Law and Life

The Future of America

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Law

Genre: Sermon Series

Lesson: 33 of 39

Track: 135

Year: 1985

Dictation Name: RR157A1

[Rushdoony] Our subject is the future of America. This is June the 1st 1985. My son Mark says it would make much more sense for the future of America if all elections were held on April the 15th [“amen” from audience] we might have a better future then [smattering of applause.] I bring you good news and bad news; some items of importance. According to some excellent authorities by 1990, five years away, the interest on the national debt will equal the gross national product. Desperate measures may be taken to avoid that crisis, including perhaps massive inflation. Just a few days ago on May 27 Morton B. Zuckerman of the US News and World Report said, and I quote, “treasury borrowing will absorb an astonishing 78% of net private savings in 1985.”

Now on the medical front. When in Washington D.C. this past month I learned of some interesting data had turned up at a legislative hearing with respect to AIDS. First of all no disease ever remains localized in the community in which it began, it does spread, it does reach the general population. Moreover the hearing turned up this very interesting fact that most cases are unreported. On the stand a doctor who came from a state with five reported cases admitted he himself had 185. He said he did not report them because he would lose all his other patients, and most of the doctors he knew were doing the same, not reporting them. He also admitted that death certificates were being altered to indicate other causes of death. Thus the prevalence of AIDS is far, far greater than anyone has imagined so that the possibility, in a few years, of a worldwide epidemic is not at all unlikely.

And another item, the Soviet Empire is turning the Caribbean into a Soviet lake. Step by step they are moving to take over Central America. The expectation is when that happens 10-15 million refugees will move towards the American border. The hope of the Marxist is that half of them will cross the border within a very short time, and their presence will sink the American economy. So much for the good news, [laughter] now for the bad news [more laughter]. When the Lord sends judgment on an age and on a people He is given opportunity to that people for repentance. If there be no judgment then it means that God has abandoned that people, and that they will slide slowly into oblivion and hell. The scripture couples judgment with salvation from beginning to end, the flood was a judgment upon the old world and the redemption of Noah. The tower of Babel was a judgment on the pretensions of men, and an opportunity for mankind. The plagues upon Egypt were a judgment upon Egypt and the deliverance of God’s people. The entrance into Canaan was a judgment upon the Canaanites, but the fulfillment of God’s deliverance of His people. And supremely the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ was God’s judgment upon sin, and our redemption. If there be no judgment there is no salvation.

The bad news is that although we need God’s judgment, too many churches and pew warmers want no part of it. We have replaced God’s son as our savior with the state as our savior, and we look to cradle to grave security from the state. We murder millions of unborn babies who were created in God’s image, and we ask “wherein will He judge us?” Through our death taxes we rob widows and orphans, that segment of the population whom God declares we are to show particular concern for, and whom He regards as a measure of the character of the people, and we think nothing about it. All we do is to increase the death taxes, the robbery of widows and orphans.

Of our day as of Isaiah’s it may be said as Isaiah said in 56:9-11 “9 All ye beasts of the field, come to devour, yea, all ye beasts in the forest. 10 His watchmen are blind: they are all ignorant, they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber. 11 Yea, they are greedy dogs which can never have enough, and they are shepherds that cannot understand: they all look to their own way, every one for his gain, from his quarter.” Later Jeremiah described again and again with horror the blindness of the people to judgment, and their insistence on a gospel of sweetness and light, their demand that the people who proclaimed God’s word give them only reassurances that God loved them. Does that sound familiar? It is because it is. We have people today ready to tell sinners “God loves you”. And Jeremiah says in Jeremiah 8:7-11:

“7 Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming; but my people know not the judgment of the Lord.

8 How do ye say, we are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us? Lo, certainly in vain made he it; the pen of the scribes is in vain.

9 The wise men are ashamed, they are dismayed and taken: lo, they have rejected the word of the Lord; and what wisdom is in them?

10 Therefore will I give their wives unto others, and their fields to them that shall inherit them: for everyone from the least even unto the greatest is given to covetousness, from the prophet even unto the priest every one dealeth falsely.

