Living by Faith - Romans

Natural Privilege and Causality

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Living by Faith

Lesson: 38-64

Genre: Talk

Track: 038

Dictation Name: RR311T38

Location/Venue:

Year: ?

Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth. Seeing that we have a great High Priest that is past into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need. Let us pray.

All glory, praise and honor be unto Thee, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, whose mercies are without end, and whose providential care beyond our imagination. We rejoice in Thy government, we give thanks unto Thee for all Thy mercies and Thy tender loving care; and we pray our Father that Thou wouldst make us ever mindful of our wealth in Jesus Christ; make us ever joyful in Thee, that we might serve Thee all the days of our life in thanksgiving and in praise. Make us mighty and effectual for Thy kingdom, to the overthrowing of the powers that be and the erecting of the things that are of Thy kingdom, and make us ever mindful that we have been created not to fulfill ourselves, but to serve Thee. Grant us this we beseech Thee, in Jesus name, amen.

Our scripture lesson, as we continue our study in Romans, is in Romans 9:14-18. Our subject is Natural Privilege and Causality. Natural Privilege and Causality, Romans 9:14-18.

“14 What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid.

15 For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.

16 So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy.

17 For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth.

18 Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth.”

As we have seen, Paul has been reviewing Israel’s history with predestination in mind. His point has been that no man and no people can make any claim on God. Moreover, the point he is driving at, which he will come to in full force in a couple of chapters is this: If God could take Israel, His covenant people, and set them aside; and bring a radical judgement upon them as was soon to follow, the destruction of Jerusalem in Judea, He can set any other person and nation aside.

Men, however, as they approach this chapter have a fixation on the idea of predestination. They find it offensive. They find it offensive because it says God, not man, is Lord. However, all men in terms of the fact that as children of Adam we have that inherited predisposition of Genesis 3:5 to be our own God, to determine good and evil for ourselves, to be our own law maker, find this doctrine offensive.

I recall in the 1930’s in Berkeley hearing a professor say concerning Calvinism that it was a triumph of logic over life. He went on to say that predestination and Calvinism, Augustinianism, could be called true if one granted that the Bible’s God was actually the living God. But, he said, first of all the only logic in all creation is in the human mind; because the world is evolved out of nothing and is essentially illogical and irrational, meaningless, and therefore the idea that there should be a logical doctrine such as predestination is nonsense. Logic has nothing to do with life.

Of course he was thereby speaking against the Westminster Confession, which pointed out very clearly in its chapter on predestination that it is the predetermination of first causes by God which establishes the contingency or freedom of secondary causes.

Now, philosophically that is true, you cannot have freedom, a secondary freedom, a human freedom, unless you have an ultimate predestination by God. But the Bible doesn’t ask us to understand that, only to believe it. We don’t wait to understand digestion before we ever start eating, no one would be alive if that were the case. None of us can say concerning electricity: “I will never use it until I understand everything there is to know about it.” Ridiculous. Then why the insistence where God is concerned on understanding before I believe?

Precisely because then they are challenged in their desire to be their own God, to maintain somewhere in a closet of their house if they are evangelicals, the claim that: “Here I am captain of my own soul and master of my destiny, my own God.”

But Paul is not arguing for predestination, he is simply assuming it, because he says: ‘God is God; let God be God. And because God is God, by Him were all things made, and without Him was not anything made that was made. Therefore it inescapably follows that all things were ordained by Him, created in terms of a purpose. God is the master architect of all things, had His master plan from all creation.’

What Paul is here doing in these particular verses is not arguing predestination, but defending God’s righteousness, defending Gods righteousness.

