Law and Life

Sacrilege of Time

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Law

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 9 of 39

Track: 120

Dictation Name: RR156E9

Date: 1960s-1970s

[Rushdoony] Let us worship God. Oh give thanks unto the Lord, call upon His name. Make known His deeds among the people. Sing unto Him, sing psalms unto Him. Talk ye of all His wondrous works. Glory in His holy name. Let the heart of them rejoice that seek the Lord. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, our hearts rejoice in Thee as we seek Thy face. We thank Thee, O Lord, for the multitude of Thy blessings, and in a troubled world of the certainty of Thy grace, Thy government, and of Thy protecting care. Bless us this day by Thy word and by Thy Spirit and grant that we may grow in Thy service, and that our joy in Thee be increased, and our certainty in Thy grace, mercy, and government strengthened and confirmed. Grant us this we beseech Thee, in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Let us unite [skip in audio]

Our Scripture lesson is from Deuteronomy 14, verses 28 through 29. Deuteronomy 14, 28 and 29, and our subject: the sacrilege of time. “At the end of three years thou shalt bring forth all the tithe of thine increase the same year, and shalt lay it up within thy gates: and the Levite, (because he hath no part nor inheritance with thee,) and the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, which are within thy gates, shall come, and shall eat and be satisfied; that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hand which thou doest. ” Our subject this morning is the sacrilege of time. Sacrilege, as we have seen, is the robbing of God, and it is an obvious fact that any abuse of the Sabbath, or profanation thereof, is a sacrilege of time. To understand something of the meaning of this, beyond the mere act, let us look first at the two statements of the commandment to keep the Sabbath day. First of all, it appears in Exodus 20, verses 8 through 11. Here we read, “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: for in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.”

{?} has observed of the meaning of the Sabbath, and I quote, “This rest constituted the creation of the Sabbath, which thus expresses God’s own nature.” Unquote. What does this mean? Because God is beyond time and necessity, because time and necessity are aspects of His creation and not of Himself, God knows the end from the beginning, and there is no necessity outside of Him compelling Him. God declared in Genesis 1, “let there be”, and there was. God’s rest is grounded in the perfection of His being, in the certainty of His work. When God says “let there be”, there is. By the word of His mouth He creates. By the word of His mouth all things come to pass. There is not a hair nor an atom in all creation that can go astray from God’s predestined purpose. Man can thus rest because God rests. There is no effort to His creative work, to His government. In God, work and rest are at one. There is the absolute certainty of His Word. And therefore, man can rest because God’s work, in a sense, is finished. God’s work to the end of time is a complete work. It stands established in His word, in His eternal decree. And therefore though all of history that is ahead of us has yet to run its course, God rests. The foundation of His word stands sure. Known unto God are all His works from the foundation of the world, and therefore God can rest in the certainty that what He says is always inescapable done. Because of God’s rest, man can rest.

Now man cannot government his life this way. He cannot say let there be and be sure that it will be so. In fact, it is a sin for him to assume that he can determine his future. He can only work under God to God’s appointed end. But man can rest in the confidence that God has total government. He rests in God’s government, and therefore man’s rest is in God’s rest. It is possible for man to worship without this faith. There is worship in paganism, there is worship in Arminianism, which has a defective doctrine of God. But, while there can be worship without this faith, there can be no rest. Therefore the creation pattern is set forth in Exodus, and it tells us wherein our rest is patterned. But then we have the restatement of the law in Deuteronomy 5, 12 through 15. Wherein we are told, “Keep the sabbath day to sanctify it, as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee. Six days thou shalt labour, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; that thy manservant and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou. And remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the LORD thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm: therefore the LORD thy God commanded thee to keep the sabbath day.”

