Systematic Theology – Eschatology

The Restoration of the Earth

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 7 of 32

Track: #7

Year:

Dictation Name: 07 The Restoration of the Earth

[Rushdoony] Let us begin with prayer.

All glory be to Thee oh God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, who has made us for Thy purpose and summoned us to serve Thee with all our heart, mind, and being. Empower us by Thy word and by Thy Spirit, give us joy in Thy so great salvation, fill us with a certainty of Thy victory, that in and through all things we may be more than conquerors through Him that loved us, even Jesus Christ our Lord. In His name we pray, amen.

Our scripture this morning is from Isaiah 11 verse 1-10.

“And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots:

2 And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord;

3 And shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord: and he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears:

4 But with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth: and he shall smite the earth: with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked.

5 And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins.

6 The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.

7 And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

8 And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den.

9 They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

10 And in that day there shall be a root of Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign of the people; to it shall the Gentiles seek: and His rest shall be glorious.”

Our subject this morning is the restoration of the earth, the restoration of the earth. Last week we dealt with eschatology in the natural world and we look briefly at the concept of nature. The word “nature” you will remember, comes from the Latin. It is a personification of the created order apart from man, and the thinking which rests in the idea or mythology of nature, we have a realm here, and against it man. Whereas in Biblical thought it is the Creator as against creation, of which man is a part. The Hellenic {?} view has indeed warped our perspective, because in the Hellenic the essential fact was a natural realm. The idea of God existed in Greek philosophy only in order to give some kind of origin, as a limiting concept to use the philosophical term, to make a point of origin tenable. So that the ideas of 18th century were implicit in Hellenic philosophy; the God concept was simply a limiting idea, a limiting concept. Reality was with a natural realm.

Moreover there was an implicit dualism in Greek thought; ideas, or forms, patterns, as the higher realm and matter as the lower. Hence the higher the particular form of life, the higher anything, the more abstract it is so that one might say in Greek philosophy you had the deification of the higher abstraction. As a result Hellenic philosophy and its influence on Christian thought has led to a spiritualizing and a rationalizing of the Bible. Everything is seen in terms of some kind of higher or more rational meaning. But how can you spiritualize, or rationalize Isaiah 2 verses 1-4? Those verses speak of world peace, of nation not making war upon nation any longer; of swords being beaten into plowshares, and so on. And yet indicative of the power of a faith over the minds of men, people have tried to rationalize away, or spiritualize, those verses which means they end up as nonsense. The same is true of Isaiah 65 verse 17-25, which speaks of the lion and the lamb lying down together and of a greatly increased life-expectancy for man. How can you spiritualize away the meaning of such a passage without reducing it to nonsense?

When we look at the world around us we must see it as the realm of creation, a created order, a created order that a specific purpose which sin marred; and sin destroyed the original splendor of the earth. In that destruction there have been three stages, the first stage in the destruction was the fall; the Garden of Eden was barred to man, and the earth began to frustrate man. The second stage in the destructive force of sin came with the flood, and the great diminishing of life expectancy; a radically changed environment from pole to pole. The third stage in the destructive work of sin is set forth in Leviticus 26:14-46 and Deuteronomy 28 verse 15-68. As lawless abounds so too, we are told, the curse increases. The curse is presented in the Bible as a continuing and pursuing fact, an inevitable fact, a consequence of sin that is inescapable. Deuteronomy 28:15 portrays it as a kind of animal that inevitably seizes its prey; the curse is a continuing and inescapable fact.

In fact the logical conclusion of the curse on man is hell; hell is the scrap heap of creation. There are no meaningful relationships in hell, all the imagery whereby the Bible presents hell to us, indicates there is no communion, no meaningful relationship. Just as in a city dump articles are miscellaneously discarded and have no meaningful relationship the one to the other, so too in hell. In fact both the Hebrew and the Greek words that we have in the Bible for Hell have reference to a city dump. It is significant and interesting, and I’ve called attention to this before, that Jean-Paul Sartre the existentialist philosopher in his play No Exit gives us his picture hell, which is very much in these terms. People sit around in hell and debate, each carries on a monolog, no-one talks to anyone else, no-one is capable of any action. They wonder if the door is locked or not, each of them in turn, but no-one tries the door. Each one has become his own universe in terms of Genesis 3:5 “Ye shall be as God, every man his own god knowing, (which means determining for yourself in the Hebrew) good and evil.” So that every man becomes his own law, and his own law-giver, and his own universe, so he is eternally cooped up in his own being; this is the logic of Genesis 3:5 as it comes to its end. Hell is thus an eschatological fact, as is heaven.

