Implications of Biblical Faith

Implications of Biblical Faith Q&A II

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Philosophy

Lesson: 3-4

Genre: Lecture

Track: 03

Dictation Name: RR250B3

Location/Venue:

Year:

In our first session yesterday we talked about the fact that the God of the Bible is discontinuous with creation, that is, He is uncreated being, whereas most of the universe, well, everything other than God is created being. Biblical faith is unique in that fact, in all other religions there is one continuous being, so that at the bottom of the scale of being you have a thinness of being, and at the top you have the absolute density of being which is the center of God, but everything is a part of God. Well, as against that idea of the total continuity of all being, all being as God, the Bible says: There is one God, in three persons, totally separate, above and beyond all His creation. So that we cannot speak, use the word God to apply to anything but uncreated being.

This makes Biblical faith unique. In other religions every time you turn around you are bumping into God in the trees, in the thunder, and in the lightning, and when you look in the mirror because everything is a part of God. As a matter of fact in one country you are always bowing to everything because that is part of God and you want to honor him. When you go to the toilet you bow to the (Benjo Kame?), the spirit of the toilet, because that’s a part of God. But with us, we have something that is a radical discontinuity, God and creation. Creation made by God but not a part of Him, a total discontinuity.

Well this has a revolutionary implication; we will come to that in a moment, but consider the fact of the burden upon anyone who is a part of God. It sounds like a very remarkable thing that you are a part of the Godhead, but it means that you live in a world of total responsibility, and total responsibility is total irresponsibility. If everything in all creation rest on your shoulders because you are a part of God, you’ve got more of a burden that you can carry. How many of you are familiar with the name of Albert Schweitzer? Well, that’s very good, quite a few of you. He was one of the most brilliant men of this century and also one of the most stupid. Albert Schweitzer was a pantheist, he believed that everything is God, now he never used those terms, he passed as a Christians and a missionary although he was totally a humanist. I have read all his writings, and there is nothing Christian about them except the façade.

For Albert Schweitzer every man was always guilty. Why? Because you inescapably were damaging life somewhere. After all you ate, and even if you were a vegetarian you were killing those poor plants, and you should have reverence for all of life. So this meant that you were perpetually guilty. You’ve seen how after a rain the worms come up of the ground which may be waterlogged and crawl onto the sidewalk. Well, Schweitzer felt that it was terrible to walk along thoughtlessly after a rain and step on some of these worms, he felt that it was his duty to stop and pick these up, and if the lawn was beginning to dry to put them over on the lawn or onto the ground. This meant he lived and died perpetually with a sense of guilt, because he could not escape from somehow damaging life, not only when he ate, but when he walked, he might be stepping on little insect you don’t see.

Of course the (Gienes?) in India carry this to the extreme, they not only are radical vegetarians, but even more than the Hindu’s, they are so fearful of damaging life that they go around with a kind of veil in front of their mouth and nose. They might breath in a gnat, and what a terrible thing, they would kill the gnat that way.

So, the (Giene’s?) have never accomplished very much. They are too busy trying to keep from killing something, and one of the ideas that you have in Hinduism that has this belief that everything is a part of God id Karma. Karma means that because you are always guilty you must always be working to unburden yourself of your guilt. And how do you unburden yourself of this vast mountain of guilt that is on everyone’s shoulders? You try to do as little damage as possible, especially to non-human life. Which means that you have replaced animals over man. It means also that you must be reincarnated a few thousand times for some millions of years to work off the burden of guilt, your Karma, until at last, bliss, you are forever dead.

Because life is a burden. You want to be forever dead. Mahatma Gandhi, who felt he was super holy, said he hoped that this was his last incarnation and that he would be forever dead when he died this time. Outside of Christianity life is a burden of guilt. You carry this tremendous burden of all your sins and all the sins in some religions that you may have committed in the past. You can never get rid of it without thousands upon thousands of reincarnations.

Now Genesis 2:1-3 tells us that on the 7th day God rested from all the works that He had made. It didn’t mean that He ceased being active, but He stopped the work of creation. And He ordained the 7th day that it should be a day of rest for all creatures. The Sabbath is the most radical thing in any religion anywhere in the world. No other religion has it in origin. Some have borrowed the idea partly because the modern world requires some rest because you work hard 5-6 days a week. And with the pace of an industrial civilization it becomes too much to work 7 days a week. Now in some cultures today as in India, as of about 15-16 years ago, an evaluation of their productivity revealed that the average Hindu working 10-12 hours a day had in terms of American working men, a 45 minute productivity. Well, we have an 8 hour day, 5 days a week and the highest productivity in the world; we have behind us the puritan work ethic.

