Sermon On The Mount

Little Faith

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 15-25

Genre:

Track: 15

Dictation Name: Sermon on the Mount – 15

Location/Venue:

Year: 1980

Oh Lord our God we come to Thee again rejoicing in all Thy mercies and blessings and Thy protecting care. We thank Thee that in a day when he who forsakes evil becomes a prey Thou art on the throne and Thy judgment will right all these wrongs and bring justice to bear upon our land and the whole world. Give us confidence oh Lord in Thy government, make us strong in faith and ever faithful to our calling. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

We have been dealing for some time with the Sermon on the Mount and in our past meeting we concluded our study thereof. However we are going to devote this morning to the study of one word in the Sermon on the Mount which I believe is a very important word. Our scripture is Matthew 6:25-30. Matthew 6:25-30.

“Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

26 Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

27 Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?

28 And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

29 And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

30 Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?”

Now ticking off people is something all of us do at one time or another, we have all had occasion to tick off our children or husband to tick off his wife and very definitely wives to tick off their husbands. When we feel that someone needs a correcting word we’re very prone to pronounce it. But what would our Lord said if He could tick us off, if He could appear and tick us off? How would He sum up our problem? Well we do know what He would say because we know the word that again and again He applied to His disciples. Now His disciples were, we would have to say, good men, it would be wonderful if we could match them even to a limited degree and yet our Lord again and again applied a term to them that He felt was the best description of their short comings and their sin, a term that I think all too often fits us also. What He said to them was: oh yea of little faith. Little faith is our subject. Now in English it is two words but in the Greek it is one word, it is a combination word like our word understand which means to stand under, to have a faith, a principle that we stand under and in terms of. Little faith is one word, a combination of two Greek words. One of these words is pistos, faith, the other is oligo, o-l-i-g-o, which means almost, brief, little. So when our Lord says oh yea of little faith He is saying oh yea of almost faith, of a brief faith, it’s there and then it isn’t there. It can on occasion mean fearfulness. Our Lord on another occasion said unto them why are yea fearful, oh yea of little faith, then he arose and rebuked the winds and the sea and there was a great clam. On other occasion to Peter: immediately Jesus stretched forth His hand and caught him and said unto him oh thou of little faith wherefore didst thou doubt.

On another occasion our Lord said to His disciples oh yea of little faith why reason ye among yourselves because ye have brought no bread. Again and again our Lord applies this term to His disciples, little faith, almost faith, a brief flickering faith like a light that goes on and then is off, it isn’t entirely there. In this our Lord says to the disciples is their real problem and this He says to us is also our basic problem. On the other hand when He commends people again and again what He commends them for is their faith, oh woman great is thy faith. I’ve not found so great a faith no not in Israel, thy faith has saved thee, go in peace. Sometimes the reactions we get to the Chalcedon Report as it goes out are very revealing because sometimes something that is said hits people with an especial force. We had a couple of letters and in a number of telephone calls references were made to what Mark wrote last month, the fear of God and the fear of man. And a great many people felt convicted, they had been more afraid of man than of God and as a result their faith had been lacking. Well our Lord is telling us that our problem really is little faith, almost faith or brief and flickering faith. We want to walk by sight, we want to know the reason for things and we want to have a guarantee before we step out that all is going to work out all right. We don’t want to take God at His word, in other words we don’t want to have faith. Now about two years ago in one of our meetings I spoke about the meaning of faith in terms of a certain illustration. When I was on the Indian Reservation in northeastern Nevada in the forties I recall on one of the first winters there one of the Indians and I went up into the high mountains very early in the fall.

We came to the river and had to cross it but it was a question mark whether the ice was strong enough as far as I was concerned, it was too early in the fall. Later on it would get a foot thick perhaps but so early in the fall I hesitated. But the old man told me, he said we can go across it, it can take a wagon load when it was as cold as it was last night and as it has been lately it will freeze hard and thick. I could have said I believe you and stayed on the shore, that would have not have been faith. But I figured he’d been there long enough and he didn’t look as though he had gone through the ice, he was a very cautious man and so I stepped out. Now, had I gone through I know being miles from home and from anyplace where I could warm up I would have had a severe case of frostbite and might have lost some toes at the very least but I took him at his word and I stepped out on the ice and it was strong. Now that’s what faith is about. Faith is venturing out, putting your life on the line or on the ice at the word of the Lord. When God says something you know it’s true, you stake your life on it and you proceed on that basis. Now in view of God’s omnipotence Christ’s incarnation, death and resurrection, to have little or almost no faith is indeed a great reproach. It is a denial of God, it is saying that God is not on the throne and it places us in the ranks of His enemies rather than His disciples.

“Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?”

Our Lord tells us that God’s government is so total that it extends to the grass of the field, to the birds, to the very hairs of our head. The whole of the universe moves in terms of God’s universal and very particular government. All things are made by Him and without Him was not nothing made that was made. When His government and His care is so total for us to believe that what He can do with the grass of the field and the birds of the air He cannot do with us is indeed a reproach.

If God is able to take care of the world cannot He take care of His own? Of His own flock, His own children, His own people?

“26 Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?”

God is not concerned about us or that we are not within His providential plan and within the circle of His love. Oh ye of little faith. This is our biggest problem. It is not the IRS or Washington D.C. or governor Brown and Sacramento nor is it the Soviet Union, it is our little faith, our almost faith, our brief, our flickering faith and our refusal to believe that God can do it. An illustration which I have also used before and I like to use it because I like to remind myself of it because I know that I need it and I figure that others may also need it is the one about the old Danish woman, old Mary who a generation ago going into town from her little farm to pick up some groceries and walking back with the bag on her shoulder was picked up by a neighboring farmer in his wagon. She still held the bag over her shoulder when she got in the wagon and the farmer said, Mary put it down in the back, don’t burden yourself with it and she said well when the horses are walking extra hard to carry me the least I can do is to carry my own weight. Well when God is carrying us it does not make sense for us to try to carry our own burdens.

It’s as foolish as that which old Mary did. We need therefore to have faith so that instead of being reproached by our Lord as being of little faith He can say to us oh woman great is thy faith and as to the man I have not found so great faith no, not in Israel. This indeed is the word of praise. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God give us grace to take hands of our lives, to cast our burdens upon Thee, to know that Thy in Thine omnipotence are ever mindful of us, that Thou wilt never leave us nor forsake us so that we may boldly say the Lord is my helper I shall not fear what man may do unto me. Lord we believe, help Thou our unbelief. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Are there any questions now?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] The question is about the received text, how is it handed down to us and at what time in history did it become a matter of debate and concern. First of all because of course in antiquity and until Gutenberg’s day there were no printing presses copying the scriptures or any manuscript was a slow and painstaking work. What was done in the Old Testament era was continued by the various monks and other professionals who copied scripture. It was a very painstaking method, it was to copy word by word from the existing manuscript.

When, let us say, Genesis was copied then there would be a reading from one person to the other of the text of Genesis, to make sure they had gotten it exactly right word for word. Then there was a checking of it in terms of the very number of letters to make sure it was letter perfect. You know it is easy to make mistakes, any one of you who type know that very often if a line ends with the same word as the one below it your eye tends to skip a line so it was very easy for copyists as they got tired to skip a line occasionally or a word. So there was a checking word by word, letter by letter to make sure that the text was totally accurate. Only then was that copy released. If the copy were defective in any degree it was tossed into a bin because parchments and other materials used for manuscripts were very costly to be scraped later and reused. Now this method was used for centuries, this is why the Bible has always been the best proof read manuscript in the world. Almost any book you get, if you are a careful reader, you’ll find typographical errors. We have some that creep through although we try to proofread the Chalcedon Report very carefully and we had a bad one last month. But the bible is error free because of the very careful tradition from Old Testament times of proofreading. There was one famous edition a couple of centuries back that has some errors and that has become a collector’s item. A bible with errors is a collector’s item, it is so exceedingly rare. Well as a result the received text was a very carefully preserved text. Now, one of the problems entered in when Jerome was asked to make a translation for the church at Rome. Jerome was one of the more brilliant scholars of his day but he was also one of the most cantankerous and head strong, bull headed men in all of history.

