Deuteronomy

Truth and Community.

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 21-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 021

Dictation Name: RR187L21

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart, who hath not have lifteth up his hands unto vanity or sworn deceitfully. He shall receive the blessing from the Lord and righteousness from the God of His salvation. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God we give thanks unto Thee that in a world where evil seeks to entrench itself and to govern the future. It is thy will that shall be done. We thank Thee that we live in a time where especially Thy judgment is manifesting itself against the ungodly. Give us joy therefore in those things which are happening. Make us ever mindful that we are being by thy mercy delivered and that better is the turmoil of Thy deliverance than the peace of evil. Strengthen us now by Thy word and by Thy spirit. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Our scripture this morning is Deuteronomy 5:20. Our subject: Truth and Community. Truth and community, Deuteronomy 5:20.

“Neither shalt thou bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

J. B. [unknown] translation brings out the meaning of this commandment very plainly. He translated thus: neither shalt thou testify against thy neighbor with a witness of falsehood. Robert Young in his literal translation also uses the word testimony. Primarily therefore the reference is very clearly to a court of law. Secondarily, all falsehood in normal circumstances of life is forbidden. This law does not forbid espionage and like covert action as some have wrongfully maintained. Nor does it obligate us to tell the truth to men who want to use it to do evil. We have in our time people who want to use it to do evil and to believe that we should. Rather than keep silence then to lie, reveal to evil men as to Nazi’s in World War Two or to the K.J.B. and this has been argued in my presence, things that can be used to kill innocent men. You tell the truth, no matter how die because of it to preserve your personal holiness. This is not biblical and it is a sordid justification for cowardliness.

The purpose of this commandment is to protect the integrity of courts of law in the normal routines of life. We live in an evil and dishonest society and we must protect the freedom of normal communication. In tyrant states as under Marxism people are afraid to talk freely one to another. One who visited the Soviet Union in the Stalinist era told me that there were no conversations between people in the streets. At the same time the squeaks of badly made shoes were everywhere. He was in fact, very conspicuous because his shoes did not squeak. Because the soviet socialist state held that it had a right to all men’s secrets truth telling between persons was limited and dangerous. To hear another man’s confidences and opinions on subjects not approved by the state placed both speaker and hearer at risk. Silence was therefore advisable, even before one’s children and between husband and wife. Moreover since one had no way of knowing what dangerous opinions someone else held in secret it was wisest not to get too close to others. This therefore limited their liability. What tyrant states have created are societies closed to God but open to the state. The church is persecuted and God’s law is despised. The strength of a society is to have a people who are open in two fundamental ways. First, they must be open to God in prayer. This helps arm them against the tyrant state because their appeals in prayer are beyond man and beyond the state and it is to the sovereign and triune God. This freedom of access to the throne of all creation arms a man against the powers of the state. Then second, men must be open to God by believing and obeying His law. They then know that God’s justice governs men and nations and that the wages of sin are finally and always death. They are then able to stand against the small closed world of the state. To keep this commandment and we must begin by recognizing that the world was created by God the Son who’s truth incarnate. The enemy of the triune God is Satan who is the father of lies. We have on the one hand the realm of Christ, of truth and of life and on the other the realm of fallen man which is the realm of lies and of death.

In protecting the realm of truth by this law God summons us to further his kingdom, not the kingdom of man. We are not to testify therefore against others with the witness of falsehood. The purpose of this law is to further and to strengthen community. In the kingdom of man truth telling is used to further evil. We are summoned to betray our neighbors godliness, is he secretly holding church services on his premises? The kingdom of man wants to use the truth to destroy men and this is not God’s ordained purpose for the truth. Therefore godless, the Egyptian midwives were not betraying the mothers and their newly born babies. And he blessed Rahab for saving the lives of the Hebrew spies. Truth cannot be divorced from God; it cannot be put to satanic purposes. But for the Greek philosophers truth along with goodness and beauty was an abstract universal which existed apart from God who to them was simply the first cause. Truth for the philosophers was an abstraction, not the Godhead. Plato wrote in the republic and I quote:

“Just in the same way understand the condition of the soul to be as follows: whenever it has fastened upon an object over which truth and real existence is shining it seizes that object by an act of reason and knows it, and thus proves itself to be possessed of reason. But whenever it is fixed upon objects that are blunt with darkness, the world of birth and death, then it rests upon opinion and its sight grows dim as its opinions shift backwards and forwards and it has the appearance of being destitute of reason. Now this power which supplies the object of real knowledge of the truth which is in them and which renders to him that knows them the faculty of knowing them you must consider to be the essential form of good. And you must regard it as the origin of science and of truth so far as the latter comes within the range of knowledge. And though knowledge and truth are both very beautiful things, you will be right in looking upon good as something distinct from them and even more beautiful.“ Unquote.

Truth for Plato is an abstract concept. It is the accurate scientific perception of things; it is reason, scientific reason. It is therefore limited to philosopher kings and scientists. The major part of humanity can only have opinions, it cannot know the truth. This view of truth logically limited knowledge and power to an elite group of philosopher kings and it placed most men under their control. We are trying now to democratize this platonic concept by saying we must have public education in which facts are to save men, in which sex education will free the young from doing wrong. In one form or another this same platonic concept governs intellectuals, scientists and politicians in our day. Most people are usually held to be incapable of knowing truth. That is truth in this scientific platonic sense. And therefore they are beyond knowledge. As a result the politically carefully crafted lie is basic to our society. We do not publicize the facts of our federal deficit or anything else, we do not want everyone to understand. Truth is the domain of a small elite. Just yesterday I heard some television reporters discussing the items about the federal deficit that [unknown] had cited, they said well it wasn’t that they were wrong but the facts are not that serious. And so they were dismissed out of hand. As against this elitist view of truth, the biblical mandate is for truth to all men under most circumstances, only when men seek to do evil as pharaoh with his order to kill all the male children born to Hebrew women are we exempt from telling then such a man the truth and thereby aiding and abetting crime. It is a wartime situation. It is a war against all who are godly. For Aristotle like Plato the world had to be reduced to abstractions in order to be comprehensible to man. He wrote and I quote:

“Again if the kinds of causes were infinite in number it would still be impossible to acquire knowledge. For it is only when we have become acquainted with the causes that we assume that we know a thing and we cannot in a finite time go completely what is [unknown] infinite.”

