Sermon On The Mount

The Golden Rule

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 19-25

Genre:

Track: 19

Dictation Name: Sermon on the Mount – 19

Location/Venue:

Year: 1980

Almighty God our Heavenly Father we give thanks unto Thee as we face the problems of our day that Thy purpose, oh Lord, shall prevail, that Thy kingdom shall come, that Thy rule shall be established from pole to pole and the people shall praise Thee. Make us ever mindful our Father that we have been called to victory and that this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. Grant us now Lord as we study Thy word that we may behold wondrous things out of Thy law, that we may be delighted with the certainty of Thy truth and the blessedness of Thy word. Grant us this we beseech Thee, in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Our text today is Matthew 7:12, the golden rule. Our subject is: The Golden Rule. Matthew 7:12.

“Wherefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them for this is the law and the prophets.”

The golden rule as we saw last year when we were going through this chapter in summary fashion is found in many cultures. I have somewhere a book that gives simply the form in a great number of pages of the golden rule in various cultures, it’s very commonplace. However in each instance it does have a different meaning. In every form except the biblical, the golden rule appears in a negative cast, it reads ‘do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you’. Confucius for example said ‘what you do not like if done to yourself do not do to others’. So that it is always negative in the formulation outside of the bible, now this does not meant that a negative formulation is necessary bad, but if the culture is as many in the far east are given to a world and life negation the golden rule then councils passivity and non-interference.

Now what does that mean? Well a faith, a philosophy can be world and life affirming or world and life negating. Virtually every religion and philosophy falls into the area of world and life negation, some much more so than others. For example, Hinduism, Buddhism and many other faiths say that nothingness is ultimate. Now, whatever is ultimate in your faith is the highest good in your faith. If God is ultimate because you are a believer in scripture then God is your highest good, your [unknown]. But if all things came out of nothingness or chaos then nothingness or chaos is ultimate. You are going to prize it. The goal of Buddhism that assumes nothingness to be ultimate is nirvana and their concept of nirvana is that it is nothingness, it is eternal death. Gandhi could say he hoped he had been holy enough in this life that he would never be reincarnated again and would be eternally dead. Life for him was a curse, death being ultimate the highest good, was death, eternal death. Now consider for a moment in the seventeen hundreds philosophy came to a belief in evolution, at first it was a philosophical premise, a premise that we encountered in men like Kant and Hagel. Then it became a biological faith with Darwin, but about a century before Darwin the philosophical premise had been developed, it had come to be believed and what happened. Because in terms of the philosophical premise you believed that all things came out of original chaos then to replace God as ultimate with chaos as ultimate and therefore what is it that you invoked?

We invoke God if we believe in God, we pray to God because we feel the need for God, the ultimate power in the universe. But if chaos is ultimate then what do we invoke? Why chaos, revolution. And so when men began to believe in the western world that chaos is ultimate they began to invoke chaos as the answer to the problems and it came to focus first in the French Revolution and we have had as one historian after another has called it: the age of revolutions, two hundred years of this. Because it is the ultimate power, chaos, out of chaos everything came. So if you want a better world order have greater chaos and out of it will come more order. Do you see the point? The golden rule means what your faith makes it to mean. If life is a burden then you do not give life support to others. You abandon the sick and the elderly and the unwanted children or girls or whatever the culture says is excess baggage. If death is ultimate then death is a blessing and because today we have again taught in our schools a belief in the ultimacy of death and chaos is it any wonder that we have today abortion as a right and a virtue? Euthanasia and the right to suicide now increasingly being affirmed? You see whatever your basic faith is, your condition, the meaning of what the golden rule is, in some far eastern cultures it means that the greatest good you can do to others is to allow them to die. If they are in the river because they’ve fallen overboard you let them die, why curse them with more life. But I said if the golden rule is encountered in a negative form the meaning still depends on the religion behind it.

