Salvation and Godly Rule

The Forgiver

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Works

Lesson: The Forgiver

Genre: Speech

Track: 38

Dictation Name: RR136U38

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

[Galatians 3:13-14] “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree: that the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.”

So often, as Christians we emphasize grace and forgiveness, but forget Him who gives grace and is the forgiver. It is important, therefore, when we analyze the doctrine of salvation, to recognize that it is meaningless without the forgiver, without God. The implications of placing God at the forefront are very, very great. Too often now when we think about salvation, we think about its benefits, its results, for us, and too little about God who forgives.

Now it is very interesting when we analyze some of the theological roots of our country, we find that secular scholars today are beginning to give a great deal of emphasis to two men who have always been favorite theologians of mine: Joseph Bellamy and Samuel Hopkins, who began their work around 1750 and had a very profound influence. In fact, some of the most recent scholars who are not in the least bit Christian, say that the War of Independence was, to a large extent, a product of the faith taught by these men.

Now, the essence of what Bellamy and Hopkins taught was really a reemphasis on the doctrine of salvation and all its fullness, the liberating effect on men, plus a thoroughly post-millennial perspective, and a great many scholars now are finally getting around to admitting, in the last year or two as they’ve restudied the era, that nothing would have happened in 1776 without these men.

Now Bellamy dealt with the subject of forgiveness in “An Essay on the Nature and the Glory of the Gospel of Christ,” published in 1762. He set forth three propositions.

“Prop. I. The Great God, the Creator, Preserver, Lord and Governor of the World, is an absolutely perfect, an infinitely glorious and amiable Being, the supreme Good, infinitely worthy of supreme love and honour, and universal obedience from his creature Man.

Prop. II. The divine law, which requires this of us, on pain of eternal death, is holy, just and good, a glorious law; worthy to be magnified and kept in honour in God's Government.

Prop. III. The Design of the Mediatorial Office and Work of the Son of God incarnate, was to do honour to the divine Law, and thereby open a way, in which, God might call, and Sinners might come to him, and he received to favour, and entitled to eternal life, confident with the honour of the divine Government.”

This is the way Bellamy began his discussion of the grace of God unto salvation, of forgiveness. He began with God and his law. It is important for us, if we are going to understand the subject of forgiveness, to examine it in relationship to the forgiver; God. Man is so easily absorbed in the fact of guilt and the need for absolution that he tends to overlook the offense and the offended one. I recall some years ago hearing a woman complain, a very vicious woman who was little better than a tramp and who’d borne at least two children out of wedlock, and whose husband had separated from her, and she whined, “Why doesn’t he forgive me? Doesn’t he realize how much I’m suffering?” In other words, the emphasis was still utterly sinful. “I’m suffering. I no longer have a very lovely home where I’m subsidized and I can do as I please. I’m bearing some penalty for my offenses. How dare he let me suffer so.” In other words, so often when we are concerned with the grace of God and forgiveness, we are concerned with the fact that we are suffering, that we want to feel right with God and with man. We want to have peace with ourselves. We want to be absolved of guilt, and we do not think of the one who has been offended, and the one who must forgive. There can be no forgiveness without a forgiver.

Moreover, there is nothing automatic or necessary about forgiveness. Forgiveness is not inevitable nor is it mandatory. God, as the offended one, has an absolute right to establish the terms of forgiveness and to hold the sinner to it. The guilty party cannot, either with respect to God or man, whomever he has offended, establish and ordain the terms of forgiveness. We can never say, “I have suffered enough, therefore you, God, or whoever the human being involved is, must forgive me,” or that “I want to be forgiven, therefore you have to forgive me.” The sinner can never establish the terms of forgiveness. Only God can. The humanist, of course, regards himself as the center of the world. If he admits God into his world, he requires God to provide him with whatever he wants, including forgiveness, health, and care; on demand.

Some years ago, an English theologian, (Illico?) remarked, “The present generation is not morally serious enough to believe in Hell. It can scarcely understand Calvin’s words, ‘Without judgment, there can be no God.’ It has sympathy with the jive of Heine, and these are Heine’s dying words, incidentally, when someone asked him if he had made his peace with God. ’The good God will pardon me, for that’s his job.’”

There is an attitude not too far different from Heine prevalent in many, many circles, where the emphasis is very heavy on personal salvation in a humanistic sense rather than on the glory of god and his righteousness. For many people, God is there to save men, whereas the reverse is true. Man’s calling is to glory God and to enjoy him forever. The salvation of man is important, but it is very far from primary. The world does not operate for our benefit. God did not create heaven and earth just to make us happy. The whole point, of course, of the Book of Job, is that God makes clear to Job, I make it to rain where no man is; The grass to grow where a people do not dwell. Man is not the measure. Man is not the yardstick by which reality is to be judged, and therefore, on the question of forgiveness again, man is not the yardstick.

