2. The Law and the Ban (Remastered)

The Law and the Ban

R.J. Rushdoony

Our Scripture is Deuteronomy 7:9-15, and our subject, ‘The Law and the Ban.’ 

“Know therefore that the Lord thy God, he is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations; And repayeth them that hate him to their face, to destroy them: he will not be slack to him that hateth him, he will repay him to his face. Thou shalt therefore keep the commandments, and the statutes, and the judgments, which I command thee this day, to do them. Wherefore it shall come to pass, if ye hearken to these judgments, and keep, and do them, that the Lord thy God shall keep unto thee the covenant and the mercy which he sware unto thy fathers: And he will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee: he will also bless the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy land, thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep, in the land which he sware unto thy fathers to give thee. Thou shalt be blessed above all people: there shall not be male or female barren among you, or among your cattle. And the Lord will take away from thee all sickness, and will put none of the evil diseases of Egypt, which thou knowest, upon thee; but will lay them upon all them that hate thee.”

Deuteronomy 7:9-15.

This entire chapter is a very important one. In the eight verses preceding our reading, and the verses following it, we have the ban, that is, a declaration whereby God says all the nations of Canaan are to be executed, to be destroyed, to be utterly wiped out. The problem that faces the modern church with regard to this chapter, is what to do with it. And the answer of the church today, both evangelical and liberal, has been that this is a part of the Old Testament covenant and is therefore no longer applicable, and therefore it is only of historical concern to us. It is important therefore to analyze this subject very carefully.

We began our analysis of the significance of the law as it is declared in the promises of the law and in the epilogue to the Law. It is true what these critics of these chapters say, that this is a part of covenant law. But the covenant law is not restricted to Israel. The covenant circumscribes all men without exception. We cannot understand the Bible unless we realize that no man, living or dead, has ever been, or ever shall be, outside the covenant of God. The original covenant was with Adam, it was renewed with Noah, it has been since expanded through Moses and Jesus Christ. But we cannot understand the meaning of the covenant unless we understand that all men are related to the covenant, either as covenant keepers or covenant breakers; there is no other possible relationship. No man can say the covenant belonged to Israel, or the covenant belongs to the Church, or the covenant is limited to one period of history, it is an everlasting covenant, it circumscribes all men in every age. Therefore all men are inescapably tied to the covenant and its promises of love and hate, of blessings and curses. Christ, in renewing the covenant, made it clear that all men were involved in it. In John 12:32,33, we read:

“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me. This he said, signifying what death he should die. ”

Now the sentimentalists try to say, well this means that everybody’s going to be attracted to Jesus Christ, or everybody’s going to be saved ultimately, and so on. What it means simply is that he now is the center of the covenant, everything is in terms of Him, and men are cursed or blessed in terms of Him and His Law-Word. Jesus was the divine renewer of the covenant of God with man. As such, all men now are judged, drawn, in terms of Him, who is now the principle of judgment, of salvation, of curses and of blessings. As a result, the covenant law judges every man, and the Lord of the covenant, Jesus Christ, judges every man. Jesus Christ is the great judge. Therefore, every man faces Him, and every man faces Him in terms of the covenant and the law of the covenant. Do they believe in him? And if they believe in Him, have they obeyed Him, for if we believe in Him, we keep His commandments. 

The covenant God in this passage identifies Himself as:

“God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments…”

He alone is the sovereign Lord; reliable and faithful, and what He has said, He declares He will do. An aspect of this trustworthiness, this faithfulness of God, is His jealousy and wrath, His hate and His love, His blessings and His curses. What He plainly says in this passage is that He will exercise retribution. He promises to repay, as the tenth verse makes clear, those who hate Him by destroying them. 

“He does not delay with those who hate Him but repays them personally.” ⁱ

As the Berkeley version translates it. In other words, God reacts to all covenant breakers personally, and intensely. Retribution therefore must be applied by men, because God first of all applies it. It is a principle of justice. He blesses and He curses, He gives fertility of womb, of land, of flocks and of herds, and freedom from the notorious evil diseases of Egypt. God asserts His sovereign rights. And in verse twelve He refers to His judgments and His blessings. 

