Exodus: Unity of Law and Grace

Probation

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: Probation

Genre: Lessons with Q & A

Track: 050

Dictation Name: RR171AA50

Location/Venue:

Year: Early 70’s

Let us worship God. This is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us. Having these promises, let us draw near to the throne of grace with true hearts in full assurance of faith. My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, oh Lord in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee and will look up. Let us pray.

Oh Lord, our God, we rejoice in all thy mercies and the showers of blessing which thou dost pour out upon us. We thank thee, our Father, that day after day we live, move and have our being in thy care. That underneath all the experiences of life art thine everlasting arms. Teach us, Lord, to take hands off our lives, to commit them into thy keeping, to know that thy love encompasses all things, and thy mercy and grace are unfailing. Our God, we thank thee. In Christ’s name, amen.

Our scripture this morning is Exodus 16:1-8, our subject: Probation. Exodus 16:1-8. “And they took their journey from Elim, and all the congregation of the children of Israel came unto the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after their departing out of the land of Egypt. And the whole congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness: And the children of Israel said unto them, Would to God we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger. Then said the LORD unto Moses, Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a certain rate every day, that I may prove them, whether they will walk in my law, or no. And it shall come to pass, that on the sixth day they shall prepare that which they bring in; and it shall be twice as much as they gather daily. And Moses and Aaron said unto all the children of Israel, At even, then ye shall know that the LORD hath brought you out from the land of Egypt: And in the morning, then ye shall see the glory of the LORD; for that he heareth your murmurings against the LORD: and what are we, that ye murmur against us? And Moses said, This shall be, when the LORD shall give you in the evening flesh to eat, and in the morning bread to the full; for that the LORD heareth your murmurings which ye murmur against him: and what are we? your murmurings are not against us, but against the LORD.”

We come now to another session of whining and complaining by the chosen people. A few days previously, they had been singing triumphantly at the seashore. Their attitude towards salvation was one which is with us still. Some years ago, a woman of some note told me that the idea that Christians would have to go through the tribulation was ungodly. And she could never believe it, and she thought it was very, very wrong of me ever to teach it. She had given up, she said, dancing which she had loved greatly, and smoking and drinking, for the Lord, and He certainly was not going to ask her to go through the tribulation. I reminded her that many people, such as the Armenians, had gone through grim tribulations, and why should she be exempt? I should add that she and her husband then went to another church.

Well, the supposition then and now that salvation must mean a deliverance into a trouble-free life is a great evil. In reality, salvation is into competence to cope with the troubles we encounter in this world. In fact, our faith often makes us a target of hostility, because friendship with God brings on enmity with the world. Israel was, again, murmuring or grumbling against God. They said, “We would have done better to have died in Egypt,” implying that it would have been better for them to die in the plagues with the Egyptians rather than to be put through the hardships of the wilderness journey. That’s a common complaint. People resent the fact that God will put them through problems, and they say, “Why doesn’t He take me instead?” as though they were being super-holy with such nonsense. In Egypt they said, “We did eat bread to the full.”

They may have wished that God had handed Egypt over to them, let them stay there. They wanted Egypt, perhaps, with all its assets, rather than being compelled to go to Canaan and develop their own resources. God, however, was requiring His people to develop, first of all, the asset of trusting in Him, and then they would be prepared to gain the material assets He would give them.

They left Egypt with much livestock. After the early days, much of this was probably slaughtered for food, leaving only the necessary breeding stock. Although they had seen God’s miracles as few have in all of history, the Israelites were still unable to walk by faith. The people disguised their rebellion against God by grumbling against Moses and Aaron. That’s a very convenient subterfuge. You can blame your wife or your husband for your problems, when really you’re complaining against God. Their leaders, they said, Moses and Aaron were somehow responsible. The text does not tell us that there was a food shortage or a famine situation. The likelihood is that Israel faced a dwindling food supply, and grumbled in advance of any real crisis.

God promised to rain bread or food on the people. There was a special gift of quail in the evening and, on one occasion and then again years later on another, and then the manna, six days a week. God’s purpose, He says in verse 4, is “that I may prove them,” or “that I may test them.” He tests them, He says, to see “whether they will walk in my law or no.” This brings us to a very important point. God tests men in both adversity and prosperity. Both are tests of faith and character. Some people can take adversity who cannot take prosperity, but all of life is a continual testing, and men can fail the test both in good times and bad. Had this account represented a Hebrew perspective rather than God’s, we would not see so unflattering an account of Israel throughout the Old Testament. God’s account, through his servants, the prophets, is unflattering of all men. No people’s history has ever been written more bluntly and realistically than Israel’s, in the Bible.

