Systematic Theology – Work

Work, Rest, and Leisure

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 15 of 19

Track: #15

Year:

Dictation Name: 15 Work, Rest, and Leisure.

[Rushdoony] Let us begin with prayer.

Glory be to Thee oh God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost who in Thine sovereign majesty has made us to be Thy people and hast given us such great and glorious promises in Jesus Christ. We thank Thee that we have an inheritance that is eternal, unchangeable, and all-glorious. Give us grace therefore so to walk day by day that we cast our every care upon Thee knowing Thou carest for us and hast ordained all things in sovereign wisdom to serve Thy glory, and to bring us to our fulfillment in Jesus Christ. Give us joy therefore in our labors, in our calling, that we may serve Thee with all our heart, mind, and being. That we might manifest that confidence and joy which Thou doest rejoice in. Bless us to this purpose, in Jesus name amen.

Our scripture today is first from Psalm 40 verse 1-8 and Isaiah 40 verses 28-31. Or subject is “Work, Rest and Leisure.” Some purists would say leisure [pronounces it differently] but leisure has become enthroned in common usage. “Work, Rest, and Leisure” continuing our studies in the theology of work. First of all from Psalm 40, a Psalm of David, verses 1-8.

“I waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry.

2 He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.

3 And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the Lord.

4 Blessed is that man that maketh the Lord his trust, and respecteth not the proud, nor such as turn aside to lies.

5 Many, O Lord my God, are thy wonderful works which thou hast done, and thy thoughts which are to us-ward: they cannot be reckoned up in order unto thee: if I would declare and speak of them, they are more than can be numbered.

6 Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire; mine ears hast thou opened: burnt offering and sin offering hast thou not required.

7 Then said I, Lo, I come: in the volume of the book it is written of me,

8 I delight to do thy will, O my God: yea, thy law is within my heart.”

And again in Psalm [He meant Isaiah] 40 verses 28-31.

“28 Hast thou not known? Hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? There is no searching of his understanding.

29 He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength.

30 Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall:

31 But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”

There is a distinction between rest and leisure which is very important. In the second volume of The Institutes of Biblical Law I have a chapter on Leisure and Work, calling attention from the distinction, quoting from the very sociologist who have dealt with the subject and defined, in their thinking, the concept of leisure. Leisure is an act of autonomy from legal and moral obligations. It is deliberately and self-consciously time off from time and history. In Leisure activity men seek to run away from work as though it were a burden, not to rest, to be refreshed for work. The world of time and the world of responsibility are seen by those who belong to the culture of leisure as a burden, and therefore the goal is escape. And the love of leisure is a part of a culture that emphasis escapism. Where men have no calling leisure has a growing appeal. It is seen as a means of evading moral duty, and the accountability that work requires of man.

As a result the modern world is very much given to a lust for more and more leisure. Advertising appeals to the lust for leisure, and vacation adds in particular “escape to a tropical paradise.” The idea of course is to go somewhere and find a Humanistic Garden of Eden with no moral responsibility nor law, and added to that is the “go now, pay later” idea. We have substituted for rest, a Biblical concept, the idea of leisure and a vacation. That word, by the way, should give us pause because vacation and vacate are related words, they involve an attempt to run away from the world and its responsibilities and burdens. But the idea of a Sabbath and a Sabbath rest, whether it be the weekly rest, a longer Sabbath during the year, is very different. In such resting we are confident that the government is not upon our shoulders, we do our work under God and unto God, and we know that our labor is never in vain in the Lord, we know moreover that even as we rest, God is at work, that he is accomplishing His purpose, that He makes all things work together for God to them that love, to them who are the called according to His purpose. So the worst things we experience, which we may not feel as good, are working together for good. We rest in that fact.

I will both lay me down in sleep and peace for Thou Lord only makest me to rest in safety, now that’s Sabbath sleep. We are to keep the Sabbath week by week, in our rest time away from work, in our eating and sleeping. It means that we know what we do and everything we’ve done in our lives, including our mistakes and our sins. Because we are now the Lord’s He will make it add up to good, to an eternal good. And this gives us a tremendous confidence, we trust then in God’s providence. We can say with Paul that we rejoice in all things, and we find his words like a battle cry of victory. “Therefore my beloved brethren be steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord. For as much as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.” To rest in the Lord is not to attempt to step out of time or to step out of responsibility, but to strengthen our trust, that our labor is never in vain in him, that he makes all things work together for good. Thus Godly rest is an act of trust, and that’s why you can rest, and that’s why you can work.

