Miscellaneous

The Day of the Vultures

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, and Sermons

Lesson: 1-1

Genre: Talk

Track: 1

Dictation Name: The Day of the Vultures 00985

Location/Venue:

Year:

[Audience Speaker] …Covenant church and I have been given the privilege to introduce our first speaker for this morning. I think much (?) of the ministry, the writings, the tapes of Dr. Rushdoony have been very influential both in my life and I am sure in all of yours. Dr. Rushdoony does not have his own satellite television network, he isn’t releasing any praise albums, or he is not appearing on the cover of any particular Christian periodical, but I believe far after our present media super stars are gone away, the writings of Dr. Rushdoony will prevail, and I believe 50, 100, 200 years from now, Dr. Rushdoony’s writings will be important and will be apprehended by a generation. So I just want you all to join me in welcoming Dr. Rousas Rushdoony. (applause)

[Rushdoony] Thank you. I am very grateful to Joseph (McCollif?) and the Tampa church for having me here. I am grateful to see all of you, because it delights me to see so many people concerned about and interested in Christian Reconstruction. Maybe something should be said, since I see at each table a glass full of candies; these were supplied by the Tampa Dental Association. (laughter)

Our subject in this first hours is The Day of the Vultures. In California we have a bird, which when I was a boy, was known as the California Vulture. Now it is called the California Condor. What’s in a name? Well, Condor sounds very dignified and respectful, Vulture is not a name that has any appeal. It is a large bird, it weighs in maturity between 20-25 pounds. It is four to four and a half feet long, and it has a wingspread of 9-11 feet in maturity. It is the largest of the American flying birds. It is also on the list at present of the endangered species. Many environmentalists are ready to blame a variety of things for the decline of this Condor, including Capitalism of course.

The fact is, while there are very few Condors or vultures in California, there are great numbers of them just across the border in Mexico. Why? Well, a Condor or a vulture eats dead things, dead bodies, carrion; and there are not many dead bodies lying around in California. I don’t know why the Environmentalists don’t remedy that by providing bodies if they want to sacrifice themselves for the environment, but the fact is if a cattleman’s steer drops dead it is immediately carted off to a processing plant. So the bodies aren’t there. Naturally, the Condor or vulture is having problems, it doesn’t have a good food supply. How long would we last without a food supply?

From the stand point of the environment, in other words, this is not the day of the Condors in California. It is not the day of the vultures. But we have a vision of the day of the vultures in Revelation 19:17-18.

John says: “17 And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God;

18 That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great.”

The word ‘fowls’ here has an obvious reference to carrion eaters, to vultures primarily. They do not kill, they eat that which has been killed, and they feast on it. And in this vision, God destroys the ungodly and gives them to the vultures to eat.

Now this vision is an important one. Because Revelation 19 depicts two great banquets, the marriage supper of the lamb, the celebration of Christ’s victory, and the open recognition of him as king of kings and lord of Lords. As against this is the banquet of wrath for the enemies of Christ, the day of vultures.

The meaning of this is that history sees judgement, because God is God. That history does not see the triumph of the ungodly, of the enemies of Christ; they see instead the day of the vultures. The anti Christian world order is called Babylon repeatedly, because like the Tower of Babel it seeks to create a world order in defiance of the Lord. It is also called in Revelation Sodom and Egypt, to indicate its immoral standards and its desire to destroy God’s people. But because it is anti God, anti Christ, it is doomed. Its defiance of God is a war against its own life.

The whole of creation is by nature hostile to all the enemies of God. This is our Fathers world, and every atom of creation groans and travails, Paul tells us, waiting for the glorious liberty of the Sons of God, for the fulfillment of God’s purpose for the New Creation; and how can that creation made by God then be hospitable to the enemies of God?

In the song of Deborah we are told in Judges 5:20, a verse we should all know by heart: “They fought from heaven; the stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” The very heavenly bodies, in all their being, in every atom of their creation, are hostile, totally hostile, to those who are against our God.

In 1968 Allen Levy wrote a book entitled The Culture Vultures, about art; and he described therein the growing world of people who are self classified as ‘the cultured ones’. They are parasites who live by promoting or producing pseudo art. Among the ten commandments of the culture vultures as cited by Levy are these two, and I quote: “The bland shall lead the bland. But where to?” and then another: “Venerate money as the cure for all evil.” That sums up Congress, doesn’t it?

We must say as Christians that Culture Vultures are those who substitute art for religion, a lifestyle for the faith; and they separate life from the ultimate concerns of man and center it on style, on synthetic concerns, and on a general contempt for morality.

Writing as he did in 1968, Levy noted at that time the already critical role of homosexuals in the arts, and then he added and I quote: “Music criticism is probably the most homosexual of the black arts today, and this may have a little to do with how sterile and corrupt it is. Like homosexual waiters and homosexual book clerks, the homosexual critic tends to be distracted, flirtatious for his own ends, and subject to all the fickle passions of his peer group.”

