Living by Faith - Romans

The Unjust Shall Live by Unfaithfulness

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Living by Faith

Lesson: 4-64

Genre: Talk

Track: 004

Dictation Name: RR311B4

Location/Venue:

Year: ?

My voice shalt Thou hear in the morning oh Lord, in the morning will I direct my prayer unto Thee, and will look up. Let us pray. Almighty God our heavenly Father, give us grace as we come to Thee to reorder our lives and our priorities in terms of Thy word and will. Teach us to hate most our own sins and shortcomings, cleanse us of our secret faults, forgive us our sins. Make us strong in Thy grace and joyful in Thy mercies, that we might live in Thy light and walk in Thy ways, and be ever faithful to Thy word. We thank Thee that Thy mercies are new every morning. And so we come into Thy presences to be nourished by Thy word and by Thy Spirit, and to behold wonderous things out of Thy law. Bless us in Jesus name, amen.

Our scripture this morning is from the first chapter of Romans, verses 22-32. Continuing our study on the book of Romans. Our subject: The Unjust Shall Live by Unfaithfulness. The Unjust Shall Live by Unfaithfulness. Romans 1:22 following.

“22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

23 And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.

24 Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:

25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.

26 For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:

27 And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.

28 And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient;

29 Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers,

30 Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,

31 Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful:

32 Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.”

AS we have seen, Paul begins Romans by declaring himself to be an ambassador of Jesus Christ. The gospel is that the just are not merely saved, or only saved by faith; but must live by faith, by faithfulness to the Lord, in faithfulness to the covenant.

Now Paul begins a series of passages which have as their purpose to show that the unjust shall live by unfaithfulness. As we have seen, Paul does not take Atheism seriously. He rejects it as a serious option. It is a fool who hath said in his heart that there is no God. Atheism is an intellectual subterfuge by which the moral problem is disguised. Man has an inescapable knowledge of God which he holds or suppresses in unrighteousness, in injustice.

So Paul says, because they resort to this subterfuge, they pretend that for intellectual reasons they are having problems with the God concept. They become fools; they mask an obvious, a screaming moral problem in their lives with an intellectual façade.

He then proceeds to say that these covenant breakers move by another principle, unfaithfulness, which manifests itself in every aspect of their lives. It manifests itself either inwardly, or finally, inwardly and outwardly; so that the ungodly manifest their evil being.

Now, very often some people (?) before their conversion, and say: “Well, I was in a sense living as a Christian before I was a Christian.” And the answer to that of course prevenient grace, grace which goes before; grace which controls and governs and guides, and prepares us. But unbelief is folly.

Now certain things follow from unbelief, the façade which covers unfaithfulness. God is the necessary, the inescapable being. If he is rejected, God substitutes are created. These God substitutes are man-made creatures from principles of ultimacy, they are often naturalist facts, men of course worshipping themselves, heavenly bodies, birds, animals, and other attempts to divinize some aspect of a natural order, or all of it. Man in becoming a god-maker really exalts himself, he becomes the God behind the gods, the source of ultimacy. In doing this men profess, (or the word in the Greek is literally ‘pretend’) to be wise. But they are fools, and so God gives them up to the logical conclusion of their unfaithfulness.

Now Paul here echoes all the law and the prophets what he summarizes with many quotations from the Old Testament in this passage and those that follow. Moreover the Hebraic faith maintained exactly what Paul is here teaching. We find one of these statements from Old Testament times preserved in the Talmud, which says: “Every fulfillment of duty is rewarded by another, and every transgression is punished by another.”

Luther said in his commentary on Romans: “He who rejects the creator needs must worship the creature.”

Paul saw four stages in this perversion. First in ingratitude towards God; then second vanity or a vain imagination, a futile imagination; and three, a blindness in all man’s being; and fourth and finally, man’s total departure from God into vice and into a life of shamefulness.

Three times Paul tells us that God gives up such men into uncleanness, vile affections, or a reprobate mind. in verse 24: “Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:”

In verse 26: “For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:”

Verse 28: “And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind,” A mind void of judgement.

The focus of this plunge into unfaithfulness is physical or bodily; and Paul immediately goes to the conclusion, he says: “This is where it ends up, in the body and in homosexuality.” Christian Science may call the body an illusion, but all men know they have bodies. Their lives on earth are physical, and their bodies remind them of what has been the two great themes in non-Christian literature: mutability and decay. In fact when I was a student there was a course on this theme, a major theme in literature; and of course it took in the Greek and the non-Christian Western poems, epics and novels, and the recurring theme of mutability or change and decay.

It is not surprising that one prominent Bishop, later I believe a Cardinal, very much trained in the literature of Western culture, should write in a hymn about: “Change and decay, and all around I see.”

