Knowing the Triune God

Lesson #1

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject:

Genre: Speech

Track: 1

Dictation Name: RR10??

Location/Venue: ________

Year: 1960’s-1970’s.

What we are going to be doing for some time now in our meetings is to go through the basic doctrines of our faith. To embark on a study of systematic theology, and at all times to avoid being abstract because our faith is not an abstract faith - we must make it relevant, pertinent to every area of our life. We shall begin with the doctrine of God and deal with it in our two meetings tonight, and continue in some of our subsequent meetings.

The doctrine of the triune God is basic to our faith. When we speak of God, we mean the God who has revealed himself in the bible. Any other God is a product of mans imagination. Men often talk about God. They (have?) an idea of God that meets some need of man... God is often mentioned in the philosophy of history, often mentioned in various religions. God is confined in non-christian religions and non-christian philosophies to simply an idea of man created in order to supply need. For example, Plato and Aristotle talk about God. But their God is totally inoperative! He is just an idea. Why do they use the idea?

Well, in the philosophy of the Greek, one of the problems in the days of (Damocles?), Plato, Aristotle, and the others, was infinite regret. For their thinking, a first cause was necessary. Where would you find that first cause? Well, they (deposited?) therefore they created the idea of a god who was the first cause and started everything, and from that point on to all practical intent, god was dead. He was just the first cause. He was what philosophers call, a limiting concept. You made the idea, so you create the idea, and then you don’t use it anymore. So in Greek thought, God had no roles except to provide the first thought.

Well, when modern philosophy began with the {?}, {some person’s name?} God in order to assure himself of some kind of valid systemology or series of knowledge. He had to have God as an insurance policy. But again, in that system, God did not count. God had no law, God did nothing except to act as an insurance policy.

Thus we could go on and analyze the doctrine of God as we see it in non-christian religion and in non-christian philosophy. It is in every case the imagination of man, of his need, philosophically and religiously for some idea that will undergird his own thinking so that God is a mental quaff of man. Created to meet an intellectual problem and when they solve that problem, or think they have solved it, they drop that idea. Modern philosophy began with a need for the God idea, and subsequently abandoned it.

Now, in all subsequent thinking man creates the God idea because he needs God. The reverse is true in our faith. God created man. Not because he needed him, but simply out of his sovereign will. God is the Creator and as a result God is uncreated being and all the universe including man is created being.

Now I’m going to review some of the things I dealt with, which a few of you heard, last Sunday in Sacramento. The doctrine of the inescapable knowledge of God. Paul deals with this most clearly in Romans 1:17-21.

He declares: “17 For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;”

--or very literally, who hold down, hold back; suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

“19 Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.

20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:

21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.”

Now what is Paul saying? He is saying that you don’t have to prove God to anyone. All men everywhere inescapably know God. It is inescapable knowledge. Every atom in all creation is the handiwork of God and witnesses to God; the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmaments show his handiwork, day after day, and night after night. The psalmist goes on to say, there is no place where their sound is not heard, where the testimony of God is not told. Psalm 1:39, the psalmist tells us that he cannot escape from the knowledge of God, it cries out in all of creation, in all of his beings; if I go to the uttermost parts of the morning, behold, Thou art there, if I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there.

One of the greatest, if not the greatest poem in the English language was inspired by that particular Psalm and the experience of the poet. Does anyone know that poem?

[audience member speaks] The Hound of Heaven.

[Rushdoony] The Hound of Heaven, by Francis Thompson. It’s a difficult poem, but it’s the most powerful poem in the English language. The Hound of Heaven, by Francis Thompson.

And it said: “I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;” and he describes how he ran away from God, tried to find a substitute for God in friendship, in nature, in people...at every place he came face to face with God. Every place he felt himself pursued, as though by a hound, going after him to nail him as a criminal. The inescapable knowledge of God. As a result, faith, when Paul says “the just shall live by faith” does not mean mere opinion, mere belief that there is a God. This is why books that tell us, look, here are proof that there is a God and you should believe in God are nonsense! Man knows that there is a God! So that when Paul says, “The just shall live by faith.” But {?}. The very word ‘believe’ in the bible means rely on, put your weight on. The word faith. One of the meanings of the words of one of the words used as faith is to say amen to God!

Everybody believes in God. The Bible says so. ‘Even the Devil believes and trembles’, James says in James 2:19. When the Bible says believe, it says put your whole weight on the line with God, almost every word. Say amen to Him.

