The World Under God’s Law

The Family Under God’s Law

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject:

Genre: Speech

Track: 02

Dictation Name: RR323A1

Location/Venue: ________

Year: _______

One of the great enemies of biblical faith is spiritual religion. Because God created the heavens and the earth and all things therein, God is totally Lord over area of life. And therefore, his word is not just a spiritual word but a total word. It speaks concerning our marriage, concerning weights and measures; concerning the land and the sabbath of the land, concerning our treatment of our animals...thou shalt not muzzle the ox which treadeth out the corn. Which means that we are not only mindful of the animals but that we have a case law there also which says if we must be mindful of the ox, we must be mindful of the laborer who is worthy of his hire; and those Paul says, who labor worthily in the Lord’s ministry are worthy of double honor - which means double pay.

God speaks, you see, concerning weights, and measures, and pay; concerning clothing, concerning fruit trees, because he is totally God. Maker of heaven and earth and all things therein. Spiritual religion began with the greco romans in the western tradition. The greco romans held that the universe evolved and that spirit was implicitly evil and fallen according neo platonism, and therefore, the life of the spirit was the good life and material life was the bad life.

This would make Satan into a very remarkable and holy person, because Satan is pure spirit. But man, body and soul, is fallen in Adam and body and soul redeemed in Jesus Christ. The word of God therefore speaks to every area of life and this is why we can speak of the world under God’s law.

Our subject this evening is the family under God’s law. I’m going to read a few verses from the ten commandments; we read in Exodus 20:12, “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth to thee.” Verse 14: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Verse 17: “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife; nor his manservant, nor his maidservant; nor his ox, nor his ass; nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.” But again, let us turn back to another commandment, verse 9: “Six days shalt thou labor and do all of thy work, but in the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God, in it thou shalt not do any work. Thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter; thy manservant, nor thy maidservant; nor thy cattle, nor the stranger which is which is within thy gate.”

Now why do I read these? Well, very obviously, you have commandments here that deal with the family. There’s nothing about the church or the state in the ten commandments, but there are four commandments that deal either with the person of the day of the worship of God, we have however a commandment that deals with the family “honor thy father and thy mother”, another “thou shalt not commit adultery”, and another “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, wife, manservant, maidservant, ox, ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s. Three [commandments] that deal with the family! Moreover, since the commandment concerning the Sabbath deals also with work and work in the bible is family oriented - work has as its purpose glorifying God and providing for the household - we can say there are three and a half commandments that deal with the family.

This is an important fact. It makes clear how important the family is in the sight of God. Moreover, the family is the only institution of paradise. God established the family in the garden of Eden. The family, in brief, is God’s basic institution. It is the most important institution in all of scripture. Now, strategically in some times of history other institutions may take a key significance. There are times when the church has been critically more important, I believe in our age especially for the balance of this century - and I shall deal with that in one of our later meetings - the Christian school is the key institution in God purposes for our times, but in every age the central institution in scripture is always the family. As a result we cannot begin to understand god’s plan for us and for the world unless we understand what God has intended the family to do, the family to be.

If you examine the powers given to the family in Biblical law and you can read of them in detail in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, (and you can find an analyses of them in my book Biblical law) you will find a multitude of laws that deal with the family specifically. In fact, the whole of Deuteronomy was given with the family in mind. Moses instructing the people of Israel in how they should instruct their families So that the basic theme of Deuteronomy as it summarizes the law is instruction for the families of God and for the instruction of their children. Virtually all powers that exist are given to the family except one: the death penalty. The death penalty is the only power on earth that God has withheld from the family. And this is why, of course, Cane was not sentenced to death. But we do know from Deuteronomy that if there is a delinquent incorrigible son the family must denounce him, they must participate in the prosecution, they must ally themselves with God’s word, so that it is not blood but the word of the Lord that must govern the family.

We are never allowed, in the scriptures, to say that the family predominates over the word of God, over the law of God. Thus, the parents must take part in the indictment of an incorrigible son. To say that, important as the family is to us emotionally, important as it is in the word of God...it cannot take priority over the Lord and his word. This is a corrective to the evils that humanism has perpetrated. On the one hand we have ancestor worship, one form of humanism which deifies the family, and exalts it above God and the law. On the other hand we have our modern sex revolution which despises the family. Today, unhappily, we have a culture that is anti family. Man is in flight from family life, he is irresponsible. The modern man is content to come home and what he expects out of a house is a place where he can watch TV, have a woman who can do his cooking and share his bed, and look after his children; and that’s about all the responsibility he wants. And he’d rather make it easier on himself and have few children or none at all.