The word ‘judgment’ as it is used here is a very interesting word. We think of judgments in the English as court decisions. In the Hebrew, the word means ‘rightful claims’ and ‘rights.’ God is the great King; therefore, when He announces His judgments, exercises or announces His rights, which are to be rendered to Him by His subjects and His servants. The judgments of God, therefore, are declarations of His rights, and any man who falls afoul of His rights gets the back of His hand. God’s Law therefore is an assertion because His Law is called His judgments. It is an assertion both of His righteousness, and of His rights. So when God declares His Law, the Ten Commandments and all the subordinate laws, God is declaring His rights. Hence, He has a right to love and to hate, to curse and to bless, in terms of all men’s reaction to His rights. 

He promises fertility and abundance to all who obey Him, this is also a very important point. It means that there is blessing inherent in the Law, even to the ungodly, to those who do not believe in God or in Jesus Christ; for to the extent that they honor the rights of God, they are blessed. If they do not commit adultery nor rob, if they respect the earth and give the earth its due and its rest, they are blessed materially, even though spiritually they are reprobate. This is why pagan, ungodly, nations have risen more than once to great power in history, because they have had a basic respect for the fundamentals of God’s Law, and they have fallen as they have despised these basic principles. Thus it is possible for nations which are nominally Christian, as the Western countries are, to be cursed, and nations which are anti-God, as the Soviet Union, to be blessed, if they should begin to abide by God’s Law.

I indicated earlier that in the rest of this chapter, the verses before and after our reading, we have the ban. The ban is the total judgment on people who deny God’s Law and the Canaanites received this total punishment. We are told that their iniquity was full, that they were morally offensive to God. Now, the ban can be only issued by God, not by man. By the ban, God declares that a people are outside of His Law and under sentence of death, that they are total outlaws in His sight. The ban is the reversal of communion, it declares an end of communion with God and man, and his death sentence. 

Now we need to understand the significance of communion in order to understand the meaning of the ban. Communion and community can exist where there are strong personal differences and enmity. People can disagree, they can disagree strongly and still have communion. A very interesting illustration of this, from Van de Leeuw, is worth quoting. As he illustrates the fact of communion and community, Van de Leeuw writes:

“To-day the finest example is still the peasant, who has no ‘feelings’ but simply belongs to his community, as contrasted with the citoyen invented in the eighteenth century! Even peasants who fight, or engage in law-suits, remain neighbours and brothers; a peasant in the Eastern Netherlands who has a mortal enemy in the village nevertheless knows that on market-days he is obliged to greet his foe and walk up and down with him once, when the peasant community of the whole district is gathered in the country town, thus demonstrating to the eyes of ‘strangers’ the fellowship of the village ad oculos.” ⁱⁱ

Now this custom is very important, and it is an ancient one which was once commonplace in the various communities of Europe, and it was also present in some of the villages of the United States. The point of such a custom was this; it recognized that disagreements, very serious, ugly ones, existed. That lawsuits could be in progress between two people but that such differences are a part of life in community, and a form of community, that they can be instrumental in furthering community. 

Now let’s illustrate this by putting on a different level; marriage. The best marriages are the ones where there are fights. Why? Because then the husband and wife act out the problems if they are godly people and it draws them closer together. In a marriage where either the husband or wife is always agreeable, the marriage never has the depth that a marriage where there are tensions and they are resolved. Thus, differences can bring people closer together by bringing problems to the surface for settlement. Thus, the old custom that Van der Leeuw describes, which still prevails today in eastern Netherlands, recognizes this. It accepts that there have to be differences, there have to be lawsuits, there have to be fights, and sometimes ugly ones, between neighbors because this is the only way problems can be settled. Therefore, these are not things that are destructive of communion and community; a community requires dissension and disagreement in order to have progress. There’s never progress without problems, tensions and resolutions. The ban is something radically different; it means an end of community, it indicates a situation beyond disagreement. 

