Living by Faith - Romans

Paul and the New Testament

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Living by Faith

Lesson: 23-64

Genre: Talk

Track: 023

Dictation Name: RR311M24

Location/Venue:

Year: ?

…Lord Jesus Christ, He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the almighty. Rest on the Lord, and wait patiently for Him. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God, give us grace ever to be mindful that Thou art more mindful of us than we are of ourselves; that Thy love and Thy grace and mercy surround us, protect us, and over-gird us all the days of our life. We thank Thee that we live and move and have our being in Thee; give us grace therefore day by day to take hands off our lives and commit them into Thy keeping. We thank Thee for Thy so great salvation, for Thy word, and the certainty of Thy word. Bless us now as we give ourselves to the study of Thy word, that we may behold wondrous things out of Thy law. In Jesus name, amen.

Our scripture this morning is from Romans 7:1-6. Romans 7:1-6, our subject: Dominion and Power. Romans 7:1-6, Dominion and Power.

“7 Know ye not, brethren, (for I speak to them that know the law,) how that the law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth?

2 For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband.

3 So then if, while her husband liveth, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress: but if her husband be dead, she is free from that law; so that she is no adulteress, though she be married to another man.

4 Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God.

5 For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death.

6 But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.”

We come now to a central section of Paul’s letter to the Romans. Before we begin the discussion of the first of the analogies he uses, the analogy of marriage, it is important to call attention to certain facts: the details of parables and illustrations in the Bible cannot be pushed to bear a meaning alien to the plain statements of scripture elsewhere. For example, in our Lord’s parable concerning the beggar Lazarus and the rich man, we are told that the rich man looked up and saw Lazarus with Abraham. Now are we to understand by that that people in hell can look in and see what is going on in heaven, and visa versa? No. That is not the point of the parable. The point of the parable has to do with the nature of the sinner, and how even in hell the rich man was full of excuses, not a confession, not a knowledge of sin, so that there was a dramatic juxtaposition of heaven and hell, so that this point could be brought out. So we are not to come to any conclusion about heaven and hell being visible one to the other; that is reading something into that parable that is alien to its meaning.

Now similarly in this illustration we are not to take the statements with regard to marriage as saying there is no divorce; we have to take scripture whenever it speaks, in terms of the whole body of scripture. Otherwise we get into trouble, for example one very distinguished scholar of a few years ago used certain illustrations to conclude that there could be no second marriages, that all second marriages whether of widows or widowers or anyone were forbidden by scripture, just on a statement somewhere in an illustration which he used to generalize and obliterate everything else scripture had to say.

Now, in the second verse here Paul says: “For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth;” Paul does not say that there is no divorce, the issue of divorce is not involved here; but what he does say is that legal claims are normally binding until death. The Law has a claim on all who are under debt to the law. Moreover, remember, Paul never says ‘the law is dead’ but that a dead man, a man dead in Christ, is dead to the law, as an indictment, a death penalty against him, because there are no charges or claims of a death penalty against a dead man.

Now, what is at issue in this passage is the claim of the law against a man. All of Adams sons are sentenced to death by the law; this is the laws claim on everyone, the death penalty. “All we have sinned and gone astray, there is none righteous, no not one. No man stands justified before the law.” But with Christ’s atonement we are now dead as sons of Adam, as members of the old humanity of Adam; we are alive as members of the new race, the new humanity of Christ, and as members of Christ we are legally alive in Christ to the law as the way of life.

As Paul is going to say in the next section of this, “The law is ordained to life, it is the way of life for the Godly. For the ungodly it is a death sentence.” As a result, we must see it in Christ as the way we want to live; in Adam as a death sentence. We are dead to the law as a death penalty, but the law as a way of life is not dead. To hold so is to warp the meaning of scripture, in fact when we read about the birth of our Lord, everything that the virgin Mary says, and all the others that hail that event tell us that they saw His coming as putting humanity on a new basis, with a new power to fulfill everything the law and the prophets declared. Now to live in terms of the law and the prophets, because now they are redeemed, they are regenerated.