Now the word righteousness is our more popular English word, justice. He is defending Gods justice. Why? Because in the Greco Roman world, and in our world too, there was an abstract concept of justice, an abstract concept of truth and of everything else, in terms of the platonic ideas or patterns; abstract ideas governed. What this meant was that somewhere, free floating in outer space apparently, there was an idea of justice to which God and man alike were to answer, and when people object to predestination and Gods absolute government, and Gods freedom to do with us as He chooses, the basis of their objection is: “Well, it is not just.” And their idea of just is not Biblical, it is an abstract universal, to use the philosophical term.

Now the Bible has no abstract universals, only the concrete universal of the Triune God. So, the idea that there can be abstract universals to which man can appeal as a supreme court against God and say: “Okay God, you missed it that time, you are out of line. Now before the Supreme Court of abstract universals, I indict you for injustice, or for being untruthful, or for this or that reason, that you are not merciful or compassionate.” If there are abstract universals you could do that, but there are none. There are none, it is a Greek idea, it infiltrated into Medieval philosophy, and then infiltrated into Protestantism with Arminianism, and it is very prevalent.

But the concept of abstract universals is wrong. It has no foundation in fact. And so, Paul says in verse 14: To say there is unrighteousness with God is blasphemous. It is to assume that there is a God over God, some kind of standard to judge God by. But the very concept of justice comes from God, justice is what God is and does. God is love, God is justice, God is compassion, God is wrath. All things are defined in terms of God, and in terms of His law word.

Paul continues: “For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.”

Paul here quotes Exodus 33:19 and Exodus 34:7, concerning the mercy and compassion of God. If God so poke to Moses, will He not assert the same sovereign power to grant or to withhold mercy to Israel and the church? In other words, if it was nothing for God to condemn Israel, is He going to hesitate to condemn the church, and to condemn the United States, or Britain, or the Soviet Union, or any other power the world has ever known or ever will know? Not at all.

God declares that the determination of those who receive His mercy or His judgement is His sovereign act. Now God is strong on property rights, much stronger than we are today, which is one reason why we have trouble understanding God. Remember the parable of the people who were hired to work because the harvest had to be completed that day, some began early in the morning, some began in the mid-morning, some at noon, and some mid afternoon, and they were all paid the same because the Lord of the harvest was glad to have the harvest done, and they had all worked well; and those who worked well all day were well paid, and those who had worked only half an afternoon were very well paid. And when they objected, some of those who had worked longer, receiving the same pay, the Lord of the harvest said: “Am I not free to do as I will with my own?”

Now that is how God views private property. Natural privilege on the human sphere God establishes, on His sphere He denies that we have any natural privilege or claim against Him, so He says: ‘Am I not free to do as I will with my own? Am I not free to do with my creatures as I choose? Do I not give you in terms of my law the power to do as you want with your property, provided you do not hurt or rob another with it?’

So God declares His determination to do as He wills with His creation.

Now, these two Exodus verses that Paul cites in verse 15 are from the incident of the golden bull calf, when Israel when Moses was on the mount involved itself in fertility cult worship; and what God then declares is, as He brings judgement upon them, He also says He will have mercy on whom He will have mercy. They had all sinned, and it was His simple declaration: “I will be merciful to some.” And that was it. The ground of mercy was not in any merit in them, but in Himself. Certainly, one of those to whom He was merciful was Aaron who was entitled to no mercy. Gods mercy is as free as His grace, both are sovereign. What Paul is doing is to shut up every crevice, every crack of human claim against God, of any attempt to say: “I have a natural privilege, and God can’t transgress it.” He is saying: “You have none as you confront God.”

And he continues in verse 16: “So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy.”

Faith is God’s gift. It is not a product of mans will or effort; and ultimate causality is reserved to God alone. Neither mans willing or running, that is, his effort, can effect Gods determination. But this gives us no ground for quietism, to say: “Well, if God does everything, then there is no need for me to do anything.” No. The Bible tells us: God ordains all things, He predestines all things, and it also tells us we are responsible, and we bear the burden of guilt for every wrong thing we do, and we are blessed for every good thing we do, even a cup of cold water given in His name is blessed.

