Law and Life

State and Community

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Law

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 13 of 39

Track: 124

Dictation Name: RR156G13

Date: 1960s-1970s

[Rushdoony] Let us worship God. The grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men. Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto Thee that Thou hast so loved the world that Thou did send Thine only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to seek and to save the lost. We thank Thee, our Father, that He is our redeemer, that in Him we have the blessed assurance of Thy care and of Thy providential protection. We thank Thee that all the days of our life we live, move, and have our being in Thee. Grant us therefore, our Father, grace to join with all our hearts in the spiritual triumph of our Lord, to know His power in all our ways, and to walk in the confidence of His government. Grant us this, we beseech Thee, in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Our Scripture is from the gospel according to Saint Matthew, chapter 21, verses 1 through 16, and our subject, State and Community. Chapter 21 of Saint Matthew, verses 1 through 16. And we shall also examine Zechariah 9, verses 9 and 10 later. “And when they drew nigh unto Jerusalem, and were come to Bethphage, unto the mount of Olives, then sent Jesus two disciples,

saying unto them, ‘Go into the village over against you, and straightway ye shall find an ass tied, and a colt with her: loose them, and bring them unto me. And if any man say ought unto you, ye shall say, the Lord hath need of them; and straightway he will send them.’ All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, ‘Tell ye the daughter of Sion, behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass.’

And the disciples went, and did as Jesus commanded them, and brought the ass, and the colt, and put on them their clothes, and they set him thereon. And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way; others cut down branches from the trees, and strawed them in the way. And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried, saying, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David: blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; hosanna in the highest.’ And when he was come into Jerusalem, all the city was moved, saying, ‘Who is this?’ And the multitude said, ‘This is Jesus the prophet of Nazareth of Galilee.’ And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, and said unto them, ‘It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.’ And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple; and he healed them. And when the chief priests and scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying in the temple, and saying, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David’; they were sore displeased, and said unto him, ‘Hearest thou what these say?’ And Jesus saith unto them, ‘Yea; have ye never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise?’”

One of the most obvious facts of Scripture is that on the first Palm Sunday, Jesus Christ entered Jerusalem, openly declaring Himself to be the Messianic king, the Messiah. He entered in self-conscious fulfillment of the prophesy of Zechariah 9, verses 9 and 10. He was recognized as fulfilling that prophesy by everyone. Matthew 21:4 says “All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet.” The multitudes very, very obviously saw it as such, and we are told that they hailed Him joyfully, crying out “Hosanna to the Son of David: blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; hosanna in the highest.” They hailed Him as the Messiah. The children in the temple hailed Him as the promised King of David’s line, and our Lord accepted all of this as His due. He cleansed the temple as its Lord, and as tokens of the new life that was now available in His reign, in His kingdom, He healed the lame and the blind. All this is obvious, but equally obvious is the fact that Jerusalem then and the church today have commonly misunderstood the nature and form of Christ’s kingship. Let’s examine a few of these errors.

First of all, there was the assumption of Israel then, that the Messianic king would be a political ruler and conqueror, so that the kingdom of God was equated with a historical state and a greater and worldwide Roman empire as it were. What they did was to equate the idea of government with the state. This was a pagan equation, and it was evidence of the extent to which paganism had taken over Israel. The pagan idea was of the state as the overall institution; God on earth, so that nothing could exist out of the state. The state had the right, pagans held, to control every religion, to control every family, to control every area of economic life, to control all the arts and sciences, agriculture, everything. It was the umbrella, it was the god whose government covered every sphere. As a result, it was impossible for them to tolerate anything which denied this overall power and sovereignty of the state. Hence, the hostility from the very beginning to biblical faith, to Christianity. Now Christianity, of course, reduced the state immediately in its thinking to one institution among many, to the ministry of justice, as Saint Paul declared it. And as a result, there was an immediate hostility, because what the gospel was declaring was that not Caesar was overlord, but Jesus Christ, and the war between Christ and Caesar was thus inescapable.

Christianity triumphed at a great price, but Hellenism; the revival of Greek philosophy, brought back the old pagan doctrine, so that the state again began to be god on earth. This happened as scholasticism arose, the Renaissance was its epitome, it had a brief minor setback with the Reformation, because it was only a minor setback of the revival of statism, recaptured the initiative after 1660, especially with Jean Jacques Rousseau. The pagan doctrine was openly and fully asserted. Rousseau held that there could be no freedom outside of the state, in fact, for Rousseau, slavery was bondage to the family, bondage to the community, bondage especially to the church. And freedom involved total statism, the state was the area of freedom, and man had to be free of the church of Christianity. And therefore, for Rousseau, there was no true freedom possible unless Christianity were destroyed. With him, the state was all powerful. There could be therefore no freedom for society, no area free associations, of independent churches, families, vocations, or anything else. The state is sovereign and omnipotent. Moreover, he said the state is by nature just and good in all its dealings with its subjects. It’s important for us to understand this, because this is the faith that surrounds us today. Men assume that the state has the right to govern in every area of life over the family, over the school, over every area; to pass rules and regulations.

