Systematic Theology – Authority

Satanic Authority

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 16 of 19

Track: #16

Year:

Dictation Name: 16 Satanic Authority

[Rushdoony] Let us worship God. Serve the Lord with gladness, come before his presence with singing, enter into His gates with thanksgiving and into His courts with praise. Be thankful unto Him and bless His name, for the Lord is good, His mercy is everlasting, and His truth endureth to all generations. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God unto whom all things shall render praise in due time. Life up our hearts now unto Thee in love and adoration, give us grace to justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with Thee all the days of our life. We thank thee for the glory of this creation, and for the greater glory of Thy promises unto us in Jesus Christ. Give us grace so to walk day by day that we might show forth unto all men that we are heirs of salvation, and children of Thy kingdom. In Jesus name, amen.

Our scripture is from the twenty-second chapter of Luke, Luke 22 verses 50-53. Our subject is satanic authority, satanic authority. Luke 22:50-53

“50 And one of them smote the servant of the high priest, and cut off his right ear.

51 And Jesus answered and said, Suffer ye thus far. And he touched his ear, and healed him.

52 Then Jesus said unto the chief priests, and captains of the temple, and the elders, which were come to him, be ye come out, as against a thief, with swords and staves?

53 When I was daily with you in the temple, ye stretched forth no hands against me: but this is your hour, and the power of darkness.”

The word translated in the last sentence as power is the word we’ve considered again and again in the past few months, exousia, which means power and authority. What our Lord here says is that Satan has legitimate authority for his action against Jesus Christ, and he tells those who came to arrest Him “this is your hour, and the hour of the power, of the authority, of the realm, the kingdom, of darkness.” Repeatedly this expression is used, the expression concerning the exousia, the authority of darkness, of Satan.

For example Paul in Colossians 1:13 & 14 gives thanks to God the Father who delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of His dear Son; in whom we have redemption, through His blood, even the forgiveness of sins. Again we have that same word and we have it repeatedly and yet our Lord says before His ascension, all power all authority in heaven and earth is given unto me so that Christ with His resurrection was King of kings and Lord of lords, and yet under Him by His permission Satan has legitimate authority.

On the other hand we are told by Paul, in these words in Colossians 1:13 & 14 that we who are believers have been delivered from the authority of darkness, the realm, the rule, the kingdom of darkness. We have been translated by God into kingdom of His dear son. The word translated is a word in the Greek which means changed or removed from one standing to another, from one legal status to another, so that now we have a new citizenship and we are under another king. No longer citizens of the kingdom of Satan but members and citizens of the kingdom of Christ. Christ by His atonement has translated, has changed us, to a new standing before God.

Now we have here a fact of very great importance. First we have the clearly legitimate authority of Satan and his kingdom. We live in it, it is all around us and we need to understand its authority. Any authority that denies Jesus Christ is a part of the kingdom of darkness, of the kingdom of Satan; so you know what you’re looking at when you look at the politics of our day, of party after party around the world. Some are more bold and brazen about their membership in that kingdom, but they are a part of it. Yet we are told by Peter and the apostles in Acts 5:29 we ought to obey God rather than men. Yet at the critical points they were also respectful of evil authorities, while standing firmly on their God-given ground. Thus we live in two realms, not an easy thing to do. We’re in the kingdom of darkness and the kingdom of Satan, and I submit in every county and in every state in this country and the world over, whatever their particular governmental divisions are, you will see an organized, and vicious murderous form. This evil kingdom with legitimate authority; I know that I have not lived anywhere were I did not see it.

The premise of that realm, Satan’s realm, is Genesis 3:5 - ye shall be as God, every man his own God, knowing, determining for yourself, what constitutes good and evil; every man his own source of law, every unit its own lawmaker with full contempt for God’s law. The essence of sin is that it is anti-God, and John tells us in 1 John 3:4 that sin is the transgression of the law, God’s law, that’s what sin is about. If you deny God’s law you’ve denied ultimately sin, and then you begin to substitute wishy-washy sentimental clichés for the law of God and for the doctrine of sin, and you begin to soft-pedal the significance of sin, and you detach it (by the way) from the sinner; that you should hate the sin and love the sinner. Well sin isn’t something in the abstract, it’s what a person is and does, so how can you take and detach the sin from the sinner and say “well there was stealing, but there was no thief?” Now of course Islam does that, they do not say that “I lost my watch” that is a doctrine of responsibility they do not adhere to, “the watch of Mohammed Ali has lost itself” and that’s the kind of thinking we get all around us now. Love the sinner and hate the sin, as though there’s a difference, there is none. Sin is the transgression of the law, God’s law, by an individual who is a sinner, who wants to move against God’s law. That’s the appeal of the sin; it is the defiance of God’s law. The appeal of illicit sexuality is its sinfulness, the prevalence of homosexuality and of incense and the growing emphasis, as in San Francisco in some circles, on bestiality indicates how far men are ready to go in their defiance of God.