I used an illustration last Sunday morning that I’ll repeat. Many years ago when I was on the Indian reservation I was, about this time of the year perhaps a little later, going up into the mountain with an old Indian. And we had to go across a stream - a river - it was the only way to make the approach to go up that particular area. I looked a little hesitant stepping out in the ice, but he said, when the weather is as cold at night as it has been for some time now, that ice would be thick enough to carry a team of horses and a wagon. Now I could have said, ‘I believe you, but I’m not going to try it.’ That would not be faith; belief in the Biblical sense. But when I walked out across that ice, put my weight on it, then that was faith in the Biblical sense.

The ungodly hold down the truth in unrighteousness. They suppress it! They won’t admit it because they don’t want to come face to face with God. To believe in the Biblical sense, to have faith in the Biblical sense, ‘the just shall live by faith’, is to put their life on the line, on the every Word of God.

So we have the inescapable knowledge of God. The God described in the Bible is not one that anyone has to have proved to him, since everything witnesses to him. The heavens declare, they proclaim the glory of God! And the firmament declareth his handiwork. There is no silencing that witness, though men may try.

I’ll always like the statement, a very candid one, a surprising one, from the psychoanalyst Theodore Rice who is an associate of Freud. He said, “I don’t know of a psychoanalyst who believes in God, and I don’t know of a one who (hasn’t betrayed?) him.

Now. To continue. Any apologetics, any theology that tries to prove God is denying him. So that we don’t begin with something and work up to prove God, we begin with God and only then can we prove anything. God is the foundation of all thinking, of all proof. You see, faith is not knowing God intellectually and saying, ‘yes, I have decided there really is a God.’ No! Then you have turned faith and belief or unbelief into an intellectual matter, and you say it’s ignorance. Well the Bible says that unbelief is the wilful turning of one's back on the God we know. It’s a sin, not ignorance. Now consider what it does to us politically if we deny God, if we say, ‘it’s ignorance, people don’t know God.’ We give them the arguments, the intellectual proof and so on. We changed the whole problem of man from a moral one to an intellectual one. We changed it from a matter of sin to ignorance; and then what’s your answer to this problem of ignorance? Why, it’s the intellectual - the expert. Every time in history that men have, whether in the churches or out the churches, denied the Biblical doctrine of faith, you have the inescapable knowledge of God in every man; whether he’s in the jungles of Africa or the jungles of New York city, or in Berkeley.

Every time you turn from that, then the answer is not faith in the sense of living in every word of God...it’s the expert, the man who has the knowledge because the problem is ignorance. It’s Plato’s philosopher team, it’s Roosevelt’s brain truck. It’s all in your commissions and your bureaucracy. You have a totalitarian order every time you abandon the doctrine of the inescapable knowledge of God, or man’s unbelief, as a moral fact, rather than as an intellectual fact. Then you say the problem is not faith and character, you say it’s ignorance and the answer is an intellectual knowledge - it is the expert.

This is why every time we have a problem today in our society we have a commission of experts, intellectuals, who give us a learned answer to it You know, we’ve had, since world war II, one commission after another beginning with the Hoover commission to deal with the problem of federal government. They never solved it. We have one commission after another dealing with violence; we’ve had all kinds of studies dealing with pornography, all kinds of with the problems in the schools and the breakdown of character. And have they done anything? Why yes, they have; they’ve given us more and more experts to rule over us! They’re not going to get rid of them until you say the problem is not ignorance, the answer is not the expert...the problem is sin. Until the answer is teaching Christ, and men, women, and young people who stand in terms of the faith, who live in terms of the every word of God, who grow in terms of it and who can stand on their own.

You don’t need some philosopher kings in Washington or Sacramento or the U.N. to provide all the answers. You see how practical the Biblical doctrine of God and of faith is? It is basic to our everyday life, it’s basic to our politics, it’s basic to the problems we have today. Thus the books that are trying to prove there is a God are tackling the wrong problem. It’s not intellectual, it’s moral. Doctor Van Til says that man’s problem is that he has the Cain-itic, like Cain, that there be no God. And so he says God is dead.

At least we can say of the death of God’s schools in the ‘60s that they had this honor, they never said ‘God is dead’, but, ‘God is dead for us.’ They never dealt with the question ‘is there a God?’, they said for us there is no God. We’re going to act as though there is no God, therefore, for us He is dead. They knew they had the inescapable knowledge of God, but they closed their eyes to Him.

