Biblical Law and Society

Biblical Law and Society – Part 1

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject:

Lesson:

Genre: Speech

Track: 37

Dictation Name: RR190D7 – Biblical Law and Society Part 1

Year: 1970’s

Newton was, himself an example of God’s amazing grace. He was a young scoundrel who himself, wound up as a slave in Africa, the slave of an African woman. He underwent a great deal of suffering and to him, indeed, his salvation out of his evil past, was an example of amazing grace.

One of the most evil ideas ever to infect the Christian church, and coming from the heretic Marcian, is the notion that the era before Christ was the age of law and works, and the time since then, the age of faith and grace. What this implies is that men, at some time in history, were able to work for, or earn, their salvation.

Now, if I work for someone, and do what he requires, he is in my debt and must pay me. To apply this notion to God is monstrous. God can never be in our debt. God can never owe us anything. God, who made all things in heaven and earth, needs nothing. He does not need our works, our obedience, our faith, or anything from us. Our Lord, very bluntly rebuked this doctrine, telling his disciples, “But which of you, having a servant plowing or feeding cattle, will say unto him by and by, when he is come from the field, Go and sit down to meat? And will not rather say unto him, Make ready wherewith I may sup, and gird thyself, and serve me, till I have eaten and drunken; and afterward thou shalt eat and drink? Doth he thank that servant because he did the things that were commanded him? I trow not. So likewise ye, when ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do.”

The word translated in this passage to Luke 17:7-10 as “servant” is the Greek doulas which, in this context apparently means slave. It can mean slave or servant. Even then, the full force of our Lord’s meaning pales, because there is nothing in our world that provides a full analogy to what he tells us. The Lord God made us. We are totally his creation. We are completely in his debt and he owes us nothing. If we do everything he commands us, we are still unprofitable servants. The world and all the peoples thereof exist only by his sovereign grace. There can be no covenant of works with God.

Covenants, as I said earlier today, are treaties of law, and there are two kinds. First, a treaty or a covenant between equals is a treaty of an agreed-upon law which both observe. Second, a treaty or a covenant between total unequals, such as God and man, is an act of grace by God, and the law he gives us is then an act of grace also. Thus, there can be no separation in our covenant between law and grace. They come from God in his mercy, his covenant mercy, but we have broken that covenant law in Adam. We all sin. We are all partakers of Adam’s nature. We all desire apart from Christ to be as God, to be our own lawgiver and lord. We are told by St. Paul that now in Christ Jesus, “ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us. Having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace; and that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby (the enmity of the law); and came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh. For through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father.”

If you are a criminal, the law is an enemy to you. If you are a law-abiding citizen, the law is your ally and your friend. The policeman is not an enemy. He is your protector.

Jesus Christ has made peace with God for both Jews and Gentiles, and has abolished, by his atoning blood, the enmity of the law. As along as we are fallen men, the law is our enemy, a sentence of death against us rather than our covenantal way of life. There is one spirit working now in both Jews and Gentiles who are redeemed in Christ, and they are on the same terms before God and the Holy Spirit. All this is true, Paul says, because Jesus Christ is our peace.

The key word in this text is “peace.” The word has been much abused and sentimentalized in our time. The biblical word “peace” has no relation to the word used to indicate the end of war, nor to the pacifistic use of the Hebrew “shalom” by hippies in the 1960’s and 70’s. Quoting again Gertlestone’s classic work, Synonyms of the Old Testament – Their Bearing on Christian Doctrine, he says, “We come now to one of the most notable words used to represent the idea of perfection, namely Shalom. It is used of a perfect heart in fourteen passages. Its usual signification is peace. The name salem or shalom being derived from it. Thus, we read in Isaiah 26:3, ‘Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace,’ perfect shalom, peace shalom, shalom, shalom. The root may have originally signified oneness or wholeness, and so, completeness. Not only does it represent the idea of peace and perfection, but also compensation or recompense. The following renderings have been also given to the verb in the authorized version “to be ended, to be finished, to prosper, to make amends, the pay, to perform, to recompense, to repay, to requite, to make restitution, to restore, to reward.” So, when scripture tells us Christ is our peace, it says Christ is our restitution. His blood is our restitution to God for our sins. Now, we can understand what Paul says, and what all of scripture means when it speaks of peace. It commonly means and very plainly means in Ephesians 2:13-18, where Paul speaks of our reconciliation to God by means of Christ’s atonement, restitution. Jesus Christ makes restitution to the Father for our sins. He is our peace. He is our restitution.

