Biblical Doctrine of the Family

Marriage and the Image Mandate

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 09

Dictation Name: 09 Marriage and the Image Mandate

Year: 1960’s – 1970’s

Let us begin with prayer.

O Lord our God, we give thanks unto thee that as we face our troubled times, we have the sure assurance of thy word, that thou art on the throne, that there is nothing that can shake thy government nor alter thy will, and that thy will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven. Grant that thy will be done in our lives and that we have the joy of knowing that we are thine in word, thought, and deed, and that thy purpose for us govern all our days. Grant us this, we beseech thee, in Jesus name. Amen.

We have been dealing with the biblical doctrine of the family, and tonight we’re going to deal with two aspects of scripture’s teaching here. First of all, Marriage and the Image Mandate. I shall read, first of all, Ephesians 5:21-33. “Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God. Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, that he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church: for we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church. Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband.”

In considering this passage, we shall also be dealing with Genesis 2 and Adam and Eve. In our second session this evening, with Abraham and Sarah. It is important to begin here because first, we see marriage in paradise before the Fall, and we see it as it leads to the Fall. Then, we see what we are plainly told in scripture is a normative marriage, that of Abraham and Sarah. One of our problems as we approach the Bible is that we are children of our times. One of the great and common evils that is scarcely thought about is that in our day, people read the Bible with Hegelian and Darwinian eyes. Hegel, writing in the last of the18th and the first of the 19th century, was the father of the idea of evolution, and all that Darwin did was to apply it to biology. The result was that it has since influenced the minds and thinking of virtually all of us.

Let’s go back and look at the Bible as the early church saw it, and as Christians say in 100 A.D. and 150 A.D. saw it. They would have been bewildered by our Bible, because it is divided in two parts: the Old and the New Testament. It was not then so divided. It was the one undivided word of God. Christ was at the center of it, but all of it was the word of God. The division came about because it was the heretics who produced the division and although the church defended itself against the heretics, it did make the division. It did accept the division. All the preaching the New Testament is based on the Old Testament as though there were no difference between that and the Gospel, but the whole of the word of God is one word, one Gospel.

Then, with Hegel and Darwin, an even greater problem set in. People began to regard the Old Testament as primitive and backward, as though God were talking down to these poor, simple, primitive tribes people, as though Abraham, and Moses, and David, and Isaiah, and all the others were not on the same level as us remarkable people with all our modern knowledge and education, with our television sets, and all. God has to have a superior word for New Testament people, and that’s hogwash. As a matter of fact, if you’re honestly reading the Bible, you’re going to find that some of the most difficult portions are the Old Testament. Why did God give such difficult portions to primitive people? Doesn’t make sense, does it? and that’s why there is a great deal of nonsense today about the Bible, because people don’t face up to the obvious fact that there’s nothing primitive about the Old Testament. There is nothing backward. God was not talking down to people who were inferior. He did not have a secondary way, but people will say, “Oh, there were such terrible things in the Old Testament, like polygamy and slavery.” Well, what about those two?

First of all, the Bible does make it clear that the normative standard of marriage is monogamy; one man, one woman. The Bible however, regards any violation of marriage as the ultimate offense, as treason against society, and that’s why the law against adultery is so severe. There’s no treason against a civil government in the Bible, but there is treason against the family.

Now, the Bible regards an inferior and somewhat sinful form of marriage such as polygamy as preferable to the kind of thing that prevails today, and so it regulated it while disapproving of it, and in Leviticus, we see it plainly condemned even as it is regulated. As for slavery, the Bible says that men, apart from Christ, apart from the Lord, are all slaves. They’re in slavery to sin where all slavery begins. It says that no believer is to be a slave, and we have not abolished slavery, we with all our civilization. It is more prevalent now than ever before. The only difference is that today, most slavery is state-owned slavery. Think of all the slaves behind the Iron Curtain. Right now, there are slave markets in Africa, buying up black natives and shipping them to East Germany, among other places probably, to be sold to the factories to work as slaves until they die, and for that matter, when there was serfdom in Europe, the serfs only had to give twenty-five percent to their income to their lord. We pay far more in taxes now to local state and federal governments, far more. The serfs would have thought our lives were slavery, and as for the Negros in the South, statisticians have computed the fact that they retained ninety percent of what they produced. Hardly what you would call slavery, if we could only have to pay ten percent to the federal government.