Men have been irresponsible for some generations, and what’s the result? Well, irresponsibility in a family is contagious. From the head of the household manifests it. SO, women have picked up the idea. Women’s (lip?), womens (lib?). What are they trying to do? Imitate the men in irresponsibility. And what are you getting now? Children’s lip! The children’s bill of rights. And it begins with the dereliction of the men. Their lack of responsibility under God, their failure to recognize that their basic responsibility under God is a family responsibility! That they cannot be men of God if they neglect the area that God’s gives more attention too in his ten commandments and throughout his law than to any other area among men. The family outranks church and state in the sight of God, and today the religious instruction, getting the family to church, the concern over the home, is left to the women in too many cases by too many men who claim to be Godly.

But lets survey very tastefully the basic powers of the family that God has placed in the hands of the family. The basic powers of society...the first and most important power in the world. In any social order is control over children. To control children is to control the future, this is why the humanist, the socialist, the communists, the pagans, want control over your children. They want control over them in the schools, they want to control your Christian schools (and we will deal with that in one of our later meetings). Why? Because to control children is to control the future!

Any man who gives his children to the enemies of God - which is what the public schools are - is guilty before God, and God will deal with him. It is a sin. It is a sin. I was invited this past winter to speak at a church...the pastor was an old and dear friend and he asked me to come and baptize his son and then to speak, and I spoke about the responsibility of parents with regard to their children and I said very bluntly that it was a sin to put ones child in the hands of the enemies of God. And I said it’s not only sin but it marks the man as a fool who does it. One of the elders wrote me a very nasty letter in protest, he said, how can you hope to win people if you insult them?

I cited the verses in scripture where our Lord insulted some of pharisees. We cannot give our children to the enemies of God. We cannot give them to a Godless education in which God’s name, God’s word, God’s cause is nothing! Is it any wonder they grow up and think God is irrelevant and God does not have total rights over them? They have been brought up to think of God as something outside of their normal life. This is why every state in the world today is moving to control children; because it wants to control the future. But there is no stability for a child apart from a stable Godly home.

You know, when Kennedy became president he had one great concern, and that was over the extensive amount of segregated education in this country. Everyone looked with anticipation to the commision that was appointed to study education in this country, statist education. And having computers, all kinds of data from every state in the union from the public schools was fed into these computers. It was analysed; the result was the Coleman Report. This is very interesting--they found that there was no difference between the segregated schools and the integrated schools in performance. Everybody had assumed that the black children who were in segregated schools were suffering badly, but they weren’t. There was no correlation.

They found also that there was no correlation between the amount of money spent in a particular district or state and performance, so that whether once they had spent twice as much as the other did not make any difference in educational performance. At every point they found no significant correlation save one, and that was the family. If the family was a stable family, the children were stable and performed well. If the family were broken and unstable, so were the children in school. And they found that something like forty percent of the black children came from unstable homes, and they showed it in school. Those black children who came from stable homes showed it in school--they did well.

They found the same correlation among white children. Those that came from unstable broken homes did badly in school and were problem children. Those who came from stable homes were not. Now, this did not mean that every child who came from a broken home turned out badly and everyone who came from a good home turned out well, but the correlation was so high it was the only area where they could find a significant correlation. This tells us how important in the plan of God the family is for the child. No society can long endure if the institutions therein are undercutting the family, and today, in our society the state and the schools (public schools) are undercutting the family, and sometimes, the churches are as well.

Thus, the first basic power in any society is control over children. God gives it too the family.

The second basic power in any society is over property. Property. In the Bible, properties belongs to the family. The Bible does not have socialistic views of property, neither does the Bible promote the idea of private property! Property is a stewardship from God passed from generation to generation through the family. Remember the story of Ahab? When Ahab wanted to buy his vineyard he regarded it as a sin to sell it! To have wealth to live off of it, because that farm had come to him from his forefathers from the days of Moses. It was not his, it belonged to the family after he was gone for generations to come. This is a very important consideration. Property is not socialist ownership nor private ownership in scripture, but family ownership!

We still have a relic of that in our statute books, although it’s been whittled away. Community property. It belongs to the community. Which community? The family! It’s family property; although we have virtually converted that into the idea of private property, so it doesn’t have it’s biblical meaning except remotely now. But that’s the way the Bible intended it. The family was a whole, a property, as a trust from the Lord.

Which takes us to our third point, inheritance. In the Bible, inheritance is family oriented in terms of the faith. The eldest Godly son, because the people of God were to regard their wealth and their property as a stewardship from the Lord to be passed on through the kingdom of God through the Godly heirs. The eldest Godly son was to receive a double portion. So that if there were three sons two of them received one fourth each and the other received a half. He had responsibility then, to their dying day, to care for his parents. The idea was that wealth, property, was a trust to be used to develop the kingdom of God to pass it on to children who would further Godly work in their areas.

