Exodus: Unity of Law and Grace

The Curtains

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: The Curtains

Genre: Lessons with Q & A

Track: 92

Dictation Name: RR171AX92

Location/Venue:

Year: Early 70’s

Let us worship God. Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth. Seeing that we have a great high priest that has passed into the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need. Let us pray.

O Lord God of Hosts, what is man that thou hast made him, for thou hast made him a little lower than the angels and crowned him with glory and with honor. We give thanks unto thee, O Lord, for the magnificence of thy creation and thy mercy unto us. Thou hast given us life, and having lost it, regenerated to us through Jesus Christ, thy Son, our savior. Our Father, we rejoice in all thy blessings, and we come together again to thank thee for thy mercy, thine unfailing care, and the glory of thy promises in Christ. In His name we pray. Amen.

Our scripture is from Exodus 26:1-14. Our subject: The Curtains. Exodus 26:1-14. “Moreover thou shalt make the tabernacle with ten curtains of fine twined linen, and blue, and purple, and scarlet: with cherubims of cunning work shalt thou make them. The length of one curtain shall be eight and twenty cubits, and the breadth of one curtain four cubits: and every one of the curtains shall have one measure. The five curtains shall be coupled together one to another; and other five curtains shall be coupled one to another. And thou shalt make loops of blue upon the edges of the one curtain from the selvedge in the coupling; and likewise shalt thou make in the uttermost edge of another curtain, in the coupling of the second. Fifty loops shalt thou make in the one curtain, and fifty loops shalt thou make in the edge of the curtain that is in the coupling of the second; that the loops may take hold one of another. And thou shalt make fifty taches of gold, and couple the curtains together with the taches: and it shall be one tabernacle. And thou shalt make curtains of goats' hair to be a covering upon the tabernacle: eleven curtains shalt thou make. The length of one curtain shall be thirty cubits, and the breadth of one curtain four cubits: and the eleven curtains shall be all of one measure. And thou shalt couple five curtains by themselves, and six curtains by themselves, and shalt double the sixth curtain in the forefront of the tabernacle. And thou shalt make fifty loops on the edge of the one curtain that is outmost in the coupling, and fifty loops in the edge of the curtain which coupleth the second. And thou shalt make fifty taches of brass, and put the taches into the loops, and couple the tent together, that it may be one. And the remnant that remaineth of the curtains of the tent, the half curtain that remaineth, shall hang over the backside of the tabernacle. And a cubit on the one side, and a cubit on the other side of that which remaineth in the length of the curtains of the tent, it shall hang over the sides of the tabernacle on this side and on that side, to cover it. And thou shalt make a covering for the tent of rams' skins dyed red, and a covering above of badgers' skins.

Now this is a text which has probably, in your experience, never been preached about. In fact, there are a great many people who would hold there are very, very few biblical passages, if any, that can equal this one for dullness. It is a technical account written in the language of the time, giving an account of the construction of certain aspects of the tabernacle, or the tent. And these are three in all. First, there is the dwelling place, in verses 1-6. Second, there is the tent erected over the dwelling places to protect it, verses 7-13, and third, there is a further covering, verse 14, to protect the tent as a whole.

The dwelling place was made of the best quality linen. Images of the cherubim were embroidered on it, and this is a very interesting fact, I believe. What the Ten Commandments forbid was not art work, but the worship of anything depicted by paintings, sculpture, or any like art. Those people who feel that any kind of depiction of art work in the church, or in the home, or anywhere, is a violation of the commandment, are guilty of a misinterpretation, if they held that position logically. Photography would have to be banned, because any careful translation of the commandment at this point, Exodus 20:4-5, would mean all art work, all depiction. But, what it says, “These are not to be worshipped,” and God requires their use in the tabernacle and in the temple. Now this dwelling place was divided in two by the curtains to make the Holy of Holies a perfect cube, and the holy place, two rooms, and then the outer court. The tent over the dwelling place was made of goats’ hair, and over it, another covering we are told of badger skins, although some say that this word in the Hebrew means sea cows. The word in the King James “taches” means, in modern English, clasps. The ark and the mercy seat were in the Holy of Holies, and the table for the showbread and the lampstand were in the holy place.

The requirements stress again that the tabernacle is a royal tent. It is a dwelling place for the king of creation. Beauty, glory, and privacy are stressed. Because tents today have a limited use, they are made simply and plainly, for the most part. So, we forget that once their construction was very costly, and very often so. Ornate, made for long term use. This involves a different mentality. When you realize that, in Antiquity, tents very often were very elaborate, and into modern times in some areas. We realize that, with the modern age, both within the western world and outside of it, a different mentality has set in. For example, in our society, people move more frequently than ever before in history, and especially since World War 2. As a result, what has happened is that houses are less often built with the generations to come in mind. We live in a rootless generation, with no sense of permanency. Our perspectives are short-term, and the results are, very often, sorry for men and societies.

