Living by Faith - Romans

The Law as Knowledge

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Living by Faith

Lesson: 10-64

Genre: Talk

Track: 010

Dictation Name: RR311E10

Location/Venue:

Year: ?

Let us worship God. Serve the Lord with gladness, come before His presence with singing; enter into His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise. Be thankful unto Him and bless His name, for the Lord is good, His mercy is everlasting; and His truth endureth to all generations.

Oh Lord our God we give thanks unto Thee for all Thy blessings; for the world in which Thou hast placed us; for the time in which Thou hast given us as our calling. We pray our Father that we may redeem the time, that we might use the days which Thou hast given us to bring everything into captivity to Christ; that in Him we might be more than conquerors. Bless us as we study Thy word, that by Thy spirit we may behold wondrous things out of Thy law, and be moved to serve Thee more faithfully all the days of our life. In His name we pray, amen.

Our scripture this morning is from Romans 3:19-20, two verses. Romans 3:19-20, and our subject: The Law as Knowledge.

“19 Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God.

20 Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin.”

Paul says that the purpose of the Law as it speaks to all men is that every mouth may be stopped, and that all the world may become guilty before God. It is important to understand that Paul says the law speaks to all men; its purpose is to make the whole world guilty before God, or subject to the judgement of God, so that to restrict the reference to Israel is a serious error. When such a restriction takes place, the whole of the book of Romans is out of focus; and then it becomes a matter of seeing things in terms of old Israel, as an isolated group in the world, and the law as applicable to them.

But Paul makes it clear that everything the law says it says to them that are under the law. Now who is under the law? Paul has told us that every man knows the things visible and invisible of God, that they are written in the tables of every mans heart. So the law speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth shall be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. His frame of reference is universal.

Thus, Paul’s reference here is to what he says in Roman 1, that all men have an inescapable knowledge of God. The law expresses Gods being, they know the law because they know God. They are therefore, Paul says, without excuse. What he is talking about thus, is Biblical law, the law given to Moses. That just as all men know that the sun is shining, even if they are blind, because when they are in the sun they can feel the heat; all men who live in Gods creation, no matter how much they blind themselves to Gods law, know that law, even though they hold it down in unrighteousness or injustice; because Gods being manifests itself in all of creation.

But men know also that no works of law can save them. As Luther said and I quote: “For we are not righteous because we act according to the law, but because we are first righteous, therefore we then fulfill the law.”

The term ‘under the law’ means those to whom the law speaks, that is, all men. All men are either covenant breakers or covenant keepers, and the law speaks to both alike. We are covenant men because of Christ. In Christ we are no longer under the law as an indictment and a condemnation, as a death sentence; but we are under the law as Gods way of life for us. All men are fallen in Adam, and fallen man is incapable of keeping Gods law because the premise of fallen man is Genesis 3:5, to be his own God; to determine good and evil for himself.

The good that fallen man imagines is alien to Gods good, even as his law is alien to Gods law. All you have to do is to listen to politicians, and you can see what ungodly goodness means. It is monstrous, it is evil. Even if at times there is a superficial coincidence, at heart there is a difference. We saw last time that Freud approved of marriage; he felt that it was the only solution to the problem of sex. But his idea of what constituted marriage is totally alien to what scripture teaches, and his idea could not stand.

Now, Paul goes on to say: “Therefore by the deeds of the law, there shall no flesh be justified in His sight.” If this is true of Gods law, how much more so of Gods law? If no man can justify himself by his perfect obedience to God, how much less can he justify himself in terms of man-made law? All humanistic law seeks to establish justice without God, and this involves the humanist in a contradiction. To attempt to establish justice without God is to imagine that there is some kind of thing called justice that is independent of God, that is over God. So that God Himself can be judged in terms of this independent universal or category, justice.

This would make the abstract concept of justice God over God. The United States, the Soviet Union, and other countries all each in their own way are promoting humanistic ideas of justice, but they are in fact legislating in various degrees injustice and unrighteousness.

The doctrine here set forth by Paul is Old Testament teaching. As a matter of fact he is quoting the psalms again. In Psalm 143:1-2 David says: “Hear my prayer, O Lord, give ear to my supplications: in thy faithfulness answer me, and in thy righteousness. And enter not into judgment with thy servant: for in thy sight shall no man living be justified.”

