5. Sabbath and Law (Remastered)

The Sabbath and Law

R.J. Rushdoony

Our Scripture this morning is Hebrews 3:14 through 4:11 and our subject, ‘The Sabbath and Law.’ We conclude our studies this morning in the Sabbath law and begin next week our study of the fifth commandment. Hebrews 3:14 through 4:11

“For we are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence stedfast unto the end; While it is said, To day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts, as in the provocation. For some, when they had heard, did provoke: howbeit not all that came out of Egypt by Moses. But with whom was he grieved forty years? was it not with them that had sinned, whose carcases fell in the wilderness? And to whom sware he that they should not enter into his rest, but to them that believed not? So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief.

Let us therefore fear, lest, a promise being left us of entering into his rest, any of you should seem to come short of it. For unto us was the gospel preached, as well as unto them: but the word preached did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it. For we which have believed do enter into rest, as he said, As I have sworn in my wrath, if they shall enter into my rest: although the works were finished from the foundation of the world. For he spake in a certain place of the seventh day on this wise, And God did rest the seventh day from all his works. And in this placeagain, If they shall enter into my rest. Seeing therefore it remaineth that some must enter therein, and they to whom it was first preached entered not in because of unbelief: Again, he limiteth a certain day, saying in David, To day, after so long a time; as it is said, To day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts. For if Jesus [or here ‘Joshua,’ because Jesus and Joshua are the same names - RJR] had given them rest, then would he not afterward have spoken of another day. There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God. For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his. Let us labour therefore to enter into that rest, lest any man fall after the same example of unbelief.”

In these words, St. Paul sums up some central aspects of the meaning of the doctrine of the Sabbath. He declares that at the beginning God, having created Heaven and earth, rested on the seventh day, that seventh day had no evening to it. St. Augustine spoke of the Sabbath of God as the goal of history, as: “…be the great Sabbath which has no evening…” i That Sabbath, God’s rest, God’s victory, God’s triumph, is the goal of history. And God separated, from the beginning, certain men unto Himself to enter into that rest. Man had departed from that rest in the fall. The purpose of history, therefore, was to recall man, to re-establish man in God’s rest, in God’s victory. The people then were separated unto Himself for that purpose.

They were called out of Egypt, out of slavery, out of bondage, to be made partakers of that rest. But because they did not believe, many of them died in the wilderness in their unbelief, so we see that they could not enter in because of their unbelief. Moreover, those who did enter in, did not enter into the fullness of rest. In other words, the Sabbath was not fulfilled in the promise land although it was a partial fulfillment. For if Jesus, because Jesus and Joshua are the same name, ‘Jesus’ is the translation of it through the Greek, Joshua through the Hebrew. If Joshua had been able to give them true and full rest by their entrance into the Promised Land, then would he not afterword have spoken of another day “There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God.” The fullness, the fulfillment, is yet to come.

Now this interpretation of the Sabbath is not merely that of St. Paul, it is the interpretation of the whole Scripture. It is the interpretation that also the Old Testament scribes and the Rabbis fully knew. They declared that the Sabbath was a type of God’s victory in time and of the world to come. That in the Sabbath the idea of creation is realized in redemption in a redeemed society, and finally in all its fullness in the creation. This has been the interpretation throughout the ages. As one modern scholar has summed up the meaning of the Sabbath:

“Man’s sabbath-rest begins when he enters into God’s rest (Gen. 2:2); as that was the goal of the creative work, so to the people of God this rest is the goal of their life of ‘works.’” ii

In terms of this, therefore, the meaning of the Sabbath as St. Paul declares it and all of Scripture witness to it, we must note first of all that the Sabbath has always had reference to the future. As we pointed out last week, its pattern is in the past, the Sabbath of creation. It is a present rest based on past events with a future reference and fulfillment. But we must, having said all this, that the future is always the keynote to the Sabbath. The fact that we observe the Sabbath today means that we are a people whose sights are geared to the future. We believe in victory, we believe that God’s law-order shall prevail, we believe that history is geared to triumph, that the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ; so that those who observe the Sabbath are the people who are geared to the future.