For example, Zacharias, the Father of John the Baptist, at the birth of John gives us a declaration of the triumph of Gods plan, Gods justice in the Christian era, of all the things that are going to come to pass as a result of the one for whom John is the forerunner. He declares:

“68 Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and redeemed his people,

69 And hath raised up an horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David;

70 As he spake by the mouth of his holy prophets, which have been since the world began:

71 That we should be saved from our enemies, and from the hand of all that hate us;

72 To perform the mercy promised to our fathers, and to remember his holy covenant;

73 The oath which he sware to our father Abraham,

74 That he would grant unto us, that we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies might serve him without fear,

75 In holiness and righteousness before him, all the days of our life.

76 And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest: for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways;

77 To give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins,

78 Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us,

79 To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

Either God was deluding the virgin Mary and the priest Zacharias, or they knew more about the meaning of the Christian era than do our antinomian commentators. Very obviously Mary and Zacharias did not see the law and the prophets set aside. They saw their fulfillment, they saw them being realized and put into force, the way of life they spoke about now becoming a reality because of Gods Son.

As E.H. Gifford over a century ago said about this passage: “The union with Christ of believers is compared here to a second marriage; we are divorced from sin, we are married to Christ.”

And Paul gives us in these verses, three stages of this: first, the disillusion of the former marriage, then the new marriage, and finally, its fruits. Man in Adam is married to sin, and is dead before the law, he is sentenced to death. By dying to Christ that old marriage to sin ends, and therefore the death penalty of the law has no claim over us. The antinomians who say the law is dead are perverting the meaning, the law doesn’t die, we die to the death penalty of the law, that is what Paul says. To hear some of them talk, Christ came to save us from the law; whereas what Paul says, He came to save us from sin and its penalty of death, and we are now free from the laws condemnation.

As Sanday and Headlam said long ago and I quote: “The Christian takes his place as it were with Christ on the cross, and there has his old self crucified. The body of Christ here meant is the crucified body. The Christian shares in that crucifixion, and so gets rid of his sinful heart.”

Thus the analogy of marriage does not set aside the Biblical law on marriage, it talks about our relationship to sin, to Adam, and to Christ. Now, the analogy here is of a woman in marriage, not a man, because Paul begins by saying: ‘I speak to them that know the law” in verse 1. Roman law, the law of the people in Rome, he is writing to the Romans, and those who were of a Jewish background new Old Testament law, and the Christians ostensibly were learning what the Old Testament had to say.

Now, Paul speaks of the woman in marriage, and compares all of us to that position, because under Roman law the husband had power over the life of the wife, the Roman controlled his wife legally, even as the law as a death penalty controls us before our redemption. We are under the law as a legal penalty for sin. Then we are in Christ and under His power and authority, hence he speaks of the law of her husband in verse 2.

In verse 1 Paul says the law as a death sentence hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth, and we are reminded that we are now under the dominion of Jesus Christ, so that we are free from the death penalty. Now, we saw previously, two weeks ago, that Paul stresses the fact that we are facing only two alternatives. Men may imagine there are other alternatives, but there is either the way of sin and death, or the way of life and righteousness or justice. Now he is saying that we at no point are ever out from under dominion. We are either under the dominion of sin, and therefore of death, or the dominion of Christ. The dominion of sin means the dominion also of the law as a death sentence. Our first husband is the old man in us. The death of our first husband occurs with our crucifixion in Christ, when we become a new creation in Christ.

Then we have a new relationship to God. We bring forth fruit, not unto death, but we are saved to serve in the newness of the spirit, as verse 6 makes clear. We are not to serve in the oldness of the letter.

Now, Paul does not oppose the law and the spirit when he speaks of the letter and the spirit, because in verse 14 he goes on to say that the law is spiritual. So he is not saying when he speaks of the letter, and he says elsewhere “The letter killeth”; the word in the Greek is ‘Gramma’ GRAMMA, as in grammar, and it can refer to two things; on the one hand the alphabet, but Paul here is not talking about the alphabet, he is not saying that the alphabet kills us or that we are not to serve the alphabet, or we are not now under the alphabet; but the word can also mean ‘a document’ a legal document. Well, it is obvious what it means. The letter is the document which spells out in careful legal language that we are sentenced to death, therefore we are to serve not in the oldness of the letter, a death penalty and us fretting under it, in bondage to it, facing that penalty down the road; we serve in newness of spirit.

Man has two alternatives. He imagines that he has alternatives of his own choice, but he only has two alternatives. Not only so, but either way, the way of sin or the way of Christ, he is under authority. He has a subordinate status in God’s plan, he is always under dominion, to sin or to Christ.

Now, we all know that original sin is set forth in Genesis 3:5, Ye shall be as God, every man his own God, knowing, that is determining, deciding for yourself what is good and evil, being your own law maker. Man seeks to be God; that is the heart of sin.