It is a problem as we approach the Bible, because we are like the foolish friends of Job. Job told them, “You think that wisdom was born with you and will die with you,” and our times tends to feel the same way, that wisdom was born with this age of ours and it will die if something happens to it, and we are really a very stupid era.

Well, with that preface, let us look at Genesis 2 and what God teaches us there about marriage. We are plainly told that marriage is not simply biology or procreation, but it is something far more. In the beginning, animals were created male and female, and we are told that as Adam went about the task God imposed upon him, naming the animals, which means in Hebrew, classifying, identifying them, classifying them, a scientific task, the order of nature, of male and female, became very obvious to him, and the fact that there was no female as a counterpart to himself. Why did God wait before he created Eve? How long that wait was we don’t know. It could have been a good many years, but Adam first had to find himself under God in terms of his calling before God gave him Eve. Adam had to see his need of a helpmeet in terms of his calling, not in terms of his biology. Not in terms of his sexual urge, but in terms of “What is my place under God, and what is the place of my helpmeet under God?” It is interesting, too, that she is called a helpmeet. God says in Genesis 2:18, that “It is not good for man to be alone,” but he allows him to be alone for a time before he gives him a helpmeet and the word can be rendered “a help as his front,” that is, as his mirror to reflect his calling and to be a part of it, and when Eve is given to him, he says, “This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” The word “this is now” is literally, “this is the stroke, this stroke.” What does that mean?

It has reference to foot tapping in music. Beating out the rhythm in music, and Adam is saying, “Here is the rhythm, now I know the rhythm of life, the beat of the music, and she is bone of my bone, the structure of my life and hers are one, and self of my self.” As a result, God tells us in Genesis 2, something of the meaning of marriage, that it is not to be seen primarily as a biological fact, a natural fact in fulfillment of a biological need, but as something in fulfillment of our calling in our life in the Lord.

Now, this, to jump back to Ephesians 5:21 following, enables us to understand the theology of marriage. We cannot understand the meaning of the Bible unless we realize it is analogical thinking. Now, that’s a philosophical term, but it has a very simple meaning, and if we look at Ephesians 3:14-15, we begin to understand what scripture is talking about . In Ephesians 3:14-15, Paul says, “For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named.” Now that’s an important statement. Think about it for a moment. What Paul is saying is not that we biologically have families, and therefore, we take human language and apply it to God. That’s often what we hear, is it not? And Paul is saying the reverse. We’re not being anthropomorphic. We’ve not taking human categories and applying them to God as though they vaguely would help us understand him, but God is the Father of all things, of all creation, and when we talk about anything in any sphere, the language comes first from God and from something that describes him, and then, as we apply it, we are the echo of what is true of the life of God, the life of heaven. So that every human father is to pattern himself after God the Father in his responsibility under God for everything under him.

Now, this is in Ephesians. This governs what follows in Ephesians 5, so that those who interpret Ephesians 5 without Ephesians 3:14-15 are missing the whole point. I’ve had ministers tell me that Ephesians 5 has to be understood in terms of the words that, “So let wives by, that is subject to their own husbands in everything.” Period. Well, if you take that in isolation from Ephesians 3:14-15, you wind up in blasphemy, and a lot of husbands I’ve encountered and a lot of ministers are practicing blasphemy. They feel their wife has to obey them as though they were the lord and master when only God is. They are to obey in everything, subject to the word of God, and the pattern is God the Father and the husband and father in obedience to God the Father. The origin of all fatherhood, of all authority, of all headship such as that of the husband, is God the Father and God the Son. That’s the pattern, and the subjection is to be in terms of that.

There is no absolute authority given to any man or institution on earth. No husband has an absolute authority, and no mother, over the children. No employer, no minister, no political figure, no employer, no one in any sphere has an absolute authority, because the whole family in heaven and earth is classified, is identified, in terms of the relationship of God to the Father in the heaven, the internal relationship of the trinity and the relationship of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost to all the angelic creations, the powers, and the principalities of heaven.

