Total Crown Rights of Christ the King

Over All Men

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Science

Lesson: Over All Men

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Track: 04

Dictation Name: RR191B4

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“And when they drew nigh unto Jerusalem, and were come to Bethphage, unto the mount of Olives, then sent Jesus two disciples, saying unto them, Go into the village over against you, and straightway ye shall find an ass tied, and a colt with her: loose them, and bring them unto me. And if any man say ought unto you, ye shall say, The Lord hath need of them; and straightway he will send them. All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass. And the disciples went , and did as Jesus commanded them.”

A very important an central aspect of these verses is commonly neglected, or rationalized away. There are some who tell us that there was a pre-arrangement between the owner of the colt and the ass, and our Lord. This is nonsense. We cannot understand this episode apart from the fact of what our Lord said, and the context in which he said it. He was about to march into Jerusalem as their Messiah King. It was not question of whether they would accept or receive him. He was King. Either they bowed before him or they would be judged and destroyed by him. They were to go and to commandeer the colt and the ass, and if anyone raised a question, they were to say, “The Lord hath need of them.” The Greek word which is translated here as “Lord,” is precisely the word which the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament uses consistently and always to translate Jehovah.

Moreover, with a definite article, in the Greek, it always refers to God. So that when our Lord sent the disciples and commanded them to say, “The Lord hath need of them,” he was as God and King exercising the right of eminent domain. So that before he marched into Jerusalem, he demonstrated in that practical dramatic form his total claim at his word to lay claim into everything in all Judea, in all the earth, in all heaven and earth as absolute Lord. “The Lord hath need of them.”

The people of that day knew the meaning of that. It was a maxim of Roman law that the wish of a king has the force of law. How much more so of God incarnate?

Thus, the first declaration of our Lord as he openly revealed himself on that Palm Sunday, was to commandeer at his will whatever he chose, and to assert thereby his absolute right over all things, over us, over our possessions, over everything that we are and have, without reservation. Christ came as the redeemer king, declaring his right to command at his will.

Israel wanted him as king on their own terms as we saw last night, king if they could be king over him. They wanted to choose him rather than to be chosen, and for this they were rejected.

Our Lord set forth, therefore, the first principle of his reign, his absolute right to command, to use, to expropriate us totally, that this is the only basis on which he comes to us, the only basis in terms of which we can have any relationship to him. The crown rights of King Jesus over us, therefore, must be recognized.

Sunday evening, I referred in passing to one area of our Lord’s crown rights, a very practical area: the tithe. God does not give us an option without money, as with our obedience in every other realm. He doesn’t say, “I leave sovereign choice in your hands.” He declares that he has a right to our tithes and offerings, and we don’t offer anything to the Lord unless it is above and over a tithe. It isn’t a gift unless it is in excess of a tithe. The tithe is his tax, and unless we come with tithes and offerings, Malachi is very clear on this point, “Ye are cursed with a curse.” You have denied the crown rights of the king. You cannot be a partaker of his blessings if you come on your terms and give him the leftovers of your life.

It was a principle of the life of the Old Testament church, although this is not in scripture, but it was consistently applied, that wherever (and this is still true today in any Judaism that pretends to any degree to follow biblical teaching) that there should be a church or a synagogue wherever there were ten men. Why? Ten tithes would equal enough then, to maintain one congregation. What will the Lord say of churches today when twice and thrice ten men cannot maintain a congregation?

The Lord, in his word, makes clear that all the basic financing, the basic government of the world, apart from the maintenance of courts and military, is in the hands of the tithe. Health, welfare, education, the basic social financing is to be through God’s government, through his appointed way, and God does not take kindly to being given the leftovers of our money, or of our lives, or of our time, or of the Lord’s Day, or of anything in our lives. He claims, as king, as a part of his crown rights, eminent domain, and let me remind the laymen here, that according to 1 Timothy 5:17, we are told that those who labor in terms of the word of God, the ministry, are worthy of double honor, and by that he means double pay. Now, God means that. If he’s worth paying at all, he’s worthy of double honor. This is the word of God, and God honors only those who honor him.

