Sermon On The Mount

Deliver Us From Evil

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 10-25

Genre:

Track: 10

Dictation Name: Sermon on the Mount – 10

Location/Venue:

Year: 1980

Our Lord and our God we give thanks unto Thee that with Thee is the victory. And we thank Thee for the victory of Lester Roloff over the State of Texas, over the forces of humanism and statism. We pray our Father that he may be enabled to build the additional homes for juvenile delinquents and that these homes may be a blessing to untold numbers of boys and girls who are in trouble. We thank Thee our Father that this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. Make us oh Lord instruments of victory and dominion that we may bring every area of life and thought into captivity to Thee. Bless us now as we give ourselves to the study of Thy word, in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Our scripture is again from Matthew 6, The Lord’s Prayer. Verses nine through thirteen and our subject is: Deliver Us From Evil.

“After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.

10 Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.

11 Give us this day our daily bread.

12 And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.”

The culminating petition of the Lord’s Prayer is ‘lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil’. The word temptation means exactly what the English means: the temptation into sin. God reserves the right to try us, to put us through testings, and our life is a series of testings because God refines us, He purifies us by fire.

The problems of life therefore are God ordained and God sent that we might grow because of them. The biblical word for pure is very different from our English word which has the connotation of cellophane wrapped and untouched, it is associated with age, with testing, with fire, being refined as gold and silver are refined. But here the word is somewhat different from the usual word that is used and sometimes rendered as temped but normally means tested and tried. This does not refer to testing or trying, it means temptation. And so the prayer is ‘Lord, lead us not into those situations where we are tempted but deliver us from evil’. Here we come to the meaning of this petition, the word evil. What does it mean? One of our problems today is that as a result of the enlightenment and as a result of modern education we tend to see things in the abstract and we make abstractions into realities. We talk about nature, no such thing as nature exists. Who is nature, what is nature? It is simply a collective noun for a vast universe of particulars. But there is no such thing as nature. Evil, what is evil? Evil in this petition is a person. If we were to translate it into modern terminology we would have to say deliver us from the evil one, from Satan. You see when we talk as I said earlier we talk in terms of abstraction, we think of sin and evil in the abstract but sin is particular acts, it is not an abstraction.

It is the denial of the Lord. It is theft, it is murder, it is adultery, it is bearing false witness. It is specific concrete things! Acts, mental states, and I say it is concrete things I have reference to what man does and what man sometimes is. The same is true of evil. Evil as an abstraction is something out here in and of itself does not exist, evil is Satan. It is Satan’s program which is a personal program. Ye shall be as gods knowing, determining good and evil for yourself. And it is every man who follows that program when in terms of Satan’s temptation says I will be my own god I will have my way, I will do that which I please. Sin and evil are not abstractions and so this gives us, does it not, a different perspective on this petition. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one. So you have two persons, do you not, in this petition. One, the Lord, lead us, the other, Satan, deliver us from him. Keep us from following his way, why? Because in Adam’s sin we are involved in Satan’s way. We are all born of Adam, we are involved in His program, it is our fallen human nature and because even in Christ we are not yet in this life perfectly redeemed, we want our own way, we indulge ourselves. We therefore are very susceptible to the evil one and so we have that petition and it involves two people, two persons: The Almighty and Sovereign God and Satan. We deliver ourselves into the hands of the evil one when we call our rebellion against God’s ways right and good.

When we say to God my will be done, not Thine. Thus this petition is a very supremely important one. It is a serious mistake to read it without being mindful that when we pray we pray with two other persons in mind, Lord, lead us not into temptation but deliver us from him, Satan. Now in a sense we might say why is such a petition necessary? After all, the Bible says that we have been made a little lower than the angels, very literally what it says there is in the Hebrew, we have been made a little lower than God, we have been made in His image. Moreover when we turn to Hebrew 1:13-14 we are told that Satan and all his hosts because they are fallen angels are lesser than men. We are told that God’s angels are ministering spirits to the heirs of salvation so that we are above the angels. Now, by their fall the satanic hosts did not increase their power, they lessened it. The power of any creature is greater when he is in obedience to God. And so we would have to say this makes the evil hosts lesser by far than we are. Then why are we asked as the culminating petition ‘lead us not into temptation Lord but deliver us from the evil one’? We are indeed above the satanic hosts but we dare not think of ourselves as independent creatures. Men are vulnerable to things lesser than themselves and never more vulnerable than in their pride they think they are superior and autonomous.