Well, let’s analyze what that involves, because it is important to what Paul says here and what will follow. God is absolute power, absolute power. Man’s lust for power is an aspect of his sin, it is an expression of his original sin. Now, some men try to express their lust for power, their original sin, within the law, to amass wealth and power over people legally. Others seek it illegitimately. But however that lust for power is expressed, within the law or outside the law, it is directed primarily against persons; God as Lord predestines all things. The very hairs of our head are all numbered. And what about the sinner who is playing God? His goal is to control everyone around him, to give them not the slightest freedom. It isn’t happiness such a man or a woman wants, it is control, to control their wife or their husband and to break their will, to make them their creature, to take their employees, their relatives, their in-laws, their neighbors, everyone; to degrade them, to humiliate them, to cause them suffering, to make them their creatures. That is how the lust for power expresses itself.

And what does it lead to? Death. We either serve death or we serve Christ, because sin leads to death, and we are ultimately in the service of death.

We are told of Andropov who went to his reward not long ago, that in Hungary he was a very gracious host, loved to go to the embassy balls and to dance and so on, and one of the people he was friendly with was the head of the police in Budapest, (Kopocksy?), when after the brief revolution the Soviet troops marched in, Andropov had (Kopocksy?) and his wife arrested, and was beaming with smiles, and waved to them as after the interrogation he had them sent to prison. It was a joyful moment for him, a moment of power; and so it is with the ungodly. Their joy is bending everyone to their will and breaking them.

Of course Orwell went through this in 1984 describing it very carefully, he said: “Men are broken to make the act of submission, and this is the price of their sanity that they must pay.” The goal is that there will be only slavery, and slavery will be the only freedom; that power is power over human beings, said Orwell, and that the party seeks power entirely for its own sake.

He went on to say that according to 1984 the object of persecution is persecution, the object of torture is torture, the object of power is power; and it is logical that it should be so, humanism is a closed and limited system, it has no values external to man to say that power must be subservient to moral ends, and therefore power is an end in itself, because the sinful man has as his dominant motif to be as God, to exercise power, to predestine everyone around them. So they can’t in effect breath without their permission, and the will to power leads to death over, and for all.

But the dominion of Christ is different, so that when we are separated from sin by the cross of Christ, and we become a new creation in Jesus, then for us there is another motif. Dominion for us is not our personal power, but it is to bring into realization the kingdom of God. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness” or justice, because justice and righteousness are the same word.

Our Lord says that our dominion over men is to be in service, in newness of spirit, in love, in ministry; and our Lord sums up God’s law and our exercise of power in two commandments: “Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind; this is the first and great commandment, and the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love Thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

The ungodly exercise of power brings death; the godly exercise of power furthers life.

Now one final word. Paul says in verse 1: “I speak to them that know the law” or know law in general. The Romans as Christians were the people of the book, and the only Bible then was the Old Testament, all the preaching, all the teaching was out of the Old Testament; and second, Rome was unusual as a civilization, unlike any that had preceded it, because it was established in terms of law, not in terms of a race or a ruler or a particular form of rule; it was a civilization of law.

So Paul’s argument throughout these verses rests on an appreciation by all who read his letter or heard it read, for the force of law. It cannot be read in any modern antinomian sense, [Tape skips a second] the force of his reason. When Paul says the law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth, everyone that heard him shared in this belief. Paul was thus laying the foundations for a sociology of justification by faith. The just shall live by faith, not merely saved by faith, but to live by faith; and so Paul says to live by faith, man must live by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.

This is our way of life. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God, Thy word is truth, and Thy word governs us because we are now Thine; and Thy word is written upon the tables of our hearts because Christ our Lord has cleansed our hearts and made us a new creation. Make us joyful in Thy word and Thy Spirit, that we may serve Thee all the days of our life with joy and thanksgiving, that we may exercise power in terms of fulfilling Thy purpose for us. Bless us to this purpose, in Jesus name, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience Member] Since man is to have dominion over the earth, and we don’t see too much of that today, are there psychological effects to the nature of the man, I mean, is he going to suffer psychologically because he is not exercising that dominion as head…

[Rushdoony] A very good question, yes. When men and women lose the focal point of their lives which is to serve the Lord, and exercise knowledge, holiness, righteousness or justice, and dominion in Christ, then their whole life is out of focus, and they become sickly peoples in the fullest sense of the word. All their being is poisoned, because they are not fulfilling what is the image of God in them.