But, the Soviet Union when it was first constituted, tried to abolish the Christian Sabbath, they didn’t want it, it smack too much of the Bible. But what they found immediately was, their industrial output began to collapse. Men could not work 7, 8, 9 and 10 days or 30 days a month running as they then required because they were going to allow no rest. Their ability declined, industrial accidents increased, and they found they were in deep trouble. So they said:” Alright but we are going to stay away from the Biblical idea of a 7 day week and the 7th day of rest. We will make it the 10th day.” It still didn’t work, it somehow went against the natural rhythm of the people. They finally had to return to a 7 day week, but in order to avoid anything that would look too Christian, they staggered everybody’s 7th day of rest, so some people were off on Sunday, others on Monday, Tuesday, and so on through the week, so that it would be impossible for people to celebrate the Sabbath together.

They could not escape the idea of the Sabbath. Well, the Sabbath is revolutionary thing. Very revolutionary. Because, what it tells men is this: The future does not depend upon you in any full or final sense. You can knock of one day a week 52 days a year, even more when you count the other holy days that were a part of the Hebrew and once of the Christian Calendar. You had Thanksgiving, you had good Friday, you had other days that were once common when I was young, many days when you did not work. Now that is a tremendous loss of time from the humanistic perspective, and when you look at the Christian Calendar of a couple of centuries ago it was not merely 52 days or 55, but it was 80 to a hundred days. Holy days that required a cessation from work.

This is a revolutionary fact because what does it mean? That it does not depend upon you or me, that God will accomplish His work even if we rest 100 days in the year, that God requires us to be faithful workmen when we work, but we are going to rest 1 day in 7, and that rest means literally this: you take hands off your life, you say it does not depend upon me. And in terms of the truly religious observance of the Sabbath, you did not do any planning on that day. You didn’t say: “Well of course I am not going to work, but I am going to sit down and do some planning about the future.” No, that is work. The essence of the Sabbath is rest. Worship is a secondary but very important fact. It is rest; you take hands off your life because you know that your future depends upon God more than it does upon you. And God says: “Rest, rejoice in me. Rejoice in my purpose, rejoice in the fact that you are my creature and it is I who redeems you, who cares for you.”

And what about those who cannot rest? The wicked are like the restless sea which cannot rest, which continually dredges up mire and dirt as it stirs itself. And God says that: ‘It is not to be so with you. Rest in me. Take hands off your life, because it is not your planning but my plan, my predestined purpose that shall prevail.”

Now for many of the ungodly, in generations past when Christianity came face to face first of all with cultures in other continents all over the world, these non-Christians were bewildered, because these Christians were the most wasteful people they had ever run into. Imagine all that time every week doing nothing! How did they accomplish so much then? Why were they so much ahead? Well, the Christians said, the Sabbath is a witness. A witness to what? Our trust in the Lord, that it is not our doing but His doing, not our planning but His plan that enables us to prevail.

The day means discontinuity. Discontinuity. We break with our working week. We say there is no necessity for us to take everything upon our shoulders. Remember that verse in Isaiah concerning the messiah who is to come? “The Government shall be upon His shoulders.” And if we try to take the government upon our shoulders, we cannot rest, and those who are not Christian find it difficult to rest even though they have a Sabbath by law. They are restless. They cannot find peace.

However, although there is to be no continuity of work, but rather a discontinuity, there is to be a continuity of community, so that we gather together, we do not worship in isolation, we gather together to rejoice in the Lord. And one of the developments that the Reformation brought about was that the Church became more of a community, a fellowship.

Now that had its problems, as it became sometimes too narrow a fellowship, but it was a fellowship one way or another. You didn’t walk in and out of the church paying no attention to other people, but you went there as one of them. Moreover one of the remarkable things that the Reformation brought about which people no longer appreciate was the difference in the church building in that the church used to be open, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in the Medieval era. The reason was the feeling that you never knew when you might need to go and pray or confess your sins, or seek the Lords face and presence. But what the Reformation did was to glory in the locked church, unlocked for the services, shut the other days of the week. Why? Because every man had access now directly to God. He could pray to God directly, find Him wherever He was. So the glory of the closed church was one of the glories of the Reformation.

