Systematic Theology - Church

Authority

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 16

Dictation Name: 16 Authority

Year: 1960’s – 1970’s

Let us bow our heads now in prayer.

O Lord our God, unto whom all flesh shall come, we give thanks unto thee that in a world filled with trouble and grief, with wars and rumors of wars, we have the blessed assurance that Jesus Christ is Lord, that he is King of kings, and Lord of lords, and that it is he and his kingdom that shall prevail. Give us grace and faith to walk day by day in the blessed assurance that greater is he that is with us than he that is in the world. Bless us now as we give ourselves to the study of thy world, that we may behold wondrous things our of thy law, and that we may be more than conquerors through Jesus Christ our Lord. In his name we pray. Amen.

Our subject today is Authority, and our scripture is Numbers 16:1-15. The entire chapter is given over to an incident, one of the most important in the Bible, relating to authority. “Now Korah, the son of Izhar, the son of Kohath, the son of Levi, and Dathan and Abiram, the sons of Eliab, and On, the son of Peleth, sons of Reuben, took men: and they rose up before Moses, with certain of the children of Israel, two hundred and fifty princes of the assembly, famous in the congregation, men of renown: and they gathered themselves together against Moses and against Aaron, and said unto them, Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them: wherefore then lift ye up yourselves above the congregation of the Lord?

And when Moses heard it, he fell upon his face: and he spake unto Korah and unto all his company, saying, Even to morrow the Lord will shew who are his, and who is holy; and will cause him to come near unto him: even him whom he hath chosen will he cause to come near unto him. This do; Take you censers, Korah, and all his company; and put fire therein, and put incense in them before the Lord to morrow: and it shall be that the man whom the Lord doth choose, he shall be holy: ye take too much upon you, ye sons of Levi.

And Moses said unto Korah, Hear, I pray you, ye sons of Levi: seemeth it but a small thing unto you, that the God of Israel hath separated you from the congregation of Israel, to bring you near to himself to do the service of the tabernacle of the Lord, and to stand before the congregation to minister unto them? And he hath brought thee near to him, and all thy brethren the sons of Levi with thee: and seek ye the priesthood also? For which cause both thou and all thy company are gathered together against the Lord: and what is Aaron, that ye murmur against him?

And Moses sent to call Dathan and Abiram, the sons of Eliab: which said, We will not come up: is it a small thing that thou hast brought us up out of a land that floweth with milk and honey, to kill us in the wilderness, except thou make thyself altogether a prince over us? Moreover thou hast not brought us into a land that floweth with milk and honey, or given us inheritance of fields and vineyards: wilt thou put out the eyes of these men? we will not come up.

And Moses was very wroth, and said unto the Lord, Respect not thou their offering: I have not taken one ass from them, neither have I hurt one of them.”

Now, authority is not a popular subject in our time. Our day is marked by very contradictory trends. On the one hand, we have a strong authoritarian and totalitarian trend, which is clearly ungodly, and on the other, we have a widespread breakdown of authority. The two are related. Wherever God-ordained authority is denied, totalitarianism and anarchism prevail. Every man becomes his own god, and every man is lawless. It ends up with the powerful exerting false authority, and the weak reacting with lawlessness.

Now, one of the key doctrines of the church is the priesthood of all believers. In our Journal of Christian Reconstruction for the Summer of 1979, I wrote a study of this very important doctrine. It is based on the Old Testament. It is very strongly affirmed, for example, in Exodus 19:6 and Isaiah 61:6. The New Testament, of course, simply repeats and reemphasizes the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers.

Now, one of the great rebellions of the Old Testament era was over this doctrine. This is what this chapter is about. The rebellion of Korah and other Levites on the one hand, and Dathan and other Reubanites had, as its basic tenant, the assertion of the priesthood of all believers. Men can use a godly doctrine to assert an ungodly claim. As Orwell pointed out, slavery in the modern world, on the political scene is advanced under the banner of freedom. The Levites rejected the prior authority of the house of Aaron. The Reubenites rejected the prior authority of any tribe over them. Both used the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers to assert any quality of authority in the congregation of the Lord, in both church and state. Now there is a difference between priesthood and authority, a very important difference.

This rebellion was led, first of all, by Korah and Dathan, but it did include a great many leaders in all of Israel. We are told that there were 250 princes of the assembly, famous in the congregation, men of renown. Thus, the rebellion had deep, popular roots.