I have cited it before and I think it’s worth citing again. Once when, on the Indian reservation, I made a trip into the back mountain country, high country, isolated, and in that whole area were only three families. Two ranches and one, a miner and his family, and they were the only ones and a good deal of the year, there was no one else because they could get out rarely, and then by sleigh in a crisis. And I knew one of the men quite well and he was a rather difficult person, and I asked the very charming, well-educated Berkeley like myself, wife of the miner, how they got along with so-and-so, and she looked at me in amazement and said, “Very well. Our life may depend on one another, so here we get along.” That’s what having roots and permanence means. It means that we learn to live with our circumstances, and ourselves. But our world is changed dramatically because of the rootlessness.

The tabernacle has been called a foreshadowing of the incarnation; God dwelling among men. The tabernacle had a framework of wood, five pillars or tent poles and apparently a ridge pole. According to George Rollinson, the Holy of Holies was a cube of apparently fifteen feet in every direction and the holy place was an oblong thirty feet by fifteen, and outside was the court of the tabernacle.

The fine-twisted linen mentioned in verse 1 was, according to the ancient rabbis, linen in which every strand was made up of four threads. It is important now, however, to look at an aspect of this text which has a very interesting relevance to our times, especially. We live in an age which hates curtains and walls in some spheres of life, while insisting on privacy in others. The right to privacy has become a privacy in law, and many insist on claiming, as a legal right, something never formulated legally in the past. Very often, this right to privacy means a freedom from all moral censure. Freedom for acts previously regarded as illicit and immoral. Thus, we see, all around us, homosexuals insisting on their privacy, while at times indulging in public acts at various celebrations in San Francisco. The right they claim is thus a claimed immunity from censure, and this is true in various spheres. The sexual revolution was marked by public fornication, and not only at Woodstock, and also by an insistence on an immunity from condemnation. That’s what the right to privacy is, very often. Films now routinely depict sexual acts, and all areas of life are regarded as non-private and open to scrutiny. The same is true of the media, of biographers, of some historians, and others. A no-curtains world seems to be the goal of many people. A good case could be made for the coincidence of a loss of freedom and a loss of godly privacy, together with a so-called right to privacy, or immunity from censure.

At the heart of biblical faith is a blunt statement, that there are things which it is our moral duty to know, and other things which it is presumptuous for us to know. Moses declares, in Deuteronomy 29:29, “The secret things belong unto the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children forever that we may do all the words of the law.” Now, this is a very important, as well as a neglected text. Thos things which are revealed and which belong to us and our children forever are the words of God’s law, the Bible. The secret things refers to God’s predictions and His predestinating power. Some people say, “Well, if God has preordained or predestined all things, what then is the point of doing anything?” God’s revelation, as in Deuteronomy 28, gives what is clearly a bleak look at an apostate’s future. However, the purpose of these glimpses that we get in Deuteronomy 28 of God’s predestination and control is to motivate us to what P.C. Cragey{?} called the responsibility of obedience.

Man as sinner seeks to be as God. Genesis 4:5 tells us this very clearly. He wants total knowledge of all things, including God. He is at war with curtains if they stand between him and the objects of his curiosity. There are to impediments to man and his ungodly attempt to have total knowledge. First, he is a fallen creature. His total being has been warped by sin. His attempts to know are clouded at best by sin, or are really radically perverse. Then second, man is a finite creature. His capacity to understand and comprehend things infinite is simply lacking. Redeemed man can have true knowledge within the limits of his creaturely being. The secret things of God are eternally beyond man. His knowledge can still be valid, though limited, and the more man accepts his limitations, the better he is enabled to know things truly. More important, as man grows in grace, God enables man to know Him better. The incarnation is God’s self-revelation. It does not abolish the secret things, but it brings God closer to us and tells us what we need to know.

The curtains which surrounded the Holy of Holies and the holy place, as a result, must be seen as not only decorative of a royal tent, but revelatory of the fact that there are limits to our knowledge and vision. The further into the tabernacles you went, the more glorious the furnishings, and yet man only saw the Holy of Holies once a year and then one man, the high priest, and only priests saw the holy place. But man seems to believe that anything glorious and beautiful should be available to him to be valid. And yet God concentrates the greatest beauty where man has the least vision of it. H. Wheeler Robinson, years ago, called attention to another aspect of Deuteronomy 29:29, namely, those things which are revealed means not only God’s law, but, to use his phrase, “The known past with its lesson of obedience to the law, this is ours.” This is a very dramatic fact, I think. It tells us how important not only the word of God is, but history when we view it in terms of scripture. It is one of those things given to us in terms of which we can grow. It tells us that a presumptuous curiosity to know the hidden things of God needs to be replaced by a godly historical sense and knowledge. The only curtains on the past are of man’s own making. This is a realm that we have open to us, from which we can learn, as well as scripture. Men too often despise history, because they are determined to transcend and abolish it.

