Laws of Liability and Restitution - D

These verses have less to do than the rest in this chapter with restitution and liability as far as the human side of things are concerned. They are more God-centered in their orientation, and they require of us a recognition that sin is primarily an offense against God, that when we sin we do involve other people, but it is God’s law that we have broken. To view sin or crime, or whatever term you may want to use as primarily a man-centered thing is to falsify one’s perspective on the matter. If it is man-centered, then man can alter it, man can forgive it, man can say, “That’s alright, forget about it, it’s nothing,” and man does not have that prerogative. We cannot forgive because we don’t want to be bothered, or maintain anger because we are still angry, we must operate on God’s terms. Forgiveness must meet God’s requirements, and our wrath must be a righteous wrath.

Well, in the first of these verses, the matter is a difficult one. “Thou shalt not revile the gods,” the word is elohim, and it can be used of God, or gods, or judges, and it clearly means judges, “nor curse the ruler of thy people.” This deals with our attitude towards those in authority, those in authority over us, and it confronts us with a very realistic fact. Throughout most of history, they have been dishonest. Throughout most of history they have been tyrannical. This has been the standard fact in history, there’s no escaping that. The amazing fact is that people go on trusting and looking to civil government, to the state, for salvation, when its history has been so evil. In fact, we don’t get must history taught to us today, nor do we get more than a superficial account of contemporary history anywhere, including the daily papers especially. But if we are knowledgeable and if we are godly, then we recognize the disparity between civil authorities; judges and officers of state, and God’s requirement of them, and the temptation is to take a purely negative attitude, to revile the judges, and to curse the rulers of the people. To damn them, and this is what many people do, including many, while this morning while sitting in the pews of churches, from coast to coast and in one country after another. When you consider that most of them regard politics a dirty business, and fully half of those who claim to be evangelicals are not even registered to vote. You have to add that part of the dirtiest of this dirty business is the irresponsibility of people who should be most responsible, and that we are in the plight{?} because too many are content with simply reviling, and cursing, damning the whole process and like good Pharisees, withdrawing from it.

About twenty years ago, someone called attention to the fact that one-tenth of one percent of the American public, at most, were committed Marxists, that they had more influence by far than the fifty percent of voting age or better who declare themselves to be Christians. At the root of that impedance is what this verse is talking about. Reviling and cursing, damning the courts, and the public officials is no substitute for godly action, for a godly stand in society, but it is a most common one on all sides.

Then we are told, “Thou shalt not delay to offer the first of thy ripe fruits, and of thy liquors: the firstborn of thy sons shall be given unto me.” The significance, of course, of the first fruits is, symbolically in the past they have stood for the totality, the first born standing for all. The tithe of the first fruits of our income. Represents also that we give the tithe, but all belongs to the Lord and must be used, whether it’s for ourselves or for any enterprise we’re involved in in terms of godly requirements, godly standards. It is the alpha, the alpha representing the all.

So, we are not to delay to offer the first of thy ripe fruits, liquor, of thy sons. The first fruits, not the last fruits in other words. We are not to say, “I’ll see how much I have in the way of other responsibilities, and then at the end I’ll see what I can give to the Lord.” So, this presupposes the necessity of giving and our feeling that we’re going to give, yes we agree, this is our stand. What it is telling us it has the priority. God does. That we cannot delay, that we cannot say that, “These other things are pressing and urgent and therefore, God has to wait.”

“Likewise shalt thou do with thine oxen, and with thy sheep: seven days it shall be with his dam; on the eighth day thou shalt give it me.” So here we have the requirement for the first fruits of sheep and oxen. However, we are told that for seven days, they are to stay with the mare or the ewe, as the case might be. We don’t know the reason for this. People say it is humanitarian, which is a vague word. However, we do know that until the eighth day, the blood in a child does not coagulate, and there is a parallelism here with circumcision. Circumcision was to come on the eighth day, not before. This was not recognized for its medical import until this century when they came to the awareness through research that a baby’s blood does not coagulate for seven days of its life. Well, we don’t understand why there is the parallel requirement with regard to lambs and calves, but it is there. Perhaps someday we will understand the reason, but for the present, we don’t know.

But we’re not to obey only when we understand, and this is why the discipline of both father and mother is a necessity in life, because the natural reaction of a father, and it’s a part of the masculine nature, when a child says, rebelliously when told to do something, “Why, why do I have to do it?” “Because I said so.” Now that’s authority and the father in the household says, “My authority governs. Because I said so, you do this.” The mother, on the other hand, says, “The reason why your father requires this of you is,” this and that, and the other reason. She explains the nature of the authority. Both are necessary. But if we don’t have the understanding, we are still are required to obey.

“And ye shall be holy men unto me: neither shall ye eat any flesh that is torn of beasts in the field; ye shall cast it to the dogs.” In other words, if a calf, or a lamb is found in the fields torn, dying, you are not to take it and butcher it and eat it. You are to give it to the dogs. This sets a standard for man. How man is to eat. We are created in the image of God. There is no justification for lowering ourselves to eat the leavings say, of a wolf, or a bear, or a coyote, and for this reason we cannot touch such food. This is an important fact. We are to be holy, and holy means dedicated, separated, given over to a particular cause. As a result, because we are given over to God’s service, the totality of our lives must be governed by a sense of holiness, that there are some things that men and women must not do, that are beneath them, that are degrading to them however practical it might seem under certain circumstances. We are to be holy unto the Lord.

Now, holiness is thus a stress in this passage. It is set forth in the fact that we are to have a religious attitude towards those in authority, which means we are to must a sense of responsibility. We are not to be given idly to damning them and feeling “that’s it,” but we are to offer our first fruits without delay. That there are things that we are not to eat because we are holy, set apart, unto the Lord.

