Total Crown Rights of Christ the King

Bringing Back the King

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Science

Lesson: Bringing Back the King

Genre:

Track: 06

Dictation Name: RR191C6

Location/Venue:

Year:

[Narrator] {?} to be able to introduce to some of you for the first time, and to bring back to this pulpit Rousas John Rushdoony, author of many books, missionary for ten years to the Indians, educator, and now founder and director of the Chalcedon educational foundation. He publishes a monthly paper called The Chalcedon Report, and also a biannual journal on Christian Reconstruction, which is a large journal and well worth the subscription price. Information can be obtained, I suppose, from the tape table, and the messages that were preached through this morning at the conference are now available for sale, and the messages that are preached tonight, you can put in your order for these, or if you will be here tomorrow evening, pick them up at that time.

So, Rush, it’s a real privilege to have you come and break{?} the word to us. Take your full time. Your subject is Bringing Back the King.

[Rushdoony] Hear now the word of God as it is given to us in the book of Isaiah 61:1-6. “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn; to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified. And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations. And strangers shall stand and feed your flocks, and the sons of the alien shall be your plowmen and your vinedressers. But ye shall be named the Priests of the Lord: men shall call you the Ministers of our God: ye shall eat the riches of the Gentiles, and in their glory shall ye boast yourselves.”

When our Lord was asked to read the scriptures in a synagogue, he turned to this passage and, having read it, declared, “This day is this scripture fulfilled in your sight.” What was the meaning of his declaration? Let us turn from Isaiah and our Lord now and examine a statement made by American historians about the strange coincidence of two facts. There was a time in this country when debtors prisons were commonplace. Then, very rapidly, they disappeared, and historians have commented on the fact that there is a coincidence and a close interrelationship between the disappearance of Calvinism as a dominant philosophy in America and debtors’ prisons. What is the relationship and what is the relationship of this coincidence to our text and to our Lord’s proclamation?

Now, first of all, the Puritans, the Calvinists in this country were not necessarily in favor of debtors’ prisons. That was a factor of life that they had inherited from the remote past. In terms of scripture, they did believe that debt was a serious matter. In terms of scripture, they believed that non-payment of debt constituted a form of theft, and therefore, debtors were bound to make restitution. A man who stole was not put in prison in Old Testament times. The prison system was not scriptural. If he were a habitual criminal, he was executed. Otherwise, he made restitution. He either paid back, double at least, or four-fold, or five-fold, depending on the type of theft, of else he was sold as a bond servant to make repayment, restitution, through his labor.

Restitution was made the rule as far as possible in every colony and maintained for some time. Because they could not strictly follow biblical law at every point, because the kings of England, in succession, would not allow them to, would not approve their charters unless they carried over a certain amount of English law, debtors prisons were also instituted, but there was a connection between the Calvinists and the debtors prison, in that it was the Calvinists who felt that debt was a serious matter. So that, while they regarded debtors’ prisons as a defective means of dealing with the problem, they still felt it had to be dealt with, but Arminianism spelled a growing rebellion against the sovereignty of God and against debtors’ prisons, and the idea that debt constituted some kind of fraud.

Now, there was a close connection between those two facts. You see, the Calvinists believed that man, by his sin, had created a tremendous, an insurmountable debt to God by his violation of the law. His debt was so great that he deserved indeed to die, to be put into the prison house of hell, and he felt that any tampering with the idea of debt was a tampering with the seriousness of all offenses as God had declared them, that all offenses against God, and all offenses against man as God had enumerated them, were together offenses against the majesty of God and his righteousness.

But you see, Arminianism rebelled against this idea. It held that sin was not to be seen as debt, not to be seen as something that was so very serious. The debt in any form was a trifling matter, and that there was something wrong with a God who was so unbending as to demand payment to the last penny, to exact it upon his son, Jesus Christ, and to say that man only approached him then because the debt had been paid to the last penny, and that then, man had to live by that righteousness of God in his relationship to his fellow men. They preferred, you see, to turn a sin into the kind of thing that happens between children, and men and men, and women and women when they get angry with each other, and a little huffy, and after awhile they cool off and they say, “I’m very sorry. Let’s make up.” And then, you say, “Well, I forgive you,” and “Well, I forgive you, too.” Now, what’s happened in that process? Sin has been converted from a transgression, a debt, to something emotional, and forgiveness has been changed to something emotional. Now the meaning of forgiveness in the Bible is purely juridical, judicial. It means charges dropped because satisfaction has been rendered. The debt has been paid. It has been cancelled. It can also mean, and is only used once in that second meaning in scripture: charges deferred for the time being, when our savior from the cross said, “Father, forgive them,” looking at the Roman soldiers who crucified him, “for they know not what they do.” He was saying, “Father, defer the charges for the time being, for they know not what they do.”

