Deuteronomy

The Lawless Mind

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 22-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 022

Dictation Name: RR187L22

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. Put on the whole armor of God that ye may be able to withstand 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 in the evil day and having done all, to stand. Let us pray.

Almighty God our Heavenly Father we give thanks unto you that day after day Thy providential care is unfailing. We thank Thee that in a world that is collapsing we know that we have a sure foundation in Jesus Christ. We thank Thee that in a dying world we have the promise of life, of eternal life, of victory in time and in eternity. Give us grace therefore to stand in Thee, on Thy word and by Thy spirit and in all things to more than conquerors through Christ Jesus our Lord. In His name we pray, Amen.

Our scripture is Deuteronomy 5:21. Our subject: The Lawless Mind. Deuteronomy 5:21, The Lawless Mind.

“Neither shalt thou desire thy neighbor’s wife, neither thou shalt covet thy neighbors, house, his field or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or anything that is thy neighbors.”

In the Authorized or King James Version, the words in the English text are different: Thou shalt not desire thy neighbor’s wife. In Deuteronomy and in Exodus 5:17 ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife’. However, that is meaningless because both covet and desire translate the same Hebrew word. Its meaning can be good or bad depending on the context. Here of course the reference is to a lawless desire, lawless delight or a lawless coveting. This law is closely related to Deuteronomy 5:19 ‘Neither shalt thou steal’ and it applies to the mind, what was previously applied to property. We have no right to want, desire or think of gaining what is our neighbors, and that means in neither in word nor thought let alone deed. Do we think of taking what does not belong to us? The law speaks to the man, the male, but he must not do neither can the wife nor the children do.

The man must set the pattern of faithfulness and obedience. He dare not use his headship to seek exemptions from the law because his headship means that it is he who sets the pattern of faithfulness and law keeping. The same premise appears in our Lord’s words to his disciples when he sought eminence in the kingdom. In Mark 10:42-45 we read:

“ But Jesus called them to him, and saith unto them, Ye know that they which are accounted to rule over the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and their great ones exercise authority upon them.

43 But so shall it not be among you: but whosoever will be great among you, shall be your minister:

44 And whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all.

45 For even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.”

Our lord in his incarnation kept the law perfectly. He did not use his status to seek an exemption from it but as our example, kept it fully and perfectly. He did not exercise what has been called in history the royal privilege. We are therefore commanded to bring in captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. The expression ‘every thought’ can be translated as every understanding or simply as the mind. In Charles Hodges words and I quote:

“The obedience to Christ is conceived as a place or fortress into which the captive is led.” Unquote.

To covet in an ungodly sense is to resent what others have and to believe that one has a better right to them and it can lead to direct theft or expropriation or hiring someone to do the stealing for us or to the popular enactment of legislation whereby the wealth of others is legally expropriated. To covet in the sense of desiring the lawless sexual use of others is to treat other persons as things to be used. And this is the essence of pornography, the reduction of persons to things to be used sexually. The current prevalence of pornography is related to statism.

The statism of our time depersonalizes everything. Statism gives priority to the impersonal machinery of the state as the solution to problems. The goals of society cease under statism to be the glory of God and man’s fulfillment in his service. The state becomes the focus of life and thought and all problems are seen increasingly as matters requiring a statist solution. This is the depersonalization of all things and this is the same approach to reality taken by pornography. A lawless coveting strips the world of God and His law. It also strips people of their status as persons. Reality then becomes no more than the self will of the egocentric willing individual. This is why in the most characteristic thinking of our century existentialism, only the individual ego and the existential moment count. Nothing else. I was told some years ago of a man very abusive of his wife who told her to leave the house, he was weary of her. When she not only did so but found a rewarding job, became interested in another man and filed for divorce to marry him her husband shot and killed her. She had in his eyes no right to an independent existence and happiness. This is the pornographic mind. It denies an independent existence to any state itself. This is why an existential age is so addicted to pornography. This reductionism can be other than sexual. In this century with a socialist influence on college students one can find vicious examples of covetousness among students. For examples I’ve heard arguments which stripped of their noble sentiments meant simply it is not right for people less intelligent than we are, such as capitalists, to have more than we do, therefore capitalism is evil. Now, let us assume for the sake of argument that the egocentric premise of these students is true.

That they are more intelligent than most capitalists. Even then, we must say that man is much more than a mind, he is a person. Moreover there is far more to capital accumulation than intelligence. Character, work and thrift are basic to capital accumulation. Whereas the socialist mind insists rather that is simply theft. This turns a moral universe upside down and it tries to vindicate covetousness and theft by redefining every aspect of the economic scene. To neglect the part character, thrift and work have in the sphere of life is to replace reality with imagination, this is what pornography does. The scope of this law, thou shalt not covet, is total. It begins with a mention of our neighbor’s spouse. By applying the law to the man with regard to a neighbor’s wife the law covers all coveting by family members. By a wife of her neighbor’s husband or by either spouse for another’s children or by children for a neighbor to be their parent. Paul has this law in mind when he writes ‘godliness with contentment is great gain’. Covetousness has lawless gain in mind. Paul says that godliness with contentment is the gainer. This law also forbids coveting another man’s employees, his animals, or anything that is thy neighbors. Lawless coveting seeks a short cut to gaining its way and will. Where persons such as another man’s wife are concerned its goal is possession without any reason other than desire. Families, social and godly responsibilities are set aside in favor of one’s will. My will be done is the sufficient rationale because the person so motivated is one who seems to be his own god and his will is sufficient justification in his eyes. To covet things lawlessly is to say that character, thrift and work are morally unnecessary for the attainment of one’s goals. God’s fiat word created all things and as the psalmist tells us in psalm 33:9: “For he spake and it was done, he commanded it and it stood fast.” We are told that man’s original sin is to be his own god, to create his own law, to make his own moral determination, to be like God and to issue fiat statements that then become reality. It’s not surprising that we have fiat money in anti-Christian era.