The Sabbath thus, while it commemorates creation in its seven day pattern, and our rest is grounded in the fact of God’s rest, began with the Passover in the Old Testament and the day of Resurrection for us in the New Testament, because it celebrates our salvation. We can rest because we are redeemed. Because the sovereign grace of God reached out unto us, therefore we rest. Thus, creation is the pattern and the ground, and salvation the source of our rest. The sacrilege of time thus involves beyond the failure to observe the form of the day, the denial of creation and contempt thereof. In modern evolutionary theory, there is an evolving universe and man is the potential god thereof; the high point of it. And man cannot rest in such a philosophy. Everything depends on him and man is neither infallible nor omnipotent. The Sabbath thus can be observed by modern man, but he cannot rest there in. It merely becomes an opportunity for some other form of activity than work. It means only a change of pace not work. The wicked are like the troubled waters of the seas, we are told in Scripture, constantly in motion, unable to rest because there is no omnipotent God who rests in His work, whose government is total, and in whom therefore, because we trust in Him, we can take hands off our lives and rest.

Second, when man denies the doctrine of salvation, when he denies that he is redeemed by the atoning work of Jesus Christ and by the sovereign grace of God in him, he denies rest and commits the sacrilege of time by making his time, his work, his activity redemptive. When man does this, he then creates his own timetable and he dreams of a world Socialist or Humanist utopia at the end of his time as his manmade Sabbath. Whenever and wherever men deny God’s Sabbath, they say “we will create our own Sabbath somewhere at the end of time, therefore work.” And the Socialist whips, the Marxist whips go to work to lash man into that so called Sabbath or worker’s paradise at the end of the road, which they never reach. Their Sabbath expresses man’s hope that there will be a finished nature, a finished universe, a finished social order at the end of the road, and then man can rest.

There’s a third aspect to the sacrilege of time, and before we can observe its implications as we saw in Deuteronomy 14, verses 27 and 28, it is important for us to understand and analyze briefly some aspects of time. Time, we know, is a resource, which when wasted can never be recovered. Time, once lost, can never be recaptured. It’s the one resource, when man wastes it, he can never buy it back. But this is not all. Time is the one resource that you cannot stockpile. Other things you can save and stockpile, you can stockpile food, you can stockpile money, you can stockpile anything but not time. So time can never be recaptured, nor can it be saved up and stockpiled. In some cultures, therefore, where there is no faith, time is made all important. Eternity being despised or rejected, man has nothing but time and therefore he says we’ve got to do everything. But the end result of this is a sensate culture. Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. It leads to a frantic, frenzied activity; work or live it up. There is no future; no time but the moment. Tomorrow you may be dead. And so it leads to a totally present oriented outlook, to an eagerness to exploit the moment and its pleasures or its opportunities to the full. This leads to existentialism; nothing is real except the moment, and it becomes a self-defeating thing. Man destroys his future when he rejects eternity, he then has only the moment, and the moment is meaningless because it is in the context of an ocean of meaninglessness.

On the other hand, some cultures go to the other extreme, under such influences as Neo-Platonism. They despise time for a non-Christian idea of eternity; for enduring values only. Now the academic world is deeply rooted in the Hellenic tradition; in Greek philosophy, and it is deeply imbued in many sectors with a contempt for time. And so they have, very often, a goal, which is a post-historical culture, beyond time, to arrest time, to create a pseudo-eternity. And again it is a failure. It’s an attempt to embody, to concretize new universals established by autonomous man. But all efforts to end time to create a universal unchanging world order are doomed, because eternity cannot be achieved in time. Time cannot be arrested, no matter how much the Neo-Platonists and their kind may dream thereof.