Then second, as Moses very rightly saw, they were gathered together against the Lord. They blamed their failure to enter the promise land on Moses, not on their sins. They applied the term “a land flowing with milk and honey” to Egypt, the place of slavery, rather than to Canaan as was normally done. They saw their slavery as ideal and they revolted against freedom in the name of democracy. The priesthood of all believers being a pretext for it. In other words, they challenged authority in church and in state. God met them with judgment.

We are told that the earth opened to swallow some, fire killed others, and plague the rest. Because their rebellion was against God, God judged them. These were leaders of the people. These were people who should have been rulers and judges, but because they were rebellious, there was no one to judge them and so God did, and again and again in history we see this fact. When the leadership becomes corrupt, who is to judge? Then only God can judge.

I recall some few years ago being at a table. I was the nobody because these were very important men in the world of finance, and they were discussing the problems they had to face, and one of them made this statement, and no one disagreed. He said, “You know, to do business today you deal with two vicious groups. The Mafia and the federal government with all its regulations.” And he said, “Of the two, I think the federal government is the more vicious and I’m more afraid of them.” That shocked me, and it shocked me that none of them disagreed. They all nodded. That’s a fearful fact. What it tells us is, that when a nation reaches that point, either there is a grassroots revival and a reawakening of faith, or God is going to judge the leadership, and that’s what we face. Either the people are going to change, or God is going to judge, beginning with Washington D.C. Moses was right. The people were gathered together against the Lord, and where rulers are corrupt, God intervened with his judgment.

Then third, we see that the basic premise of the revolt was the equal authority of all the people. They affirmed the priesthood of all believers. All the congregation are holy, everyone of them, and the Lord is among them, they said. This is true, but they used a truth for false purposes. There is a difference between priesthood and authority. The priesthood is common to all believers. The essence of priesthood is that a priest dedicates himself and all that he represents, to God. Moreover, basic to priesthood is access to God. Now, every atoned man has access to God. Every man who is a believer is called to dedicate himself to the Lord. When we examine the Old Testament priesthood, there is no governing power over men and the priests, apart from the matter of atonement, of approaching the sanctuary. The prophets had authority, and the ministry in Western Christendom is derived as much from the Levites and the prophets as from anything. It is interesting that the Eastern churches follow closer to the Old Testament tradition, which was done away with, and there, the priests have virtually no authority.

Now, the distinction between priesthood and authority is important to grasp. Let’s put it on a very simple level. A child can pray to God. A child should pray to God. He has access. If he believes, he can and should pray, but this does not mean that because he can pray to God he has equal authority with his parents. He does not. Priesthood and authority are two separate spheres. As a matter of fact, the Old Testament does a great deal to insist on the learning of the child so that he may know the meaning of the atonement of priesthood, but at the same time, know the authority of his parents. We read in Exodus 21:17, “And he that curseth his father or mother shall surely be put to death.” In the Old Testament, the family is the basic institution, and anything that strikes at the family is treason to society. There is no treason to the state in the Old Testament, or in the Bible anywhere. Treason is to the family, and this is what people don’t understand when they say, “These are such weird laws, the laws dealing with the place of the child and with adultery. We can’t take them seriously.” Of course they don’t, because to them, the state is more important than the family, and God says the family is basic.

Now, both priesthood and authority are God-given. One cannot be used to set aside the authority of the other. In our modern world, contempt for godly authority is seen as a mask of intellectual and religious freedom. As a result, every church faces a crisis. Godly authority is replaced by false authority under the banner of freedom. Contempt of freedom beginning in the family is routine in our society. Children learn it the minute they go to public schools, to feel independent of their parents.

One of the things that horrified me when I was in the university was the fact the kind of papers that would be assigned to students, to write a critical paper on this or that in Shakespeare. Now, I’m not a fan of Shakespeare’s, I think he’s a very great dramatist and a remarkable poet. I don’t like his boot-licking attitude towards the Tudor monarchy, because he wrote a number of plays which glorified that evil line, the worst of which was Richard III in which he vilified a really good king whom the Tudors had replaced, but that’s beside the point. The point is, I was a reader in the English department, and I was grading papers by students who should never have been let out of bonehead English who were being asked to sit in judgment on Shakespeare, and on Milton, and on Ben Johnson, and others. Is it any wonder we have problems in our world when incompetence, non-entities who don’t have the intelligence to see what is good are told, “Write a paper critiquing so-and-so.” It leads to a contempt for excellence, and a contempt for authority, every man a little god passing judgment on everything, beginning with his parents, and certainly passing judgment on God.