Now we know if we violate the rules of health physically we are going to pay a price, that we cannot, to use a very obvious example, drink a fifth every day without very serious trouble before long. Well, similarly we cannot put our lives to the service of ourselves and humanistic goals without paying a price, so we do suffer.

Now, one thing more. Remember, we are told by Isaiah that as the gospel age extends itself and men come under the power of God and in faithfulness to Him, the world will be changed; the life expectancy of man will increase. So, these things happen because men have quit drinking a fifth of sin, a fifth of surrender, a fifth of retreat, a fifth of dereliction from their God given calling and nature; and not only as individuals but as a society they become God centered. Yes?

[Audience Member] My question was directed mainly to the man.

[Rushdoony] Yes, but I think it applies both to men and women, and…

[Audience Member] Won’t it affect the man, and say his manhood in such a way that…

[Rushdoony] It will affect the man in his manhood, in his sexuality, in his work, in everything; and because it affects the man it will affect his family, and today men are as it were running away from being men, from being husbands, from being fathers, from being responsible wherever they are. Yes?

[Audience Member] Isn’t the non-believer subject to the image of God in terms of righteousness, knowledge, holiness, and dominion, in a humanistic sense, in other words, his nature as being created by God, isn’t he focusing everything in the wrong direction, because he still tries to practice dominion, only he is doing it in a self-serving sense; he still wants knowledge and wants it for the wrong reason, and so forth and so on.

[Rushdoony] Yes, man in inescapably Gods creature. Therefore when he is in sin he doesn’t lose that fact that he was created in terms of a will to knowledge, holiness, dominion, and justice or righteousness, but he seeks a false holiness, separation from God, in terms of humanistic ideas. You are not really realizing yourself, you are not free until you are a good humanist. He seeks a Godless knowledge, he seeks a humanistic justice, and he seeks a sinful dominion. So he is still manifesting the image of God, but diabolically. Yes?

[Audience Member] …so much controversy over that Baby Fae case, some Christians felt that man was exercising this right of dominion over the heart of the monkey for instance, how do you feel about that?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Of course it was an exercise of dominion in the Baby Fae case, but ungodly dominion, because it was saying that we are not created each after his kind; and it was saying that evolution is true, and therefore we can bridge the gap between a baboon and a human, that the rejection factor which says that there cannot be a cross between these two is something that we are going to break down if we experiment long enough.

So that they actually said that what they were doing might prove the truth of evolution. It was a high handed act of ungodliness, and the fact that it was done in a religious hospital didn’t change the fact that it was evil. Any other questions? Yes.

[Audience Member] What point is Paul making in verse 6 when he refers to the oldness of the letter which he contrasts with the newness of the spirit?

[Rushdoony] Ah. I referred to that you remember, Gramma, GRAMMA, the letter, can mean either the letters of the alphabet or documents, legal documents. So he is saying we now serve in the newness of the spirit as a new creature in Christ and in the Holy Spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter, no longer as sinners who are under the legal document which sentences us to death. So the letter there has reference to a document. Any other questions or comments?

Yes John?

[John] I just, for information purposes, I just finished reading a book by John A.T. Robinson called Redating the New Testament, and it is very interesting, the tide of New Testament scholarship, even among liberals, is beginning to see now that all books of the New Testament were written prior to 70 A.D. And that is in fact what Robinson does in this book, as he redates, he believes that all the books in the New Testament can be shown to be written, including the book of Revelations, prior to 70 A.D.

[Rushdoony] Yes, there is I believe quite a bit of evidence to that fact, but you see when unbelief began to deal with the Bible, one of the first things they said was that the New Testament writings were unrelated to the time of the actual events, they were second century documents about a hundred years after the event, written by people who pretended to be apostles and disciples. And step by step the dating has been pushed backwards, and with good reason because so much there presupposes, both for example in John, the 4th gospel, and in Revelation, that Jerusalem is still standing, and that people will recognize certain things.

[Audience Member] Well for Robinson that is a key factor, he said the fact that 70 A.D. destruction of Jerusalem is the single most important historical event of the first century, and it is nowhere mentioned in any of the New Testament documents, he said it is not even alluded to or suggested or hinted at, and he said that the only place it is ever talked about is in the prophecies of Christ and the book of Revelations, and then it is an even to be something future.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, it was not only the most important event of the century, but perhaps almost certainly the greatest disaster of all history.

Well, our time is up, let us bow our heads now in prayer. Oh Lord our God, we thank Thee that Thou hast called us to joy and to victory. Make us ever mindful how great our privileges and our calling is in Jesus Christ. 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.