Even the subversives know this. A century ago, when alien subversive forces began to work in this country, they realized that the key to capturing the United States was to capture the churches, the people of the Sabbath. And so, they began then their infiltration of the churches, beginning with the seminaries, an infiltration which has reached its triumph today. They did this because they recognized that here there was a land and a people geared to the future, a Biblically-oriented future and it could not be weaned away from this unless they captured the Sabbath and geared it to their purposes. The Biblical Sabbath, thus, is future oriented in terms of God and His plan.

Second, as we saw a few weeks ago, the law of the Sabbath requires providence, that is a provident people, a people that thinks of tomorrow, that plans for it, a thrifty people. The Biblical law which was a part of the Sabbath required short-term debts only, six years as the maximum period for debt. Each century had sixteen full years of Sabbath, counting the two Jubilee years. And the man had to be able to produce wealth so that he could live without an income during those Sabbath years. This created a society totally different from the kind of society we have now. Our society today is debt-oriented. We may talk about large-scale planning, but all of the planning involves debt. And so it is that a very sizable percentage of the national budget is always given, not to the future, but to the past. We burn up the future and we have to pay those past debts, and any examination of the national budget indicates that in spite of all the large-scale talk about planning the future, the budget is geared to paying past debts. But the law of the Sabbath requires providence. And instead of a consumption-oriented societies we have today that is continually burning up all that the people have produced, burning up inherited wealth, burning up resources, Biblical society was production-centered and rest-conscious. Now, these are aspects that make a world of difference. The Sabbath made society geared to the future, geared to production, geared to rest. This makes an enormous difference in any culture

Third, the law of the Sabbath created a society best oriented to give rest. A simple illustration will suffice. About a century and a half ago, the railroads came into being. Now, a good deal of our contemporary histories, as they deal with the rise of industrialism, are written by people who are out to make a case against capitalism. And as they deal with the mills, for example, in England, they falsify the picture. But one point we must give them credit, the railroads do present an ugly picture. For some reason or other railroading from the beginning was in the hands of men who were thoroughly reprobate. An examination of the American railroad history gives us an ugly picture of manipulation of the government by these huge railroad tycoons; their tremendous wealth, the savagery with which they dealt with people. California, of course, has a long history of this kind of thing with regard to the Central Valley and what the railroads did as they defrauded people of land, sold to them under uncertain titles.

Thus it was that the railroads, from the beginning, began to set a working day that was twelve hours and seven days a week without any days off from one end of the year to the other. These are the ugly facts of railroading in America. And this continued until not too many years ago, within the lifetime of some of us. And yet, here’s the interesting thing. These old railroaders here in the United States, who worked twelve hours a day seven days a week 365 days a year, had a greater capacity for rest then men today on a forty-hour week. And when we look back at some of the life stories of some of the very simple railroaders, working men, and we find that they could come home and indulge in activities and keep up an active life in a way that today men cannot do, it causes us to marvel. They obviously had a capacity for rest. What was the answer? Even though they were working under a reprobate system, they still lived, and was surrounded by, a society that was Sabbath-oriented. Fifty years and a hundred years ago and forty-five years ago when these conditions were still true of railroaders all around them, the rest of America was still Sabbath-conscious, it was still a society that had a capacity for rest. And so even these men, who worked twelve hours a day, had the ability to rest that is lacking today when stress-induced diseases; ulcers, heart conditions, and the like are skyrocketing, and among men who work short hours. In other words, a Sabbath-oriented society was able to convey something even to those who were oppressed. The older society had enough Christianity to give it order, rest, and law. And when a man lives in an ordered society, in a law-abiding society, he can work long hours and still have rest.