About a week and a half ago, Dorothy and I visited some friends of ours who live on a farm, and they were describing the daughter-in-law of a friend who is probably as sick a character as can be described, who has fought with everyone in the area, and fought in a most ugly manner. This friend was saying that she had only met this young woman twice and on the second occasion she came by the house for just a moment and started to pick a fight. And Bertha’s reaction was a very healthy one, “Don’t try to pick a fight with me, I don’t know you that well.” I thought that was an inspired bit of feminine logic, “There’s no community between us, so there can be no fights,” and that was that. 

Now a ban means the end of community. It indicates a situation beyond disagreement, where the curse has taken over, God’s curse, and the people are beyond communion or community, beyond disagreement, they are under judgment. 

We do have instances in Scripture of curses pronounced by men. The curse is a valid thing and our prayer should ask not only for God’s blessing, but also for God’s curse on those who are hardened in their lawlessness. In a curse man invokes God to judge a man or people he regards as beyond communion, whose sin requires total judgment. But we must remember that God will not harken to an undeserved curse. A very conspicuous case of this is Balaam in Numbers. In Deuteronomy 23:5 we are told that the undeserved curse is turned by God into a blessing. When God pronounces curses which appear in the Law, He places all those who are disobedient to that law under a ban. There are certain curses we cannot pronounce. We are forbidden to curse rulers or judges in Exodus 22:28; it is for God to curse them, and He will when they disobey His Law. Thus, the curses are already pronounced. We are forbidden to curse parents, Exodus 21:17, and the dead, in Leviticus 19:14. The fact of the ban and of curses, and the fact that blessings apply to nations who are unbelievers makes clear the fact that the scope of the law is beyond Israel, and beyond the Old Testament.

When God gave the Law, He had all men and all nations in mind. At this point the Talmud, which is sometimes very much like our modernist preachers in its contempt of the Word of God, was right, when it declared that because God owns the entire earth, all the heathen are accountable to God and His law for the care of the earth, for obedience to the Law of God, and for the tithe.ⁱⁱⁱ This point is true; there is nothing in the Law which says any man or any nation is an exemption to it. To deny the law is to deny the victory or the blessing, because victory and blessing are the same thing, which the law promises. And it is at this point that modern evangelicalism as well as earlier Protestantism went sadly astray. 

We saw last week, and we shall see further in a few weeks, how Luther and Melanchthon, and also Calvin, having first affirmed the Law, later tended to reject the Law, and when they did that, they rejected victory. It is a sad fact that the Lutherans actually wrote this into their confession, the Augsburg Confession. Reformed confessions did not. The Augsburg Confession, article 17, declares of the Lutheran Churches that:

“They condemn others also, who now scatter Jewish opinions, that, before the resurrection of the dead, the godly shall occupy the kingdom of the world, the wicked being every where suppressed [the saints alone, the pious, shall have a worldly kingdom, and shall exterminate all the godless].” ^iv

In other words, the Augsburg Confession condemned all those who believe that the cause of Christ shall triumph in history. As a result, the movement of Lutheranism was from victory to defeat, and the same was true of Luther. It’s not surprising that a man who began so gloriously, and who’s placed us all in debt, should have ended sadly. And his last years were full of tears and doubts and fear; he moved from victory to defeat.

The death mask of Luther is rarely ever reprinted by any Protestant book because it shows us so tragic an aspect. It is unfortunate that we have to call attention to these things, but there is no progress unless we take the good that others have done and build on those things, and avoid their errors. It’s not surprising that a Catholic scholar, one of the most brilliant of our generation, Freidrich Heer, has pointed out the fact that the end result of Luther’s position was that he went right back to Thomism and to Thomistic natural law ideas.^v In other words; everything that he had tried to do, he had undone. 

