Salvation and Godly Rule

Outlaw Cultures

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Outlaw Cultures

Lesson: Change

Genre: Speech

Track: 21

Dictation Name: RR136L21

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Let’s worship God. Grace by to you and peace from God the Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins that he might deliver us from this present evil world. According to the will of God and our Father, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.

We have not an 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.

Our Lord and our God, we give thanks unto thee that we have a high priest who is mindful of us. Who knows our every thought, our down-sitting and our up-rising, and who speaks for us, intercedes for us, and has given his life that we might live, and so, our Father, we come boldly to the throne of grace in Jesus Christ, to commit unto thee our hopes, our wants, our wishes, our needs, the hunger and cry of our hearts, knowing, our God, that thou art able. Bless us and minister to us in thy wisdom. Be with our loved ones to lead them to a saving knowledge of Christ and do thou surround them with thy providential care. Defend our nation and reestablish it upon thy word, and revive thy church, O Lord, and make it mighty and effectual in thee and unto thee. Bless us now by thy word and by thy spirit, and grant us thy peace. In Jesus name. Amen.

Our scripture lesson is Deuteronomy 5:1-3, and our subject: Outlaw Cultures. “And Moses called all Israel, and said unto them, Hear, O Israel, the statutes and judgments which I speak in your ears this day, that ye may learn them, and keep, and do them. The Lord our God made a covenant with us in Horeb. The Lord made not this covenant with our fathers, but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day.”

The commentaries spend a great deal of time trying to explain away these verses. Because of this, they go astray of their understanding of the covenant and the law, and they misinterpret the meaning of salvation. The people who were at Sinai when God established the covenant after their escape from Egypt were all of them now dead, except for three men; Moses, Joshua, and Caleb. Almost forty years had passed. The younger generation now were standing at the threshold of the promised land. They were renewing the covenant by a reading of the Ten Commandments and a summary of the entire law as it had been given at Sinai. In this chapter, just before the Ten Commandments are restated by Moses, he makes this significant statement. “The Lord our God made a covenant with us in Horeb. [That is, at Mount Sinai] “The Lord made not covenant with our father, but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day.” The statement is emphatic. The nation that stood at Mount Sinai and with whom supposedly the covenant was made, God says I did not make it with them. He is most emphatic about that.

How are we to understand this? Those who were physically there when the covenant was made were not the ones with whom the covenant was made. We cannot understand this without understanding the meaning of covenant.

When we studied the law, we saw that the covenant was a treaty, binding both parties to certain responsibilities which are spelled out in writing. There can be no covenant, or treaty, without law. It is a law to which both parties agree and both bind themselves to it. Normally, covenants are between two peoples, and this is why the covenant always was and is, first of all, a covenant of grace, because God, in His grace, deigned to make a covenant with man who is not His equal, but his creature. God bound himself to do certain things for man, and this is the whole meaning of our redemption. This is the whole function of prayer. It appeals to the God of the covenant, to honor the covenant which, while we have not kept in our person, Christ, in his person has kept, and he is our representative.

Covenant is a treaty which is law. All treaties are a form of law. Indeed, there have been scholars who have gone so far as to say that all laws are a form of treaty. I’m not sure that that is a tenable thesis, but I think it’s a possible one, but very definitely, all treaties are a form of law. This is why, of course, the move in the fifties to eliminate the legal status of treaties from the Constitution was bound to fail. The answer was not to change the nature of treaties, which are law, but to get administrations which would make only the right kind of treaties. Treaties are a form of law. Their violation normally in the past, has meant war. The law of the covenant or the treaty, having been violated, there is warfare between the two parties. This is why there is warfare between God and all covenant breakers. They have violated the treaty which God, in His grace, has established. All men are either covenant keepers or covenant breakers, and covenant breakers have no covenant with God. They have a state of warfare.

