Systematic Theology - Sin

Sin and Desecration

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 19

Dictation Name: 19 – Sin and Desecration

Year: 1980

Oh Lord our God, we come unto Thee again, mindful of the greatness of Thy government, Thy sure mercies and Thine unfailing grace. We beseech Thee oh Lord to give us the victory against the enemy, against the powers of darkness, against the humanists, the occultists, the homosexuals and all the evil community that rages against Thee and against Thine anointed. We thank Thee, our Father that Thou art He who shall rule them with a rod of iron and smash them in pieces. And so we come to Thee to cast our every care upon Thee how carest for us. Instruct our hearts by Thy Word and by Thy Spirit, in Jesus’ name, amen.

We have been dealing with the doctrine of sin and we shall next month conclude our studies of this doctrine. Our scripture this evening is again Genesis 3:1-5 and also II Corinthians 11:14.

[Genesis 3:1-5] “1Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

2 And the woman said unto the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

4 And the serpent said unto the woman, ye shall not surely die:

5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

And II Corinthians 11:14, a very, very interesting and important verse, beginning with the fourth word, “… for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.”

This year, 1980, a very interesting book was published. I shall return to this book again in our second session. The book is entitled, Michelle Remembers by Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder, M.D., a psychiatrist, a man who is a Christian. Michelle is a young woman who, in this book, recounts her experiences which have been extensively checked out by Dr. Pazder and confirmed. The book deals with Satanism and the Church of Satan. The locale of the book is in British Columbia, in Victoria. The book not only deals with the Church of Satan there and some of their practices which include ritual murder, human sacrifice and every kind of perversity, it also has a number of the revelations of Satan to the group. I’ll deal more with these in the second hour, but for the moment I’d like to call attention briefly to a couple of the items in these revelations from Satan.

One thing which comes through clearly is that the Satanists thrive on despair, that nothing gives them a better chance to succeed with people than despair, a loss of hope. And according to their church, Satan declares, “I go where everybody’s afraid,” a very interesting statement. And another statement from their revelations from Satan says, “Think so much, no time for play.” We’ll return to these and more, as I said, in the second hour.

But one of the things that marks the cult is its desecration of everything that is holy and righteous, and of course this is our subject in the first session, “Sin and Desecration.”

This kind of desecration is practiced in every way imaginable within their own lives, within the community and is such practices as defecating on the Bible and on the cross. The goal is to make the world free for evil, to desecrate that which is righteous and to make evil look trifling, not serious at all, but even as Dr. Pazder says, “small and mean and unoriginal.” When we see evil as a trivial matter (which is their goal), then we both under-rate evil and Satan.

Another interesting aspect of the faith, Dr. Pazder reports, is that nothing spontaneous is allowed to happen. Now, we need to assess this in terms of the two scriptures we read, Genesis 3:1-5, which is the tempter program, and II Corinthians 11:14. The first of these two gives us the creed of Satan, Satan’s creed as proposed to Adam and Eve.

         First of all, every man is to be his own god, his own source of law.

         Second, it is an affirmation of the most radical kind of total freedom

         Third, it is total war against God and His Law, and the way of light is Satan’s way; he leads a revolution against God in the name of light

It is interesting in terms of Paul’s statement, “Satan is himself transposed into an angel of light,” that one of the most common names for Satan in these cults, as well as a very ancient name going back to Old Testament times is Lucifer; Lucifer. The word ‘Lucifer’ comes from two words, lux (light) and ferre (bearer), so that when Satan comes as Lucifer, he comes as the bearer of light to man. Here is the truth. Here is the light. In other words, Satan is saying it is I, not God who can truly say “Let there be light.” And yet it is ironic that Satanists want darkness for their rites.

No spontaneity—that’s an interesting fact. The occultist’s power in all its forms requires a rigid adherence to form. No matter what group of magical adherence or occultists or Satanists or witches, you find an insistence on a radical adherence, a rigid adherence to form. No deviation permitted; it spoils everything. They are the ones who demand total freedom from God, but they are the ones also who in their groups, insist on the most radical kind of slavery conceivable. What is the key to this rigidity? It is the desire to negate everything good.

