Systematic Theology – The Land

The Curse and the Covenant

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: 3-19

Genre: Speech

Track: 03 of 19

Dictation Name: 03 The Curse and the Covenant

Location/Venue:

Year:

Let us begin with prayer. All glory be to Thee oh God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, we praise Thee for Thy great and marvelous works. We thank Thee our Father that Thou who dost rule all things are the wise and omnipotent judge and Thou in Thy good time will bring judgment upon the earth, thou wilt bring Thy vengeance to bear upon those who trample Thy word under foot and Thou wilt deliver Thy suffering saints who are persecuted in the far corners of the earth. Make us therefore zealous in Thy word and by Thy spirit that we may move in terms of Thy victory and be more than conquerors through Jesus Christ our Lord. In His name we pray, Amen.

Our scripture this morning is Genesis 3:17-19. Genesis 3:17-19 and our subject: The Curse and the Covenant. The Curse and the Covenant.

“And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;

18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;

19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

We have been studying the past two weeks the theology of the land and we saw that God requires atonement for the land. This runs contrary to our current highly spiritualized and platonicized thinking but God says the earth must have atonement made to it. This atonement means restitution for the wrongs committed by man against man, and man against the earth. In our scripture we read about God’s curse upon the earth for man’s sake. The idea of God cursing the earth is very repugnant to humanistic man.

The reason for its repugnance is that this makes clear the fact of an ultimate personal cause and causality. Now man is ready to believe that he can be a cause but he wants no higher personal cause than himself. We hear a great deal about man as a cause today particularly man as the polluter, it makes it very easy to indict man for everything. But to admit there is another and an ultimate personal cause is to dethrone man. But the bible says God is the ultimate and the absolute cause of all things. Nothing happens apart from His will. God states plainly that His way of dealing with man is in terms of His covenant law. Aylmer [sp?] summarized it more than a century ago in these words:

“If man turns against God, God turns against him.”

We read this in Leviticus 26:23-24 where God says:

“And if ye will not be reformed by me by these things, but will walk contrary unto me;

24 Then will I also walk contrary unto you, and will punish you yet seven times for your sins.”

Now our concern as we deal with Genesis 3:17-19 is primarily upon the curse of the earth and while we will make note of the curse upon man our primary concern is in so far as the earth is affected. However as we begin we must make note of one fact, in verse seventeen God tells Adam:

“Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife….cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;”

Since the middle ages to the present preachers have had a heyday with that sentence, and wrongly so. This is a very much abused statement because Adam’s sin was not in listening to his wife, per say, but in listening to her or to any voice other than God’s voice in so far as the government of life is concerned. Any other authority than God is humanism. Thus the curse progresses where humanism prevails and man’s word is given priority over God’s word. The false word for which man is accursed can be a wife’s or a husband’s, it can be our word, any man’s word when it is given priority over God’s word. Then second, man was created out of the earth, in the Garden of Eden he had a happy relationship with it. This was to be his destiny. But with the fall this relationship was now broken and struggle replaced symbiosis. There was work in Eden but now work is different, it is threatened by failures and wastes of time and often comes to nothing. Its actual result has no relationship to the effort expended. Very few of us appreciate the extent to which agricultural work is a problem. We see work in our spheres with its frustration, we see how much time we spend on things and how many dead ends there are but we forget that farming is not sweetness and light. One of the most unforgettable statements came in the very early sixties in Berkeley when the triple revolution was being advocated by campus radicals all over the country. Basic to that triple revolution was the premise that in the modern world technology had made work obsolete. It was an incitement of the university because it prepared students for a world of work when, according to this proclamation, work was obsolete, it was a conspiracy of the establishment against youth that they were trained to be slaves, to work when work was no longer needed.

