Living by Faith - Romans

Predestination Versus Human Rights

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Living by Faith

Lesson: 40-64

Genre: Talk

Track: 040

Dictation Name: RR311U40

Location/Venue:

Year: ?

Let us worship God. Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth. This is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything in accordance with His will, He heareth us. Having these promises, let us draw near to the throne of grace with true hearts, in full assurance of faith. 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, unto whom all things shall come, the ends of the earth shall praise Thee. We give thanks unto Thee that Thou hast chosen us to be Thy people, and has given us such gracious promises concerning our children and our children’s children. We commit ourselves unto Thee afresh, beseeching thee to be mindful of all our needs, to strengthen us in Thy service, to make us every joyful in Thy praise, and obedient to Thy word. In Jesus name, amen.

Our scripture this morning is from Romans 9:24-29, and our subject: Predestination Versus Human Rights. Romans 9:24-29.

“24 Even us, whom he hath called, not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles?

25 As he saith also in Osee, I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.

26 And it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people; there shall they be called the children of the living God.

27 Esaias also crieth concerning Israel, Though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, a remnant shall be saved:

28 For he will finish the work, and cut it short in righteousness: because a short work will the Lord make upon the earth.

29 And as Esaias said before, Except the Lord of Sabaoth had left us a seed, we had been as Sodoma, and been made like unto Gomorrha.”

Paul has a passionate concern; it is to shut the door on every attempt by man to assert his imagined privileges, his rights against God. He declares that there can be no independent realm of truth or of justice. Truth and justice, love, everything comes from God. And man cannot manufacture philosophical myths and declare them to be true. The idea of free will rests on Genesis 3:5, man as his own God and determiner, because free will is an absolute concept; not even God can be other than what God is. It was Karl Barth who asserted that God could be the devil tomorrow if He chose, and would be of necessity, to be free. Now Barth made that statement, because he wanted man to have the freedom to be good or evil, and equally free in whatever he did. And that is the heart of this philosophical concept of free will, which is an absolutist concept. We have responsibility, which is a totally different thing. Responsibility means accountability to someone higher than us.

Now in verse 24, Paul says God has called and chosen His vessels of mercy from among both Jews and Gentiles. Both are in the church, Paul says; and both are evidence of God’s grace to all peoples. Salvation is not a natural right or privilege of any. Sinners have no rights before God, no claims they can make, and this is true of saints and sinners alike. Our salvation is all of grace. But, because some might say: “What about Israel?” Paul sees Israel as the chosen covenant people of God, not as a bloodline. As long as they were faithful to the covenant, they were his people, and we as Christians, as long as we are faithful to the covenant of God and to the covenant law, we are His people, it is not a blood line. Hence as Paul says very early in Romans, Romans 2:29 “They are not all Israel which are of Israel.” And we can say they are not all of Christ who say they are.

Paul’s point is, some of the called are Jews, and some are Gentiles. This is very important to the point he is developing. His very point is that the called of God are from all peoples; moreover he says that the covenant promise has not failed, a good deal of the church he says is Jewish; they are providing the transition, they are the instruments, (like myself, he could have added) to bring in all the peoples of the earth, to bring in the true Israel of God, the true children, the true seed. And these are those whom God has called, and calling is both a grace and a discipline.

We are prepared for our calling by all our life before hand, nothing is wasted; so that we can as one Christian of old prayed, who had a lot in his past that was anything but good, he prayed saying: “We thank Thee for all our yesterdays,” because all those yesterdays have gone into the making of him in terms of God’s sovereign purpose, so he could say that he could thank God for all his yesterdays. God wastes nothing in our training.

In verse 25, Paul quotes Hosea saying: “I will call them my people which were not my people, and her beloved which was not beloved.” This is Hosea 2:23. And God says to apostate Israel at that point in history that they shall again be His people; and Paul cites this verse of Israel’s restoration to show the grace of God to all peoples. It is all of grace, it is not a birth right, it is not a natural privilege.