Now, God’s law is about righteousness or justice, and at the heart of the law is the fact of restitution. The sacrificial system cannot be dismissed as merely ceremonial law, as I said earlier. It tells us that God requires the restitution to be made to him by an unblemished substitute. In no other way than the vicarious sacrifice of restitution by a substitute, an unblemished animal, a type of Christ, can we establish peace.

Again, God’s law requires restitution in the offenses of men against men, and this penalty culminates in the sentence of death as a form of restitution. “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” This is what, after the flood, God tells Noah. “And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.” Now, this is what the law is about, restitution. The whole of the law. Whether it’s sacrificial, or criminal, or whatever you want to call it. In Exodus 22, we read that depending on the nature of the offense against another, the restitution can be double, or fourfold, or fivefold, depending on the type of crime. It is necessary to see the meaning of peace in the Bible as restoration, recompense, perfection, restitution. IN other to understand also our Lord’s words in John 14:27 when he prepared them for what is to come, his atonement, his death on the cross. “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” These are his words at the Last Supper shortly before his atoning death.

Our modern sense of the word “peace” is, no problems. Nobody’s bothering me, but this would make our Lord’s words senseless. They were soon going to see the arrest and horrifying crucifixion of the Messiah. They would face persecution and death after his ascension. They would face everything except modern man’s idea of peace. Their peace would be the forgiveness and remission of sins by the blood of Christ, his atonement or restitution for us, to the Father.

The law makes clear that peace with God comes through our Lord’s atoning restitution for us. It makes also clear that peace between men comes by way of restitution. Paul tells us in Colossians 2:13-15, “And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses; blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross; and having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it.” When we were dead, that is, legally sentenced to death by the law we had broken, the handwriting of ordinances, the indictment, was against us, and Jesus Christ nailed that death penalty to the cross in his own person, as our substitute, to triumph over sin and death for us. The essence of the law is the necessity for restitution and restoration, for peace with God, so that there might be peace among men. The goal of the law is peace, and Christ is our peace.

Therefore, we are no longer under condemnation, but under grace. We passed from the enmity and from continual warfare against God to peace and grace. In Paul’s words, “Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid. Yea, we establish the law.”

Any war against the law of God becomes, therefore, a war against his atonement, his restitution, his grace, his peace. It is an abandonment of biblical faith for humanism because the emphasis then becomes a humanistic pietism, meaningless spiritual exercises, pious gush, and a retreat into the church as a refuge from the world, replace Christian power.

Harold J. Berman, formerly of the Harvard Law School, in describing the Western legal tradition, sees its origin in a number of Christian doctrines, most notably, the last judgment and the classical doctrine of the atonement, as given in scripture, and formulated by St. Anselm, atonement as the satisfaction of God’s law or justice. Restitution made for us by Christ.

God cannot forgive man’s sins freely, as a matter lawless grace, because this would leave the fallen condition of the universe undisturbed and uncorrected. There would then be no justice, and no peace. Mercy, said Anselm, is the daughter of justice. It is derived from justice and cannot work against justice. This is why, in his book Law and Revolution, The Foundation of the Western Legal Tradition, Berman says that, as we’ve moved away from the doctrine of the atonement, we have moved away in our societies, from justice. We have moved away from God’s law. We have moved away from restitution, and we’ve substituted psychological and psychiatric clap-trap. In fact, he says, that in the next ten or fifteen years we do not return to a biblical basis, beginning with the atonement, which is centered on the seriousness of God’s law and the need for restitution as peace, he feels it will be the end of our civilization.

Christendom rested on the foundations of biblical law. As Berman said, at one time, the preamble to the city law of Slushwig{?} began, “By law, shall the land be built,” and they meant God’s law, because they saw it as the only true source of justice, but since the Enlightenment, and especially the French Revolution, Christendom has been replaced by Western civilization, humanism, and God’s law by statist law. We are now in the last days of Western civilization. Its humanist law is more productive of lawlessness than order. We have a dying world around us, and what it urgently needs is Jesus Christ and a revived Christendom. It needs the foundations of God’s law and God’s peace, Christ’s atonement.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in A World Split Apart, his commencement address at Harvard University, June 8, 1978, called attention to the decline of courage in all of modern society. While courageous individuals still existed, political and social life, he said, was no longer determined by them. In fact, one of my staff members told me recently that some of his studies are indicating that one of the sins condemned in Revelation as marking those who are outside the kingdom, can be rendered cowardice. Solzhenitsyn cited George Kennan’s{?} statement. Kennan{?}, one of most influential American diplomats of this century, who said we cannot apply moral criteria to politics, and Solzhenitsyn observed that this made space for the absolute triumph of absolute evil in the world. Our humanism, he said, is destroying the world, and our problem is not a superficial one. Its source is in the roots of our modern culture, beginning with the Renaissance and finding greater expression with the Enlightenment. The doctrine of autonomous man, man in independence from God, now prevails. Man is worshipped, and there is no recognition of his evil. The evil is in the environment.