In other words, for Aristotle truth must be comprehensible to the philosopher. For the Christian truth, Jesus Christ, whose revelation is his inscriptured word is open to all men. For Aristotle truth is a domain for philosophers and scientists. For Aristotle the good is that for which all men aim but as Christians we know that fallen man aims at evil not at truth, as a result the non-Christian doctrine, the doctrine of truth, is in all its forms a lie.

It does not tell the truth about man. Man does not naturally aim at truth. Thus there are very important issues in this law. Thou shalt not bear false witness. It is a question which Pilot treated skeptically, saying what is the truth? What is truth? The purpose of this commandment is to guard the truth and the community of the kingdom of God by insisting that truth telling means no false witness in courts in law or between ourselves and our neighbor. The purpose of truth is to enhance and develop justice and community in society. It means that the commandment where obeyed furthers peace and harmony in a society. If we do not testify against our neighbor with a witness of falsehood it means positively that we live with him under the mandate of our king, Jesus Christ. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God make us ever mindful of the priority of Thy word. That we live in a warring world, that we have obligations to Thee and to our neighbor in Christ. And it is Thy order that must prevail, not that of the kingdom of man. That no tyrant state, no Marxist, no fascist state can demand of us that which is a tribute to that order. Bless us therefore, in Thy service and in a true witness in terms of Thy kingdom. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes, increasingly the state in one way or another is demanding full disclosure. The kind of thing that in Christian history has been required only to God, whether in private prayer or through the confessional truth was to be told to God. Man had no right to it and this is why the sanctity of the confessional against any probing by the state was insisted upon. And with good reason. The state is not God, the state has no title to full disclosure. It cannot ask us to confess to it and this is precisely what the state is demanding and because it is doing so it is destroying progressively the sanctity of the Christian domain. Yes?

[Question] Well the manner it is accomplishing this…[becomes unintelligible]…you have to make full disclosure in the civil case, you’re not required to make full disclosure in a criminal case.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, it’s not an accident that as we have seen this sort of thing progress in the twentieth century, confession has receded in the catholic church. It has virtually disappeared within Protestantism. And the civil counselor, the psychologist, has taken the place of the priest and pastor. And now of course you have a very ugly fact, the state is demanding that the psychologist or psychiatrist reveal what he knows, and its reached the point where it is no longer necessary to even put him on the stand to disclose it because they enter the premises and photocopy everything that is in his office records. So full disclosure to the state has replaced full disclosure to God. And ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness to the state is now the law. Yes?

[Question] The federal government routinely lies to the people in this country when they give us figures of the deficit, for instance, and not everything is included. The national debt, all the current liabilities are not included, any confirmation that they did not include all the current liabilities..[becomes unintelligible].

[Rushdoony] Yes that’s very true. And it is interesting that in that same discussion that I heard yesterday morning by several news media men one of them admitted that their analysis of the strength and weakness of the candidates was routinely made after they read a poll. And he said ‘we find out what polls say and then we decide why Bush is losing or why Clinton is gaining’ and he said ‘it is not an independent analysis’. Yes, any other questions?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Because on whom the omission is. [Man speaks again, Rushdoony answers] I think there’s a difference between social forms and courtesies and lies. When we’re asked how are you, if we don’t go into medical report, we say okay, or fine. There’s a difference between that. If its someone who’s genuinely close to us we might tell them that we have been ill but we’re better, but the social courtesies are there to facilitate human relationships not to impede them. And it’s not a lie when we don’t go into a full report on everything.

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Well first of all people have no right to probe into certain things. That’s between you and God. So that anyone who starts probing is asking questions that are not their business. We don’t owe full disclosure, everything to anyone except to God. But some people feel they have a right to anything they ask and that’s not only true of individuals its true of organizations, business corporations, they demand a full disclosure. I know one man told me about twenty five years ago he applied for a job with a major corporation for which he was imminently suited and he was submitted to a total questionnaire of every aspect of his life by a psychiatrist. He read it so far and took it and handed it to the psychiatrist and you know what you can do to your job. And I think he did the right thing. In other words, no one has the right to put on a confessional and to replace God in your life. That’s arrogance of a staggering dimension but a very common thing. Yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Well and it was also discovered by taking certain things depending on the person, an aspirin tablet, the lie detector could not determine the truth, again in one instance of about twenty years or more ago this young woman who was very, very guilty lied, passed the test, and subsequently very calmly confessed, saying that she just wanted to see how well she could do on the test. Any further comments or questions? Yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes, some are becoming smarter in that respect. They were very niave in the sixties when they went on to that sort of thing but I think they’ve in some instances become more discerning since then. Well if there are no further questions let us conclude with prayer.

Our Lord and our God we give thanks unto Thee that Thou hast made clear for us the way of life. But our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in Thy infallible word marked out for us the way in which we should go. Guide, bless, prosper us in Thy service. And no 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.