The tithe, thus, is a test of our stand, of our faith. Do we come to Christ as Lord? Or do we come to him as lords commanding him to give to us according to our wishes, telling him that we will give to him as we see fit and when we see fit, as an act of charity? Only three percent of church members today, in this country, tithe. That’s a sad fact. If Christ is king for us, then his every word is mandatory for us to harken to, and if we will not harken to his word, we will soon find, to our grief and dismay, that we have no word from him to harken to.

The old Russian had a great deal of religion, and a great deal of spirituality, but not in terms of the word of God, and the judgment that has befallen them is a fearful one. I was deeply moved recently, as was my wife, Dorothy, as together we read Solzhenitsyn’s most recent book. It is a series of essays by men in the Soviet Union, essays written, types, and passed from hand to hand, an indictment of socialism and atheism, and describing the needs of the people for the word of God, and one of the writers in that describes how the hunger for the word of God there is now so great in a land that once was indifferent to it, that when the Anti-God League issues a tract against the Bible, and quotes Bible verses to mock them, people grab those tracts eagerly and hungrily, and then, with a heavy pencil, black out everything except the Bible verses and treasure them, and one of the writers describes seeing a sight that moved him deeply. Bibles are rare. People copy various books of the Bible by hand and pass them around, and this one peasant in from the country stood at the door of a church in Moscow, and begged the passerby’s. “Good people of God, is there no one of you who has a book from God to give to us? Where we live we have no word from him.” They would not hear. Now they hunger for the word.

The crown rights of King Jesus are also set forth for us in the doctrine of predestination. This is an offense to man, because it so clearly sets forth the sovereignty of God. It is biblical predestination that men are opposed to. I have spoken elsewhere on another occasion on the fact that modern man is a believer in predestination. In fact, I have encountered in political and scientific writings the common use of the word. They believe in predestination by the scientific, socialist state, predestination of man by man. There is no choice with regard to belief, except between absolute chance and chaos, and nobody truly believes in that. They may talk about it, but they don’t believe in it.

The choice is between what form of predestination: predestination by God or by man. That’s what our politics is about today. You’re given your choice between a democratic platform of predestination and a republican platform of predestination, or another country’s name the parties. Each has a plan of predestination, of control of man by man. People want this. They have rejected the government of God for the government of man; predestination by God for predestination by man. The crown rights of King Jesus for the crown rights of man. The catechism of humanism and Arminianism is a form of humanism can be summed up in this sentence. The chief end of God is to glorify man and to enjoy him forever, but our Lord said, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you and ordained you that ye should bear fruit,” and when we go out under that kind of commission, we bear fruit. His word does not return unto him void.

Our Lord has crown rights over us by virtue of two facts. He made us. “All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made.” He has a double claim over us because he remade us. Through the atoning work of Jesus Christ we were bought with a fearful price, regenerated, so that we are doubly his, and we dare not withhold from him his crown rights. We dare not reserve unto ourselves a single atom of our being, a single cent of our income. Everything belongs to him and must be used in terms of his calling, his purpose, his crown rights over us which are total. When you have Arminianism, you have man declaring his sovereignty over God, saying that it’s not God’s choice, but it’s my choice. The logical end to that is situational ethics. After all, if you reserved to yourself the sovereign choice over God, you certainly are going to reserve sovereign choice to yourself in matters of morality, in matters of law, in matters of money, in every matter. When you assert your right to choose God then there is no area that you do not claim, where it is not our will, rather than God’s will.

