Law and Life

Inheritance and Dominion

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Law

Genre: Sermon Series

Lesson: 33 of 39

Track: 135

Year: 1960’s – 1970’s

Dictation Name: RR156S33

[Rushdoony] Particular our concern is with the fifth first, Psalm 16, and our subject “inheritance and dominion.” A few weeks ago we began our study of the Biblical doctrine of inheritance. I shall continue to deal with this subject next Sunday and the week after, and in a sense this morning we shall be putting together some of the pieces from our study of Biblical law and reviewing them, and as it were preparing a spring-board so that we can now examine more fully the Biblical doctrine of inheritance. Psalm 16.

“Preserve me, O God: for in thee do I put my trust.

2 O my soul, thou hast said unto the Lord, Thou art my Lord: my goodness extendeth not to thee;

3 But to the saints that are in the earth, and to the excellent, in whom is all my delight.

4 Their sorrows shall be multiplied that hasten after another god: their drink offerings of blood will I not offer, nor take up their names into my lips.

5 The Lord is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup: thou maintainest my lot.

6 The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.

7 I will bless the Lord, who hath given me counsel: my reins also instruct me in the night seasons.

8 I have set the Lord always before me: because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.

9 Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth: my flesh also shall rest in hope.

10 For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.

11 Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fullness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.”

We have seen that according to Exodus 4:22 & 23 and many another passage of scripture God speaks of His covenant people as His first form. He declares us to be His children by the grace of adoption through Jesus Christ over and over again in the New Testament. Now when God speaks of us as His sons, when scripture declares that through Jesus Christ we are the sons of God; as we saw last time this is not typology, this is not imagery, this is not hyperbole, it is a declaration of a legal fact. The Bible here is dealing with legal data. We are now the heirs of God through Christ’s atoning work. This constitutes a legal status in the eyes of God.

Now as we look at the Old Testament laws of inheritance, and inheritance as we have seen is always in scripture a theological fact, and we’re going to explore the implications of this for man, for the family, and for Christ and His kingdom. We find that the firstborn has a double portion of the estate. That is if there were three children the estate was divided four ways and the firstborn gained half, a double portion, and the other two a fourth each. Now the reason for this, the double portion, was that he inherited the responsibility for the care of the parents, he inherited a double portion of any debts that the family might have, and he inherited the leadership in the family; thus with the additional inheritance there went responsibilities. We saw moreover that the firstborn by his inheritance had to be not only the firstborn; he could be set aside if he were not of the faith, but he had to be also in the grace of God, that this took priority over blood.

Now when we studied Biblical law we saw that the modern state declares itself to be the firstborn of every family and claims more than a double portion through the inheritance tax, through welfarism it takes over the care of parents and so on. It does not, of course, assume the family debt. The state thus claims to be the family of man. It redefines the family to make itself the family of man. In the Biblical family the eldest son, unless disinherited, received a double portion, and the others equal portions. Now the double portion was not favoritism, it meant that in a sense his was equal to all the rest but it was proportionate to his responsibilities. There was thus the principal of equality for all Godly sons. The state as the first born, by its own claims increasingly asserts its absolute priority as heir to every family and asserts that equality must be applied to all members of the family of man. And so you have the modern equalitarianism. The Biblical family says that there is an equality between the sons that are in the faith, the eldest son gets a double portion because he gets a double responsibility in every area, so there is basically that extra only to take care of extra responsibilities, there is an equality of faith, they are in grace. But the state says “we will establish an equality apart from grace” all who are born into the family of man must have equal rights, equal income, equal privileges in every area of life and so modern equalitarianism moves progressively towards total equality.

The book that some years ago influenced the modern ideas of inheritance profoundly, so that after Marx, was the most influential was by a Fabian Socialist Josiah Wedgwood, the economics of inheritance. When you look at your tax laws with regard to inheritance, perhaps the most vicious laws on our books, most anti-Christian, they come out of the thinking of the Fabian socialist who carried Marxist ideas into the Western world, and this book in particular is most influential. In an introduction to the 1938 edition, one of the many printings of this book Josiah Wedgwood said, and I quote “In the new age of uncharitable faith the liberal, economic method remains dispassionate and agnostic, agnostic in all but one respect. Those who employ that method need not affirm a wholesale belief in utilitarian philosophy but they must not throw away the baby with the bathwater, they must accept, in theory at least, the idea inherent in all the great philosophies, and not least in the ethics of Christianity, that the welfare of all human beings irrespective of race, class, creed, or color is of equal importance in the sight of God and should be in the minds of men. 10 years ago it was not absurd optimism to assume that that belief formed a common basis underlying free discussion of social problems. And age seems to have passed since then, that anyone who takes the trouble to do any research on social and economic questions must still try to believe with Plato and the stoics willfully misses the truth.”

