Deuteronomy

God and Government

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: God and Government

Lesson: 2-110

Genre: Lecture

Track: 02

Dictation Name: RR187A2

Location/Venue:

Year:

Let us Worship God. Lord I have loved the habitation of thy house where the face of thine honor dwelleth. I was glad when they said unto me, let us go unto the house of the Lord. Praise be the Lord. Sing unto the Lord a new song in his praise in the congregation of saints. For the Lord taketh pleasure in his people, he will beautify the meek with salvation. Let us pray. Almighty God our heavenly Father, we thank thee that our times are in thy hands. Give us grace day by day to walk by faith. To cease from our fretting. To know that thou art on the throne that it is thy will, not the will of man nor our will that shall be done. Strengthen us in faith, in trust, and in thine service. Grant that day by day we may seek to do thy will, rejoice in thy word, and rely upon the refreshing of thy Holy Spirit and its empowering. Bless us now as we give ourselves to the study of thy word, in Christ name, amen. Our scripture this morning is from Deuteronomy 1 verses 5 through 18. Our subject: God and Government.

Deuteronomy 1:5-18

5On this side Jordan, in the land of Moab, began Moses to declare this law, saying,

 6The LORD our God spake unto us in Horeb, saying, Ye have dwelt long enough in this mount:

 7Turn you, and take your journey, and go to the mount of the Amorites, and unto all the places nigh thereunto, in the plain, in the hills, and in the vale, and in the south, and by the sea side, to the land of the Canaanites, and unto Lebanon, unto the great river, the river Euphrates.

 8Behold, I have set the land before you: go in and possess the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give unto them and to their seed after them.

 9And I spake unto you at that time, saying, I am not able to bear you myself alone:

 10The LORD your God hath multiplied you, and, behold, ye are this day as the stars of heaven for multitude.

 11(The LORD God of your fathers make you a thousand times so many more as ye are, and bless you, as he hath promised you!)

 12How can I myself alone bear your cumbrance, and your burden, and your strife?

 13Take you wise men, and understanding, and known among your tribes, and I will make them rulers over you.

 14And ye answered me, and said, The thing which thou hast spoken is good for us to do.

 15So I took the chief of your tribes, wise men, and known, and made them heads over you, captains over thousands, and captains over hundreds, and captains over fifties, and captains over tens, and officers among your tribes.

 16And I charged your judges at that time, saying, Hear the causes between your brethren, and judge righteously between every man and his brother, and the stranger that is with him.

 17Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; but ye shall hear the small as well as the great; ye shall not be afraid of the face of man; for the judgment is God's: and the cause that is too hard for you, bring it unto me, and I will hear it.

 18And I commanded you at that time all the things which ye should do.

According to Richard Clifford, in no book of the Bible is exclusive fidelity to the Lord held up, so insistently to Israel as it is in Deuteronomy. Now this may be an over-statement since all the Bible stresses faithfulness. But because these are Moses farewell words to Israel, they do have a strong and insistent character. Our text is in two parts. In verses one through eight we have a summons to possess the land, this is a commandment from God and it carries with it, promises for faithfulness. Then in verses nine through eighteen, Moses prepares the people for his death. And he requires that they follow God's ordained pattern of government.

Deuteronomy was the most influential book in history because it is used by the prophets. Its stress on possession of the land had a powerful effect, and it is an emphasis needed now. Because we have separated faith and the land, faith and possession of the earth, Christianity has ceased to be a Biblical faith and has become a kind of bubble head kind of spirituality. But all through the Bible faith and the land are tied closely together. God having done certain things for his people, requires therefore certain things of them. True faith must have works. Faith means vision and action, a static faith is dead. God told his people at Sinai: ”Ye have dwelt long enough in this Mount.” God's alternatives are moving forward or death.

But 150 years ago something began which is still powerful although fading. It was the idea of spiritual retreat. A people going to a conference center to retreat from the world and to seek a higher spirituality. One of the immediate effects of this was heresy. Beginning with a (Cheswick?) movement in Britain. These movements began to emphasize a spirituality, divorced from God's law word. A spirituality divorced from the problems of life, a spirituality divorced from the family and its obligations, from the work place, from every area of life. It was a form of neo Platonism, not Christianity.

But God at Sinai told his people: “Ye have dwelt long enough in this Mount.” You have now received my word, now move on, live it. In verse 11 Moses with intensity wishes that ,with God's blessing and the peoples faithfulness they might grow a thousand fold. Now this verse is an interesting one because in verse ten he says, “Ye are this day as the stars of heaven for a multitude” 2 million people. Well in antiquity and until the discovery of the telescope, all the scientific observations depending on the eye sight said there were about ten thousand stars. These two verses were the only dissenting ones and it was regarded by scholars until the discovery of the telescope as hyperbole on the part of the Bible. So they had been summoned to move forward. When God commands us and where God commands us he empowers us to do his will. Human power is often formal. God’s power always real. Throughout Deuteronomy, Moses insistently relates God's word and God himself to the people. He speaks in personal terms, the Lord OUR God. The Lord YOUR God. This is a characteristic of Moses in Deuteronomy.