He is really remarkable, Jerome was in a class by himself for his ability to be bullheaded, wrongheaded and cantankerous. His cantankerous would spill over into three continents when he went into a tantrum. Well, Jerome’s translation we have as the Latin Vulgate. There are many, many errors in it, it was a one man work because Jerome was incapable of working with anybody very successfully, people had to be rubber stamps for him, but it became the official Catholic bible even to this day in the [unknown] translation, a very bad error by Jerome in the New Testament is still translated into the English because that’s official and then corrected in a footnote. As a result the Greek Orthodox Church which had lots of failings was the church which through the centuries in the Christian era preserved the received text very faithfully and rigidly. Some small sects including some heretical ones maintained the received text in Europe, the reason they did it was they were anti-Rome, therefore they wouldn’t use the Roman version, they got the Greek version which was the received text. Well, at the time of the reformation a number of scholars recognized that the vulgate was a very faulty translation. As a result [unknown] went to the received text and prepared an edition of it for Europe, Western Europe. The King James Version was translated from the received text as was the Geneva Bible and others. The received text as a result became the text of the Eastern Church and of Protestantism, predominantly until the late eighteen hundreds, about a hundred years ago. At that time some liberals in the Church of England who had been assigned the task of bringing the King James up to date because some words had changed their meaning.

We know that the term ‘the quick and the dead’ doesn’t mean the fast and the dead but the alive. Those who are alive and the dead, naturally the alive are quick and that’s how we got our term quick. I know during World War II one officer misunderstanding this got very upset over the use of the term the quick and the dead by the chaplain because he felt that fostered some kind of retreatism, running away. Well, The committee was formed at any rate in the church of England to revise the King James, simply to change the words where they were obsolete. What they did however was to decide that they would make a totally new translation and they abandoned the received text. As liberals they decided perhaps some other texts are more authentic. As a result they started to look around for other manuscripts. Well naturally there were other manuscripts to be found everywhere because in all the old monasteries in particular these faulty translations or copies still survived. Some had been reused, others were still sitting there in bins and they went to these and said aha, this is an authentic version. And as a result you, if you read closely some of the modern translations you not only find there are changes but missing verses. Father forgive them for they know not what they do. The woman taken in adultery, the conclusion of Mark and much more are just left out because they were missing in certain manuscripts and they hold that these are more authentic. As a result the modern translators not only follow defective manuscripts ever since the revised English Version and the Revised American Translation about 1901 followed the English Version but now they are going further.

It’s not enough to depart from the manuscript, they change the manuscript, they supposedly reconstruct that the original meaning must have been. Which means that because they have an idea in their head and they say they couldn’t have meant that, they meant what we say, they reconstruct it, or else they dismiss the universal reading, for example, in Genesis 1: And God said let us make man in our image and they say well the usage of that verse of course has led people to say well here is Trinitarianism right back in Genesis 1 that was just the plural of majesty. Well the plural of majesty is a modern idea, no ruler or king or sovereign in antiquity said we, they said I, the plural of majesty is a modern concept but in the most recent translations it reads and God said I will make man. Genesis 1 and 2 are rewritten to make them not into three sentences but into one sentence so that instead of reading as the King James reads:

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

Now this is the way it is in the original Hebrew but they reversed the whole thing and made it all one sentence:

“When the Spirit of God began to move upon the face of the waters the earth was without form and void.”

And so on so that the earth was there when the spirit of god began to move upon it, so that you have a material universe from all eternity and you get another religion which is in essence monachism. On top of that they’ve gone one step further and I’m sorry to say that most of your bible translation groups have fallen prey to it. They’ve adopted the theory of dynamic equivalence, there is an excellent book on that by a Dutch scholar which I can tell you more about later if you’re interested in it.