When I was in Memphis, a little better than a week ago, to speak at the Christian schools conference, Dr Roper was discussing this matter with me, he said Tennessee had legislation in the hopper to control Christian schools. A group of Christian school men led by him waited on the governor and opposed these things. He promised, of course, to do nothing until he consulted them, but frankly he did not understand their position, he was bewildered by it, because it seemed to him the logical thing. The state by its nature has to govern everything. Now this is paganism. The overall government by the state rather than by the god, by God. Now Rousseau in his Social Contract, states it thus, “The sovereign power need give no guarantee to its subjects, since it is impossible that the body (the state) should wish to injure all its members. Nor, as we shall see later, can it injure any single individual. (Well, that’s news. The state cannot possibly harm you, whatever it does is by definition good. Remember that when you pay your taxes in the next few days.) The sovereign (That is the state) by merely existing is always what it should be. But the same does not hold true of the relation of subject to sovereign. In spite of common interest, there can be no guarantee that the subject will observe his duty to the sovereign unless means are found to insure his loyalty.” Unquote.

Now think of what that means, the state is always right. It can do no wrong by definition. And in any conflict, the citizen is by definition always wrong. Of course this is very openly stated in the Soviet Union. The idea of what is right is thus defined as, what the state does is right. So, Rousseau held, in terms of this pagan idea; that the duty of men is to teach people that they can only be free when they submit to the state. And so he spoke of compelling men to be free. Isn’t that beautiful language? He said, “In order then that the social contract may not be but a vain formula, it must contain, though unexpressed, the single undertaking which can alone give force to the whole, namely that whoever shall refuse to obey the general will must be constrained by the whole body of his fellow citizens to do so: which is no more than to say that it may be necessary to compel a man to be free, freedom being a condition, which by giving each man to his country, guarantees him from all personal dependence and is the foundation of what upon which the whole political machine rests and supplies the power which works it.” Compel men to be free, how? Rousseau says “By freeing them from all personal dependence one to another.” By divorcing them from the family, from the community, from their fellow men. This is why it is illegal, as I have pointed out on other occasions, in the Soviet Union, for you to be charitable to your neighbor, it’s revolutionary activity. And this is why statist education works, works systematically to create a rootless generation, to break the bonds of children and parents, to alienate them, because this alone is freedom, to make the individual totally dependent upon the state. But the kingdom of God means our dependence upon God, and upon those areas where God requires to be interdependent, one upon another: the family, the community, the school, the church, every area of associations, institutions which God has ordained in His Word. So God creates a chain of networks, relationships, personal dependences, and the result is that this network ties us one to another but supremely to God, because we obey these ties one to another in terms of His Word and because we acknowledge His sovereignty.

But the modern state goes back to paganism and says we must eliminate all these areas of personal dependence. We must regard the family as a barbarous relic of tribal life. We must create a rootless band who then can be free. This is why modern education has produced beatniks and hippies and much worse to come. Freedom supremely, Rousseau said, is freedom from Christianity and freedom from the family. Society cannot exist, only the state. And to cite Rousseau once more, “Each citizen would then be completely independent of all his fellow men, and absolutely dependent upon the state, which operation is always brought by the same means, for it is only by the force of the state the liberty of its members can be secured. Men must be made totally rootless, so that they will have no power to depend on other than the power of the state.” Now this has been to a great deal accomplished. Men today yearn for community, but they have lost the ability to establish community. They want to go where community is, not to create it. And any time you propose that any kind of groups of people do anything, there is cynicism about the ability of people to work together, which is what the state wants us to believe, what the philosophy of Rousseau works to accomplish, and so every little problem we have with people turns us off on people, we’ve been conditioned, brainwashed, to react that way, and we feel well you can’t work with people. So what can you work with? The coercive power of the state alone is left. By brainwashing us through the public schools to deny the possibility of private associations, of community created by working out our frictions and our problems, it leaves only the coercive power of the state. And so man yearns for community, but he refuses to build it. And the result is that social action gives way to statist action. And modern education is triumphant in what it has accomplished. The idea of community action is ridiculed and the state becomes the only effective force. This is paganism. It is not the kingdom of God. And yet even Christians who are orthodox are basically pagan today because they have broken with the idea that man has the responsibility under God to be dependent upon his fellow men. Not to isolate himself, but to work together. Not to be cynical about any possibility of people accomplishing anything together. To recognize that failures are many, but the only possibility of a Godly life in community is to work beyond those failures and to work, not to wait for the state to create it.

