Systematic Theology – Eschatology

Motivation

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 15 of 32

Track: #15

Year:

Dictation Name: 15 Motivation

[Rushdoony] Let us begin with prayer.

Oh Lord our God we give thanks unto Thee that Thou who art on the throne art the defender of Thy people, and we beseech Thee oh Lord be mindful in these troubled days to defend the Saints of Nebraska and Iowa and elsewhere, who are persecuted by the powers of Humanism and Statism. Be with pastor’s Rolloff, {?} Sylavan,{?} Randall Johnson, {?} and others, as they stand against these forces. Make us ever strong in prayer that we might be mindful of the needs of Thy kingdom, that we might give thanks unto Thee for Thy providential care, and for all things that contribute to our strength and our peace and prosperity in Thee. Bless us now as we give ourselves to the study of the things of Thy kingdom, and grant that out of Thy word we may draw nourishment and strength in Thy service. In Jesus name, amen.

Our scripture is from Hebrews 12 verse 1-4 and our subject is Motivation. Hebrews 12 verses 1-4.

“Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us,

2 Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.

3 For consider him that endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds.

4 Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin.”

We come today to a very important subject, and before we look very closely at the text there are some considerations that we need to bear in mind in order to understand what it is that Paul is telling us here. One of the problems that pastors have over and over again through the years is that very earnest and fine people, concerned because their husband, or their wife, or their son, or daughter, is not a Christian, will ask a pastor to talk to him when he is over visiting. Now the person in question the non-Christian, feels trapped in that situation and begins very hostile. The last thing they want is somebody to work them over publicly, and it puts the minister into a difficult situation, and it ends up, usually, with the family member who started the thing getting into an argument with the husband, wife, or child, who is supposed to be converted in the situation; and it doesn’t lead to anything except what they want. And sometimes I have seen the person, especially the man in question, lash out with some very contemptuous and blasphemous statements, pushed into it by some nagging. On one such occasion the wife, rather shocked, rebuked her husband saying that was blasphemy and wasn’t he afraid of facing God when he died? So he turned to me and said “what happens when we die?” Expecting me to preach at him and prepared to jump on me. Well the last thing I wanted, an argument, because I don’t believe anyone is ever converted by arguments, so when he said “what happens when we die?” I said “nothing much, only more of the same. If life now is meaningless for you, then you are meaningless and the future is meaningless. But if life now for you is Jesus Christ and salvation, then that is your future. It’s the same life, simply brought to fullness.”

Now that wasn’t a fully adequate answer but there was a point to it all the same, and this is what we’re concerned with today, motivation. Last time we saw the relationship of causality to eschatology. Now let’s look at motives. Motives are not rationalistic, although they can be reasonable. Our motives are in essence religious. We do whatever we do for religious reasons. Now the religion may not be a Biblical faith, it can be Humanism, it can be almost anything, but we act out of religious motives, we speak out of religious motivation; and rationalism fails at this point because it wants to account for things rationalistically, rather than religiously. Let me give an example.

Some years ago, about the time I was a university student, one of the stock arguments of atheists was that if everybody became an atheist life would be vastly improved. Why? Well because people would then know there is no life after death, and there is no God out there, all there is in the universe, the only spark of life is in man. And when men learned that life was limited to what we have here and now they would realize life is precious. All they have of it is a brief span, and they would learn to cherish that and to prize life. They would develop a reverence for life, and work to protect it, so wars would end, murder would end, violence would end, because you wouldn’t tamper for life. Well it has been anything but that. The reverse has been true. Instead of a greater respect for life, and an abstention from war and violence, we have become an age of almost continual warfare and very much continual violence. Why? Because man is a religious creature, and if you say to a man that life has no meaning, there is no God, there is no life after death, no judgment, what are you saying then but “life here is also meaningless”? How can anything have meaning in a cosmic void? How can there be any responsibility if there’s no universal responsibility? A lone man cannot establish meaning in a cosmic void, and the net result is every time that kind of unbelief has prevailed, what men have then said is that “I’m not going to live in terms of justice, in terms of righteousness, let us eat, drink, and be merry; for tomorrow we die.”

Paul refers to that statement in the days of the Romans. You can find that statement in ancient Greece, long before Paul. You can find it ancient Egypt and elsewhere. Again and again when men have no seen no meaning in life they’ve said first “let us eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die”; and then after a while they’ve dropped out of being merry, because how can oyu be merry if life has no meaning, if death is everything, and the whole of the universe and your life is a farce? So finally nothing is left, except the quest for power. Joy, you see, requires a framework of meaning, of God. And all that is left then is the quest for power, and you have exactly the kind of world you do today, and the kind of world that Orwell depicted in 1984 when he said “The ultimate goal of power can be expressed in the symbol of a boot stamping on a human face forever.” The sheer brutal manifestation of power, and of course that’s exactly what life has become in the Soviet union, and in Red China, and everywhere that you have had that kind of thing, the quest for power: economic, political, sexual, criminal, but the quest for power.

