Systematic Theology – The Land

The Land And The Poor

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: 7-19

Genre: Speech

Track: 07 of 19

Dictation Name: 07 The Land and the Poor

Location/Venue:

Year:

All glory praise and honor be to Thee God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. We thank Thee that of Thy grace and mercy Thou hast brought all things into being, that Thou hast made heaven and earth with all the majesty and glory thereof and has made us the heirs of creation. Make us ever mindful of our responsibility to bring all things under the dominion of Jesus Christ, to recapture for Thy kingdom that which was lost through Adam, that in Jesus Christ all things may be made new and that we having been made new by Christ may carry the principle of renewal into all creation. Grant us this we beseech Thee in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Our subject this morning is the Land and the Poor and we shall look at a series of texts which deal with this subject, some of the more significant texts. First of all Leviticus 19:9-10. All these texts deal with the treatment of the poor in the law. They are extensively used and developed in the prophets and in the New Testament. First of all Leviticus 19:9-10:

“And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of thy field, neither shalt thou gather the gleanings of thy harvest.

10 And thou shalt not glean thy vineyard, neither shalt thou gather every grape of thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and stranger: I am the Lord your God.”

Then Leviticus 25:35, the first text dealt with the law of gleaning, it meant there could not be a total harvest, that something had to be left, a fair amount, as a kind of tithe for the gleaners. 19, or 25:35 in Leviticus:

“And if thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee; then thou shalt relieve him: yea, though he be a stranger, or a sojourner; that he may live with thee.”

Here we are told that we are to aid the poor, that the word relieve is literally strengthen him. Strengthen him economically and personally by being a good neighbor to him. And the next verse of course says:

“Take thou no usury of him, or increase: but fear thy God; that thy brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him thy money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase.”

In other words, charity must be charity, there cannot be loans that are profit seeking to the poor. Then Deuteronomy 10:17-19. Deuteronomy 10:17-19.

“For the Lord your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward:

18 He doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment.

19 Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Here God’s position is set forth. God first of all makes clear He is to be feared, that if we go astray, if we sin then we have great cause to be afraid of God who does not respect the status or economic rank of persons nor accept bribes. He loves the stranger, the foreigner, the downtrodden, the fatherless, the widow, and therefore we are to manifest our love of God by manifesting love to these. Then in Deuteronomy 14: 28-29.

“At the end of three years thou shalt bring forth all the tithe of thine increase the same year, and shalt lay it up within thy gates:

29 And the Levite, (because he hath no part nor inheritance with thee,) and the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, which are within thy gates, shall come, and shall eat and be satisfied; that the Lord thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hand which thou doest.”

Now here we see that besides the annual gleaning and this gleaning to apply to the modern world applies not only to the agricultural sphere but also to any kind of production, is also to be accompanied every third year in a cycle of seven, thus the third and the sixth year by a second tithe¸ a tithe that is given to further charity. Then finally in Deuteronomy 24:19-22. Again on the law of gleaning, a little more detail. Deuteronomy 24:19-22.

“When thou cuttest down thine harvest in thy field, and hast forgot a sheaf in the field, thou shalt not go again to fetch it: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow: that theLord thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hands.

20 When thou beatest thine olive tree, thou shalt not go over the boughs again: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow.

21 When thou gatherest the grapes of thy vineyard, thou shalt not glean it afterward: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow.

22 And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt: therefore I command thee to do this thing.”

The premise of all these texts and more is that the earth is the Lords and the fullness thereof. He is the lawgiver because He is the creator. He gives laws to govern the land and the use of harvests and our treatment of the poor. Those who have the means are to care for the poor. These laws are case laws. Failure to observe these laws is robbing the poor. On the other hand, the law never says that we are to feel that the poor are entitled to our gifts but neither does the law say that we are entitled to our harvest and production. We are all God’s servants. We live on God’s earth and He therefore is alone entitled to tell us what is ours and how we are to use what He gives us.