We read first of all from Psalm 40 by David written, according to the best Hebraic scholars, when he was a refugee for his life running away from Saul with a price on his head; and he said “I waited patiently for the Lord.” And although he has not yet been delivered and Saul is still out there, he says because he went to Him, to God in His despair, he brought me up also out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock. Now when rock is used symbolically in scripture it means God, the miry clay where he was caught was himself, his humanism, his effort to find the way out on his own and to answer the thing for Himself. Well what answer is there? Somebody’s out to kill you, you’re running, what more can you do? Worrying isn’t going to help. But now God has taught him to trust in Him, so his feet are set upon the rock of ages. “And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto my God, unto our God. Many shall see it and fear and will trust in the Lord.” When people see the confidence that I have, it’s going to make them afraid; and when David came out of the cave and from a distance showed Saul what he had taken from him while he was sleeping and how he could of killed him, but had not, for a time at least it broke Saul up. And Saul recognized “this man is the Lord’s anointed, he moves in the fear, the love, and the power of God.” And so David could say it isn’t the form of religion that God wants, it isn’t the outward sacrifice, though those are commanded, it is that with all my being in this situation, the worst in my life thus far, I trust in Him.

“Then said I, lo I come in the volume of the book it is written of me to do Thy will oh God. I delight to do Thy will oh my God, yea Thy law is within my heart.” David was resting when he was running for his life. Because faith without works is dead, and to wait on the Lord is to delight, to do the will of God, to hear and to obey God’s law. The Bible thus sees true rest, Godly rest, as an act of faith, it is a trust in God’s providential work, it is also work done in that faith and trust. We work with rest because we know God works.

Now we’ve been talking about work, rest, and leisure, and their relationship to one another. Let’s go a little further. One of the great illusions of our time is that leisure is a source of productivity. This is a myth. People everywhere dream of what they could accomplish given time off, given leisure, and the world is full of frustrated who are sure they could do great things given subsidized leisure. And I constantly hear that “well I have an invention in mind, if I could only get a subsidy and have enough leisure time I could produce this.” These are very superior, very intelligent people. Or “I could write” or “I could paint” or “I could sculpt” or “I could do this and that, I could compose music if only I had the leisure time.” And they’re always applying for subsidies, looking for a good angel to provide them with that subsidy and with that leisure. I regularly get letters from brilliant who feel ready now to embark on the great venture if we can give them so many thousands a year, if we can subsidize them. But is leisure a source of productivity? There are foundations doing that kind of subsidy work and they’re producing nothing, nothing of any real significance because leisure is not the source of productivity and all to many spend their entire year or the three year grant accomplishing nothing, nothing. Why? It is not leisure that is productive, but work.

Now, we had an arts and media conference, most of you were there. The young man, Martin Salbretie {?} whose composition we heard, and we heard him speak, has had at the age of 26, what is it 26 compositions? Something like that… [audience interjection] …70 performed by a symphonies or string ensembles and so on. He works with his father in their type-setting plant, puts in a hard day’s work there. He is a family man with family responsibilities. How can he compose so much? Why because he is involved in the context of life, of work, with Godly rest. This is what leads to productivity, it is not leisure which is productive, but work with rest; and the best inventions are all produced in the context of work and need. And men who are productive are productive no matter what the circumstances, they produce because it is something in their being, in their bones, which has to be done.

I like Sanson’s {?} music and I like his saying that he produced music the way a pear tree produces pears, or we can say the way a hen lays eggs, it doesn’t meditate on whether it’s going to lay and egg or not, it lays them! And those who are productive are productive because their being requires it. Where subsidies and leisure operate the results are at best mediocre and meager, and this is why the world of art today because it is a subsidized world, is unrelated to reality. We have an art that is empty, music that is empty, it’s dead, it has no relationship to the real world.