This is good Old Testament teaching that Paul is giving us. Ecclesiastes 7:20 says: “For there is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not.” Proverbs 20:9 says: “Who can say, I have made my heart clean, I am pure from my sin?” Solomon in 1 Kings 8:46 says there is no man that sinneth not; and Paul in Romans 3:23 which we shall come to next time says: “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” And John in 1 John 1:8 says that: “If we say that we have no sin we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”

Therefore as Paul makes clear in verse 20, there shall no flesh be justified in His sight. Man cannot attain a righteousness apart from God and apart from God’s grace. Hodge said and I quote: “To justify is a forensic term, that is, it expresses the act of a judge. Justification is a judicial act.” It means that a person is not condemned. The law has declared that restitution has been rendered and the man is therefore free and justified. Christ’s atonement effects our justification.

Now we must recognize that justification is not the same as pardon, it is much more. In the kind of pardon the world knows, a guilty man can be pardoned; but justification is much more. It wipes out the charges and declares a man to be innocent before God. We are not justified of course to resume our course of sin, but to assume not lawlessness but the law as our way of life. If we cannot justify ourselves by Gods law, we cannot justify ourselves by apostate man’s law.

Thus, for the church to be content with humanistic laws in the state is blasphemy. For Christians to say: “It is alright for the state or the Federal government to pass any kind of law as long as they don’t legislate against Christianity” is nonsense. Laws are either godly or they are ungodly. They either legislate in terms of Gods justice, or against it; and we cannot surrender the sovereign claims of God in the civil sphere without losing them everywhere else. Our problem today the world over is that Christians have said that there is an independent justice, and that what the state does is justice even though it is not in conformity with God’s law, and may be in contradiction to it.

A few years ago on the east coast I encountered a group of people who claimed to believe the bible from cover to cover; but they were not fighting homosexuality, in fact they were compromising with it in their denomination. They were not fighting against abortion, they were compromising with it. They were not fighting against any number of evils, because they said: “All we have to defend is the heart of the gospel, John 3:16.” Well, if the heart is separated from the body it dies; and if you take John 3:16 apart from the Bible and let the rest of the Bible go, and all that God has to say about everything else, then you have destroyed the word of God. You have rendered it null in effect for yourself, and you will face its judgement from God.

Thus for the church to be content with humanistic laws in the state is blasphemy; for neither the state nor the church, nor any other sphere can know the good life in terms of man’s law. There is no good apart from God; there can therefore be no good law apart from God. The church is too much infected with the humanistic idea of the Greeks that the good, the true and the beautiful existed as abstract universals above and over the Gods, or any God; and therefore all things were subordinate to these abstract universals. And men have been reading the Bible and Romans in terms of this kind of pagan thinking, that there is no good apart from God, no independent realm of goodness which man may appropriate and use.

Thus God cannot be judged, or His word. To imagine something apart from God in terms of which God and His word can be judged is impossible, absurd, and a denial of Christianity. Paul tells us: “By the law is knowledge of sin” in verse 20. How does a man know what is good and evil? Does he know it from his own heart because he is so ultimate that he as the standard can say: “This is good and that is evil”? Does he know it because somehow it is up there in outer space as an abstract universal, and by his rationalism he can apprehend it? How does he know what is good and evil? Paul says by the law, the law of God, is the knowledge of sin; and by this he means that we know what is right and wrong, good and evil, because God in His law defines it.

So we have a standard, not an abstract universal. We have an inescapable knowledge of good and evil, of law, of all things; which is a part of our knowledge of God. True, written in our being; but because we hold it down in unrighteousness, because we are not perfect in this life, we need the written word; because this knowledge comes only from God.

Thus it is absurd to limit the meaning of Gods law as so many theologians have done, to telling me I am a sinner. By the law is the knowledge of sin, and Paul by that means that it tells us the nature of right and wrong. It does tell us we are sinners, but it tells me thereby what justice is. If the law tells me it is a sin to steal and to kill, that this is injustice, it tells me what is justice; that I do not destroy another man’s life in word thought or deed, or seek to harm that which is his, his property. It tells me to regard life on Gods terms, to use property as a stewardship, to be content with what is lawfully in my trust, to regard marriage as Gods only ordained and lawful sexual relationship, and to see life as a community of faith under God.