The theory of dynamic equivalence says that you translate into the culture, that is, if you are translating the bible into the language of some primitive tribe in the East Indies you translate it as though it were a series of myths because this is what they believe in. you don’t translate it as actual history, now this is a radical falsification of the Bible, it reduces it to a whole series of fairy tales. So you can see what’s happening, we’ve departed from the received text and step by step we are moving toward the creation of our own text. Now you have people saying in plain violation of Greek and Hebrew that it’s wrong to speak about God as He, well, there is no neutered text- uh, neuter in the text, it is always male and female. They are also saying when the bible is so plain in speaking against homosexuality and in fact one of the few times the bible uses language can be called insulting it uses it of homosexuals. In Revelations 22 as well as in the Old Testament they are called dogs. But now we have books written telling us that the bible is in favor of it, it has no feelings against it. Well how do they do that? It’s because they rewrite the bible in effect to make it mean what they want it to mean. So we are really in trouble. Now they’ve pulled back from the recent proposal to retranslate the bible and eliminate all sexism in the Bible but they hold back temporarily. The commission is still in existence, when they’ve feel they’ve softened up people sufficiently they will probably go ahead with such an anti-sexist bible.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes that’s a good point. We really do not have translations now. We have paraphrases. A paraphrase is not a translation, what a paraphrase does is to say I’m going to put the idea in my own words. A translation is a literal word by word rendering of the original. Now very often words in an original will have another word implied, for example the word [unknown] is one word but in English it becomes two words. Well very often in some languages certain words are implied in a verb. If I say shut the door you is implied in the verb shut. Now whenever there is an implied word in the conjugation or [unknown[ of something the King James gives that to you in italics, so as you read you often find italics, these italics indicate an implied or included word in a conjugation. Now a paraphrase sometimes serves a useful purpose. I very often cite as a case of a very fine paraphrase GoodSpeed’s paraphrase of the beatitude blessed are the poor in spirit. He paraphrases it ‘blessed are they who feel their spiritual need’. Now that gets to the heart of the idiom that our Lord uses, poor in spirit, they that feel their poverty of spirit, they that feel their spiritual need. That’s excellent but a great deal of GoodSpeed’s paraphrases were very bad and they showed his dislike of many Christian doctrines because he softens or eliminates key meanings. So paraphrases have to be used with caution. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] It was very early in the Christian era gained the name textus receptus, received text. But it was previously known simply as the text of scripture, the canon.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Well, first of all its all their reconstruction, and then second at the beginning of this century man who was at first a liberal scholar and was going to demonstrate the falsity of Luke and Acts spent a great deal of time in researching them and found that the evidence was overwhelming in favor of their thorough authenticity. You can get his writings still from a Christian discount book center, Sir William Ramsay, R-a-m-s-a-y. But you see these people pretend to be very learned and they’ll give you a lot of footnotes but all of it is footnoting one another not to any reality. I read a book yesterday by a Jewish scholar which supposedly has arrived to the truth about Jesus. And he says the gospels are all junk, nonsense, falsifications, that Jesus was a member of the Pharisees and a revolutionist who was crucified as a revolutionist. He also says that Jesus and Barbarous were one and the same person. Now there isn’t a shred of evidence for it but that’s a book club selection, by the way, currently, and highly regarded. But it’s pure reconstruction out of thin air. The only thing to do was to take all such things as the jokes they are, they have no authority. Now if you and I decide that there are flying saucers and each of us then begins to write something down and we begin citing each other as authorities, why look at all the documentation we have but it has not relationship to reality.

Well this is the way it is with these scholars. About three, four years ago in our meetings here I cited an example of what one logician did to these arguments and I think it’s worth repeating. William Whetley early in the last century when Napoleon was alive and had just been sent to Albas as a prisoner, I believe, wrote a book. Now the title of it was some doubts, I believe the title roughly was this: Some Doubts Concerning the Historicity of Napoleon Bonaparte. Whetley was a philosopher, a logician, a teacher of logic. All he did was to take the methodology that people used concerning the bible and the New Testament and apply it to Napoleon who was alive. And he analyzed all the reports, documents concerning napoleon and he said consider the sources, this and that reporter and this and that interviewer is of poor character , judgment is not to be trusted. This and that person has been known to spread propaganda and so on and so forth. And he finally said in terms of all logic and common sense there is no reason to believe that such a person as Napoleon exists, he is a fiction created by the British Foreign Office for their own political purposes. And do you know there were Englishmen actually convinced by that book it was so logical? Well, all he di was to apply some of the premises that had been used with regards to the New Testament to prove that in terms of the kind of standards they used you could prove a man still living to be non-existent. It’s a delightful book. Well I think if there are no further questions we will conclude our meeting and will meet again two weeks from now.