. The old Wailing Wall comes from the early centuries of the Christian Era when Jerusalem was rebuilt. It does not have anything but the original stones. It’s not the same wall at all. Moreover, the country is not the same. It’s been radically altered. It was, in those days, and our Lord said the land was going to be cursed. A widowed country, it had many streams flowing. We don’t realize that the whole of what is now Arabia was not once desert, but forest land, and many of the forbearers of the Arabian peoples made their money burning up the forests into charcoal, making charcoal out of the wood until they reduced it to nothing, and it’s the desert land that it is today. So, to see Palestine today is to have no idea of what it once was light, a forested country with abundant rains so that they did not have to irrigate in order to farm. Nonetheless, people do go because it still, in spite of the fact that it is a ruin, was the area where our Lord walked, and of course, pilgrimages were quite the thing during the Middle Ages, very religious in motive. Now, they are more governed by curiosity and historical interest. There is no particular merit in it. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Is occultism and Satanism, does it tend to originate from the Soviet Empire, is that your question?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes, I understand now. The question is, is it as big in the Soviet Empire as it is here, and the answer is it cannot be formal there because any kind of organized activity by private individuals is forbidden. So that an organized occultism and an organized Satanism is forbidden activity because any kind of private organization is forbidden, but once granted that, we have to say there is a great deal of it. First of all, of course, the Soviet scientists are interested in the subject, because as thorough-going evolutionists, they believe that the only powers that exist in the beyond have to be primitive, primeval powers and forces in the universe. So, they are very much given to investigating everything in this area, from ESP on down. It’s an area of tremendous interest on their part, and periodically, there are announcements whereby they think they are making great breakthroughs which will give them world power in this area. Then second, popularly, there are many indications that a great many of the people do believe in the reality of the Devil. They see enough evidence of evil around them so that it seems to them the only power that is left is the Devil.

Now, there is a novel that was published during the brief thaw under Khrushchev, whereby Russian writers were able to publish works that they had written and stored away under Stalin, and could not very well publicize, and one of these was then published and then translated. I’m not sure of the exact title at the moment, or the author’s name except that it’s a very long one. I think the title is something like Margarita and the Devil. Maybe some of you have read that. At any rate, the one thing that appears in that novel is that in the world of the Soviet Empire, everything is falling apart. There is no contact between man and man. The one thing you believed in finally is the Devil, and there is an episode about a grasping landlord who is a Soviet agent, of course, because the collective houses, apartment houses, are government property and they appoint one of their little bureaucrats to run it, and this bureaucrat, like all of them, is charging people for the right to rent. That is, if there is a vacancy, they pay him a bribe in order to get it, and somebody, of course everybody does this in the Soviet Union, but if they want to get you, they then have an excuse. So someone who has it in for him, is able to call the Secret Police on him, but he is a person who is receiving bribes, and is a suspicious character, and so on and so forth, and they go there and they locate the secret hiding place where he has these Rubles that he’s taken by bribes in which he cannot account for in terms of his normal income, and nobody knew it except his landlord. Except miraculously, they have turned into dollars, and now, he is not merely a person who has received a bribe, but he is a foreign agent as well, and that’s a very serious offense. So, what’s his answer? It’s the Devil, the only real power they know, you see? Now, this is the kind of thing that is believable to them. They do have a readiness to believe in the power of evil, a miraculous power of evil.

Now, of course, since then, they’ve clamped down on this type of writing because it doesn’t say much for life in the Soviet Union. It portrays life as the ultimate in perversity, because this is the only power that Satan manifests, the power to be perverse, and this does not present a good picture abroad. This novel was brought into this country and translated and it was out in paperback for awhile, but I don’t know whether it’s still available, but it does give us a very good insight into an aspect of life there that is confirmed by what many, many people who have left the Soviet Union have reported.

Our time is just about up. I have one announcement to make and that is that a week from tomorrow, at our Placentia meeting on Monday night, and I will have the directions for getting there next week, Gary North will be our speaker. I’d like to share with you now something that is, I think is rather amusing. It’s from the life of Lincoln, it’s a letter he wrote. Lincoln was not always the most diplomatic of persons. In fact, far from being a very kindly person, he was often given to the crudest and even more cruel kind of practical jokes, but he had a good sense of humor and he could laugh if the tables were turned on him. Now, this letter is not about a practical joke, but he writes to a woman, the wife of a very close friend, Orville Browning, to report on a situation. He was engaged for awhile and what happened to the engagement? Well, I’m not going to read all of the letter, but the circumstances were that this woman he knew told Lincoln, who was then 27, that she was going home to Kentucky, they were in Illinois, and it was time Lincoln got married and why not marry her sister? Well, Lincoln felt it was time he got married, and so he was agreeable to having this mail order marriage worked out. He had briefly seen the women three years before. He didn’t remember too much about her, so he went along with it. This was out in 1836. So, the friend came back, the woman, with her sister,