Now Otto Scott is working on a book which will follow his Wilson book on the relationship of Christianity and industry to technology. Industrial research and development produces inventions, not the academicians at the universities with their 3-4 hours a week, which is what full professors teach, three hours sometimes too. A workload like that you know, leaves them no time to produce. So the academic scientist is an unproductive man, but industrial research and development is productive because the man is on a deadline. This has to go into production, we need this and that to be developed in order to be able to accomplish this. What has happened in our world today is that in our thinking, because all of us yearn for that very often “oh if only I had the leisure” “if I had six months I’d do some remarkable things.” We all have that, we’ve picked it up from our culture like we pick up cold germs and other things [laughter].

But in the arts and the media subsidies and leisure have replaced work and the Sabbath principal, and the result is an elitist art, there are no hierarchs in the world of arts and the media because these men are not dedicate to sacred rule, which is what hierarch means. A hierarch is a man who is ruled by God and rules, whatever his work, in terms of God. But leisure means a break with work and with reality, it is a break therefore with productivity and the result we have all around us, the sterility of the modern world in the arts and the media. A radical sterility when you put good men and leisure together you produce, in effect, mules who are sterile; and of course the orientation of leisure is the dreams. Leisure itself is a dream of modern man, a dream of escapism, of a break with the world and with its productivity and with its day-by-day routine and requirements, and what it does when men yearn for that, well thing about it when you’ve learned for it. As I say, we all are guilty of this at some time. It produces a fretfulness which is non-productive and self-destructive. So if we work saying “Oh I could do so much if only I had a year off, or six months off,” what we are dreaming about will make us fretful.

One of the most telling shifts I have seen in my lifetime, now I was born in 1916, has been the shift from a delight in life to boredom. When I was a boy the word “bore” meant to drill something [laughter] now when somebody speaks about being bored, they don’t say somebody’s drilled them, put a hole in their head or someplace, they mean that they’re weary of life. Now the most exciting game around is life, how can you get bored with life? Or work if you have a calling? You may feel you’ve got to much to do and you wish you had more time to do more, but to get bored with it? That’s what life is about! You’re saying you’re bored with living. Boredom is a doctrine that has been revived because we have revived Greek thinking; first in the later part of the last century with the elite, self-styled elite. Elitist, because they believed in the Greek world of philosopher kings, and didn’t believe in working, just in managing everybody’s life for them, and they got bored doing nothing. And the elite today are bored and they have conveyed their ideas and their world and life view to everybody, so children are bored now “nothin’ to do.” I never heard anyone say that when I was young, never did! And the number of games that existed when I was a boy have all disappeared, why? Well because instead of reality people have geared to leisure activities, and to dreaming with the television helping them, and the result too has been not only a separation of thought from matter, and idea from work, but an abstraction from life, an ivory tower education.

Some few years ago ten-twelve years ago a scholar, very fine man, very gracious gentleman, told me very earnestly and with the best intentions in the world that I was making a serious mistake in my writing. I was writing for the general public, anyone who wanted to read, and I should write for scholars so that a dialogue could be entered into in which they would critique my work and I would critique their work and we would be involved in endless dialogue back and forth without any relationship to reality. That’s the elitist principal, and that turns a man’s perspective into unreality, into a world of leisure thinking. But the Biblical doctrine of rest is something different.

When we are told in Isaiah that God, who is the God of the creator of the ends of the earth, gives power to the faint and to them that have no might, he increaseth strength. We are told even the ewe shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fail. The reference there is to those who are in military service; they’re in the middle of war. So here they are battle weary, they’re ready to faint, ready to collapse with weariness, and what God tells us here, what through Isaiah, those who are on the firing line of life, in the midst of work, if they wait upon the Lord He shall renew their strength, and they shall mount up with wings as eagles. What a wild image, ever seen a man fly like an eagle? It would take something supernatural to make me fly like an eagle. [Chuckles from audience] But what Isaiah is saying is this, if you are doing your work and you trust in the Lord, and you wait on Him, He gives power in the place of responsibility so that from someone who’s ready to collapse in the battle, and to pass out, suddenly you’re doing your work like an eagle is soaring above all problems, you’re more than a conqueror in Christ. They shall run, and not be weary, and they shall walk and not faint. That’s power, power in the context of the battle, power in the context of work.

