Deuteronomy

Justice and World Law

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 87-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 87

Dictation Name: RR187AV87

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. Put on the whole armor of God that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God that ye may be able to withstand all in the evil day and having done all, to stand. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God unto whom all honor and glory belongeth. We come unto you knowing that thou alone art God. Things come from Thee and all things should be accepted as from Thy hand and for our eternal good. Make us strong by Thy word and by Thy spirit, make us constant in Thy service, joyful in Thy kingdom that in all things we may ever be more than conquerors through Christ our Lord. In His name we pray, Amen.

Our scripture is Deuteronomy 24:17-18. Deuteronomy 24:17-18, Justice and World Law.

“Thou shalt not pervert the judgment of the stranger, nor of the fatherless; nor take a widow's raiment to pledge:

18 But thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in Egypt, and the Lord thy God redeemed thee thence: therefore I command thee to do this thing.”

These two verses are concerned with a very common emphasis in the law, the prophets and also in the gospel. From one end of scripture to the other, these verses have a significance very few people appreciate. Deuteronomy 10:17-19, for example, God identifies Himself as one who loves the fatherless, the widows and the aliens and this is a theme stressed over and over again. He pays no attention to wealth or to status. His judgments are in terms of His law word. In Exodus 22:21 through 24 and again in Exodus 23:6 God promises judgment against persons and nations to exploit such people, widows, orphans and foreigners. Proverbs 22:22 says the same thing as do other proverbs, Isaiah 1:23, Jeremiah 5:28 and other texts stress this. This law is not addressed to judges, rulers, kings or civil powers but to the people. Neither charity nor justice can exist in any country if they do not exist in the hearts and lives of the people. Although the civil authorities must administer justice its beginnings are in the lives of the people. The law of God thus governs the private and public life of the people so that justice may begin with each and every man. Only then can it exist in the minds of the civil authorities. They reflect what the people are. The state has no part in charity; the scripture never says that the state is to administer it. This means that unless the people are charitable the society will be a cold and a heartless one. And if the people are so then the state they create will reflect them. Statist welfarism is not a part of scripture. It is impersonal, it winds up insisting on a right to be cared for and it propagates dependency and social disintegration.

Well it should be apparent by now that Deuteronomy is a remarkable book. It summarizes the law of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers and in the process highlights the remarkable unity of law and love, of justice and mercy, of kindness. It militates against evolutionary beliefs in the primitivism of Old Testament faith and life. It’s ironic to read texts like this from one end of the law to the other and then turn to scholars that talk about the primitivism of the Pentateuch. It centers the hope for a society in the faith and life of its families because the book is a series of addresses to the covenant families. Deuteronomy clearly offers a solution that fallen men reject. The goal of nations throughout history has usually been power and power is seen as the ability to control and to manipulate other peoples. As against this dream of power, God offers the covenant life, grounded in the justice of His law. Men reject this openly and covertly because they reject God. Three classes of helpless people are cited in our text: the orphan, the widow and the alien. In a society whose goal is power the helpless will at least be neglected if not exploited. If welfare is given it is to silence guilt or protests and welfarism divides peoples. Charity unites them because it is personal and religious. This is why Moses stresses kindness, community, brotherly love. In this particular context the concern is justice. Justice requires that the weak and defenseless be protected from injustice. Whenever the state exploits the helpless or allows people to exploit them no matter how much charity may officially prevail in the form of welfarism exploitation is the name of the game.

Control is the objective. We are told over and over again, Psalm 72:12-14, Deuteronomy 10:18 and 27:19, Exodus 22:22, and innumerous other texts that justice is the duty of godly kings and rulers. Israel should remember, God tells them, that they were once helpless and exploited in Egypt. Their redemption was God’s work. All the redeemed of God should remember that their standing and prosperity is of God’s grace and it can be withdrawn at any time to the destruction of a people. Society cannot long exist nor flourish without justice. At the foundation of all social orders is a hope of realizing a just social order. Those social orders which reject or neglect justice in due time undermine their own foundations. The people go from a love of their country to a hatred of those in power. Fallen man’s nature makes him very prone to injustice. The society he creates shows the same disposition to evil. As the old proverb has it, you cannot make a good omelet with bad eggs. You can create a good society with a bad people! Then there is only one objective, control, power. As Orwell said, the goal becomes a boot stamping on a human face forever. So fallen man replicates his own nature in the societies he creates. He makes the world in his own image, the fall is thus a repeated act because men refuse to acknowledge what they are and where their hope lies. They talk about justice when their goal is power.