But today, forgiveness is not based upon restitution, either the restitution of Jesus Christ in our relationship to God or the restitution of man to man in terms of God’s law. It is no longer a case of satisfaction being rendered. Forgiveness has been turned into a matter of emotions. “Well, I was really mad at him but now I’ve gotten over it,” and “Why don’t you forgive me?” as someone once said. “You’re not mad any longer, are you?” and I told him that the matter of God’s law stood between us and he had not made restitution to the parties involved. Our Lord did not pay the debt to allow us to proceed in more lawlessness, nor to create a society based on lawlessness, but when, in the rebellion against Calvinism, men struck out at the idea of a God who would demand satisfaction to the last penny, and they began to tamper with the doctrine of the atonement, and if you don’t believe they’ve tampered with it, look at the Nazarene theologian, Wiley, who, in his book on theology, the classic in his church, winds up by saying the cross is a very meaningful event but he really doesn’t know what it means. It’s a great mystery. When men began to do this, the net result was that the idea of debt began to change.

First you had to eliminate the debtor’s prison, and the God who demanded restitution, and you began to insist on a democratic God. The politics of this country began to change. Increasingly, it became popular to speak of anyone who is a creditor as a nasty character, just as the God of scripture, the sovereign God, was seen as a nasty God, and the people who preached such a God as nasty people, and all the sympathy, politically and religiously, began to flow to the debtor.

I know that when I was a boy on the farm, if a farmer owed money to the bank, why, it was the dirty banker, nothing wrong with the farmer and, of course, anybody who was in a position of authority and power was automatically bad, and it was the dirty packers and bankers, but I began to see a few things. True, the packers and the bankers weren’t all they should have been, but I noticed the farmers were throwing dirt into the boxes of raisins, good church members all. There wasn’t one family for several miles around that didn’t go to church. But very few farmers who didn’t, when they had a chance, pick up a handful of dirt and put them into every box of raisins. It added up to a lot of pounds, when you had ton after ton of raisins to sell. Or who didn’t water their peaches just before picking to put a little extra weight on them, or who didn’t follow some such skullduggery about every kind of thing they marketed. Sin, I began to realize was no respecter of classes and persons. It was a common disease, but everybody felt it belonged to those who were creditors, not debtors, and all the sympathy on all sides was in the favor of the debtor.

My uncle took me to one side one day and after a great deal of talk was going on, against the bank, and the two banks in town closed in 1932 and did not reopen. They were small town banks, and he said, “You know, those farmers who are doing the griping, they are the ones who are destroying that bank because they owe so much, and they’re not meeting their payments, and because land values have dropped the bank won’t gain anything by foreclosing. It’ll still lose money.”

But it didn’t stop there, did it? Anybody who is a debtor in any sense, if he’s a criminal, “Why those poor people in the prisons,” or if he’s a minority group, whether he’s a good man or a bad man, all the sympathy is on the side of the debtor. This is a part of the continuing revolt against the God of scripture. It’s a part of the continuing insistence that sin is not to be taken seriously. What’s a little sin between friends? Why not overlook it. After all, God overlooks it, doesn’t he? Not according to scripture. Not when it costs him the blood of his only begotten son to render full satisfaction for that debt of sin. For men who deny the reality of debt, and the seriousness of debt, there can therefore be no Jubilee, because the whole meaning of the Jubilee is the cancellation of debt.

But, there is an interesting fact about the Jubilee. There was no cancellation of debt for the unbeliever. None. Typifying thereby that only those who are in Christ, only those have satisfaction rendered for their debt.