“In a few days, we had an interview, and although I had seen her before, she did not look as my imagination had pictured her. I knew she was someone oversized, but now she appeared a fair match for Fal {?} I knew she was called an Old Maid, and I thought no doubt of the truth of at least half of the Appalachian, but now when I beheld her, I could not {?} my life before thinking of my mother, and this not from withered features, for her skin was too full of fat to permit its contracting in to wrinkles but from her want of teeth, weather-beaten appearance in general, and from a kind of notion that ran in my head that nothing could have commenced at the size of infancy and reached her present bulk in less than 35 or 40 years, and in short, I was not at all pleased with her, but what could I do? I have told her sister that I would take her for better or for worse, and I made a point of honor and conscience in all things to stick to my word, especially if others had been induced to act on it, which in this case, I doubt and not that had, for I was now thoroughly convinced that no other man on earth would have her, and hence the conclusion that they were bent on holding me to my bargain, {?} I had said it and be consequences what they may, it shall not be my fault if I fail to do it. At once I determined to consider her my wife, and this then all my powers of discovery were put to the {?} in search of perfections in her which might fairly set off her defects. I tried to imagine she was handsome, which but for her unfortunately clepulency{?} was actually true. Exclusive of this, no woman that I have seen has a finer face, else I also tried to convince myself that the mind was much more to be valued than the person, and in this she was not inferior as I discovered to any with whom I had been acquainted.

“Shortly after this, without attempting to come to any positive understanding with her, I set out for Vandalia where and when you first saw me. During my stay there, I had letters from her which did not change my opinion of either her intellect or intention. But on the contrary, confirmed it in both. All this while, although I was fixed firm as the surge repelling rock{?} in my resolution, I found I was continually repenting the rashness which had led me to make it. Through life, I had been in no bondage, either real or imaginary from the thralldom of which I so much desired to be free. After my return home, I saw nothing to change my opinion of her in any particular. She was the same and so was I, and I spent my time between planning how I might get along through life after my contemplated change of circumstances should have taken place, and how I might procrastinate the evil day for a time, which I really dreaded as much perhaps more than an Irishman does the {?}. After all my suffering upon this deeply interesting subject, here I am, wholly, unexpectedly, completely out of the scrape, and now I want you to know, if you can guess, how I got out of it. Out clearly in every sense of the term, no violation of word, honor, or conscience. I don’t believe you can guess, and so I may as well tell you at once. As the lawyers say, it was done in a manner following to wit.

After I had delayed the matter as long as I could, as I thought in honor do, which by the way had brought me round unto the last fall, I concluded I might as well bring it to a consummation without further delay, and so I mustered my resolution and made the proposal to her direct, but shocking to relate, she answered emphatically, ‘No.” At first, I suppose she did it through an affectation of modesty, which I thought would ill become her under the peculiar circumstances of her case, but on my renewal of the charge, I found she repelled it with greater firmness than before. I tried it again and again, but with the same success, or rather with the same want of success. I was finally forced to give it up, at which I was very unexpectedly mortified, beyond endurance. I was mortified, it seemed to me, in a hundred different ways. My vanity was deeply wounded by the reflection that I had so long been too stupid to discover her intentions, and at the same time never doubting that I understood them perfectly, and also, that she whom I had taught myself to believe nobody else would have, had actually rejected me with all my fancied greatness, and to cap the whole, I then for the first time began to suspect that I was really a little in love with her, but let it all go. I’ll try and outlive it. Others have been made of fool of with the girls, but this can never be said with truth of me. I most emphatically, in this instance, made a fool of myself. I have now come to the conclusion never again to think of marrying and for this reason, I can never be satisfied with anyone who would be blockhead enough to have me. When you receive this, write me a long yarn about something to amuse me, please. Give my respects to Mr. Browning, your sincere friend.

It is interesting that she went back to Kentucky and promptly got married, and somewhat later after Lincoln’s death, she told a granddaughter she had a high regard for Lincoln but didn’t love him, couldn’t think of marrying him. Well, I find that a very amusing example of human folly.

One more brief announcement: I said last week that we would have our seminars on history later in the year. Some of you asked if it would be the fall or the summer, and I’m open to suggestion at that point. I assume that none of you would want it until fall, and would prefer not to have it in the summer. So, if you will let me know, those of you who are interested, when you would prefer the seminars to begin on history, American history, I’ll be governed by your wishes. 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.

End of tape