Miscellaneous

Understanding Our Crisis (part 2)

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, and Sermons

Lesson: 2-2

Genre: Talk

Track: 2

Dictation Name: RR331A2

Location/Venue:

Year: 1985

…to the sea voyage you had another set of Gods in the Greco Roman world, Castor and Pollux. In other words, there was no sovereign Lord over all things. And Marshal Foster told you the problem he had when he set up the foundation. Do you know what his critics were? They were Polytheists. They believed in many Gods. They believed that Jesus Christ is Lord over the church, but not over the state, nor over the school, nor the arts and sciences, or the universities.

But if the God of scripture is the God He declares Himself to be, His word is: “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.” In other words, ‘My word applies over the church and over the family, over your business life, in your sexual life, your political life and your economic life. There is no area where you can escape me and my government and my word.’

As the Psalmist said: “Though I make my bed in hell, behold Thou art there.” God’s government. God’s word. God’s presence is everywhere, and every area of life and thought must be brought under the kingship of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ.

Well, today we are in a crisis. My subject is Understanding our Crisis. I’ve said enough to indicate that we do have a crisis. Now let me look at another aspect of the crisis, the Humanists are in crisis. The world of the humanist is falling apart. Solzhenitsyn not too long ago said that in the Soviet Union nobody believes in Communism any longer, and the problem in the United States is that too many do.

Everywhere in the world, humanism is falling apart. Some of you who have heard me before know that I have stressed the fact that we are living in the darkest age of history, and in the bloodiest stage of history. A higher percentage of mankind has died in the twentieth century than ever before, due to war, revolution, slave labor camps, persecution, famine, and so on. Man created ills.

Incidentally the term ‘Dark Age’ was a term coined by the early church to describe any and every place and period in history that is outside of Jesus Christ. The United States is right now a Dark Age, because it is outside of Jesus Christ.

Humanism is in crisis, it is falling apart all over the world, in Moscow, London, Paris, Cairo, Jerusalem, Washington D.C. and elsewhere. It is coming closer and closer to a bloody end. As a result it is moving frantically, hastily, to kill off the only opposition it fears: the true church of Jesus Christ. And hence the persecutions; all over the world they have been stepped up. They are more intense in the Soviet Union today than they have ever been. One of the people on our mailing list, a Hebrew Christian Pastor in Israel has told of the mobs that have broken up his Bible study meeting, and of being taken in terms of the law of last year January, to a police station in the middle of the night, accused of illegal activity, that is preaching the gospel. And in one country after another, including our own, though these attempts are unpublicized there is an attempt legally to suppress and destroy the word of God and Christian faith. Humanism is falling apart, and it feels that its best chance for survival is to kill off the opposition, precisely because now as never before in the past few centuries, Christian faith is on the march. Do you realize that the humanists believe with good reasons on the basis of statistics that if they do not wipe out the Christian school movement soon, by the end of this century less than 21 years away, all the children of this country will be in Christian schools, believing the Bible from cover to cover.

Next Wednesday I will be in Nebraska to be a witness in a trial of a Christian school. Its only fault is that it is better than the public schools. There is a persecution underway. The enemy recognizes that unless they defeat us, they are finished.

But meanwhile the church needs to wake up. So much of its preaching is irrelevant. You see, the word of God is not an abstract word, it is a word that speaks to our day. We read in the Bible that the preachers of the word confronted the men who were in sin, and said: “Thou art the man.” What is wrong with the preachers in Washington that none says when Jimmie Carter comes in: “Thou art the man.” Or with others who do not say that to the senators and the governors, who are instead honored with all their godlessness when they walk into a church.

You see, it was the essence of the Puritans that they spoke to the issues in terms of the word of God. Do you know that before every election in this country for generations, election sermons were preached? Why? To tell people what the word of God had to say concerning the problems they were confronting, so that they might in Civil Government apply the word of God and the kingship of Jesus Christ. They never saw, you see, scripture as something abstract and purely spiritual. They were not Polytheists, they believed in terms of scripture that God is the God of the spiritual and the material, the ecclesiastical and the political, the economic and the scientific, and of every other realm. He is the Lord.