Now we are not told to pick and choose between those two things, divine predestination and human responsibility, ‘which do you like best, take your choice.’ No. God says: “Here it is. You believe both.” When we have the mind of God, which we never will have, then maybe we will understand all of it, but we are asked to believe it. The child is not told that they cannot eat until they understand digestion.

Then in verse 17 Paul continues: “For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth.”

Again, Exodus is quoted, Exodus 9:6 in this case. In this instance God tells pharaoh through Moses after the plague of boils: ‘Pharaoh, you are very ill, but I the Lord am sparing your life, because I want you to see the consequences of your decision. I want you to see the ruin I am going to bring upon you, and the eternal reprobation.’ And so he was sentenced to live.

And so Paul concludes in verse 18: “Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth.”

God is sovereign. He alone is the ultimate cause of all things; and whatever He does is just. Calvin in discussing this passage wrote and I quote: “The predestination of God is in reality a labyrinth from which the mind of man by no means extricate itself; but so unreasonable is the curiosity of man that the more perilous the examination of a subject is the more boldly he proceeds; so that when predestination is discussed as he cannot restrain himself within due limits, he immediately through his rashness, plunges himself as it were in the depths of the sea. What remedy then is there for the Godly? Must they avoid every thought of predestination? by no means, for as the Holy Spirit has taught us nothing but what it behooves us to know, the knowledge of this would no doubt be useful, provided it be confined to the word of God; let this then be our sacred rule, to seek to know nothing concerning it except what scripture teaches us. When the Lord closes His holy mouth, let us also stop the way that we may go no farther.”

So Paul says, this is it. Calvin says this is it. You believe that God predestines all things, and you believe that you are fully responsible for everything you do. We are not to pry into the secret things of God.

So, as we analyze what Paul has said, he has told us first in these verses that there is no injustice with God. God is justice. There are no abstract universals, and we cannot dream up our own ideas of justice and impose them on God. We cannot believe that fallen man, of all things, knows what justice is more than God.

Then, second, Gods determination of all things means that predestination has to do with more than heaven and hell, its scope is all things. Our Lord says that the very hairs of our head are all numbered, and yet our Lord says that we are responsible for everything, for every idle word. Here you have human responsibility, and divine predestination, set forth in the very hairs of our head and every idle word.

Third, God is declared by Paul to be the full and final cause of all things, and there is no ultimate determination apart from Him. There can be no diminution of this doctrine without the fatality of faith. But the idea of man’s natural privilege, man’s rights against God, is a very popular one, and whenever you have it it leads to a different concept of causality; because then primary or ultimate causality is transferred from God to man, from the supernatural to the natural realm. For example, it is not an accident that Greco Roman thought which insisted on the ultimacy of man’s decision and the natural world as the source of causality, wound up in the morass it did where man lost all freedom, because now he was totally determined by the natural world, by natural forces, by heredity and so on.

And a classical scholar who does not share our perspective at all, William Norris Cochrane in a classic work of a few years back, Christianity and Classical Culture showed the paradox that here were the Greco Roman philosophers on the one hand, objecting to Christianity and its doctrine of predestination, as a violation of the idea of human freedom, and they were the ones who wound up affirming that man had no freedom because of naturalistic determinism, and the Christians who affirmed predestination were the champions in Greco Roman society of mans freedom. Very important book.

But, when you come to the late middle ages, what happens? You have a tremendous outbreak of belief in witchcraft and magic, a belief in Alchemy and Astrology proliferating. What does that represent? Why, a belief in naturalistic causality being ultimately determinative. In other words, predestination, not in God but in this world, and you had the same belief arise again toward the end of the Reformation and Counter Reformation era. And what did it lead to? Scientism. All one has to do is read the life of Isaac Newton, and others of the great scientists of the early modern era, to see how they came out of that background, a belief in totally naturalistic determinism. The priority of causality being on the human realm, which sentenced man, ultimately, as (le maitre?) said, to be a machine, nothing but a machine, naturalistically determined, no freedom.

