Law and Life

Community and Order

Professor: Rushdoony, Dr. R. J.

Subject: Law

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 17 of 39

Track: 128

Dictation Name: RR156J17

Date: 1960s-1970s

[Rushdoony] Let us worship God. We have not a high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but was in all points tested 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.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we thank Thee that Thy grace is ever with us, that in time of need Thou art ever near, that we have the blessed assurance of Thy Word that Thou wilt never leave us nor forsake us, so that we may boldly say the Lord is my helper, I shall not fear what man may do unto me. We come therefore, Father, in this context, to cast our every care upon Thee, knowing Thou carest for us, committing unto Thee all our yesterdays, our todays, and our tomorrows in the certainty of Thy grace and of Thy government. Bless us our Father, and prosper us in Thy service, ever protect us by Thy grace, be with our loved ones to watch over them and to lead them into all truth and righteousness in Jesus Christ. In His name we pray, Amen.

Our Scripture lesson is from the epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, the third chapter, verses twenty following, and our subject; community and order. Romans 3:20 following, community and order. “Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference: for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; to declare, I say, at this time His righteousness: that He might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law. Is He the God of the Jews only? Is He not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also: seeing it is one God, which shall justify the circumcision by faith, and uncircumcision through faith. Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law.”

Basic to the idea of community is order, and basic to order is peace, so that men can plan, they can work in the confidence that they will profit from their labors, and can live in trust with all men without fear. The Bible gives us an image for this kind of peace which we meet with over and over again. For example, when it speaks of the peaceful reign of Solomon in 1 Kings 4:25, we read “And Judah and Jerusalem dwelt safely, every man under his vine and under his fig tree, from Dan even to Beersheba, all the days of Solomon.” We meet with this imagery of the vine and the fig tree and every man living at piece under his vine and his fig tree in 2 Kings 18:31 and Isaiah 36:16, Micah 4:4, and elsewhere, as a symbol of the kingdom of God. Now this image has a double meaning. First of all it means that every man feels totally safe from attack. Second, it means that every man is totally safe in that what is his will be his. He will harvest his vine and his fig tree with no fear of anyone robbing him. It gives us therefore a picture of order and of peace, where every man lives in security. How is this attained? Our subject is community and order. We are very commonly today in our colleges and universities given a picture of community life and social order as it exists supposedly in primitive societies. For example among the American Indians or the tribes of Africa, and the ugly Christian went in there and destroyed all this beautiful harmony and peace. But of course the picture is one-hundred degrees, or one-hundred and eighty degrees wrong. It is a total distortion of reality. Quite reverse is true. In the various non-Christian cultures, from tribal on up all over the world, the basic force is not a sense of community but of envy. As a result, the stronger the element in a society, the less possibility there is of any progress. The people who have gone out, the young idiots really, to work for the Peace Corp, have an evolutionary concept and as I’ve travelled I’ve talked with one or two and they tried to tell me how primitive these people are, because they show them how to do something better, how to get better crops, and they refuse to do it. And the minute they leave and go elsewhere, they go back to the old ways. And so they assume these people are so backward, so primitive, that they don’t see that one and one makes two and that this method improves their farming, or their cattle work, or whatever they are doing to provide for their living, and therefore if they adopt it, they will be better off. The truth is they see that it will make them more prosperous, but it is dangerous for them to be more prosperous. Why? The minute they are, they excite the envy of their neighbors and their life and their possessions are in danger, and it’s safer to be as backward as everyone else and to avoid the danger.

