Exodus: Unity of Law and Grace

The Court and the Oil

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: The Court and the Oil

Genre: Lessons with Q & A

Track: 95

Dictation Name: RR171AZ95

Location/Venue:

Year: Early 70’s

Let us worship God. Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth. Seek ye the Lord while He may be found, call ye upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return unto the Lord, and He will have mercy upon him and to our God for He will abundantly pardon. Let us pray.

O Lord, our God, we come into thy presence again mindful of all thy mercies and thy sure kindnesses. Make us ever mindful of how rich we are in Christ, that we may serve thee with gladness, with thanksgiving, and ever mindful of our duty to yield unto thee ourselves, our mind, our being, our substance. Empower us by thy word and by thy spirit, that we may be zealous in thy kingdom’s cause. In Christ’s name. Amen.

Our scripture is Exodus 27:9-21. Our subject: The Court and the Oil. Exodus 27:9-21. “And thou shalt make the court of the tabernacle: for the south side southward there shall be hangings for the court of fine twined linen of an hundred cubits long for one side: And the twenty pillars thereof and their twenty sockets shall be of brass; the hooks of the pillars and their fillets shall be of silver. And likewise for the north side in length there shall be hangings of an hundred cubits long, and his twenty pillars and their twenty sockets of brass; the hooks of the pillars and their fillets of silver. And for the breadth of the court on the west side shall be hangings of fifty cubits: their pillars ten, and their sockets ten. And the breadth of the court on the east side eastward shall be fifty cubits. The hangings of one side of the gate shall be fifteen cubits: their pillars three, and their sockets three. And on the other side shall be hangings fifteen cubits: their pillars three, and their sockets three. And for the gate of the court shall be an hanging of twenty cubits, of blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine twined linen, wrought with needlework: and their pillars shall be four, and their sockets four. All the pillars round about the court shall be filleted with silver; their hooks shall be of silver, and their sockets of brass. The length of the court shall be an hundred cubits, and the breadth fifty every where, and the height five cubits of fine twined linen, and their sockets of brass. All the vessels of the tabernacle in all the service thereof, and all the pins thereof, and all the pins of the court, shall be of brass. And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always. In the tabernacle of the congregation without the vail, which is before the testimony, Aaron and his sons shall order it from evening to morning before the LORD: it shall be a statute for ever unto their generations on the behalf of the children of Israel.”

Around the tabernacle itself was the tabernacle court. Fifty by one hundred cubits in dimension, with the tabernacle itself near the other side from the entrance. So, we have an oblong, a court, and at the end of that court but not up against the walls of it, the tabernacle. The altar and the laver were in this area. All that anyone outside the court would see of the tabernacle would be the red ram skin roof of the tent. Now, since the court walls of linen were white, the red ram skin would be like a mountain of flame rising out of a basin of snow when viewed from the distance. Kate’s comment here is very telling. He said, and I quote, “The entire complex was designed to proclaim to Israel the abiding presence of God, and to demand from them in response, faithful, obedient service. Its portability indicated that God and they were going to be on the move. They were being led to a land beyond. The wilderness was not their home, nor was it His.”

The tabernacle represents a number of closely related things. It is God’s palace. It is a throne room, and this is why, in the early church, and almost to our time, churches were built with the sanctuary representing a throne room. The tabernacle also represented heaven, God’s dwelling place. It is furthermore, the headquarters of an army on the march. God’s army. All these associated meanings are related to the significance of the church, as Christ’s body on church and also as a building. The tabernacle stresses the imminence of God. He who inhabits all eternity and infinity is also the God who is closer to us than we are to ourselves.

The Psalmist speaks of the ungodly who hold that God does not see their work and he says, “They break in pieces thy people, O Lord, and afflict they heritage. They slay the widow and the stranger and murder the fatherless, and yet they say, ‘The Lord shall see not, neither shall the God of Jacob regard it.’” The very minute particularism of God is routinely denied outside of the world of biblical faith. The scripture tells us that the very hairs of our head are numbered, but the further we get into intellectualism, the more abstract and remote God becomes. Because the philosophers disdain concern over those beneath them, they assume that God is only interested in more important matters than ordinary people. Scripture is emphatic on God’s particularism, His concern for everything in His creation. But many churchmen, and others, are emphatic in denying it. But God tells Jeremiah in Jeremiah 23:23-24, “Am I a God at hand, saith the LORD, and not a God afar off? Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? saith the LORD. Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the LORD.”