The Sabbath moreover was a covenant day, this was said from the early days of the church and especially by the Reformation, what does that mean a covenant day? Well, our faith is covenantal faith, a covenantal religion. We have two parts in the Bible, it is really one, it is all one Covenant, but one of the sad facts is that it was separated into old and new. There are not 2 covenants, but a number of ratifications and continuations of one covenant. Originally with a single man, then with a people, and then with Christ with all peoples. But the same Covenant of God. Now a covenant is literally a treaty, but it is a special kind of treaty. There are two kinds of covenants, one is a covenant between peoples, you could enter into a covenant, an agreement with someone sitting next to you. You would bind yourselves to be faithful until death in obeying the covenant, and you would create a number of rules and regulations, laws that would bind your relationship one to another. A Covenant is a treaty of Law. However, when it is between unequal’s, God and man, it is between one party who makes the law, the other who receives it. And the party who makes the law, God, out of Grace gives His law to the other party. That is us. So, God’s covenant with us is both of law and of grace. And you cannot separate the two. He gives us His law as an act of grace, as a way to live, as a way to be free. James in the New Testament calls it “the perfect law of liberty” the way of freedom under God.

Well, the Sabbath is a celebration of the covenant of God with man; it is a covenant day, a covenant holy day, so that we rest because we know again it does not depend upon us, and that God out of grace has given us a law whereby we can live, be free, and serve Him.

So the Sabbath is a remarkable and eventful thing in all of history. It is first of all according to Ezekiel 20 in verses 12 and 21 and in other passages a sign between God and us, that we are His people and He is our God. Then second, it is to be kept holy, it is a time dedicated to God. A day for joy. Have you ever looked at the hymns, old hymns they are, that celebrate the Sabbath? “Oh Day of Joy and Gladness!” They all celebrate the Sabbath as the day of joy, because it is a mark that God is in covenant with us.

And then third we are told that we are to keep that Sabbath: “So shall ye know that I am the Lord.” It is a way of recognizing afresh who God is, why we are to rejoice in Him, and why it is to be a day of rest and gladness. So, the hymns are right, it is a day of joy. But only if we rest in the Lord, only if we have the ability by faith to come to the Sabbath as we come to all our tasks, in the Lord. To lay our burdens down and say: “Lord, I have a lot of heartaches, I have a lot of burdens, here they are,. I am letting you know what they are because you only are able to resolve them.”

And then we can rest in Him, because we’ve laid it down. My wife Dorothy was once a nurse, and years ago when she was in training in Pittsburgh, one day she was at the desk working and she could hear a couple of the nurse’s aides talking, and the one woman had nothing but woes to report, everything that could go wrong had gone wrong, her husband was sick, her children had this or that problem, and her parents and her relatives all had problems, and all seemed to be insuperable. And the other nurse’s aide commiserated and said: “With all of that what can you do? What are you doing?” and the woman said: “I just said: “You take it Lord, it is too much for me.”

Now that’s the Sabbath. You recognize your limitations, you know that these problems are too much for you, and you say: “You take it Lord, it is too much for me.”

The Sabbath was made for man, our Lord tells us. It was made for man, to bless him. To provide him with peace, in a world that doesn’t have much peace. It marks as we saw earlier, a discontinuity from the every day working world. As it were, we say time stops for us. We stop our work, we stop our fretting, we stop our worrying, our concerns about the future, and we rest in the Lord, that He has the answers, that it is His day when his word is proclaimed and we hear and obey Him.

Now this discontinuity means that we are freed from playing God. It does not rest upon our shoulders, but upon Gods. And there is a great freedom in that, we are free to be human beings. As a result, theologically the Sabbath is a critically important fact, an essential part of our life and of our faith. I’d like to stop now because I’d like to give you a chance for any questions you have in mind; let me say one of the worst things that can be done to the Sabbath is for people to lay down all kinds of rules, and to give children and young people the idea that: “Well, you’re not really a good Christian, you are not keeping the Sabbath, unless you do this that or the other thing, and unless you don’t do this that or the other thing.” And that is hostile to the Sabbath faith, because it replaces it with a belief that if you do certain things you have kept the Sabbath.

I know one man who was very pharisaical about this, and he was continually condemning everyone else in his church because they were not strict in their observance of the Sabbath. But in some respects his was the most profane, because he was very much given to doing nothing but listing the things that his friends and neighbors were doing they shouldn’t have been doing on the Sabbath. For his part he would spend a good deal of the Sabbath evening watching films that I don’t think he should have watched on any day of the week. Are there any questions now?

[Audience Leader] Yes, Doctor Rushdoony, knowing that we are creatures created for the pleasure of God, why do you say that worship is our secondary goal on the Sabbath, certainly the Sabbath is a blessing for us, but its purpose along with the purpose of all other actions we undertake is to give glory to our creator. Do you agree, why or why not?