Both views lead to a contempt for man. In the one it’s only the moment that matters, in the other the only thing that matters are the universals they are going to concretize. And so the people who hold this view in the academic community, either view, despise man because the ordinary man is somebody in their eyes who wastes time, whose world is filled with trifling concerns. And they cannot deal with trifles, they are above trifles. And so you find them very commonly despising people, despising courtesies, why waste time on courteous trifles? And why waste time on anybody who’s a non-intellectual, who’s beneath you? Or why waste time on buying on selling. The contempt of the intellectuals, for marketing, for salesmanship, is staggering. Why? They regard salesmanship and marketing as the epitome of barbarism. All that should be taken care of by a commissar in some office. Because salesmanship, and marketing, and supply and demand involve people; knowing people, liking people, you cannot sell unless you know and like people. And if you despise time, either as a Neo-Platonist or as an existentialist, then you’re going to despise people, you’re going to despise salesmanship, courtesy, and so on. In the dream world of the anti-historical scholars of both varieties the world of people, or courtesy, of salesmanship is a sordid world that must be eliminated.

Some years ago as a student, I recall hearing about an incident where a very prominent professor at a social gathering where they had to be present because the university president and the regents were there, this professor was mildly chided by his wife for his boorishness and his unwilling to be the least bit interested in anyone else. And he snarled back “I have no time for etiquette and small chit-chat.” What he really meant was that he had no time for man, for man as such, only for important people. And his snobbishness and his false philosophy were justified in his eyes by his self-importance. He was above trifles and time is made up of trifles.

Now when we look at the Biblical view of time, from the modern perspective, whether Neo-Platonic or the frenzied existentialist who says I’ve got to use this moment, the Biblical view seems grossly wasteful. What does it do? Well the Biblical view says one day in seven you rest. Moreover, when you create a Godly Christian order one year in seven you also rest; a Sabbath rest. And that’s not all. At the end of seven sevens of years, you have not only the seventh or a Sabbatical year of rest, you have a Jubilee year, a two year rest, which requires of course, as we saw when we were studying Biblical law that you be provident. You have to save so that you can have your rest. But it also says you spend that time rejoicing before the Lord. You’re wasting time from the humanistic point of view. But you see, this is the essence of the Biblical point of view. It requires providence on the part of man and a rest in the Lord. But again, this is not all. A requirement of that rest is fellowship.

Now our Scripture says that a part of one’s tithe every third year had to be used in rejoicing before the Lord with the Levites; the religious and educational leaders, with the strangers; that is foreigners; people who were outsiders to the community, with the widow and orphan, with the needy. So that the rest involved not only physical rest, spiritual rest in the Lord, but community; that they were to have fellowship with those with whom they normally would not have contact. This requirement of fellowship was thus a type of that which was expected at all other times. Incidentally this was required in Puritan New England. But it is the mark of our age that exclusiveness is soft.

Recently I read a very interesting work by a sociologist in which he was analyzing social classes in America today, and the one thing above all else that all are pursuing is exclusiveness. So he was quoting the very wealthy, he had a series of interviews and forms, what their hobbies, their interests were. Well, their hobbies were to collect something and do something that nobody else was doing, and to travel to someplace where no one else was going, where there were no tourists. And the minute somebody else picked this up they had to drop it. And the middle class desire to imitate the wealthy, to show an interest in the kind of foods, art objects, points of travel, style, that those above them had, which by the time they picked up immediately the upper class dropped, and then by the time the middle classes decided it was no longer exclusive, by that time the lower classes were picking it up. In other words, exclusiveness was soft. And the worst thing was to associate with people out of your class. In fact, on the corporate level, the minute you got a promotion you would have a dinner or something for all the associates in your old peer group, and after that you were polite to them but you did maintain the associations, that was bad taste and it was frowned upon. You now belonged to a new peer group and therefore that group was the group you associated with and entertained. And to try to maintain ties with anyone in the old group, if you were an executive with a promotion, was bad taste. But what does the Sabbath rest require? That we be knit together as a people.

Now just as there is no worship in the church if we think of worship as something belonging to the church exclusively, and there is no government in the state if we think of government as a state thing (primarily and essentially), so there is no rest if we think of it as something belonging to the church and no community if we think of it only in terms of the day when we get together. True worship is only possible in a church if it exists in the home, in our work, in our moment by moment living. If worship is not something we observe every day, it disappears from the church, it becomes an empty form. This is why there is very little worship in the churches today. Even those which are Evangelical or Reformed, because worship is gone out of their daily life. And this is why when the state today is getting total power and is becoming the Government (rather than civil government), government is disappearing in our lives, and increasingly we have anarchy.