Recently, I was doing some reading in the works of the Reverend John Fletcher, a very interesting, a very remarkable man in some ways. He was one of the big three of the Wesleyan movement. Whitfield is the Calvinist, Wesley the Arminian, and Fletcher basically on Wesley’s side although not as extreme as Wesley. It was to Fletcher that the task of defending Wesley against Toplady, the author of Rock of Ages and one of the great Calvinist writers of the day, it was to Fletcher that that task fell, and Fletcher, in one book after another tried to attack Toplady because Toplady had indicated in one of the debates that the end conclusion of Arminianism was lawlessness, antinomianism, that man, having made himself sovereign over God was certainly not going to stay under God’s law, and Fletcher’s approach was, “No, I don’t believe that. It is Calvinism which is Antinomian. After all, if you believe you are predestined and going to be saved, then what’s the use of obeying God’s law. You’re going to go to heaven anyway.” That was his argument, but if you will bear with me, I’m going to read a somewhat extended passage from Fletcher in which he suddenly admits the charges of Toplady, because after having argued as he does, he suddenly realizes that while he believes that he is right, the actual evidence favors Toplady, and so he says, there is a general antinomianism among Wesley’s followers, and this was in the days, the very early days of the Wesleyan revival.

“But whence springs this almost general antinomianism of our congregations? Shall I conceal the sore because it festers in my own breast? Shall I be partial? No, in the name of him who is no respecter of persons. I will confess my sin and that of many of my brethren, though I am the least and I write it with tears of shame, the most unworthy of them all. I will follow the dictates of my conscience and use the authority of a minister of Christ. If Balaam, a false prophet took in good part the reproof of his ass, I should wrong my honored brethren and fathers, the true prophets of the Lord if I feared their resenting some well-meant reproofs which I first level at myself and for which I heartily wish there were no occasion. Is not the Antinomianism of hearers fulmented{?} by that of preachers? Does it not become of us to take the greatest part of the blame upon ourselves according to the old adage, ‘Like priest, like people?’ Is it surprising that some of us should have an Antinomian audience? Do we not make or keep it so? When did we preach such a practical sermon as that of our Lord on the Mount, or write such close letters as the epistles of St. John? Alas, I doubt it is but seldom. Not living so near to God ourselves as we should, we are afraid to come near to the consciences of our people. The Jews said to our Lord in so saying, ‘Thou reproaches us,’ but now the case is altered, and our auditors might say to many of us in so saying, ‘You would reproach yourselves.’ Some prefer popularity to plain dealing. We love to see a crowd of worldly minded hearers rather than a little flock, a peculiar people zealous of good works. We dare not shake our congregations to purpose lest our 5,000 in three year’s time be reduced to 120. Luther’s advice to Melanchthon so preached that those who do not fall out with their sins may fall out with thee, is more and more unfashionable. Under pretense of drawing our hearers by love, some of us softly rock the cradle of carnal security in which they sleep. For fear of grieving the dear children of God, we let buyers and seller, sheep and oxen, yea goats and lions fill the temple undisturbed, and because the bread must not be kept, we say from the hungry children, we let those who are wanton make shameful waste of it, and even allow dogs which we should beware of, and noisy parrots who speak chiveleth{?} to do the same. We forget that God’s children are led by his spirit, who is the comforter himself, that they are all afraid of being deceived, all jealous for the Lord of Hosts, and therefore, prefer a preacher who searches Jerusalem with candles, and cannot suffer God’s house to be made a den of thieves, to a workman who whitewashes the noisom{?} sepulchers he should open, and dogs{?} over with untempered mortar the bulging walls he should demolish.”

I think Toplady won that argument. Now, is it any wonder that Arminianism has become what it has become from such a beginning, when its second greatest champion and its greatest literary champion made such a confession? When men feel that they can choose God, they also feel very soon that they can choose their own law, and they confuse their spirit with the Spirit of God, and their lawlessness with grace.

Sovereign grace being denied, sovereignty was transferred to man, and although Wesley would be horrified, I suspect, at the conclusions that his doctrine is coming to, yet it was there from the beginning as Fletcher recognized, because Wesley’s doctrine said implicitly that God must be a man-pleaser, because the choice is in man’s hands, and if God is a man-pleaser, is it any wonder that the clergy, in terms of that doctrine became, as Fletcher saw, men-pleasers, and that we have a generation of congregations that expect the clergy to be men-pleasers. They become offended with the clergy so readily. They feel that it is their place to lord it over their pastors, not because of an offense of the word, not because the pastor has been faithless to the word, but because he has not pleased them, and no congregation has any jurisdiction that enables it to set aside the word of God, or to rule in any matter where the word of God must rule, or to lord it over a pastor, or hinder his hand when he preaches the word of God faithfully. The judgment of God is upon all such, because the word of God is not intended to be a man-pleasing word, and the crown rights of King Jesus are denied wherever congregations demand pastors who are pleasers of men, who demand preaching that will be man-pleasing, but this is the kind of preaching that most congregations require.