There is an interesting aspect to this law that goes back to the Rabbis of old. The requirement that these helpless people be given justice was seen as requiring help to them in court whenever they were in trouble. This premise led to what we now call the public defender although his modern purpose has strayed somewhat. The special attention is called in our text to the widow’s garment. It cannot be taken as a pawn or security. No man’s loan to a widow gave him any ground to humiliate or degrade her. Particular respect should be shown to widows, orphans and aliens. The marginal note in the Geneva Bible for this text reads:

“Because the world did least esteem these sorts of peoples therefore God hath most care over them.” Unquote.

In a forthcoming issue of the Chalcedon Report I will have a rather long article on the unknown John Calvin. And even that won’t do more than scratch the surface. Two things that marked him, because he took the law seriously! First he was given to hospitality, any stranger passing through Geneva knew he could go to the Calvin house, he would be fed and given a place to stay, no one was going to be helpless while John Calvin was alive. Have any of you ever heard that about Calvin? Another aspect was his stress on Christian charity. It because a mark after Calvin and before his death of all the Reformed churches that every service there was a second offering for the poor and the needy.

And then after the service to make sure they got everyone the deacons would stand outside with the baskets with the long handle on it to make sure that everyone contributed to the poor and needy because for Calvin that was the mark of a true church, the true preaching of the word and the concern for those whom God said we should be concerned about. Very different man is it not from what the school books tell us? Two words are used here, in contrast curiously. Pervert and remember. It’s a curious juxtaposition and a very interesting one; it is not the contrast that would come to our minds. As against the perversion of justice we are to remember our need for justice, justice can exist only in the concrete, not in the abstract. Having received it we are to give it to others. If we have not received it, and Israel did not get justice from Egypt, all the more we should be dedicated to gaining justice for others. The ultimate and only true source of justice is God. If we reject His law of justice we cannot expect God to be mindful of us. This law is an aspect of God’s laws of justice. In the main there are only three concepts of justice which have governed man, everything else is a variation. First, for biblical faith justice is God’s nature and law. Justice is an expression of God’s being and is therefore the inescapable standard over all things. God gives us His law; it is the rule to live by. Justice is thus in essence supernatural because a fallen sinful world cannot be just. It expresses injustice in all its ways, the world does, and whatever its pretenses a hostility to justice. For us the law of God is the law of justice.

Then second, some see law and justice as the expression of nature and they speak of natural law. This has been a belief amongst many Catholics and Protestants, deists and even agnostics. This view even in its church related formulations has an inherent contradiction. How can a fallen world give us a law? How can a fallen nature teach us morality? We can agree that there is a law over the universe and that this law is abretive within the universe but it is God’s law, not natures. At a conference I attended where a professor expounded upon natural law and called it the worlds and freedom’s hope, one man asked him ’what does natural law say about adultery?’ The professor dismissed the question as irrelevant. Natural law is usually invoked to invade God’s name but it does not have any reference really to God, it is a way of evading God. The specifics of natural law no natural law scholars have ever agreed upon, there is no given body of natural law that you can go to the library, take off the shelf and say ‘here, in black and white is natural law’. Natural law received quite a body blow by one thinker who used it, the Marque De Sade. He affirmed it and he said nature leads us to kill, to steal, to commit adultery, to rape, to burn, to do everything evil. He enjoyed that, he reveled in it.

God’s law, he held, was against nature and only nature’s way should prevail. Then third, law can be purely the expedient, temporal and changing law of nations. This is what we have now. It has no eternal validity and it is pragmatic in purpose. More and more the law that you deal with has one purpose: to control you! To make sure that you can do nothing without a permit, a license, some kind of regulation. Such law has no eternal validity; there is no absolute good nor evil, right nor wrong. If God’s law is not the overruling government over all things then some kind of super state must provide it. As a result a world of statist law making bodies seeks soon to create a fiat world law, world court and world state. If there be no God with a governing law over all things then a man-made world order must replace him. The alternative to God and His law is inevitably a humanistic law and world order. An obvious fact that scholars shy away from is this: when Darwin abolished God by reducing the universe to chance there had to be logically a substitute for God. That substitute has been socialism, statism. When there is no God to predestine and control all things, then man and the state must do so. So we have a world-wide explosion of statism with one goal in mind, to replace God with statist controls and regulations, and just as God’s predestination that works from within determines all things the modern state is determined to govern, regulate, and prescribe all things. From the womb to the tomb, from cradle to grave, we are in a religious war! Whose predestination will prevail? That of Almighty God or that of the state? Take your choice. Let us pray.

