Systematic Theology - Church

Laymen and the Church

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 21

Dictation Name: 21 Laymen and the Church

Year: 1960’s – 1970’s

Let us begin with prayer.

Glory be to thee, O God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. We praise thee, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that thou hast, of thy grace and mercy, made all things, made us to be thy people, and set before us such glorious promises in thy word. Make us ever mindful, our Father, that thou hast called us to victory, that thou art he who made all things and shall remake all things, and thou the heathen rage and take counsel and conspire together against thee, it is thy kingdom that shall prevail, for thou dost have them in derision. Thou shalt smite them with a rod of iron, and thou shalt shatter them into pieces. Arm us, therefore, our Father, by thy word and by thy Spirit, for the battle which thou hast ordained is our calling. The battle against the powers that be, against the darkness of this world, against unbelief and humanism, against sin in all its forms. Give us grace this day and always to trust in thee, to hear and obey thy word, and to be faithful in all things. In Jesus name. Amen.

Our scripture today is from 1 Thessalonians 4:1-12, and our subject, Laymen and the Church. “Furthermore then we beseech you, brethren, and exhort you by the Lord Jesus, that as ye have received of us how ye ought to walk and to please God, so ye would abound more and more. For ye know what commandments we gave you by the Lord Jesus. For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication: that every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour; not in the lust of concupiscence, even as the Gentiles which know not God: that no man go beyond and defraud his brother in any matter: because that the Lord is the avenger of all such, as we also have forewarned you and testified. For God hath not called us unto uncleanness, but unto holiness. He therefore that despiseth, despiseth not man, but God, who hath also given unto us his holy Spirit. But as touching brotherly love ye need not that I write unto you: for ye yourselves are taught of God to love one another. And indeed ye do it toward all the brethren which are in all Macedonia: but we beseech you, brethren, that ye increase more and more; and that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you; that ye may walk honestly toward them that are without, and that ye may have lack of nothing.”

When we go to the Greek New Testament, we find that the word used, which is rendered into English as church, is ekklesia, a word which we have in ecclesiastical. Our word, “church” comes from kurios, Lord, or more directly, kyriakon doma, the House of the Lord. It has reference, the word “church” does, to a building or an institution. However, the New Testament word “ecclesia,” which is the same as the Old Testament word which is translated as “gathering, congregation, or assembly,” this in the Septuagint, is gathering, assembly, congregation. It can be a civil, religious, or military gathering. The Lord’s ekklesia, or assembly, can be men meeting for worship. It can be an assembly of the prophets, of princes, rulers of the realm, and of the army of Israel.

When God assembled his people before him at Horeb, that assembly is called, in scripture, a congregation. The church is an assembly gathered together by God through Christ. It is united by a common purpose: to serve the Lord. It has a common faith and a common head. It is made up of the covenant people. These people are the recipients, the channels of God’s real presence on earth. They are soldiers of God against the darkness of this world, against sin in every manifestation. The church thus, is, in its essence, not a building nor an institution, although it can and normally will be both. The covenant people who are faithful will apply the covenant law-word to all of life, to men and nations, and every sphere. These are the church.

Now, to be more specific as to the subject that concerns us today, laymen and the church. The meaning of this, I think, we can understand by dealing first with the chaplaincy. The chaplaincy is a very important institution and one not sufficiently appreciated or understood in our time. In fact, I feel we have a very considerable evil today in that the chaplaincy is very, very often abused. The chaplaincy, a very important aspect of Christ’s ministry, is today all too often regarded by churches in terms that I find difficult to express adequately, but with disrespect. Let me cite two instances in passing.

In the last couple of years, I have twice encountered situations where pastors who are radically incompetent, and one of them emphatically unfit for the ministry or membership in a church, and yet, in the latter case, because he was the son of a prominent pastor within that denomination, the church gave him fulsome recommendations to get him into the chaplaincy. In both cases, the leftovers were given to the chaplaincy. I regard such things with a real anger. A true chaplaincy is a very important thing. In the Bible, the military are often seen as the congregation of the Lord, a church on the march. A true chaplaincy has, as its function, to make the army godly insofar as it is possible, but modern man has a view of the army which is radically false, and as a result, his view of the chaplaincy therefore, is false.

We need a chaplaincy because the world, the army, the people who are on the frontlines of the world need the ministry of Christ. The meaning of the chaplaincy is that we cannot withdraw God from the world of national defense, from the world of very grim realities such as war. We cannot withdraw God from the world of the army, or the world at large, and bring God into the walls of the church, because then we’d lose him.

Now, this means that the church must be in the real world, and we can best understand the work of the laymen in the church if we see laymen as a chaplaincy into the world at large. The real world out there is where the church belongs. A layman does not leave the church when he walks out of the building. He is a part of the church, and he must carry Christ into his vocation, into his family, into every aspect of his life. So the role of the layman in the church is as a chaplaincy to the world. Every man in scripture is an elder over his family.