As a result, the generation who stood at Sinai could not be called a generation with whom God made a covenant. When Moses came down from the mountain, he broke the tables of the law. Two copies, with all Ten Commandments written on both. As with all contracts, two copies, one for both parties. The one to be placed in the Ark of the Covenant, and the other to be in the hands of the people. Moses broke the covenant because the people had broken it and God told him when he was on his way down, or before he left, that the people had broken the covenant even as it was being made. It was not an act of anger on Moses’ part, though He was angry. It was formally signifying that the treaty had been violated by their idolatry, and so there was a state of war, and the next thing he did was to say, “Who is on the Lord’s side, let him stand with me,” and to go through the camp, to kill the idolaters.

The treaty therefore, was {?}, Moses says now. Forty years later. “With us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day.” It was reestablished that God knew there was an apostate generation with whom he was at war and He killed them all off in the wilderness. They were not {?} the promised land because they were not the covenant people. He was making it with their children, and He kept them alive for their children’s sake.

In other words, a covenant, being a law or a body of laws, it is impossible for a covenant to exist with a lawless or an antinomian people. We cannot, therefore, say there are antinomian Christians. There are antinomians, but they are not Christians.

Just recently, as a matter of fact, on June 26, there was a very interesting article in the papers about a robbery in a church in Flint, Michigan. Listen to the article, the news report in its full.

“’God loves you, ‘ the preacher said to the youth who stood on the church altar, pointing a gun at his head. ‘I hope so,’ the bandit replied as he pocketed money from collection plates in a Sunday hold-up at the Christ and Christian Union Church in downtown Pontiac,’ [excuse me, I said Flint]. The stick-up left the Reverend James Ray Nessleroad and forty parishioners $400 poorer. ‘We weren’t scared,’ said a sixty-four year old parishioner, Cecil B. Tucker. ‘We seemed to feel that there was someone looking after us other than ourselves.’ Toward the end of the sermon, the Reverend Mr. Nessleroad said a youth in his late teens and another in his early twenties barged through a side entrance. One of them pulled a pistol and fired a shot into the feeling. ‘This is a hold-up. Everybody stay in your seats and everybody get out your money,’ one said. One gunman stood at the entrance guarding the congregation and the other, brandishing two pistols, walked up to the pulpit and asked where the collection plates were. The youth found money in Sunday School offering plates, then one of them laid an army 45 by the side of my head,’ the minister said, and took his wallet. ‘Then he took up a collection,’ he said. ‘People held out their money and he walked down the center aisle taking it.’ The gunman returned to the front of the church and climbed onto the altar. The Reverend Mr. Nessleroad looked the gunman in the eye and told the youth, ‘You know, God loves you.’ ‘I hope so,’ the bandit replied, stuffing money in his pockets. The minister turned to his congregation which stood up and prayed, ‘Dear God, help these boys to realize where a life of crime will lead them.’ One parishioner said thee bandit on the altar was really shaking; he could hardly stand up when we started praying. While the parishioners were praying, the minister said the robber who had held him at gunpoint, jumped down and told us not to follow him. Then he joined his partner and out the door they went. Police are investigating, but the Reverend Mr. Nessleroad and members of the congregation said they would rather not prosecute. Someone forgot to show them the way to God,’ said the minister.”

Is that a Christian church? I doubt that it is. First of all, they deny the biblical doctrine of responsibility. Someone forgot to show them the way to God.” Now that’s blaspheme. Scripture emphatically makes clear that every man knows in his heart the law of God and knows God, but he hold the truth down in unrighteousness. It is sin, it is wickedness on his part that leads him to deny God, so that every man, everywhere on the face of the earth, whether he has ever seen a Bible or not, knows the truth of God. He holds it down, the Greek literally reads, he suppresses it in unrighteousness. Now, if man is man’s creature, if he is a creature of the state or of man, as the humanists believe he is or can be, if he’s a product of his parents and of these schools, then man must be taught responsibility by man, but if man is God’s creature, then God has implanted responsibility in him, and to deny that these people are responsible and know the truth is to deny that God is the maker.