He cannot therefore, emphasize man’s needs even for forgiveness to the point of making them central, because then we become humanists. It leads to making man’s way central, and when we make man’s way central, ultimately, we dethrone God. Let us turn back again to Joseph Bellamy. Bellamy, writing 200 years or so ago, called attention to what the end result is of making man’s salvation the end purpose of God and making man’s forgiveness God’s basic business. He said it ultimately leads to the fact that whatever man does is right, and he said, “To say it is no matter what man’s principles be, if their lives are good, is the same as to say that paganism and Mohammedism are same ways to heaven as Christianity, which is downright infidelity. To say good men may differ, there are more ways to heaven than one, all equally safe, it is needless to be at pains to look at things to the bottom, is much the same as to say that everyone sincerely live up to his own scheme and he will be safe, which again will land one on the shores of infidelity.”

In other words, Bellamy said, unless your first premise is that God is God, and that forgiveness is on his terms, not in terms of our need, we wind up in total unbelief. We enthrone man as God. Implied in the Gospel is the fact that, as Bellamy summed it up, “God is considered as the moral governor of the world, that man is considered as a proper subject of moral government, that God’s law is considered as holy, just, and good. That man has broken it is without excuse, stands guilty before God already condemned, and it is so far from penitence that he is dead in sin, an enemy to God, and at enmity against his law and government.”

Thus, in order to think about forgiveness, we must think first about the forgiver. We must, therefore, as we approach the subject, have certain very theological and God-centered considerations in mind. First of all, it is a person who has been offended, God himself. All sin is essentially and basically against God. When David sinned against God by committing adultery with Bathsheba, and conspiring for the murder of Uriah, yet in his confession he said, “Against thee, thee only have I sinned and done that which is evil in thy sight.” David was right. Sin pits man’s will against God’s will. Man’s dream of bending reality to his will against God’s will. Sin is not only committed by a person, but against a person. First of all, against God.

Thus, the forgiveness of sins is an aspect of the relationship between person and person. If there were no God in the universe, we would have an impersonal universe and forgiveness would be meaningless. In an impersonal universe, everything is governed by impersonal forces, and then we would have precisely the kind of world that secular scholars today tell us we have; a world in which heredity, environment, sociology, and so on are the root causes of human problems, and you don’t locate problems in person responsibility, but in impersonal forces. In such a world there is no room for forgiveness, because forgiveness is a personal relationship. In such a world, you so deemphasize persons, for impersonal forces that personal relationships become a problem. This is why modern man is unable to understand people of past ages. They look like wild people to him, and so many modern scholars will turn to previous eras and say, “These people were primitive,” or something. Why? They cannot understand the intense personalism and the strong sense of responsibility, and accordingly, they see them as barbarous. Let me cite a specific example.

One of the greatest Christians of the Elizabethan Era, a man who was something of a lay preacher, was Sir Francis Drake. Now, you never read about this when you read about Drake in the textbooks, where he is portrayed as the freebooter, and ship’s captain, a pirate who preyed on the Spanish fleet and the Spanish Main and who, very really so, so terrified all of Spain, one ship captain that mothers in Spain would silence their children by threatening them that, “If you don’t behave, El Draco will get you,” but Drake was a God-fearing man whose father had brought him up on the Bible, who always instructed every man in his ship or if he ever had a fleet as he did on one or two occasions, in the word of God, required chaplains to be on every ship. On one occasion when a chaplain didn’t preach faithfully, he had him put in irons and took over the preaching himself. Above all else, it was important that men get the word of God. On one of his most important voyages, when he persuaded Queen Elizabeth on the importance of the New World, of colonization, and of checking the Spanish threat to England overseas by hitting at the source of their wealth, he set out with the blessing of Queen Elizabeth, having persuaded her that his idea was sound. It was on this particular voyage that he landed at San Francisco and left a brass plate.

However, Lord Burley was very much against the journey and figured that as soon as Drake was gone, he would persuade Queen Elizabeth otherwise, and so he persuaded a friend of Drake, Thomas Doty, to create a mutiny when they were out at sea and take over the ships, and radically alter the plans. Doty attempted to do this, and Drake found out about it and caught him at it. He held a trial on ship for him, found him guilty, and gave Thomas Doty three choices. To be returned after the voyage to England for a retrial, to be marooned on the first island they sighted, or third, at the first island they sighted, to be landed and to have his head chopped off. Doty told Drake that a retrial wouldn’t do any good, he was guilty and he knew it. He’d take the third alternative, on one condition. That having acknowledged that he had done great wrong, that they would have communion together, and only after that, he would be beheaded.