The American Indians for example; IQ tests, for what they are worth, have indicated that the American Indians are the most superior group in the United States. On the average, the American Indian child will do better than any other group in the United States: Germans, Anglo-Saxons, Scotch, Italian, whatever you will. But in America the American Indians are the lowest on the economic scale. Why? Because they have that so-called primitive background in which envy prevails, and a sure sign of being an evil man is to get ahead of others. It means that you are profiting at the expense of other people. This is their idea of success. The only way you can be successful is at the expense of someone else. It was a very difficult thing to be a Christian on the Indian reservation where I worked, because the fact of being a Christian made you immediately hated. You had a better home, you saved money, you advance, and therefore you were an evil man by definition, you were an exploiter, you were someone who was living off of the people. And no argument could change that fact. Your success had to be at the expense of others. This, of course, is the conflict of interest theory of society which you find everywhere outside of Biblical faith. And of course, now as Biblical faith is receding, we are seeing envy again taking over, and this same idea; if somebody is successful, well they’ve done it at the expense of the workers, or they’ve done it at the expense of somebody, the consumer. This is envy. Now you don’t hear the word envy in politics, but as Helmut Schoeck has said, it’s the most common factor in politics in the world today. It comes disguised in terms of another word; equality. That’s what the talk about equality amounts to. It is a weasel word, it is a cover word to mask envy, so that every politician who appeals to the fact of equality is appealing to envy. And as Schoeck, “The envious man by definition is the negation of the basis of any society. Incurably envious people may, for a certain time, inspire and lead chiliastic, revolutionary movements, but they can never establish a stable society except by compromising their ‘ideals’ of equality.” Unquote.

Apart from Christian society, envy has governed the world, and no civilization has gotten so far before envy has pulled it down. Only when Christian faith has been strong, because it so emphatically not only condemns envy, people over the world know it’s wrong, but gives the grace and the power through the regeneration power of God through Christ to change the man, so that he obeys the Word of God, be content with such things as ye have, and be not envious, and so on. Only then can you have progress in a society. But today we disguise our sin, envy, as equality, and so we are taking the road back to primitive man, to the dead level of society, where anyone who advances has to be cut down, and of course in Marxism he is literally cut down as he is in primitive societies. Then, whatever order there is in these primitive societies, or in Marxism, or in any culture which promotes envy, is a false order. In the primitive societies, it is magic and witchcraft, which are used to kill and to strike at anyone of whom you are envious. In Marxism, you put them into slave labor camps, because they are progressive; they advance. In our society, the more it becomes anti-Christian, the more you use taxation as the first step to tax them out of their success, to penalize them for being successful. But you can see why witchcraft is recognized in Scripture as so deadly a sin, and equivalent in murder in its penalty; the death penalty. Because witchcraft is envy in action, it is murderous.

One of the most interesting books of the last few years was written by a historian, not a Christian, who started out feeling that the witchcraft trials and what-not of the Middle Ages and of the early Reformation period were instances of superstition and persecution by nasty Christians of innocent people. He was horrified by what he found, trying to be as skeptical as he could. It was a murderous thing, striking out at everyone and everything that was successful. Not only killing, but practicing human sacrifice, cannibalism, every kind of abomination imaginable, because it was envy in action. And it’s not an accident today that we have on the one hand the demand for equality, which is envy turned into a supposed virtue, and on the other hand the rise of magic and witchcraft, and hence already of animal sacrifices and human sacrifices. And of course in the Manson case what was it but envy on the part of Manson, who wanted to be a successful pop singer, at people in the show business who were successful. They were succeeding at his cost, that was his reason. Anyone who is successful is robbing you. And so, outside of the faith, envy and its companion; murderous witchcraft, take over, and they go hand in hand. In the modern era, therefore, law and order are a problem. The answer of many people who are conservative is that you have to have strong law enforcement, as though that were the answer. It’s the Marxist answer too, although coming to it from a different perspective. Guns is the answer, as though guns can provide order. They won’t. Order is something that begins from within.

