Exodus: Unity of Law and Grace

The Sixth Commandment

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: The Sixth Commandment

Genre: Lessons with Q & A

Track: 065

Dictation Name: RR171AJ65

Location/Venue:

Year: Early 70’s

Let us worship God. This is the confidence we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His name, He heareth us. Having these promises, let us draw near to the throne of grace with true hearts in full assurance of faith. My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, oh Lord. In the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee and will look up. Let us pray.

Oh Lord, our God, we give thanks unto thee that all things come from thee, and thou in thy sovereign wisdom hast ordained all things for thy purpose. Give us grace to receive all things from thy hands, to give thanks in all things, and to know that thy purpose for us is altogether righteous and holy. Give us grace to understand thy word, to rejoice in thy word, and by thy spirit, to serve thee with all our heart, mind, and understanding. In Christ’s name, amen.

Our scripture is Exodus 20:13. Our subject: The Sixth Commandment. Exodus 20:13. “Thou shalt not kill.”

There are, in the Hebrew, ten words which are translated in the King James Version as “kill.” In nine of these cases, the meaning is inclusive of murder, or lawless killing, and this is true, of course, of Exodus 20:13. The word “murder” restricts the meaning normally to human life, but in the Bible we find there are restraints on all killing, apart from God’s law. The use of animals and vegetation for food is of God’s ordination we are told, but restrictions are placed on the killing of animals for food, in that, in hunting birds, both mother and young could not be taken, and a like provision governed other animals. The use of the word “kill,” thus, here preserves a broader meaning.

But in our time, we have a strange situation. We have, on the one hand, a fanatical dedication to preserving the lives of trees and animals, and on the other hand, abortion and a high number of murders combined with a hostility to the death penalty. The most recent issue of the animals rights magazine comes out in defense of and speaks of the lovable nature of those animals called varmints, including rats and mice, and others like them. So, apparently, they are not expendable and we are.

We exalt life in this century, which is the time of mass murders. The roots of all this are in the separation of life and law from God. Life is now seen as an evolutionary accident, and the law is seen as an instrument of rule and authority created by the state. Whenever you separate life and law from the totally personal God of scripture, we depersonalize both life and law with very, very serious results. IN the early years of the twentieth century, Albert Schweitzer was regarded by many as one of the greatest men of all history. His philosophy of reverence for life is still with us. It is behind the environmentalists and their movement, and behind also the animal rights people. Schweitzer felt very strongly about the life of worms crawling onto a sidewalk during a heavy rain. All life was equal for him. By shifting reverence from God to life as such, Schweitzer depersonalized life, and helped destroy reverence. Because, if a work, a mouse, or a rat has life that is equally to be prized with that of the greatest man, then what becomes your criterion? The only criterion is that if you are for killing animals, or killing criminals, then somehow you are in the wrong and your life alone is not prized. So, we have the logic of our world today coming right out of Schweitzer.

Writing from a very different perspective than orthodox Christianity, Anton C. Zijderveld wrote, in The Abstract Society, a Cultural Analysis of our Time, and I quote, “Religion no longer binds together the different sectors of life. It has been institutionally isolated into one sector among the many, and in the process, it has been relativized into merely one possible explanation of life and the world. In the consciousness of modern man, religion is largely restricted to a particular institutional sector, the church, where it functions as a kind of private preference on the part of individuals. By and large, religion has lost its integrating function with regard to society as a whole.”

The result has been a decay of authority in its historic meaning. The result, said Zijderveld has not been a collapse into anarchy, but the replacement of the authority of religion by a new and coercive authoritative force. And he said, and I quote, “I propose to view modern bureaucracy as the general coercive force in pluralistic society that keeps this society together as a functionally integrated whole.” The title Zijderveld gives to his analysis is what has resulted; The Abstract Society. His analysis is good, but he has no solution. Everything has been rendered abstract, and God has been replaced, he says very perceptively, by bureaucracies, but he has no answers.

We can add that this is a return to the Greek ideal of abstractionism. Truth as ideas. Ultimate reality as abstract forms, and the personal as something which is merely transitory, not essential. The abstract society reduces me to abstractions, and the results are deadly. In the modern age, we have seen the triumph, and now the growing collapse of economic man. Both capitalism and socialism see man as an economic animal. Capitalism carries with it elements of its Christian past, but it reduces man to a worker, a hired hand. A hand can be a man, a machine, or a robot. To treat a man as a hand is to deny that he is a creature made in God’s image, a person. We can junk a machine, but can we junk a man?

In a very important parable, one of the longer parables of the New Testament, our Lord tells us how God works and how a godly householder works, in Matthew 21:15. The Lord of the vineyard hires a number of men, some early in the morning, to go out and pick the grapes, others at mid-morning, noon, and mid-afternoon, as he sees that the work is not going to be done, and it needs to be done in a day. He then pays them all the same wages promised to those who began in early morning. Those who had worked all day protested, even though they had received the wages they had contracted for, but the lord silenced them saying, in part, “Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with my own? Is thine eye evil because I am good?” The key here is the clause, “Because I am good.” The word “good” is a translation of “agathos.” We have it as the name Agatha, which means good. It refers to being good in a moral sense. In this case, charitable.

The crisis of our age is that we have separated economics and morality. It is routinely assumed that only economic concerns should govern the monetary and commercial realms, nor moral ones. This separation of morality and economics is a violation of the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” It depersonalizes man into a hired man, and we do have class hostilities now. Not because the workers are not better off than previously but because they are only better off economically. They have been depersonalized and this is demeaning.