Now, Doty knew what the consequences would have been if Drake as his friend had forgiven him, and then released him from penalty. It would have meant, and the voyage was a very difficult one, although it became one of the most successful voyages finally, and profitable that any Englishman ever undertook, and Queen Elizabeth realized more from that voyage than from all her revenues in a single year. Yet, there were many times when the fleet would have mutinies because conditions were so trying and difficult if they had known they could get away with it with impunity. Yet they knew they had a man who would not spare even his closest friend, and they never did. Doty knew that, Drake knew it, and Drake agreed, and so they sat down as good friends and had dinner together when they sighted land, and chatted about old times and their wonderful years together, and then hand in hand, landed ashore, and Doty quietly and with faith put his head upon the block. He felt he had deserved it, and he was grateful that he had been forgiven.

Now, to modern man that sounds very, very barbarous, and people give Drake a very bad time because of his hard heartedness, but they forget it was men like this who could command legions, and who because they had a strong of personal responsibility, also had a capacity to forgive, and when occasion required it to live with people, they forgave, but today, because we have become impersonalistic, there is no sense of responsibility and forgiveness has become an emotional word which means “wipe it out,” but in which hard feelings and ill will remain. The result is, people are a major problem to one another in a way that they were not in Drake’s day. An impersonal age will have no age to personal problems. It will aggravate them.

But then second, we must say not only is the person of God offended by sin, but also his law, and his law order. God’s peace is broken by sin. His kingdom is claimed by a rebellion, and the penalty is death. God’s law must stand. This is imperative. The law must stand or God is not God. Let’s turn again to Bellamy, because I think it is so important to hear the words of men who made this nation in terms of a faith concerning God and his saving power. Now Bellamy put it in these words, which I think sing out. “The law supposed that God was really, by name, God, an absolutely perfect and infinitely glorious being as it required us to consider and treat him as such, our revolt, our sin is a practical declaration that he was not, by nature God, nor worthy to be glorified as God. To give up the law in favor of his rebellious creature must therefore be the same in effect as for God to give up his own divinity, and unGod himself in the sight of all his dominions to gratify a rebel. Again, the law also supposed that as God was the creator, Lord, and owner of the universe and by nature, God, so he was possessed a supreme authority, an authority infinitely binding and infinitely worthy to be revered. To give up the law, therefore, was in effect the same as to resign his authority in favor of those who had despised him, give a quit claim of the universe, and tolerate a general revolt, as if God should say, ‘The universe is not mine nor have I any authority over it. Angels, men, and devils are all at liberty. There is no king and so everyone may do what is right in his own eyes.’ For to hold his authority merely on the footing of a voluntary loyalty of his subjects, so that when any revolt they are at liberty no longer obliged to obey, to do this only in one instance is, in effect, to relinquish all claim to authority over any as founded in his godhead and lordship which is, in effect, the same as to quit his claim to his own divinity and to his own world, to gratify those who would gladly unGod him and dethrone him. In a word, for God to give up the law, which requires us to love and obey him with all our hearts, is practically to declare to his rebellious creatures, ‘Your disaffection to my character and rebellion against my authority is no crime, for I am not worthy to be loved and obeyed with all your hearts, for I am not, by nature, God and absolutely perfect, an infinitely glorious and amiable being, your creature, sovereign Lord, and King, as in my law I claim to be, and to welter and abase the law and bring it down to the taste and good liking of an apostate world who are enemies to God and his government, enemies to the order and harmony of the universe, must be much the same as for God to give up his law and authority entirely, for he must quit his supremacy, give up the rights and honors of the godhead, justify their revolt, turn to be on their side, turn enemy to God and his law, and employ his infinite wisdom and almighty power to promote the schemes they have laid in consequence of their revolt, schemes suited to the taste of apostate creatures, and thus they must become as gods as Satan said, and the Almighty become their true and faithful servant, for nothing short of this would suit an apostate world, but this is even worse than merely to quit his claim to the universe and resign his government over it, as it would be bad for King George to quit his throne for the pretender, and fly{?} his country, but worse, to become the pretender’s servant and to be obliged to employ all his power to promote the pretender’s interest.”

In other words, Bellamy said the law must stand or God is not God, and the greater the authority, the more important the commandment and the greater is {?} guilt if we disobey. Thus, to disobey God is the ultimate in guilt.

