Systematic Theology - Sin

The Religious Nature of Sin

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 01

Dictation Name: 01 The Religious Nature of Sin

Year: 1960’s – 1970’s

Almighty God our Heavenly Father, we give thanks unto Thee that however difficult the problems of our time may be, we have the blessed assurance that Thou art on the throne and it is Thy counsel that shall prevail. Give us grace therefore, oh Lord to move in the certainty of Thy government, the blessed assurance of Thy grace and the knowledge that Thou shall prevail. Bless us this evening as we give ourselves to the study of the things that are of Thee, in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Tonight we begin a series of studies into the doctrine of sin. It is particularly important for us to understand this doctrine because too often our failure to know what the ramifications of sin are in ourselves and in society make us incapable of dealing with it both in ourselves and in the world around us.

Now a good many years ago, when I was a missionary to the American Indians, on arriving, I asked the three old men who were the…really, the church, because there was scarcely anyone else at that time who was in the church, what the religious classification of the indians would be, how many there were of any particular faith. And they mentioned that some were still adherents of the old-time Indian faith, the belief in the wolf cult. Others were in the peyote cult and then they said, most of them belonged to the whiskey religion. Now, they said that half humorously, but also seriously. Their observation was a very sound one.

Too often we fail to appreciate that religion is what a man depends upon. Now, if you depend upon drugs or whiskey, your religion is either drugs or whiskey. If you depend upon pleasure then you have a religion made up of pleasure. What you depend upon determines what your faith is.

Now as we analyze the doctrine of sin, we must remember that our definitions are too often moralistic. Sin is a religious, a theological fact. At the heart of all sin is a religious purpose. Genesis 3:1-5 makes this very clear because here we read very plainly set forth, the program of sin.

“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.”

We will return to the meaning of this on another occasion but suffice it to say that what the tempter was proposing to mankind was a religious goal, that man should not depend upon God but upon himself, that every many can be his own god, determining good and evil for himself. Learn to depend upon yourself and remake the world in terms of your independence, of your self-reliance.

Negatively considered, sin is a violation of God’s Law. I John 3:4 tells us, “Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the Law of God, for sin is the transgression of the Law.” The Westminster Shorter Catechism no. 14 declares, “Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of the Law of God.” Sin is thus a hostile act against God and against God’s Law.

There are two basic words in the Greek for sin. I’ve touched upon these on another occasion, but they need repeating because they are so important to understanding the Bible. One is anomia. Literally, it means anti-law, or lawlessness. Now anomia is what marks every unbeliever. He is anti-God’s Law. Lawlessness is his way of life. The other word is hamartia. Hamartia is falling short, or missing the mark. In anomia, lawlessness, you’re going in the other direction than the target. But in hamartia, you’re falling short. You’re missing the mark, but you’re aiming at it. Thus, the Christian can commit hamartia. He can fall short. He does miss the mark. This is an inescapable fact of every redeemed person. But he will not be guilty of anomia, of lawlessness, anti-Law.

Now let’s go on to sin positively considered. It is, as we said earlier, a religious act. It is an affirmation of another way of life.

Some years ago, a very interesting study was made. It goes back to the 20s but it’s only been confirmed over and over again since them. After World War II it became obvious that adultery and fornication were being practiced for reasons other than people have historically fallen into these sins, for love or pleasure or some other reason like that. No. Now there was a different motive. People were practicing adultery who didn’t enjoy it, and said they didn’t—found no pleasure in it. But it was their way of affirming their freedom, of being alive so that sin was being openly considered as a way of life. During the 60s especially, I heard more than one hippie around a university campus say to others who were godly, what’s the matter, are you afraid to live? And inviting them either into drugs or into sexual acts. In other words, sin was seen as life. You’re not really alive if you’re just living in terms of God’s Law. This is the implication.

And of course, we see this even with little children who dare each other to do something as though stealing the apples from the neighbor’s yard was somehow a remarkable act. It proved something. What are you afraid of? You’re a nobody if you don’t break the law, in other words.

On the other hand, whereas sin says this is the way of life, the Bible says this is the Way, God’s Law. Walk ye in it. joseph when he faced is brothers in Egypt and identified himself, and before he did, made clear one thing—this do and live(my commandment) because he had power over them. Therefore you conform to me if you live. If you choose to die, break my word. And God says the same thing to us. This do and live, so that for us, righteousness is life and Christ is righteousness incarnate.

Whereas for the ungodly, sin is the way of life. Thus, sin is a religious necessity for all men who are in revolt against God. They’ve got to sin. As a result, every effort to build a good social order on the foundation of fallen man is doomed. Fallen man will move a world, a family, an institution, a society into radical lawlessness. It is the principle of sin: every man his own god, to be anarchistic and lawless. It always leads to social upheaval and to tyranny.

Now even the Humanists recognize this fact and so to counteract this fact, the drive into lawlessness, the elite men say we will play gods over other men. One of the most interesting instances of this kind of thinking is in Karl Marx. Karl Marx was very bitterly hostile to Max Sterner. Max Sterner was an Anarchist, a systematic Anarchist who believed that anything goes. And I mean literally anything goes. He regarded the state as much an enemy as he did anything else. He felt that anyone who was moral, that is who felt there was something against incest or rape or any other act was a fool. Now Marx never said Sterner was wrong. But he wrote two fat volumes attacking Sterner. He knew that the logic of Atheism, the logic of Humanism, led directly to what Sterner was talking about. If every man is his own god, there is nothing in heaven above or in earth beneath that can bind a man except his own law. But he said if we have that, we will destroy our Humanism, our anti-God world. Therefore we must have an elite group to rule, the dictatorship of the proletariat.