Situation ethics says that morality is to be determined by man, and man’s needs. It is modernism, yes, but it is the logical conclusion of Arminian fundamentalism, because if you are making it a mandatory fact that you choose God, that God must be a man-pleaser, then as lord over God, you are lord over his word and you can dispense with as much of it as you choose, and today, we are seeing (I could document this at length) evidences of situation ethics in congregations that are ostensibly Bible believing. A police commander walked out of a church meeting not too long ago, and came to me to tell me what had happened. He’d stood up and protested, because the pastor, who professed to be a Bible believer had said that we are under grace and therefore, not under law, and even the marriage ceremony was old legalism that Christians didn’t need. Well, that pastor at least was logical. In terms of the logic of Arminianism, man is sovereign. There is nothing outside of man that should bind man, and the chief end of God becomes this: to glorify man and to enjoy him forever.

But all of scripture declares from beginning to end the crown rights of the King. Moreover, it declares the crown rights of the King who never surrenders and is never defeated. The world cannot point to the grave of God the Son. He destroyed the power of death in the grave, but history is the story of the death of his enemies. God is never defeated nor surrenders, nor relinquishes an iota of his crown rights and sovereignty, and at every turn, Satan is the loser, and at every turn where men depart from the crown rights of the king and the affirmation of it, they find themselves the losers. They find their lives destroyed. Old Russia had no place for the word of God, and it has the communist regime today, a living hell.

St. Augustine, long ago, explained the matter very clearly. He said Where God and his law are set aside, every state that so does becomes no more than a band of robbers, and by divorcing Christianity from the state, we have made increasingly our United States into a band of robbers. I think the front pages of the newspapers of the past ten years have made that abundantly clear.

It’s a very interesting fact that a book was written recently by D. L. Chandler on criminal brotherhoods, criminal syndicates. The author is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a Christian, but at several points he makes a very interesting witness to the faith. These criminal syndicates are a fact of the modern world, and he says they arose simultaneously with the rise of the modern state and humanism. As the state divorced itself from God, criminal brotherhoods began to spring up as little governments within the larger government, and (he documents this at great length) all of them working in alliance with the civil government in that particular country. In a working alliance, both of them as bands of robbers. The author knew nothing of Augustine’s statement in The City of God concerning every godless state, but his book is almost a commentary on it.

We deny the crown rights of the King at our peril. We deny to our destruction, to the judgment of God upon us. We have no choice. The world does not move in terms of our wishes. The world is not going to be remade according to our image. God created all things according to his word. It moves in terms of his law. His crown rights prevail, either to our glory in him as his people or to our judgment as his enemies. How shall we live? Our Lord made it clear when as very man of very man and as the Second Adam he confronted, not in the garden by in the wasteland that man’s sin had made of this world, in the desert, Satan himself, and answered him. How shall man live? By every word, every word, that proceedeth from the mouth of God. Where do you stand in terms of Jesus Christ and his every word? Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we come to thee as Lord and King, total King who makes total claims on us, rejoicing, O Lord, that thy government is total, that there is no area of life where we can step outside of thy sovereign grace, thy sovereign government, thy sovereign power? Make us joyful in that fact, O Lord. Give us grace ever to serve thee by thine every word, that we might be ever partakers of thy blessings, joyful in thy service, and triumphant by thy power. Our Lord and our God, we thank thee for these thy children who delight in thy word, who hunger and thirst after thy righteousness. Fill them by thy spirit and make them ever zealous in obedience to thee. Grant this, we beseech thee, in Jesus name. Amen.

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