For example Rabbi [unknown] in Old Testament times said whatsoever thou wouldst that men should not do to thee do not do that to them. His formulation is very close to that of Confucius but the meaning is very different because Rabbi [unknown] went on to say this is a summary of the law and the prophets, what God taught in His law, the Old Testament, he made it emphatically clear. It had a very different meaning then although the words were almost identical to Confucius words. For [unknown] it meant abide by God’s law if you expect other people to treat you as you would like to be treated. Bring about God’s law order in which all men abide one with another in terms of the righteousness of God. We find this particular formulation that [unknown] gives in a number of Christian scholars and rulers including Alfred the Great. But the golden rule has more to it than that, it is an aspect of the dominion mandate. Now for many religions it can mean a way of retreat. Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you, just stay in your shell, be non-involved because you don’t want them involved, you stay in your yard and I’ll stay in mine but what our Lord means by it is closely linked to the dominion mandate. To exercise dominion and to subdue the earth through the whole word of God, the law of God.

““Wherefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them for this is the law and the prophets.”

Our Lord adds something to the golden rule that is not present in all the non-Christian forms. He says this is the law and the prophets. We cannot use the golden rule apart from those words. Our Lord makes it clear. What is the teaching of the law and the prophets?

“Thou shalt love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and being and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

And what is it to love someone? Well you keep the law in relationship to him, thou shalt not kill, you respect his right to life, thou shalt not commit adultery, you respect the sanctity of his home, thou shalt not steal, you respect his property, thou shalt not bear false witness you respect his name and thou shalt not covet, thou shalt not desire what is his nor seek to defraud him of what belongs to him. Our Lord has made it clear in the Sermon on the Mount that heaven and earth shall pass away but my law shall not pass away, not one jot nor tittle thereof. The law is not presented by our Lord as something that is to go or that is an enemy to us, the law is only an enemy to sinners. What our Lord teaches us therefore in the golden rule is the royal virtue, the royal virtue, the way of God, the way of the king of kings. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If the golden rule is detached from the law and the prophets, from Jesus Christ, form the word of God it can be an invitation to sin. The Marque De Sade was the first one who saw that point. He was all for the golden rule but of course he said all men are depraved and any pretense to virtue is a fraud, all men are sadomachostic, all men have a desire to practice every perversion so let’s do unto each other as we would like to have done one to another. Let’s indulge in the hundred and one days of Sodom or whatever else he had in mind and that was his faith and his philosophy. And in the past fifteen years that concept was revived and some people did make use of the golden rule to justify their thoroughly pornographic perspective with respect to mutuality, to doing one to another. To deny the law basis of the golden rule is to leave oneself wide open to that kind of interpretation.

This is why the golden rule as we encounter it in various cultures all over the world and as we encounter it in its usage today is not the same as it is in the bible. Because in the bible the concluding part of the golden rule is for this is the law and the prophets. To deny the law basis of the golden rule is to make it humanistic and to say that a will to death, suicide, abortion, euthanasia and more can be vindicated in terms of the golden rule. In fact one contemporary scholar has insisted that the golden rule needs to be stated negatively, he has said there is so much evil in the world and so few of us who are capable of any goodness that if we say do not do unto others what you would not have done unto yourself it would enable us to live better because he said each of us would stay in our own corner and we wouldn’t bother anyone else. Non-involvement, this is what Doctor Abrams said was the meaning of the golden rule. At least as he read it. Non-involvement, don’t get involved because involvement only leads to trouble and to evils. But even Sherman Johnson, a modernistic scholar has said and I quote:

“The essence of righteousness is the constructive doing of good, not the negative avoidance of evil.” Unquote.