It is work and Godly rest which are most productive and most renew our lives. The quest for leisure, for leisure to produce, leads to fretfulness, boredom, and mental depression which is born of emptiness. The products of leisure, let me say again, are notable for their sterility. God calls us to work and rest in Him, and the two go together. We rest like David could rest in the midst of running for his life, trying to evade Saul’s men as they were searching him out, he rest by trusting in the Lord. So you can take a weekend off, or take a week off, or two weeks, but there’s not rest if there’s no trust in God, only another kind of weariness; and as a result a leisure oriented society which has replaced work and meaning with play, in time gets bored with play. It loses all interest in either play or life. You know there’s a familiar saying “if you want to get something done, assign it to a busy man.” There’s a lot of truth in that, don’t look at me please [laughter in audience] I have my share of assignments [more laughter]. But there’s truth in that, it’s the busy man who gets things done because he knows how to work, and he knows how to rest.

But elitism exalts Greek abstractionism from the world of work. It sees leisure as the seed-bed of creativity, but it undermines the society and insures its one destruction. That’s why our society all around us is self-destructing, it is losing the capacity to work and to rest. Sadly this kind of faith, this Greek elitism and leisure worldism has infected all to many of us. We have a problem right now, a world is falling apart, this is why I’ve been dealing with the theology of work, because it is we who are Christians who have a calling, we who have the responsibility to take over, and to rebuild, to reconstruct all things, and we can only do it in terms of God’s way. Productivity is born out of the context of life, out of Godly work and rest, and those whose being is in that context shall flourish, but those who have a hatred of work and a lust for leisure are taking the road to death. Let us pray.

Thy word oh Lord is truth, and Thou hast called us to work and to rest in Thee, and has promised that our labor in Thee can never be in vain. Give us grace therefore so to work with joy and thanksgiving, and so to trust in Thee, that day by day we are more than conquerors in Christ Jesus our Lord. In His name we pray, amen.

Are there any questions now?

Yes?

[Audience Member with heavy accent] I suppose not so much a question but a confession some of my {?} for example {?}

[Rushdoony] We can do the same thing as another person but it’s what our relationship to God is that determines whether it is rest or leisure activity. You can go off on a sailboat on a cruise and come back no more ready to work because there is no the rest and the trust in God. So, it’s what we are that makes the difference because you remember David in the Psalm’s says God doesn’t delight in the burnt offerings and sacrifice per se, it’s the heart that trusts in him that only gives meaning to those things. So we can be involved in activities which to another man spell escapism, but for us can be rest in the Lord and a strengthening for our work.

Yes Ari?

[Audience Member] {?} Of the Old Testaments that you used this morning. Would the New Testament scriptures in terms of being complimentary to the ones you cited to be the ones about the development and multiplication of the talents first of all?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[ Same audience Member] And secondly the scripture “to whom has much, much more will be given, and to who has less, much will be taken.”

[Rushdoony] Exactly, very , very well said because our Lord tells us there that those who meet responsibilities more shall be given to them because they are going to use them and find a greater trust and rest in doing their work under God. But those who don’t are the ones who are fretful. The man who didn’t use his talent came up fretfully, fearfully, he’d hidden his talent in the ground.

[Sam Audience Member] And the other point is that for the fallen man, the natural man, work is still the curse as in Genesis, but for regenerate man work is obedience to his calling for which he is created, therefore work becomes a joy from which he does not seek to escape.

[Rushdoony] Exactly, exactly.

Yes John?

[Audience Member] The whole problem is with falling man looking at work as drudgery, is in fact, generally speaking, the law structure upon which he works, being false produces a frustration and a lack of productivity eventually it self-destructs and I think many people see that, that’s the a lot of the importance of the law so much. I think the law itself, most people never stop and think about it, you know. If I put God’s law to work what’s it going to do? It’s going to make me feel better and all these kinds of things, yes, but it’s also going to be productive, it’s also going to be creative, it’s also going to

show a profit in support of what Ari was saying, in the increase of the talents, only comes by putting God’s law to work, consciously putting it to work.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[John] Obeying his laws of economics, his laws of governing, his laws of study and what have you.

