Deuteronomy

Justice vs. Process

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 85-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 85

Dictation Name: RR187AU85

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. Grace be to you and peace and fro our Lord Jesus Christ who gave Himself for our sins that we might deliver us from this present evil world according to the will of God and our Father to whom be glory forever and ever. Let us pray.

Almighty God our Heavenly Father, we thank Thee that we live, move and have our being in Thee. That Thou art our total environment. That all things come from Thee oh Lord and therefore all things have an eternally righteous and holy purpose for us in Christ. Teach us therefore by Thy spirit and by Thy word to walk in confidence, in faith and in trust, knowing that Thy ways are all together righteous. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Our scripture this morning is Deuteronomy 24:14-15. Our subject: Justice vs. Process. Justice vs. Process, Deuteronomy 24:14-15.

“Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy, whether he be of thy brethren, or of thy strangers that are in thy land within thy gates:

15 At his day thou shalt give him his hire, neither shall the sun go down upon it; for he is poor, and setteth his heart upon it: lest he cry against thee unto the Lord, and it be sin unto thee.”

When I was a hired boy on the farm this law was still commonly routinely applied to farm labor. Where short term jobs were involved such as pruning, picking fruit, turning raisin trees and the like, farm workers were paid daily. School children from neighboring farms were paid when the work was done because their parents wanted the wages in a lump sum to be saved. Now consider what this law means. If you’re a farm worker and you follow the fruit, the harvesting, whatever it might be, and a man hires you and tells you you will get so much and then at the end of say a week of harvesting or two weeks he gives you in terms of what he thinks it was worth and in terms of his record of the hours.

It’s too late to walk away, you have no recourse, you’re a traveler, you cannot fight him. As a result this law from biblical times until a generation ago was routinely respected. It meant that if at the end of the day you were not honest with your workers they would not return the next day. On top of that nobody would come because they would know you were a cheat. But this was ended when federal laws required taxes to be withheld, forms to be filed and work permits for children and teenagers to be secured. Payment then was by check with all the deductions and it was too late for you to say as a farm worker this was not the way I understood it. In some areas minority peoples would refuse a job even after the federal regulations if the pay were not in cash and this has put the employer in a bind. If that’s the only kind of work you have and they will not work for you except for cash then you pay the penalty. You are fined by the federal authorities. A centuries old practice was ended when for taxing purposes statist intervention governed the employer and the worker. We can assume that abuses existed under the old system, all the same, the worker was usually free to leave one farmer for another and he often did so. This law appears also in Leviticus 19:13. The hired man’s capitol was his ability to work. His major asset is abused whenever an employer can postpone payment because postponement means that settlement of the account occurs when it is too late to act against it.

The phrase in verse fifteen ‘in his day’ means the day of his labor. A deferred payment means the depersonalization of a man and his work. Under the present system neither the employer nor the worker control both the character of the work and its pay and both are harmed as a result. When the Roman Empire took over Judea and Galilee its centralized authority made it easier to overlook this law, as a result the wealthy both Jews and aliens were able to use the fact that Roman law now took priority over God’s law and they exploited workers. The brother of our Lord, James, gives us a clear statement of the evil that resulted, we read in James 5:1-6:

“Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.

2 Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth eaten.

3 Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.

4 Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.

5 Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter.

6 Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you.”

What James is here saying is that everything you have is going to in effect rust and disappear because judgment is coming upon you, the day of the Lord. Now modern Christians tend to think the day of the Lord refers to the last judgment but from early in the Old Testament on through the New it refers to judgments of God repeatedly, the day of the Lord with regards to Edom, or Moab, or some other country. Here with regard to Palestine. James prophesies judgment on these peoples and it came in the Jewish-Roman War of 66-70 A.D. He sees their costly garments, their gold and their silver, as worthless as against that day of condemnation and their very assets will eat their flesh like fire. The more they have the more they were the target of oppression. They would be the especial target of the vengeful and conquering Romans.

Their sin was postponing payment until protest by the workers would have no effect. God hears the call of these poor because He is a compassionate God. Laws manifest a theology and we must never forget that. Wherever we find law we find there also a doctrine of community and of ultimacy. What and who is ultimate is always revealed by a body of laws. Biblical law manifests the God of justice and grace, of mercy and wrath. As we read in the Ten Commandments, for I the Lord thy God is a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of those that hate me and showing mercies unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments. God’s judgment and grace are tied together as aspects of His justice and care. The poor are told to look to God rather than to man for justice. Many commentators because of their modernism and their evolutionary perspectives are convinced that this law and Deuteronomy as a whole and most of the Pentateuch was actually written centuries after the time of the Exodus and of Moses. Their premise for is is evolutionary. They cannot believe that as far back as Moses’ day such advanced thinking was possible. Because of their Darwinian belief men back then were still semi-brutish in their eyes and wisdom was born only as men reached some proximity to the Greeks and the Romans, such is their premise. But morality is not a product of evolution but of a true and regenerate faith. If we begin on Darwinian premises but fail to recognize the possibility of devolution as a companion of evolution we will be forced to believe that history goes onward and upward. And so those in the Old Testament were primitive compared to those in the times of the Greeks and Romans and they are backward in comparison to us.