Today of course we knew not in terms of any Godly principle but the pleasure principle! How can I best enjoy life? And ours is perhaps the most unhappy age in history, since the fall of the Roman Empire, because people who try to enjoy life cannot. Pleasure does not come on men's terms but on God's terms. And today of course we see the state seeking to take over children, we see the state trying to take over property and tax it--tax it out of existence. We see the state claiming to be the first born heir, and claiming the double portion before anybody else can touch the estate and saying, ‘forget about your parents, we will give them welfare and relief, we will be the eldest son to them’. And that’s Godless.

Then a fourth basic power of the family is education. The family is the greatest educator under the sun. No one can equal the family. I like to tell mothers that they are the best teachers in the world, that there is no one from kindergarten up through graduate school and the university to equal them and their educating ability! The most difficult task in all of education is routinely accomplished by all mothers without giving it a second thought. It’s to teach a newborn baby, who doesn’t understand a word of any language, the mother tongue. And it’s done in a couple of years very simply and easily. There isn’t a task to equal it in all of education. But it’s done! Done beautifully all the time! The basic attitudes towards life, all the basic learning of a child comes from the family. The family is the great educator.

Moreover the family puts more money into education than the states do--we’re impressed with all the money that the states put into schooling, but actually when you figure out all that Christian schools parents put into their childrens education, and all that parents do across country, and to the college and university and graduate school education of their children, the total of that is far greater than that which the state puts into education. The family has always been the great educator. People fail to appreciate how much the family has done and can do. in the years; the early part of last century when tremendous floods of immigration were doubling the population of this country every few years, those immigrant children were educated by Christians in Christian schools.

Has it ever occured to you why it is that this country is not Catholic today? It should have been with the immigrants, consider the huge wave of Irish immigrants! But do you know that according to a Catholic sociologist most Irishmen in this country are Protestants? And a very large number of them Presbyterians! Why? Well they were taken care of when they arrived here by Christian tithe agencies and Christian schools, and they became Protestants. The Christian schools determined the future of this country for better or worse, and when they evacuated the field to the state a Christian cause in this country began to decline.

Then, a fifth great power of the family is welfare. The family is and has always been the basic welfare institution in society. There are more parents and relatives cared for by the family than by the states and the federal government. And of course, Saint Paul says, he who does not care for his own is worse than an infidel. It’s our duty to care for our own, it’s our duty to care for our parents. It’s one of the powers of the family, one of the privileges of the family! Which God has ordained.

Now I’ve dealt with five basic powers of the family, which are the five basic powers in any society. Control of children, control of wealth, control of inheritance, control of education, control of welfare. And the state has been trying to take over all of those. The state has tried to be an imitation family and it has messed up our society and our world and our children and our lives and taxed us almost out of existence in the Protestants.

You see, we are in a revolutionary age and one of the key revolutions is against the family. This is one reason why you cannot find a decent book anywhere on the Empress Theodora. Now who was the Empress Theodora? Well she was the Empress of the Eastern Roman Empire, or of Byzantium, and the wife of the Emperor Justinian. Are any of you familiar with her story? Well, one of you. Now that’s very interesting because we should know her as one f of the greatest people in all of history. Her life was an amazing one. He father was an animal trainer for the Roman circuses, in the arena. He died when his three daughters - he had three children, they were girls - I think they were something like seven, nine, and eleven. The girls were left without any means of support and were tossed into houses of prostitution at that age!

That’s how Theodora grew up! When she was about eighteen or nineteen a wealthy businessman took her on a business trip to North Africa. She got into an argument with him and he became angry with her and just abandoned her there without anything. She became seriously ill and almost died; a Presbyter took her in and nourished her to health in his own home, and taught her the scriptures, witnessed to her systematically. She was deeply impressed, although she was not converted. She returned to the capital, and there she met a young lawyer. The young lawyer came from from a village some distance away, his parents were very poor, his uncle was a general and he was childless. He had written to his sister and said, ‘you cannot educate your son, why don’t you send him to me and I’ll educate him and adopt him since I’m childless?’ So the young man went to the capitol. He was given a new name; since his uncle’s name was Justin, he was called Justinian.

Justinian, the young struggling student lawyer, and Theodora became acquainted at a party and fell in love. Together they wrestled with some of the ideas and problems of the time and their faith deepened and they both became Christians and then subsequently became married. Meanwhile, the emperor was dying. He too was childless and he knew there might be a civil war after his death, so he called in his old friend the general Justin and adopted him as his son, and his successor. Justin became an emperor. He was an old man so a few years later he died and young Justinian became emperor of Byzantium, and the girl who as a very young child had been tossed into a house of prostitution now became empress of one of the great empires of all history--perhaps the greatest.