This pagan view was the view of Israel, and so it was that they hailed Him as the Messiah when He entered into Jerusalem, but within a few days when He did nothing to establish a world empire and they began to get the drift of what He was saying in His teaching in the temple, they were ready to shout crucify Him, crucify Him. He was not going to create the world state and compel men to be free, compel everyone to be good, and create a paradise by a fiat law. But there is a second false idea about the kingdom that Christ came to establish, there are many who will agree to this point and say true, true, it was not to be a political kingdom because He had not come to establish a kingdom in this world. So we must see it as purely spiritual, purely as something connected with the world to come, but this is a radical misreading of John 18:36, which reads “My kingdom is not of this world”. Our Lord does not say my kingdom is not in this world, but not of, not derived from this world. If my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight that I should not be delivered to the Jews, but now is my kingdom not from hence, or as the Berkeley version reads that last phrase, “But now the source of my kingdom is not here, but really the source of my kingdom is not here.” Christ’s kingdom is not derived from this world, but it is in and over this world, and it cannot be separated from this world and placed in heaven. To deny that Christ’s kingdom is in this world and over this world is to alter the faith and to reduce it either to a neo-Platonism or a Manichaeism in which the world is delivered into the hands of Satan. But then there are still other ideas as to what constitutes the kingdom. For example there are those who say that yes, Christ came to establish a kingdom, but it is a kingdom of love, and therefore we must all work to make love prevail in every area. There’s a very clear statement of this view in a Catholic devotional guide of the post-Vatican II era; My Daily Visitor for October 1967, in which the Reverend Melvin L. Ferrell writes and I quote, “The kingdom of Christ in this age of classless society, seems as relevant as a knight on a white charger patrolling a freeway. Isn’t it coincidental that Pilate found the idea equally incredible? Christ answers present skeptics as He answered Pilate, my kingdom is not of this world. Those who see triumphalism as essential to Christ’s church are as much as Pilate who looked for an army at Jesus’ side. Christ is indeed a king; the promised son of David who was to establish the messianic kingdom of God on earth, enthroned at the right hand of the Father on Ascension Day. Jesus began His reign by sending forth the Holy Spirit upon His followers, supreme in power, Lord of history, assured of final and total victory. He is the gentlest of all rulers, He denounces the sword, He condemns ostentation, He confides in love alone to win His cause.”

Now there is no warrant in Scripture for the statement that Christ confides in love alone to win His cause, this is pure humanism. It denies divine grace, it denies the law of God which required satisfaction upon the cross and therefore it denies the atonement. And yet in Protestant and Catholic circles, this is an extremely common view. Then there is still another view that is very common which {?} in his study of Revelation sets forth that somehow the kingdom will come with the suffering and sacrifice of the saints. Now again this is humanistic. It says that somehow what man does and man’s sacrifice of himself is going to bring about the kingdom, and this is ridiculous. It was Christ’s sacrifice which ushered in the kingdom, not man’s. Then still another view, to hasten on, is that of Scofield that Christ came to establish a literal kingdom, in the old pagan sense. And because He was rejected by the people, then He changed His mind since He could not establish that literal, physical kingdom, and postponed it to the future and decided that the way of the cross was a second best way. That is pure blasphemy. It denies the omnipotence of God, it denies the efficacy of salvation because it says that salvation through His atoning blood was a kind of second best thing with God, and there was another way of being saved by a world super state.

All these views are commonplace, but they are wrong. To understand Christ’s kingdom, we must recognize first of all that Christ, as very God of very God, as a member of the Trinity, created the world, the world was created to be the kingdom of God. But man fell, man who was assigned to the task of governing the earth under God sought to govern it apart from God. And so God cursed the very ground for man’s sake so that man would not be able to establish a kingdom apart from God. The whole world now, the whole of physical nature being fallen, frustrates man so that he cannot, unless he be redeemed, establish the kingdom. Everything he does is met with a corresponding frustration. We have become so brainwashed by public school education that we can no longer see the world around us in terms of God’s curse. I think it is not an accident that as men have become more apostate, more natural disasters, curses upon men abound. Last year was an all time record for tornados, was it not? And this year it promises to be worse. And areas right up into Canada that have never heard of tornados are experiencing them and droughts are abounding in various parts of the world, in estimates of the extent to which the Sahara is creeping southward vary from 30 to 100 miles a year. And there are some who feel that a number of countries that are in the wake of that growth will disappear and the people perish. One very powerful numerous people have virtually been wiped out by famine and death from famine. There is a curse operative, and as men are apostate that curse increases. The ground is cursed for man’s sake so that man can establish no kingdom apart from God. But God sent His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ to be the new Adam, who kept the law perfectly for us, who rendered satisfaction for our sin against the law with His atoning death upon the cross and commissioned us to go forth, all power being given unto Him, and to make disciples of all nations, to bring them into the kingdom and to the service of God in Christ. Not by coercion or political action or {?}, or man’s sacrifice, for the genesis is of another character. God’s kingdom is first of all supernatural, it depends, it is ushered in by Christ’s justifying grace and His regenerating power which make us a new creation and commission us to extend the significance and the power of that new creation, so that the new man in Christ must exercise wherever he is and works, and bring every realm into captivity to Christ.