This is what the insistence on natural privilege does, it leads to a concept of natural ultimacy of causality, which is destructive of all things. The quest for ultimate causality outside of God leads to disastrous byways. It has always been productive of false science, of occultism, and more. Natural privilege in reference to man is a dangerous doctrine in reference to God. Paul is not advocating that we regard the natural world as of no consequence, or of the social order as of no consequence, far from it; Paul makes clear again and again in his letters that he is not in favor of revolution, but of regeneration: “Let every man abide wherein he is saved.” He is not to seek to overthrow the order, but by his conversion to transform it.

Paul was not a revolutionary. Someone, sometime, should write a paper on Paul and his use of the law, it would be a delightful paper. Because you must remember, Paul was a Roman citizen, he was born a citizen, which meant he was in his day one of the more privileged people of the empire; he knew Roman law, he used it a number of times. He was trained by Gamaliel in the law, and Paul tied up the Jewish courts and the Roman courts regularly with his knowledge of the law; he used their own law against them, did it beautifully and subtly. We could learn a lot from Paul. He was not ratifying their power, he was using it, using it for his own goals.

But in relation to the things of God, Paul admitted nothing of man as having any privilege or standing. Man is Gods creature. By Him were all things made, and without him was not anything made that was made. How then can the creature imagine that he can play the creator, or make a claim against the creator? Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God, Thy word is truth because Thou art the way, the truth, and the life. Thy ways are altogether just because Thou art justice, all holy, all righteous, all wise. Give us grace therefore to believe Thine every word, to rejoice in Thine every word, and to go forth as more than conquerors, armed by Thy word and by Thy grace. In Jesus name, amen.

Are there any questions concerning our lesson this morning? Yes John?

[Audience Member] Interesting how quickly Christians will accept the union of two natures in Christ, God and man, but they will not accept at the same time the union of predestination and human responsibility.

[Rushdoony] Yes. If they can’t understand it, they don’t want to accept it where God is concerned, but will accept Einstein although we don’t understand a word of it, and it probably isn’t true. Yes?

[Audience Member] Would you say that the ‘God is love’ people fall into the category of laying down a fundamental rule? Of laying down a rule for God?

[Rushdoony] Yes, because what they do is to take scripture and say that one aspect of scripture, one sentence, rules out all the rest; so they are making an idol out of that one sentence: “God is love. Therefore God cannot be judgement, God cannot be justice, God cannot be wrath, and I am safe. All He can do is love me.” I think it was Heines who when he was dying was asked if he were ready to repent, and he laughed and he said: “God will forgive me, that is His business.”

Yes?

[Audience Member] When we talk about human responsibility and predestination, and say we believe in both, now is this, are you referring to a life, or to salvation?

[Rushdoony] To life, yes, and well, salvation is by God’s sovereign grace.

[Audience Member] There is no human responsibility as far salvation is concerned, right?

[Rushdoony] No, there is the responsibility however of response.

[Audience Member] Is there a response, when life is given there is a response because of life, not to respond to receive life, is that right? So that would be absolutely sovereign grace that gives a life, because of the life there is a response. And when the free will, or man’s responsibility begins at this life in order to live, is that right?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience Member] Well, they have responsibility prior to that, do they not? Human responsibility does not begin with salvation, right?

[Rushdoony] Human responsibility is from birth, we are created to be responsible creatures; so that all our days we are responsible creatures, and we are answerable to God for all things. Any other questions or comments?

Well, if not, let us bow our heads now for the benediction. All glory be to Thee oh God, who of Thy sovereign grace and mercy has made us thy people, and has given us such great privileges in Jesus Christ. Make us ever mindful our father, that we have received these gifts that we might return them unto Thee fivefold, tenfold, a hundredfold. Bless us that we might so return them.

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.