Man’s material needs and their satisfaction are given priority, and all our politics now is gears to satisfying man, not pleasing God. Solzhenitsyn cited Karl Marx’s 1844 statement, “Communism is naturalized humanism.” Without a return to biblical law, we can say that all humanistic states will go the way of Karl Marx as indeed they have been doing.

To be in God’s grace and law leads to one thing, and to live in sin leads to another. In Paul’s words, in Romans 6:20-23, “For when ye were the servants of sin, ye were free from righteousness (or justice). What fruit had ye then in those things whereof ye are now ashamed? for the end of those things is death. But now being made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Paul is here speaking of two ways and of two ends. This is a subject common to all of scripture. We see it very clearly in Leviticus 26, Deuteronomy 28, Psalm 1, the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere. In fact, in the early church, one of the most common subjects of preaching was the two ways. The way of life, Christ’s atonement. The law of God, or the way of death, no peace with God, self-will, self-atonement, self-law. Autonomy is made up of two words. Auto, self. Nomos, law. Theonomy means God’s law, and as Dr. Van Til said, there are only two ways of life, theonomy and autonomy. To live in terms of every word of God or to live in terms of our word, our law.

The way of life then, is the way of grace and law, and the way of death is reprobation and lawlessness. We are saved by grace and we are sanctified by our growth in obedience to the law. Wherever we find a contempt for God’s law, we find a society under God’s curse.

Before the French Revolution, the world of the Marquis De Sade was the world of the wealthy and the nobility. All kinds of perversions prevailed. Homosexuality, lesbianism, bestiality, child molestation, and much, much more, as I said earlier today. Sade’s problem was not what he said and did as much as the fact that he gave public voice to these things so the whole world would know what the nobility and the aristocracy were doing. The world of Louis XV was a world of systematic debauchery and profanation. In every way possible, God was mocked. It was a world given to pleasure and it equated pleasure to sin. The French Revolution overthrew that regime, not to replace it with a better one, but to democratize every kind of evil as the right of all men. It, in effect, said we all have the right to be depraved.

To a limited extent, Christendom still lingered on in the levels of society, on the common level, but now the war against God became a policy of state and all of society, and statist education was instituted to further the destruction of Christianity, the de-Christianization of the common man.

The theatre, with the Enlightenment, became the province of the elite, now became another instrument to destroy the remains of Christendom, and now the theater has been enlarged to films and television. The thinking of the Marquis De Sade and of the nobility of his era, including prominent churchmen, was a will to death. That will to death led to the destruction of the old order. It became democratized, however, through Romanticism, which moved rapidly in the train of the Marquis De Sade. In April 1791, according to Dr. Ivan Block{?}, just before the end of the old order in France, “There existed in the Pale Royale{?}, a public theater where a so-called savage and his mate, both nude before the eyes of a crowded audience of both sexes, went through the act of coition.” Two centuries later, in the late decades of our century, similar acts have marked films and other acts of the modern media, including television. Every evil of the old regime, of the Enlightenment philosophy, has become now an aspect of popular entertainment.

Sex education in state schools, and the distribution of condoms, has placed the depravity of the old order of France on the level of all people in our society. The will to death is well advanced. In 1791, the old order could not believe it could ever be overthrown. It was so deeply entrenched and powerful, but in a short time, it was dead, and today the present encean{?} regime, the present old order all around us of humanistic statism, is in its death throes. It hates you because you represent something totally at odds with them, and your success means their death. Therefore, their hatred for any and all who truly stand for Christ. Thus, a return to Christ as Lord and Savior, to Christendom, to God’s order of peace, restitution, grace, and law, is in order, and by the grace of God, it has become everyone of you, as a living witness to that fact.

God bless you. Amen.

[Audience] Thank you, Dr. Rushdoony. Some of you were not here during the day. We had excellent sessions during this day. We want to mention to you that those are available on tape, and also by way of video. You can contact the back desk on the way out, I believe, Pastor Davis, there’s that information, plus there are books available that are somewhat in line with what’s being taught during this day.

End of tape