Systematic Theology - Sin

The Lie

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 22

Dictation Name: 22 – The Lie

Year: 1980

Our text is from Revelation 22:13-15. Revelation 22:13-15, “13I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.

14 Blessed are they that do his commandments that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city.

15 For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.”

Recently a book was published by a feminist leader on murderous women. The book was rather strange in many of its statements because the authoress claimed that the law was discriminatory against women who committed crimes. She claimed, for example, that in Iowa, a woman can receive a five-year prison sentence for a misdemeanor and a man received no more than one year. Reviewer J.W. Bishop checked out some elementary facts including this one and found them to be completely false. And he said I am led to question her claim to scholarship.

Was this unusual? No.

Just recently a birth control pro-abortion group sent out a fundraising letter. They declared in that letter that the Right to Life people were setting fires to medical clinics, using bribery to get the names of women who had had an abortion in order to harass them, creating trouble and violence in hospitals where abortions took place, and much, much more. None of the charges were true. When a demand for documentation was made, they could produce none.

Unusual? No.

Such lies are commonplace in politics, in the press; everywhere. And yet the scriptures are clear: thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. A lie is a sin.

But lying is a cheap and an easy sin. There are less risks involved in lying than in almost any other sin. You don’t go to jail very often for telling a lie, not even for perjury in a court. Only occasionally is a perjurer convicted. Other crimes often bear serious and severe penalties, but rarely lying. Moreover, lying is a very significant sin because hatred against God and also against man is most easily vented in words. People who do not have the courage to assault someone or to commit murder will lie very readily. This is why James in his epistle [James 3:1-18] speaks so plainly and bluntly about the menace of the uncontrolled tongue. Moreover, he tells us, that the tongue in the ungodly is uncontrollable. He declares that the lie is a key area of sin and a symptomatic one, that it is revelatory of the heart of man.

Our Lord says the same thing. In Matthew 12:34, 35, we read, “34O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. 35 A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things.” Again in John 8:43-45 our Lord speaks about lies and their origin. And He says, “8Why do ye not understand my speech? Even because ye cannot hear my words. 44 Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it. 45 And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not.”

A man’s life is established on a faith, on a principle. It is either established upon God or a humanistic faith. The faith we hold will govern our life. It will rule our being. Now if we believe that God is the Lord, then we know that the world is created by the personal God. Truth is not abstract. It is personal. It is the Lord, Jesus Christ. If God is our Father, we are told in John 8:42, we will love and know His Son. If we cannot understand His words, it is because we are on alien ground.

The word ‘understand’ is a very interesting one. It comes from the Anglo-Saxon and it means exactly what it implies, that we stand under something. Our understanding is based upon some authority, a faith, a principle. If our understanding is governed by Almighty God, we stand under Him. We obey His every word. We believe His every word. Our understanding is under the Lord and under His Word.

We are a consequence of that which we believe, and we stand under it. We are its children. This is why our Lord says, “Why do ye not understand my speech? Even because ye cannot hear my words. Ye are of your father the devil and the lusts of your father, ye will do.” You stand under the devil, under his authority, under his leadership and therefore ye will do his works and abide by his word.

For the ungodly, their truth is a lie. For them, the truth is that there is no God and that every man is a god. Because Satan is the father of lies and a murderer in whom there is no truth, the ungodly make a lie their truth. Their foundational premise and principle is, ‘I shall be as god, knowing (determining) good and evil for myself.’

Now in Revelation 22:15 we are told after our Lord says, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last, and blessed are they that do his commandments,” we are then told, “that they may have right to the Tree of Life and may enter in through the gates into the city.” But outside, we are told what classes of people there are: dogs (that is homosexuals), sorcerers (that is, occultists), whoremongers (all who pursue illicit sex; the term in the original is broader than our understanding of it), murderers (that is, man-killers), idolaters (every form of idolatry; everything in our lives that places God on a secondary basis). Then finally, as the culminating evil, whosoever loveth and maketh a lie, very obviously in the catalog of sins in scripture, the lie is very important. And yet in the modern view, the lie is useful.

Perhaps no better defense of the lie has ever been given, or a more open one, a balder one, than that by Nietzsche. This is what Nietzsche wrote. “The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it. It is here perhaps that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions are the most indispensable to us that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely imagined world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live. That the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of live—a negation of life. To recognize untruth as a condition of life, that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.”

Now what Nietzsche is here saying is very logical, granted the premise of unbelief. To renounce lying is for Nietzsche to renounce life itself because for him, man is god. And if we are god, what is it that must stand—God’s Word or our word? In the beginning, the Lord God created the heavens and the earth. He said let it be and it was. And what man is trying to do and hence the use—the very use—of the word in Genesis 1, for “and God said, let there be,” ‘fiat’ – let there be light (fiat lux). That word has come into our language (fiat) to stand for what money is today. It’s fiat money. Law today is fiat law. Every area we turn to it is man’s fiat that prevails.