Moreover the denial of God means the denial of responsibility. Philosophers like Stirner, Nietzsche, and Kaufmann, have made the point very clearly. If there is no God, there is no guilt, no innocence, no justice, no good or evil, no responsibility; and evil then is more conducive to a senseless universe, and so man pursues evil on pragmatic grounds. But what is Paul saying to us? Paul says repeatedly, as for example in I Corinthians 9:24-27, that life is a race, and an athlete trains, he prepares himself, because there’s a prize if he runs that race as he should. Paul says that the motivation in this race comes from Jesus Christ, who gives total meaning to all things. “By Him were all things made, and without Him was not anything made that was made.” We know that “all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” A universe of total meaning; and hence we are to work, mindful that we have that universe of meaning, and this is what Paul is talking about in our text. “Wherefore seeing that we are encompassed with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and the sin which doth so easily beset us; and let us run, with patience, the race that is set before us.”

Now the first thing to consider in this verse is the cloud of witnesses. In fact to often people get off on the wrong foot by spending all their time trying to explain what the cloud of witnesses are. The cloud of witnesses does not refer to people watching us, or the saints in heaven watching us, or people on earth watching us. Paul in the previous chapter, Hebrews 11, gives us a series of statements about the saints of old, from the early days on through the old Testament. All of these, he said, walked by faith, they witnessed to God in an untoward generation. These are the witnesses that he’s talking about, so Paul says we are compassed about, history gives us the significance of the work of men from Able and Noah, and Moses and Abraham, on down to the present. So our world is created and conditioned by the witness of these men. They are the witnesses that we are to look at. We are not to see them as people watching us. It is not they, they witness to the Lord, they’re not witnessing what we are. Our witness is, the One who watches us, is the Lord as Hebrews 4:13 says of God “Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in His sight, but all things are naked and open unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.”

Now we began by calling attention to the fact of motivation, here we come to it, motivation. Now if you’re a Humanist, and Atheist, what is your motivation? Who sees what you are doing? Why no one what’s inside your head, at least that’s what a humanist believes. If you’re actions are not witnessed by human witnesses, who know? Nobody, because he doesn’t believe in God, so there is, he says, no witness. Now what kind of a mentality does this create if you can keep hidden all your thoughts, and a great many of your actions? Well exactly what you’ve seen over and over again in history, hypocrisy. You’re going to put the emphasis on appearances, keeping up a good front. And of course where all religion disappeared and atheism, or agnosticism and humanism took over, as in the far east, and as in Rome, and as in our world today, you have an emphasis on face, and it becomes a face culture.

Now anthropologists have divided cultures between guilt cultures, and face cultures. A guilt culture is one where conscious governs men; a fact culture is where appearance governs men. The extreme example of that has been Japan where, if you lose face, you commit suicide because life without face is nothing, appearances are everything and, as they have pointed out, we have since World War II become a face culture. Appearance is everything, putting up a good front, keeping up with the Jones’s, and the net result is hypocrisy. So that inescapably atheism creates a culture that is hypocritical as a way of life, because appearance is the only thing you know. Appearance is everything. At the same time behind it is a philosophy that vindicates that. Because if you go back to modern philosophy what is it that you find? Culminating in Hume, the belief that you cannot know things in themselves, things in themselves are unknowable, all we know are phenomena or appearances, and so beginning with Immanuel Kant, and coming through to the present, through the existentialist, what is reality for modern man? Appearances, phenomena to use the philosophical term; and hence you have pragmatism and instrumentalism, which is the reigning philosophy of the public schools, which says the truth is what works. Truth is not something out there, above and beyond men, truth is simply what works, appearance. If you can put up a good front, that works. Truth is what works.

So we have today all around us the culture of Humanism, the culture of hypocrisy, of appearances only, and this is because the only motivation an unbeliever can have is to maintain an appearance. There is no God to provide him with motivation, his conscious is not the source of his motivation, only appearance; and so he will try to find out “what is it that will enable me to make a better appearance?”