Now in Genesis 1 we are told over and over again that God created everything good. Now this is important to know. The Fall does not change that. All things are metaphysically good. They are good in their being. This is why Paul can say to the pure, all things are pure. Why? Because they come from the hand of God. He made them. The Fall is not metaphysical; it is moral. We are in our worst depravity, still metaphysically good. Our being is good. Our morality is evil. The Fall is a moral fall, so the Fall does not change the character of being. The world is still God’s creation. This is why wisdom can say he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul. Everything in us is hurt by sin, cries out against sin. Sin is a sickness on something that is basically good. Now Manichaeism says the whole material world is evil. This is not scriptural. We have to say in terms of scripture, what God said when He surveyed creation. Everything’s good. Sin affects the moral nature of man but not his metaphysical being, his existence or life or the world. They remain good, even though marred by sin.

Thus, the fall of man does not alter the being of things. It affects the moral spirit. In man’s regeneration and in the new creation, the metaphysical goodness of all being, of all things, is united again with a moral goodness. This means that man in his fall is in civil war against himself. Everything in him, because it’s created by God, witnesses against himself, so that there is no peace, saith my God, for the wicked. This means that the Satanists find that everything spontaneous witnesses against them. Hence, no spontaneity is permitted.

As a result, what they attempt to do, as this book recounts, Michelle Smith was sold by her mother to a priestess of the cult at the age of four. They want children like that so they can rear them from their earliest days into total depravity, hoping they can eliminate that which is good. And their problem is that even then, the child cries out for its mother, a natural and a wholesome thing. But their desire is to pollute totally and to prove that it can be done. They will not tolerate the slightest outcropping of any natural feeling and love in a child because it destroys the validity of their ritual. They indulge in perversions. They indulge in ritual murders and sacrifices in order to try to destroy anything in man that witnesses against himself. They seek to pollute all things.

And this is what Paul witnesses to in Romans 1:27 when he says of the homosexual, they leave their natural use; they war against their natural use. They forsake it. They go against it. That’s the point Paul makes. Even the fallen man in his sin knows he is going against his natural being because he was made by God to serve and to glorify God. This is why the occultists indulge in every kind of depravity. In some groups of witchcraft worshipers, incest is required in order to destroy any good feeling in a person, but it never works. As the Existentialist philosopher, Camus declared, “Since God claims all that is good in man, it is necessary to deride what is good and choose what is evil.” Freedom is thus sought in evil, but evil is hostility to the metaphysical goodness of being and hence, they can tolerate no freedom. As Proverbs 8:36 declares, all they that hate me love death. The light witnesses against that.

And so the Satanists are given to desecration. The sinner wants to desecrate that which is holy, but they cannot strike at God, so they seek to strike at God’s people, to His creation, the Church, the Bible, the cross. And they also seek to desecrate God’s image in themselves.

I recall back in the 40s, reading what some patients in mental institutions do to defile the image of God in themselves, the kind of depravities they indulge in even in their own cell, trying to defile the image of God in themselves. Now that statement, that this was the purpose of what they were doing, was made by a humanistic psychiatrist.

“Think so much, no time to pray…I go where everybody’s afraid.” Cultivate despair in man. Fear denies God’s omnipotence and His government and it renders us susceptible to evil. Fear is an instrument of evil when we do not fear God. What we fear is power, and our fears will make clear to us what is the great power in our lives. If we fear evil inordinately, then we deny God’s power. Psalm 19:9 tells us that the fear of the Lord is clean. Proverbs 1:7 says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. The fear of evil, however, is a sin. We cannot substitute our fears and our thinking and our planning for prayer.

This puts the government on our shoulders and says that it is our thinking and our planning that will rule and prevail. Fear and prayerlessness are sins and they desecrate us.

Are there any questions now?

Yes…

[Audience] Can you explain further please what you were talking about with the creation being good yet sin being moral? Did Christ also redeem creation when He died on the cross? If so, how?

[Rushdoony] Yes. We are told that He is (Jesus Christ is) firstfruits of the new creation, that with every person who is born again, we have an extension of the new creation, that the new creation grows wherever we exercise dominion. It will culminate in His coming again and the regeneration of all things.