You see, mans problem with God is that God IS and that God is God. Man says that I want to be God. That’s the heart of the problem. Genesis 3:5 “Ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil, deciding for yourself what constitutes good and evil. So then, man’s problem is that God is and he wants to be God himself.

Now, as we go a step further to deal with God and the doctrine of God we must say that we cannot define God. To define, a definition, is a limit. It comprehends, it limits. But God is infinite and God is incomprehensible and therefore we cannot define God. All we can do, and this is all clean, is to describe God in terms of his own revelation of himself. A definable God is no God at all; in fact, a definable God is often less than man. The Bible tells us, in fact God himself tell us in scripture, that He cannot be defined.

We meet this in Exodus 3:13-15 “And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them?

And God said unto Moses, I Am That I Am: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Am hath sent me unto you.

And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, the Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations.”

Now when Moses said, ‘What is thy name?’ He was asking God to define himself. Because, in ancient times, names were definitions. As I mentioned before on a separate occasion, Abraham was defined by God. He could only get away with his name - we don’t know what his name was first, his second name was Abram when God called him, and then later God changed it to Abraham. He made Abram bear that name by faith. Now it must have been hard for Abraham, because it meant father of many, and then, father of great multitudes.

Now think of the embarrassment when people met him and he had to say what it was and they said, ‘Oh! How many children do you have?’ And they must have said, behind his back, ‘the nerve of that man, defining himself as the father of many when he has no children.’ But God made him bear that name by faith.

Now. Names are definitions, so when a Moses said, ‘the people of Israel are going to ask me to define you, what shall I say?’ God refused. He told them, ‘I Am that I AM.’ For who can {?}. ‘I am uncreated, absolute Being.’

The gods of antiquity had names. Their names were definitions. We still use their names to describe certain things, like, Venus, or Cupid. They tell us something about a certain aspect of life. Or Mars, and War. Marshall - you get that from the word Mars. The names were definitions because the gods of the ancient world were limited gods, and a limited god is an impossibility. Their names, moreover, not only said they were limited, but described their usefulness; so if you had a problem with a girl, you went to Venus; if you were interested in battle you went to Mars; if you were going to take a sea voyage you went to Castor and Anapos. So the Gods were useful and their names described their utility. They were governable Gods. But the God of the Bible is not governable and he is beyond utility. He governs, he is not governed. He defines all things, he is not definable. All things are what they are because God has so created them and you have to understand what God intends by them to know their true definitions.

Say that I Am Who I Am. Creator, the definer...not the one who is defined. But then God goes on to say, ‘I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.’ He describes what he has done in history and he does it through all of the Bible, and he says, ‘You know me through my revelation. You know what you can depend on.’ So we have the Bible. It gives us God’s description of himself. Not a definition - he’s beyond definition - but he tells us something of his nature. We see it in the work of Creation, we see it in the work of Redemption, we see it in his Law, we see it in his Son, we see it in the workings of his Spirit. So that we have a description, and he says, ‘This is forever my name, and my memorial to all generations’ so that God says, ‘I have no name. I am He who IS, I am uncreated BEING. But here’s my name, if you want one: my revelation, which is beyond definition. But it is a description of what I have done and what I will do, because I change not, I am the same yesterday, today, and forever.’ You see, there is no evolution, no change in God.

Moreover, when we speak of God as Christians, we speak of the Triune God. The living God is the Triune God and this is why the Westminster Larger Catechism declares in the questions and answers 8 and 9, “Are there more Gods than one? There is but one only, the living and true God. How many persons are there in the Godhead? There be three persons in the Godhead, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one true, eternal God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory, although distinguished by their personal properties.”

Are there any questions now? Yes?

[audience member speaks unintelligibly]

Yes he (Francis Schaeffer) does, that’s one of his weaknesses. He tends to define God, to deal with it as though it’s an intellectual problem. And it’s the pride of man...he does like that, that appeals to him, it’s flattering to him. And then man becomes the judge over God. So it is unfortunate that some very able men are making that approach to college youth today. This is one reason why they are successful, they are not productive. This is why so much evangelism goes on, reaches millions, and nothing happens. This is why you can have 60% of the country as church members and most of them supposedly born again Christians, and they’re not doing as much as one tenth of one percent of accounting; because they’re looking at it from the wrong perspective.

Any other questions?

Well-- [audio ends abruptly]