Just as the curse is a continuing developing eschatological fact, so too is God’s blessing. We are told that the desolate places will be someday like the garden of Eden. For example in Isaiah 35 verses 1&2 and 5-7 we read: “The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.

2 It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing: the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon, they shall see the glory of the Lord, and the excellency of our God.

5 Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped.

6 Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert.

7 And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water: in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes.”

What we are here told very plainly is that physical deformities shall be gone, that such infirmities as lameness, blindness, dumbness, shall disappear. Moreover the waste places of the earth shall become rich and fertile, and nature shall blossom. Thus we have a magnificent picture of the fact that even as all creation through sin fell under the curse, so in time all creation with regeneration at work, shall be under God’s blessing. We are given many beautiful and dramatic pictures of this throughout the Bible. For example in Ezekiel 36:33-35 we read “33 Thus saith the Lord God; In the day that I shall have cleansed you from all your iniquities I will also cause you to dwell in the cities, and the wastes shall be builded.

34 And the desolate land shall be tilled, whereas it lay desolate in the sight of all that passed by.

35 And they shall say, this land that was desolate is become like the garden of Eden; and the waste and desolate and ruined cities are become fenced, and are inhabited.”

God through Ezekiel made clear that this restoration, which follows after redemption and regeneration, requires growth in sanctification. We must be made holy; we must be cleansed from all our iniquities by the Lord. When man is truly sanctified, then nature is also as Hosea makes clear in Hosea 2:18 “18 And in that day will I make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field and with the fowls of heaven, and with the creeping things of the ground: and I will break the bow and the sword and the battle out of the earth, and will make them to lie down safely.” Thus we are told that there will be world peace, that the coming of the Messiah marks the beginning of the new creation. WE are told specifically that He is the first fruits of the new creation, and the conclusion is world peace. The restoration affects the relationship of man to man, of man to animals, and of animals to all other animals. Every aspect of creation is affected, and in Isaiah 11:1-10 which we read earlier this is very clearly stated. To try to spiritualize it away, or rationalize it away, is to reduce the meaning thereof to nonsense.

It is an interesting fact that men are ready to take the most absurd forecast of nuclear holocaust very seriously although it is clear that the popular accounts are greatly exaggerated. Physically, in terms of physics, it is impossible for their forecast to be true. The idea that a bomb 50 times as great as the bomb that hit Nagasaki will have 50 times more destructive force is nonsense, it will have at best 4 times as much, and even that will be limited because the destruction wrought at Nagasaki and Hiroshima have been vastly exaggerated. But it is interesting that prophesies of evil are seen by the this generation very seriously. The most absurd prophesies. You will recall that a decade or so ago, as a result of an occultist forecast that California would fall off into the ocean, all kinds of people across the United States were concerned, and as I travel I still hear comments about that, although anyone who knows anything about the coastline will know that there isn’t enough depth there for anything to fall off into. The pacific is shallow, and there’s quite a shelf for some distance out. But things like this are taken seriously. We have a peculiar propensity in our time for believing in forecasts of great evil. But the prophesies of God’s restoration are regarded as poetry.

Of course for many the logical conclusion is the natural deterioration of creation, rather than God’s restoration as the future of the world; and so the best possible destiny for man is to be abstracted out of the universe, to be rapture out of it as some would have it, or as Kenneth Heuer, a British astrophysicist, the great thing for the future is for man to work scientifically for the deliverance of man from matter; and he predicts that in time we will of course the deterioration of the sun, but we will before that have created a synthetic sun and placed it in the heavens; and he says we will then have time enough ultimately to transcend matter and to live forever.

Now this type of thing is taken seriously because, after all, deliverance matter. A la great philosophy, and so the best possible destiny for man is to be extracted from matter, and we see this in the scientific community – A la Kenneth Heuer – or in the Christian (so called Christian) community with some of the rapturist theologies. The implicit idea is that the physical creation is God’s job that failed, and therefore has to be rejected. But the doctrine of the resurrection of the body denies this. The fall began the decent of creation not into matter, but into sin and death; and the redemption is not out of matter but from sin and death into righteousness and life. And we are told by Saint Paul in I Corinthians 15:24-26 that death itself shall finally be destroyed.