Now, this brings us to a word which we will consider today. A very important word because it is descriptive of many sacrifices in the Bible. Whole burnt offerings which were to be laid upon the altar and totally consumed, and not to be eaten by the priest or the sacrificer. They did not belong to either. They belonged totally unto the Lord. They were offerings of atonement. Now, while we are to be holy unto the Lord, and dedicated to Him, we are not burnt offerings. This is important. We are wholly dedicated to Him, but we are not his ordained sacrifices of atonement. This is a very important point because there has been in this century a great deal of confusion on the subject, it began with World War 2, when the massacre of Jews was spoken of as a holocaust, and since then many others have picked up the term so we speak of the Cambodian holocaust, the Chinese, the Armenian, and a great many others so that the word has suddenly spread out into a number of communities and usages beginning with the massacre of Jews, but there is a difference between massacre and holocaust. A massacre is the murder of innocence. A holocaust is an offering of atonement. Can we speak of the mass murder of any group of people as a holocaust? It is done routinely. We are told of the holocaust Stalin worked, or that Mao Tsetung did. This is a misuse of the word. It has done no small damage in that it has led people to give a religious significance to massacres, and to speak of them even as an atonement.

This usage has certain roots in some very heretical groups in the Middle Ages, among the Jews, and with them, people prayed at the time of their death that “May my death be an atonement for my sin,” and such prayers were made even by criminals who were about to be executed. Cavalists{?} especially were prone to that kind of thinking. But it has been revived in our time. All this represents a humanistic approach, because it gives undue weight to man in the scheme of things, as though man’s death could make atonement. As though the death of a group, or millions, could make atonement. Why have we abandoned the legitimate word: massacre? It’s because we have switched theological terms from God to man. So much so that we have forgotten their theological orientation. We speak of the state as sovereign, and it is routinely affirmed since World War 1 by American courts and before that, was routine for centuries in European courts of kings and then courts of law. But sovereignty means lordship, same word, same concept. It can only be applied legitimately to God.

So, when we switch from a God-centered perspective to a man-centered one, we pervert everything including language, and we have a kind of incredible insanity today that is so prominent in the press. The pros and cons of how to abolish the plague of drugs. I’ve been sent lately a number of pro and con articles, for legalization, as though this would solve the situation, and for the drug war as proposed by Washington. Both are a disaster. Both assume that some device would take care of the matter, when it is basically the emptiness in people that drives them to drugs, a religious emptiness, and the one thing that no one in any place of authority will suggest is: This is a religious battle. We have a plague of drugs that is sweeping the world because people are empty within. They are running away from self-consciousness, from the fact of what they are and what they need, which is atonement, so they deal with their guilt with drugs, and the solution is avoided because they will not have this man to rule over them, Jesus Christ. He shall be holy men unto me. Apart from that, there is foolishness. “Unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.” Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto thee for thy word and for its plain speaking. We thank thee that thou hast given us the privilege and the opportunity of being holy men in Christ, of being dedicated, consecrated, set apart for thee and for thy kingdom, for thy purposes, now and throughout all eternity. Make us joyful and grateful, and ever zealous in thy service. In Christ’s name, amen. Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] The misuse of language is becoming commonplace. I hear words misused on television, in radio, and see it in the newspapers, and read it in books all the time. The standards of language in the United States have declined very sharply.

[Rushdoony] Yes. We actually have several schools that take a dramatically warped view of language. Post-structuralism, deconstruction, and so on. The gist of which is that the original writer of a {?} literature did not know what he was saying, and therefore, it has to be decoded by the expert, and this has virtually taken over most schools in the United States so that all the major universities and a great many minor ones are now deconstructionist, or post-structuralist, and I was reading the other day an interpretation of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, I simply won’t attempt to reproduce it. It was so weird that I had to keep going back to it to ask myself, “Did they really believe that, did they hold that?” Well, this is a good way of destroying, or thinking you have destroyed anyone you disagree with or anyone from a previous era whom you feel was not as enlightened as you are, but it is the destruction of the language. Yes?

[Audience] Well, that leads to more than disagreement. I leads to alienation.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes, one of the theses behind the generation gap is that the different generations don’t speak the same language, and in the world of post-structuralism, deconstruction and what have you, that’s held to be a fact, but then it’s also held that men and women don’t speak the same language. Well, there’s no end to it. It does lead to alienation, isolation, because you’re trapped inside yourself without the ability to communicate with anyone. Although I’ve never had any difficulty in understanding Dorothy, or she me, but apparently, according to theory, we are supposed to be on different wavelengths. Yes?

[Audience] I think one of the contributing factors to the change in language has been the disinformation aspect of propaganda which was generated hot and heavy during the fifties. At various times, I’ve tuned in international shortwave to, for instance, Radio Moscow and some of the other propaganda-generating stations and they continually misuse words in order to confuse their meaning, and I think this has set a tone and many academic institutions apparently feel that this has become the correct usage.

[Rushdoony] Yes. We’re also being separated from writings of the past. The new translations of the Bible work to destroy your knowledge of the past, which then means you then cannot read and understand sixteenth and seventeenth century writings too well, and now you have to have a modernized version of even Paul Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress. Well, what is happening is that in universities, upper division and graduate work, students are getting through without ever having read anything that’s more than a century old. They’re cut off from the past, they don’t know the language. They’re a new kind of illiterate, so it’s no wonder they have no understanding because they don’t have any historical roots. Well, if there are no further questions, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, we thank thee that we live in thy creation, not in the creation of the fools of our time, who sought to remake the world in their image. We thank that thou hast made us in thine image, called us to a great and glorious purpose, and hast given us thy word as our marching orders. How great thou art, O Lord, and we thank thee. 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.