Living by Faith - Romans

Autonomous Man

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Living by Faith

Lesson: 9-64

Genre: Talk

Track: 009

Dictation Name: RR311E09

Location/Venue:

Year: ?

Let us worship God. Grace be unto you and peace from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ. Give unto the Lord the glory do unto His name, worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.

Let us pray. Oh Lord our God, we come to Thee in joy and in thanksgiving, knowing that Thy hand is upon us for good; that all the days of our lives Thou art with us, thou wilt never leave us nor forsake us so that in all things we may say “The Lord is my helper, I shall not fear what man may do unto me.” Give us grace therefore our Father to cast all our cares upon Thee who carest for us, to commit all our ways into Thy keeping, to trust in Thy word, to walk by Thy Spirit, and to rejoice that Thou art He who art ever with us. In Jesus name, amen.

Our scripture this morning is from Romans 3:9-18. Our subject: Autonomous Man. Romans 3:9-18.

“9 What then? are we better than they? No, in no wise: for we have before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin;

10 As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one:

11 There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God.

12 They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

13 Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips:

14 Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness:

15 Their feet are swift to shed blood:

16 Destruction and misery are in their ways:

17 And the way of peace have they not known:

18 There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

Paul charges both Jews and Gentiles, the fallen irrespective of their race, color or creed, of being incapable of any justice apart from and without God. That no man can set up an independent concept and order of justice; justice is what God requires, not what man thinks. The just are those who live by faith, and by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. The just know and practice justice or righteousness.

In the first 8 verses of this chapter Paul makes it clear that there is no justice or life apart from God. There are no laws, no justice, nothing as categories or universals, or realities apart from God and independent of Him. So that we cannot say that: “This is justice” and then bring God to the bar of justice and say: “Here you fall short.” Justice is what God declares.

God made all things. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made. Therefore to assume that there are any concepts or possibilities apart from God is to imagine a vain thing. The only possibilities, the only categories of thought; the only ideas, realities, the only anything that can exist, exists because of Gods ordination.

Thus when we talk about justice, we are talking about God, whether we admit it or not. Let me say that again; when we talk about justice we are talking about God. The standard is God and His law. Neither the Jew nor the gentile, the Christian nor the ungodly who have never heard the gospel.

If we begin with status on the human scene, we can never escape the resulting humanistic premises and standards. And so Paul says if you begin with the fact of being a Jew or being a Christian, you will always be trapped within the world of humanistic standards. You begin with God and His righteousness, his justice.

Thus, Paul says, there is none righteous, no not one. No man can claim any righteousness or justice apart from God, and all men have sinned and gone astray. Paul in making this statement: “There is none righteous, no not one.” Is not only indicting the behavior, the fallen estate and conduct of all men, but also all men’s autonomous concept of justice. Men want to have their own standard, which means they want to be their own God and law maker, and say: “Well, God you didn’t measure up here,” and to hold God and the world accountable. And Paul says there is none righteous, no not one. Not only men, but their concepts of justice are unjust.

He then quotes Psalm 14:1-3, where David says:

“The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.

2 The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God.

3 They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy:” (or it can be translated ‘stinking’) “there is none that doeth good, no, not one.”

Note what David and Paul both say. “Men say in their hearts: there is no God.” Neither David nor Paul are talking about a valid atheist. There were probably very few in David’s day, but David is talking about atheists, practical atheists; men who profess to be covenant people, the Israelites in his day, but in their hearts were atheists.

A man, whatever his profession, who lives not by faith but as though no God lives, is a fool who has said in his heart: “There is no God.”

All such, David says, have done abominable works. There is none that doeth good. Thus David was speaking about practical atheists, men who profess to believe everything, and practice next to nothing, only what suits them. This is practical atheism. Paul retains this meaning. He is talking to the church, he is trying to get the people in the church to see their own problem, not to look down on others. And Paul says that the Lord viewing this scene finds all have gone aside; they are all together become filthy or stinking. There is none that doeth good, no not one.

David and Paul give us Gods perspective on men, who while nominally covenant men, are in reality not of the covenant, because they have an autonomous idea of law and justice. Wherever you find men setting up a concept of law apart from the law of God, or a doctrine of justice apart from the justice or righteousness of God, there you have practical atheists; and precisely the men that David speaks of in Psalm 14, and Paul speaks of in Romans 3.

Man cannot be the source of justice, nor the source of law. Paul uses David’s words therefore, with David’s meaning. All thinking which is independent of God and His law word gives us evil. The just shall live by faith.

The redeemed of God abandon their own law and justice, their idea of goodness, because they by Christ’s salvation now live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

Paul thus in Romans 3:10-12 is quoting Psalm 14:1-3 which speaks of living by faith, not by verbal profession. Again in the next verse, the 13th, he quotes David from Psalm 5:9 “For there is no faithfulness in their mouth; their inward part is very wickedness; their throat is an open sepulchre; they flatter with their tongue.”