Now you will recall a few months ago when we began our studies in eschatology I dealt, briefly at the time, with the role of man in eschatology. Eschatological thinking is falsified if we see it only as God’s work. Eschatological outlooks should be governed by an endpoint perspective as well as the end time perspective. And wherever there is an endpoint perspective man’s sin contributes to that, but man’s righteousness, (and remember the Biblical word “righteousness” means also “justice) contributes to the end point. So we have to speak of the role of man in the restoration of the earth. Deuteronomy 28 for example spells that out, and we have seen abundant evidence in history of the destructiveness of man. The Sahara was once good farming country, and good ranching country. Portions of the Sahara still get as much rainfall as the Great Plains area and we could, through careless use, turn the Great Plains area into another Sahara. We came close to it in the 30’s with the dustbowl and in the last few years as the rainfall has decreased in some of those areas we have been threatened with a like fate.

We know that evil nations have sometimes laid wasted vast areas. Turkey for example turned much of the Middle East into a desert by taxing everything including, among other things, trees. They led to the deforestation of every area they had because people could not afford the taxes that were imposed. Their exploited policies thus laid waste a vast region of the earth. But we know what man can do in the way of restoration. Very few people remember that Holland is in large areas a land re-claimed from the sea; and that work was begun by monks very early in the Christian era, and in fact many portions of Europe were first reclaimed from wasteland, or unhealthy marshes, by monks. Indeed it became the policy very early in the Christian area for monarchs and noblemen to give the useless, unproductive areas in their realms to Abbey’s, knowing that in due time they would make them highly productive; which is exactly of course what happened. Indeed much of Europe, including Britain, represents untold centuries of work by men in restoration, reclamation, extending the frontiers in man’s cooperation with nature to make it more effectual in the services of man and more productive.

Thus the possibilities in restoration are very great, and they do involve man very emphatically. Man must be a restorer, he has been a destroyer and God requires that man be a restorer also. The present perspective therefore of quietism, as though it were equivalent to Christianity, is all together wrong. The quietistic perspective does not do justice to our faith. The restoration of the world is indeed a task for Christians, it was mans sin that began, and still continues in many areas, the curse on creation, the destructive forces that are unleashed in all corners of the world. But the reconstruction must begin, it has been done over and over again in the centuries, and the work of restoration in our day and in every age is an eschatological task. Man has an end point, to be a blessing and to extend the blessing of God to all the earth. Thus we fail to understand what eschatology is about if we do not see our place in it. Let us pray.

We thank Thee our Father that Thou hast called us to be restorers. Deliver us from the destructive forces of sin, and make us a new creation in Christ that we may be effectual in making all things new in Him. Bless us to this task we beseech Thee, in Jesus name, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

Yes?

[Audience member] I know that those who hold to the popular eschatological perspective today would certainly want to make it clear that they believe their position is supported by scripture. There’s a few place in scripture that would seem to deal with the idea of a rapture. II Thessalonians comes to mind. I wonder if you could comment on that.

[Rushdoony] Well first of all the II Thessalonians passage says nothing about a rapture, I’ve dealt with that in Thy Kingdom Come, it says nothing about a rapture such as these people presuppose. The whole idea that man, having turned a world into a mess, is going to be taken by God out of it and rewarded for having made such a botch of things, is offensive. I think God is saying instead “you stay put and what you’ve done you’ve got to undo, and restore.” So the rapturist mentality a very irresponsible perspective in that, “well we’ve made a mess of it but thank God we’re going to be raptured out of it. So don’t worry about what’s happening because it’s no concern of ours.” It creates such a ungodly perspective that I don’t see any need to comment further about it.

Yes?

[Audience member] Well another thing that kind of confuses me is the fact that those who hold to that perspective are amongst some of the largest evangelical groups that are doing so much in the area of, say Christian education, social functions in terms of helping the poor, and so forth, and it seems to be…is it just an inconsistency in their thinking? Or, I don’t understand how they can do those sorts of things and hold to that sort of theological perspective.

[Rushdoony] First of all those who hold to the pre-mill, pre-tribulation perspective are a greater majority of evangelicals. So that one would have to say that most things that are visible on the current landscape, at least in this country, are activities of those groups. However having said that we must that, that perspective of theirs is beginning to wane considerably to what it was ten and twenty and thirty years ago; and it is waning precisely as they are becoming more and more involved in Christian reconstruction here and now, so that there is a growing departure from that kind of position. Particularly as they abandon a pre-tribulation position they do develop a greater sense of responsibility. But we have seen the consequences of their irresponsibility in the present political position of the United States because we have the most numerous single group in this country; fifty to sixty million adults who have abdicated from any concern with what’s going on around them. We have in recent years seen the beginnings of a change in that perspective.