We can understand American history very well as far as its foreign policy is concerned by something from the life and letters of Walter Hines Page, who was the ambassador to Great Britain under Woodrow Wilson, a man who with Wilson had a great deal to do in getting us into World War I. Now the thinking, the philosophy of Page and of the American State Department was very clearly shown in a memorandum which he wrote in November 1913, after discussions with Grey, the English foreign office head. Page wrote, and I quote, “The foregoing I wrote before this Mexican business took its present place. I can’t get away from the feeling that the English simply do not and will not believe in any unselfish public action, further than the keeping of order. They have a mania for order, sheer order, order for the sake of order. They can’t see how anything can come in anyone’s thought before order, or how anything need come afterward. Even Sir Edward Gray jocularly ran me across our history with questions like this, ‘Suppose you have to intervene, what then?’ Make them vote and live by their decisions. ‘But suppose they will not so live?’ We’ll go in again with armed troops, and make them vote again. ‘And keep this up for two hundred years?’ asked he. Yes, said I, the United States will be here two hundred years and it can continue to shoot men for that little space till they learn to vote and to rule themselves. I have never seen him laugh so heartily. Shooting men into self-government. Shooting them into orderliness he comprehends that, and that’s all right, but that’s as far as his habit of mind goes. At {?} last night, when I had to make a speech, I explained idealism (they always quote it) in government. They listened attentively and even eagerly. Then they came up and asked if I really meant that government should concern itself with idealistic things beyond keeping order. Ought they to do so in India? I assure you, they don’t think beyond order. A nigger lynched in Mississippi offends them more than a tyrant in Mexico.”

Now of course, our foreign policy then and now was that we’ve got to save the world by making sure there are elections everywhere in the world; in Korea, in Vietnam, in Africa, everywhere. And that when everyone has elections (this was Page’s thesis), the world will have perfect peace and order; true order. And so he was entirely in favor of the United States opposing any country that does not have representative government, and moving in on any occasion with the troops in order to impose representative government, elections, on that country. Of course that’s what we did in Vietnam. The emperor was a religious figure, everybody had respect for him and obeyed him on religious grounds. Without him, in North Vietnam, there is only the bayonet to keep people in line, and in South Vietnam, the elections are fraudulent most of the time and are meaningless. As one person who was in Vietnam told me, the attitude of people is who is he? Why should I obey him? That’s their attitude toward any elected man, elections mean nothing to them. The very idea of elections is ridiculous to them. But for us, that is the way the world is going to be saved. And so to this day, for us, law and order depend on elections, whereas for others, it depends on guns. In either case, the whole idea is ungodly, it is immoral, and it has made us with all our power, a world disturber of the peace. We have been a destroyer in one country after another by this ridiculous idea of salvation through elections. A totally anti-Christian idea. On the other hand, there are others who equate true order with love, with trust, with an absence of coercion. And all over the world, including this country in men like Ramsey Clark, former Attorney General, this idea is very strong. You’ll get true order if everybody loves one another. So, get rid of the police, get rid of the army, get rid of the navy and the airforce, and just tell everybody to start loving everybody, and then true order will come in. Now that’s as ridiculous as the idea of the utopia arriving by elections or by guns.

And so, the world is in trouble. Envy and witchcraft are rising because the principle of true order, God Almighty, the Triune God, has been removed from the picture by men. Now this is what Saint Paul and our Scripture is talking about. The trouble with most interpreters of this text is that they read it from an ecclesiastical point of view, from the churchy point of view. As though Saint Paul were talking about something that were true in the church, and with regard to your soul and God alone. But God is the Lord of the whole world, and his truth is valid for every area of life. So this has implications for us individually with regard to our salvation, for our communities, for our societies, for the whole world. What does Saint Paul say? Well, first of all, in the 20th verse, he uses a word that is basic to the entire passage; “justified”, “justification”; that’s that he’s talking about. Justification is a judicial, a legal act. Justice does not condemn, but pronounces just; or pronounces itself satisfied where the demands of the law are met. So, true justice; God’s justice; if I approach God in perfect innocence, perfect righteousness, it will pronounce me justified, as it did with Jesus Christ, the perfect man. If I approach God and the law is satisfied, restitution has been made, or the death penalty has been satisfied, as it was for me in Jesus Christ, the law declares itself satisfied, and I am justified. Everything has been made right. Now, justice; justification, is thus a matter of law. Saint Paul is here dealing with a legal pronouncement. He is making a commentary on the law of God, to abolish the law of God totally is to abolish justification as well. To justify does not mean to render good. To justify means to declare the good to be good. Justification does not make us righteous, that is regeneration. God justifies us through the atoning work of Christ, and Christ regenerates us. Now these are two separate factors although they are brought together in experience. So that, our justification is because the law of God has been satisfied. Similarly, to condemn does not mean to make bad, but to declare bad that which is bad. Justification declares righteous what in the sight of God is righteous. We are, in the sight of God, righteous because Christ has made full atonement, full restitution, full satisfaction.