Our Father, Thy word is truth and Thy word alone can provide us true justice. Thou art the source of justice, of grace, of law, of all things good and holy. Teach us to look unto Thee, take us away from the things that deflect us from Thy kingdom and make us strong in Thy service. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Question] On the question of widows the state of California has a [unknown] program which pays for extended nursery care and so forth which until recently has been covered by Medicare and a private home residence is exempt [unknown]. They now have a new rule where after the individual dies…[becomes unintelligible].

[Rushdoony] Yes you may recall when Tim [unknown] was here and their baby at birth was in serious trouble and had to be flown to the Davis Hospital by helicopter. He was startled at that time to find out from the hospital how many, many funds there were that most people don’t know about apart from Medical and things like that that provide a host of services at the public expense. So that almost everything now is covered and every opportunity is used to take away from the people what is rightfully theirs.

It has been said that vast areas of New York City are now vacant, houses just standing there boarding up, beautiful homes. Possessed, repossessed for taxes, or some such thing as this, and that some city officials have as the goal to take over the entire city and reduce everyone to tenancy. But there is a will to take over and it is not motivated by justice, they’re going to create a society of dependent people. People who have to look to them totally for their support and for their way of life. Yes?

[Question] When the Bolsheviks took over in Russia they made an inventory of every room and dwelling in the country. And they threw out of their homes the people that they decided belonged to the oppressive class and gave those homes to the people they decided belonged to the laboring class. So one of the things involved in the confiscation you might call it of property in the United States is the intent to change the nature of the people who live in the various neighborhoods and houses.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, we have at least one state that already requires a full inventory of everything in your house. The tax collector can penalize you if you don’t make a complete inventory. We have the census every ten years which increasingly requires more and more information about you and your home and apart from the form that most people fill out every seventy forms one is a multi-page form which requires knowledge of everything, every room in your house, everything. So we are moving towards that and its interesting what has happened to the census since World War Two. Very few people are aware of the fact that before World War Two and for some generations before the census was taken to provide scholars with information. So that since it was recognized that the churches were a very important part and basic to social order, two fat volumes provided nothing but information about every religious group in the United States. If it was a group, say in a little country town of ten members, an independent of any denomination, their history, their beliefs, their purposes, their charitable activities, all this was recorded. They were invaluable means, these census reports, of social history. And everything else that the census collected at that time was useful to the people, not to the state. And that’s gone now. It has a statist concern. Any other questions and comments? Yes?

[Question] How does this apply to illegal aliens?

[Rushdoony] How does what apply…? To illegal aliens, yes. Well, first of all they have broken the law. And justice to everyone requires that the law be upheld. So if they are illegal aliens they should be deported. Now that’s justice because it’s comparable to breaking and entering into a man’s house. If there should be a change in the immigration laws there are ways of making change but there’s also a failure in our current practice of reciprocity. For example, we allow entrance to peoples who will not allow anyone from our country to migrate there or to own property. That is hardly justice. So it does have an application. One of the strange aspects of the modern world is that we are so busy doing things the wrong way, did you know for example, that all the treaties we make, the U.N. is a treaty organization, we promise to respect the territorial integrity of all the nations. No matter how badly those lines have been drawn, no matter how wrongfully. For example, Romania has a great many peoples who don’t belong to it, it has a whole slice of Hungary as does Poland, and there are bits and pieces in other countries that have always been Hungary! The U.N. and the U.S. are busy, for example, in a [unknown] stopping the Armenian troops every time they reclaim some of their historic areas, where their peoples lived. That’s not possible, why? Because we guarantee the frontiers to [unknown] and to all the other countries. Now you would think doing that, we would say when there is aggression by some of these powers, we would do something about it but we don’t because their signatories and we are working with them. They cannot lose their properties; they might be able to seize other properties. So the whole world of treaty making today is an abomination.

Well if there are no other questions or comments let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, make us instruments of Thy grace, Thy mercy and Thy law. That Thy kingdom may indeed come and Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We know our Father that Thy art God and Thy will shall prevail. Give us patience, zeal and faithfulness that we may serve Thee as we should. 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.