Failure to act in terms of God's promises had 38 years earlier lead to defeat. As the marginal comment in the Geneva Bible reads at this point: “The fault was in themselves, that they did not sooner possess the inheritance promised.” The old term applied in Judaism in years by gone to Deuteronomy was correct, it is a book of reproof. In verses 9 through 16 the required form of government in church and state was set forth. What God requires is the reverse of the usual or normal form which is from the top down. Ruled by an elite at the top is an ancient pattern as well as a modern one. In Plato’s Republic, the ideal of all intellectuals ever since, it is held to be the only valid form, that is, rule by Philosopher Kings. The intellectuals. These men are and unelected elite, they are under no law. Their will determines all things.

This is of course the pattern of Marxism and Fascism, increasingly of democracies and certainly of the so called European community, which is governed by unelected rulers and whose law is their will. Increasingly the countries in Europe are finding that their laws are being overturned and declared to be unconstitutional, although there is no constitution in the European community. And people who are faithless and unknown to them are decreeing what they can and cannot do. Whether in their personal lives, in business, in church, state or elsewhere. But Gods requirement in government is from the bottom up in terms of His law. It begins with the self-government of the Christian man where the family is the government, the church, the school, a person’s vocation, society, the various voluntary groups and agencies, and finally civil government, one government among many. This is the Biblical pattern. It requires responsibility on the grass roots level. God's way places responsibility on every man. Whereas all humanistic patterns remove government from God and man, to the state or to the autonomous individual.

God’s law in every sphere limits the powers of man, church, state, family and all human agencies. Its basic thrust is man's responsibility. “Thou art the man” says the Bible. Statism assumes a care taker roll, which denies implicitly that man is created in Gods image and has a calling to govern himself and his peers, a responsibility. This is why when the church abandoned Gods law they went into spirituality, a higher spirituality which regarded the Bible as something to be mined for the nuggets of spiritual wisdom. Which regarded Biblical Law as not binding anymore, which regarded everything in the way of doctrine as chains, and which sought freedom in airy headed, bubble headed spirituality.

Where the law of God is set aside, man’s law which is anti-law, from before Plato’s day to ours replaces it. The Christian is a man empowered by God’s grace and by his spirit because he has a clean conscience before God as Hebrews 10:22 makes clear. Where Gods law and grace are rejected, the system of government devised by man always rests on sin, guilt and injustice. The power of guilt to cripple a man is very great. We see it widely used today to make men feel guilty because they are successful or white or almost anything. We are held to be polluters of the air and of the earth and an accursed race of exploiters. The effect of this on millions is very severe. People are afraid to state obvious facts, lest they be accused of racism, cultural imperialism, ideological oppression and so on and on.

Guilt is a very powerful means of controlling and castrating people. And so guilt is stressed in every sphere, everything we do we are somehow guilty of something. It cannot even be said today that there is a higher rate of illegitimacy among blacks than others, that’s racism. The very fact is there, it cannot be denied but it is racism to cite it. This guilt is also created by manufacturing sins which have no place in Gods sight, but are very important in man’s plans to govern over men and nations and the earth as well. If we are held to be guilty because of our race and national past all because of the imagined sins of Columbus, there is no way of removing that ostensible sin and its guilt. One of the most evil ideas about sin is a product of the Darwinian and Freudian world views. Sin and guilt are then metaphysical conditions. Aspects, ineradicable aspects of being human, and they can never be erased. Man is then perpetually guilty. But in the Bible sin and guilt are moral facts and conditions. Christ came to remove them from his people and start them on the way of sanctification, which is obedience of Gods law. And this freedom from sin and guilt, the Christian is God’s free man, the only true free man. And yet one of the horrifying facts that I encounter by mail and by telephone is how many people feel guilty, ineradicably guilty because of things they never did, which are dinned into them by godless media and by godless men at the pulpit. Even to the point of suicide. For however sin and guilt are metaphysical facts, unlike our freedom in Christ there is no escaping them. And the best possible role for the state is not a remedial but a custodial one. The care-taker state becomes the keeper of the human zoo. Injustice becomes a natural and inescapable fact of the human scene, and man has no escape from tyranny and injustice. Humanistic liberation is from freedom, to custodial slavery. Whereas Gods plan set forth here and throughout Scripture says, you begin with a man, then a head over ten families then over 20, 50, 100, 1000. From the bottom up. In terms of Gods law. In terms of Gods atoning grace. Man will either live in terms of God’s grace and law or they will live under sin, guilt, and injustice. Sin, guilt and injustice are used every day to control men. And the term given to them by one scholar is the system.