One liberal reporter who was there who had a glimmering of common sense raised a question ‘but what about food?’ and one girl answered with contempt, food is. Well, that very much summarizes the modern urban liberal attitude, a total lack of reality. But consider the facts of agriculture, we’ve had unstable weather here in California the past two or three years. What has it meant? It has meant that some farmers have had to plant their crops two, three, five as many as seven times before it germinates successfully. Rains have caused the seed to rot in the ground or the frosts have wiped out the entire production of food, of fruits. This is routine. The world in every area shows the marks of the curse. It frustrates man. But third we are told by this text the earth suffers under the curse for man’s sake and yet at the same time the earth gets its vengeance upon man, it receives man’s body at the point of death, so the earth consumes man. Man at the beginning was called to exercise dominion over the earth and to subdue it, now he returns to it as a dead man. Moreover, all the days of his life man has the promise of the certainty of death and the fact of death governs all the days of man’s life. And as the curse increases that fact of death becomes more onerous in a culture, consider one fact alone: death is so exploited in our day that it’s more expensive to die than to be born.

To be more put under the earth has become a very costly matter but even more serious is the matter of death taxes, inheritance taxes. It’s reached the point where nobody can really afford to die any more. So we are doubly cursed. We have become a curse to ourselves by the way we, mankind, has exploited death. The covenant is as God ordained it a covenant of life but man has turned it into a covenant of death. We are told that with sorrow thou shalt eat of it all the days of thy life. The word in Hebrew translated thou is plural so the reference was to more than Adam, it was to all men to the end of time. The primary guilt was of course Adams because his was the primary authority. Then fourth we see that because man is an earth bound creature the curse of the earth is the curse of every department of life and of this world. Calvin said concerning this fact in his exposition of Genesis and I quote:

“We may add that properly speaking this whole punishment is exacted, not from the earth itself, but from man alone. For the earth does not bear fruit for itself but in order that food may be supplied to us out of its bowels. The lord however determined that his anger shall like a deluge overflow all parts of th earth that wherever man might look the atrocity of his sin should meet his eyes. Before the fall the state of the world was a most fair and delightful mirror of the divine favor and paternal indulgence towards man. Now in all the elements we perceive that we are cursed and although as David says the earth is still full of the mercy of God yet at the same time appear manifest signs of his dreadful alienation from us by which if we are unmoved we betray our blindness and insensibility.” Unquote.

Then fifth the curse includes weeds as well as the frustrating battle with the soul and here we see something of the marvel of God’s work. In the providence of God weeds now have their function. They replenish things in the soil that are needed. So while they plague man they also build up the soil as man depletes it. So that the weeds take out of the air and out of the soil and break down and by decomposition negate man’s work even as they curse man. We are told in scripture that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to His purpose, that tells us that when man moves out from under the curse into the blessing in Christ everything works together for good, everything serves to further God’s purposes through Him. But when man moves more and more under the curse everything works to further the curse and to frustrate man. Man in his sin creates deserts and wastelands, he is always suicidal and destructive. All they that hate me, God declares, love death. Then sixth we are told very plainly that the curse includes the food supply. The reference to the herb of the field is a reference to the grains used to make bread. He shall gain his bread, the staff of life, only by the sweat of his brow. Man’s life after the fall is death oriented and tied to the production of food. Before the fall the fertility of the unfallen earth made food no problem, but now as man’s sin advances the production of food becomes not only hard work but is further cursed. As evidence of that consider socialism.

Wherever the hand of socialism is advanced every kind of production abates. The Ukraine once was the bread basket of Europe; today the entire Soviet Union cannot produce food to feed itself. It is dependent upon the United States and other food producing countries and meanwhile we are hurting our own food production progressively. I recall about six or seven years ago an economist told me that when in the 1960s the John Burke Society produced a book entitled Ill Fares the Land dealing with agriculture and predicted that if federal control of farming increased we too would someday have the famine problem as Russia and other countries did. This economist told me when the book came out someone gave it to him, he read it and he thought it was preposterous, this country had such a remarkable record with regard to the production of food and one which had been unmarred by statist decrees that destroyed productivity that he felt it could never happen here. But he told me now I’m afraid the direction of things indicate that we too will through socialism destroy the production of food and induce famine in given time, in due time. Socialism is a form of sin, a fearful sin. It is destructive of all that is good as all sin is and it destroys the production of food and is accursed of man and the earth. It is man developing the implications of the curse pronounced upon him in the beginning. And with it all the other curses increase, disease, predation, parasitism, and so on. All afflict the earth. A few years ago we had a warning that should have scared people when we had a blight on corn.