On the other hand the premise of the kingdom of Christ is our change and our removal to that realm by Christ redeeming blood atonement, by the forgiveness of sins. To be in that realm is to be a member of Jesus Christ and even as in the first temptation we have the premise of the kingdom of darkness. “Ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.” So in the great temptation of Christ in the wilderness, from the paradise now the world has been turned into wilderness, and Satan says “justify me, agree that I was right” and our Lord gives three answers, one to each of the temptations, each premised with the authority of the Bible, the word of God; it is written, it is written, it is written. And what He tells him is “man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” And second “thou shalt not tempt the Lord Thy God.” You shall not put God to the test; you will not demand that God prove something to you. God can put you to the test; you cannot put God to the test. And thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.

Now here we have the three premises of the kingdom of Christ. Just as in Genesis 3:5 we have the great humanist manifesto out of which all other humanist manifesto’s proceeded. So we have here the two great realms, and our Lord said in the third premise of His kingdom “thou shalt worship the Lord Thy God, and Him only shalt Thou serve. It’s important to understand what worship means. The word that is used here for worship is literally “to kiss towards, to do homage, to submit, to obey.” We have an example what that means in the last three verses of Psalm 2 verse 10-12 when the rebellious nations are told “kiss the Son lest He be angry and ye perish in your way. This was to kiss, to do homage, to submit in the fashion that was then common place. You stretched yourself out prostrate before the figure of the king or emperor and kissed his feet; and he could, if you were a rebel or a conquered person, do what was commonly done, take and put his foot on your head to indicate that you were now under him. Now worship is that precisely that, it means total submission, not to any man, this is why we are forbidden to worship anything that is human, or to yield that kind of obedience to anything that is human.

This is why the Christians were offensive wherever they went, this is why even a few centuries ago people like the Quakers, without approving of the Quakers, were offensive because they recognized what doing homage to the king meant, and they refused to take their hat off in his presence, or in the presence of judge or anyone else. It is interesting that I’ve known of courts where judges have threatened anyone in the courtroom who did not take off his hat. By the way in New York the attorneys with the judge’s permission, in all their municipal courts, leave their hat on because if they put it down given the character of the defendants and most of the people in the courtroom, they’ll never see their hat again.

But this is the meaning of worship, and we are only to worship God, this is the premise. Thou shalt worship the Lord Thy God, and Him only shalt Thou serve.

These two realms are in history, the fallen humanity and the redeemed humanity of Jesus Christ. God gives authority to the realm of Satan. We must obey God, but we must not at the same time be revolutionary. We are warned by this in scripture, especially by Paul, when I Corinthians, the seventh chapter in the 20th the 23 and the 24th verse, and again in Colossians 1:13 & 14, makes it clear that we are called, not to be revolutionaries, but we have been regenerated and regeneration is the way the world is to be changed, and then by the obedience, the worship we give to God. You don’t worship God if you do not serve Him, Him only shalt Thou serve. We must not be the servants of men, this Paul tells us specifically.

Well we have a problem do we not? We are members of a kingdom, but live also in another which has legitimate authority from God. Why did God do it that way? Well there is an interesting sentence that sums up a great deal in scripture in a rather unorthodox source, the poet William Blake. William Blake was a repository of every idea that ever went around, he never discarded anything. He had a grape arbor near his house and he refused ever to prune anything in it, he didn’t believe in pruning, either his grapes or his mind. But in this one sentence he summed up something very, very, important; he said “I saw the finger of God go forth giving a body to falsehood, that it might be cast-off forever. Now that’s what Hebrews 12 is talking about when in verses 18 following Hebrews 12 tells us that God in the Old Testament era put the nations through a great shaking, and now with the coming of Christ and the world-wide expansion off His realm, His kingdom, the things which are, are being shaken all over again. Why? So that only those things which are unshakable might remain, so we live in a world of great shaking; and God has a purpose in it. He lets men have the freedom, He allows falsehood to have a body as it were, so that all the evil imaginations of man’s heart can take form and haunt him, and destroy him so that he is driven to the recognition that his way is the way of death. And men again and again and nations again and again have worked with all their heart, mind, and being to give a body to the falsehood they worship, and then in horror work to cast it off.

James tells us in his letter, first chapter verses 13-15 “13 Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man: 14 But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. 15 Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.” Men go their own way, they want to blame God or, like Flip Wilson used to say, “the devil made me do it.” Well John Donne in one of his poems was more honest, he spoke of tempting Satan to tempt us, so that we can say “the devil made me do it.” Men insist on seeing sin as a great and glorious human possibility, a part of their possibility thinking. And God says “fine, I’ll give you authority to work it out, you work out your humanistic United States or Great Britain, or Soviet Union, or whatever the case may be. You work towards the great society or the world socialist state.” And men are allowed by God to see the conclusion of their marvelous dreams of replacing God with something better, and the end thereof is death.