Someone in the state department recently heralded with what happened in the Middle East, and the Balkans in particular, Central Europe, as the end of history. How presumptuous. Men are determined not only not to know the past nor to learn anything from it, let alone from the word of God, but to abolish history, to declare everything in the past invalid, up to the point where man is master total of his fate, and totally captain of his soul. That, to them, is the goal of history, and hence, they are anti-God and anti-history. For all such, we must say that the grave is their destiny.

So we see a world today that despises curtains. A curtain is like a red flag to a bull. They want to destroy it, for no reason at all but their will to dominate and know everything that they should not know. They are hostile to curtains, and this is why this text requiring curtains, and making clear the splendor that is there where only one man can ever see it once a year, is important for man to recognize. It confronts man with a fact that the world is not made for him, and that the ultimate beauty and glory that man produces is primarily for the glory of God, even if it is only occasionally or rarely apparent to man. Let us pray.

Our Father, we thank thee for thy word. We thank thee that thou hast established boundaries to our knowledge and yet opened vast realms for us to explore and to know, and to rejoice in. We thank thee that the ultimate glory and beauty surrounds thee and thy throne. Make us mindful, O Lord, of the true center of all things. Give us humility with respect to ourselves, our calling, our place in the scheme of things. Make us joyful in those things which are revealed unto us, and give us growth therein. In Christ’s name, amen. Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] Why to people who do not believe in predestination go to fortunetellers?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Because as Charles Norris Cochran, in his magnificent study, Christianity in Classical Culture, made clear, when in the debate, and this came out in the debate, but between the early church fathers and the Greco/Roman philosophers, when you deny God’s predestination and you open the world to chance, then elemental things like natural forces and the stars take power over man. Then man is not made lord over creation by God, he becomes subject to natural forces, and so, it is precisely the anti-God thinking that leads always inescapably to things like astrology and witchcraft, trying to understand what the forces within the universe are doing to you rather than realizing God predestines you, but you under God are lord over creation. Cochran’s work is one of the great classics of this century. Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Audience] The comments toward the end of your lesson there almost seem like an argument in favor of wilderness preservation.

[Rushdoony] What? Wilderness preservation? No, because man is lord over nature, and it is to be used to the glory of God. Now, we cannot favor the modern wilderness preservation which subordinates man to everything else in nature. You cannot kill rattlesnakes, you cannot kill mountain lions, you cannot cut down trees, and so on. Let us remember that the greatest work of conservation in the history of the world has been done by Christians. The forests, the Black Forests of Germany, are products of Christianity, and particularly Lutheranism. That the redemption of desert places in Europe, and it’s hard for us to think of Europe being once wasteland, desert areas. That was the work of early Medieval monks. A remarkable amount of preservation to the glory of God, and to the better living of godly men, has been accomplished by Christians over the generations. It is ungodly men who have an ungodly view of nature who do not good. In fact, many of the forest areas that have been preserved in this country have become wastelands, either because the trees are so think that nothing can grow and no animals can live in them, so the deer have died out or moved elsewhere, or else now, with some of their more recent cutting practices, they are very destructive. The amazing things is that our loggers can log and replant, and make money, and pay large taxes, but the National Forest Service is logging many areas here and in Alaska, and losing money on the log sales, actually losing money. Now, that seems impossible, but I think it was, who was it?

[Audience] Sutton

[Rushdoony] yes, Sutton, in his recent newsletter called attention to the fact that even the customs service, which ceases things at no cost to itself, so it’s like having a pawn shop in which everything is gained freely and there is no rent to pay, and then losing money on the sales, but it routinely loses a fortune. That’s hard to understand but this is the reality. So, anytime the state touches anything, it destroys it, and its preservation acts become destruction acts. Yes?

[Audience] In the passage that you used for your message today, much has been made about the symbolism of the various numbers, like fifty, attaches the eleven curtains, the cubit size. Would you comment briefly on the attempt to find symbolism in those numbers?

[Rushdoony] Yes, all kinds of attempts have been made, and what it amounts to is that anytime the Bible uses a number, some symbolism is attached to it. Sometimes it’s valid if the text makes it clear. But now, how reading this text or anything else throughout the books of Moses can you find a meaning for those? You simply can’t, you have to drag it out of your own mind, but you know what curtains mean, and you see the fact that the exterior of the tabernacle, which everybody could view, was made of the roughest, toughest pelts. As you went in, everything became more and more magnificent. In the holy place, there was the greatest concentration of gold, of fine linen, embroidery work, and so on. So, very obviously, these curtains, coverings, tell you something. That the glory of the tabernacle was not something men were to enjoy. It was for the glory of God, and it tells you that there are limits to man’s vision. An obvious meaning is always the correct meaning. Well, if there are no further questions or comments, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, give us grace and humility that we may know that the secret things belong unto thee, and how great and marvelous is that which thou hast left to us. Make us ever mindful of the curtains that are a necessary part of faith and life, and that they are of thine ordination. Teach us to grow in those ways thou hast ordained. And now go in peace. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.

End of tape.