Systematic Theology - Sin

The Kingdom of Sin or the Kingdom of Man

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 16

Dictation Name: 16– The Kingdom of Sin or the Kingdom of Man

Year: 1980

Our subject in this second session this evening will be “The Kingdom of Sin or the Kingdom of Man.” We have in these current series which we will terminate before the end of the year, in studying the doctrine of sin as we go through basic doctrines of the faith.

Men are sinners who love to justify their sin as self-realization. They fight epistemological self-consciousness; that is the recognition and the knowledge of what they are. They do not want to know themselves as sinners. And so Paul says in Romans 1:17, they suppress the truth. They hold it (or literally hold it down) in unrighteousness. They profess on the one hand to be champions of righteousness or justice, and on the other hand, they work to subvert all things of God and man alike. Proverbs 8:36 sums it up when it says he that hates me wrongs his own soul. All they that hate me love death. The love of death is basic to man the sinner. He is suicidal.

In Revelation 17:5, we have a verse that gives us a description of the Kingdom of Man, or Babylon the Great. “And upon her forehead was a name written, ‘mystery, Babylon the Great, mother of harlots and abominations of the earth.’” This is a very interesting description, and perhaps the most interesting fact of it is the use of the word as the first term to describe this great kingdom of man is mystery. We have in this verse, a recognition that man works both to build something and to destroy it.

Now mystery, the Greek word which is translated as such, means that which is known only to initiates. It is comparable to the kind of knowledge that belongs to fraternal lodges, masonic groups for example, something reserved for and known by initiates. But all unregenerate men are governed by sin. Why then is not the principle of sin known to all such? Why is there then a mystery about the kingdom of man?

Why also the proneness of the world of fallen man to conspiracies? Some few years back, an interesting book was written about the fact that since the enlightenment, since Humanism became openly the faith of western man, we have seen a succession of conspiracies, at all times a multiplicity of conspiracies. Why? The Fall, of course, was man’s basic conspiracy, and still is a conspiracy, a rebellion against God. Man as a sinner is in rebellion against God but he tries to keep that fact hidden. Most men want to have a foot in both camps; a foot in God’s camp and a foot in the world of sin, in the devil’s camp.

The image of God in man always witnesses to the truth. Because God made us, every atom, every fiber of our being testifies to God. The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork. Everything witnesses to God. Man therefore knows he is a sinner. But he does not want to admit the meaning of his sin, and so he holds the truth, he holds5 it down, suppresses it in unrighteousness.

Revelation goes on to tell us that the kingdom of man is the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth. ‘Abominations’ means that which is disgusting and unclean; harlot, a woman who sells herself. Now the fact about the sinner is that he wants to sin, but he wants to call his abomination (to use the biblical word) clean. Whatever he does, he wants to justify it—idolatry, abortion, homosexuality, whatever it is, he will justify. He will form organizations attempting to make it legitimate, to justify it, to vindicate it as something altogether healthy. There was even a call a while back (what became of it, I do not know), for necrophiliacs to unite and to vindicate their sexual tastes (necrophilia is a desire to make love to the dead). Can you imagine such an insanity? And yet this is the direction of sin. The sinner wants his sin, but he wants to call it righteous, so whatever he does, whether it’s homosexuality or abortion, he’s going to put a good label on it. He wants a foot in both camps. He fights epistemological self-consciousness, that is, the self-knowledge of what he is. He wants to call his abomination clean. Only a handful will admit what they are, and it is there that you have the mystery, the initiates, those who are openly and self-consciously, as Revelation says, sinners and who affirm their sin.

If all sinners were as logical as Walter Kaufmann, the Princeton professor of philosophy who died recently, they would be confronted with the same kind of dilemma his logic forced him to. In his book published in 1973, Without Guilt and Justice, he argued that both guilt and justice are biblical ideas and in a world without God, they are obsolete. We should abandon the concept of guilt and innocence, of justice and injustice. All things are equally good and all things are therefore permitted. But very few are ready to be so open, so obvious in their rejection of God. Most of them want the kingdom of God in name and the kingdom of man in fact. Hence, their rebellion against all who compel them to face up openly to what they are.

