Professor: Rushdoony Dr. R.J.R.

Subject: Systematic Theology

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 18 of 19

Track: #18

Year:

Dictation Name: 18 The Power to Kill

[Rushdoony] Let us worship God. Serve the Lord with gladness, come before His presence with singing, enter into His gates with Thanksgiving and into His courts with praise. Be thankful unto Him and bless His name, for the Lord is good, His mercy is everlasting and His truth endureth to all generations. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God unto whom all honor and glory belongeth we come into Thy presence rejoicing in Thy mercies past, present, and future. We thank Thee that we live and move and have our being in Thee and that Thou art our God, and Thou who hast given Thine only begotten Son to die for us will do yet more and care for us. Give us grace therefore so to walk day by day that in confidence in Thy mercies we may ever be faithful, ever zealous in Thy service, ever joyful in Thy care. Bless us to this end, in Jesus name amen.

Our scripture is in Deuteronomy the thirty-second chapter, the twenty-ninth verse; our subject The Power to Kill. Deuteronomy 32:39.

“39 See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god with me: I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal: neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand.”

This statement is one which we encounter in several forms in scripture. In Isaiah 45:18 God declares there is no God with me, I am the Lord and there is none else. Again in the 21st verse of the same chapter “there is no God else beside me, a just God and a Savior. There is none beside me.” God declares emphatically that He only is God; that the issues of life and death are ultimately and essentially in His hands. Now this is a necessary emphasis because original sin is mans desire to be His own God, to say “my will be done, not God’s.” Humanism of course is the logical development of this presupposition. The pagan as well as the modern state represent the institutionalization of mans desire to be His own God. Man cannot create life, he has dreamed about this more than once and today of course we have regularly announcements of the scientists have taken a major step towards the creation of life. And all these claims are exaggerations and are fallacious. 

Man has not been able to create life. He dreams of it because it is his way of playing God. But what he can do is the other half of the equation, to kill, and so he plays God by killing. The more humanistic a state the more murderous it is. From the French Revolution on the state has become an agency of mass murder. What George Orwell in 1984 described was the reality of the nature of the modern state, he simply carried it to its logical world-wide implications. In 1984 the vision is ultimately of a boot stamping on a human face forever. Man playing God in the only way he can do it, murderously. We are told by more than a few people who have escaped from the Soviet Union of the very great delight of torturers in torturing, in playing God. In one account after another we have horrifying illustrations of this exercise of power.

As the Earl of Gloucester says in King Lear “as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport” now this is fallen man’s common idea of divine power. God uses power to enjoy its exercise over helpless creatures. Isabella in Measure for Measure said of man’s dream of power “could great men thunder as Jove himself does, Jove would never be quiet. For every pelting petty officer would use his heaven for thunder. Nothing but thunder,