[Audience] So then it’s…man’s fall was not necessarily his physical, it was his moral being?

[Rushdoony] It was his moral being. Now, it brought death into the world which affects our physical being, but our physical being still remains good as God made it. Life is not an evil. It’s what we do with life that is an evil. Our bodies are not evil. It is what we do with our bodies that’s evil, you see. That’s the distinction.

Yes…

[Audience] Um, when you talked at the very beginning when you said Satan doesn’t allow, or doesn’t want to allow the spontaneous to happen, could you give us another example of that?

[Rushdoony] Could I what?

[Audience] Give another example? You… you gave the example of the baby crying for his mother…

[Rushdoony] Yes. In the Church of Satan, as this book states, no spontaneity is required. In all the books (and I have a couple hundred on the subject) stress

[Audience] [Mumble]

[Rushdoony] What?

[Audience] You said no spontaneity is required.

[Rushdoony] Is allowed. No spontaneity is required—is, is allowed, excuse me, because spontaneity will witness to the goodness of life.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well….

[Audience] You mean in their worship service?

[Rushdoony] No, no. In the worship service no spontaneity, yes, but they try to destroy it in themselves also by deliberately doing that which is evil. In other words, their sexuality must be perverse. Their relationship (husband and wife) must be perverse. Their relationship to their circle has to be perverse. Thus, if you see someone you know that is in need, hard up, you want to help them. Even the sinners are inclined to do that. But the Satanist says we’ve got to destroy that. We cannot allow any goodness to exist. We’ve got to recreate all things in terms of the image of Satan as it were. So the more a person pursues the path of Satanism, the more they try to suppress everything that is good, everything that is in any sense an expression of a natural feeling of kindliness and grace, because people will naturally be kindly unless they’re very depraved and are systematically trying to suppress that.

Does that help?

[Audience] Um-hm.

[Rushdoony] For example, I’ve been helped many times over the years when I’ve had a flat, somebody who’s not a Christian will stop and give a hand. Now this is the kind of thing that Satanism wants to destroy—any natural feeling of kindliness or goodness.

Yes…

[Audience] {?} that thing, where “the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked…” and every imagination and thoughts of man’s heart are only evil continually? So… {?}… “…no not one, none that understand, none that seeks after God…”

[Rushdoony] That’s right.

[Audience] That’s the natural….

[Rushdoony] “None righteous, no not one,” “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God,” all those things have to do with man’s moral nature.

[Audience] {?} everyone is depraved to start with.

[Rushdoony] Everyone in Adam is fallen in their moral nature and they are totally depraved, but we are not depraved in our metaphysical being, that is, our body is not a depraved thing. Our life is not a depraved thing. It is what our heart, our moral being is, that is depraved.

[Audience] that, it says that defilement only comes from within, in other words there’s {?} to be put into the mouth, it’s what comes out of the mouth, so out of this depraved man comes evil, but the food and animals and everything else are not evil in themselves, I mean it’s… the man, moral…

[Rushdoony] That’s why Paul says to the pure all things are pure. They know that God made all things good.

Any other questions?

Yes…

[Audience] I’ve read where artists in Russia are not allowed the freedom to express themselves, as we are in the free world. And creativity is an attribute of the Lord, it’s spiteful this… seems we require that same {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, a very good point. In the Soviet Union and in every totalitarian regime, the artist, like everyone else, is allowed no freedom of expression. In our country, we supposedly have freedom of expression, but they’re trying through the galleries and through the publishers, to channel it in only a depraved direction. So they’re trying to stifle the freedom here by saying there’s only one way you can express yourself in terms of these depraved standards.

Yes…

[Audience] You said curiosity would…would the extent of government control that we see today be an attempt along those lines, or is it aiming in a different direction?

[Rushdoony] Very good question. The extent of government controls today by the State is an expression of the same satanic thing, to substitute for God’s government, the government and program of Satan. And it therefore wants to suppress our freedom, because in the exercise of our freedom, it is God’s creation and His purpose that will prevail.

Yes..

[Audience] Freedom is to be free to do what we ought, not to do what we want.

[Rushdoony] That’s right.

Well, we’ll take a break now for about 10 minutes or so.