A few months ago when we were dealing with the office of elder, we saw that every man in scripture is required to be an elder, a head of his household, and that out of every ten elders, one becomes a head over the ten, then a head over fifty, hundreds, thousands, and so on up, and in Israel, there was a counsel of seventy elders who made up the Sanhedrin, and we saw how originally, in early Christian Europe, the College of Cardinals was made up exclusively of laymen, laymen who were elders and who governed the church. As a matter of fact, laymen in the College of Cardinals persisted up to about two hundred years ago, or less. Although they had, for centuries, been not as common, but every man is an elder. The pastor is a teacher, and normally and historically in many communions, he is not even a member of the congregation he serves. The government of the congregation is in the hands of the laymen. The pastor is simply brought in as a teacher who is to instruct the laymen in what their calling and duty is.

Thus, the essence of the layman’s life in the church is that they are a chaplaincy to the world, a ministry, a dominion ministry. To go out and to establish godly principles of life in their homes, in their callings, in every area of life. In politics, economics, agriculture, the sciences, everything. I believe that we are beginning to see a dramatic rise in this concept of the role of the layman.

One of the things that delighted me was a bank loan officer in Texas who, when anyone applied for a loan, sat down with him first and said, “Now, the biblical standard is that a loan be for six years only. We do not have the right under God to mortgage our future indefinitely. Now, if you want a long-term loan, I’m here to grant it to you. The Bible says those who are slaves are not going to be living a life of freedom, and a debt-free life, or a short-term debt means freedom,” and he would give them the statistics on how much interest they were paying in a long-term debt. Well, he upset a lot of bank officers and a lot of people when he spelled out to them what God requires in his calling, and what God expects godly people to do, but it was a tremendous ministry, and the fact is that people have picked up on that. This is the meaning of a lay ministry, a chaplaincy, to establish God’s saving power, his righteousness and justice, his reign in every area of life and thought.

Now, of course, evangelism is the basic task of the church, but there can be no effective evangelism if the application of the faith is lacking in the life of a people. Paul tells us that we are to be members one of another, that we are to be a family. This means that a congregation, an assembly, a church must care for the sick, for the elderly, for the needy, for the troubled. They are to be members one of another.

As a matter of fact, the early church not only took care of its own to the point that it upset the Romans to see these people as a government amongst themselves, but they would reach out, as I have mentioned on other occasions, and go for the abandoned babies, because babies that were unwanted were abandoned in Rome under the bridges, and in different cities, in different places, to be eaten by animals, including wild dogs, and Christians would go around and pick them up, and parcel them out. It made the church very powerful, because people knew there was a difference in these people.

This is the kind of ministry the early church had. Visitation of those in need, and of one another. In the parable of judgment in Matthew 25:31-46, our Lord in that parable speaks to the people who, on Judgment Day, are going to present themselves to his as Christians, ready to go to heaven, and he said, “I was sick, in prison, naked, hungry, thirsty and you did not visit me. Lord, when saw we thee in such a condition? Inasmuch as you have not it unto the least of these my brethren, you have not don’t it unto me.” So, our Lord there is telling every member, it’s not just the work of the pastor, it’s the work of all of us. This is why the deacons were established very early in the life of the church, to organize the congregation in a ministry to every need within it.

When Paul, in 1 Corinthians 11 deals with the abuses at communion services which, in the early church were love feasts, and he said, “You bring your food and you sit with your own, and you eat your own food because you feel somebody else hasn’t brought anything as good, and you stay in your own cliques,” and he said, “And you call that communion. You are not members one of another.”

Thus, Paul says to have communion means to be a community, to be members one of another. Paul declares in 1 Corinthians 10:17, “For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread.” Now, Paul goes on to speak then about the family life, and its relationship to the life of the church, and he says, and this is a very that is often cited, “Let the women learn in silence with all subjection,” 1 Timothy 2:11. But what does it mean? People stop there, but Paul went on to say, “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” Now, what is the thrust of Paul’s statement with regard to women? We’ll be dealing with the work of women in the church because there is a great deal on that in scripture, but this particular point, they are not to challenge the authority of men, and they are to be silent where teaching and the usurpation of authority is concerned. Now, how does a woman usurp authority, which Paul says a man is as a layman in the church, to put a stop to, not to permit? Well, Paul tells us elsewhere that much trouble in churches is created by tensions between women, one woman disliking another, and trying to influence her husband in that regard. Now, this is a usurpation, because what the woman is doing is instead of keeping silent about things that are purely personal and not a part of the life of the faith of the community, and she is saying, “My personal feelings about Mrs. So-and-So are going to influence you, my husband, and through you, the church,” and Paul is forbidding this, and a man is to be judged if he allows his wife to do this to him.