Man seeks by his fiat will to gain what he wants. He forgets that he is a creature, not God, and he is a fallen creature as well so his will is too often an expression of his sin. The Ten Commandments seek to restrain our words, thoughts and deeds in their fallen bent. In order that we may be freed to serve God as we ought these laws govern all men because they are God’s laws but only the redeemed in Christ find in them what James 2:12 calls the laws of liberty whereby they are free from the law of sin and death. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God we give thanks unto Thee for Thy word. We thank Thee that by Thy sovereign grace through Jesus Christ we have been delivered from the laws of sin and death into the glorious liberty of Thy children, Thy law word. Grant oh Lord that we grow in strength, in our faithfulness, in our service, so that in all things we may indeed be more than conquerors in Christ. In His name we pray, Amen.

Are there any questions now about this lesson? Yes?

[Question] Well both the politicians and our media encourage covetousness. Perhaps that’s the reason this country is so [unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Very, very good point. When you encourage covetousness you do create unhappiness because man’s inordinate will will never be satisfied. The artist poet William Blake did an excellent wood cut to illustrate this that I often think about. He showed a man with an unbelievably tall ladder trying to plant it against the moon and saying ‘I want, I want’, an impossible desire, an impossible attainment. And that’s exactly what is encouraged by the media. Are there any other questions or comments?

[Question] Are all legislative bodies unbiblical? All they do is make fiat laws.

[Rushdoony] Yes that’s an interesting point because one thing we forget, and I think I have called attention to it in the past is that we did not start with legislative bodies originally in this country. In Massachusetts what is now a legislative body and may still retain the title was known as the General Court, in Virginia the House of Burgesses. And what these groups did was simply to act as watchdogs on the governor! To make sure that he didn’t create fiat law, that he did not legislate against justice, God’s law, that he represented what was Godly, so they were watchdogs, not lawmakers. And this is why in the early years of this country legislative bodies so called only met every other year for a couple of weeks or for a special emergency and congress met infrequently.

They were not necessary constantly because there was no need constantly to create new laws to deal with new problems. So we have undergone a legal revolution in that fact alone. We have created legislative bodies where once they were the watchdogs of the people against the state assuming powers it did not have. Especially because in the colonial era the governors were royal appointees. The people’s court was there to make sure that this foreigner did not transgress on the word of God. And this tendency continued for a long time after the constitution and the republic were created. In fact the real revolution away from that was created by two people, one was Andrew Jackson and the other was Abraham Lincoln.

[Question] The referendum process where everyone has an equal voice would seem to be a better way to go, I understand that the reason for representative government was because of the inability to communicate so it would seem that they’ve out lived their usefulness and should be disbanded.

[Rushdoony] Well the referendum process has times been wrongly used but at times it has been used to place a check on the power of the state to act as though it were god walking on the earth. So we do have a counter trend now. How far it will go depends on what Christians do in the days ahead, but there is a growing recognition that the state is too powerful and there is a hostility to the increasing powers of the state. I was interested that in one news program yesterday there was an awareness of this and it centered on ‘is the federal government taxing us too much?’ and you were to telephone in how you felt about it. It was interesting, they put on a young man and a young woman, but thirty-ish who said we aren’t being taxed enough and nobody who said to the contrary. Now it’s hard to take their statements seriously as representative of any large group of people. Any other questions or comments?

[Question] The only comment that comes to mind is [becomes unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] The only one that has been devised is the biblical but nothing can prevent man’s sin from corrupting anything. And that’s why going back to the constitution is no answer. They are forgetting that people are not what they were in 1800 and earlier and subsequently. That people today feel that the state is there to give them something so they both want more and complain when they have to pay the price for it. Yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Well it is a sinful world but we can be virtuous and there have been times of exemplary virtue in some cultures. There was a time when the Scotland that John Knox created was a place of remarkable virtue. Almost unequaled in history. And there was a time in this country when the people in this country were living a remarkable life. I read some years ago in something written early in the last century of the revolution they felt had been created by the French-Indian war. Because they said it introduced British troops and French troops as well into the country with a totally different life style. And it began to create a different expectation on the part of people in New York and Philadelphia, Boston, the urban centers of the colonies. And many felt it was the beginning of the corruption of America. Well that’s how they felt about 1830, that the French and Indian war had introduced something that had radically altered the character of the country. Yes?

[Question] As an interesting historical remnant from the influx of Scottish and Welsh miners that came here during the gold rush, it was common …[becomes unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes and one of the things now forgotten is that instead of the miners being the wild kind of thing they are living the TV and films portray them as, they observed Sundays even though there were no churches, they’d read the bible, they’d write letters home so that life in the mining camps was usually very proper. Yes?

[Question] Well in the best periods of most cultures were in the earlier, less rich periods.

[Rushdoony] Yes. That’s why Wesley was afraid that Methodism would collapse, he said that we are teaching them to be hard working and thrifty and faithful to the Lord and they will get rich that way and then they will be corrupt. Any other questions or comments? If not let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father we give thanks unto Thee that day after day we have the joy of knowing that underneath the experiences, the events, the trials and troubles of this life are in Thine everlasting arms. For Thou hast said Thou will never leave us or forsake us. We thank Thee that we can boldly say that the Lord is my helper. I shall not fear what man may do unto me. In this confidence, our Father, we come to thank Thee, we go to serve Thee and day by day to live, move and have our being in Thee. How great Thou art our Father and we thank Thee. And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, Amen.