The basic government in the kingdom of God, moreover, is not the state but the self government of the Christian man in Christ. Because he can govern himself, he can govern whatever realm he is in, and our ability to govern depends on our being governed by Christ. And so it is the community of faith, the people of faith, exercising dominion in the church, in the school, in the state, bringing all of these into captivity to Christ, and certainly the church needs to be brought into captivity to Christ, it’s in captivity to man today.

The Lord therefore entered Jerusalem in terms of this; in deliberate fulfillment of Zechariah 9, verses 9 and 10, which declare “Rejoice greatly O daughter of Zion; shout O daughter of Jerusalem: behold thy King cometh unto thee: He is just, and having salvation; lowly and riding upon an ass and upon a colt, the foal of an ass. And I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem, and the battle bow shall be cut off: and he shall speak peace unto the heathen: and his dominion shall be from sea even to sea, and from the river even to the ends of the earth.” He is the king, having salvation, possessing it as His power, able to bestow it on whomever He will, so that where He reaches out and commissions a man to do a thing, nothing can ever alter that which He is. So that the Psalmist declares that though a thousand arrows are directed against us, no harm shall befall us, when we move in terms of the Lord’s calling and His task to accomplish it for His name’s sake. He is the King, and He comes having salvation.

Then we are told that Christ the King will eliminate war from the world. There will be a cessation of all warfare because Christ shall be triumphant in His warfare against sin. And the world shall be under His rule. It shall be, moreover, as Zechariah tells us, worldwide. He will speak peace to the nations (or Gentiles), from sea to sea. And as T.B. Moore, generations ago, pointed out in a study of that phrase, wherever we find it in Scripture it means absolute universality, sovereignty, and dominion. And so it is, the Word to us, on Palm Sunday, rejoice greatly O daughter of Zion. The covenant people are asked to rejoice because there came rules over all things and His triumph is assured, and to move forward in that confidence. Rejoice greatly; the victory is ours in Christ, and as we move in His chorus, a thousand shall fall at thy right hand and at thy left, but it shall not come nigh thee. This is the plain declaration of Scripture. For when we move in terms of that kingdom and its power, exercising dominion, claiming the crown rights of King Jesus in every area of life, the results are astounding. Someone someday should make a study of the Puritan troops who moved into battle in the confidence that they would not perish, that they would not be killed in battle if they kept the terms of the law. People don’t dare take that seriously today, our Puritan forefathers did and they declared it was true. That God is faithful to His Word to those who move in terms of His kingdom, of His Word, a thousand shall fall at thy right hand and at thy left, but it shall not come nigh thee. Rejoice greatly O daughter of Zion. Salvation is not an act of man, nor of the church, nor of the state, it is the act of God in Christ. It is manifested then in the Christian community, in church, state, family, school, vocation, and every area of life, every area of society. And so it is that life in the community of grace is an aspect of the redeemed life. Therefore, we must work in terms of the community of grace, the community of faith, to establish it wherever we are, knowing that it is then that the blessing of God abounds unto us and upon us. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto Thee for Thy Word. We thank Thee that our King is come. Forgive us O Lord, that so often we do not rejoice in that fact, that too often we look at Caesar rather than Christ, and that too often we are mindful of the power of the enemy and of man than of Thy power, and the fear of man so often brings a snare to our hearts. Teach us therefore so to walk that the triumph of Jesus Christ over the powers of this world over sin and death is manifested in and through us, and that the community of faith may become the community of this world, from sea unto sea. Bless us to this end, in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Are there any questions now, first of all on our lesson? No questions? Well then next week we will be continuing our studies of the significance of the resurrection and its relationship to the community of faith, what it means for the community of faith, and how the resurrection cannot be seen except in relationship to us. Because Christ rose again from the dead, it has a very specific meaning for us today. That will be our subject next Sunday morning. 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]