Now, Saint Paul says, all men, Jew and Gentile alike are guilty before God. Therefore, the only way they can be justified, they can be made righteous, is through faith in Christ. Only Christ himself is justified by His works, by His perfect obedience. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, we are therefore justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; to declare, I say, at this time His righteousness: that He might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. God therefore is concerned with His law, with absolute justice, that He might be just, He is just therefore in that He requires the full penalty, He is merciful, in that He provides it through Jesus Christ. He does not set the law aside. Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law. Men are incapable of justifying themselves in their sin. Obedience to the law of God therefore cannot justify them because they are incapable of obedience, their every act, while outwardly seemingly obedient, is itself motivated by sin. Paul does not say the law is wrong, but that none can justify themselves by law, because all men in Adam are anti-law, and what the law brings them to is the knowledge of sin. But man’s works are only evil as long as he is in Adam. The righteousness of the law can only be obtained by grace, which is the gift of God. Now, we keep the law, not perfectly, we are not perfectly sanctified, but we keep it by the grace of God, because it is now written on the tables of our hearts; is now our way of life. We stand before God with the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ, through the propitiation of God’s justice on the cross by our Lord. Therefore, he says, man’s boasting is removed. All pride is removed. Man is humbled. The law is vindicated, man is reestablished in the service of God by grace. By grace are ye saved, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God. No moral obligation is removed, no penal sanction is disregarded, the law is not made void through faith, it is rather established. The law stands, therefore, the law is vindicated, but we are moved through Christ from the curses of the law to the blessings of the law as they are declared in Deuteronomy 28.

Now the implications of this for society are that the fallen man is incapable of true righteousness. This incapacity marks him in his person and in his institutions as well. Sinful men cannot have a godly state, a righteous state. One of the ridiculous ideas that infiltrated as a result of the natural law philosophy, both Catholicism and Protestantism, was that through the laws of nature, even though men may not be Christian, they could have still a godly state. There’s no warrant for this in Scripture, and it’s logical from this to conclude that men can be saved without faith. And of course, this is what modern theology has concluded. Vatican II in constitutions on the church, number 16, actually says (and Protestant theologians were very happy with it, because it stated everything they’d been hoping they could put through, but had not yet been able to, although they’re teaching it in every seminary virtually) namely, that man can be saved through Buddhism, Mohammedinism, Animism, any kind of religion without Christ. But that’s logical, if we hold that man can create social reform and godly government without faith in Christ, why they can save not only their institutions then, but their own persons without Christ. Job, centuries ago, put it very clearly in Job 14:4, “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one?” Righteousness can only flourish where it is grounded in the atonement of Jesus Christ. The blood of Christ witnesses to the seriousness of God’s law and God does not change. True order is not a product of guns or of butter or of the elective process or of love. None of these things can produce order. But you cannot have community without order. But that order can only begin with God’s order. It’s not surprisingly that some of the humanists are beginning to doubt that there is any hope for man. Yeats has written of the fury and the mire of human veins, and has commented that old men have reason to go out of their minds because they know that no better can be had. What we have now is the best that man can have. He is doomed.