But on the other hand, we do have a great deal of ungodly authoritarianism, no question about it. We’re surrounded with a world in which there is a great deal of ungodly authority. How do we contend against such an evil? We content lawfully in terms of God’s law. For example, Exodus 20:12 says, “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the earth in the land which thy God has given thee.” Honor, even where with maturity or where there is sin involved, obedience is not to be given. Honor is still mandatory, and this is true in every realm. We are told to honor rulers, not always to obey them, because unconditional obedience belongs to God alone. All human authorities, we are commanded by Paul in Romans 13, to obey for conscience sake. We obey rulers. We obey authorities in the church. We obey parents, employers, for conscience sake. That is, in obedience to God, because he requires it unless it’s a transgression of his law.

The Apostolic principle as given in Acts 5:29 is we ought to obey God rather then men. Modern rebellion is against authority, and it is destructive. It is not productive. Where the Apostles were disobedient to Caesar, it was a constructive disobedience, because it was faithfulness to Almighty God. As Moses said, “What is Aaron that ye murmur against him?” Aaron’s authority was slight. It did not diminish the authority of a single prince in all of Israel, but what Aaron clearly set forth in his priesthood was the holiness, the dominion, and the separateness of God. What the rebels could not tolerate in Moses or Aaron was the hierarchy of powers which God has ordained over men. It is interesting that, in this rebellion of Numbers 16, these men were rulers rebelling against Moses and Aaron. They weren’t saying, “Let those under us have equal power with us.” They never said that. They were ruling over the two million men of Israel, say three hundred of them, but they never said, “Let those under us have equal authority.” “No, let there be none above us. No power above us.”

Too often, the demand for equality is a façade for oligarchy and autocracy, and the lawless demand for freedom usually precedes slavery. Authority is a fact of life. If parents had no authority, life would perish. Employers must have authority over their employees. The captain over a ship must have authority over the stokers{?}. To deny authority is ultimately to affirm death. As Proverbs 8:36 says, “He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul. All they that hate me love death.” We have a death-oriented culture, a society that loves death.

We have a world in which all too many love to affirm their supremacy by attacking all authority. No one is good enough for them to accept or submit to in their pride, and they delight to find fault in others as a way of proving their own righteousness, but we can never become righteous by means of criticism, only by faithfulness to the Lord. All authority comes from God alone, and where God endows people with authority, we must respect that authority. All obedience is ultimately to God, although sometimes to men because he appoints them over us. Authority collapses under humanism, because humanism makes every man his own God, and we should remember this, in humanism, men as our Lord said, love to lord it over others. He said, “Be not as the Gentiles are who love to lord it over people. It shall not be so among you.” Because authority in scripture means responsibility, the greater the authority, the greater the responsibility. “To whom much is given of him, much shall be required,” and so godly authority is important because it means godly responsibility. The authority of Moses and Aaron was greater than that of any simple herdsman in one of the tribes, but the responsibility of Aaron and Moses was also greater, and more important for the life of the Hebrew commonwealth. Their authority and their responsibilities affected more people. Authority gives only godly privileges and it gives and requires even greater responsibilities. Let us pray.

O Lord our God, we thank thee that thou hast given to each of us in our place, authority, responsibilities, tasks to perform under thee and according to thy word. Make us faithful in the discharge of our duties to thee, and to those over us, that we may be workmen approved by thee. Bless each of us in our family life, that we may there establish thy authority, and develop it in terms of thy word. Grant us this, we beseech thee, in Jesus name. Amen.

Are there any questions now, in terms of our subject? Yes?

[Audience] I don’t fully understand the command to obey authority for conscience sake.

[Rushdoony] Yes, what Paul means, that our conscience is to be governed by God, not by man, and therefore, when he commands us to obey for conscience sake, he means a conscience governed by God and his word. Today, men are not governed by conscience in the biblical sense, but by peer pressure. That is, what is the group that I’m involved with doing? What are they thinking? It’s called group dynamics, to respond to what the group is doing rather than to God. About 1950 we began to see the turn in this country, and in a book written then by a team of sociologists, Reeseman{?} and others, I’ve forgotten the title, the point was very emphatically made that we had moved from a inner-directed, conscience-directed people to a group-oriented, group-governed people. Any other questions or comments?

Well, if not, let us conclude with prayer.

We thank thee, our Father, for our time together. We pray for thy blessing upon those of our fellowship who are ill or are away. Give them traveling mercies as they journey homeward. We thank thee for one another. We thank thee that underneath all the experiences of life are thine everlasting arms, that we live, and move, and have our being in thee. Great and marvelous are thy ways, O Lord, and we praise thee. In Jesus name. Amen.

End of tape