But it is not so with the Christian man, why? He has a different motivation. All things are naked and upon unto the eyes of God. Moreover we have the indwelling Holy Spirit, so that we not only have God looking at us, we have God within us, and we cannot escape from God. I said on the previous occasion, as I’ve said many times, that God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. Now when that comes home to us, what does it do? It gives us a different kind of motivation. We cannot hide from God, there is no hiding place, and if we try to pretend before God and man we grieve the Holy Spirit of God. This creates a radically different motivation, and then our motivation becomes the work of the Spirit, and then we know there has to be a unity between the inner man and the outer man, we cannot have one kind of appearance, and another kind of reality because there is no closet in which we can hide from the living God; and no closet into which the indwelling Spirit is not there.

Thus either our motivation comes from the Lord or our judgment comes from Him. And this is why Paul says, as he summons them to witness a good witness, and then gives the account of all these great men of the Old Testament, and then says “seeing that we have these great cloud of witnesses, who in the past have stood far more valiantly then we’re called to stand, and we have not yet resisted unto blood as they did. Let us therefore lay aside every weight, every burden, every mask” Drop the masks, drop the appearances, because they’re excess baggage when you are running a race.

“And the sin which doth so easily beset us.” What is the sin which so doth easily beset us? It is Genesis 3:5, original sin. “Ye shall be as God, every man his own god knowing, (that is determining) for himself what is good and evil.” Drop all the appearances, all the excess baggage whereby you’re trying to cover up what you are. That’s excess baggage, weight and the sin whereby you make yourself God, and the center of the universe. “Run then with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.” Here’s the point, here’s the one we look at, here is the one who looks at us. Not some mystical cloud of witnesses around us, those are the saints of old who witnessed a good witness, who set an example for us. So we have that example set forth in scripture, we have Jesus Christ to look unto Him as the author, the one who starts us, the beginner, the one who regenerates us, and the finisher of our faith. He is the one who leads us to the finish line successfully. Who, for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God. Here is our motivation, Jesus Christ. When you drop appearance, and the excess baggage of putting on a front, then with that inner motivation, with the unity between your inner and outer man, you can run the race; and you see that our Lord endured the cross for us, and despised the shame, and He’s triumphed and has sit down at the right hand of the throne of God; and that we have great promises in scripture concerning our victory in Him.

We are children of God in Christ, and if Children than heirs. Heirs of God and joint heirs of Christ if so be that we suffer with Him, that we might be glorified together, as Paul says in Romans 8:17. This is an eschatological statement, it’s about last things, it tells us that when we have a Godly motivation, then we have a victorious conclusion. But if our motivation is only keeping up appearances sooner or later the appearances disappear. For one thing, time destroys the best of appearances, and time erodes as surely as age does, every kind of front we try to put up. The unreality of it comes through, appearances collapse. And so we are summoned to have joy in adversity, because Christ joyfully assumed His task. “For consider Him, Jesus Christ that endured such contradiction of sinners against Himself, (the hostility, the attempt to destroy Him) lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds. Ye have not resisted unto blood, striving against sin.” So Paul says we have no cause to be discouraged. Regeneration has given us the motive, we are the new creation.

“If any man be in Christ he is a new creation, old things are passed away, behold all things are become new.” According to Paul in II Corinthians 5:17 we are a new creation, joint heirs of Christ, we are never alone, we have the motivation which makes for victory, and nothing else does. We are the people of the Lord and of His victory over sin and death. For us all things work together for good, because we are the Lord’s. Whereas for the unregenerate all things work together for evil, they cannot win. The reverse of the golden rule is their lot, do unto others as you would have then do unto you. But God declares through Obadiah “For the day of the Lord is now upon all the heathen, as thou hast done it shall be done unto you. Thy reward shall return upon thine own head.” So speaks God in Obadiah 17, and we have like statements in Lamentations 1:22, in Jeremiah 50:29.

Therefore as members of Jesus Christ we know the meaning of life, of time, and of history. We are never alone, we are governed by the Holy Spirit and we are not our own. The motivating force and power in our lives is the Lord and His victory. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God we thank Thee that Thou art the motivating force in our lives, through the grace of Jesus Christ. We pray our Father for Thy saints who are beset with adversities and contradictions, that Thou wouldst be with them to govern their heart and lead them unto victory. We give thanks unto Thee our Father that we are not alone, that none of Thy children are ever alone in any situation. So our Father, give us a victory, make us bold in Thy Spirit that we may meet the contradictions of the ungodly and confound them by Thy Spirit. Bless us to this purpose, in Jesus name, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

[Audience member] Didn’t pietism retreat Christians into appearance, {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, a great deal of pietism is a retreat into appearances, as though the form of a devotional life is a substitute for Godly motivation and action. You have a great many pietist who indulge in endless pious gush but will do nothing, and this we see clearly in these court cases because these people come up there and they talk a better Christianity than anyone else, but they’re not there when the time comes to make a stand; and they turn their back on their fellow believers, or on Christians, because they’re not believers to do so, and line up with the humanist.