[Rushdoony] Yes, but the fact is that we can only truly worship if we rest in the Lord, and the very meaning of the word Sabbath stresses the necessity for rest; so that it is primarily a day of rest, of taking hands off our lives, and committing ourselves into God’s care. When we rest in Him, then we can worship Him. But if we don’t rest in Him then we cannot worship, we cannot worship properly, and I think we’ve overstressed certain forms and ways to the exclusion of the fact of rest.

Years ago in the 30’s, in the first church I ever served there was this woman, a very fine woman but she had the wrong notion of the Sabbath, and she had 3-4 children I’ve forgotten how many now, and she would march them in and make them sit down and tell them, and I heard her say it more than once; “I had to sit still and sit through a sermon whether I liked it or not, and you are going to do the same.” I don’t think those children had a decent chance to know what the Sabbath meant, I think there is less of that then when I was young, I hope so at any rate, but I think she broke the Sabbath every Sunday and I tried very gently to tell her that was the wrong way to train her children, she could not see it.

[Audience Leader] The government is involved in more things than the Bible gives it authority over.

[Rushdoony] I can’t quite hear that.

[Audience Leader] The government is involved in more things than the Bible gives it authority over. The Bible tells us who is responsible for things like welfare and education, but who should be responsible for road design and construction? Is a Christian in sin to be employed in things the government has wrongfully taken responsibility over/ such as public education, roads, welfare.

[Rushdoony] Well, early in our history and I mean under the constitution, roads were private toll roads, built by men as a business investment. Now the idea of toll roads has come back in some areas, but they are not private toll roads, though I understand one is in construction. In fact, when Rhode Island first tried to have a state highway built, there was such a public outcry against it that they had to stop. Because the people said: “We don’t believe in church or highways getting any funds from the public trough.” But now of course almost everything is federally done, and the sad fact is that it was Christians who let in the public schools; they did it because Arminianism was taking over the country and the Arminians felt that Christian schools were a waste of the churches time, let the civil government take over. So between the Arminians and the Unitarians, public education was brought in. Well, we are no in the process of taking back government from the state. We are well on our way with Christian schools and homeschools. The interesting thing about these Christian schools and homeschools is, that a higher percentage of public school children are in them than ministers children. The public school teachers know what their schools are like, and they send their children elsewhere.

Well, step by step we have to undo what we did a hundred and fifty or sixty years ago, and this isn’t going to happen overnight, but we are well on our way. We have taken back a sizeable portion of education. We once were the health providers. We are going to have to take that back. We were once in charge of charity, we are having to take that back, slowly but surely. It is interesting that Governor Fordice of Mississippi said: “State welfarism is collapsing. The churches once did it, and did it better. Why don’t you churches take back welfare?”

It is interesting that a number of churches have done that. They’ve gone to the welfare offices and taken over the cases in their area. Even more interesting is that almost all those churches are black churches.

How many of you are familiar with the name of Walter Bowie? Yes. Well, he is a man in Mississippi a pastor, who was the pastor of a very large church. He’s a black, he had a congregation of a few thousand. And he upset the church by talking, this was about 8-10 years ago, against welfarism and against public schools, and telling the people they should take care of their own and they should create Christian Schools. They kicked him out of the church, but Walter Bowie’s ideas are catching on, and he has started another church and is doing well. It is men like that that are creating a revolution, a Christian one.

[Audience Leader] In the Institutes of Biblical Law you seem to say “The Sabbath is no longer an obligation.” Have I read that wrong?

[Rushdoony] What I did say in the Institutes If I recall, I wrote it a good many years ago and I don’t remember all that I have said there, is that the Sabbath as it was once kept, in a very rigid manner which really echoed more of Phariseeism than it did of Christianity and the bible, I did not believe in the kind of Sabbath. I believe in a Sabbath as I have indicated where it is a matter of faith, not of form. We don’t observe the Sabbath as was once done where when there was a man who went around with a pole to knock anybody in the head in the pews who was dozing. We don’t believe that glorifies God, or by making him listen he is any more the holy. And besides it gives the preacher an excuse for being dull. So, a lot of those aspects of sabbetirianism were still evidence when I was young, I am 80 now, and I glad to see a great many of those aspects have disappeared.

[Audience Leader] You said that non Christians are ready for their eternal death to come, most non Christians I know are scared of death, do they just think they are ready for death?

[Rushdoony] Yes, they tend to talk a little too much about how death doesn’t mean anything to them, and how it will be welcome. There is a certain half-truth to that, as Proverbs tells us, God declares: “He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul. All they that hate me, love death.” So the sinner is subconsciously suicidal, and yet he wants to cling to life. He is contradictory in that respect. Back in the 20’s, there was a very prominent writer now more or less forgotten, and I read an account of his death. He had a magnificent home, he had a large library, all kinds of books in it, and the person who wrote the account of his last days said that: “Day after day, knowing that he had a very limited time left, he’d go and stand in front of the book cases, in front of the shelf where the Bible was, put his hand on it, pull it out a little bit, and then shove it back and take another book.” He wanted what that book had to say but he didn’t want the person who said it. That was his tragedy.