The requirement of church officers, and of all men, is stated over and over again: ruling their children and their own houses well. So, what does Paul have to say then about laymen? In our scripture, very specifically, he says, “The will of God for you, all of you, is your sanctification, your growth in holiness,” and then he spells it out, it’s a very practical thing. It’s not a lot of spiritual exercises, being able to say, “I was on my knees so many hours,” or “I submitted to this or that spiritual discipline,” or “I went to this or that Bible conference, or retreat.” Not at all. When Paul spells it out, God’s will for us, our sanctification, our growth in holiness, is very practical.

He then goes out to spell out some aspects of it. He says this beings in your marital lives. It means sexual purity. Paul does not permit the casual attitude toward sex offenses which was commonplace in the Greco/Roman world as it is today. Those days, everything including homosexuality was, by the culture of the times, treated as nothing. Paul does not permit this. He is emphatic that the only kind of illicit or permitted sexuality is within marriage.

Then, he says that no man should go beyond the bounds of God’s law and defraud his brother in any matter, because the Lord is the avenger of all such, for God hath called us not unto uncleanness but unto holiness. So, Paul says, Christians are to be Christians one to another. They cannot defraud, or take advantage, of one another, and that’s all too prevalent today, and Paul says God is the avenger of all such, and then he uses a very interesting word when he says, “God hath not called us unto uncleanness.” The word “uncleanness” in the Greek is akatharsia which has usually reference to perversions, sexual matters. So, Paul is saying anyone who takes advantage of a fellow Christian and cheats him, or defrauds him, or mistreats him is like a sexual pervert. It’s a form of perversion. So Paul is very harsh on unchristian dealings amongst Christians.

Then, he says that men are to live honestly and quietly, industriously. They are to manifest brotherly love, one towards another. They are to be a family in Christ, and to study to be quiet and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you. Now, Paul there is harkening right back to the Old Testament and Old Testament practice. One of the things summed up among the Hebrews of the Old Testament era in a proverbs was that if you did not teach your son the law of God, and to work with his hands, you taught him to be a thief. So, the requirement was that every man teach his son how to work, and to know the law of God, or else it was tantamount to teaching him to be a thief. Paul is referring to that fact, to that old Hebrew proverb.

As a matter of fact, that Hebrew proverb was carried into the life of th4e church, because it did sum up the Old Testament teaching for fathers. Teach your child the law, the word of God, the law of God, and how to work with his hands, and that created tremendous movements within the Christian church. Not only within the sphere of the family, but did you know that many of the Medieval, monastic orders were premised on that faith, and that the Puritans subsequently picked it up and made it basic to the Puritan way of life?

Paul goes on to say they are to live to gain God’s blessing and they will have lack of nothing, and there, of course, he is echoing such passages of scripture as Deuteronomy 28:1-14, that if we are faithful to God and we keep his law-word, we will be pursued and overtaken by God’s blessings so that we cannot escape them, and Paul is saying the same thing. So it will be with you, and so, Paul says, “What is your work, you Thessalonians, you men of Thessalonica? Why, it is to manifest God’s law and God’s requirements in the family, in your relationship to your children and to your work, and your calling, to your wife, to everything you come into contact with. Then, when you do this, what happens? You will also walk honestly toward them that are without. You will then be someone who is a commendation to the faith, to all those with whom you come into contact.” And the result will be that the life of the faith will commend itself to the world because it is important.

You know we are told by church history that one of the things that the Greco/Roman world commented about with regard to the early church was these Christians really love one another. They care for one another, and they reach out even to take care of some of our own. That was the biggest advertisement for the faith that you can imagine. It commended itself to the world, and no slander that Rome invented about the early church could overcome that fact. They were impressive because of the way they lived, and of course, this is what our Lord requires of us. When he was asked what the duty of man is, he said, “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.” This is the requirement of our Lord for all believers. It is the essence of the life of faith, and the life of the church. Laymen are to be a chaplaincy unto the whole world, and the church is simply the training place where the pastor, teaches them and says, “Our Lord summons us to go into all the world and to our corner of it, as well as the far places, and wherever we are, there we are to manifest the life of Christ. This is the chaplaincy of the laymen. Let us pray.

O Lord, our God, thy word is truth, and thy word spells out the way of victory, the way of peace and prosperity. Give us grace, O Lord, to unleash the power of thy word in this our generation, in our hearts, in our lives, in our fellowship, and in the world at large, to the end that the kingdoms of this world might become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ. Bless us to this purpose. In Jesus name. Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? No questions today? Well then, let us conclude with prayer.

Lord, it has been good for us to be here. We rejoice in thee, in thy word, and in one another. We thank thee that thy Spirit is ever with us, to guide us, to bless us, and to draw us ever closer to thee. Make us ever joyful in thee, in thy word, and thy kingdom. In Jesus name. Amen.

End of tape