And he also quotes David from Psalm 140:3 “They have sharpened their tongues like a serpent; adders' poison is under their lips. Selah.”

Now the poisonous nature of the tongue is obviously stressed. We are often told about the evil in the tongue, from one end of the Bible to the other. But we have something more here, the comparison of the throat to an open grave, which introduces an association with death. The tongue is capable of much evil, and is deadly. The poison which the tongue spews out comes from the jaws of death, the throat as a sepulcher.

Now Luther spoke very tellingly of this particular passage, and he wrote and I quote: “The apostle shows how such unrighteous persons sin also against each other, as they themselves have turned away from God, so they seek to draw to themselves and away from God, other people. As the Sepulcher takes the dead, so their throat and doctrine devours those who are already so completely dead that there is no more hope that they might be reclaimed from damnation, unless by a special act of His power God should intervene. Their throat is an open sepulcher because they devour and mislead many; as we read in 2 Timothy 2:17 “Their word will eat as doth a a canker. Such wicked deceivers devour also righteous persons. But as they cannot pervert their faith, they destroy them in their bodies by persecution. Their throat therefore is truly an open sepulcher, they devour ever so man by teaching false and deceitful doctrine, and they proclaim their false doctrine in such a way that it appears to be holy, full of salvation, and coming from God.”

Now, all this is true. It certainly ties in with Proverbs 8:36 “He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul; all they that hate me love death.” And David and Paul are telling us that the gospel of these people is death. If men have no atonement in Christ, they will seek self-atonement through sado-masochism, through the invocation of death; bringing, because of their sense of sin and guilt, judgement upon themselves and the world around themselves.

A very telling illustration of this is a statement by Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, who has said and I quote: “We have wished, we eco freaks, for a disaster or for dramatic social change to come and bomb us into the stone age where we might live like Indians in our valley with our localism, our appropriate technology; our gardens and our home-made religion; guilt-free at last.”

And of course that explains so much in our world today. Men trying to create a world wide disaster, to bring judgement upon them in order to feel guilt free at last, we have made atonement for our sins. But Paul says that no race, no culture, no people has any status before God apart from God’s grace. And Paul cites forms of practical atheism; the refusal to understand God or to seek Him, unprofitable lives, the inability to do good. Death is in all their being, he says; it pours out in their speech. The hatred of God is the hatred of life. These people, he says, are death oriented. Destruction and misery are in their ways, there is no peace, no fear of God before their eyes.

Paul cuts the ground out from under all such objectors. He exposes them for what they are. He makes it clear that there is no justice, law nor good apart from God. To seek a law other than from God is to war against God. This is why we have to say that the nations of the world today are in war against God, because they seek a law of their own making, and they are going to judge God in terms of it.

We must first seek Gods law, then we can understand its echoes in man and in the world around us. The just only can be justified, and they are made just by the triune God because there is no other justice in all the universe than Gods. There is no independent word, no independent law, justice, goodness, grace, mercy, or love. Man’s autonomous word means only death, not law; not justice.

Thus Paul says, all man are all under sin, when they are outside of Christ and under their own word. The heart of all autonomous words I summed up in Genesis 3:5, when the tempter says: “ye shall be as God, every man his own God, knowing, determining for yourself what constitutes good and evil, what constitutes law, what constitutes justice, or any virtue in any sphere.

The supposed covenant man who seeks an independent word, and has an independent justice or righteousness or goodness, turned his circumcision unto uncircumcision, and Paul says by implication: “Now turns his baptism into un-baptism.

David in Psalm 51:4, as he made his confession of sin to God, said: “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight:” From the human point of view, David had sinned against several people, but what he meant was that since God alone is the law giver, every offense is essentially against God. It is God’s law we break, not mans. If we rob or hurt our neighbor in any way, it is God’s law we have broken, not man nor man’s law. So that David quite accurately said: “Against thee, thee only have I sinned.” All sin is essentially against God, because it is Gods justice which is broken, not a law of our making.

Thus we can begin to see the direction that Paul is leading us in Romans. By declaring that the just shall live by faith he is saying that all their lives must be under God in whom they believe, under the word of God and the Spirit of God; that for man to seek any independent word is to live not by faith, but by sin; and for the church as is so prevalent today to declare that they believe in Jesus Christ, and then to be antinomian and say: “Well, we will leave it to the state to make the laws” is another way of saying that they are not going to live by faith. It is another way of making their baptism un-baptism. This is why the book of Romans is so important for our time, because it tells us why the church has become powerless; it has the form of godliness, but lacks the power of God because it does not live by faith. It seeks to be saved by faith, but not to live by faith. And one is impossible without the other.

If we are going to be saved by faith, we are going to live by faith. The one flows out of the other. Thus to recall the church of the twentieth century to its calling, to the mandate God has placed upon it, we must proclaim this word: “The just shall live by faith.” By every word, as our Lord said, “That proceedeth out of the mouth of God.”