So, we have a chain of authority, and no human authority can command obedience in isolation from the prior obedience of all to God. Not only is all factuality created by God, all things in heaven and earth, but all derive their meaning from him and all derive their nature from him. All fatherhoods reflect God’s fatherhood, or are conformed to his fatherhood, or else they are self-destroying. Human fatherhood does not suggest God’s fatherhood, but God’s fatherhood sets the pattern for ours, and the relationship of Christ to the church, we are told, sets the pattern for marriage. Christ loved the church and gave his life for it. The authority is to be used to further the welfare and the life of the family.

Thus, all of life, and all aspects of life, are governed by the being of God, by his nature, and by the order which flows from his word. This is why there is no community, no order in the universe apart from God, and as we depart from God, we depart from order, from community. That’s why, in our life today, and our society here in the United States and the world over, there is so much crime, so much disorder. We’ve departed from God. Therefore, we’ve departed from law, and from order, from life. There is no community, no order, in hell.

Milton, in his Paradise Lost, is therefore, very astute when he portrays Satan as beginning with an empire and ending with a chaotic hoard. Order disappears as they separate themselves from God. God is the source of all meaning, of all life, of every aspect of the orders of life, and to depart from God is to depart from all these things. Because we have been made in the image of God, our lives are revelational of God, and our marriage must be also.

In the Fall, which began with the fall of Satan, Satan, a subject, chose rebellion. His premise was to be his own god, and this was the temptation he brought to mankind, and so he went to someone who was to be under authority and, like himself, who had refused to be under authority, was flirting with the same idea. He incited Eve to the same rebellion, the same temptation, “to be as God,” and Adam, his sin was that he was weary of responsibility and he allowed it.

Adam’s life in Eden was a sinless and a perfect life, but not an easy one. Remember, he was created, set down in the Garden of Eden, which had boundaries, and which was to be a pilot project for the whole world, and there he was told to till it, to keep it, to classify the animal creation and to understand its nature and being. But first of all, although the animals there were unfallen, they were still animals, and no doubt they were getting into the vegetable patch, and bothering the fruit trees, and he had, right off the bat, without tools, to try to put up some fences. Not an easy task. It meant he had to make tools. So, Adam had a difficult task. Then, we are told that the earth was watered in those days by a heavy dew every night. There was no rain, but there was a heavy dew that took care of everything. Well, imagine sleeping out in the open. So, the first thing he had to do was to provide for shelter, and no doubt, it was a simple lean-to. Well, when Eve came along, I’m sure she took one look at Adam’s simple shelter and said, “Adam, this will never do. We’re going to have to have better housing than this.” So, the point is, when we think of perfection, we think differently than scripture. We can say paradise was perfect in our sense, but in the biblical sense it was not, because perfection, the word in the Bible, means maturity, and that doesn’t come until the end of creation. It was very immature. It was imperfect, but sinless and totally good. So, think of all the work poor Adam had to do, a great deal of work, and what happened? Adam grew weary of responsibility, and that’s true of men in our day. Weary of responsibility.

A few weeks ago, I received and still have a copy of a flyer on a seminar for executives, and Otto and I were discussing it with no small amazement. It was a seminar in firing people, and the jist of it is that the biggest problem the heads of factories and corporations today face is their inability to fire anybody, and so they are having expensive seminars to which all these executives are brought on how to fire people, because men evade responsibility now a days. They’re weary of it. They don’t like it, and this is another reason for our problems, and so, here you have Adam getting weary of responsibility and Eve, thinking, “If I had the management of things how better it would be,” and Satan saying, “If you listen to me, you’re going to be gods. And what does God do? He says, ‘Let there be, and there is.’ All you have to do is listen to me, and everything will be by your fiat word.” Well, that’s original sin, man’s desire by his fiat word, to accomplish everything.

That’s what politics is about. Politics today is each party saying, “If you vote for us, we’ll get in and we’ll pass certain kinds of legislation and you’ll have paradise on earth,” and we’re getting hell on earth as a result, and of course, this is the same kind of sin, the belief in the fiat word that messes up marriages, coming back to our subject. The belief that, “Well, once you’re in love, all is bliss.” That’s not true. It may be a good marriage, but it’s not a perfect one. It’s immature, to use the biblical perspective, because that’s when the work begins, but if you come at it from a modern perspective, that’s when the husband and wife figure, “All my problems are over. All I have to do it sit back and be loved, and all will be well,” and that’s when hell begins to break lose in that relationship, because of that false expectation.