And God is far more generous in what He allows to us than what the federal government does. John Stafford who is with us today tells me that it has now reached fifty nine percent. Fifty nine percent of our income is taken by some agency of state. God who created heaven and earth does not ask anywhere as much. But there is another point in these texts, the poor is not simply the believing poor. They are the strangers, the sojourners, the aliens, anyone who is in need. On the other hand it is clear that the poor cannot walk in and take what they want from our fields. There is no license to anyone to live off of their successful neighbors. These are the needy and deserving poor whom God has in mind. Widows and orphans are specifically named to indicate the kind of situation that God has in mind. Gleaners would go into a field by permission and by permission only. Moses Maimonides, the great Jewish commentator on the law, said in his book of agriculture and I quote:

“Laborers are forbidden to harvest the entire field and must leave the proper amount of corner crop at the end of it. The poor people however have no title to the corner crop until the owner of his own will explicitly sets it apart as such. Therefore a poor man who sees a corner crop at the end of a field is forbidden to touch it on pain of being charged with robbery until it becomes known to him that it is such by the will of the owner.” Unquote.

The meaning of these laws is set forth by Saint Paul when he declares in Ephesians 4:25:

“Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members one of another.”

Our membership in one another is twofold. We are all members of one another by virtue of our birth in the old humanity of Adam in the fallen world, but we are also members one of another as Christians because Christians have a special relationship to each other as members of Jesus Christ.

We are to meet needs in terms of both connections. Statist charity is always divisive. It stresses membership in an impersonal entity, the state. As a result because an impersonal entity gives charity there is no gratitude because it is an impersonal relationship. It is significant that one Christian school in the San Francisco Bay area which decided two years ago to start giving weekly food to the poor in their area because they were in an economically distressed area found that some refused to take it when they found it was not given by the federal government because they did not want to feel gratitude for anything they received. They wanted only that food which they could regard as their right. Now that’s the attitude statist charity creates. It is impersonal, it does not engender gratitude, it engenders instead the feeling that it is a right. Impersonal relationships are thus deadly. For a very simple example I am very grateful to my wife for her constant helpfulness and I try to show it. I enjoy my bed but I’m not grateful to my bed, it’s not a person, I simply use it. There’s a marked difference, an impersonal object is a very different thing from a person and statist charity comes from an impersonal object and it treats the recipients increasingly as impersonal objects. As a result it engenders no thankfulness, it does lead to a sense of expectation and a sense of this is my right. The result is a social disaster. Godly charity on the other hand unifies and heals society. It promotes communion. Thus charity has as its foundation in scripture that we are members one of another and our relationship is to be personal.

Charity includes fellowship with the poor because we are of one people in the Lord. It furthers our communion with God who tells us that He will bless us. Now from the New Testament times to the present as well as of course in the Old Testament the church has cared for the poor. We know that Jesus and His disciples did so, as a matter of fact the treasury who dispensed such funds was Judas and we are told that he was a thief, according to John 12:4-6 and John 13:29. The New Testament church had collections regularly for the needy saints as in 1 Corinthians 16:1, Romans 15:26 and Acts 11:29. According to Acts 6:1-6 the office of deacon was created to meet such needs within the church community. Very early to provide order pastors and then bishops supervised this ministry. Money and property was accumulated to make it possible and this was the origin of trusts and foundations. The non-Christian foundation is essentially a product of this century and the first great one was the Carnegie trust which has done a great deal of evil in its day. These were organized and the church organized its work to prevent the same person from applying to several people and to gain more than his fair share, in other words, to prevent exploitation of charity. The scriptural injunction for this was found in a number of texts including Titus 1:8 which said that the bishop or presbyter must be a man who is a lover of hospitality, by which it is meant ever ready to care for those who need attention and to lead in the care of such people. We see early in the church how very heavily this aspect of the life of the church was stressed. For example, we have in the ecclesiastical history of the venerable deed letters that deal with this subject. In 579 Saint Augustine of Canterbury wrote to Pope Gregory to ask about the proper use of tithes and offerings, the ratio and Gregory wrote back to Augustine saying and I quote:

“Holy rite which no doubt you are well versed in testifies and particularly Saint Paul’s epistle to Timothy in where he endeavors to instruct him how he should behave himself in the house of God, but is a custom of the apostolic seat to prescribe rules to bishops newly ordained that all [unknown] which approved are to be divided into four portions. One for the bishop and his family because of hospitality and entertainments, another for the clergy, a third for the poor and a fourth for the repair of churches.” Unquote.