So I think one of the good things about these trials is that it is exposing the lack of faith in these people who are all for the forms of the faith, but not for the power and reality thereof.

Yes?

[Audience member] Talking about eternity and in the way you put it was very general, about you know, how you feel now is the way your future’s going to be. Hell is the absence of God.

[Rushdoony] Yes

[Same audience member] Ok, so the person before he dies then, also is, the absence of God it is in his life.

[Rushdoony] Exactly. If God is absent from our lives now, no matter what professions of faith we may make, He is absent in our life throughout all eternity, because hell is the absence of God, it is the absence of meaning, it is the junk heap of the universe and men cannot junk up their lives and feel that there can be anything for them beyond. This is why the belief in a second chance, which is beginning to creep into supposedly evangelical circles again, is so evil. Because it is saying that somehow if I’ve made my life an emptiness, God has to give me a chance to do otherwise; although all I want really is emptiness, without have to pay the price of emptiness.

You see trying to avoid responsibilities for what we do is a characteristic of sinful man. Now the Romans used to dream of being able to do as they pleased without paying the price for it, and as a result what they would do, (isn’t a very pleasant thing to bring up not to long before lunchtime) but they would have their banquets and would eat and drink to incredible excess, and a slave would then come and tickle their throat with a peacock feather to make them throw up, and they’d rinse out their mouth and start in again on the wine and on the food. And their idea was that there has to be a way of avoiding consequences, because if you over eat and over drink you normally pay a price. So this was their idea, there has to be somehow a second chance at getting drunk without paying the price of it. Well of course Rome destroyed itself because it would not look at the consequences of what it was doing. And it’s radical sense of unreality destroyed the people, and the civil order.

Now today we have that same mentality. We’ve seen it for example with regard to veneerial diseases. The dream that somehow some drug can obviate any consequence for sin, and therefore man can be free to sin with impunity. This is the goal. Well this is the product of emptiness, it is saying that there has to be no causality in the universe, that you don’t pay a price for what you do; and the conclusion is hell because you’re denying that there can be a consequence, you’re insisting there must not be.

Any other questions or comments?

Yes?

[Audience member] could you expand a little more on the premise that God is closer to us than we are to ourselves?

[Rushdoony] Yes. I was asked, if you didn’t hear it, to explain the statement that God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. To use philosophical terminology we can speak of both the transcendence of God, that is if God is completely above and beyond the whole of creation, and the imminence of God; that God is present in all things. Now how can we speak of it so? Well God is transcendent because you cannot confuse God and creation; they’re two different things, two different kinds of being. But God has made all things, everything in the universe, every atom, every sub-atomic particles, if you can call them particles, is God’s creation totally.

Now we are not fully aware of all that we are, we’re not aware of the far reaches of the world of an atom. They have said that within an atom there is as much of a vastness as there is in the whole of the universe that you enter into another universe in the atom. Every part of it is made by God, and He is totally knowledgeable and present in all of it. Well, God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. We are told the very hairs of our head are all numbered. Now there’s not a one a one of us who knows the number of hairs on his head. I don’t believe even the baldest of men have every counted up what they’ve got left, but we’re told God knows.

In other words God has such a total knowledge of all reality, including ourselves, is closer to us, more knowledgeable of us, knows our every being so that we can grieve the Holy Spirit of God, because He has that total knowledge of our every thought, our every action and all things are naked and open unto God. We are not totally naked and open to ourselves, we don’t fully understand ourselves very often, or anytime do we fully understand ourselves. This is what it means to say that God is closer to us than we are to ourselves, and this is why when we come to the recognition of the fact that all things are naked and open unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do, it gives us a different kind of motivation than the person who believes there is no such God; and all he has to do is to put on a front before other people and before his children, her husband, or his wife, or employers and friends and neighbors as the case may be, and get by.

Does that explain it?

Any other questions or comments? Well if not, let us bow our heads in prayer.

Oh Lord our God great and marvelous art Thou and all Thy ways are glorious beyond our fathoming. We rejoice that the government is upon Thy shoulders, that all things in us are naked and open unto Thy sight, and that Thou by Thy Holy Spirit are the motivating force in our lives. Rule us oh Lord and use us. Strip us of our hypocrisies, and grant that the appearance that we have is the reality of Thy presence, Thy governing power, and Thy motivation. Bless us to this end in Jesus name, amen.