He continues to quote from Hosea in verse 26: “And it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people; there shall they be called the children of the living God.”

And this is of course again from Hosea, this time from 1:10. Now, Paul in quoting this is striking hard against the pride of his fellow people, of the Jews, and obliquely any potential pride that Christians may develop in the future. The citation is from the marriage of Hosea, to a woman who not only became adulteress, but then became a prostitute; but in due time she was humbled and broken, and restored because God said in effect to Hosea: ‘look, there is no need to take her back, but I am going to demonstrate in your life how great my grace is, that she who deserves to die and should die, I will receive again. And so it is with the sinner. They deserve death, but by my grace I restore them.’

So, God speaks here of His unmerited grace. Just as the whoring wife can make no claim on her husband, has no natural privilege or right except to death, and yet God says: ‘Even so will I be with the people whom I redeem. They will be comparable to a whoring wife, but I will redeem them.’

In verse 27 he turns now to Isaiah, and quotes Isaiah: “Though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, a remnant shall be saved:”

In other words, physical Israel, the bulk of Israel, will be set aside in the time of our Lord, as well as in Isaiah’s time. Great numbers were saved, but not as a nation. The church supplants the nation, and Paul in citing Isaiah 10:22-23 refers to the reduction of the nation to a remnant by the Assyrian invasion. Israel was to be reduced to a remnant, but must not fear, Isaiah said, for God will triumph through the remnant. And he says in Isaiah 10:21 “The remnant will return, even the remnant of Jacob, unto the might God.”

Paul is writing with the apostasy of Judea and the forthcoming fall of Jerusalem in mind. As Hendrickson noted and I quote: “At this point we should guard ourselves from committing an error in our interpretation. It is a rather common practice to say that Paul was now and now begins to spiritualize, by stating that only the remnant will be saved. However a close look at Isaiah’s own prophecy shows that he by no means restricts his prophecy to a prediction of a physical return from captivity, but states that the remnant will return to the mighty God. They will lean on Jehovah, will rely on the Lord. Paul is therefore exactly reproducing Isaiah’s thought when he says of the total number of Israel’s, on the remnant will be saved.”

Both with regard to the fall of Judea and the calling of the Gentiles, Isaiah says, and Paul, that these are predictive in the Old Testament, and the gentiles will be rejected if they assume that their status is a natural privilege, that they are the better people. They may be, and it well may be that we can say for example that the Americans today are the best people on earth; but if they forget that all that they are and have is of the grace of God, they will suffer the same judgement as Judea in its pride did in our Lords day. So declares Paul in Romans 11:19-21.

Then Isaiah 1:9 is cited by Paul in verse 29: “Except the Lord of Sabaoth had left us a seed, we had been as Sodoma, and been made like unto Gomorrha.”

Isaiah is emphatic that only God’s grace separates Israel from Sodom and Gomorrha, and Paul implies the same with regard to all the gentiles. There is no standing before God apart from Christ.

In verse 28 the efficiency of God was stressed. Gods purpose concerning history is effectively carried out by Him, and this development is contrary to our will very often, but it is in terms of Gods will. Paul is a loyal Jew. He saw the superiority of Israel. He saw that they were morally, intellectually, educationally, culturally, far better than the nations; but he saw that this was not enough if they were an offense to God, because they saw it as their natural achievement, and not the blessing of God. And so Paul strikes at the pride and arrogance of the Jews, but also at the pride and arrogance of the Greeks and the Romans, and of all Christians. As he says writing to the church in 1 Corinthians 4:7 “For who maketh thee to differ from another? And what hast thou that thou didst not receive? Now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory as if thou hadst not received it?”

It is a human failing to which we are all prone, to compare various peoples, nationalities, individuals, favorably or unfavorably, and to stress their differences. These may be real, but Paul has no use for them as we face God, and he declares: “For there is no difference. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” Paul hates natural privilege, he hates the idea of human rights, natural rights; because he sees it as the deadly moral ailment of his own people, whom he loves intensely. He sees it as a threat to the future of the church, and warns the church of it in Romans 11:19-21. He was fully aware that pride is no respecter of persons or nationalities. Our standing before God and in history then is Gods sovereign grace, mercy, and predestination. We may have virtues and abilities by His grace, by the providence of God, but also God raises up His Assyrians and Babylonians, and Romans, and the USSR, to do His work and to shake the nations, and to bring judgement.