A fourth aspect of the Sabbath is this; its relationship to law. All law has reference to the future. When we began our studies in Biblical Law, we pointed out that all law is a plan for the future. When you pass a law, you are passing a plan, you are saying you are going to legislate out of existence a certain class of people; murderers, thieves and the like. You are going to try and suppress a particular form of social activity as illicit, and you are going to try and wipe out a certain class of people as socially undesirable. This is the whole function of law. Law is a plan for the future, and the Sabbath law is a plan for the world’s tomorrow, a capsule plan.

What does the Sabbath law tell us? It tells us very plainly, and the law spells it out, that it is to be the abolition of evil or the suppression thereof. But man is to have rest in society, every man in his own house and under his own tree, at peace because evil has been suppressed, put down, kept under; so that a man can walk without fear in security because God’s law-order prevails. 

It is to be also, as the law stated it, and we read it on an earlier morning, a plan for the suppression of poverty. The Sabbath laws requires as we have seen earlier, providence. And God spells out the fact that if people walk in terms of my law and keep my Sabbath, there shall be no poor among you. And so, the Sabbath law declares that God’s plan for the future, through His Law, is the abolition or suppression of evil, and the abolition of poverty and also of debt. It is, moreover, to provide man, as we have seen, with rest, and finally with a re-creation of the whole creation. The Sabbath law, therefore, in capsule form, is a declaration of the direction of the whole law. It declares what the nature of that future is toward which Biblical faith is working, and for which Biblical Law has been given.

Thus, while Colossians two verses sixteen and seventeen declares that the old formalisms of the Hebrew Sabbath are ended, the essence of the law is in force, and is basic to the whole of Biblical thinking.

Now, as we turn away from the Biblical Sabbath to non-Christian thinking, we find that non-Christian thinking, too, tries to gear itself to the future. But when non-Christian thinking tries to deal with the future it carries a double-penalty. First of all, it is past-bound, past-bound. Perhaps nothing states this more clearly than the Civil Rights revolution. The Civil Rights revolution supposedly gives us a program for the future of our society. But listen sometime to these civil right revolutionists. Apart from a plan to destroy what do they offer? All they talk about, basically, is what they have suffered in the past. Their basic thrust is with real or imagined evils in the past. I read a number of the books written by the civil right agitators. And they are so past bound that what they may have suffered, real or imagined, last year and ten years ago, and twenty years ago, is not enough. They dredge up everything that they imagine their ancestors have suffered for the past few hundred years. And for some of them this is not enough. They dig into the Bible and go back ages to pre-Christian times to the Mosaic law and try to find fancied evils against the black there.

They’re past-bound, all they can think about is the past. And having this past-bound characteristic, they turn on the present with hatred, and their only plan is to destroy it. They have no real plan for the future except to level, and then supposedly paradise will appear. This is true also for many labor men. I cited earlier the twelve-hour days of the railroaders. Now, you can talk to some union men who have had only good wages and good hours all their lives and yet they will dredge up things like this that have no relationship to the present scene. Certainly it was terrible that the railroaders worked that way, but certainly it is terrible the way railroaders work now, is it not? The vast amount of featherbedding, the fact that some of them can put into two or three hours and collect a day’s wages. Or the bricklayers who can, when they work normally, put up a couple of thousand bricks without trouble in an eight-hour day but in some areas have limited by law the amount of bricks they can lay to six hundred so they don’t have to carry a lunch with them when they go to work. If they lay more than that, it’s overtime. And yet, to talk to any labor organizer, all you get is the story of ancient evils, they are past-bound. Therefore, they cannot cope realistically with the present. 

When I was among the American Indians for eight and half years, this was the same thing you found among Indian agitators. All they could think about was all the evils they had suffered at the hands of the white man, how once they owned the whole land and now they only had a reservation and so on and so forth. And I’ve seen them time and again, with their eyes flashing, go on by the hour in this vein. I recall once when one of our Christian Indians spoke up and said, “I remember that rich grandfather of yours who owned all of America. He ran around all winter shivering with nothing but a loincloth on, and very glad if he caught a rabbit to feed himself and the whole family.” But it didn’t make any difference, that Indian who was ranting about the past was standing there in good warm clothing and he had a car parked at the curb. But he couldn’t live in the present because he was past bound. And this is the way of the non-Christian, he talks about planning for the future, but he is so past bound that as he faces the present and the future, his program is only destruction.