Mans new religion, in fact his first religion after the fall, is still humanism. It has substituted art and lifestyles for Christianity, because these provide them a basis for society which is more to their taste. Their outlook on life is first of all elitist; in this they follow Plato. Plato created an elite group of philosopher kings in his imaginary Republic, and these philosopher kings are held to be the only true arbiters of life and society. These elitists believe themselves to be superior because they have freed themselves from religious and moral constraints; in the Christian era from Christianity and its theology, and its work ethic. Second, this new religions substitutes caste for morality. As a result, homosexuals are very easily dominated in many circles since WW2, because the last thing they are interested in is morality. Caste, style, these are most important to them. Because they are militantly hostile to Biblical faith and its moral order, and they have stressed style and caste as replacements for faith and morality, we can agree with Karsten Harries who wrote and I quote: “Baltasar Gracián and his many followers, developing ideas of the Italian Renaissance, supplied Europe with a new image of man, the man of taste. Unlike the Cartesian man of reason, the man of taste has no principles by which he governs his actions. He needs no rules. The individualism implicit in such theories, easily leads to the opposite extreme, to absolutism.”

Freedom in this faith means freedom from God and morality, it means freedom to be God. At the very least, according to Harries, Freedom is put in the place of God. (Cassomere Mallovich?) in 1962 defined creative freedom as and I quote: “The freedom to do what one wants.” This is why, whether it is in art or any other sphere of life today, all the rules are broken.

Then third, this new religion is parasitic, and it treats all things as carrion. It is a vulture culture, living off the corpse of the past. We are told by Solomon in Proverbs 8:35-36 “For whoso findeth me findeth life, and shall obtain favor of the Lord; but he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul. All they that hate me, love death.”

Well, the lovers of death are all around us, and we have seen them growing in the past century numerically. For a man like the artist and poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his wife only really became interesting to him after she died; and then he painted portrait after portrait of her. She wasn’t very interesting while she was alive. Modern culture is a long flirtation with death, in drugs, in sexuality, in film, novels, art, politics, and all of life. Vultures need a world of death. Vultures need a world of death; and they hate those of us who belong to Christ, because we belong to the world of life.

Fourth, we must say that law is inseparable from life; only the dead are imperious to law. Where religion is separated from law- as in Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, where religion is antinomian and mystical- death, not life and action begin to take over that culture. You may not be familiar with Rudolf Otto’s book The Idea of the Holy, but it has dominated so much of theological thinking about what holiness means, and it has led the separation of holiness from law.

Again citing Harry’s, we can agree with his really, restrained comment when he says and I quote: “A God who is grasped, who is only known in ineffable moods or feelings, cannot be the author of a law. To identify religious experience with a sense of the numinous, with the holy, is to divorce religion and ethics. Religion becomes then a retreat from action.” Holiness cannot be separated from morality or ethics, from law; and when it is, religion becomes as he puts it very mildly: “A retreat from action.” We could say a retreat from life.

Then fifth, the vulture society will stress individual freedom- to do your own thing, to live as you please, to break all the rules, to show contempt for God’s law. But it will not stress responsibility, and therefore whenever men turn religion into a sphere of feeling, they surrender moral concerns, they surrender law. But you can’t have a society with moral concerns, and without law. If the church surrenders it, who takes it over? Why the state does. And Congress today of course is our great law making body, our source of the new morality, and it has overturned all the ancient landmarks, together with our courts.

So to turn religion into a sphere of feeling rather than the sphere of God and His moral concerns, and holiness as inseparably related to and part and parcel of law, is to sin. What does God say as He gives the law? “Be ye holy, even as I am holy.” And then He lays down the law. He is telling us how to be holy. He does not say you are going to be holy if you work yourself up into a lot of pious gush.

The ugly fact is that hyena’s will devour one another. More than a few predatory animals will turn on their wounded member and devour him. I live up in the mountains, and one night I shot a particular predator because it was prowling around the house and was going to try to break into the chicken house. I shot him and in the morning there was not a trace of him. He was dead, and I could hear him being devoured. Predators turn on one another.

Now the same is true in the vulture culture. The humanists are tearing at each other. I was discussing this fact on the telephone with John Lofton, whom you will hear later in the day, and John said he had a stack of books as high or higher than his desk of recently published biographies where the humanists were tearing like hyenas at their own. Well, I could give you examples of a few such books, the better ones: Joanne Peyser: Bernstein, a Biography. A.S. Huffington: Picasso: Creator and Destroyer. Charles Higham: The Duchess of Windsor, the Secret Life. Albert Goldman: The Lives of John Lennon. And there are many more. These books are very carefully researched and apparently accurate. Each is, in and of itself, a work of some scholarship; but the clear and obvious fact however is that we are seeing a growing number of such works, of which these are probably the superior ones, that tear apart some of the humanistic idols of the twentieth century.