Because government is first of all the self-government of the Christian man. It is the family, it is the church, it is the school, it is society, it is our calling, our work. Those are all areas of government and civil government is just one other. But when civil government becomes totalitarian and destroys all of these, it perishes, it collapses into anarchy because the roots of government have been destroyed. And when the church says worship is the church service, worship disappears, it is destroyed worship. And when community becomes only when we come together formally every third year, if this is what had happened in Israel, the community that God required here would be gone. And if we only rest on the Lord’s day, you do not rest. It begins first with that trust in God; resting in the Lord, waiting patiently on Him, casting all your care upon Him for He careth for you. That is rest, and it is there where that rest in our hearts every day that true worship begins, the true government begins, the true fellowship begins.

And so the ultimate, the third form of sacrilege, the sacrilege of time, is not only a denial of the Sabbath rest, but of the community and fellowship of God and of man with man, which the Sabbath rest requires. And so the true Sabbath is a community of man with God, and of man with man in the Lord, resting in Him, a joyful rest in the Lord and fellowship in Him. Because man is saved by God’s grace, not by himself, nor by the creation round about him, man {?} when he rests in the Lord and the reality of eternity as well as time. We are citizens of the new creation, we have a dual citizenship in time and eternity. Then we neither waste time nor we overvalue it, we live in time without being its creatures, we can “waste” time because our work now is purposeful, we accomplish something, we know that our labor six days of the week is not in vain in the Lord, and so we can rest in the Sabbath, and we can work to create a society in which there is a Sabbatical year and a Jubilee year, what a “gross waste” from the standpoint of modern man, but what a productive society that will be because no man then will work in futility and everything he does will have more meaning, more direction, more value, and a {?} productivity.

The Lord makes this fact very clear what this rest involves. Over and over again the note sounds, but perhaps most strongly in Isaiah 28:16. “Therefore thus saith the Lord God, behold I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste.” He that believeth shall not make haste. The existentialist makes haste because all he has is time, and time without meaning on top of that. He makes haste because he has to establish a new, a purely personal meaning or essence to existence, and yet he knows it is ultimately meaningless, even that which he does, so that Sartre, who writes telling us how we are to do this, has to say himself, “man is a futile passion”, because with all that frenzied work, the moment is meaningless, man is meaningless, everything is meaningless. But he that believeth shall not make haste. He is not surrounded by total meaninglessness but by total meaning. His labor is never in vain in the Lord. The future does not depend on our labor, but the Lord yet requires it as a service and He blesses it, and He makes it productive as the ungodly’s work never is.

In every age the existentialist has finally concluded, let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. And this is a despair of time; a flight from responsibility, a flight from reality, it is a destruction of hope. It stands in strong contrast to the Sabbath rest with others, and it’s sense of community and faith to rejoicing before the Lord. Now what Deuteronomy 14:28 and 29, and so much else of Scripture says, let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we live. Our labor is not in vain in the Lord, and our Sabbath rest is the gift of assured victory to man. He that believeth shall not make haste, for as much as we know; that our labor is not in vain in the Lord. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto Thee that in Jesus Christ we have rest. Teach us therefore, Father, to enjoy that rest more deeply, more fully, to take hands off our lives, to commit them into Thy keeping, to cast our every care upon Thee knowing Thou carest for us, to cease from our fretfulness, and to rejoice in Thee, to unite ourselves together in Christian fellowship, to have our hearts and our doors open to Thy people, to the needy, the orphan, and the widow, the stranger, that together we might rest in Thee. Bless us to this purpose we beseech Thee, in Jesus’ name, Amen.

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

[Audience member] What did the people do in the {?} on the Sabbath year?