11 For they have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.”

The time of judgment faces it, we have already entered it. What America’s future is, and will be, depends to a great extent on what the churches do. When Hitler came to power the German Protestants were largely responsible. The Catholics at least were distrustful of Hitler. The Protestants were divided into two groups. The modernists, who were ready to believe in the state, and who were ready to welcome Hitler because, after all, he did believe in science and his outlook was modernistic; the pietist who made up the rest of German Protestantism were not much interested in anything except the fact that Hitler claimed he was going to institute moral reform, they were satisfied with words. Who opposed Hitler on the side of the modernists? Well some pastors did, and the one name that comes to mind unfortunately, represents the rest of them, Niemoller. When someone recently suggested when Reagan went to Germany that perhaps he should have honored one of Hitler’s opponents among the pastors, such as Niemoller, National Review commented, and I quote “in the church for a good German to honor Elie Wiesel, chairman of the U.S. holocaust memorial council, suggested Reagan go to the grave of Pastor Martin Niemoller, a WW I German submarine commander who was pacifist in WW II. Niemoller, it turns out, has already been honored by Soviet and North Vietnamese. He received two Lenin prizes from the USSR and went to Hanoi to receive honors for his anti-American activities during the Vietnam war.” All too much of the protestant resistance to Hitler was of this character, non-Christian.

In this country the evangelicals elected Jimmy Carter because he said he was born again, they elected Reagan, and re-elected him, with about as much excuse, but at least they became finally, in those three elections, active in the political scene. They need to become more sophisticated in their approach, and to extend their interest to the state and the local scene. Part of the problem of course is the evangelical outlook of withdrawal. Early in the 1950’s at a church where I was the pastor an elder, who at best could be described as a very meager man, if man he was, complained very strongly that I was making it impossible to sleep in church [applause]. He said that he believed a man should feel so at peace with the world when he was in church that his best sleeping should be there [laughter] after all at home the worries of the world would sometimes impinge on him. But where in scripture are we ever permitted to feel at peace with the world? Where does the Bible ever tell us that God calls us to live at peace with the world? And is it not precisely this that marked most of the people who call themselves Bible believers? They separate themselves from a few habits; “I don’t spoke, and I don’t chew, and I don’t go with girls that do.” [laughter] But apart from that they are all too much at peace with the world.

Are we not summoned instead to be at peace with God through Jesus Christ in order that we might be armed for our battles in and with the world? Are we not promised by our Lord if we follow Him that “in the world ye shall have much tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” To overcome the world is not to live at peace with it. Today on the American scene what we see is militant humanism in every sphere of life and thought. Militant Humanism, Humanism that is determined to obliterate faith. Our laws are humanistic to the core, our education is entrenched Humanism and I have among other such books in my library, a book used for teacher training entitled A Humanistic Source Book in Education and yet some of us tell one another that all we need is to get more Christians in the school. What good are Christian teachers when they are required to leave the faith? The most important thing in all of education out of the curriculum, and how honoring to God is that? We see the persecution of Christ’s church in school wherever we turn. Our Humanistic Federal and state governments are at war against our Lord. We have a mandate not for peace but to conquer and to convert, and we must remember that any elementary reading of the Bible tells us that God’s wrath was greater against Israel and Judah, both of which had the form of the covenant and bore the name of the Lord, that against Assyria an Babylon who denied the covenant.

The United States still has the forms of the covenant. The constitution requires, for example, an oath of office. We forget what the oath is. An oath is a pledge to obey the covenant, and the covenant law. The oath of office was originally taken with the Bible open to Deuteronomy 28 invoking all the blessings and the curses of God for obedience and disobedience to God’s covenant. An oath is a covenant fact, we may have forgotten that but God has not.

The Soviet Union makes no pretense of being a covenant nation. The good news is that God is on the throne and His judgments are altogether righteous and holy, and wherever His judgments fall, whether they be on us or the person or people next door, they are altogether good. The bad news is that we have forsaken our covenant God and therefore Isaiah’s prayer must be ours “Lord Thou wilt ordain peace for us, for Thou also has wrought all work in us, oh Lord our Lord other Lords besides Thee have had dominion over us, but by Thee only will we make mention of Thy name. Whatever we achieve” says Isaiah “has been all Thy doing oh Lord, for Thou hast wrought all our works in us. While other Lords have had dominion over us, today we will acknowledge only Thine authority.” The Good news is that Jesus Christ is Lord, but this is only good news for us if He is Lord over us. Then indeed Romans 8:28 is true “for we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose. Then we know that as we face the judgment of God as it comes upon all the earth, though the mountains shake and the whole earth trembles, the Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge, but if not then the word of Obadiah 15 is true. “As Thou hast done it shall be done unto thee, thy reward shall return upon Thine own head.”