Let us pray. Thy word oh Lord is truth, and Thy word speaks to our every condition, and ministers to all the ills of our time. Give us grace to proclaim Thy word, and to make Thy saving truth known to all nations, to the end that the kingdoms of this world might become the kingdoms of our Lord and His Christ. Bless us to this purpose in Jesus name, amen.

Are there any questions now, first of all with respect to our lesson? Yes.

[Otto Scott] Are there any new revelations?

[Rushdoony] No, we have been given a once and for all sufficient word. But this is of course what the church acts as though exists, in a sense most churches are turned semi-Mormon, without claiming apostles and revelations, because when they say: “Let the state make its own laws without regard to God” they are saying there are new revelations therefore. It is the same thing. Yes?

[Audience Member] That quote from the Good Earth about finding a peaceful valley to escape to, would you say really the most effective way that man has found to escape guilt is through drugs?

[Rushdoony] There are a variety of means, those who are masochistic will use liquor and drugs, and drugs are very popular in this country. On the whole we tend to be masochistic; our country both in the personal behavior of the peoples and in our foreign policy is masochistic. We find the whole foreign policy of both parties to be in varying degrees one of self punishment. Both parties when in power have done all they can to arm our enemies; the greatest foreign aid recipient of this century has been the Soviet Union. That is masochism. The Soviet Union on the other hand is sadistic; again a form of atonement, laying their sins upon others. It is the capitalists, the middle classes, the United States, the Afghans, whomever it is they hate. They blame all the ills of their society, endlessly, upon someone else. And we take the sins of the world upon ourselves. Both are equally evil, both are a threat to the world.

So we have national and personal forms of masochism and sadism. Of course all peoples have elements of both sadism and masochism, on predominating. Yes?

[Audience Member] Are you saying that the bureaucrats are looking at societies guilt as one form, and the individual guilt as another form?

[Rushdoony] Yes, we are.. yes, we are of a piece. If we are masochistic or sadistic, we are going to show it in how we treat ourselves and others. At the same time when we have anything to do that effects other peoples, whether it is a business firm we run, or some aspect or bureau or agency of the state, or foreign policy; we are still going to manifest the same characteristics. We are going to be sadistic or masochistic, we don’t change from one sphere to the other. So what we are on the personal sphere we are going to manifest in the social and civic spheres, as well as in the religious sphere.

We have churches today that actually have litanies of worship that are composed for special occasions, which are nothing more than breast beating that we are responsible for all kinds of evils in Asia and Africa and all over the world; and these people endlessly go through these rituals of abusing themselves masochistically, when they do nothing about the evils at hand, because they are not concerned with Gods law, they are only concerned with their feelings of guilt.

This statement I read by Stewart Brand about ‘guilt free at last’ after you have created a world disaster, says nothing, significantly, about what we can do now to avert a world-wide disaster. No, we are not going to be happy until we have created it; because everything in our being requires it. So meanwhile, what do you do? You go for drugs, you go for liquor, you go for anything that will destroy you, and socially you will do that same; you will try to create a world disaster.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes. It is interesting, that Marquis De Sade said that the two greatest sins that he looked forward to with relish if man could accomplish them; one was to destroy the sun, which would destroy all life, and the other to kill God.

He gloated over the very idea of such a thing. Yes?

[Audience Member] Where Paul is referring to the psalmist beginning in verse 10, you indicated that in verse 13 where he refers to their throat being an open sepulcher, I think you were quoting Luther where it is drawing men into the depths of the sepulcher, or drawing them into death; the ‘they’ that is referred to there, is that everybody or does that have reference to the teachers of Israel?

[Rushdoony] This has reference to everybody who is outside of Christ, and everybody who is not faithful to the every word of God, or trying to be. So he says: ‘Their throat is an open sepulcher” but it is an idea of a sepulcher which is open with death going out of it, like a contagion, a vast plague going forth. So he says: “These people are like walking graves out of which a plague goes forth, because they are determined to bring death to all the world.” Yes?

[Audience Member] So that is the natural bent of natural man.

[Rushdoony] Yes. It is that all men apart from Christ are to be so categorized. Yes?

[Audience Member] Does speaking in tongues have anything to do with people trying to find further revelation?

[Rushdoony] Well, that would depend on the group. Now there are some who claim to have revelations, others who say it is a means of expressing their joy in the Lord. So there are a variety of opinions here. In the early days of the movement there were some who talked about new revelations to the ‘nth degree, that almost corrected the Bible at times. But the bulk of the movement today is very responsible, and just does not hold to that type of thing.

Any other questions or comments? If not, let us conclude with prayer.

Oh Lord our God, how great and marvelous are Thy ways and Thy truth. Give us grace to build our lives on the rock Jesus Christ, upon Thy word, and to know that Thy word is truth and life, and the only way for man to walk. For Thou art life, and every word that proceeds from Thee is life to Thy people. Bless us and grant that all our ways be the ways of life.

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.