Having denied the law, the Lutherans and the early Calvinists retreated into ineffectual pietism, and Protestantism was only rescued by the rise of the Puritans. When men deny the Law of God, they deny the blessings of the Law, the victory which the Law gave us. When God makes it clear that even the ungodly who to any degree obey the Law by their care of the earth, by their stable homes and their avoidance of adultery, will become great in Him, how much greater will be those who, believing in Him, obey His Law? How great their victory shall be!

Let us pray. 

* * *

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, thou hast shown us the way to victory and blessing. Grant that we as individuals and as a nation, walk in this way. Thou seest, O Lord, how all around us they make void thy Law, they despise thy Word, and thine only begotten Son they reject. Grant, O Lord, that we may be used to reestablish the sovereignty of thy Word. Recall our nation and its people to faith in Jesus Christ, and to obedience to thy Law-Word that again we may be a land blessed of thee. Use us, O Lord, to this end. In Jesus' name. Amen.

* * *

Are there any questions now, first of all with respect to our lesson? Yes.

[Audience] What of these current protesters, are they following God’s Law? ^vi

[Dr. Rushdoony] They are pure negation and destruction and therefore there is nothing but a curse for them. 

Yes.

[Audience] Did the evangelicals always have the position that God loves everybody? ^vii

[Dr. Rushdoony] No, they have been moving towards that steadily, you see. It’s been the logic of their position. So that evangelical Protestantism has progressively grown more and more lawless, especially in the last generation or two. Seventy-five, a hundred years ago, there was still some regard for the centrality of the Law in evangelical circles. But with each generation it has receded to the point now where radical antinomianism is taking over. 

Yes.

[Audience] Where will those trajectory end, do you think, Dr. Rushdoony? ^viii

[Dr. Rushdoony] Their next position will be that they will progressively make common cause with other religions, insofar as they are spiritual. The differences between the evangelicals and pagan pietism will diminish. As a result, you already see the tendency to see good in pagan piety. 

Any other questions? 

If there are none I’d like to share a few things with you. I called your attention, a while back, to the article in The Review of the News for July the 8th, I believe. Reverend Robert Coburn and his school, Fairfax Christian School.

The interesting thing is this. I was talking to Bob Thoburn last night by telephone, and he told me that one out every hundred readers or subscribers to The Review of the News, have written to him for information about how to start a Christian school, which indicates something of the direction of things today. They have never had a response to any article in The Review of the News to equal the response to this article. And that I think is very heartening news. 

I mentioned also, sometime ago, this pupil who was subnormal that was in his school, one of four children placed by a prominent official in Washington in this school until they could find a special school. His I.Q. was 67, and when he was tested by psychologists at the end of the school year, which was the fourth grade this class spring, he was at grade, or well above grade in every subject. So, they’re keeping him in the school, he will be in the fifth grade starting this week, and their feeling was, no special school could teach him as much as Fairfax Christian. So it is interesting that that school, which everyone says, “Well, it’s for exceptional children,” is doing so much for a child who is so very subnormal. 

Then another item of interest. I was happy recently to pick up a copy of an old book, almost a hundred years old, that I’d been looking for, for some time. It’s Howard Carroll’s Twelve Americans: Their Lives and Times. It was written almost a hundred years ago, about twelve famous Americans whose lives expand the first half of the century, the last century, to the seventies, approximately, some not quite as long. And it is a beautiful account of life in America in those days. The first of these is about the farmer’s statesman, Horatio Seymour, who was one of the great governors of New York and a candidate for the presidency. And I think the account of his life in the early years of the eighteen hundreds, he was born in 1810 in Central New York, are very interesting:

“The conditions under which his early life was passed were indeed remarkable ones. The people of his native village, like those of every other community then established in Central New York, were poor-constantly engaged in a struggle to gain food and clothing. At the same time, however, they were contented and hopeful. They were inspired by kindly sympathies which sprang from common wants. All intercourse was upon a level. No man envied his neighbor, for nowhere did the glare of wealth put poverty to shame. Coming, as most of them did, from the old and, to a certain extent, cultured settlements of Massachusetts and Connecticut, one of their first cares was to provide schools for their children [there were no state schools, they were all Christian schools or homeschools - RJR]. To this end no effort was spared, and Mr. Seymour relates, as within his own recollection, the fact that some of the men of Pompey put mortgages upon their lands that proper institutions of learning might be furnished for the boys and girls of the settlement. To erect churches they made equal sacrifices, and, when all other means failed, it is a matter of record that, in order to attract a crowd of hardy backwoodsmen to aid in lifting up the framework of one of their places of worship, they announced that when the steeple had been so erected, an adventurous youth, who had more love for the cause than regard for his neck, would stand upon his head on its topmost point. [That’s a new way to get a crowd out to work! - RJR] So, too, when the pews were sold, the deacons placed upon the pulpit stairs a bucket of rum-punch, to make more liberal the spirits of the bidders for seats.

It has, with much truth, been said that those were ‘the days of vital piety, sound Democracy, and pure liquor.’ [That, incidentally, was a common saying about the first half of the last century, that they were days of good religion, Bible piety, sound democracy and pure liquor. - RJR] They were, at least, days in which men of all occupations, classes, and conditions mingled together with the utmost freedom. The village inn was then the chief place of public resort, and in its ample room, warmed by a great fire of blazing logs, farm laborers and lawyers, doctors and shop-keepers, clergymen and publicans, met upon an equal footing, to talk over the affairs of their district, of the State, and the nation. Such discussions were open to every one who cared to take part in them. Men of all parties then heard both sides of questions which agitated the public mind. They learned to temper their prejudices, correct their opinions; and ministers of the Gospel, lawyers, and politicians, knowing more of human nature than do their fellows of to-day, gained greater personal followings, and knew better how to retain the regard of their constituents.” 

If I may pause there, you see, this is what made for the great oratory of those days. If you wonder how a man with only a fourth grade education like Lincoln became the powerful speaker he did, or how his opponent, Steven Douglas, the little giant, was the spellbinder he was, remember they would gather together in the inn and debate and discuss by the hour, and it made for very eloquent speakers. It was a training that doesn’t exist today. 

“His father, Henry Seymour, afterward an honored public servant of the Empire State, was then one of the men of most consequence in the village of Pompey; but at a time when men of all classes were at a moment's notice called upon to protect each other from the attack of some adventurous bear or wolf - as the early settlers of Central New York were more than once obliged to do-exclusiveness was not one of the marks of distinction. Young Seymour was taught, when in his infancy, that no man in this country is born better than another; that the most exalted in the land, if they will take the trouble, can learn many a useful lesson from the humblest. He never in after-life forgot these truths; and to his remembrance of them, as well as to other impressions which he received in the home of his infancy, he may well attribute much of the popularity which, in the years that followed, made him a leader of the American people.” ^ix

Now there’re many such very delightful passages in this book, but the interesting thing then was that there was a basic education, a very slight difference from the richest and the poorest, and more the democracy in those days than now when we’ve made democracy a byword, can exist. 

Are there any other questions or comments before…

Yes.

[Audience] Didn’t they all have a basic agreement back in those days? ^x

[Dr. Rushdoony] That’s the heart of it. Everyone agreed on something. On a basic faith. This is what made them all more equal in ability, you see. That is, the differences were nullified.

Now, we just discussed a little while ago, Fairfax Christian School. Now, consider the democracy that exists there, between a superior child and a child who is a high-grade moron. Because a common faith, a common concern for every child, tends to nullify the differences, and that child, of an I.Q. of 67, who’s sitting with children of 150, doesn’t have the gap between himself and the other children, that you have, say, in a public school. 

And I can cite from other books of the same area, describing the life, say of, Western New York or Central New York, of the day, that the faith was so strong and so intense among everyone in such communities that in one case, where there was someone who was an atheist, they felt the person was insane. An atheist was an insane person. It was just unbelievable to them, and they were actually put away. They felt that such a person should be confined. Now, that’s the kind of unity of faith there was, and therefore there was a community possible. 

Yes.