The system is a linkage of state, capital, labor, the criminal groups and churches all allied in the control of men. It was described in detail by Franklin Hitchborn in his book The System in 1915. The sociologist Edwin A. Sutherland in 1937 documented a specific case of a thief who robbed a man from the other end of the country, and how nothing the man did for years was successful in beating the system because he was challenging the linkage. Simon Chuck Giancana in Double Cross saw the system as controlling the presidency in our laws of city state and federal agencies and the church and so on and on. And many of them works can be fact. What is clear is that in a world which denied Gods covenantal grace and law, of necessity sin and guilt and injustice as endemic to the human scene will be used by men to control people and institutions.

No plan of government or fallen man can evade the forces of sin guilt and justice. Those who know God’s grace and law are required to live by his requirements. And for government, this means a highly decentralized structure. In earlier times both in England and the American colonies, the hundred courts were basic in government, derived from our text. And they were patterned in terms of Gods law. And they used Gods law to settle all cases. Their officers were known as justices of the peace. Calvin in commenting on Numbers 15:39 where God condemns men and nations for going a-whoring, that is seeking their own will and way, wrote and I quote:

”And first of all, by contrasting the hearts and eyes of men with his law, he shows that he would have his people contented with that one rule which he prescribes, without the admixture of any of their own imaginations. And again, he denounces the vanity of whatever men invent for themselves and however pleasing any human scheme may appear to them, he still repudiates and condemns it. And this is still more clearly expressed in the last words when he says that men go a-whoring whenever they are governed by their own councils. This declaration is deserving of our special observation. For whilst they have much self-satisfaction who worship God according to their own will and whilst they account to be very good and very right, they do nothing else but pollute themselves by spiritual adultery. For what by the world is considered to be the holiest devotion, God with his own mouth renounces to be fornication.”

Let us pray. Our Lord and our God, forgive us for departing from Thy word. Oh Lord our God thy church and thy people have drifted. Have sought ways of knowing Thee of their own devices. Have run from thy law word into their own spiritual exercises and have boasted that they have found a higher way. Lord have mercy upon us, recall us to thy law word. Teach us to walk in thy light. Make us again a people joyful in thee and thy word that we might again be more than conquerors in Christ. In His name we pray, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

[Audience Member] I think it’s interesting that the environmental movement has chosen a pattern to subvert Christianity by creating a whole new set of sins with which to burden people and create guilt.

[Rushdoony] Yes they have created a whole new set of sins and there is no solution to those sins as long as you’re alive. Man is the polluter and you are guilty, your ancestors are guilty and your race is guilt, your nationality is guilty. What’s the solution? It is actually pushing people to the edge of suicide, literally. And what do they get when they go to the churches, a higher spirituality which leads ultimately to a spiritual collapse. Yes?

[Audience Member] I think it’s interesting that Vice President Quale created such indignation when he mentioned family values.

[Rushdoony] Yes, it’s as though that were something obscene. It was startling the extent to which the media reacted with outrage. And his statement which I read in full was a mild one. But days have passed and the news is still full of outraged reactions to what he had to say.

[Audience Member] You can get an indicator as to where the masses are right now, their indignation was pretty well pointed towards the fact that he mentioned a television show, and this is where the masses get their information of where they’re at. The indication of a certain television show where there was a single mother on the show.

[Rushdoony] As long as it’s entertaining they’ll take anything. Well we are in the business today of manufacturing new sins. Federally created sins. Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Audience Member (Otto Scott?)] Paul Johnson in the spectators society of political correctness has formed a censorship in which certain words and certain values are not allowed to be mentioned.

[Rushdoony] Yes that’s a very good point and one very well taken. We do have a form of censorship in that any dissenting opinion today is immediately damned as the ultimate sin virtually, the unforgivable sin. Especially if it strikes against the humanistic establishment. So we have a situation where increasingly people are driven into silence, because if they open their mouths they are immediately treated as though they had committed the unforgivable sin.

Well if there are no further comments or questions let us conclude with prayer. Our Father thou art the Author and Creator of all things. And Thou art the definer of all things. Give us a zeal for thy word that we may know how all things beginning with sin and grace, judgment and forgiveness and salvation are defined. So that we may not be led astray by the evil tempers of our time. But in the face of all these things we may be more than conquerors. That we might hold forth the glory of thy kingdom, thy government, thy word and in the face of all thy enemies. Grant us this we beseech 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.