Exodus: Unity of Law and Grace

The Consecration

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: The Consecration

Genre: Lessons with Q & A

Track: 105

Dictation Name: RR171BE105

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, O Lord. In the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee and will look up. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto thee that underneath all the experiences of life are thine everlasting arms, that we live, move and have our being in thee that that which we cannot understand still comes from thine all-gracious hands. Give us grace therefore, to rejoice in all thy ways and to thank thee, knowing that thou art He who dost make all things work together for good to them that love thee, to them that are the called according to thy purpose. Bless us this morning and day by day, that we may grow in grace and understanding and may serve thee more faithfully. In Christ’s name, amen.

Our scripture is Exodus 29:38-46. The Consecration, our fourth and last study of Consecration. Exodus 29:38-46. “Now this is that which thou shalt offer upon the altar; two lambs of the first year day by day continually. The one lamb thou shalt offer in the morning; and the other lamb thou shalt offer at even: and with the one lamb a tenth deal of flour mingled with the fourth part of an hin of beaten oil; and the fourth part of an hin of wine for a drink offering. And the other lamb thou shalt offer at even, and shalt do thereto according to the meat offering of the morning, and according to the drink offering thereof, for a sweet savour, an offering made by fire unto the Lord. This shall be a continual burnt offering throughout your generations at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation before the Lord: where I will meet you, to speak there unto thee. And there I will meet with the children of Israel, and the tabernacle shall be sanctified by my glory. And I will sanctify the tabernacle of the congregation, and the altar: I will sanctify also both Aaron and his sons, to minister to me in the priest's office. And I will dwell among the children of Israel, and will be their God. And they shall know that I am the Lord their God, that brought them forth out of the land of Egypt, that I may dwell among them: I am the Lord their God.”

These verses begin what some have called an appendix to the consecration directory. However, we would have to say it’s related to the consecration even though it speaks in part of Israel’s daily sacrifices, and the last four verses make clear how it is related to the consecration. They very clearly refer to it. The consecration requires a faithful adherence to the correct form of ritual, but a formal correctness, however essential, does not ensure the validity of a consecration or a ritual before God. It is the faithfulness and the daily duties, which is very much stressed here in the closing verses. Man must believe and obey, the priest must be duly consecrated but he must also be faithful. As James 2:14-26 tells us, “Faith without works is death, and the most correct ritual cannot replace faithfulness.

But more is involved here than faith and works, or a true consecration, or a faithful service. God sets forth His priority. It is He who will sanctify the altar he says, He who will sanctify the tabernacle and the priests. The ritual correctness is required, but the validation is God’s sovereign act. The church has a duty to require biblically valid rights and ordinances, but it cannot reduce validation to the institutional act, without denying God’s sovereignty.

The daily sacrifices were to be two firstling lambs; one in the morning, one in the evening, according to verses 38 and 39. According to verses 40 and 41, a meal offering and a drink offering was to accompany each sacrifice. In verse 40, there are references to Hebrew measures. The Berkeley version renders it in modern terms thus: “With the first lamb, you shall offer an ample six pints of fine flour mixed with two and a half pints of pressed olive oil, and a libation of two and half pints of wine.” The purpose of the consecration in the daily sacrifice was to make the people always mindful of the relationship between sin and death as its judgment, and the need for atonement. Ronald E. Clements has very ably said of verse 45, and I quote, “I shall dwell in the midst.

The whole purpose of Israel’s sacrificial worship is thereby summed up. God would be with His people by means of the glory which was to remain in the sanctuary. The divine presence was to be the source of life and blessing for the whole nation, and from it, the priest would be able to obtain further divine instructions.” God says that His meeting place with His people is at the door of the sanctuary. Important as the Holy of Holies is, the meeting place is at the door, a public site. This is an emphasis, not on a hidden or a mystical experience, or meeting with God, but on a public one, in a place of openness. True religious experience has a public and demonstrable character, because God alone is all-holy and the source of all holiness. He alone can sanctify, and he does it in His appointed place and way.

The law of daily sacrifice is also given to us in Numbers 28:3-8. Daily life was to be sanctified by the continuing reminder of who God is and what man is. All life and meaning originate from Him and His sovereign decree. Like the priest, our hands are to be filled with his work. The great old commentator, Thomas Scott, wrote, and I quote, “Do we maintain daily communion with Him, presenting our morning and evening sacrifice of secret and family worship, acceptable through the atonement of the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world? and are our hands filled with His work, and our time and talents offered to the Lord as a wave offering and improved to His glory? Is this a sincere intention and desire of our hearts all the day long?” God, in His omnipotence, majesty, and glory, declares all the same that He is wherever the true offering is, to bless His people. We have, in verses 43-46, His royal promise. It is an emphatic royal declaration and affirmation. Kasuto said of this, and I quote, “Finally, as befits a king who signs his name at the end of the declaration he has issued, in order to validate it and accept full responsibility for its implication, comes the solemn formula, ‘I am the Lord your God,’ which concludes the main part of the divine communication concerning the tabernacle of God’s glory, wherein he would cause his presence to dwell among the children of Israel.”