The court of the tabernacle was an enclosure. It is estimated to have been 7 ½’ high. There are various descriptions of its length and width, but we are given it as 50 and 100 cubits. No roof over this area, and all Israelites who were neither ritually unclean nor excommunicated could enter the court. Josephus tells us that the construction of the tabernacle was such that it was not affected by the winds, but was quiet and immovable continually. He also said that the tabernacle was an imitation of the system of the world, an image of the universe, but there is nothing to validate this view although it was common for centuries. The court, besides being the altar area, protected the tabernacle by placing a barrier between it and the world outside.

As we saw earlier, the tabernacle represents heaven, God’s palace and His throne room, and the headquarters of an army on the march. In recent years, unfortunately, these concepts have been disconnected from the church. The early church, however, saw itself in the same terms as the tabernacle and the temple with the exception of the sacrificial functions. The common description of the church as the church militant on earth, and the church triumphant in heaven, comes from the tabernacle and temple imagery, but too often now, the church is built as an auditorium, not as a palace and throne room. It is not seen as the center or headquarters of an army on the march. Instead, for many, the church is simply a refuge from the world and the faith is seen as a means of hiding or escaping from the pressures of the world. But this is a denial of the meaning of the church.

Another aspect of the church, which is clearly apparent in the New Testament and the synagogue is that it is a teaching center. Preaching now is too often very low in its educational function and it is more oriented to emotional inspiration, or to psychological self-help, or social commentaries in some churches. The church must educate to remain a church. It is not an accident that schools and universities were born out of the church to give direction to Christendom. This was true not only in the Medieval era, the Reformation era, but through the last century. Up to 1900, seventy-five percent of all colleges and universities in the United States were church-created, and this includes many of the places like the University of California at Berkeley. It was originally a Reformed institution, surprising as that may seem now.

In verses 20 and 21, we have instructions concerning the oil for use in the lampstands. It is to be clean and clear, and made out of pressed olives. Today, some varieties of olives are grown for eating and others for their oil. So that, as you drive around California, for example, in the foothills and see olive orchards, just by glancing at them it’s not distinguishable, but some orchards are planted exclusively for their oil. Whether this was true in Old Testament times, we do not know, but the clear, pure olive oil does not smoke when it burns. Scripture does make a difference between the clear oil of pressed olives and beaten oil. This distinction is not clear in the King James Version, but it is in the Hebrew. Dr. Gispen sees the reference in Exodus 27:30 in the Hebrew, to the pressed oil, and in Exodus 29:40, to beaten oil. Now, the difference was this. The clear oil of pressed olives was made by crushing the olives into a pulpy mass, then placing all of this into a basket and allowing it to drip through. It would be a finely-woven basket. No other part of the olive came through and, as a result, the oil was very pure. To produce the beaten oil the same thing was done but heavy rocks were placed on the pulpy mass in the basket, which produced good olive oil but not of the same total purity. The clear oil of pressed olives was used for the lamps and was, of course, smokeless, and the beaten oil was used for the meal offering.

According to verse 20, it was the duty of the people to provide the oil for the lamp, and this is stated as a commandment. They were to bring their best oil. Now this is a very interesting and important point which, in our time, we’ve forgotten. We’ve obscured the meaning so it’s no longer anything in the minds of anyone. We are not told how this commandment was implemented. There is no specified plan for the giving of the oil because there is no penalty for failure to provide it. So, here we have a commandment and no penalty. Well, the significance of this is a very obvious one. Our Lord tells us that we are the light of the world, a city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. We are, however, a derivative of light, not the source of light. Our Lord also declares, “I am the light of the world. He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness but shall have the light of life.” Our Lord is both light and life. The light of the tabernacle depended on the people. If they failed to bring the oil, the light grew dim or burned out. The same is true of the church. When the people fail in their responsibility to provide for the light to shine forth, the church becomes weak and helpless.