We have forgotten that in the past centuries with less grounds blights wiped out entire crops and with hybridization we have made crops all the more vulnerable to like blights so that the entire production of food could be wiped out in a season. Then seventh, all things having been made in the creation week they were in a sense now unmade by sin in that death and decay set in and degeneration. But with Jesus Christ this curse was broken, and all who are members of Christ now are in the area of blessings and are moving out progressively from the curse into the life of blessing. And as they take over a given realm that realm becomes a realm of blessing. Blessing upon the earth and blessing upon all of the realms that man moves in. And because of Christ this means now that man lives when he is in Christ by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. The humanistic word expedites the curse and if we are governed by the humanistic word the curse in all its implications grows and develops and becomes more oppressive, but to be governed by the word of God is to be governed by blessings. The simplest man can apprehend and know and experience all the blessings of God if he is faithful to the Lord. Then second the divine blessing in a word is life. Our Lord says that He came that we might have eternal life in Him and as we move in Christ we have the blessing of life, of children, of grandchildren, of fertile soil, of good weather, of victories over our enemies, of earthly prosperity and much, much more.

Go through the blessings declared by God upon man in the Old and in the New Testaments. It will give you a very different picture than some people will do. They are quite ostensibly material blessings. With it we are told, however, thy loving kindness as David says in Psalm 63:3 is better than life. We have the favor of God, His grace is the supreme blessing, but together with it God gives us all these material blessings. Then third we must say that instead of death man having become an heir of eternal life in Christ experiences that in a renewed creation. Wherever Christian man, dominion man, is faithful to the word of God there you have a corner of creation renewed looking forward to the great renewal of all things, when heaven and earth are made over and are one. The earth is again to become a paradise and it is our work to restore it. The life of faithfulness is the life of benediction. It is life in the covenant of God and in His providence. As David said in Psalm 16:5 the Lord is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup, Thou maintainest my lot. The earth receives as we grow in Christ and as nations together with men are faithful the land and the people are removed from the realm of curse to the realm of blessing. When we began we saw that modern man finds the idea of God as the ultimate and absolute cause repugnant. He wants to see himself as the only cause apart from blind impersonal causes. But God is the ultimate cause and there is no dominion apart from Him. The universe is God’s creation and it is spoken of for him as His habitation. Sin is the problem. There is no avoiding the fact of sin and what it has done to creation.

When men depersonalize causality they reduce it to meaningless forces. By doing so they make sin nonexistent because sin means a personal wrong against an absolute person, God. All that remains then when you depersonalize the universe is not sin¸ no morality, only technical errors. After thirteen million kulaks were systematically wiped out by Stalin who earlier justified their liquidation and said that the time had come to do so, the Soviet Union was so reduced in its food production and in its strength that it was necessary somehow to acknowledge that it was wrong. Stalin gave a speech concerning it which referred to the matter as not morally wrong but the work of overzealous underlings who proceeded too rapidly to enforce a good principle. If the universe is depersonalized then man is also depersonalized and the government of all things is then in terms of vague impersonal forces, platonic ideas. What Darwin did was to revive Platonism. It’s not surprising that at the same time there was a powerful revival of classical learning in England. The whole platonic idea was remolded and it was now impersonal ideas or forces inherent in the material universe. These still had the same capacity for action that the platonic ideas or universals had. They were simply transferred from something out in space inherent in being but not located specifically in being now located in matter.