Now Wedgewood was not dispassionate as he claimed to be, moreover he is not an agnostic with regard to Statist humanism, but is a true believer of humanism. Moreover he is a liar when he speaks of Christianity, because Christianity does not affirm his ideas of equality. Moreover it is Platonism, not the Bible, that says no soul willfully misses the truth, this is to deny that man is a sinner and the Bible most emphatically declares that men are sinners, that they, according to saint Paul hold, or hold back, hold down, suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

Moreover the Bible does not call us to deal with all men on this principle of equality that Wedgewood calls for as the summation of the ethics of Christianity. As we have seen on previous occasion the Bible makes a distinction between our treatment of various groups and classes of people, first of all the family. The family, our family, is to gain our primary attention. We are to love our wife in a way that we are not, as I pointed out before, to love our neighbors wife. We are to care for our children in a way that we are not asked to care for our neighbors children. Then second, our brethren in the faith. We are to have a responsibility for our brethren in the faith that we do not have towards those who are ungodly. And third we have a responsibility to the rest of men, to the ungodly, to witness to them concerning the things of the faith, to be charitable to them in works of mercy, and to be honest and just in our dealing with all men.

So there are three levels of our relationship with people. Wedgwood calls for the end of income with respect to work or service, and favors an equality of income based upon need. According to Cannon{?} whom he quotes in his book, Wedgwood says “income according to service is almost obviously a hopelessly rotten ideal. Since it means nothing for those who temporarily or permanently cannot serve at all, and these in many cases are the very people whose needs are greatest. I have never swerved from the advocacy of the nearest possible approximation to distribution according to need and have always looked on distribution according to service as a shimerah [I think he meant Chimera] and an undesirable shimerah.” “In other words” he says, and you must remember that this is the book that has had such a powerful impact on legislation throughout the Western world, “to be paid according to the work you do is an ugly notion, and to say ‘I am worth 10,000, or 20,000, or 100,000 and I want what I am worth to you’ is an evil, undesirable idea. We should be paid according to need and some of those who are rendering no service” he says “have the greatest need.” And of course you can see how this idea is being applied in our legislation and it means of course that somebody is going to determine who has the greatest need, not you. And how they determine the greatest need will have no regard to what you may consider to be a need. And of course this is simply the Fabian form of the Marxist principal which is common to all Humanists. And it rests in the idea that the equality of the new God-head, mankind, must be asserted and the state as the firstborn in the family of man must enforce this equality.

Now this is the idea of inheritance that we have to deal with, equality according to need, income geared to need, not to service or work. And you will not understand what is happening unless you understand that this is the idea that dominates our legislators and it is anti-Christian to the core. Now Wedgwood admits that all men are not born equal and that they have in-born differences which are determined by differences in their ancestry, and he says that we must alter this fact by law. Some men are more capable then others, some men have more aptitudes and abilities, but by law we must abolish these differences and equalize them by a distribution of money according to need, and this poor person who does not work and feels stupid, why we must make it up to them by taking from those who have and giving to these have not’s.

Now the Bible gives no justification for an equalitarian order, nor for an elitist order, only for a Godly order in terms of Biblical law. Both equalitarianism on the one hand, and elitism on the other, are humanistic ideas. Both are contemptuous of man and the name of man. Both claim to do something for man in the name of man, but both are geared toward manipulating man. The idea of inheritance in the Bible is theocentric, God-centered. To understand this is what we must realize is that one of the key words used in the Bible for inheritance is a word, chellac {?} which is also most commonly translated as “portion”, portion. Now what does this word literally mean that is translate “portion”? It does mean what our English word “portion” conveys, but it has in it implicit the idea of providential bestowment, providential bestowment. So that when the Bible speaks of something being man’s portion, or a person in the Bible says “this is my portion” he mans “this is my providential bestowment.”