Second, as the non-Christian faces the future, his thinking is utopia. He builds a dream world, he cannot face reality. Lewis Mumford, who cannot be accused of being either a Christian or a conservative, in his book The Story of Utopias declares: 

“Each utopia is a closed society for the prevention of human growth.” iii

And he goes on to say that every plan and program man has devised, the utopian program for tomorrow, reduces man to an economic animal and feeds man in terms of external only, it forgets that he has a soul, a spirit. It makes him a cog in some kind of machine which is your future utopia. And as a result, the non-Christian, because his thinking about the future is utopian, when he is able to try to bring his future about, only creates chaos and destruction. He tries to force man into an impossible mold, and the result is catastrophe.

But for us there remaineth therefore a rest, a Sabbath for to the people of God. God’s law provides a program, a plan for the future, in terms of which today we can rest, knowing that he shall bring it to pass. That the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and there shall be, at the end of time, a new creation.

Let us pray.

* * *

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee for the glory of thy Word, and we thank thee that today we can rest in thy Sabbath, in thy plan, knowing that we have an assured future in Jesus Christ, a glorious rest, a glorious law-order. We thank thee, our Father, that thou hast called us to be citizens of our kingdom, and we pray that day by day we may move in this glorious certainty and in victorious faith. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

* * *

Any questions now, first of all with respect to our lesson. Yes?

[Audience member] I’ve heard is said that John Calvin never took a day off in his life. iv

[Rushdoony] I’ve never seen that statement that John Calvin never took a day off in his life, so I couldn’t comment on it. All I could say is that certainly on the Sabbath he was always busy in Geneva lecturing and preaching, and that during the week he was regularly lecturing to vast numbers of persons; students, scholars who came from all over. But John Calvin did have the capacity to rest, and I’m sure that even with all his activity each Sunday, it was still a day for Him, because he knew how to rest in the Lord. 

Yes?

[Audience member] Should I prepare food before the Sabbath in order to best rest on the Sabbath? v

[Rushdoony] Well, the answer is one which you can yourself solve best, because if you want to prepare the food the day before and rest, very well. Well, in the Old Testament the food was prepared the day before, and it was made completely a day of rest. That strict formalism did go out in the New Testament, but it was not ruled out of court, that is, it is still certainly a valid thing to do. So if you want to rest, you can prepare the food the day before. But the real rest of a woman is to be under the authority of a man who provides her with security, with a future, with godly authority. Even as the true rest of a man is to be in Christ and to be fulfilling his calling in terms of the Lord.

[Audience member] Is the seventh year Sabbath still in force? It doesn’t seem very practical in today’s world. vi

[Rushdoony] Yes, we are no longer geared to having a Sabbath year regularly every seventh year, but the principle still remains valid. The land needs a rest, we are mining the soil without replenishing it. And therefore, a Sabbath to the land, a rest to the land, is necessary. Now, in some parts of our country they had learned the principle of fallowing the land, sometimes it’s just for a season or two seasons of the year. In some places, by rotation, they allow it to lie fallow a year, and this has proven to be an excellent plan for those who have done it. But the endless use of the soil without fallowing, without a Sabbath, is destructive of the soil. 

I remarked a few weeks ago that the Sahara was once rich cattle and farmland and orchard country and portions of it, as late as the days of the Carthaginian Empire, were still very rich and fertile. The rainfall was about that of many portions of the Midwest, but through continuous use and exploitation it was destroyed and reverted to bare rock in some areas, and drifting sand in other areas. They stripped the hills and the mountains of trees, they over grazed, they destroyed the soil. 

