Deuteronomy

Perjury

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 62-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 062

Dictation Name: RR187AG62

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. Give unto the Lord all ye kindreds of the people, give unto the Lord glory and strength, give unto the Lord the glory due unto His name, bring an offering and come into His courts. Oh worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. Fear before Him all the earth. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God we come into Thy presence again mindful of all Thy blessings and Thy protecting care. In a world of darkness Thou art our light, in a world that gives no leadership Thou art our leader, our Savior. And so we thank Thee. Give us grace therefore day by day to serve Thee as we ought, to give our heart, mind and being to Thy service and in all things to rejoice in Thee. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Our scripture is Deuteronomy 19:15-21. Deuteronomy 19:15-21 and our subject: Perjury.

“One witness shall not rise up against a man for any iniquity, or for any sin, in any sin that he sinneth: at the mouth of two witnesses, or at the mouth of three witnesses, shall the matter be established.

16 If a false witness rise up against any man to testify against him that which is wrong;

17 Then both the men, between whom the controversy is, shall stand before the Lord, before the priests and the judges, which shall be in those days;

18 And the judges shall make diligent inquisition: and, behold, if the witness be a false witness, and hath testified falsely against his brother;

19 Then shall ye do unto him, as he had thought to have done unto his brother: so shalt thou put the evil away from among you.

20 And those which remain shall hear, and fear, and shall henceforth commit no more any such evil among you.

21 And thine eye shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.”

The abuse of justice is a religious offense. As a result, this law specifies that all cases of perjury must be tried before a court of priests and judges. The false witness had done more than attempt to destroy a personal enemy. He has by his false witness attacked the justice system. And he has in effect declared the God of justice to be irrelevant or non-existent for him. False witness has as its basis first a desire to destroy an enemy by testifying falsely against him. Malice and hatred outweigh any concern for justice. The paramount concern is to discredit and condemn a personal enemy. Second, false witness can have as its motive personal gain. Bribery for perjury is not uncommon. I recall some years ago being told quietly by a bank teller a hundred miles away from the trial that great sums were spent to bribe witnesses and gain an acquittal for a flagrantly evil man. Third, a man can perjure himself in order to deflect evidence of his own guilt. A lax attitude towards perjury warps and destroys a legal system. The laws against perjury come from the Bible, from the Ten Commandments, from the law ‘thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor’. We find this in Exodus 20:16 and Deuteronomy 5:20. Without a biblical faith such laws cannot stand. Non-Christian cultures routinely resort to torture. In biblical law the oath and this law against false witness replace torture. Faith conscience and the sanctity of an oath provide the assurance of honest testimony. As Christian faith wanes perjury and then torture replace it. In Proverbs 6:16 and 19, 21:28 and 24:28 God’s hatred for the false witness is spelled out. In the New Testament the law is again reaffirmed in Matthew 10:19 and Luke 19:20, also in Matthew 19:18 and Romans 13:9.

In Proverbs 19:5 and 9 it is emphasized that the punishment of perjury is mandatory. At one time in Texas in terms of this law in cases involving capital offenses the punishment for perjury was death. As recently as 1937 in California we find the following judgment and I quote, this in People vs. Rosen:

“It is time the citizens of this state fully realize that the biblical injunction ‘thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor’ has been incorporated into the law of this state and that every person having taken an oath that he will testify, declared, or certify truly before any competent tribunal, officer or person in any of the cases in which such an oath may be by law administered willfully and contrary to such oath states as true any material matter which he knows to be false is guilty of perjury and is punishable by imprisonment in the state prison for not less than one nor more than fourteen years.” Unquote.

Now the death penalty here had been dropped but the bible was still quoted. Without a biblical foundation and faith and knowledge of the sanctity of God’s law a society begins to disintegrate into anarchy and coercion and torture arise. Every society needs cohesion. If religion does not supplant then coercion and torture will. Churches which are antinomian have contributed substantially to our growing anarchy. The penalty for perjury is in God’s law exactly what the trial called for against the accused. If restitution is required the perjurer made similar restitution to the innocent party. If the case called for the death penalty the perjurer was executed. In verse twenty one we read: “And thy eye shall not pity but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.” This is the so called r[unknown]. All that the law here provides is that the punishment shall fit the crime. It does not require a literal knocking out of a tooth or a lost tooth or an eye for a lost eye. Scholars have tried to say this is its meaning but they have not been able to come up with a single instance of that in all of biblical history and related documents. The documentation is there in abundance but they cannot justify it. It is simply their desire to make the bible look primitive.

Perjury could be used to defend a guilty man or to save him from the consequences of his offense. In such cases both the accused and his false witness paid the penalty. Despite the insistence of some scholars that the [unknown] was literally applied in Israel not only was there no evidence as we’ve seen but all the evidence indicates it was in the other direction. It had simply held the punishment must fit the crime. The stipulation of at least two or three witnesses or more than one form of evidence rests on the fact that all men are both sinners and also fallible. Corroboration is thus necessary. The integrity of the judicial system is a moral and religious act. Legal reform without a religious reform is not a tenable hope. There must be a religious reformation before there is judicial or civil reform or else the alternative is coercion. Coercion of course eventually produces greater evils. The goal of the false witness is the miscarriage of justice. He wants to alter the outcomes to favor evil where it suits him. He wants God’s creation to move on his terms. In verse twenty we are told why the strict punishment of perjury is necessary. The rest of the people will fear. They will be afraid of treating the justice system lightly. Here as in Deuteronomy 17:13 we have clearly affirmed the doctrine of deterrents. Men will be more apt to obey God’s law when they see it faithfully enforced. The literal reading of verse sixteen is very telling. The false witness is literally a violent witness in the Hebrew, or a witness of violence. Although his offense is a matter of words he is doing violence to God’s justice system. The words ‘that which is wrong’, that is that he testifies to that which is wrong can be rendered as ‘that which is apostate or apostasy’. To bear false witness is to be guilty of apostasy from God because it goes contrary and in contempt of God’s law order.