Moreover, to say to a lawless man that “God loves you,” is to deny the fact that they are at war with God, and therefore, it is to sin grievously. I have no doubt that such a religion would be attractive to a young Cretan. You can eat your cake and have it, too. One very prominent evangelist, well-known in this area to some of you, not too long ago in the presence of one of our number told a young man, who was confessing one depravity after another, “That’s alright, that’s alright. God loves you.” That’s blaspheme.

A covenant is the covenant of salvation. It is an act of grace, whereby God who is not man’s equal and owes man nothing says to man, “I will bind myself to abide by certain things, in my care of you, but you are going to abide also by the law of this covenant, my law.” Grace and law are inseparable. The law is given by the grace of God when He makes a covenant, and apart from the law and apart from that covenant, there is only a death sentence. The world outside the covenant is made up of covenant-breakers, men at war with God. It is made up of an outlaw world.

Thus, every institution outside of Christ is an outlaw institution and a part of an outlaw world. It is not we who are called to wage war against it. God does. The family is a God-ordained institution, but when the family is not Christian, when the family is not godly, it is an outlaw institution. Listen to this definition of the family from the Dictionary of Sociology. “Family: The basic social institution. One or more men living with one of more women living in a socially-sanction and a more or less enduring sex relationship with socially recognized rights and obligations together with their offspring. The four general forms or types in their order of known frequency are monogamy, polygamy, polyandry, group marriage.” Is this a definition of the family as you and I know it? To cite a few things wrong with that definition, it fails to mention the fact that the family, first of all, is a religious institution, a God-ordained institution. It fails second to cite the fact that the family is the basic law institution. It is a law order. Third, it says that the legitimacy of sexual relations is found in social sanctions, so they vary from culture to culture, but we deny that there is any legitimacy in social sanctions whereby adultery or homosexuality, or polygamy or anything else is legitimatized. Legitimacy comes only from the law of God.

Then, again, and much more could be cited that is wrong with this definition, the rights and obligations of marriage are not legitimate because socially recognized, but because religiously bounded. What the dictionary is defining is nothing godly. It is what they would like the family to be as an outlaw culture, an outlaw institution, and the same is true of their definition of the state. The Dictionary of Sociology defines the state, “State: That agency, aspect, or institution of society authorized and equipped to use force, that is, to exercise coercive control. This force may be exerted in the way of control of the members of the society or against other societies. The voice of the state is the law, and its agents are those who make and enforce the laws. These agents constitute the government. State and government should be carefully differentiated. The former includes traditions, political instruments such as constitutions and charters, and the whole set of institutions and conventions that have to do with the application of force. The latter is a group of individuals entrusted with the responsibility and equipped with the authority to carry out the purposes of the state.”

Again, this is an outlaw institution that is described, not anything that is of God, hardly that which has existed in much of history. Again, religion is left out of this definition, although the state is not only a religious institution but has all too often, been the main religious institution, pagan or Christian. Again, the state is defined as “force, coercion,” as that institution in society which exercises force or coercion. Well, that’s ridicules. After all, most of us have seen more force or coercion exercised on us by the family than by the state, and historically, this is true. The family punishes its children and its members. After all, I don’t think there is anyone here who hasn’t at some time or other, suffered a spanking or discipling, or chastening at the hands of their parents, or any wife or husband here who hasn’t felt the wrath of their spouse, and perhaps far more often than you felt the wrath of the federal or state government. Coercion is a part of other institutions than the state. There is scarcely any institution which does not exercise some kind of coercion. The schools, for example, and the law is included in the definition but a very humanistic idea of law. Why? These definitions in other words, are doing one thing. They are trying to create an outlaw concept of the state, of the family. The same is true of their definition of the church, and so on, and the Dictionary of Sociology does not even define vocation.