There are portions now of France where the same thing has happened, and it’s an interesting reason why. In the old days, the monarchy kept certain areas of France as forest reserves, they made it also a hunting reserve for themselves. But they kept it as a reserve, because they knew the value of keeping such an area as a reserve. And as a result, those areas were uncut, they were rich in timber, rich in brush and growth, wild animals, and there was a continual seepage out of them of ground waters to the valleys and areas below as well as the rainwater carrying down a tremendous amount of decaying matter which restored the soil in the area below. 

Well, the French Revolution was so hostile to everything the Monarchy did, that it embarked on a systematic program of destruction. We don’t realize how radical it was. The greatest composer of the French in the pre-revolutionary period is now unknown except for two short pieces that have survived. And the forests were cut down because they represented royal law. So that France has been progressively seeing, in many areas, a rapid deterioration of the soil and some areas are totally unproductive. Now, this of course happened in Italy, in south Italy, it has never recovered, and it’s an area now that is ridden with disease and infection, malaria and the like, where the soil is depleted, and this is true of Sicily also, and the people have gone downhill. And yet once the richest, most productive part of Italy was Sicily and the kingdom of the two Naples. This was the area that the Byzantines and the Greeks earlier had all wanted to possess because of its fabulous wealth, the richness of the soil. But it’s all been depleted because it’s been mined steadily.

And we’re seeing this here in our country now. I’ve called attention to this fact before and it’s worth stating again. Not too many years ago, when I was a boy in the Central Valley, the idea of sprays was unknown and unnecessary. Because the ground was still so rich, it produced, and the fruit, the trees were healthy, and they were disease-resistant. Today, the peaches and other fruits are sprayed seven times with deadly Forathian so that the field has to be posted for…  it’s twenty-four or forty-eight hours, if a bird flies over it during that time, it drops dead. If the farmer when spraying uses his bare hands, touch the empty can of Forathian, he dies. Seven times, on the grapes twice, and every year or two it gets worse. Why? Because the soil has been mined, it needs a Sabbath. The principle is a very valid one. Some soil scientists have pointed out the importance of it. But ‘fallowing,’ as it is called now days, is only practiced in limited areas in the country.

Yes?

[Audience member] Comment of the restoration on old, sound, practices in France. 

[Rushdoony] That’s true, some of the French peasants have begun to re-establish this. In many areas, however, the damage has not been undone. There has been a program towards that end. Now, one country that has suffered very badly in this area is Mexico. In Mexico, you remember in the twenties there was expropriation of land. It was taken from the wealthy landowners and given to the peon. This was a big noble gesture, but what has happened? The total agricultural production of Mexico has been dropping steadily because the peons have cut down all trees for firewood. They have steadily overworked the soil, so Mexico is facing an increasing population and a decreasing productive ability and a decreasing water supply. And of course, Mexico City is an excellent example of what’s happening when the water table drops, because the very ground is beginning to sink there. 

[Audience member] China, likewise, has experienced great destruction of this kind. vii

[Rushdoony] That’s very true; China is an example of this kind of massive destruction. And China’s population in the twentieth century has increased, and its productive ability has suffered because of its abuse of the soil. 

The one area in the world that has been relatively free of this has been Japan. The Japanese have been excellent in their use of the soil, but since World War II, they too have been following some modern practices. 

Well, our time is just…yes, one more question before I share a couple things with you 

[Audience member] When does the child start to be responsible for their actions? viii

[Rushdoony] Well, the child is always responsible. A very small baby has enough intelligence... Well, there is no difference in the intelligence of a one day old baby in the same child at ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred. The only difference is experience gives that intelligence more to work with. The intelligence is there, and any parent knows what a child can do to work the parent. A baby in a highchair that can’t walk yet can play games with the parents in dropping a spoon four or five times before you catch on, as you automatically pick it up, but a game is being played with you. The child is responsible very early, and the child must be taught, because the child is by nature a sinner. The child is thinking primarily of itself, it is egocentric. So, the child does need training. 