And so today wherever you have unbelief, whether it’s among the Marxists, or among the Rockefellers, or among the Fabian Socialists or any group, there alternative to God is a handful of men to play god and govern the rest of them. After all, this measure in Congress to prevent you and I from expressing our opinions politically is that not designed to enable an elite group to rule the country without interference with us? The next step would be for them to pick the candidates in every party for the people.

So you have the elite men declaring they will exercise the general will for the general welfare, that they become the great tyrants of society. In the name of the democratic consensus or the general will or the dictatorship of the proletariat, they claim to incarnate the will of man in themselves. But since the will of fallen man is evil, any man who incarnates that will, will give us the concentrated maximization of evil. It is not surprising that the modern state is an evil force in the world because the modern state is a Humanistic state.

Now as I’ve already indicated, sin is a way of life. From the biblical point of view, it is rather a way of death. But the sinner equates sin with life and with freedom. He sees it as a necessary experience of man. This can mean the commission of lawless acts. It always means the abolition of God from relevancy to any and every area of life. It is the secularization of man, of his life and of his world.

So we do not have to go out and kill someone or commit adultery or rob or steal or bear false witness to be sinners. We’ve already committed a great sin when we say God has no relevancy outside of the Church to my vocation or to the school down the street or to anything else. That is the ultimate sin. It says God is dead except within the walls of the church.

Today of course, this is exactly what we have in our society. Man sees himself as in a world which is a do-it-yourself world, law as do-it-yourself in nature, and man is out to make his own charts, his own laws, his own goals. Self-realization is the purpose of life, or the Great Society or the Communist State or the Age of Aquarius, all meaning essentially the same thing.

Now the tempter in Genesis 3:1-5 presented his goal as highly moral, as religious. Sin means the redefinition of all things. Long before sin is an act, it is a faith, but not in God. It is a faith in man and in man’s way. Now sin does result in acts, but it cannot be reduced to an act. Sin is a religious fact for the sinner. For us it is righteousness. It is Christ and our hope is not in sin but in the Lord.

The Bible always speaks of course, of God’s wrath against sin. It speaks of the judgment upon sinners. God knows the religious nature of all sin and He knows that it’s an act of war against Himself. Sin can and does affect man in every area of his activity, his thinking and his life. Our sin affects us, our families, our society and other men, but sin is always above all else, directed against God.

David saw this when he said in Psalm 51:4, “Against Thee, Thee only have I sinned and done evil in Thy sight.” Now today all too many preachers who are liberal would justify David’s sin by saying the man was lonely, or his wife didn’t understand him and that’s why he fell into adultery. One excuse after another would be seen as justifying or excusing his sin. But David as a godly man, saw his sin for what it was—an act against God, a declaration, if only for a time, of independence. The appeal of all sin is precisely that; sinning against God. My will be done. It is affirming our will, our way of life, and of course this is a fact that we need to recognize. We like our way. We love it. And we want people to see us as the center of things. Sin is not weakness but it is a strength, an evil strength. It is an assault, a war against God. It is an attempt to evade His Law and His government in favor of our own.

One of our great problems today is that sin is not understood for what it is. It is seen as deprivation. It is seen as weakness. It is seen as almost anything except what it is—a religious act, an affirmation of a way of life outside of God.

Are there any questions now?

[Audience] I don’t have a question but I really appreciate what you through {?} studies. Had me under the corner that way but I surely {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, you see the popular idea that sin is a weakness is very encouraging to our sinful heart because it enables us to excuse what we have done and you remember Flip Wilson used to say, “The Devil made me do it!” Well, John Dunn, the Puritan poet and preacher put his finger on it when he spoke of us tempting Satan to tempt us. We want Satan to do it so we can blame him. Well, we don’t need any help from Satan. We’re anxious enough to do it on our own most of the time

Yes…

[Audience] That Satan is an omniscient, omnipresent, but he’s not divine, so we blame him for many things more than… it’s impossible for him to do. His network does it, but he doesn’t do it. And if by his power, he does, all the demons in his own network around the world, but actually Satan doesn’t tempt all of us. He’d tempt Jesus Christ, some of the key leaders maybe, but not, not us because we go away in our own lusts, it says in the Bible.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] We are enticed.

[Rushdoony] Very true. You see, Satan is a creature. Therefore, he can only be in one place at one time, so to give too much power to Satan is a way of excusing ourselves.

[Audience] Wasn’t Satan and angel and wasn’t the angel something less than the human?

[Rushdoony] Yes, very good point. Satan is a fallen angel, and the angels are spoken of as lower than man, as under man in God’s order.

[Audience] So we’re really giving him a lot more credit than he deserves.

[Rushdoony] Exactly. We give Satan more credit than he has any right to. Within--

[Audience] Where’s it say about lower than the angels.

[Rushdoony] What?

[Audience] Where is it saying when it says {?} lower than the angels.

[Rushdoony] Literally in the Hebrew, it’s Elohim, a little lower than God.

[Audience] {?} excellent.

[Rushdoony] Yes. That’s in Psalm 8.

Well, if there are no further questions, we’ll take a recess for a few minutes.