Thus very early we see that the church is giving one fourth of all receipts to care for needs in the community. This had very deep roots in the early church, as matter of fact, Canon 80 of the first Council of Nicaea when the persecutions had newly ended, declared that in every town a procurator should be named by the churches whose duty would be to care for the poor in every town under his jurisdiction. He was to be under the leadership of the church, he was to care for those in prison, he was to provide food, clothing and a legal defense for the persecuted. Later, the relief of prisoners of war was added to his duties. The church in those days took this very seriously. Not too long after the persecutions ended Saint [unknown] of Jerusalem actually sold off all the church treasures to provide for poor relief and this was not uncommon over the centuries. Very early hospitals were developed and as we look at the record of these hospitals and the diet we find that in those early years it was superior to what came centuries later in the early modern era. Moreover churches and monasteries provided lodging for travelers both rich and poor and also instruction in the brief time they were there in the faith. they cared for the lepers. They cared for every kind of human need. Now it is a significant fact that every time statist tyranny has moved against the church one of the first points of attack has been on charity.

The confiscation of the trusts and foundations set up to alleviate human need. Very commonly in the medieval era monarchs seized as did the holy roman emperors such trusts and foundations. As a matter of fact before Henry the 8th ever decided to do anything it had become routine for monarchs to seize monasteries and their trusts for the care of the poor and the lands of course as well. The lands were an especial target because the lands were used to raise food and meat to give to those who were in need. It should not surprise us therefore that one of the first points of attack in the last decade when the states and the federal government began to move against Christian work was such ministries, in particular the work of Lester Roloff in Texas. The pattern was an ancient one. The destruction of such ministries undercut the life of communion and community drastically and whenever the church surrendered such a ministry the church suffered dramatically. This should not surprise us. We are emphatically told by our Lord that a good tree bears good fruit. Both Paul and James tell us that faith without works is dead. And when the state has seized the area of works and cut it off and the church has not fought to reestablish it then the church has begun to wither. Our modern antinomianism whereby the church frowns on works and works have their place not in terms of salvation but in terms of sanctification, our growth in holiness, the antinomianism has developed as a product of statist confiscation of the works of charity by the church.

In every era over the centuries where the state has moved and confiscated the church then has gone into a period of decline. The same is true when the church of its will has failed in this area as happened at the time of the Black Death when the church was not as responsible as it should have been. Thus we see that works of charity are like a barometer in the life of the faith and the life of individuals and of congregations. This is why God in these texts that we read makes clear that He blesses us as we become a blessing to others. Thus the destruction of such ministries has historically been a very critical matter in the life of the church. Today we see the growth of these ministries, the Christian school movement of course, a very necessary aspect of the life of the faith, homes to take care of delinquents, the elderly, street people, youth on drugs, every kind of need imaginable. As these needs are met and as the church grows in this ministry God blesses His people for without that aspect both the Lord’s Table and worship become rootless in the life of a people. The goal of the modern humanistic state is to succeed the church as the community of man. Hence its movement into these areas. It seeks to be man’s true church. This was very clearly stated by Horace Mann when he created the public control or statist control of education. He saw the state as the agency of salvation and the true community of man and therefore he had to move to take education away from the faith, because ultimately it was the faith, Christian faith, orthodoxy, that he sought to destroy.

As a Unitarian his role in the destruction of this country has been fearful. Thus we must work to reestablish the life of faith in the world of practical action that we might be blessed and prospered of the Lord. Let us pray.

Thy word is truth oh Lord and Thy word speaks plainly concerning our duties, our responsibilities, and Thy requirements. Give us grace to hear and to obey, to become a blessing to those in need and to those around us that we might be blessed of these. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Are there any questions now concerning our lesson? Yes?

[Question] I’m reminded from what you say about charity that I had an interview years ago with Jimmy [unknown] when he was a political boss on the west side of Manhattan and his argument against Mr. Roosevelt, he said that Mr. Roosevelt has learned anything he knows from [unknown]. When we used to give people food baskets or get somebody out of jail we didn’t have to ask them because they knew who did it and we would get automatically the votes of the whole family. But he said Mr. Roosevelt is doing this and the people don’t know who is giving it to them and he says it’s not going to turn out the way he expects.

[Rushdoony] [laughs] yes and it has not. It’s been most destructive. Any other questions or comments, yes John?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] And the only way to get the federal government and the states and cities out of the charity business is for us to take over, exactly what we are doing in education we must do in every other area, take back government from the state.

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

We thank Thee our Father for our time here together. Thou hast made us members one of another, hast given us the joy of salvation, the joy of fellowship with Thee and with one another. Bless us in the days ahead and give us grace, strength and success as we plan to further Thy kingdom in Jesus’ name, Amen.