Now as we look further at the idea of order, basic to the idea of order is relation. When we look, for example, at the word order in botany and in zoology, the word order belongs to plants or animals that have common characteristics and are members of a family. Therefore they are called an order. Now the scientific use of the word order gets to the heart of it, order does require a relationship. A relationship first to God, and then to one another in God. What is your relationship to your neighbor? Almost certainly very casual, unless your neighbor is a like-minded Christian. If everyone on your street and everyone in this city, or let us say the overwhelming majority were redeemed men, believing in Jesus Christ as their savior, and the law of God as the way of sanctification, there would be a relationship between us and almost all the people of Los Angeles. But, if they do not believe in God, then the logic of their position, whether they’ve carried it to its limits, as more and more are, or whether they have not, but implicit in their position then is the belief that every man is his own God, determining for himself what is good and evil. And this means anarchy, which is what we are getting. It is the logic of unbelief. There is no relationship between people when every man is his own law and is his own god. Envy takes over, murder, witchcraft, anarchy, which is what the world is seeing progressively. In other words, relationship one with another is impossible for men apart from God through Christ. And since relation is basic to the idea of order, there is no community, no order without Christ. And this is the problem in the world today.

The best description in the Bible of true order is perhaps the Lord’s Prayer, which puts us first into relationship to God and has us looking to God in all things, and then deals with everything down to our daily bread and our neighbor and our enemy in terms of God and His Word. Only through Him is order possible. Apart from Him; anarchy. This is why, today, the world is talking more than it has about community and about order because they see it disappearing and they’re trying to come up with one sociological, psychological, or elective gimmick to provide it, but they cannot. It is disappearing. It will continue to disappear into anarchy until men turn to God. Only in relationship to God in Christ will order return. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we thank Thee that we who were enemies in our sins and trespasses have been made Thy children by grace through Jesus Christ and now are related to Thee and have the principle of order in our lives. Our Lord and our God, grant that men, women, and children be summoned into a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, and that Thy order spread from person to person and command men and nations. Grant us this, we beseech Thee, and use us to this purpose we ask. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Are there any questions now, first of all, about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience member] I want to ask a question about the law of God. In what sense would you, you said before the law was from the beginning, but in what sense did people know the law, they didn’t know it as Moses came and revealed {?}.

[Rushdoony] Essentially they had the law as it was later given to Moses from the Garden of Eden on, it was first given aurally, then later in written form. In the earlier eras, revelation was person to person through God. Later it was given in full and written form.

[Audience member] But would the Sabbath law {?}

[Rushdoony] The Sabbath law was not binding in the same way, the Sabbath was instituted at the Passover. However, while there was no Sabbath in our sense before, we know that tithing existed from the very beginning. Abraham tithed, so we know that from the very beginning there was a tithe. So we can assume there was a tithe of time, and it was only when the Christian state or the godly state was created with Moses that it was required of the state to set apart one day a week. Now how they observed that tithe of time previously we don’t know.

[Audience member] Now when Jesus was {?} that He fulfilled the law, that law was {?}.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Any other questions. Yes?

 

[Audience member] Would you explain Romans 11:28?

[Rushdoony] 11:28. “As concerning the gospel, they are enemies for your sakes, but as touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers’ sakes.” Now this goes back to verse, well let’s take you back to 25, “For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Zion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: for this is my covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins. As concerning the gospel, they are enemies for your sakes, but as touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers’ sakes.” Now, what he is here talking about is the fact that when he was writing, most of the believers were still Israelites; Jews and Galileans. And it was a matter of great suffering and mental anguish to them that most of their relatives were not only hostile but were instrumental in their persecution. So, he declares that it is God’s purpose in time, in the fullness of time, to bring in all people, Jew and Gentile alike, all are going to be saved before the end, the overwhelming majority. “All” does not here mean every particular one, but all as groups collectively. So that every people, tongue, tribe, and nation will be overwhelmingly Christian. And so it is written, he says, all Israel shall be saved, that is both those who are going to be brought in of the Gentiles and also all of the old Israel. “For this is my covenant unto them when I shall take away their sins.” So he says I have made a pledge to Abraham and to the prophets that I am going to bring in the whole world including those of Jacob that have fallen away. As concerning the gospel these, your fellow people, are enemies for your sakes, they hate you, they are persecuting you, but as touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers’ sakes. So, what he is saying is Israel right now is your enemy, it’s persecuting you because of the faith. But in terms of the future, Israel is beloved, it shall be a part of the election. It shall be brought in with every other people into the faith.

Are there any other questions? If not let us bow our heads 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]