I recall a few years back in my travels, meeting an older executive who had been fired during a recession because his very high pay made him expendable. Perhaps four or five younger men, fresh out of a business school from Harvard of Stanford, could have been added to the staff for what he was receiving. He had financial security, so that was not a problem, but he was very deeply hurt. He felt he had been someone who had contributed to the corporation, and now he had been cast off. He could not keep from repeating two things as he talked about it. They had admitted that there had been nothing wrong with his work, and that it was excellent. And he kept saying, “I thought we were friends working together to promote the company.”

No one has ever written a history of business, over the centuries. As Christians who were very successful conducted it, keeping both morality and economics in mind. But they did, countless numbers, who regarded themselves as a friend of their workers, concerned with their problems, but in our abstract society, that idea is becoming rapidly unthinkable, and of course, problems have resulted.

In our abstract society, men are physically murdered every day, in increasing numbers. The murder rate is going up. But men are also spiritually murdered by depersonalizing tactics. In the 1950’s, I met a minor corporate figure who very respectfully told me that he could not establish roots in the church or community, and so he could not be considered for any church office because his corporation wanted loyalty only to itself, and would transfer him and others regularly to keep them loyal as company men. For this, he was very well paid at a price to himself. Some jobs require moving. That’s a very different thing. It is the deliberate espousal of abstractness that has been so deadly, especially in the past generation.

Our faith tells us that Christianity is not one aspect of life, but the governing and total force in all of it. We are persons created in the image of God, and we must be treated as persons, not depersonalized in any sphere of life and thought. This commandment, thou shalt not kill thus is inclusive of more than murder as we see it in the courts. But our problem is depersonalization is basic to the abstract society. People today insist on environmental causes for crime. This is abstractionism. It increases the evil by denying responsibility and depersonalizing both the offender and the offense.

An obstetrician telephoned me just a few days ago, and he spoke of the absence of the personal sense of sin among those whom he sees regularly. And his practice is among blacks and whites. And he sees the breakdown increasingly of morality, and he told me with some despair of having delivered the baby of a ten year old girl. He delivered her mother, and her grandmother, so he had delivered the children of the forty-five year old great grandmother, beginning with the great grandmother’s first born, all illegitimate. Now, of course, this was in Mississippi, but he said it was not like anything like this a generation ago, in his youth. And now it was commonplace.

If we reduce life to economics, or biology, or anything else, we deny its god-given meaning, and we violate the sixth commandment, thou shalt not kill. To keep this law positively means, as our Lord says, thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment, and the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

The Soviet Union is a good example of an abstract society. It is a realm in which abstract social goals are more important than people. It is God’s grim irony that Marxism, with its plan of salvation by political abstract, uh political economic abstractions, is so great a failure in both politics and economics, and is a murderous regime. If abstractions govern men, the lives of people become a minor consideration, or as Stalin said, “If you’re going to make an omelet, you’re going to have to scramble the eggs.” Abstractions are today’s reality to many people. Thus, by definition, it is held by many that the revolutionary group is always democratic, progressive, and dedicated to liberty, and the facts of revolutions from the French Revolution to the present, are all disregarded because the abstract idea of revolution as being democratic and libertarian is seen as the reality. By definition, all who oppose revolutions are reactionaries, evil capitalists, and enemies of the people.

The word “people” becomes an abstraction in such thinking also. To represent what the revolutionists say is their following, at point after point, everywhere we turn in our modern world, and abstractions are replacing God’s reality. In statist education, abstractionism and anti-Christianity prevail, and the results are deadly for men and society. It should not surprise us, as Sam Blumenfeld has pointed out so tellingly in his books and his writings. Death education is more and more a part of the curriculum of statist education. As Proverbs 8:36 tells us, “All they that hate me love death.” Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we thank thee that in Jesus Christ, thou hast called us to a love of life, to a love of thee, to a life of obedience and of service. Deliver us, oh Lord, from the world of abstractionism, its dehumanizing and killing ways. Teach us always to see people as persons, as responsible, that we might apply morality into every sphere of life and thought. Bless us to this purpose in Christ’s name, amen.

Are there any questions about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] Well, it is true that the theory of modern life is based on abstractions, but the reality is based on people. Even in a corporation, there isn’t any rule of the company that isn’t subject to alteration because of the personalities. And their reactions. And I don’t really think anybody can excuse himself for going along with the abstractions if it conflicts with morality.

[Rushdoony] The problem is that the root of the abstractionism is in the modern state, and it is in the universities, and it is seeping out into every area. The world of the corporation comes out of a Christian heritage, and it hasn’t outgrown it, but nobody has ever written a business of what the corporate structure, what the business world has done over the centuries in a moral sense, as a force in the community, and today people are ignorant of that and corporation boards are often increasingly unaware of the history of what they represent.

[Audience] Well, of course, the state has always put itself {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes?

[Audience] I don’t see how some of these leveraged buy-outs when you see it manifested in the employees that work for these companies, I’ve had personal experience with people that they say the employee turnover is just incredible, and they have these grand plans of how this is going to work, but when it gets down to managing the people, if it isn’t in the budget or on paper they don’t have any concept of what’s really going on, and so I see in possibly a recession or something I don’t know what these bond holders are going to do because these companies don’t have any substance to them, or loyalty from the people that work there.

[Rushdoony] I know of two examples in this state where, with a buyout, everyone associated with the old company was released because they wanted only loyalty to themselves, no comparison of the past, and in one case, the income from that particular division dropped to one-tenth of what it had been the previous year, and it didn’t concern them because they figured they were now building up something that was going to be theirs. Any other questions or comments? Well, if not, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, we thank thee for the multitude of thy blessings, for the blessing of thy word and thy government, of thy spirit. Make us joyful in the calling which is ours, and the future to which thou hast called us in Jesus Christ. 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.