However, instead of prizing and caring for their bodies, the ungodly inflict degradation upon them, Paul tells us. They dishonor their own bodies. And he describes homosexuality in verses 24-27, male and female; and then those things which accompany this degradation, the breaking of all ties, being filled with all injustice, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity, whisperers; that is, backbiting slanderers. Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant breakers, fornicators, without natural affections, implacable, unmerciful; all unfaithfulness, all moral rebellion comes to a climax in the unfaithful.

Now (Verkile?) renders the second half of verse 27 in these words: “and similarly the men forsook their natural relationships with women, and burned up with their lust for one another; men committing shamelessness with men, and so acquiring in their own persons the penalty that was coming to them on account of their wrong behavior.”

The King James Version says that they “burned in their lust one toward another.” Not entirely the best translation. The word in the Greek is ‘ekkaio’ which is ‘burned out’. Burned out. Very literally, homosexuality is presented as the burning out of men and of women, and they receive in their own persons the recompense, the wages which are their due, is what the word is literally.

Paul, a little later in Romans 6:23 says that the wages of sin are death, both spiritual and physical. Now we do not know the medical history of homosexuality in antiquity, but certainly Paul’s word here are very suggestive, that apparently in the Greco Roman world they had problems very similar to that which today besets homosexuality. A recent article in Spectator called attention to the very great many diseases transmitted by homosexuality, by homosexuals. The current dental magazine I believe for California, after studying a 177 such patients tells doctors: “You had better literally beware when you open such a mouth, for your life; your life is at stake.”

Very clearly, Paul’s words suggest some such thing. “Receiving in themselves that recompense of their error, which was their meet.” God gives unfaithful, covenant breaking men, over to the logical and inevitable devolution of the reprobate mind. They do those things, he says, which are not convenient, (or literally; fitting) for Gods image bearers. But they do so because of their reprobate mind.

Now the word reprobate is a familiar word. It is a word that in a sense comes out of the classroom. Reprobate is anyone who whether in a schoolroom or in life, cannot pass the test. He is a failure. Moreover, he is a perverse failure, he glories in his failure, he tries to make a virtue out of it. having failed he says: ‘This is the finest thing of all’. The reprobate mind therefore has a great perversity about it.

Remember the two words for sin the Bible uses; hamartia, missing the mark; anomia, anti law. If you are continually missing the mark, John tells us, you are guilty of lawlessness, anomia; and the reprobate are those who will not meet the test. They regard failure as the glory of man. And all we have to do is to analyze what has happened in this country in the years since World War 2 to see how a reprobate mind has developed in our culture, how the dropout was exalted, and now in other ways the same facet is being cultivated by the avant garde. The reprobate, the one who failing the test perversely insists that he possesses the greatest virtue, is the true elite.

Paul then describes the marks of the reprobate, the failure. When he speaks of them being given to debate, he means being quarrelsome. Perversion in one area of our lives means a perversion in all areas. All these vices are practiced in opposition to Gods law, to Gods justice. Such men work to overturn and to overturn deliberately all moral order.

Calvin said and I quote: “Wretched men having cast away all shame, undertake the patronage of vices in opposition to the righteousness of God.” Vices become a virtue, and these reprobate become the patrons, the champions of vices in opposition to the righteousness of God. Certainly in politics we see no lack of reprobate minds who are going to defend every vice, and become patrons of it. What Calvin said, and what Paul said best of all before him, Camus restated in his book The Rebel. He said and I quote: “Since God claims all that is good in man, it is necessary to deride what is good and to choose what is evil.” There we have the key premise of Camus existentialism. Everything good has to be derided, everything evil, anti-God, anti-Biblical has to be exalted and made not a matter of moral character, but a choice exalted as the premise of life, because the unjust shall live by unfaithfulness, by as Paul uses the word here, being covenant breakers, covenant breakers. Breaking faith with God at every point.

Paul as we saw last week, began this section on living by faith as against living by unfaithfulness with his statement about the inescapable knowledge of God. And here as he concludes he says of the reprobate: “Who, knowing the judgement of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.”

They have pleasure in them that do them. I was very interested the other day in an article about the fact that the two most prominent women of our time, those who have demonstrated in the political sphere their abilities are Jean Kirk Patrick, and Margret Thatcher. And the feminists do not like them, because they do not stand for the things which are reprobate, and therefore they refuse to see what they have done as achievement by women, they are somehow read out of the sex.

This is the reprobate mind, they will have no pleasure in those that do good, only in those that do evil.

Paul as he speaks here of the inescapable knowledge of God says that everyone knows what homosexuality is, everyone knows what being disobedient and hostile and venomous to parents is, to be without natural affection, to be covetous, malicious, malignant. They know these things and what they are, but they insist on doing the same, and to have pleasure in those that do them, even though they know that they that do these things are worthy of death. They are anti-social. They have declared war on the idea of community, on the idea of society; what they want is a totally lawless, dog-eat-dog world. A world of murder.

