Christian Reconstruction

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Christian Reconstruction

Lesson: 1-2

Genre: Lecture

Track: 109

Dictation Name: RR155A1

Location/Venue:

Year:

The last time I was in this assembly room I shared this platform with Congressman Larry McDonald. Then last week he was murdered by the communists. One veteran foreign correspondent editor told me that this was more than the death of a man. That the Marxist ‘s tested the ability of the US to resist and they found us as soft as hot butter and so he said this may well mark the death of the American republic. Larry McDonald was shot down by 3 squadrons of three fighter planes whose technology came from the U.S. to great measure and who were probably fed on American wheat. Nothing the White House has said thus far has indicated that we will stop the flow of technology apart from which their nuclear missiles cannot be built, nor the flow of grain apart from which they would face hunger. One soviet dissonant, who died last year of (?) made the statement in a book he wrote a decade or so ago that the main ally of the Soviet Union was the government of the United States. This, unhappily, has been the case. The day before Larry McDonald was killed, Lord Bethell of England wrote an article published in the Wall Street Journal Tuesday Sept. 6, 1983, which highlights a few facts from articles and a book he has written. The title is How the Western Allies shipped victims to Stalin. Reading just a little bit: On Jan. 19, 1946 a contingent of

American military police surrounded a prison camp near Munich with orders to arrest 105 Russians and deliver them to the Soviet authorities. The Russians did not want to be handed over to Stalin. They had every reason to believe that they would be shot as soon as they returned. However, the US and Britain had agreed at Ulta to repatriate all Soviet citizens after the war irrespective of their individual wishes and by force if necessary. The Russians had barracked themselves inside their huts and stripped their underwear. When they refused to move the M P’s broke into the huts and dragged them out one by one. One hut was especially well defended. The Americans fired teargas through the windows. Then, as soon as they broke down the door and entered, the Russians embarked on an orgy of mass suicide. Two men tried to disembowel themselves with broken glass. Another stood side by side slashing at each other’s throats. One man stuck his head through a window and shook it from side to side pressing his neck down through the jagged edges. The MPs beat the man into insensibility and carried them to the waiting trucks on stretchers. Day after day it went on until we had finally delivered more millions to be killed by Stalin than Hitler had ever killed. I knew a Russian girl who was allowed to live because she was acting as interpreter for the American high command in Vienna. At her pleading they allowed her family, her parents, her brothers and sisters to survive and felt they were being very big hearted. When she cried out against the massacre of the millions they said, “We are only obeying orders.” Exactly what at Nuremberg we sentenced Nazi’s to death for. Is it any wonder that we are doing nothing significant to date of the murder of Larry McDonald. Washington has been closer to Moscow then it has been to men like Larry McDonald and to the Christians of this country.

In a sense we asked for it. The churches have withdrawn from the world. They have acted as if only a small corner of the world, the church, belongs to Christ and the rest belongs to the devil and can be allowed to go its own way. They’ve forgotten the great commission to make disciples of all nations. And so it can be said: “Shine, perishing republic with phosphorescence of decay and of death.” Turn to the church pages for evidences of that. God wants you to have inner peace. What kind of gospel of conquest is that? Withdraw from the world. Withdraw from the mission of the church. Just to concern ourselves with our inner peace! Men seeking peace when there can be no peace to the wicked; and we are of the wicked when we pass by on the other side of the road and are not good Samaritans when we have no gospel to the people of the world except our quest for inner peace. We have sinned.

As churches and as a nation and we are like that woman described in Proverbs 30: 20 of whom it is said, “Such is the way of an adulterous woman that eateth and wipeth her mouth and said I have done no wickedness”. The meaning of that is that just as the flight of the eagle through the air leaves no trail, and the path of a ship through the waters half an hour later leaves no wake, so the adulterous, so sinners feel that all they have to do is to pass on and there is no mark of sin left. She eateth and wipeth her mouth and all trace of the sin is gone. The assumption is that sin has no consequences; but it does and judgment is in the air. We live in a time of judgment but in every time of judgment there is also salvation. The Bible tells us that throughout history there is a coincidence of judgement and salvation. That the flood was a judgment upon the old world but the redemption of God’s people. That the plagues upon Egypt were the judgments upon the old world but the salvation of the people of God.

The cross is supremely the judgment of God upon man but also our salvation. On revelation tells us that the history of the world from the fall of Jerusalem on marks a great shaking of the nations. The seven vials, the seven bowls of wrath indicating the judgment upon the ungodly upon the nations on the salvation of His people. This is the time of judgment and of salvation and the only question is, “Will we be among those judged or redeemed?” (10:58)

The sad fact is the Christian community, so called, is largely on the side of the enemy. I was amused in a grim way the other day. I received a publication by the so called evangelical homosexuals. They are a large group. At their last conference they had alumni and delegates from every major reformed and fundamental seminar in United States. They singled out three men as their enemies and had a paragraph about them. Francis Schaeffer, John Whitehead and R.J. Rushdoony. (laughter, clapping). We do have the right kind of enemies. But do you know whom they quoted in that statements sighting us as the great enemies and threat to Christianity? Carl F.H. Henry, an evangelical. And again, and again this is the case. They let the evangelical community do the hatchet job for them. Interesting.