The word vocation comes from the Latin, voco, “call.” A vocation is a religious calling. We are what we are because God gave us aptitudes, and led us into various callings and professions that we might there serve Him. The first thing that man, the sinner, did when he disobeyed God was to hide himself in the garden from the call, from the voice of God, and this is why modern man is, no matter what his profession, too often vocation-less, because he is an outlaw.

Again, the Dictionary of Sociology as it defines man, makes him an outlaw. It defines him only as being different from sub-human species or organisms, the higher animal. It d3efines him in terms, not of law nor of God, but of the lower animals, instead of defining him in terms of the image of God. Whenever man denies the covenant, denies the grace of God and the law of God, he creates an outlaw culture, an outlaw church, and outlaw family, and outlaw state. An outlaw culture denies God, but imitates Him. Satan has very wisely been defined as the “ape of God,” who seeks to imitate God, and to create a world in mimicry of God, but without God and His law, and when we look at outlaw institutions, we do see this mimicry.

When Moses said, “The Lord our God made a covenant with us in Horeb. The Lord made not this covenant with our Fathers, but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day.” He then went on to repeat the Ten Commandments. The law of the covenant, which God in his grace had given to His people and given them a heart to respond to that law and to obey that law. The covenant and that law was given to the people of the covenant, not to the disobedient. They come up with an eighth commandment. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” and today the outlaw state tells us that it is a sovereign state, and claims a sovereign allegiance. The word “sovereign” is very interesting. It comes from the Latin supra, “above.” That’s why the word sovereign belongs properly only to God. God alone is truly and only above all things. No graven images, the commandment says, but modern man makes out of his institutions and the state a graven image.

During World War 2, a group of the most distinguished people in the world, including great scientists and scholars at home and abroad, and men who called themselves theologians, issued a declaration entitled, “The City of Man, a Declaration on World Democracy,” in which they issued the guidelines for the future. These men were not just talking. They had a powerful voice in the determination of events, and they declared, among other things, “universal and total democracy is the principle of liberty and life which the dignity of man opposes to the principle of slavery and spiritual death, represented by totalitarian autocracy. No other system can be proposed to the dignity of man, since democracy alone combines the fundamental characteristics of law, equality, and justice. Democracy therefore, must be redefined. No longer the conflicting concourse of uncontrolled individual impulses, but a harmony subordinated to a plan. No longer a dispersive atomism, but a purposive organism. It is not a sequence of chivale{?}, of Pharisaic lip service to the disembodied slogans of freedom and justice. It is the plentitude of heart service to a highest religion embodying the essence of all higher religions. Democracy is nothing more and nothing less than humanism in theocracy and rational theocracy in universal humanism.” Man is God, and humanism is the true theocracy, the highest religion is the religion of man. Clearly, this is idolatry and man makes himself his graven image.

And these men went on to take the name of the Lord in vain, because they said all biblical religion was moving toward the third age, the age of the Holy Spirit in which man would be his own god. They also believed that there would be a true Sabbath rest in this religion of man, and instead of honoring father and mother, they proposed honoring the family of man, and since World War 2, a book has continuously been in print, a very sentimental book, entitled The Family of Man.

The outlaw society has its commandment Thou Shalt Not Kill, and it abolishes capital punishment in the name of this while killing by means of abortion, and one can go on down the list of the commandments and see how the outlaw culture is the ape of God, affirms the law in its own demonic sense.

Moreover, as one of their own number has observed, the outlaw culture, humanistic culture, creates its own fanaticism, and Matsey{?} has written on the fact that we have now the new fanatics, the humanists, the intellectuals, because there is no god above and beyond them, they see themselves as ultimate reason, ultimate truth, ultimate God, and therefore, they absolutize their will with fanaticism, and they make themselves their own law.