Well, that’s the way the ungodly are, they want life and yet they are suicidal.

[Audience Leader] Where do you draw the line as to breaking the Sabbath? What is, or how is work to be defined?

[Rushdoony] Work is to be defined in terms of that which we do in order to live and survive and get ahead, it is our day by day vocation. On the Lord’s day we neither do our work, nor bring things home from the office to do at home, nor do we do odd jobs around the house that need doing, we rest, and we rest in the Lord, in the satisfaction that He is the one who redeems us and will undertake for us. So that it is a religious rest.

[Audience Leader] Yesterday you stated that everything has an origin or beginning, I have heard this argument from an atheistic view used against the Christian ideal, could you please articulate the importance of stressing God as apart from creation, needing no beginning?

[Rushdoony] God is the eternal one, from all eternity, without beginning or without end. In His sovereign grace and mercy at a particular point He chose to create the heavens and the earth. We cannot escape the idea of God, it is written in us so that those who abandon God make out of Evolution as it were another God, or of time or of the state, something replaces God, it may even be themselves, but they cannot escape from the idea of someone that is ultimate. Something or someone that is ultimate. And therefore idolatry which is the manufacture of Gods, it is one of the great avocations and vocations of modern man, creating substitutes for God. But they are all dead Gods, and they are of no use. Did I understand the question properly I am not sure that I got it?

[Audience Leader] Is there a follow up? Okay. How does the fact of creation lead to the fact of predestination?

[Rushdoony] The fact of creation leads to predestination because God is the absolute and sole maker of all things, and therefore He having made all things, all things are made in terms of His plan, His purpose, His goal. Therefore they will accomplish the purpose for which He created them, because as God He ordains all things. Just as a man who invents something invents it for a particular us, so for God’s creation everything is particular in its purpose; it is governed to the last detail. There are no loose ends in God’s Creation. Therefore Creation leads to Predestination.

[Audience Leader] When you say no planning on the Sabbath what exactly do you mean? Wouldn’t that be a good time to get your thoughts straight, in order, for the rest of the week?

[Rushdoony] I have known people who were very strict Sabbatarians, but who would sit down Sunday afternoon after the Sunday dinner and plan everything connected with their business, or their Christian school, or their farm, and make it really a day of work because they would be planning everything in great detail. Now that is work, planning is work, sometimes it is the hardest kind of work. and the whole point of the Sabbath is that we take hands off our lives because we know that we are ultimately in God’s hands. And so we say: “You take it Lord. It is too much for me.” You rest in Him.

Let me add on ething, very early on I found that one of the best ways to observe the Sabbath was after dinner to stretch out and take a nap. And it has been a revivifying thing for me, I know that when I was a child my mother prepared the Sunday dinner beforehand, so that everything was ready. It might be cold cuts or it might not be, but then my sister and I had to set the table, put the food on the table, take everything off and wash the dishes, she didn’t work on that day.

[Audience Leader] With the Sabbath or Lords day being treated like any other day basically in our culture today, would you say that government declared holidays now are in essence our Sabbaths?

[Rushdoony] Well when I was growing up the Sabbath was very strictly observed, very strictly. It was regarded as a great day in the history of labor. How many of you are familiar with Christopher Hill the English historian? Well, Hill was during most of his adult life a Marxist, and in one of his books he said: “The thing that swung the common people of England into the puritan camp was the puritan view of the Sabbath.” Under the old Royalist Cavalier Regime they worked 7 day’s a week. There was never any rest for them. And when the Puritans said: “Six days shalt thou Labor, but on the 7th thou shalt rest” immediately they had the working people of England on their side, and Hill said that it was one of the great triumphs in the history of labor, the observance of the Sabbath.

Now, certain things require continuous operation, for example you cannot shut down power plants. Those areas fall under the Biblical classification of works of necessity, but we have gone far, far beyond that and have done everything to turn the week into one continuous working week. I was very interested a few years ago when I was in England, it was when Thatcher was still Prime Minister, to see a measure passed by Parliament, totally unexpected, calling for a stricter Sabbath, and shutting down some of the Sunday operations. It was unexpected because the least religious country in the world right now is Britain. But it passed, because the working men were tired of the endless round of 7 days of work, not a day that could be a family day even though they were not Christian. And so they said: ‘We want the Sabbath back.”

[Audience Leader] Thank you very much.