Justinian set about revising the entire law of the empire, and Theodora took a hand in it and said I am going to have a say so with regard to family law, to make sure that it follows the law of God strictly! So she had written into the law of the empire that the only kind of sexual relation that would be legal would be marriage. She had written into it that every other form of sexual activity was illegal, against the law and punishable by law. Whether it was adultery or fornication or homosexuality, whatever! Everything other than marital sexual relation. She had written into it again in terms of scripture that only the legitimate child born of a marriage before God could be the heir. In other words, she wrote the Bible into law.

All our Western law has been a product of the work of Theodora! All of history for centuries, virtually, has been a product - so far as the family and it’s life and legal power is concerned - of the work of Theodora. And what we have now is a revolution against God’s word, and against the family, and therefore Theodora is someone you don’t really hear about. And what we do read about her is mostly slander and vicious to the enth degree. But Theodora was right. She felt there was no future for a civilization or for Christendom apart from the family being firmly placed under the word of God. Every time in history that the family has been moved out any degree from Biblical law and from its responsibility to God the whole foundations of civilization begin to crumble.

The family, you see, is extremely important in the sight of God. What does God do when he wants to speak of the importance of the church? He compares it to a family - the household, the family of God. What does God do when he tells us supremely how important he has made us by his grace. He says he has adopted us, that we through Jesus Christ have been adopted into the household of God and are adopted children of God. Over and over again the language of scripture, when it speaks of us and tells us how great God’s grace is, uses the language of scripture. The church is spoken of as the bride of Christ. Sin is compared to adultery.

All of which witnesses to the centrality of the family in the purposes of God. The centrality of the family in the purposes of God. This is why, whatever your calling and mine may be, whether we are called to be high in the world or in the kingdom of God, or placed in a lowly one, the greatest position and the greatest calling we have in Christ is to be fathers and mothers. Three of the ten commandments given to the family, the scripture replete with laws dealing with the family and with the life of the family. The book of Deuteronomy, dealing with the family; Proverbs, interpreting the whole of God’s law for the family, for the child. The great calling. It takes the whole of our lives, it requires us to see what a tremendous responsibility and privilege we have under God to be parents. It is not easy but it is remarkably good and blessed.

The family under God’s law is a blessed family and a privileged life.

Let us pray. Our Lord and our God, be merciful unto us for our blindness. Thou hast made us rich by giving us life and families under thee, and all we think of our poverty. We have been born again rich in Jesus Christ, and been given a great privilege in having husbands, wives, and children, and we take these things for granted and despise our wealth. Open our eyes that we may see how great is thy goodness unto us. How rich and blessed we are in thee. What a position of power is ours as fathers and mothers, and what great things can be done for thy names sake and for thy kingdom in the exercise of our duties as parents.

Open our eyes, our Father, and bless us unto faithfulness to thee in our family lives. In Jesus name, Amen.

Are there are any questions?

Yes?

[audience member speaks unintelligibly]

Well it’s a very specific one. First of all, unless the New Testament specifically says something is abrogated such as the ceremonial law, I don’t believe it is. Because our Lord is very very specific on that. He says, ‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets, I am not come to destroy but to fulfil.” Now the word fulfil, the Greek word that is used means ‘put into force or confirmed. For verily I say unto you, until heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled.’

Now if fulfilled means to be done away with, our Lord would be contradicting himself. He would say, ‘think not that I come to destroy the law. I am not come to destroy but to destroy!’ You see? So it’s there. So unless it is set aside specifically as a ceremonial law - the sacrifices - them we obey them.

Now, even with the sacrifices, I come from a background that still takes them very seriously. I’m an Arminian. I was very interested in your Seattle paper yesterday, it had an article about what’s still going on in Soviet Armenia. Now I know my father told me about it. What is this? Before anyone, any farmer, killed the calf for family use or a lamb or a pig or a chicken he would go to the neighborhood church and kill it there at the place of the door and he would place his hands upon it and he would say, “I know, O Lord, that it is not the blood of cows or of goats which redeems us from sin, but the blood of Jesus Christ our Lord. But as I shed this blood I remember the blood that was shed for me, and I come to give thee thanks.” And then he would divide the animal and leave a portion at the church for the clergy and go home. It’s still done in Soviet Union today, says the article! Of course, I knew it was done because my cousin was over there and he says the farmers still do it. They thumb their noses, so to speak, at the Soviet Union and continue to do it.

I think that’s a beautiful way of showing their respect for God’s law, it’s now a memorial and still honors the clergy. And this was also done in this country.

I spoke at Louisville to the Southern Baptist seminary there about a year ago to some graduate students, all of whom were doing work in some of the country churches out there. It was a graduate student seminar. And I said, this sort of thing was still done as well as gleaning in the United States in some parts. I know some parts of California which, up to World War II, were still having gleaning, and some parts of North Carolina. I said, ‘are any of you familiar with this?’ and a number of them raised their hands. They still get the firstfruits. [audio ends]