So men are allowed to see the conclusion of their faith and its end results. The premise of Genesis 3:5, every man his own God, every man his own moral arbiter and law maker, is given authority by God so that God says “it’s the kingdom of darkness, but if that’s what you want I declare that it has legitimate authority under my son.” Legitimate authority, it isn’t going to be called an illegal thing, it is the product of rebellion, of revolution against God, “but I’m going to give you legitimate authority, let’s see how you like it.”

So the authority of the power of darkness is allowed to have its sway in history. It does have a widespread scope. Look at our economics, our politics, our education, our law and our law enforcement, our churches, our arts, our sciences, and more. In all these realms men are exercising exousia, power and authority as ordained by God, by God’s permission; and they’re going to be responsible for the results. And as God tells the nations through Isaiah, when He speaks of the great shaking He will bring on all nations, when the consequences of their own lives and faiths works out its implications “they shall know that I am the Lord.”

Paul tells us in Romans 13 the powers that be are ordained of God. He also tells us that they must be a terror to evil-doers. If they become a terror instead to the Godly they are moving towards death. Psalm 1 draws the parallel between the counsel of the ungodly and the way of the Lord and His law. Those who delight in the law of the Lord, of all such we are told that whatsoever they do shall prosper, but the way of the ungodly shall perish. And Psalm 2 applies the same premise to all the nations who say “let us break the bands, the cords, the restraints, of God’s law asunder.” And they take counsel (or it can be translated they conspire) together against the Lord and His anointed. And God just sits back and laughs. In due time, judgment falls upon them. Satanic authority therefore is real, it is legitimate, but its end is death. The authorities of our time therefore insofar as they depart from God’s law have adopted a course whose end is death, and we can say of men and of political parties, and political platforms and of individuals “except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.” Let us pray.

Thy word is truth oh Lord and Thy word has power and authority. Give us grace oh Lord to walk every day as members of no mean city, as citizens of Thy kingdom commission to power and authority over the nations; to go forth and to conquer in Thy name and to bring all things into captivity to Jesus Christ. Thy word is truth oh Lord, and the nations are crumbling the world over as they pursue the way of the powers and authorities of darkness. And we see indeed in our time the flood waters rising high, and the earthquake shaking the mountains, but we can rejoice for the Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge, our God we thank Thee in Jesus name, amen.

Are there any questions now?

[Audience member] Rush what was that passage in the Old Testament that you said that you discussed here a while back, it’s the inverse of the golden rule “as you’ve done so shall be made unto you” or something.

[Rushdoony] Yes, that’s in Obadiah, yes Obadiah tells the ungodly “as you have done so shall it be done unto you.” So that verse doesn’t have the popularity of the golden rule, but it’s the other side of it.

[Audience member] Well that and the golden rule and that rule set in contrast is something like a summary of everything you said today.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience member] It’s like the Christian uses the golden rule internally and fights that other rule externally.

[Rushdoony] Yes. No, Obadiah is a marvelous little book, great deal in it that’s very, very telling. In the fifteenth of Obadiah, which has only one chapter “for the day of the Lord is near upon all the heathen, as Thou hast done it shall be done unto thee. Thy reward shall return upon thy own head.” There’s a like verse in Jeremiah, it’s a good Old Testament, as well as New Testament premise. Yes, Jeremiah 50:29 “Call together the archers against Babylon, all ye that bend the bow camp about it round about, let none thereof escape, recompense her according to her work, according to all that she hath done do unto her, for she hath been proud against the Lord, against the holy One of Israel.”

Yes?

[Audience member] What this amounts to is a portrayal of power as a trap.

[Rushdoony] Very good observation, tremendous, because that’s exactly what power apart from God is. God is saying “You want to die? Go ahead, I’m giving you the power to do so.” So he’s given the power to the Soviet Union, the United States, and every nation and every individual in the world to kill himself.

[Audience member] I would think our foreign policy then ought to be to live Godly, if you live Godly then you would help that {?} you would hasten that process to conclusion.

[Rushdoony] Well I don’t think Satan is pleased with our state department.

Yes?

[Audience member] The saying “give a man enough rope and he’ll hang himself” is that along the line of what you’re saying too?

[Rushdoony] Exactly, that is a thoroughly Biblical observation. Give a man rope enough and he will hang himself, and God gives us the rope.

[Audience member] Of course some would try to hang us [Laughter]

[Audience member] You know those verse you read from Obadiah and Jeremiah also seem to knock in the head the idea of “you should hate the sin and love the sinner.” Because if you hate the sin and love the sinners, says to do good to those who do evil and the Bible just in those two verses said the opposite

[Rushdoony] Exactly.

[Audience member] Thus destroying the idea that to hate the sin and love the sinner is a Christian ideal, or a Biblical concept.

[Rushdoony] Yes. They cannot find anything in the Bible to substantiate that, they get it out of their humanism.

Any other questions or comments? Well if not let us bow our heads in prayer.

Glory be to Thee oh God who dost rule all things in Thy wisdom and majesty. We thank Thee our Father that Thou art on the throne, and that Thy ways are above and beyond all men, all nations, and we praise Thee. 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.