The covenant form of the books of the law and all of scripture stresses their royal character. The Bible and its law is given as the decree of the king of creation. We have seen that ritual is, among other things, an enacted parable and a preparation for the responsibilities and duties of life. It is also a declaration of meaning. To understand what this means, we need to look briefly at any view of the universe which strips it of God. It ceases, at the least, to then be a universe and becomes, at best, a multi-verse. Even more, all things become a vast realm of meaningless and chance facts, all unrelated one to another. The term, popularized by Van Til, is brute factuality. It’s a term that very aptly describes what the entire universe is in terms of modern science and philosophy. Instead of being a universe of God-created facts, all of which derive their meaning from the triune God and from His purpose, we then have an infinite number of meaningless and unrelated facts, brute factuality. Law, order, and meaning are only possible in terms of God and His creating purpose and decree. In terms of the plain meaning of modern philosophy or philosophy since Emmanuel Kant, and science since Kant, the universe Is totally one of unrelated and meaningless factuality, brute factuality.

How then is science possible? Well, strictly speaking, two hundred years ago they said it is impossible. But as Van Til has stressed, what modern science has done is to deny God on the one hand while assuming His existence, secretly, because without God as the basic premise, without God as the basic presupposition, we have only brute factuality, a universe of brute factuality, facts which cannot be related one to another, which cannot provide any knowledge because there is, by definition, no coherence nor relationship which can exist in a chance universe.

Some years ago, at a forum where I was one of the speakers, another was a graduate professor from Johns Hopkins, and he was very indignant when I insisted on the ultimate rationality of all things because all facts are God-created facts and therefore, have a meaning, and he was on his feet to say there is only a thin edge of rationality in the universe in the mind of man. All else is unreason, illogical, absurd, meaningless, and any meaning therefore for him, as came out in the questioning that ensued, had to be a man-imposed meaning that basically was meaningless, had no relationship to reality.

Now, ritual is a declaration of meaning. It tell us that this is a world of meaning, and it sets a seal on that meaning. It is an assertion on relationships, a God-ordained one. At the heart of Christian rituals; baptism, communion, worship, weddings, funerals, and more, is the spoken word. Speech is an expression of meaning and of relationships, of community and communion. The validity of speech rests on the fact that words are forms of propositional truth. They represent realities, forms, meanings, ideas, and more. They are not meaningless grunts.

At one of the conferences we held a year ago, I called attention to the fact that Marcel DuChamp felt that, as long as we had language, everything would point to God, because the languages that existed, each word was a propositional truth, it presupposed a world of meaning and of God. So, he tried to create a language without reference to meaning and had to give up, it could not be done. So, in his own way, while he denied God to the last, he had to admit the inescapable truth, that God is. But, in the world of brute factuality, or where men believe that brute factuality is the truth of things, words begin to lose their meaning, and communication breaks down, and that is why we’re seeing in our time a communications gap, the rise of meaninglessness, and all too many court decisions now manifest this breakdown of meaning.

A case decided on very recently by the U.S. Supreme Court dealt with child pornography. The Ohio man convicted in Ohio of possessing sexually explicit photographs of children being subjected to obscene acts was, according to Justices Brennan, Marshall, and Stevens, the victim of an ostensibly vague law which could convict parents of photographing a baby in the bathtub. But, as John F. Will observed, and I quote, “Gracious. If the meaning of words like ‘lewd’ are as slippery and as fuzzy as Brennan says, how can there be reasonable, predictable enforcement of laws against say, fraudulent advertising or negligent behavior. If Americans are, as Brennan evidently thinks we’re to be given confusing family snapshots with pornography if Americans are that nonsensical, what hope is there for democracy, the point of the First Amendment anyways? Such liberals are safe from absurdity by the virtue, in this case, of insincerity. They find the English language perfectly serviceable for complex legislation when it serves their ends.” Granted that George F. Will is correct about the insincerity of these judges, we must add that there is also evidence of a fundamental contempt for the meaning of words, because there is no believe in the God who made man and gave him the power of speech as a means of understanding God and His universe and purpose. Whenever faith in the God of scripture has waned, meaning has waned, and law has become a tool for injustice. From the days of some rabbinic commentators who very cleverly made laws mean the reverse of their open meaning, through the Christian centuries, ungodly men have twisted laws and words to justify evil and to destroy meaning.