Now as we saw in Psalm 16:5 David declares “The Lord is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup. Thou maintainest my lot.” We’re going to return in a couple of weeks to this verse again because there is so much here in the words “portion” and “lot” and we’re just barely touching on it this week and we will explore its meanings in greater detail because they give us the key to the theocentric, the God-centered nature of inheritance. First of all David says, speaking as a fugitive, speaking as someone whose life is in jeopardy, that his primary providential bestowment is the Lord Himself. So that as he speaks of his inheritance as a son of Jesse, a well to-do sheep man with many other kinds of livestock, and as he speaks to the fact that through the prophet Samuel he has already been anointed to be king in the place of Saul, two great inheritances; the son of a well to do man, though a younger son, still a rich inheritance, and an inheritance to be king over Israel. He says “the Lord is the portion of mine inheritance; he is the essence, the heart of my providential bestowment.” So that as he faces his problems in the confidence that God will deliver him, that he will inherit from his father Jesse, that he will inherit the kingdom as Samuel has anointed him too. He sees as his essential inheritance the Lord.

Again in Psalm 73:26 “My flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion forever.” Thus the Lord is our central portion or inheritance, and we cannot begin to think of inheritance apart from this fact. So that as David views the fact that he is going to inherit property and the kingdom, both the property and the kingdom have to been seen in terms of his central inheritance which is to govern all else, the Lord.

Now the other key use of the word “portion” in scripture, providential bestowment, is a rather startling one in Deuteronomy 33:9 in the song of Moses “For the Lord’s portion is His people, Jacob is the lot of His inheritance” Now that’s a startling thing, God says He is an heir. An heir to what? “The Lord’s portion is His people”, you and I. God says we are His inheritance and in His providence He has so ordained history that we gained the Lord as our providential inheritance and He gains us as His providential inheritance.

Now some generations ago a great Anglican divine, C.H. Waller {?} as he summed up this matter dealing with the implications of this word in the Psalm of Moses declared, and I quote “He chose Israel for His own portion that through them He might inherit the world.” Now we begin to see something of the implications of the Biblical doctrine of inheritance, and what the relationship of property is to inheritance. Or primary, providential bestowment is that through His sovereign electing grace we were chosen in Christ. Apart from that providential portion, or bestowment, is the property, the talents, and whatever else we inherit. These are to be used for the Lord, that through our work He may inherit us and what we do, that His kingdom may be extended, that through us people may be reached, that through our property His kingdom be furthered, that His word, His kingdom, His grace, His sovereignty be extended.

In other words this fallen world is to be re-captured through inheritance, through our portion. This is the heart of the Biblical doctrine of inheritance and we shall see on subsequent occasions some of the far-reaching implications of this. This is why, you can see already, statist interference with inheritance, the idea of the inheritance tax is demonic, it is an attempt to strike at the kingdom of God, to break what God has established through His providence of redeeming men and a fallen world and bringing it back into his domain. It strikes at the purpose of succession and dominion, it sets aside service, Godly service, in favor of ungodly needs. Inheritance taxes are thus anti-Christian to the core, and were so designed. And wherever you have encountered them in history you have encountered the strong-hold of anti-Christianity, whether it is in the ancient world with the Mazdakites {?}, primitive communists, or with Karl Marx, or with the Fabian Socialists, its purpose has always been anti-God, anti-Christian. We must therefore use every legal means at our disposal to avoid, to counter-act, and to somehow legally evade the inheritance tax in order that God’s work might be furthered.

Remember that when God delivered His covenant people He established their type of His work to the end of time, because revelation over and over again deals with the plagues, the seven vials, the seven judgments and so one, which are taken from the last seven plagues upon Egypt. The first three struck both Israel and Egypt, the last seven struck only the ungodly. And in His culminating plague and judgment God destroyed the firstborn of Egypt and all the ungodly firstborn of Israel who would not place their children under the blood of the lamb. He destroyed the airship of apostate men. He declared Israel to be his firstborn heirs of the world, a Godly law-order and Godly inheritance works to disinherit the ungodly and confirm the Godly in their inheritance, and as Christians we must view inheritance in the same terms as God does.

Firs the Lord is our portion and all things in the Lord for His service “Israel is my firstborn; let my people go that they may serve me.” And this is the purpose of inheritance, and we are the Lord’s portion, and we are to leave unto Him a goodly inheritance, and having used as wise stewards all that which is ours, our talents and our property and our children, the work we do day by day for His names sake, so that the Lord may rejoice in His goodly inheritance from us. He chose Israel for His own portion, that through them He might inherit the world. For the Lord’s portion is His people, Jacob is the lot of His inheritance. Let us pray

Almighty God our heavenly Father we thank Thee that by thine electing grace in Jesus Christ thou art our portion, and we thank Thee that in Thine electing grace Thou hast made us the work of our hands, our children and our possessions, Thy portion forever. Oh Lord our God make us mindful of the responsibilities that are ours in Christ Jesus, that we may give ourselves and of our substance and of our household unto Thee for Thy names sake and for Thy glories sake. Bless us to this purpose in Jesus name, amen.