Turning again to Revelation 19:17-18, we must recognize that we are there told that when God comes in judgement during history and at the end of history, there is a destruction of His enemies. It becomes a day of the vultures and their feast. Such times of judgement are not easy to live in, but there is no salvation without judgement. Go through the Bible, look at every time of judgement, and you will see that it is a time of salvation; only with the judgement upon Egypt which shattered that nation was Israel saved. Over and over and over again throughout the history of scripture, we see this coincidence of judgement and salvation. The supreme example of course is Golgotha, the cross of Christ. The absolute judgement of God upon our sins, and at one and the same time our salvation.

Now we are today in the early stages of a time of judgement. Consider the fact of almost world wide drought this past year; evidence that the drought may continue. Consider the fact of Aids and Herpes and many other things that are possibly threatening. Consider the fact that the drought is leading in some areas to food shortages- in Red China today they are facing perhaps the death of countless numbers through famine, and there is a prison sentence in North China if you use more than your ration of water, which is very, very low. Consider the fact of the world wide debt structure, and the imminent economic chaos from that. Consider the fact that if the food crisis deepens in the Soviet Union where the drought was not as bad as it could have been, but still they had a drought, and some experts fear that if it continues there, there may be a military take over and military venture to demand food from other countries.

We could go on and on to describe the crisis that are building up, that are evidences of God’s judgement. Now I know that a great many people do not like the word ‘judgement’ applied to current affairs. I know that one prominent pastor was quoted in the media as saying that it was unwise to speak of aids as God’s judgement. John Lofton was asked whether he agreed with that or not, and the question was: “Do you believe that aids is God’s judgement?” and John came right back and said: “And do you believe it is God’s blessing?”

We live in the early years of a time of world wide crisis and judgement in the spheres of men and nations, their economies, world health, world weather, and much much more. In 1950, shortly after WW2, the historian Halecki wrote: “The attempt to create a culture which would be European without being Christian is now recognized as the main cause of the present crisis of European civilization.” And we can add, the attempt to establish America on a non Christian basis is the main cause of our present crisis. And since 1950 the crisis has deepened far beyond anything Halecki then imagined.

We live in a time of great and dramatic changes. The very remarkable church historian, Francis William Butler, in one of his studies disagreed with the standard Greek dictionaries in their definition of the world (Alasso?) as ‘change,’ and he said because the standard dictionaries have misunderstood the meaning of that word, it gives a false reading to 1 Corinthians 15:52-54. The sad fact is that no one paid any attention to Butler’s analysis. Let me read that passage as it appears in the King James, and with the same word used as in other versions:

“52 In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.

53 For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.

54 So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.”

Butler said that instead of reading: “We shall be changed” the more accurate meaning is: “We shall be in… [tape skips]

Paul’s words clearly apply to the end of history, but we can say with justice that every judgement by God of Egypt, of Babylon of sin on the cross, and of all the historical events since such as the fall of Rome, and also our modern humanistic order which world wide is in its death throes today. Its effect is not merely a change, but an investiture into great and marvelous opportunities in Christ.

Earlier I cited Harries. Harries wrote about church architecture, and he said and I quote: “The art most qualified to imitate the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem, is architecture.” Church architecture in the past often imitated a city.

Now an interesting fact that most Christians do not realize is, that while it was perhaps 200 years or more before the Christians could build their first church, they built of stone; and they built the sanctuary in the form of a throne room, it was the throne room, the palace of Christ, the King of kings, and Lord of lords. And when the scriptures were read the congregation stood in the early church, because when a king spoke you stood, and every word of scripture was the word of the king.

Now going back to Harries and his analysis, he pointed out that in times past the city meant among other things first a place of security, a walled area protecting man from the evils outside; and second, the walled city was a place of not only security, but of joy and delight. And he said: “These two conceptions dominate the church architecture from the early days, well through the Middle Ages.’

The church which is truly Christ’s faithful army is not only a place of security and a place of delight in a day of crisis and judgement, but also the only true agency of change and investiture. There you go, to submit yourself to Christ, to be governed by Him through His faithful stewards, to be invested into the role of priest, prophet and king in Christ. Only God the Son can change and redeem man and society, and His change is a rebirth and investiture of man as His priest, prophet, and king over the earth, to occupy until He come.

We are living in the early days of the time of the vultures. We are summoned by the Lord to make it our time of investiture by Christ’s sovereign grace, and a time when we occupy in His name.

Paul tells us that we are more than conquerors in Christ. Now more telling language is not possible to imagine, because the word ‘conquer’ was a technical term. When generals like Vespasian and Titus and others returned to Rome, they rode in a chariot with wagons behind them laden with gold and silver and other treasures seized in their conquest, and kings and lords in chains following behind them. This is what it meant to be a conqueror. Bear that in mind every time you read that passage, because Paul says that our calling in Christ is to be more than conquerors. We have a world to conquer. Thank you. (applause)