One of the things that made Max Sterner so unpopular early in the last century is that he required this logical self-consciousness on the part of men. In his book, The Ego and Its Own, Max Sterner ridiculed the atheists of his day. He said they were secret (or closet) Christians. Why? Because he said which of you self-righteous Atheists will sleep with his daughter or his mother? Why? Why don’t you do it? Because you’re secretly morally Christians, he said, and you’re hypocrites. When you have rejected God, you have to reject everything. There’s no longer any evil. All things are equally good. But most men don’t want to be that logical. They want a foot in both camps.

And so the kingdom of man fights a self-awareness. And the sinner, no matter how obviously and flagrantly a sinner he is, will still have a vein of self-righteousness and a desire to say that somehow he can be all right with God. I don’t know how many times over the years I heard some very far-out reprobate say, justifying himself, I’ll take my chances with God. And several times, I’ve heard a very disgusted wife say she wouldn’t take chances with him at all!

Now, Max Sterner was right. Walter Kaufmann was right. If God’s Law is gone and God is dead, what law remains? If an innocent, unborn babe is expendable, what adult is not? This is why, when men began to unite in sin, God said concerning them in Genesis 11:6, this they begin to do and now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do. But for most sinners, this is too much. They fight shy of that knowledge.

Igor Shafarevich, a Soviet mathematician, contributed I think the best of the underground essays in the book published in this country by Solzhenitsyn entitled, From Under the Rubble and Shafarevich analyzed Marxism. And he said what the people who follow Marxism do not realize is that its goal is not a better world order, not justice for the masses. It is, he said rather, the death of God, the death of the family, the death of man. The goal of Marxism, he said (and he gives compelling evidence from the Marxist writers) is the death of mankind. It is what Samuel Warner described in his book The Urge to Mass Destruction, that temper, mass destruction, an urge to mass destruction, marks unregenerate man. It marks the world without God. And our world today is governed by an urge to mass destruction. “All they that hate me love death,” God says.

Sin leads to tyranny and ultimately to death. It presents every man as his own god, determining good and evil for himself, according to his tastes. Nimrod is given to us as the founder of Babylon and the City of Man, and his name almost certainly means tyrant. He’s called a mighty hunter, which means really, tyrant, and his name (Nimrod) comes from rebel because he represented rebellion against God.

The tempter in Genesis 3:5 identifies knowledge with a simple attempt to determine good and evil independently from God. It is interesting that in terms of modern educators, or the philosophers of education, this is the definition of true knowledge. Not too long ago a textbook was put out for majors in education entitled Humanistic Education Sourcebook. The four co-authors of it had chapters in it with such titles as “Humanism: Capstone of an Educated Person.” In the chapter on values, the point that was made was values are neither good nor evil. Morality has nothing to do with true or false, right or wrong. Morality and values are merely personal goals, tastes and objectives. Now every man so taught is a potential tyrant because value for him is ‘my will be done!’ And it is not surprising at all that we have all around us today precisely such a generation, because the essence of the teaching of all too many public school educators, the young in particular, and of all too many in the pulpit is self-realization, meaning ‘my will be done.’

The logical conclusion of such a society is death. Because the universe is God-created, nothing in this universe can work which is not of God. Sin is self-defeating. It always is suicidal, and thus as we look at our times today and we see the course of this country and of the Soviet Union, of every continent and every nation, we have to say their course is suicidal, so that the evils of our time are going to be with us none too long. The question is not what will happen to them, because they will destroy themselves. The question is what will we do to establish a godly future, to promote the cause of Christian reconstruction in terms of the Word of God?

Are there any questions now?

[Dead Air]

[Audience] …. Book, a little book written by the author of God’s Smuggler (I forget his name) ah…

[Audience] Brother Andrew!

[Audience] Brother Andrew. Was Marx a Satanist? I picked it up on a book rack in a church because I was interested in studying the Satan worship that was present not only in the common {?} in the latter part of the 19th century, but back with Robespierre and I was very surprised. It’s a nice little book. He did an, he did his homework, and it’s well documented, and after he gets done putting together a chain of circumstantial evidence from Marx and Engels’s lies, you come away saying yes they were Satanists, there’s no question about it.