It is important to remember this verse in order to understand the parable of the ten virgins, the wise and foolish virgins. We are told by our Lord that the five foolish virgins took no extra oil. What, at midnight, the bridegroom arrived, the lamps of the foolish virgins were flickering and going out. As a result, there was for them no entrance into the marriage celebration and banquet. They were shut out. This parable does not make much sense unless we understand Exodus 27:20. Why should the foolish virgins be excluded from a well-lighted banquet hall? Why does the bridegroom say to them when they cry out, “Lord, Lord! Open to us!” he answers, “Verily I say unto you, I know you not.” The meaning becomes clear in terms of verse 20, in Exodus 27. It is the duty of all the Lord’s people to provide not only for their light and sustenance, but also for the Lord’s work and kingdom. God makes clear that while He requires sacrifices and gifts from us, He does not need them. He can do His work, He can accomplish everything without us, but all the same, He makes vast areas of our lives in history dependent on what we do. We must provide the oil for the light or face darkness and judgment.

When we understand this verse, we can understand Matthew 25:1-13, the Parable of the Wise and the Foolish Virgins. It is not enough to provide oil for your lamp, but for the Lord’s work, His lamp, the work of His kingdom. In Psalm 50:10-15, God declares through Asaph, “For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. I know all the fowls of the mountains: and the wild beasts of the field are mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof. Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats? Offer unto God thanksgiving; and pay thy vows unto the most High: And call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me.” Again, the reference is to Exodus 27:20. God commands that the oil to provide light to make the tabernacle and temple, and church function, be provided by the people, but He says emphatically, all things are His. He does not need us, and therefore, when he makes the commandment, He is saying, “There is no future for you, nor for the church, nor for the kingdom, nor for your life and world, apart from this. I command it, I attach no penalty that any man or church or state can impose upon you, but thou shalt command the children of Israel that they bring the pure olive oil beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always. God commands us to bring Him our offerings for our own welfare. Let us pray.

Our Father, we thank thee for thy word. We thank thee that thou hast let so many things outside of the power of men to enforce so that it might be thy Holy Spirit which moves us and makes us obedient and faithful. Teach us, our Father, so to walk that we may be the people of thy spirit, faithful, joyful in thee, more than conquerors because of our joyful service to thy kingdom, to thy house and to thee. In Christ’s name, amen. Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] Is this tabernacle to be built stationery in one location and was it moved?

[Rushdoony] It was to be moved, but it was built in such a way that, according to all the accounts, it was able to withstand severe gales, and it was to be like a permanent dwelling where it was but it was so built that it could be quickly disassembled by the Levites and transported. Yes?

[Audience] Very simple, now how could, they’re in the wilderness, how could they build all these excellent features. Linen, gold, and so forth?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Because when they left Egypt, the Egyptians overwhelmed them with gifts; gold, silver, linen, everything, in order to make them ready to leave because they didn’t want anymore destruction. On top of that, in the wilderness, they did meet with other peoples and they had gold and silver to purchase anything they were short of, because they were in an area of a great many nomadic peoples. They were not in an uninhabited area. One of the things we forget about the whole of what is now Arabia was, that it was originally a highly forested area, and a highly populated area, so that while Israel was following a course that took it on the edge of the areas that were wooded and well-inhabited, they were close to a great many peoples and could thereby trade with them constantly. Yes?

[Audience] They must have had an enormous pool of skilled artisans then, because they had to know metallurgy, carpentry, and a great many skills.