So, we have, as a result, Eve ready to be the leader and Adam, weary of responsibility, and both of them sinning. Adam, with knowledge, knowing full well what he was doing. God’s judgment then, ensued. We have an interrelationship of sin, judgment, and marriage. In Genesis 3, we have the condemnation of their act. First, Eve rebelled at Adam’s rule and sought to be her own god, and God says, “But he shall rule over thee,” and to an ungodly woman, this is punishment, not joy, and what should have been in Eden a delight, that he had the primary responsibility, becomes in the Fall, a punishment, both because of his sin and because of her sin, and second, “Thy desire shall be to thy husband.” Her own nature will witness against her.

Then third, the pain of childbirth, not cited as a normal thing, but children in a fallen world are often a burden, a heartache, and a problem, because of sin.

And then fourth, Eve rebelled at being a woman. Now, to be a woman was her punishment when it had been her privilege. Now, she finds it a burden, but in salvation, she is to rejoice in what God made her to be, and Paul tells us that her marital life is revelational of the relationship of Christ to his church. The church has no independent authority nor any interpretation of reality apart from Christ. So the godly wife is in subject to her husband who is to be totally subject to Christ, and to govern and interpret all reality in terms of the word. We have the same interrelationship of sin and judgment in the sentence pronounced on Adam.

Adam had preferred slavery to freedom, to responsibility under God. For man, dominion and authority are freedom. To reject them is slavery. Slavery and freedom are not states in themselves, but aspects of our relationship to God and his law. When we are faithful to God and his law, we are free. “If the Son make you free then are ye free indeed,” but if we are not in the right relationship to God and his law, we are slaves, whatever we think, we are. Adam had turned his back on dominion, and now the ground is cursed for his sake. To live is made difficult, and the ground will produce thorns and thistles unto him.

Moreover, Adam is told that, as he was made of dust, in departing from his calling, his destiny, his death, is dust. Moreover, Adam’s sin has a double direction. By rejecting his creation image and its implications, he has also rejected his relationship to Eve and to the creation placed under him, and Christ came to reestablish this order.

Thus, the truth of every relationship is not in man to woman, and woman to man, but of both to God. The typology that Paul speaks of reveals the eternal reality. The human marriage passes away, for there is no giving in marriage in heaven, but Christ’s community of life with us remains forever. That’s the reality, and marriage is a shadow of it. The church is born, it is created, out of Christ, even as Eve was born out of Adam, and the church’s calling is to serve Christ’s dominion. Adam gives Eve her name, and Christ names the church, because he gives it its life, and its nature.

Are there any questions now before we take a break for a few minutes? Yes?

[Audience] Van Til said that there is no brute factuality. Would you expand on that?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Van Til said there is no brute factuality, which means there are no meaningless facts in the universe, that everything is God-created, God-interpreted, and has a purpose in terms of God’s eternal decree. Now, what modern science and philosophy tells us is that the whole world, the whole universe, is brute factuality, that everything is meaningless, and that the only meaning that it can derive is a meaning man gives to it. So that man says, “Well, nothing has any meaning unless I say so.” So, man plays God, and the reason why people want to believe that the world is a world of brute factuality is that the more emphatically they insist on that, the more they can play God, and this is why Arminianism and theology has a partial insistence on brute factuality. It says, “Yes, God did so much, but we have a considerable area where we determine things,” but if we believe that there is no brute factuality, we say God created every fact, and everything is governed by God. Everything has a meaning from God. Now, hell is a place where men, believing only in brute factuality, live out their eternity in their determined, meaninglessness and isolation, because in God’s universe, everything is related, totally related to everything else, but hell is like a dump. In a dump, everything is meaningless. Here maybe a broken part of a chair next to garbage, next to a dead cat, next to trash of a variety of sorts, no meaningful relationship. Well, hell is where those who are determined that there is no meaning except their own, are to be found, and their only universe is their own mind.

[Audience] So evolution is brute factuality, is that right?

[Rushdoony] Evolution, because it insists on chance as the source of the whole of creation, is a very insistent doctrine of brute factuality. Darwin was emphatic that everything was a product of chance. He threw in one vague sentence about God at the end of his book in order to satisfy people, but it was meaningless in terms of the book. Any other questions or comments?

Well, if not, let us take a five to ten minute break.

End of tape