The constructive doing of good, not the negative avoidance of evil. And our Lord makes it clear what that constructive doing of good is, it is the law and the prophets. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God Thou hast spoken the word and Thy word is truth. Give us grace to hear and to obey, to rejoice in Thy word and to know that it is the remedy for our problems. Make us people of the golden rule of Thy law, of Thy love and grace that we might bring all things into conformity to Thy holy purpose. Grant us this we beseech Thee in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Are there any questions now? Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes. I think at that point he was off base because very definitely we are told in various texts of scripture that the image of God is righteousness, holiness, knowledge and dominion. So that the bible defines in various passages the image of God and it does not speak of it as a physical image. I’m afraid he got carried away and overstated the matter.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] I don’t know I’ve not heard enough of them to know [laughs] I couldn’t say.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] I really don’t know as to that. I’ve rarely encountered that statement but it’s clearly wrong because its pushing scripture to say something it does not say. Any other questions, yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] No, that’s right. In the ancient world man believed that the world came out of chaos. He worshipped chaos. We have a faint relic of the cults of chaos in the Mardi Gras. What the cults of chaos did in the ancient world was to say that chaos is a necessity we worship chaos and so once a year for a matter of days or up to two weeks all order would be illegal and all disorder would be mandatory. So that every kind of sexual perversion had to be practiced, no one was permitted to do anything that was orderly, the worst condemned man in prison was released for the period and made the king even to possessing the queen, total disorder, total chaos became the rule. The Saturnalia was the best known of these. They felt that only so could society be revitalized. However they wanted strict order the other fifty weeks but they felt the world would run downhill if it wasn’t given a charge of disorder periodically. Now this actually involved in some other religions where they didn’t have the periodical festival going to the temple to practice there some perversion, a deliberate and repulsive act of perversion in order to revitalize, recharge their life with chaos. But when faith, Christian faith came in our charge came from being born again and being in continuing communion with the Lord through prayer and knowledge of his word. Well when men began to depart from that their faith went to chaos as a result of the doctrine of cultural evolution which preceded biological evolution by about a century.

That result was that they felt in all their being the need for chaos and hence they deliberately created chaos in society, revolution. Until that faith goes it will be a must.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes. All over the world, yes. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Mhmmm.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] No, they were not. Unless you might say they were unconsciously because during the Saturnalia the one element of society that was forbidden to stop work everybody else was ordered to stop work totally, the one group forbidden to stop work was the bakers. [laughter] Because you could live for a matter of days or two weeks on good black bread and they wanted to stay alive during the Saturnalia. So the bakers had to work and the baker’s shop was off limits to anybody with their disorder. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Who?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] I don’t think he wanted it explained, first of all we believe in one God, three persons. Second Islam borrowed its idea of God from the Bible, so if ours is pagan theirs is more so because it’s a hand-me-down. Third they have tried to replace the three persons of the Trinity with a variety of gins and spirits and what not and they have had to replace Christ with the belief in a [unknown], a savior who is going to come.

So it has been a very cheap imitation religion. [laughs] They’ve replaced the spirit of God with a variety of weird spirits and Christ, the second person of the Trinity with a future [unknown]. There have been, by the way, several pretenders, several false [unknown] and in fact, oh, Lord Gordon lost his life to the [unknown] of the Sudan, yes. He’s been the most prominent [unknown] in the past century. So Islam has been an imitator of the bible very self-consciously.

Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] King Alfred of England. Yes. Now I think that’s very interesting because even when I was a boy King Alfred was still in the textbooks but going out. But we did have a number of stories about King Alfred and about His teachings. King Alfred was one of the great English kings who made the bible the law book of the land ,who established in the face of very serious invasions and the like in his day a just and a godly order. A very remarkable man and almost totally forgotten today. But King Alfred of England was a very remarkable man in the early centuries.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well they hadn’t died down in his day, he was still fighting them but his was the beginning of reconstituting a free England. Very remarkable man but King Alfred is no longer in the school books because he doesn’t represent the kind of person we like. The readers in the elementary school when I was a boy were full of stories about King Alfred.

Any other questions? Well then we shall continue two weeks hence with our studies on the Sermon on the Mount.