Darwin was a good Platonism without perhaps knowing it. At any rate the platonic ideas were basic to evolutionary theory. Man now has no right to stand in the way of the idea, the true principle of being. And man is expendable in the modern world view because these impersonal forces, these ideas must have their way and man is nothing before them. Moreover, if you have an elite group of scientists who are the masters, the voices of the idea of these impersonal principles, then these elite men alone count and the rest of us are manure for the future. By separating himself from God man has made himself accursed. The developing of the premise of that separation means man becomes progressively accursed to others and to the earth. Only through Jesus Christ can man remove the curse from himself and from the earth. And only as Christians are faithful to the every word of God can they render the atonement of man to man and of man to the earth that God requires. God has said this is the way, walk ye in it. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God Thou hast shown us the way and Thy word is truth. Thy word is written so that He that runneth may read and may act. Give us grace to heed Thy word, to obey it, to exercise dominion in Thy name and to remove ourselves, our families and the nations from the curse into blessings. To the end that the kingdoms of this world might become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Are there any questions now, yes John?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] And it gives the microorganism in the soil a chance to revive and to do all these things. Those who do obey the sabbatical year and there are some farmers in this country who do, find that no manuring or fertilizing can equal the benefits of lying fallow or of a sabbatical. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes. We are told that God is greater than all things and that nothing can contain Him so that when Solomon dedicated the temple he said very plainly that this house cannot contain Thee although it is Thy habitation, for the heavens are Thy throne and the earth is Thy footstool, so he both said there is nothing in heaven can contain Thee but all things are filled with the presence of God. Now we call this the doctrine of imminence and transcendence. Imminence in that God is totally present everywhere so that we are never remote from god and yet God is transcendent, He is beyond all things so that it’s not just the little corner of God that is present here where we are but God in all His being is everywhere.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] No He is not confined to any one place.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes you see just as you said because man can no longer have dominion over the earth in the biblical sense the earth controls him. During his life and by death and therefore all the adversities, frustrate and discipline man. They turn him from his path because God does not permit him to realize his hopes in any area, he’s always going to be frustrated.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] No, you’re right. Just as with weeds they are a curse and yet they are a plus. So everything that God has ordained works out both as a curse upon man and as a plus in terms of the future and Isaiah tells us that even as the ungodly pile up wealth and do great things it is for the future as God has ordained it for His people. So that the best things that the ungodly do are going to work for God’s kingdom in due time.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes. Very good point. What God has ordained is that even as man does his worst trying to enthrone himself and to strike at God he hurts himself most. For example, the man who saw that most clearly was perhaps Sigmund Freud. Freud self-consciously saw himself as the culmination of humanism. He said Copernicus, Darwin, and myself are the great three humanists. We have dethroned man and now he said by removing guilt from the area of religion to the area of science we have abolished totally any relevance of God from the world. But, at the same time he knew he had also destroyed man.

By striking totally at any relevance of God for man in any area He also reduced man to the primordial elements that composed him. So he said I am also the destroyer of man because man no longer is god.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Freud said that yes. In my book on Freud I call attention to that and its critical to understanding Freud, he saw himself both as the culmination of humanism and as the end of it.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] They tried to enthrone man but in the process the further they got away from God the baser man became. So if man is not created in the image of God what does he become, as you enthrone man? Well, he’s in a meaningless universe and he’s the product of meaningless forces and he is reduced to the it, the ego and the super ego so he’s nothing.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Mhhmm…yes. So as man seeks to enthrone himself and become god he becomes in his own eyes less than man finally, because man can only be defined in terms of God and the image of God. Well our time is really about up but we might have time for one quick question, if anyone has one.

Well if not let us bow our heads now for the benediction.

We thank Thee our Father that Thy word is truth and thy word shall prevail. That we who have been made in Thy image and recreated in that image in Jesus Christ are called to be kings, priests and prophets unto Thee. Bless us in this task. 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.