Howard Phillips wrote recently, and I quote, “According to the New York Times, the new Jersey Supreme Court has reversed the death penalty ruling because the prosecution did not prove the defendant intended to kill his victim, though he stabbed her fifty-three times. It was the sixteenth time the state court had reversed the death sentence. The justices, as they had in two previous rulings, held that a defendant can be sentenced to death only if there is evidence of a deliberate attempt to kill. In 1986, the defendant, Kevin Jackson, 27 years old, pleaded guilty to the 1985 killing of a woman who lived in the apartment complex where he was staying in Lakewood. The next year he was sentenced to death by lethal injection. In their appeal to the state’s highest courts, Mr. Jackson’s lawyers said that while he admitted he stabbed the woman, he never acknowledged that he intended to do more than inflict serious injury. Radical reform of our criminal justice is required. Citizens of the community in which a crime is committed should have the right to determine the guilt or innocence of the parties involved, with {?} penalties, and to see that those penalties are carried out without external interference. If a resident of your community is murdered, your community must have the power to execute the murderer.”

Well, we see this same evil in the churches, where scholars and pastors reinterpret the Bible to make it say things radically alien to what the scripture says. In recent years, feminists have done this at times, and especially homosexuals have done this. They have tried to give the texts condemning homosexuality new meanings. The root of this evil begins within those churches who seek to warp the Bible to suit their ends. Well, if the churches do this, why not the courts? Why not everyone? The result is the breakdown of meaning, and of communication. True ritual is an enacted parable, a preparation for life, and a declaration of relationships between our covenant God and His creation and people. It is a mandate for meaning in our lives. This is why when meaning breaks down, rituals are quickly dropped.

For example, in baptism, we declare that the child is given to us by God and therefore belongs to God, and must be surrendered to Him. We promise to rear the child as God’s possession. This is the starting point of baptism. If the meaning of the ritual is neglected or perishes, the rite is dead and is pointless. Daily we have, as Otto Scott pointed out last time, the rituals of courtesy, and we acknowledge that a meaning beyond ourselves governs life. Just since last week, an incident occurred where a prominent actor appeared at an important gathering in clothes more suited to the beach. He was contemptuous and disgusted that any criticism was leveled against him because he said he lived his own life as a free man. His denial of social dress and courtesies, courtesies of speech was an affirmation of brute factuality. For him, there could be no binding community of meaning, no formalities, no courtesies, because for him, there was no ultimate realm of meaning that compels all men to submit to a sovereign God, and in the Lord to respect on another. This actor had scrapped the last relics of ritual courtesies, because he alone is god in his thinking, and logically so. If there is no God, there is no ritual, no community of faith, no responsibility, no courtesies because there is no meaning, and every man is his own god, and only what he wants is meaningful in his life. Let us pray.

Our Father, we thank thee for thy word. Thy word is truth, and thou hast declared that thy word must be obeyed, that the forms of life that thou hast established. The respects thou hast ordained are to be held and defended. Make us mindful, O Lord, of thy truth, of thy kingdom. Make us ever mindful in all our ways, that we are, in all things, accountable to thee, and bless us in our faithfulness. In Christ’s name, amen. Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] Well, if justices of the court are making it clear that a Constitution is no protection if the people will not defend it.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] And we should not have permanent judges. We should not have barbarians on the court with civilized men, and the same thing in the academy and the same thing {?} If society permits the degeneration of meaning, then of course it will totally collapse.

[Rushdoony] Yes, the framers of the Constitution, in making judges life-appointed, were assuming that men were going to be as good as they were in their day, and they were simply trying to remove them from politics, but they made them a form of politics above and over the people, and beyond any sense of responsibilities. So, as the country has seen a moral decline, the judges have become more and more arbitrary and since the courts rule on the judges, federal judges, they are now sustaining one another. So that the taxing power in the Missouri case of judges, an unprecedented thing, was maintained by the supreme court, so that there is no longer taxation by representation. Are there any other questions or comments? Well, if not, let us bow our heads in prayer.

Our Father, thy word is truth, and thy word is a joy unto us, a strength and a comfort. We thank thee that we live, move, and have our being in thee, and it is not the will of man that shall prevail, but thy word, thy power, thy kingdom. Make us faithful in our service to 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.