The law gives me knowledge of sin, at the same time it gives me a knowledge of justice and righteousness. In so doing, it gives me a knowledge of God.

What Paul is doing here is to give us the sociology of justification by faith. He is saying that all society has to be built on the law word of God, that man cannot say: “In this sphere I am a Christian, here I am bound by God; but here I can do some independent pioneering and it is a do-it-yourself world, do-it-it-yourself law, do-it-yourself justice.” Not so.

God speaks in His law, that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may be subject to the judgement of God, because He is the Lord. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God, Thy word is truth, and Thy word speaks to us and commands us to hear and to obey. Oh Lord we beseech Thee, recall Thy church to the only canon or rule of truth, Thy word. That we might again be a people dedicated to justice or righteousness, that we may bring all things in captivity to Christ our Lord and king, our savior. In His name we pray, amen.

Are there any questions now. Yes, Otto?

[Audience Member] I couldn’t help but think about (Quamo and Herarro?), and I also thought that part of the confusion that they are creation is the fact that instead of saying Christian, they are saying Catholic. Instead of saying Christian, the denominational names are always used.

[Rushdoony] Yes, (Cuomo and Ferrara?) are two people among many others who are insistent, among many others, that there is some kind of independent justice, independent righteousness in terms of which the church must be judged. And in fact, a great many Jesuits are saying the same thing; in fact there is an excellent book put out by a Catholic lay group on the Jesuit order, in which he calls attention to the fact that in some of their manuals of prayer now, the Jesuits are told that they must pray to the Christ who lives today, in humanity; not to the Jesus of 2,000 years ago who cannot be recreated.

Now, this is simply dispensing with Christianity, and creating a do it yourself religion for the day. And this is all too popular in Catholic and protestant circles today. (Cuomo and Ferrara?) are two very prominent examples of this, but they are far from alone, unfortunately. Yes?

[Audience Member] I have forgotten where it says that the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel, I don’t remember where that is in the Bible, and in what context was that given? Was there anything around it?

[Rushdoony] Yes, it was simply describing that even in attempting to be merciful, the wicked are cruel.

[Audience Member] …?... politicians.

[Rushdoony] Yes. So that the tender mercies of (Cuomo?) and others constitute cruelty. And you have to say that from a Biblical perspective, anyone who insists that you can depart from the plain word of God and say that there is a realm for a possibility, or of two truths, is talking nonsense. Any… yes?

[Audience Member] I was both amused and a bit irate over an article that was in the latest television guide, dealing with a program coming up whose subject is the fall of a nun and a priest, that has been, I am sure you have noticed that there has been a lot of that going on lately, and their timing is very good too insofar as they bring them out around Easter time, or near Christmas and so forth; and the interesting thing that was said in the last paragraph while taking to task the Catholic church for both rigidness in tradition, and all the sort of things that one would associate with the Catholic church as being positive and good, they said that they lost the law of love, was the language that was used, and that to me was very offensive, and I am very offended by those things that are coming out against the Catholic church, I wonder if you could comment on that.

[Rushdoony] Today the terms ‘rigid’ and ‘unloving’ are applied to anyone who is a fundamentalist or a Calvinist, or a conservative Catholic, because you are not supposed to believe that truth is objective and universal, and from God. It is situational, and therefore it changes from decade to decade, or from year to year.

A few years back it was very interesting to see in a Liberal periodical where they were half seriously, and half tongue in cheek, dealing with how to be up to the moment on things; they said: “This year blacks are out and gays are in.” I think there is a lot of truth to that. This is the way their idea of truth works, and anyone who holds to an unchanging truth is going to be damned by them. At that point they can be absolutists.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Any other questions or comments?

Well, if not let us bow our heads for the benediction. Oh Lord our God, we thank Thee that in the midst of all the follies of men we have the certainty that Thou art on the throne; and it is Thy will and Thy purpose that shall prevail; that Thy rod shall smite the wicked and destroy them, and Thy righteousness shine forth as the sun. Bless us in Thy service, keep us every faithful to Thy word, and make us strong by Thy Spirit.

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.