You see, today because we deny the sovereignty of God, we have the doctrine of the sovereignty of the state; because we deny that God is the Lord, we have totalitarianism; and totalitarianism is simply the claim after Hegel that the state is God walking on the earth, Lord over all things. Some of you are familiar with my book, The Messianic Character of American Education. I call attention in that book to the fact that John Dewey said that Democracy and Christianity were incompatible, and sooner or later one or the other would have to go. Why? Because Democracy believes in equality, and Christianity believes in inequality; heaven and hell, the saved and the lost, right and wrong.

James Bryant Conant went even further. He said the family is an aristocratic and anti democratic institution, and it will have to go also. And that is the point of this year, the international year of the child; it is dedicated to the destruction of the family, the Biblical family.

Now the question that confronts our time is simply this: Who is the Lord? And who has the all-encompassing word that speaks to every area of life and thought? Christ or Caesar? Who has the binding and the final word? The Supreme Court or the Triune God? Christ or the State? Who ordains law? Who establishes good and evil? God or man?

You see, all problems are at root religious. Man is not a rational animal, or a political animal according to Aristotle, nor a social animal according to our sociologists. He is a religious creature, made by God in His own image. So that in every fiber of our being we are God’s creation. As Augustine said: “Our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.”

Our problem thus is always religious, and we have on the one hand false religion with its open hostility to the every word of God. Humanism, occultism, Eastern cults, and so on. Or we have a limited religious which claims to be Christianity, and it gives us a smorgasbord approach to the Bible.

Now it’s not that I don’t like a smorgasbord, I like smorgasbords, where food is concerned. But not where the Lord is concerned. The Bible is not a smorgasbord book. It is a binding book, every word of it, and it speaks to us, and to the totality of our lives.

And of course, another area of false religion is humanistic religion in the church. People going to a church in terms of: “What has my church done for me? Or for my family?” Reducing the church to a social center, with a focus on man and not the Lord’s calling and His will.

In other words, what I am trying to get out as I deal with this crisis this morning is really the principle of tithing. What the principle of tithing tells us is that everything belongs to the Lord, and therefore the Lord can tell us how to use it, how much to give to Him, how much to use for ourselves, and how to use it. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and all they that dwell therein.” So what the Lord says in tithing as in everything in scripture is that He is the Lord, and that we are His possession. One of the meanings of the word Lord, ‘kurios’ in the Greek, is not only God by absolute property owner. Absolute property owner; the earth is the Lords and the fullness thereof. We are His, doubly His by creation and recreation in Christ. And so everything we are and have, and can be, is His. He determines the disposition of our lives.

Now man wants this power for himself, he wants to give himself to the Lord, and then set the ratio for God as to how of him God can have. Now the whole point of the book of Judges is again applicable in our day, the theme verse repeated again and again in the book of Judges is: “In those days there was no king in Israel” that is, God was not recognized as king, “and every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” The world is the same today. And the result is that the world is falling apart, it is in crisis, and nothing can alter that crisis or redirect history except the Lord and men who move in terms of His word and in His Spirit, and by His power. The word still stands: except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.

What is your life, and what kind of building are you involved in? Let us pray.

Almighty God our heavenly Father as we face the crisis of our time, we thank Thee that Thou art on the throne, and no man in Moscow or Washington moves a step apart from Thee and Thy holy purpose. Oh Lord our God, make us Thy instruments, fill us with Thy Spirit and Thy power that we may go forth as more than conquerors, that we may make this day of crisis a time of opportunity, reaching men, women and children, institutions, churches, civil governments, every area of life and thought with the power of the gospel, with Thy sovereign and binding word; so that all things may serve Thee and magnify Thy holy name. Bless us to this purpose we beseech Thee, in Jesus name, amen.