[Audience] They say that the liquor in those days may have been weaker than in the present day. ^xi

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. Well, first of all, in those days you had a more rural population, the population was predominately rural, this made for a difference. These were men who were farm owners or had little businesses in the villages; they were a more responsible population. 

Now the liquor problem became a problem in the United States when you began to develop large urban cities with increasingly irreligious populations. As a result, the rootlessness of the people that inhabited the cities did lead to problems. Moreover, in many big cities, water was not readily made available for drinking, and this was often on purpose. In some Western towns, or cities rather, like Seattle and San Francisco, a few wealthy people made fountains available by their will; there’s a fountain in San Francisco which was established years and year and years ago, and it dropped the percentage of drunkenness rapidly because water was made available to the sailors when they landed. And so everything was done to make liquor more available and water less available to people who were working in these cities. 

Now the consequence was, also, that these people, these large urban populations, could be more readily controlled by liquor. As a result, your political bosses, through Word War One, were connected with the distilleries and breweries. Election Day, very few people knew how they voted. There was free liquor at every bar. Therefore they went to the bar to get the free liquor before they voted, and then the politicians saw to it they stayed all day there, and other men would run to the poll and vote for them, or they would buy their votes to do this. As a result, the country was becoming controlled increasingly, as far as the big city votes were concerned, by political bosses who were in the pay of the distilleries and the breweries. 

Now, meanwhile, as a part of the pattern of this, most of the factories were having more and more problems because of alcoholism. As a result, prohibition was not brought in because of the WCTU or the church groups that may have been working for it, it was brought in because factory owners in the various cities decided the only way to restore any kind of efficiency was to do this; plus people were concerned about the intense corruption of politics. Now, the first strategy was evangelism. As a result, some of the evangelists of the day, like Billy Sunday were actually financed, heavily, subsidized, by mill owners and factory owners who would put on the evangelistic campaign and bring someone like Billy Sunday, who tended to be a showman, had been a famous ballplayer, and put on a evangelistic campaign in the hopes that it’d straighten out some of their workers, and they wouldn’t have the radical problems they did with alcoholism.

However, after this proved to be insufficient, then they voted in prohibition. Now, one of the most dangerous things that can happen to us is if bars again opened on Election Day, because it will make again possible the kind of political control that existed up to the time of prohibition. This is why many of the politicians who worked for repeal had early worked for prohibition, and they stipulated that on Election Days the bars were to be closed because they were afraid of what would happen. When you study the history of the prohibition movement in California, you find that it was many of the reforming politicians and newspapermen who knew what was going on, who were themselves drinking men who worked for prohibition, so this was the background.

[Audience] Was Prohibition a correct move, then? ^xii

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes, and no. That’s a long problem. Basically, the law was a violation of liberties of an individual, and it tried to replace, by law, what character should do. But the evils have been exaggerated. You had the various gangs ruling the cities before, in some respects in a far more ugly fashion. So while a great deal has been said about the gangs and their activities in the twenties, nothing has been said about the far more violent activities in the teens. And in Wilson’s day the kind of gang warfare you had, and the total ruthlessness, the mass murders, that’s been covered up. So both sides of the story need to be recognized.

Well, our time is up; let’s bow our heads for the benediction. 

* * *

And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always. Amen.

i. Gerrit Verkuyl, trans., The Modern Language Bible: Berkeley Version (Hendrickson Publishers, 1969), Dt 7:10.

ii. G. Van Der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, p. 243.

iii. Gittin, 47a, p. 208; Kiddushin, 38b, p. 188.

iv. The Augsburg Confession. A.D. 1530^, Art. XVII.—Of Christ’s Return to Judgment  Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, with a History and Critical Notes: The Evangelical Protestant Creeds, with Translations, vol. 3 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1882), 18.

v. Friedrick Heer, The Intellectual History of Europe, pp. 239,240.

vi.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

vii.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

viii.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

ix. “1. The Farmer Statesman, Horatio Seymour.” In Twelve Americans: Their Lives and Times. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1883, p. 1-3.

x.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

xi.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

xii.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.