The United States only has a future worth cherishing in and under Jesus Christ. We are plainly told of God the Son, all things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. Again we are instructed of Christ by Paul in Colossians 1:17 “and he is before all things and by Him all things consist.” The Greek word translated into English as “consist” is made up of two words, which means “with” and “to stand” {?} it tells us that nothing stands apart from Christ, He is the only foundation anything and all of creation can have. Except the Lord build the house they labor in vain that build it. Paul is telling us therefore that since by Him all things consist, there is nothing more insane then to believe that you can have a civil government that will endure, or that will give justice apart from Jesus Christ. By Him all things consist, then can only stand in terms of Him.

There is no justice apart from God and His law. There is no such thing as abstract justice in the universe, that’s Neoplatonism. To believe that somewhere out there, free-floating in outer-space there is such a thing as truth and justice, or anything else in the way of virtue, is nonsense. God is love and God is justice, and God is truth, and none of these things can exist apart from Him, the triune God. And therefore by Him, Jesus Christ, all things consist, and to attempt to have an economics apart from the law-word of God is to try to build on empty space to ensure collapse. To believe that it is possible to have validity in any sphere of life, and thought, education, or anything else apart from Jesus Christ is nonsense. But today the church has boxed Christ into the church and has allowed the world to go its way into Humanism and Secularism and is wondering why things are going wrong.

Nothing stands apart from Christ, the universe is upheld by Him and so too are the nations, and all the peoples thereof. As Isaiah 40 verses 15-17 tells us so clearly “15 Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance: behold, he taketh up the isles as a very little thing. 16 And Lebanon is not sufficient to burn, nor the beasts thereof sufficient for a burnt offering. 17 All nations before him are as nothing; and they are counted to him less than nothing, and vanity.” The good news is that Jesus Christ is Lord; the good news is that if we build on Christ then our structure endures, and we must begin to overhaul every sphere of life and thought in terms of God’s infallible law, in terms of God’s word. It means that the arts and the sciences have to be re-made. That economics as we have it today is fiat economics, man playing at God saying “I will make, I will create my own economics.” It means that law, when man makes it, simply reveals the fact of the fall, of Genesis 3:5 wherein man says “I will be my own God, determining for myself what is good and evil, what is the law.” Our politics today is the humanistic science of man playing God, and all our politics, whether we call it liberal or conservative, fascist or Marxist, democratic or non-democratic, is today in theory and out-working of Hegel’s philosophy that the state is God walking on earth, and this a faith we cannot tolerate, but it is the faith that you have in the state-house and in Washington D.C.

By Him all things consist, and today the structures, the foundations of society are crumbling because we have built on other foundations, and we are seeing on all sides the decay of one area of life and thought after another. We see the abandonment of all attempts and philosophy to deal with meaning. We see in the sciences an increasing hostility to anything that will point to an order in the universe, we see in education the enthronement of unreason and anti-Christianity. We see meaninglessness enthroned every time we turn on the television. And the real horror of our entertainment is that it points to a life without God as though He did not exist, so that even at its best it gives us a world without meaning. And then we wonder why teenage suicide is increasing, why crime is increasing, why the world around us falling apart.

By Him all things consist, and the good news is that as we build on Christ we build then with a greater power than we represent, that then we are in harmony with all creation, by Him were all things made and without Him was not anything made that was made. Every atom of creation is God-created, every atom of our being witnesses to God, and all that man is doing Paul tells us in Roman’s 1:17 following, is to hold down the truth in unrighteousness and in injustice. And when we work in harmony with that truth God the Son, then we work in harmony with God and with the power of God; for this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. This is the good news, Jesus Christ has always been the good news, and there is none other. Thank you. [applause]