I read a book recently on mathematics and the teaching of it today in which professor Morris Klein objected intensely to current mathematics as fallacious, having no reality to engineering or to any other science because it was fiat mathematics, not practical scientific math. And yet, having said that he was unwilling to go the second step and accept the reality of God and of God’s Word. At every critical point he would then turn his guns on Fundamentalism, the belief in scripture, the belief in the absolute—when it was what he wanted above all else. And it was fiat mathematics he was attacking.

But the sinner loves the lie. It replaces reality for him because it is his fiat. Go to now, we will have a five-year plan and we will create a new world. Go to now, we will have a plan for the control of all children and we will create a new generation. Go to now, let us do thus and so. Let us say and it will be done. Fiat education. Wherever we turn today, this is the essence of it.

I finished reading this morning, a Rockefeller report on human rights and human needs; most interesting, because for these men, self-consciously human autonomy, man’s fiats have replaced God’s Word. But what can you do when everyone has a different definition of human rights? And what are rights for one are not rights for another? “In those days there was no king in Israel.” God was not recognized as King. “And every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” He saw it as right. And today from nation to nation, from person to person, the conception of human rights is what I want—my will be done! Every man is propagating his own lie and saying, ‘this is reality.’

This is why for Nietzsche to renounce lying is to renounce life itself; because for him, life must be without God and it must be life in which man by his own word says this is the way the world should be and therefore it must be. As Hegel said, the rational is the real. What I can see as the rational, therefore must be the real because I have pronounced the fiat word.

And so today our fallen civil orders, our civil governments lie by law. They issue their plans, their fiats to remake the world and they create their towers of Babel (their United Nations), their world dreams, all of which are a lie. But they see man’s fiat word, his lie as man’s hope. The lie seeks to make a truth outside of Jesus Christ and to declare that this is man’s hope.

The lie is a religious fact and that is why in the culminating catalog of sins, we have “and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie” is outside the kingdom, outside the city because whosoever loveth and maketh a lie is he who says, ‘I shall be as god and it is my word that shall determine good and evil or shall abolish good and evil,’ a la Nietzsche. A lie is a religious fact. It denies God’s reality and says I am god. Bow down before my word.

And yet, all things remain forever God’s creation and in due time, all the champions of the lie shall hide themselves vainly, saying to the mountains and the rocks, according to Revelation, fall on us and hide us from the face of Him that sitteth on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of His wrath is come and who shall be able to stand? A lie like all sin is a false covering. In the end, it leaves man naked and ashamed.

Are there any questions now?

Yes…

[Audience] I have something I’d like to share.

[Rushdoony] Very good.

[Audience] Are any of you familiar with The California Farmer? Rush has written a column in there for a little over 10 years, I know.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] And here’s a letter to the editor.

The company I work for subscribes to California Farmer and recently I had the opportunity to go to seven year’s back issues looking for a sourdough bread recipe. I did not find the recipe but in my browsing I did find a lot of “bread” for my mind and soul. I thoroughly enjoy many of your editorials and Rev. Rushdoony’s inspiring messages. It is truly a wonderful thing that you have been able to incorporate your faith in the supremacy of the triune God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost in your magazine. It will have great impact on many lives.

I do want to think you and express my appreciation. Keep up the good work, and if I can be of any service I will do my best to help.

Beverly Endervy Kinsey

Anaheim

[Rushdoony] Thank you, I hadn’t seen that letter.

Any other questions or comments?

[Audience] I was thinking back on your message of, I think three times ago, when you went over the Magnificat of Mary and talked about the imaginations of men’s heart and how the lie and the concern with fantasy in our modern world really are one package, just variations on the same theme.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I ran across an interesting fact with regard to the Magnificat since that time. In the 18th century, the Catholic and Protestant monarchs of Europe forbad the use of the Magnificat in services because they found it highly offensive and they wanted no such Christ preached in their churches, of whose work it was said by Mary that (let me find the exact wording) “he hath put down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree.” That to the crowned heads of Europe made Mary’s Magnificat taboo. It could not be used.

[Audience] I was always amazed that George II could sit through the whole Messiah.

[Rushdoony] Yes…

[Audience] And listen to things like “King of Kings and Lord of Lords “ and where the nations so furiously raise together and all that.

[Rushdoony] Well, his grasp of English was very poor! [Laughter]

[Audience] And he can’t understand what people were singing anyways, so… [Laughter]

[Rushdoony] George III was the one who was English through and through, and self-consciously. George I never bothered to learn English and George II didn’t like it and preferred German (and sin)

[Audience] Are those synonymous? [Laughter]

[Rushdoony] No, but for him sin was very much to his taste and he didn’t have much taste in sin!

Any other questions or comments?

Well if not, let us bow our heads in prayer.

Our Lord and our God, we thank Thee for Thy Word. We thank Thee for Jesus Christ and His Kingship. We rejoice our Father that we have been enrolled by Thy grace in a victorious army. Make us strong in battle and ever-faithful to our commander. Bless us now and grant unto us traveling mercies as returning homeward, a blessed night’s rest, and joy in Thee day-by-day as we serve in our appointed place. In Jesus’ name, amen.