As [unknown] put it: man is moving to an omega point, it is advancing because evolution by definition means an advance. AS a result even the majority of the church under the influence of Darwin regards the Old Testament as somehow on a lower level. As a result they do not know God. Another aspect of this law is cited by Matthew Pool, namely, the premise justice must not be denied nor delayed. Any delay in justice either in the courts or in daily life is morally wrong. The nature of the political process in our time is alien to a quick justice or to justice at all. It should be apparent by now that all law has a source and a context. Its source can be the state or it can be God. Its context can be a state bureaucracy or a godly community and the kingdom of God. Law rests on certain presuppositions. At its extremes this can be the natural goodness of man or it can be the total depravity of man. If man is naturally good then its institutions, the state, its bureaucracy, are also good and they can be trusted with power. But if the Bible is true as we believe it is when it declares that man is fallen and sinful then neither man nor his institutions, whatever they are, whether they be church or state or any organization or corporation or union or anything, can be trusted because sin permeates all things. Then not the state’s law but God’s law alone can be valid. And then a decentralization in society is necessary to preserve it from tyranny. The rise of modern tyranny has accompanied the belief in man’s goodness as it did with Renaissance humanism. This does not mean that decentralization eliminates tyranny or sin, far from it. Evil seeks power on all levels. But a decentralized society at least limits the scope of evil and this is why God’s law requires a decentralized society. Apart from regeneration sin is always there and sooner or later triumphant. With regeneration its scope is progressively limited and it is placed under control. There’s also the time factor to be considered. Delayed justice undermines law and justice alike. Justice is then delayed with an endless process. Men condemned to be executed for their crimes are sitting in American prisons, a few thousand or several thousand of them, ten and fifteen years after their sentencing pursuing continuing and repetitive appeals when there is no reasonable doubt as to their guilt.

Why? Because we equate today in legal theory justice with process. The appeals are usually based on the technical details of their conviction. The requirement that there be justice is subordinated to the demand that the process be observed rigidly. We have therefore an inordinate faith in the legal process rather than in justice. It is not unreasonable to insist that this too is an aspect of the Darwinian world view. Evolution replaces the creative act of God with an endless process and since Darwin the world has enthroned process over justice. It would appear that faith in justice has given way to faith in process. Ideas do have consequences. God’s law requires things be settled clearly and quickly and with justice. God’s law says that evil must be dealt with and the fact of evil is paramount. Guilt or innocence, now it is not guilt nor innocence but process and men known to be guilty are set free because some minor technical detail was overlooked in the trial. Evolution is process; our trust now in our law is in process. It is not in God we trust, not in His righteousness, but in our process. Ideas do have consequences of a very reaching and deadly sort. When there could be no appeal unless an injustice was done, now the appeal has nothing to do with that most of the time and less and less so. It is entirely procedural; it is a belief in process which comes out of anti-Christian world and life view. It is a product of Darwinism, not of Christianity. Let us pray.

Our Father, Thy word is truth and Thy word deals with our depravity and Thy word teaches us to look to Thy grace and to Thy law whereby we might live. Teach us, give us grace to heed Thy word, to follow Thy way, deliver us from the ungodly world that surrounds us and make us the people of Thy word, of Thy grace, of Thy justice. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Question] Can anybody describe the American process of justice?

[Rushdoony] I don’t believe that its possible because anytime the Supreme Court meets the process is further developed and altered and made more and more a strange and complex thing. Any other questions or comments?

It’s worth noting that what has happened since Darwin is that entirely different kind of world has developed philosophically. Before Darwin most people knew because they were more or less under the influence of scripture that there was a right and a wrong and this was right and it was always right and this was wrong and it was always wrong. But then process philosophy took over and it began to be maintained that instead of an unchanging truth process rules in every sphere. Now the great fear in sociology was Émile Durkheim who in the 1890s, I think it was 1891, wrote his Rules of Sociological Method, one of the most influential books for this century. It was simply an application of Darwinism in a radical way. And what he held was was that we don’t know what the next truth or the next development in evolution will be, therefore the criminal may well be an evolutionary pioneer, so instead of being the worst in society he can very well be the next best, the best that is coming in the next generation.

Well, process philosophy governs all things. Most people still act as though well, we know what is right and what is wrong but in the world of law and in the world of sociology and the world of philosophy, that is not true. Process philosophy has taken over with very, very devastating results. This is why students can go through a university today and without actually formally abandoning their faith their whole mental outlook is eroded! Because process philosophy undergirds everything. In terms of this we now find that in some instances the teaching of Shakespeare and Milton, for example, is downgraded because that which is being done today must be better. It represents an advance. And of course we’ve seen professors say that their comments on Shakespeare at least equal to anything Shakespeare wrote if not better. So this is what process philosophy has done to our world. And it is still doing it and it will erode everything until we return to a faith in God’s unchanging word and non-evolving word, a given, a fixed and eternal word. Yes?

[Question] Well it is evident that most of our legislatures and judges, their viewpoint is based on an evolutionary process of law.

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes! This is why we’ve shifted from a fixed concept in law to a process and a faith in process. To say that you believe in process is to say that you accept the Darwinian universe. Well if there are no further questions or comments let us bow our heads in prayer.

Our Father we thank Thee that Thy word is eternal, fixed in the heavens. And all men and nations who despise and defy Thy word will be judged by it. Give us grace day by day to believe in Thee and in Thy word, to grow in grace and in understanding, to be zealous in the service of Thy kingdom and in all things to be more than conquerors through Christ our Lord. 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.