Any other questions or comments?

[Audience member] I’ve talked on this topic, because of course this is my {?} we have two lessons, one from the Old Testament, one from the New Testament. I think one can find a good deal in the early testament. I {?} has failed to find a suitable new testament passage which deals with the idea of our duty to be stewards or financial groundings, and I’d be awfully grateful if at some time you could suggest what might be suitable passage for this from the New Testament {?} related to this type topic.

[Rushdoony] Yes, one of our problems –that’s a good question- one of our problems as we deal with that is of course that many people who call themselves “New Testament Christians” and we have many such in the United States, therefore insist on disregarding all that the testament has to say about the land, and about the earth. But the idea of a New Testament Christianity is not Biblical, and it doesn’t conform to anything that is in the New Testament because all the preaching of the apostolic church was out of the Old Testament. When we go through the New Testament we find that they are continually using as the relevant text the New Testament, and all that they are adding to the existing scriptures is with reference to the life of Christ, and the ministry of the early church as it lays the foundations for worldwide extension of this one faith. So that they did not feel the need to restate what was already there.

Moreover when we look at the book of revelation what we have there are a series of seven plagues, seven bowls, seven judgments. Now the typology there is derived from the ten plagues upon Egypt. The first three of the ten struck both Goshen and Egypt, in other words Israel and Egypt, but the last seven struck only Egypt, and so these are seven plagues that strike the unbelieving world. So that the meaning of Revelation there is that these judgments are to disposes those who do not belong to God. You remember the scroll that is presented and John says “no man can open it” and he wept, and it was written on both sides, totally covered. That was the form that a last will and testament took in those days, it would be precisely the length, and totally inscribed so there could be no addition, especially if the scribe had to make it for a man. Thus if it were totally inscribed there could be no addition.

So this scroll represents mans inheritance, and no man is able to open it save the lamb, who then opens it and then the plagues follow to disposes the false heirs to the kingdom of God so that the true heirs might inherit the earth. SO you have very clearly the restatement of everything in the Old Testament, that now we must work to disposes the false heirs, as well as to convert them, but there is to be a dispossession and we are to inherit the earth. And of course our Lord on the Sermon on the Mount selects very key passages in the perspective out of the Old Testament. “Blessed are the meek” the meek meaning those who are tamed of God, disciplined, brought under the discipline of God, “for they shall inherit the earth, and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.” So throughout the Sermon on the Mount the references are precisely to these Old Testament passages. So it’s a confirmation of the same thing, in kind of a short hand confirmation.

Does that help answer your question?

[Audience Member] Yes, it helps it in a negative sense. As I understand it what you’re saying is that {?} which relates to our duties, what I conceive to be our duties, as stewards of the {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, because in the eyes of the early church the Bible was one book. They didn’t feel that any part of it was obsolete, it was their book and Paul once refers to the church as the Israel of God; and this was how they saw themselves, as the Israel of God. They took this so seriously that they retained and felt it was a mandate to retain the forms of the synagogue, and the construction of the church. So that even in Rome, the College of Cardinals was 70 laymen representing the church at large, like the 70 elders of Isreal; and with the bishop of Rome as the high priest, as it were. So the pattern was maintained because they saw themselves as the true Israel of God, and therefore everything in the Old Testament was still valid. The fact that is often forgotten is that, in what was erroneously called the dark ages, we had what William Carol of Stanford has called “the age of the frontier thinkers”.

The early church fathers who very definitely used the Old Testament, felt that it was their mandate. The fact that the monks embarked upon the work of reclamation; the fact that our first industrial revolution took place in that era, and many remarkable things that we no longer appreciate because they are things we take for granted, such as the horse collar, which made a tremendous difference in agriculture and in the movement of freight and so on; all developed in that first industrial revolution. A remarkable technology that began to flower very early, and made possible the culture of medieval, and it was all based on the mandate they saw here in the Old Testament as a mandate for the church, and for the Christian era; that it was one book.

Well if there are no further questions let us bow our heads now in prayer.

We thank Thee our Father that Thou art on the throne, and that Thou hast called us to serve Thee and given us such great promises, that Thy blessing will be upon those who are faithful to Thy word. Make us joyful in faithfulness, ever instant in Thy service, and more than conquerors through Christ Jesus our Lord. In His name we pray, amen.