Recently a woman who is in her sixties has been a faithful church goer all through the years, sits in the second row morning and evening and is always present in prayer meetings told me she had come to a conclusion. That the church was the enemy of God. Why? She said she suddenly realized that as I was going through my Bible again that all the servants of God, all the prophets of God spoke out against the kings and I don’t know when I have heard a preacher speak out against Washington of the State Capitol. And certainly God knows they are as evil in Washington and in the State House today as they were in the days of Elijah and Elisha and the other prophets. And the church is silent. Moreover it ignores the basic doctrines of the faith. The doctrines of the covenant. This is basic to the Reformed faith.

No one can call himself a Reformed believer who does not appreciate the significance of this doctrine. Because what does this doctrine tell us? A covenant is a treaty of law. It is always and without exception a treaty of law. What it is contracted between a greater and a lesser party it is at one and the same time a treaty of law and of grace. The greater gives his law to the lesser party and says if you live by my law I will extend to you my protection. God’s treaty with us is a treaty of grace and of law at one and the same time. God in His grace gives us His law and says, “This is the way, walk ye in it. And if you are faithful to me my blessings will pursue you and overtake you and come upon you.” Irresistible blessings for faithfulness.

One of the great reformed preachers of about two and a half centuries ago was Jacques Saurin. Look up his name in some religious encyclopedia and you will be told what a great man he was in his day but what a bad man he is from our perspective. They don’t like him now and I am sure from having read a number of those articles none of the writers ever read Saurin.

In his day in the early seventeen hundreds Saurin began to encounter the kind of antinomianism and pietistic withdrawal from the world which marks the church today. In the seventh volume of his sermons on the covenant of God with the Israelites, he says in part and I quote:

“Moses required the Israelites in renewing their covenant with God to consider what constituted its essence. Which according to the views of the lawgiver was the reciprocal engagement. Be attentive to this term, reciprocal. It is the soul of my definition. What constitutes the essence of a covenant is the reciprocal engagement of the contracting parties. This is obvious from the words of my text, that thou shouldest stipulate or enter. Here we distinctly find mutual conditions. Here we distinctly find that God engaged with the Israelites to be their God and they engaged to be His people. We proved at the commencement of this discourse that the covenant of God with the Israelites was in substance the same as that contracted with Christians. This being considered what idea ought we to form of those Christians, if we may give that name to men who can entertain such singular notions of Christianity, who venture to affirm that the ideas of conditions and reciprocal engagements are dangerous expressions when applied to the evangelical covenant. Then what distinguishes the Jews from Christians is that God them promised and required, whereas now he promises but requires nothing. My brethren! Had I devoted my studies to compose a history of the eccentricities of the human mind I should have deemed it my duty to have bestowed several years in reading the books in which those systems are contained that I might have marked a posterity to precise degrees to which men are capable of carrying such odious opinions. But having diverted them to other pursuits, little it is confessed, have I read of this sort of work. All I know of the subject may nearly be reduced to this. That there are persons in these provinces who both read and believe that without attacking by long course of causes and consequences a system so destructive of itself. We will content ourselves with a single test. Let them produce a single passage from the Scriptures, in which God requires the acquisition of knowledge and engages to bestow it without the least fatigue of reading, studying and reflection. Let them produce a passage in which God requires us to possess certain virtues and engages to communicate them without enjoining us to subdue our senses , our temperature, out passions, our inclination in order that we may attain them. Let them produce one passage from the Scriptures to prove that God requires us to be saved by the merits Jesus Christ and engages to do it without the slightest sorrow for our past sins, without the least reprobation of our crimes, without precautionary measures to avoid them, without qualifying dispositions to participate the fruits of his passion. (21:03)

What am I saying? Let them produce a text which overturns the hundreds and the hundreds more passages which we oppose to this gross antinomian system. And with which we are ever ready to confront its advocates. We have said my brethren that this system destroys itself. Hence it was left with a view to attack it that we destined this article then to apprise some among you to have adopted it at the very moment you dreamed that you reject and abhor it. We often fall into the error of the ancient Israelites, frequently forming as erroneous notions of the covenant God has contracted with us as they did of that he had contracted with them. The people had violated the stipulations in a manner the more notorious, the most notorious in the world. God did not fulfill His engagements with them, because they refused to fulfill their engagements to Him.”

Unquote. And yet today, we have prominent pastors in this country such as one who has said that you cannot lose your salvation. Why, God has bound Himself to you once you say yes and go forward. But you are not bound because grace is free of any obligation of reciprocity of faithfulness, of obedience. In fact this man goes on to say did you know that if you were a genius you could not figure out a way to go to hell. You can blaspheme, you can deny the Lord, you can commit any sin in the Bible plus all the others but there is no way, once you have said yes to Jesus, he is bound to save you. “By their fruits you shall know them and faith without works is dead. “ But today Jesus Christ is talked as if He were a fire and life insurance salesmen. Come to Jesus and get fire and life insurance and go your way. Most of us have to think as to where our insurance policies are. Once we get them we don’t worry about them. If we have a problem we call the agent.