Well, there are a couple of things here that I encountered this week that I think are of interest. This is from a book published fairly early, or towards the middle of World War II. Richard E. Lauterbach, These are the Russians and I thought the concluding paragraph was interesting because it was simply a quotation from Wendell Willkie which, as the author makes clear, summed up the American attitude. This will explain why our government under any administration has been the way it has been. This is what Willkie said:

“I tell you that if a man is not, deep in his belly, in favor of closest possible relations with Britain and Russia, then it does not matter what else he is. Such a man will be anti-Labor, even if he praises labor twenty-four hours a day. He will be anti-Labor because he will be working for a constricted America, a less prosperous America. For the very same reason the very same man will also be anti-business, in the deepest sense, even though he may consider himself a servant of business, even though he falls on his knees before business. He will be anti-business because he will be working for a smaller America, a less important America. This is the touchstone to a man’s entire position in politics today. Only occasionally does it happen that one issue arises which is so controlling that every other issue is subsidiary to it, and this is it. But it is not enough for a man merely to repeat the right words about world collaboration. He has to be on fire with it. He has to feel, in his belly, that this is the door which will open outward to an expansion of American activity and prosperity. You cannot be wrong on this issue and right on any other.” ix

Then finally just a few sentences from the Indicator Digest from October 22, 1968. It’s a long article but the gist of it is this, Congressman James A. McClure, Republican, of Idaho issued a release October 9 1968 to the press, which never got to the press. And it was this. 

“Representative James A. McClure today accused the treasury department today of manipulating the silver market, and raised the possibility of a congressional investigation of the government silver program. The department still thinks it can control the price of gold by depressing the price of silver. Private citizens would be jailed for doing the same thing. Unless silver policy is sharply reversed it may be necessary for Congress to use its investigative powers to bring the whole sorry view into public view, McClure stated.”

But as Indicator Digest points out that this which should have hit the front pages, and certainly every financial page, never got into the press. The Wall Street Journal did not carry it. Then, on Friday October the eleventh there was another release by McClure which stated that because of the election, it was apparent that Congress was not going to investigate. Again this did not get into the papers. 

Then another very important item it points out did not get into the papers. Sunshine Mining, the nation’s largest silver producer, announced it would stockpile its silver concentrates at the American smelting refinery, withholding all newly-mined silver from the market until hire prices are obtainable. And they comment:

“We have not seen any mention of this on the Dow Jones newswires as yet.” 

“At the same time director Harry Magnuson of Hecla told his hometown newspaper, the longer the silver price is artificially depressed, and the more the market is manipulated, the more violent the price rise will be when the market is ultimately freed of all treasury influence.”

This is the reality of the scene, and the sad fact is people move too often on in terms of news rather than in principle. And Franz Pic, the world’s greatest financial expert, said a while back during another crisis when people were concerned as to what was going to happen, he said, “Pay no attention to the orchestrated press, act on your principles and stand on your principles,” and that certainly is true. But in the last week, the sacks of silver climbs have fluctuated widely, they dropped and rose and dropped day after day, sometimes twenty, thirty dollars variation from day to day, because so many little people, in terms of the news, were selling. But the interesting part is every time it dropped because the little people were selling, very large-scale buyers were moving in to pick them up. Which is tragic, it should have been the other way around. 

Well, with that we are adjourned.

i. Augustine of Hippo, “The City of God,” in St. Augustin’s City of God and Christian Doctrine, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. Marcus Dods, vol. 2, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1887), 511.

ii. W. F. Moulton, “Hebrews,” in Ellicott, VIII, 297.

iii. Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias (New York: The Viking Press, 1922, 1963), p. 4.

iv. Question added/modified for the sake of clarity and brevity.

v. Question added/modified for the sake of clarity and brevity.

vi. Question added/modified for the sake of clarity and brevity.

vii. Question added/modified for the sake of clarity and brevity.

viii. Question added/modified for the sake of clarity and brevity.

ix. Richard E. Lauterbach. These Are the Russians. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1944, p 359.