Finally, restitution, restoration is necessary. The negative aspect of restitution and restoration is death. The positive that the broken order must be restored, and this man cannot do, and this Christ does. St. Paul declared, “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made curse for us. For it is written, Cursed is everyone that hangeth on a tree.” Now, this is a very remarkable statement, because St. Paul does not say what we would logically say. Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made accursed, accursed for us. No. According to St. Paul, made a curse for us. The curse itself, he was all cursed, voluntarily. Now, St. Paul tells us in Colossians 2:9, In Christ dwelleth all the fullness of the godhead bodily. He was very God of very God. In some similar sense, St. Paul tells us, the fullness of the elect humanity dwelled in Christ, and the fullness of their sin and of their guilt was borne by him so that he was made a curse for us, that he might fully make atonement, that the blessing of Abraham might come onto Gentiles through Jesus Christ, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.

Thus, man’s response to God’s grace in Christ must be, among other things, obedience of the law of God and a manifestation of the same forgiving grace. God is the forgiver, and we must, in Christ, be forgivers also. As he manifested grace, so must we. The law must be obeyed because the purpose of our forgiveness is to reestablish us in dominion, and the grace of God unto salvation must be manifested. “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” The terms of our forgiveness and of our forgiving are those laid down by the forgiver. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee that, through Jesus Christ, we have been forgiven. We thank thee that thou art the forgiver, so that our forgiveness stands in time and eternity because it is thy doing, not the work of man, nor by imagination, and so, our God, in Christ, we stand before thee forgiven, that all our sins blotted out, and according to thy promise they should be remembered no more. O Lord, our God, we rejoice in the freedom that it ours in Jesus Christ, and we pray that, by thy grace, we may use this liberty for the establishment of the things which are of thee. Bless us to this purpose in Jesus name. Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] {?} and yet we now have people who {?} people {?} not necessarily {?} but, is charity a fact of forgiveness?

[Rushdoony] A good question. The question if you did not hear is, if charity a kind of forgiveness? Is charity a kind of forgiveness? Now, it is related to forgiveness in that with the ungodly, charity is seen as a kind of restitution. Thus, in a socialistic society, the attitude is that if there are men who are poor, somehow it’s the fault of the rest of us, and therefore, the rest of us have a duty to make restitution to them and in a sense, be forgiven by the fact that we surrender what we have, through taxes, to them, that there might be some kind of equalization, and of course, this goes very, very far in some societies. It’s an interesting fact that some scholars now say that as much as 50% of the people in Rome were, in later years on charity, on welfare. That’s an amazing fact. It meant that everyone was supporting somebody else. We may come to that, and of course, this is what destroyed Rome. You can imagine the tremendous burden that it involved. If you’re a family of one, or of three, or five, you doubled that in terms of the kind of support that is necessary for you to make. So, from the ungodly perspective, charity, or welfare would be the better word, is a form of restitution related to forgiveness.

Now, this is not the case in a Christian perspective, because charity is not given because we are forgiving somebody or are seeking their forgiveness. Charity is an act of grace, whereby you, out of your bounty, relieve somebody in distress, but in a Christian perspective you do it because first, there is an emergency need or second, because they are a brother or sister in Christ. Now in terms of the scripture, charity is a requirement of Christians to help one another. This was the purpose of the deacon’s fund. Families, first of all, were required to take care of their members. The parents or the children were to be provided for by parents, or by the children if the parents were old and infirmed. Then, the church as a family, was to take care of all its members, and the office of widows and the office of deacons was created for this purpose. Then, those who were outside the church were not normally the object of a continuing charity, but were objects of works of mercy, so that if there were a disaster or a crisis, they then worked to relieve their needs. It was recognized that, under normal circumstances, you couldn’t think of treating the whole world. You took care of your family, your blood family, and you took care of your religious family, and beyond that, you ministered to crises situations, but this was entirely different from forgiveness. This was charity, as an act of grace, an act of family love. It’s a perversion today that charity, or welfare, is seen as a way of seeking forgiveness. Any other questions?

Well, if not, we have one brief announcement. We have the announcement sheets in the back on the lectern for this Saturday night’s dinner, 6:30 p.m. at the San Marino Masonic Temple on Huntington Drive. It will be a Chalcedon Guild spaghetti casserole dinner, and I shall be speaking on Vitality Versus Stagnation in the Christian Faith. This will deal with the doctrine of the last things, with millennial perspectives. How does it affect our outlook? What are the consequences of it? You can either speak immediately to Secora{?} Gutierrez if you are planning to come, and make your reservations with her, or take these sheets and mail them in. Please don’t forget, therefore, to make your arrangements if you’re planning to come, as quickly as possible. It is this Saturday.

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.