To rest upon natural privilege is to rest on death. For all such are sure to perish.

Men today speak a great deal about natural rights, human rights, as though this meant something. It means nothing, absolutely nothing. It can be defined as the speaker chooses, because there is nothing written in God’s word or in the heavens saying: “These are human rights.” There are no ten commandments of human rights. And how are human rights defined? Well, today they are defined as abortion as a human right; homosexuality as a human right; euthanasia as a human right. And now we have a growing number who are insistent and have periodicals promoting their new gospel of rights. Child molestation as a human right, drugs as a human right, and so on and on and on and on. Once you depart from the law of God as the foundation of all man’s freedom and rights, you get into a doctrine of human rights which is whatever man chooses to define it. It is not accident that the further men depart from God the more they identify human rights with monstrous evils.

Remember, the Soviet Union identifies whatever it does with human rights, and if you oppose the Soviet Union you are against human rights and human freedom. In fact, any of the leaders, the intellectuals who today are challenging the Soviet concept of human rights, are put in mental institutions, because they are obviously sick; don’t they realize that they are really getting all the rights that a man can have, and all the freedom that a man can have? The Soviet government has said so.

When men and civil governments define human rights, it can mean anything. I have been in court often enough in first amendment cases to know that human rights and civil liberties apart from God can mean anti Christianity and the persecution of His church and His people. The premise of all such thinking is anti Christianity.

But Paul destroys this premise, he says that no man has any claim against God. God is the Lord. Isaiah faced with the vision of the glory of God saw that instead of any privilege, he merited only judgement. And we are told by him in Isaiah 6:5 “Then said I, woe is me. For I am undone, because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips. For mine eyes have seen the king, the Lord of hosts.”

Some of us are old enough to remember when this country had a great deal of freedom, when it was still in essence a Christian country; when as Otto Scott has pointed out, the sermons were regularly reported and written up as important news by the newspapers. Can anyone say that we have more freedom now that we are talking about human rights than then when we were declaring God to be the Lord? I don’t believe anyone can with any honesty.

Man’s hope is in God’s grace, and in God’s law. Let us pray. Oh Lord our God, Thy word is truth, and Thy word declares that we are Thy people, that we stand only by Thy grace, and that our strength, our freedom, and our future is only in terms of Thy law word. Make us ever mindful oh Lord of our calling in Thee, faithful to thee, joyful in Thy word, and triumphant by Thy grace. In His name we pray, amen.

Are there any questions now concerning our lesson?

Yes?

[Audience Member] …. It seems to be almost a curse and a blessing in terms of, on the one side we have got two nations at war with each other who really hold to this natural privilege concept, and that is probably one of the fundamental motivating factors in the whole Middle East conflict, and here the United States is being both cursed, yet it may be a blessing in disguise by being brought into this and being publically humiliated in front of the entire world.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Lebanon was known as the Switzerland of the Middle East before this began. Can anyone say that they are better off now, or can be if any side gains its will?

Yes?

[Audience Member] This brings to mind this talk about victimless crimes which we hear about. Now a lot of these crimes are against God, and yet they will say they are victimless.

[Rushdoony] Yes, and they are against society in that they break the fundamental order of society. The concept of victimless crimes forgets too that the one who commits them becomes his own victim. So, it is a humanistic concept which is very destructive.

Any other questions or comments?

Well, if not, let us bow our heads in prayer. Oh Lord our God, we give thanks unto Thee for the abundance of Thy blessings and Thy providential care. We commit ourselves and our loved ones and their needs into Thy omnipotent and all gracious hands. Bless, heal, guide, and direct them all the days of their 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.