We have, in first, in verse 5, the first requirement of Sabbath observance. The manna would be provided for six days with enough on the sixth day to care for the seventh. The meaning of the Sabbath is rest in the Lord, cessation from work, and the outward aspect of an inner trust. But the Sabbath rest means also that we do not believe that our work and planning determines the future but rather that God does. The Sabbath is an affirmation of God’s providential care and predestination. We affirm by taking our hands off our work, hands off any planning, that it is God’s purposes that are determinative in our lives and in the world.

In verse 7, we are told that they would be provided with enough on the sixth day to care for the seventh, and in verse 7 we are told that Moses and Aaron told the people in the morning, “Ye shall see the glory of the Lord.” God is somehow going to make Himself visible to you. Keil and Delitzsch said of this statement, and I quote, “Bearing in mind the parallelism of the causes, we obtain this meaning that in the evening and in the morning, the Israelites would perceive the glory of the Lord who brought them out of Egypt. Seeing is synonymous with knowing. Seeing the glory of Jehovah did not consist in the sight of the glory of the Lord which appeared in the clouds, but in their perception or experience of that glory and the miraculous gift of flesh and bread.” In other words, we see the glory of the Lord in what He does for us. In His care. And ask for more is wrong.

Many years later, Moses referred to this incident in calling God’s people to faith and obedience and summoning them to be faithful. He said in Deuteronomy 8:1-3, “All the commandments which I command thee this day shall ye observe to do, that ye may live, and multiply, and go in and possess the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers. And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no. And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live.”

This is the text, of course, which our Lord quotes in the temptation of the wilderness, His own time of testing. “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” The church father Tertullian referred to our Lord’s statement as his answer, our Lord’s answer to Israel. They had grumbled against God, but Christ returned the reproach to Israel and Tertullian’s words, I quote, “Whatsofar as I, with my poor powers understand, the Lord figuratively retorted upon Israel the reproach they had cast on the Lord by their murmuring for bread.” Psalm 106:15 has a very telling reference to Israel’s grumbling on another occasion, and he God gave them their request but sent leanness into their soul.” Chadwick observed of God’s ways, and I quote, “Perhaps we are allowed to be comfortable because we are unfit to be heroic.”

Men tend to forget what George Rollinson observed in the nineteenth century, and I quote, “Human life is a probation. God proves and tries those most whom He takes to Himself for His peculiar people, and the trial is often by means of positive precepts, which are especially calculated to test the presence or absence of a spirit of humble and unquestioning obedience. Men are very apt to prefer their own inventions to the simple rule of following at once the letter and the spirit of God’s commandments.”

But most men resent the idea of probation, of testing. They insist on demanding that life on earth be a heaven without any testing. Once they’re saved, they want heaven from there on out. The essence of modern politics is the insistence on a heaven on earth as man’s entitlement without any necessary probation or work, and it is this belief which so readily produces hell on earth.

Thus, in this episode, God gives them, He says, manna. Now you’re not going to have to worry about your problem of food, it’s going to be taken care of from now on until you enter the Promised Land. Well, that was almost forty years. Forty years with no problem as far as food was concerned, but it did not make them grateful. They took it for granted. As someone who is not a Christian once observed, If spring happened once in a decade, or once in a hundred years, it would be regarded as the most marvelous event in the life of man. But because it happens annually, after awhile we become very casual about the blessings of the weather.

Well, all of life is a testing, and this is what comes out of this text, so we are continually on trial, both in prosperity and in adversity, because our life here is a brief span, a century at the most, and usually much less. But eternity awaits us, and in eternity there is a community, an eternal community. Of the nature of it we do not know, other than there is no sin there, neither tears, nor crying. There is work there but without the curse. There is an eternal state of man’s freedom under God, and for that, all our life is a testing. In fact, although Christians do not like to think of it as such, when they are converted, they are taken into as it were a boot camp, a military training camp, a life of preparation for eternity. They have been drafted, and naturally, God will train them since He has an eternal purpose for them. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, make us mindful day by day as we face the problems, the adversities and the blessings of life, that these things have a purpose in testing us, in training us for that purpose that hast ordained for us throughout all eternity. Keep us from grumbling, from whining and complaining about our problems. Grant that we see them as opportunities for growth in service, for growth in knowledge and understanding. We thank thee that thou hast called us, that we are in training. Be merciful unto us in our waywardness. Bless us as we serve thee faithfully and make us ever stronger for thy purpose. In Christ’s name, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] Seems the people of Israel wanted the Garden of Eden back without having to work for it.