[Rushdoony] And Marx was very clearly suicidal in all that he did. Nathaniel Wale has written a very interesting book on Marx and of course our own scholar, Gary North has an exceptionally fine book on Marx which I hope will again be in print before too long.

But Marx was a man who did everything to harm every person he ever came into contact with. He was masochistic to the nth degree, always punishing himself. All his life, he suffered from boils, from head to foot, just enveloped with boils all over his body. He lived sometimes in poverty, but his income was better than that of most English gentlemen, all his life. What he did with the money was, in a time when fortunes were being made on the English Stock Exchange, because everything was going up, up and away, he went for every wild get-rich-quick stock that was ever offered, and he was a sure loser every time. If there was one share of stock on the market out of a hundred that was a fraudulent thing, Marx went for it with an unerring instinct! So he continually lost everything he had, would beg Engels for more in order to live off of it, and promptly splurge again in the market. He wrote about the capitalists as exploiters, but they had one servant in the house who came with his wife (his wife was a noblewoman) and he raped that girl, and the Marxists worked to hide that until recent years because this was the kind of thing Marx accused the capitalists of and he himself had been most flagrantly guilty of it.

It would be easy to go on to talk about the suicidal nature of everything Marx did and everything he touched, but we’re not talking about Marx, I just cite that as an illustration of how the more you pursue pure evil in your affirmations, the more you negate life itself. And that’s Satanism and its practical consequences.

Any other questions or comments?

Yes….

[Audience] How would you fit this in with, say, Asceticism or Arminianism, people who…..

[Rushdoony] Asceticism has a different origin and it comes from a false doctrine concerning man and creation. According to Asceticism, man is dualistic. Now, the Greek doctrine was that there were two kinds of substance which were ultimate: one was mind and the other was matter, and of the two, matter was clearly lesser. And it was mind which had a special divinity about it. So to rise in the scale of being, you suppressed matter in your being and affirmed pure mind or spirit. And that’s the origin of Asceticism, a false doctrine of man. For us there are two kinds of being also, but one is the uncreated being of God and the other is created being—all of it.

[Audience] Seems like it’s always, though, the doctrine of self-destruction, of….

[Rushdoony] Yes, it has elements of self-destruction because in its extreme form, as with the heretical groups, the dualists like the Albigensians, and the Catherists. They felt it was necessary to destroy the body, going so far as suicide in some cases. Regarding marriage as an evil—anything that catered to the flesh was an evil. So when you depart from God, you are suicidal in some sense. Yes.

Yes…

[Audience] Why do you think, um, so many contemporary evangelicals divorce the definition of, ah, in the definition of sin, against God’s Law?

[Rushdoony] Well, of course the historic definition of sin is, sin is any want of conformity to or violation of God’s Law.

A great deal of contemporary Christian thought is infected with the ascetic idea, which is Greek in origin, that sin is that which, submitting to the material side of things. But as I’ve said on many an occasion, Satan was a purely spiritual being and totally sinful. Sin is not something that belongs to the flesh; it is something that originates in the mind. So you get a false definition of sin if you see it as catering to the flesh. Using the term flesh in our sense, Paul uses the term flesh in a different meaning. In his case, it refers to human nature, as against the reborn nature, borne of the spirit. He’s not referring to the Greek dualism there.

Yes..

[Audience] How come you say sin originates in the mind?

[Rushdoony] Well, it’s the mind which governs us.

[Audience] How about if I said the heart? What would…

[Rushdoony] Yes, the heart, or the mind, the core of man’s being, but the mind is the thinking center.

[Audience] {?} has a good point, people were always taught that

[Audience] I’ve never heard that. I’ve never thought sin originated in your mind.

[Rushdoony] Well….?

[Audience] That would make it intellectual.

[Rushdoony] Sin is an intellectual ascent into a false principle, yes. But it promptly, it originates also in the heart. The heart means in the Bible, the core of our being. Well, what is the core of our being? Is it not thought? Feeling? [tape abruptly ends]