Our Lord, therefore, when he proclaimed the Jubilee, and declared that this day this scripture is fulfilled in your sight, in my person, was declaring that he had come because sin was so serious in the sight of God, and that he, by his atoning work, was going to effect the cancellation of debt for his elect, that they, by their liberation, would be commissioned to go forth, and empowered to go forth as free men. “Ye have been bought with a price. Therefore, be not ye the slave of men. Owe no man anything but to love one another.” Those declarations are related. To build up the old wastes, and raise up the former desolations, to repair the waste cities and the desolations of many generations, and as the free people of God, free in relationship to God, and free in relationship to men by living in terms of his requirements concerning debt, for the borrower is servant, or slave, Solomon says, to the lender. They were now, as the free people of God, to be the rulers of the earth by obedience to his law word, and the strangers would become their servants, and “Ye shall eat the riches of the Gentiles and in their glory shall ye boast yourselves.”

There is, you see, a theological connection between the sovereignty of God and the idea of debt, historically, and today, we do not take debt seriously, because we do not take God seriously.

I talked with a church officer a couple of years ago, and had to rebuke him seriously, and he was very offended with me. He had twice gone through bankruptcy and did not feel it was a very serious matter, and I told him he had sinned, that he had no realization of the seriousness of debt in the sight of God, and as we talked, it became apparent that his views, he believed, he claimed, in sovereign grace, of God were mystical, not scriptural. As we take the sovereign God seriously, we will take sin seriously. We will take debt seriously, and we will begin to reconstruct our lives and our societies.

Now, as we go through history, we find that one social revolution after another has taken place over the idea of debt. Let us cancel debts by overthrowing the social order, by killing the bankers, by destroying the records, and over and over again, one of the first things that have been done in revolutions is that they have gone to the banks and to the governmental seats to destroy the records of debt, but none of these revolutions has ever created a Jubilee. Men through their politics are trying to create a false Jubilee, a false atonements, a false cancellation of sins, but there is no Jubilee for the ungodly, because the debt cannot be repaid by man’s way, either by a forgiveness, which is no forgiveness at all, or by a destruction of the creditor and of the records of the debt, but only by God’s way. We cannot, you see have two plans of atonement, one, in relationship to God and one in relationship to man. God’s word being sovereign when he says that debt is serious in my sight, and every offense against my law is so serious that it requires the death penalty, either upon my son as the vicarious substitute, or upon you.

He does not restrict this idea of debt to one area. He says that in every area we are to be free men in him, for we have been bought with a price, and we are not to be the servants or the slaves of men, and we must recognize that most of our debts are contracted because of covetousness, because we want to keep up with the Joneses, and we do not take seriously the word of God when it says “Be content with such things as ye have, and in everything give thanks.” Oh yes, Lord, we’ll give thanks when we can get that new car, and a color TV, and this and that and the other things. Then, we certainly will give thanks, but we are to give thanks for such things as we have now, to live in terms of contentment, not in terms of covetousness which is idolatry.

How then, do we bring back the King when David was still out in the camp, and the repentant nation in shame, faced its sin. The voice was raised, “Will someone not speak a word about bringing the King back?” We need to speak a word about bringing back the king, by means of faith and obedience, by committing not only our life in relationship to eternity, but our life in terms of our day by day living, into his keeping, by living in terms of his word, free of covetousness. In everything giving thanks, recognizing that God’s word is a total word, and therefore, it must govern the totality of our lives. When we bring back the King, then indeed, we find contentment. Then indeed, we find that in everything we can give thanks, then indeed, we find that we are very rich, that we are more than conquerors, that if “God be for us, who can be against us?” That our lives, indeed then, are in the totality of his word, of his mercy, and of his blessing.

As you go to your homes, what will you do concerning bringing back the King? Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, thou knowest the evil of our times when debt has become a virtue, and criminals and hoodlums are defended and excused, and all too often as we approach thee, we excuse our offenses and our sins, and our shortcomings, and turn our covetousness into need. God have mercy upon us, conform our hearts unto thee, that as thy people who live in the Jubilee, we may go forth to rebuild the waste places, the desolations of many generations, and may know the certainty of thy blessing and of thy word that declares that we shall eat the riches of the Gentiles, and boast ourselves in their glory. Bless us to this purpose, we beseech thee, in Jesus name. Amen.

End of tape