One other scholar, Cavell{?}, in writing on the new religion that is emerging among students, says, “The students I have spoken with generally find the idea of guilt unacceptable in every way. They deny the possibility that they may feel it without being aware that they do. They are convinced that the guilt they do feel is nothing but projection into their consciousness of a false moral system, and they think that in a healthy society, we would be guilt-free. The young, like the rest of us, don’t like to feel guilty. They need to hope. They want to love and be loved, but granted that society extracts too much in the way of instinctual repression, and that our guilt is often excessive and misplaced, still the insight of religion in the West that our capacity for remorse is bound up with our capacity for love seems to me an important one, for guilt it says, is the only way we have or recognizing, with feeling, that we hurt or wish to hurt someone we love, and love itself never was easy.” Now, of course, Cavell, in saying this, is trying to find a humanist rationale for opposing these youth whom Cavell finds in classes at the universities where Cavell teaches, but a rationalist answer to a rationalist ailment is no answer at all.

Men{?} Cavell comments on the remarks of Charles Manson. Manson protests that since the law is not absolute, not divine, it results in the fiction that guilt can be assigned to one individual rather than to society as a whole. Taking up the argument, “Rolling Stone” commented, “The court must proceed as if events took place isolated from the society in which they took place, and once that fiction has been established, it is easy to find villains in individuals. Our legal system is guilty of just what Manson claims. It is a form of theater in which real victims are found for sacrifice.”

In other words, the new religion, the outlaw religion which is emerging says, individuals are not guilty. That is a myth propagated by the old religion. It is society which is guilty, and so the individual is absolved from guilt to make all of us guilty, and so they admit thereby, that they are all outlaws. They turn all the world into an outlaw world, and this point, they are not too far from wrong, although for the wrong reasons.

The world around us is an outlaw world. Moses was right. The Lord our God made a covenant with us in hope{?}. “The Lord our God made a covenant with us in Horeb. The Lord made not this covenant with our fathers, but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day.” And Moses there is speaking to us also who are the people of the covenant. God made that covenant with us. He renewed it in Jesus Christ. The covenant is an act of grace because in His grace, he deigns to make a treaty with us, to bind himself to us and asks us to bind ourselves to him by the law. Around us is an outlaw world, and that world will continue as an outlaw world until first it recognized that it is guilty and deserves to die, and it set the grace of God unto salvation through the atoning death of Jesus Christ, and then binds itself to God in grateful response, by the law of God. Only then do we have a covenant culture, and this is our calling, our vocation. To hear the voice of God, and everywhere to establish a covenant culture. Let us pray.

Almighty God our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto thee that of thy grace and mercy thou hast made a covenant with us in Christ. We thank thee that thou hast bound us to thee, and thyself to us, and that thou hast revealed thine own obedience[?], unto death. O Lord, our God, indeed thou art a covenant-keeping God. Make us a covenant-keeping people, for thy of thy covenant, O Lord, in homes, churches, schools, and in our nation, that we might be a people who show forth our salvation by our obedience, who magnify thee in and through all things, and establish in every realm thy word and a culture of thy law. Bless us to this purpose in Jesus’ name. Amen.

We have time for just a couple of questions. Are there any questions, first of all, about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Very true. God alone has the right to be totalitarian, because God alone is sovereign and absolute, and when men establish totalitarian regimes, they are claiming to be God. That’s the meaning of totalitarianism on the human scene{?}. Any other questions?

Our time is just about us. I’d like to make a couple of announcements. First of all, our Chalcedon’s Christian schools seminar will convene a week from tomorrow at Knott’s Berry Farm. Our meetings will run from 10:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. and on Tuesday evening, at the chicken dinner restaurant at Knott’s Berry Farm, at 7:00, the Reverend Robert L. Thoburn will be the speaker speaking on “Crises in Education.” There are reservation forms on the lectern in the back for the dinner. If you have not made your reservation already, I urge that you do so promptly and hand your reservation forms to Mrs. Thurston, who is right here in the front row. Next Sunday morning, our speaker will be the Reverend Robert L. Thoburn.

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