[Rushdoony] We don’t know how much they were successful in having a Sabbath year, we do know that they did require the rest, that they did require the community in particular, and they had various laws whereby the stranger, the widow and the orphan, had to be cared for and had to be made welcome. And it is ironic, the Puritans had a horror of Catholics, and yet when a French fleet had trouble and put into port in New England, they were treated like long-lost brothers and they were wondering what would happen in this Puritan stronghold where they had such horrible ideas about Catholics. But you see they felt they had a duty and they enjoyed it, and it was a very remarkable episode in the fellowship and the delight they took in each other because they felt they had that obligation and they felt that God would bless them for fulfilling it. Yes?

[Audience member] In line with the working six days and resting one {?} taking a vacation on your day off, you don’t {?}

[Rushdoony] That’s a change of pace, not a rest.

[Audience member] Well, I mean, it’s not working.

[Rushdony] No, it’s a change of pace however.

[Audience member] All right.

[Rushdoony] But it’s not a rest. Any other questions? Well if not I’d like to share something with you on a totally different subject, I’d like to read a book review to you about a very Godly woman who ended her days in California; Mrs. Bidwell. She was a good Reformed girl in Washington, DC who met a man many years her elder, this was just during and immediately after the Civil War, and he fell madly in love with her and she was insistent that he become a Christian first. Anyway, it’s a book about Ann and John Bidwell; General Bidwell, entitled What Makes a Man? And it’s mostly the letters they wrote together with an introduction giving their life story. The letters were written between 1866 and 1868 while Annie was in Washington and Bidwell in Washington, Chico, and at sea and in Europe. The letters reveal that the General changed his character and lifestyle because of Annie’s influence and her insistence that he must become quote “an archetype of Christian perfection before she would marry him”.

But the book is more than just a record of the gradual osmosis of Annie’s will into John, it offers a deep look at her strong mind, her religious fervor, her innocent guile, and occasionally her humor. It also shows Bidwell’s strong affection and deep infatuation as well as love for this daughter of the Federal census taker. Many times in his letters, Bidwell proclaims that it must be she and no other that he marry, and quote “all my future seems involved in the result of our relationship.” But Annie was a cautious soul. Time and again she begs him to become a Christian, always hinting that he might have a better chance with her if he did. And when that did not immediately drive John to baptism, she tells him that there is another man possibly in her life. Finally leaving the love of his life in Washington, the frustrated Bidwell returns to Chico, California. He repents, espouses Christianity, and is accepted on probation by the Methodist Church in Chico. That pleases Annie but not totally, she is a fervent Presbyterian and wishes there were a Presbyterian Church in Chico.

[Audience laughter]

She writes, “I want you to be a Presbyterian, not because of any ill will to any other church, but because I want us to be mutually understood.” Then in a surprise move on October 7, 1867, Annie promises John she will marry him, and repents of her quote, “naughty, trying, vexing, obstinate, and culpable traits”, “since my spirit is with you,” she tells the General who is in Chico, “I find myself of little comfort to those so dearly loved, and my home a place of unrest instead of a haven of the past.” In the spring of 1868, John and Annie are married in Washington and return together at last to Chico. Annie’s sharp mind and ability at the perfect squelch are recounted vividly. At a social gathering soon after Annie arrived at Chico, a local matron took upon herself to advise the new Mrs. Bidwell that the General had enjoyed the favors of an Indian princess before succumbing to the Kennedy charm. Ann Elicot Kennedy Bidwell smiled sweetly and replied, “it would not surprise me in the least; the General has always had the best.”

[Audience laughter]

I thought you would find that interesting because it gives you something of the flavor of life a century or so ago. She must have been a remarkable girl. Are there any other questions? Yes?

[Audience member] There is a Bidwell Presbyterian Church in Chico.

[Rushdoony] Yes, I was just going to add that, so you see how much she accomplished when she got there. She was a Calvinist to the core and she didn’t rest till she did establish the Bidwell Memorial Presbyterian Church. 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]