Remember the fact that the Marquis De Sade not only spoke of every kind of perversion as a delight, but dreamed of the supreme pleasure to destroy the sun, and therefor to destroy the world and all human life. “Ah,” he said, “That would be a crime indeed.”

They know that all who do such things are worthy of death, and so what they do is to make death itself a virtue. They are suicidal. Everything they do, however much they may deny it, points to death. Their whole life is a drive to death, and as societies they march towards death. They adopt the foreign policies of suicide. This is the logic of living by unfaithfulness.

This is why Paul begins his next chapter: “Therefore thou art inexcusable, oh man.” Inexcusable. Without excuse. Paul makes that point in this chapter too, because he says: “They are without excuse. For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.”

The whole thing is a violation of reason, of the mind, of logic, of feeling, of all things. It is like trying to take a human heart and put it in a Cadillac when the carburetor fails. It is ridiculous. It is against life, and everything that the ungodly do is, Paul says, against life. Therefore the wages of sin are always inescapably death.

Let us pray. “Oh Lord our God, Thy word is truth, and Thy word sets forth the way wherein we should walk. Give us grace day by day to know that we must live by faith, that we must forsake every false way, and cast our every care upon Thee who carest for us, and by Thy Spirit to look to Thy word for the way. Oh Lord, Thou hast made us for Thyself; give us grace to rejoice in life in Christ, that we might know all the glories of life in Thee. In Jesus name, amen.

Are there any questions now concerning our lesson?

Yes?

[Audience Member] Is it always easy; I mean, is it difficult sometimes to distinguish the reprobate? Does he cover this with a façade of success?

[Rushdoony] Yes, very often they do, and very often they will mask their reprobate nature, especially if the society around them requires it, with a philanthropic façade. They want to present themselves as the salt of the earth. However, as the society as a whole begins to disintegrate, the need for that façade begins to diminish and disappear, and as the society goes downhill, the reprobate are more and more proud of being a reprobate. So you have a progressive polarization.

Today for example in this country I would say in some parts, particularly in the Bible belt, you don’t have that polarization. The reprobate will still be holding church offices and pretending to be pillars of righteousness. But where you have a polarization, there the reprobate are openly what they are.

[Audience Member] What about the hobo?

[Rushdoony] The homosexuals?

[Audience Member] The hobo. The one that rides the rails…

[Rushdoony] There are fewer of them, but historically most hobos have been homosexuals. They have been moral dropouts... in a sense I should qualify that. The hobo is a term which has been applied both to these dropouts who do nothing but drift, whereas the true hobo was a migrant worker, and originally he very often when he was low on money rode trains without paying, went from place to place, in search of work. Subsequently the name was claimed by a vast number of drifters who would not work. And so we have two very different classes of people called by that name. Yes?

[Audience Member] When Paul speaks in verse 19: “Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them” is that knowledge, can that be compared in some way to the knowledge the believer has of the truth of scripture, as confirmed by the Holy Spirit? How would you contrast the two knowledge’s? The knowledge of the reprobate, knowing that God exists but suppressing the truth, versus the knowledge of the believer that the word of God is true and confirmed by the Holy Spirit?

[Rushdoony] Let us put it this way. You and I know we are alive. Being alive is being a part of Gods world, a world that was made, that was structured, that was given law and order, everything, by the creator. Now, the ungodly suppress everything except that “I am alive.” Descartes: Cogito Ergo Sum. But the Godly, because God has restored their sight which they themselves took away, they blinded themselves; now they are ready to recognize the whole of it. The others suppress it in unrighteousness.

Yes?

[Audience Member] Well, would that be a good reason why we cannot use a rationalistic argument to convince somebody of the existence of God, because they have already blinded themselves ethically, spiritually, and therefore your argument makes no sense to them?

[Rushdoony] Yes, you cannot argue with someone who wants to reason about the whole subject, because instead of reasoning, to say, “By conclusion I have proven that there is a God” you must say: “I can only reason because there is a God. He is the starting point, not the conclusion. And there could be no life, no reason, nothing without that starting point.” Yes?

[Otto Scott] The word (amame?) used to be thrown around quite frequently, I haven’t seen it recently, but a few years ago; to describe alienation from society, from civilization. Is there a connection?

[Rushdoony] Yes, because now it has become the condition of everyone, and you are describing the culture, those who mold and shape and command the culture; and they no longer want to use such a term for themselves. They have dropped the façade, it was once reserved for a limited group who were the Avant Garde, now they no longer use it. Yes, did you have another question? Any other questions or comments?

Well, let us conclude then in prayer. Oh Lord our God, we thank Thee that though men blind themselves to the sun of Thy righteousness, Thy righteousness and truth blaze forth unchanged, and shall prevail. Give us grace to walk in Thy light, and to know that it is Thy word and Thy judgement which shall prevail, and the blind will only destroy themselves with their folly. Make us bold, make us strong, make us courageous as we face the difficult days of Thy judgement.

And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, amen.