[Rushdoony] Exactly, because they were the artisans for Egypt. That was their required service. The tax was not in the form of money, but it was in the form of service to the state, and so many weeks or two or three or four months, depending on the particular monarch and realm of service to the state was mandatory, and very early therefore, as you were trained, if you were a subject people, you were trained in the skills; metallurgy, wood work, everything. The result was that the skilled people in Antiquity were the slave peoples. We think, for example, of all the inventions that Greece produced, and yet what we forget, and I wish somebody would write a book on it, I once started to collect incidental datas, I learned of the various Greeks who invented things and who developed geometry and so on, these were not Greeks, they had Greek names but they were slave peoples. They were sometimes given their freedom after developing something, and they were always given a Greek name from day one, but the Greeks themselves despised working with their hands. They were intellectuals, if they were anything. They lived off the work of slaves. This is why, in Athens for example, it was forbidden for slaves to wear anything distinctive garment. They had to be clothed by their masters just as the rest of the family, because they outnumbered by so many times the Athenians, the Greeks, that if they had been garbed in distinctive garbs, they would quickly have realized, “We can wipe these people out.” But, the slave peoples of Antiquity were the inventers and the artisans, and an important aspect of that was that the Hebrews were preferred. So, it was something of a danger to be a Hebrew, because the Hebrews did not have the contempt of practical skills. In fact, we have to this day, although no longer kept by modernistic Jews, that a man who did not teach his son to read the Torah, and to trade with his hands, taught him to be a thief. That was something that had deep roots in Hebrew history. As a result, a very high percentage of the slaves in Greece, for example, were of a Hebrew background. They brought a good price, and we now a days don’t think about that aspect of slavery, but it was an important one. The pragmatic attitude towards whom shall we enslave existed even in the blacks who were brought over here. They were brought from areas where the blacks were of tribes that were submissive and controlled by other war-like tribes who sold them into slavery, and those that settled into South Carolina were specifically purchased in terms of settling there, and they came from areas where there was a rice culture, of sorts, and therefore, in South Carolina, where there was a great deal of swampy land, they very easily and readily became a part of the economy there. So, it was slave people in short who had all the skills in Antiquity.

[Audience] Well, apparently the Hebrews in those days, like the Diaspora today, is very adaptable. I think a certain amount of credit has to be given to the surrounding environment. The Diaspora in Germany, for instance, became very Teutonic and very Germanic in its approach, and in Greece, mathematics greatly exceeded what the Hebrews ever did. The Hebrews never put together a decent calendar, and I would say that if they came from an agricultural background, or rather a background of sheep and cattle, husbandmen so to speak, they may very well have picked up some of those skills in the surrounding culture that enslaved them.

[Rushdoony] Part of their realm of the twelve tribes was nomadic. The tribes across the river Jordan. Most of them in what later became Israel, the Northern Kingdom, were agricultural but Judah, being in the south, was predominantly pastoral, sheep. They did have a very good calendar. It was a calendar of twelve months of thirty days each, with five extra days which were celebrated, two at the end of one six-month period and the other three at the end of the others as special sabbaths, and their calendar was a very practical one.

[Audience] Included the moon, did it not?

[Rushdoony] It was, in terms of a lunar cycle, yes. But it was as accurate as ours.

[Audience] Not too accurate.

[Rushdoony] What?

[Audience] Not too accurate.

[Rushdoony] Well, as accurate as you can get because, of course, you have a few minutes that are left over, in any calendar. There’s no way you can do it without having some extra days added periodically, but they did have a good calendar, and there is some debate as to whether they first reached the concept of pi. Ironically, it’s a Jewish scholar who attacks the notion most rigorously, but there are others who believe, Christian scholars, that the notion of pi was first reached very early, and they find in the Hebrew of the Old Testament, a reference to it. So, there’s a great deal that we have not recognized that was true then.

You mentioned the German Jews. A book was written about twenty years ago studying the blood types of all the European Jews, and their general characteristics, and found that they had no connection with anything Semitic. They were Germans, or they were French or English, or Austrian, or whatever. Because in the early years of Europe after the Fall of the Roman Empire, and I referred to this before, as some Jewish traders and monks moved northward throughout Europe, they settled at Fords{?}. There a monastery would be built and there a trading port, and the two would work together. Well, the net result was that when the Jewish traders had bought furs and other items from the tribes, they paid them in goods and if the tribes wanted more goods than they could be paid for, the tribes paid for them with slaves out of their own number. The chief would sell them, and these people very quickly converted to Judaism because they realized the minute they were Jewish converts they would be free, but in their own tribes they would continue as slaves. Because of this fact, the amount of Jewish blood in European Jews is very slight and virtually non-existent. They are Germans with a Jewish religion, or French with a Jewish religion. This is why the Supreme Court of Israel, knowledgeable of these facts, has refused legally, as of my last knowledge, to define what constitutes the Jews. Are there any other questions? Well, if not, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, we thank thee that thy mercies are new every morning. We thank thee for thy mercies unto thee, unto us who unto thee have so often been poor, and yet rich to ourselves. Yet thy grace and thy mercy, daily surround us. Give us joy in thy service. Joy in yielding ourselves and our substance to thee and thy kingdom. Joy in the knowledge that thou art on the throne, and thy will indeed shall be done. 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.