by R.J. Rushdoony
“If God be God, then His every word is of necessity law, because His every word is the authoritative and ultimate word. There is no word, law, power or standard beyond by means of which God and His word can be judged.
(Dr. Cornelius) Van Til makes this clear in the course of his discussion of the righteousness of God:
“With the righteousness of God we signify the self-consistency of the divine Being. God is a law unto himself. He is the absolute self-existent personality and therefore, at the same time, absolute law. God does not have a law, but is law. His self-conscious activity regards with absolute complacency the eternal rightness of relationship between the various aspects of multiplicity that are found with the divine Being. He cannot and does not tolerate any subordination of any one aspect of His Being to any other aspect of His Being. The attributes and the persons of God are all on a par.” (Cornelius Van Til: “An Introduction to Theology”, II, Philadelphia, PA 1947, p. 214)
It is therefore destructive of the Biblical doctrine of God to oppose or exalt one aspect of God over or against another. We cannot oppose grace and law; men may do so, but in God’s being they are in unity and not in subordination to one another. Similarly, in God’s being love and justice are not contraries but equal aspects of Hid being and are an essential unity. To say “God is love” (1Joh 4:8) is scriptural, but it denies Scripture if we mean therefore that in God love is more basic than law, justice, jealousy, wrath, grace, or any other attribute of God’s being. Thus, when Scripture contrasts any of these terms, it either has reference to man’s use of them or to man’s relationship to them under God’s economy.
Van Til illustrates this by reference to 2 Corinthians 3:6:
“who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” The contrast here is not between grace and law, nor a materialistic dispensation versus a spiritual one. “The ‘letter’ as spoken of by Paul, refers not to Scripture as a whole, but refers to the ‘ministration of condemnation’”, that is, to the Pharisaic externalism. Thus, “the contention… that the Bible was never meant to be taken as a book that should be interpreted literally” is invalid (Ibid., p. 136)
The misuse of Scripture condemned by Paul was not a faithful obedience to the literal meaning of Scripture but a reinterpretation of that meaning in terms of man’s word, will and thought. We must, on the contrary,
“make Scripture the standard of our thinking and not our thinking the standard of Scripture” (Ibid., p.210).
It is to the advantage of apostate man to deny or wrongly divide the word of God. If the Bible is reduced to a non-literal meaning and made anything other than the very word of God, the result is a very different kind of God. God then has no sure and certain word because God Himself is an uncertain and unrealized being. Those who pretend to exalt God by declaring Him to be unknowable and hence unnamable are thereby undermining the deity of God. Greek philosophy, for example, assumed the utter unknowablilty of God. As Van Til observes,
“An apostate man has every reason to teach the unnamability of God. If God is unnamable then he cannot name anything in the world. Only if God is unknowable can man think of his own knowledge as autonomous” (Cornelius Van Til: “Christ and the Jews”, Nutely, NY 1968, p. 8).
God can be named, but not by man. For man to name God means that man’s autonomous mind establishes the categories of definition. The definitive and ultimate word is then the word of man. For man to define God would mean that man could then classify God in relationship to himself, and would understand and judge God, as well as to name Him, in terms of man’s infallible word. This is at the heart of the evil of idolatry. Some forms of idolatry seem, superficially examined, to be very noble; some, in fact, show the influence of Biblical thought. At heart, however, idolatry defines God, whether by word, graven image, picture, or philosophical thought, in terms of man’s autonomous mind and man’s defining and creative word.
The people of Israel wanted, in the person of Moses, a definition of God. What was His name ? By this they meant a definition of God in terms of man’s requirements and being. God refused to so name Himself. In terms of man, He is beyond definition, because He is not to be defined by anything external to Himself as a criterion over Himself, but in terms of His own Being. Scripture defines man in terms of the image of God; hence apostate man is fallen man: he has fallen from God’s norm. Of a contemptible sinner, we say “He’s not much of a man”, because man is not defined by his own existence. We cannot name, define or know God in terms of anything external to Himself, and hence we cannot judge God, because God and His word are the criterion of all judgment. We can truly say of a man “He’s not much of a man”, but we can never so speak of God, that He is not much of a God.
As a result, God answered Moses, not as Israel would have wished, but by declaring Himself to be God: that was His name, He Who Is, the self-existent one.
“God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And He said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.” (Exo 3:14-15)
This means, FIRST, than man cannot name or define God: God names Himself, I AM WHO I AM. Where man does any naming, as Adam was required to do in Eden (Gen 2:19-20), it is either as a covenant-keeper, working to understand the world under God and in terms of God’s purpose as a creator, or as a covenant-breaker, seeking to establish the meaning of creation in terms of man’s autonomous and ultimate word (Gen 3:5: “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”).
SECOND, God defines Himself by His self-revelation. The naming, defining, knowing word is thus the word of God. Man’s word, when autonomous in intent, is unable to create reality or impose its own determinative meaning on reality. All things having been made by God, serve and obey His word and purpose.
THIRD, this means that Scripture is the necessary word. God makes Himself knowable by means of His sovereign and infallible word. God’s word is the word of salvation, but it is also the word of knowledge, basic to epistemology [the science that studies the possibility, origin, nature and extent of human knowledge]. It is the word of law, love, wrath, grace, justice, judgment, and more. It is the word which establishes the meaning of life, time, and history.
FORTH, God’s word is the unchanging word. He is “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb 13:8). He declares “For I the LORD do not change” (Mal 3:8). He is “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”. As He was then, He is now and forever. “This is my name forever”. His word is thus the infallible word, because He is the absolute and omnipotent God, whose every word is truth.
FIFTH, God then made clear to Moses that He did not answer to Moses or to Israel: they answered to Him. Hence, Moses had to “go” at God’s command, and Israel had to stand up to Pharaoh in terms of God’s requirement that Israel must serve God, not Pharaoh (Exo 3:16-20). Israel could serve neither Pharaoh nor itself: it must serve the Lord, and if Pharaoh (or Israel) stood in God’s way, He would stretch out His hand and smite him. This is no less true today. The Scripture is not a problem to be resolved by man, nor a mere subject for research and speculation. It is God’s infallible command word: we either obey it or are condemned by it.”
From: Rousas John Rushdoony: “Systematic Theology” Volume I. Vallecito, CA 1994, p. 49-52
Bible quotes, unlike in the original, from the ESV (not the KJV)