One of the men I knew in my student days and I sometimes think of with a little relish perhaps not in a best of [laughs] saintliness because I know he got what was coming to him. It’s really a remarkable almost storybook character, an Errol Flynn type of person, a swashbuckling character, who once told me I was stupid because I talked to women as though they had a mind and they were something to talk to. He simply used them and the way he put it was hardly printable. He regarded women as very much inferior and as playthings. Then he got married to a little slip of a girl and he became perhaps the most henpecked husband I have ever known [laughter] and it was very simple. All she did was to exploit his sense of guilt and she ruled him. Someone does not have to be more powerful than us to rule over us. Our own sins can be used to dominate us and Satan uses our sins to dominate us. Remember what our Lord said to Peter when Peter was insistent that his way was better than the Lords, which meant the cross and the Lord said ‘Simon, Simon, behold Satan hath desire to have you that he may sift you as wheat but I have prayed for you that your faith fail not and when thou art converted strengthen thy brethren’. The word converted does not mean what our English word now means, it means when you’re turned back from the course you are taking now. Our sins are used by Satan to rule over us. The minister of the seventeenth century at Saint Paul’s in London, the writer and poet John Dun wrote at one time of man’s habit of tempting Satan to tempt us.

Yes, our sins are used by Satan to rule over us. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. And so this petition requires us to see on the one hand the person of God and on the other the person of Satan and to see that we are not autonomous, we cannot face the world in our power but only in the Lord’s power. Every clause of the Lord’s Prayer summons us to recognize our dependence on the Lord. Thine kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. It is God’s will that must be done, not ours. Give us this day our daily bread, our total dependence is upon God. It is He who gives the weather, He who gives us the power to gain wealth. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Man can only live a life of peace and joy when he has the forgiveness and the grace of God and so Lord lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one for Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever, Amen. We are to pray knowing that we are not gods, that we are not autonomous, that we are His creation and we need the Lord’s help and government at every step of our lives. If we try to lead ourselves we are of all men most miserable, therefore lead us not into temptation. Deliver us from evil. Let us pray.

Almighty God our Heavenly Father we give thanks unto Thee that Thou art He who leads us through the valley of even the shadow of death. Who makes us to lie down beside the still waters, who restoreth our soul. And so we come to Thee Lord beseeching Thee, lead us, deliver us from the evil one, make us strong effectual and victorious in Jesus Christ our Lord. In His name we pray, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Question] How are we to view Satan in terms of our personal contact with him, if we’re to be praying that we’re not influenced by the evil one, delivered from the evil one…?

[Rushdoony] Yes how are we to regard Satan in terms of personal contact with him and so on. First of all Satan is a creature like us and as I’ve pointed out more than once and I think it needs restating again and again because he is a person he has a purely local appearance. In other words he cannot be in New York City, Moscow and [unknown] at one and the same time. He can only be at one place at one time. Satan’s work is accomplished in part by the demons but even more by his program, his principle of rebellion which is in all of us by virtue of the fall, by virtue of the fact that we are children of Adam. And as children of Adam we have Satan’s principle, yea hath God said? Well God may say it but I think otherwise and I’ll pick and choose what I like from God and I’ll offer my own word where I like it and I will be my own God deciding for myself, determining for myself, knowing that which I choose to know and saying that good and evil are what I feel they are. Now that’s how Satan approaches us. He has an enemy in our camp, the elements of the old man within us and this is why we need to pray that the Lord lead us and rely on Him because it is only so that we can indeed be delivered from the evil one.

Now Satan can never have the dominion over a believer that he does over the unbelievers. He can work in us to a degree but he can never possess us, we belong to Christ. He tries to limit us in our following after Him but we are freed from his power through the cross of our Lord. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Well what we need to say is to ourselves, [laughs] shut up and let the Lord take over [laughs some more] you see it’s not enough to say shut up to Satan we have to say it to our own nature. Because we can put Satan outside and we’re still in there, wanting our own way, that’s the problem. If we had as much problem with Satan as we do with ourselves we’d be in a mess. That’s why I’ve always like the line that [unknown] uses, the devil made me do it, it’s a very convenient excuse you know [still laughing]. Any other questions? Well if not we’ll meet again next week.