Are there any questions now first of all on our lesson?

Yes?

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] The question is about the possibility of passing on to ones heirs an estate by means of gifts before death and are foundations the means of doing this. Well the answer to that is that it is possible by annual gifts to transfer a limited amount to one’s children every year without taxation.

Foundations have been used, but that loophole is rapidly being plugged so that it is not available as it once was. In fact virtually all foundations as accumulations of funds will be wiped out under the present law in a generation. As a result it is a difficult thing. I’m not competent to answer the various legal loopholes that still exist, this is a matter to discuss with some accountant or estate planner or lawyer who is competent in estate planning to find out how these things can be done. But it is important for one to explore this because it is imperative that what belongs to the Lord people is not taken by the ungodly, which is the purpose of the inheritance tax.

Yes?

[Audience member] {?} For the purpose of new people that are going to be listening to your tape would it be profitable for you to explain that {?} limit to the nation of Israel, two different Israel.

[Rushdoony] Well of course at the beginning it was the nation of Israel, but only those who were of faith because those who were not perished in the wilderness, and Israel was set aside, finally, for lack of faith. But it was to be a nation whose purpose it was to redeem others, to be a missionary nation of Psalm 87 and other passages makes clear. And of course the term Israel means “the people of faith” it has reference to the people of faith, it means those who are princes with God; that is by grace have a status with God and can approach to the throne of grace.

Yes?

[Audience member] {?}Isn’t it proper to have a group of people who have acquired a national identity and should be {?} to lose that identity and their inheritance as a nation that they should seek that inheritance to reclaim it?

[Rushdoony] The question is, “is it proper for a people who had a national identity and have been conquered and have lost it to seek to reclaim it?” That’s a rather general question, I don’t think we can say “no they cannot”, it would depend on the situation, I would say it’s proper under certain circumstances to seek to reclaim it. But if they’re training to reclaim it without any reference to God it’s another expression of Humanism, you see. It has to be theological because in terms of scripture God is working to disinherit all the ungodly, and therefore in the sight of God the ungodly are destined sooner or later to be disinherited, so if they’re trying to reclaim an inheritance or heritage apart from the Lord it is of no concern to God.

Yes?

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well in the case of the Armenians they are trying to reclaim it, I would say that many of them are humanistic in their ideas of it. Others are theological. And, for example in Soviet Armenia today many of them, especially in the rural areas, are refusing to surrender anything of their faith and are most defiant of the Soviet Regime in insisting on the integrity of their faith and to worship exactly as they always have. So you have there on the part of many nothing but humanism, on the part of others a real theological principle involved, and it’s the backbone of the resistance of many, especially behind the Iron Curtain.

Yes?

[Audience member] What if there are no sons? What about daughters?

[Rushdoony] Yes the daughters have a stake in the inheritance as, I believe it’s Numbers, I dealt with that on the previous time, I think it’s Numbers 27 that deals with it. In fact ungodly can be set aside totally in favor of Godly daughters, and should be. Yes?

[Audience member] Do you know when Josiah Wedgwood’s book was first written and {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, Josiah Wedgwood’s book is out again, it has been almost continuously in print. It came out I believe shortly after WWI, I could be wrong on that. But it was about that time that he and others began in various way to promulgate the ideas, so no later than the 20‘s the first printing came out. The most recent that I know of is 1971, but there could be editions since then.

[Audience member] Is he still alive?

[Rushdoony] What?

[Audience member] Is he still alive?

[Rushdoony] I’m not sure that he is, I don’t think so.

Any other questions?

Yes?

[Audience member] With the incident of Joshua and the Gibeonites where they deceived him and they were close at hand and they said they were far away and he promised to not attack, and to be their allies, and where God had told Him invade all the nations in that area, should he have kept his vow to him or should he have done what God said and slayed him even though he promised?

[Rushdoony] Well of course what he should have done was to check on what they said first, that’s where he was wrong. So his first mistake was that he did not try to verify their word. He went into an alliance without any investigation, so there was a very real mistake on his part at that point. But we are not bound to keep our word to the ungodly who deceive us. You see the idea that if we are tricked into saying, by a liar, into giving our word on something, presupposes the conditions of honesty so it’s an invalid contract to begin with because the terms are false.

[Audience member] So he should have not honored his…

[Rushdoony] He should have said “no, I will not abide by it” and ordered them out.

If there are no further questions let us bow our heads now in prayer, or 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 forever, amen.