Perjury means abandoning the faith in other words. It is an act of violence against man and against God’s justice system. This is the meaning of the commandment ‘thou shalt not bear false witness’. In verse nineteen we read as he has sought to have done unto his brother, that is, his fellow man, is literally ‘as he had purposed’. In other words, perjury is a deliberate and purposive offense whose attention is evil. Matthew 5:38-39 is sometimes cited to hold that our Lord set this law aside. But this is not only false but in direct contradiction to his declaration in Matthew 5:17-20 that His purpose is to fulfill or enforce the law, not to nullify it. Because perjury is a serious and a revolutionary offense we are told plainly in verse twenty one that we are to have no pity for perjurers. His offense strikes at the foundations of justice. Now, we have to add that the law deals with perjury, not with errors. In the course of testimony some witnesses frightened and intimidated sometimes confuse details. Such errors do not mean a sustained false testimony but an incidental error, a very different thing. The law depends on trustworthy testimony and perjury is an offense against the life of the law. The religious trial of the perjurer before priests and judges underlines this fact. The integrity of the law must be preserved and the false witness sometimes even more than the criminal threatens the very existence of justice. This is why verse eighteen states that the judges must investigate diligently every case dealing with ostensible perjury. Not to do so would be an act of contempt on their part both for justice and for their office. Where there is no prosecution for perjury there really is no longer a law order.

Apart from testimony before Congress under pressure circumstances there is no prosecution for false testimony. In our time we see that more and more that we have agents’ provocateurs. They are used regularly. They are people who under pretense of being a part of a group urge others to commit acts they have not intended to commit. Such agents push foolish men into violence and their arrest. This too is an abuse of justice, a form of aiding and abetting crime. It is dangerous for any system. In its latter years the old czar’s regime used agent provocateurs, one of them was Stalin. These agents, Stalin and others, worked both sides ready to be on the winning side whatever happened. What they did was to destroy justice in the social order. We see the same thing happening again, it is an abuse of justice. Let us pray.

Our Father, we thank Thee that Thy word speaks so plainly concerning the evils of our world. We confess oh Lord that we live in a time where the abuses of justice are great and many. We cry out oh Lord for Thy justice. Overrule these works of men, confound them, bring them down in their evil. Cleanses us and make us again a righteous nation. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Question] When the testimony of perjurers is now accessible….at one time perjurers could not testify because he had no word.

[Rushdoony] Yes at one time anyone who was not an orthodox Christian, if the court accepted his testimony, it was done with the qualification that this man, being an unbeliever, could not take an oath and therefore his testimony had to be weighed very carefully and regarded with a basic suspicion. Now, I’ve been told of instances where a man’s testimony has been shown to be perjured and nothing has happened. There is no consideration given. And as I indicated in any such a situation what happens is that coercion in some form or torture sooner or later takes over. Yes?

[Question] There is torture today in the American system because people are confronted with total ruin unless they change their testimony.

[Rushdoony] Yes, that’s a form of coercion, very emphatically and the pressures are only increasing, our judicial system is becoming more and more openly anti-Christian. It was shortly after world war Two that Chief Justice Vincent denied the validity of absolutes, so that the law was simply the word of the state. And they proceeded in the early fifties to dismantle as legal scholars have pointed out the Christian character of the American law system. It’s now in radical disarray. Some have predicted that if we do not return to a Christian law order by the end of the first decade of the next century this country will be in a radical state of collapse.

Any other questions or comments, yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes, this is why the bible has no prison system, that is for punishment. Only a temporary custody, very short, pending a trial, and then either restitution or execution, in minor cases corporal punishment. Yes?

[Question] They talk some inmates into taking a drug called [unknown] which more and less turns them into zombies after two or three years in use and now they’re tying that with deviance in society.

[Rushdoony] Well, in the name of preventing cruel and unusual punishment which did not refer to the prison system because it didn’t exist when the constitution was written, we are now freeing prisoners. Freeing them after a very short stay in the prison. Nothing is said about this being cruel and unusual punishment for the law abiding population who have to face a population on the streets that is criminal.

[Question] Yeah, actually they hate society. I think prison teaches the average criminal to hate society so when they come back out their hatred for society is ten times greater than before they ever went in there.

[Rushdoony] And that’s an aspect that very few people are aware of, this hatred of society.

[Question] Except the ones that do it.

[Rushdoony] Yes, any other questions or comments?

This from Deuteronomy represents a part of the book that as I’ve said before was our Lord’s favorite book, the one He quoted more than any other. It is also the book that is more under attack than any other in the Old Testament, everything done to deny its authenticity. It’s a book that has no miraculous events so that you can’t say it’s their hatred for their miraculous or the supernatural, it’s simply because it sets forth so clearly and in summary God’s law system. And this they find intolerable. If there are no further comments or questions let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father we thank Thee for the sufficiency of Thy word. We thank Thee that Thy word is a guide, a light and law. Make us faithful to Thy word, grant that by Thy spirit we be empowered to obey it, to make it again the law of the land and to become more than conquerors in 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, thi day and always, Amen.