[Rushdoony] What was that?

[Audience] It seems as though the people of Israel wanted the Garden of Eden back without having to work for it.

[Rushdoony] Exactly. Exactly. They wanted Egypt, they longed for Egypt throughout the wilderness journey but without the responsibilities of life in Egypt. They wanted to enter into the Promised Land immediately without any problems, and their mentality, of course, has been reflected throughout the history of Israel and the history of the church over and over again. People want to the fruit without the roots, without the work, without the labor that goes into producing them, and I think that mentality especially marks our age. I never weary of citing the woman at Berkeley, at the University of California campus, the young student, female student, who when a reporter who was not liberal, talked to them about their triple revolution which said that work was now unnecessary and it was a kind of deep, dark conspiracy that they were trained for work, and the reporter, although a liberal, had common sense, and said, “A work-free world? Well, what about food?” meaning the production of food, and she looked at him haughtily and scornfully as though he were retarded, and she said, “Food is.” That’s the Garden of Eden mentality that sinful man has. Yes?

[Audience] This seems to me the essence of socialism. If you can’t get it from God, then you can steal it from your fellow man.

[Rushdoony] Yes, and the curious fact, it’s hard to believe that it’s true but Lenin and the other Bolsheviks had no idea of how anything was to be produced. They thought all they had to do was seize the wealth. In fact, in one of the studies of the early days, I encountered a statement by one of the Bolsheviks who, when they had seized a production unit, a major manufacturing unit, they broke open into the safe and were shocked. Nothing but papers. They had expected gold to be piled up there and in the various rooms, because these exploiters had obviously great wealth. They had no comprehension of how to produce, and so immediately you had the famine. They had no idea of what they were going to do to create an ongoing culture. Everything was supposed to take place automatically when you got rid of the exploiters, and the very idea of a soviet structure to society was an ad hoc thing borrowed at the last moment from an America socialist, Daniel De Leon.

They had no plan, except somehow the Garden of Eden would arrive, a humanistic garden, the moment they took over, and ironically, that same expectation you find in one revolution after another since then, and they produce poverty and hunger, and they will not admit it. You’re seeing this currently in Ethiopia. They cannot understand why they have poverty, why they have famine. And of course, the economy of the Soviet Union has been in a state of collapse since the revolution, and right now it is said to be near terminal, and it will beggar the west to continue to provide for them as we have from the beginning.

I read once of an account of how after Lenin, the great famine of the early twenties under Hoover, we shipped grain there to help keep the people from starving to death. At the same time that our ships were unloading, the Soviets were shipping grain out, so that they had no intention of saving the lives of people, only what the Hoover Commission was able to get into the hands of people themselves, kept people alive. Of course, it’s not only the ungodly as this episode reveals, it’s the people of God, of Israel and the church who feel once they’re saved, all their troubles should be over. Yes?

[Audience] Your quote on {?} why we are so comfortable, it’s something about we’re so comfortable because we’re not {?} and who said that?

[Rushdoony] I’m trying to locate that. Is it the, oh yes. Chadwick, G.A. Chadwick, a Church of England Dean said, “Perhaps we are allowed to be comfortable because we are unfit to be heroic.” Yes, that’s a very telling statement. Perhaps we are allowed to be comfortable because we are unfit to be heroic. Yes?

[Audience] Does it describe what manna was. What was manna, did it say what it was, like the….?

[Rushdoony] We’ll come to that next week, yes. When the manna begins, we will touch on that. We really don’t know too much about it. All kinds of studies have been made trying to theorize what it is, including naturalistic explanations, none of which are satisfactory, but we’ll come to that next week. Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Audience] In the {?} that God has a sense of humor, if He made us in His image, He held back a very important ingredient: wisdom and the intelligence to handle perfection.

[Rushdoony] Well, the interesting thing is, we are told by James in his epistle, that there is one thing God gives without any restrictions if we ask for it: wisdom, and how many people ever pray for wisdom. Being sinners they assume they were born with it. Well, if there are no further questions, let us bow our heads in prayer.

Our Father, we thank thee for thy grace, and we thank thee for thy promises to us in Jesus Christ. Give us wisdom that we may understand thy ways better, and our purpose in terms of thy kingdom, our calling, and our responsibility under fire. Bless us as we serve thee. 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.

End of tape.