[Rushdoony] Otto?

[Otto] Would address for a second the concept of wait, because most people today, I’ve seen so many Christian friends of mine who you ask them why certain things haven’t gotten done, and they come back invariably with the “I’m waiting on the Lord” routine. A couple times I’ve gotten a little frustrated with that and I’ve said “well has it ever occurred to you the Lord might be waiting on you?” [Laughter] That whole concept of “wait” seems very passive and leisure like in terms of….

[Rushdoony] Yes. Quietism which arose in the 17th century perverted the Christian perspective on waiting on the Lord. The Biblical perspective is to wait on the Lord while you are doing your duty in the Lord. So it is not a quietist but an activist perspective. The waiting is Spiritual; it is not a retreat from activity.

Yes Howard?

[Howard] When I’m getting confused isn’t there two dialects in American English. One waits for the waitress to wait on them, and the other waits on the waitress to wait on them,[laughter] and most educated people speak the first dialect and most Christians come from a group that speaks the second dialect, but is it? Might it be correct to say that is the mode of the waitress that we are in, not of the customer, would that be a good way of explaining it?

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes.

Otto you had something to say.

[Otto] Well William Bolitho wrote the book Murder for Profit, a mass murder of the 20’s. And the single thread that ran through all his troubles is they didn’t know how to earn an honest living, and by luck in most cases, or accident, they discovered that killing somebody led them to money. So therefore they went into murder as business, and if you take the census of the average prison you would find there pretty largely an absence of any kind of work skill so the net result of this is that if we educate people without telling them how to work we’ve destroyed them from the beginning.

[Rushdoony] Exactly, and that’s how we destroyed many people in Africa and elsewhere. The ones we educated we abstracted from work.

Yes, you had ?

[Audience Member] The ultimate outcome is that this polarization between waiting on the Lord and working is a result of the conflict of Greek thought entering into the Christian realm, and not recognizing the clear spiritual and animal nature of man while we wait of the Lord Spiritually and work as He given us to our calling in the physical realm.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

Mark?

[Mark] That’s one thing I’ve noticed about Christian school, they’re pretty much geared to educating in the liberal arts in preparation for college. But that I know of there aren’t many Christian school movements that gears in high school or thereafter, towards trades.

[Rushdoony] Yes. However what we’re seeing little by little is departure from the older standards. The Christian school was originally a public school with Bible added. Little by little we’re getting a different emphasis, and of course we need to develop this further in the direction you indicated.

John?

[John] Well in terms of what Otto was saying about work, they hadn’t been taught how to work, that was the, if I understand one of the things that Dorothy Sayers is talking about in her essay on education in a Christian school, I mean you were there, was that what they in effect did in lower grades was they taught kids how to work in terms of pursuing knowledge, they taught them the tools of learning which in effect taught them how to work; and then latter on the subject just became the grist for the mill. Whereas today’s curriculum is exactly the opposite of that; you start out with subjects and it’s only until you get to high school that you actually learn how to study.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Any other comments or questions?

Yes Chuck?

[Chuck] Taking it down to the personal level of the young man and his education, it seems that the first thing that needs to be done in his case is for him to be able to determine what his talent is because obviously he can’t work productively, or at least not very productively, unless he has a concept of what his calling and what his talent is. What are schools doing to address that, specifically the Christian schools, and how’s a curriculum developed to take care of that particular problem?

[Rushdoony] Yes. I don’t think much is being done. A great deal needs to be done there of course, but today career training is not an aspect of education to any healthy degree. This leads to a crisis because after reaching 18 or 21 or 22 the young man suddenly is confronted with the fact that he has to work and is not prepared for a working world. So what he tends to do is to take the easiest way out, something that will give him enough money so he can eat and sleep and enjoy himself, and so you have low caliber performance progressively. The further we get away from a Christian work ethic, the lower the productivity of the average person.

Well our time is up let us bow our heads now in prayer.

Lord it has been good for us to be here, Thy word is a healing, empowering force in our lives and we rejoice that Thou hast given us Thy word that we may walk with light, with joy, with peace, and with Thanksgiving. Make us ever joyful in Thee, and Thankful. In Jesus name, amen.