65. Leviticus; The Law of Holiness and Grace

Law and Holiness

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Genre: Lessons with Q&A

Lesson: 1

Track: 01

Dictation Name: RR172A1

Date: Early 70s

Zechariah 14:20, 21

Let us worship God. Our help is in the name of the Lord who made Heaven and Earth. The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon Him, to all that call upon Him in truth. He will fulfill the desire of them that fear Him. He also will hear their cry and will save them. "Where two or three are gathered together in My name," saith the Lord Jesus Christ, "there am I in the midst of them." Let us pray

All glory be to Thee, oh God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. We praise Thee that Thou hast of Thy grace and mercy have made us Thy people. And hast given us such great promises in Thy Word. We thank Thee, our Father, that Thou has made us heirs of all creation. And we pray that by Thy grace we may be empowered to claim those things which are ours, and to bring every area of life and thought into captivity to Thee. Arm us this day by Thy Word and by Thy Spirit and prepare us for this service. In Jesus' name, amen.

Today we begin a series of studies in the book of Leviticus. However, instead of starting with Leviticus 1, we're going to look at two verses at the end of Zechariah, the next to the last book of the Old Testament. Zechariah 13, verses 20 and 21. Excuse me, Zechariah 14: 20 and 21. Our subject is law and holiness, which is the subject of Leviticus.

"20In that day shall there be upon the bells of the horses, holiness unto the Lord, and the pots of the Lord's house shall be like bowls before the altar,

"21Yea, every pot in Jerusalem and in Judah shall be holiness unto the Lord of hosts; and all they that sacrifice shall come and take of them, and seethe therein; and that day there shall be no more a Canaanite in the house of the Lord of hosts."

This vision of Zechariah gives us the purpose of the book of Leviticus. The goal of Leviticus is holiness. The distinction between the sacred and profane which was introduced by sin would cease. And the purpose of Leviticus is that all things be dedicated to the service of God. Leviticus gives us the legal foundations of holiness in the totality of our lives. Its goal is that we be holy and that the whole Earth be holy unto the Lord. The Canaanites possessed the Promised Land at the time of the conquest. And the conclusion of Zechariah's book is that in that day there shall be no more of the Canaanite in the house of the Lord of hosts. Many Canaanites continued to live in Palestine after the conquest. But the point of this is something even more radical. Many of the Israelites who regularly worshiped at the temple were in their hearts Canaanites. Israelites by blood and tradition but not by faith. And so, Zechariah is saying there shall no more be anywhere upon this Earth in that day anyone who is an outsider to the faith or a pretender to it. All shall be in the house of the Lord, and all shall be there in faith.

Isaiah gives us the same vision of World holiness again and again as, for example, in Isaiah 11, citing just verses 6 and 9:

"6The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them."

"9They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea."

Things that to us seem to be in perpetual hostility--the wolf and the lamb, the leopard and the kid, the calf and the young lion and fatling--all these shall dwell in harmony. The world shall be a peaceful place where these elements of hostility symbolizing the hostilities of men shall be at peace. So that "they shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, in all the earth; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea." Isaiah goes on to tell us that so total will be the renovation of the earth that it will all be like the Garden of Eden. "The desert places shall blossom like the rose," we are told. And the whole earth shall be transformed.

To give an idea of the extent of the holiness, we are told, ""that in that day there shall be upon the bells of the horses, holiness unto the Lord." As {?} Moore wrote a century or more ago, I quote, "The bells of the horses were those bells that were fastened to them partly for ornament and partly to make them easily found if they strayed away at night. They were not necessary parts of the harness and trifling in value. When therefore it is said, that even they should have the inscription that was engraved on the breastplate on the high priest. This declares the fact that even the most trifling things in this future state shall be consecrated to God equally with the high and holiest."

The goal is that the Garden of Eden would be so surpassed that it would be forgotten in the world ahead of us. The first Garden of Eden was a limited one and a simple one. Man was there in a state of innocence, without sin, but without tools. It was a primitive situation. But the second will be worldwide and complex and made more marvelous by man's technology, by his skills and his cultivation. The high priest's crown had engraved on it the words "Holiness to the Lord." As Exodus 39: 30 tells us. "We having been washed from our sins in Christ's blood,” according to Revelation 1:5,6 "have been made kings and priests unto God and His Father by Christ." Now, the high priest's insignia describes us and all the world as it shall become. Paul talks about this repeatedly. It is the goal of the Holy Spirit as He works in us, Romans 8 tells us.

The Law is the way of holiness and hence the centrality of Leviticus in the Bible as the book of holiness. There are ninety uses of the word 'holy' or 'holiness' in Leviticus. But apart from the use of this word the total concern of this book is holiness, as is the concern of all the Law. Now this goes contrary to the modern view. Because men today regard law as a lower order of life, you live life on a higher plane if you live in terms of love. And spirituality is seen as something separate from law and as a higher order. The commentators on Leviticus quite routinely describe its laws as now obsolete. They were supposedly given by God; some go so far as to say, to a more primitive people. But God now has supposedly a higher way for us.

This is a Marcianite and an Evolutionary perspective. And of course, these ancient views as well as Hegel and Darwin affected the church and prepared the church for the kind of thinking that now prevails in and out of the church all over the world. Evolutionary faith has made law an unpopular subject. Because Evolutionary faith is intolerant of law. Law presupposes a fixedy in the nature of things, and Evolution cannot tolerate this. The lawyer who believes in God and in God-given rules of good and evil will seek to make laws and the courts conform more and more to true justice as set forth in God's Law. The Evolutionary lawyer on the other hand, will work to destroy and eradicate any dedication to absolute law, to good and evil. Evolution requires change. Truth is then a changing fact and the law must change. The law for the Evolutionist thus cannot be correlated with God's justice. It is related to the changing needs of mankind. And the law must serve the people rather than the people serving the law.

Now Marcel Duchamp, one of the key figures in the world of modern art, saw these issues. Philosophically, he was one of the more astute men in art in this century. He hated logic. He hated the very idea of language, because words, he recognized, of propositional truths which point to a world of total meaning of God. He was the innovator of anti-art, of junk art, of the hatred of meaning in art. He questioned the validity of all law and of all science. As Calvin Tompkins said, “The word 'law' was against his (Duchamp's) principles."

Since Oliver Wendell Holmes the world of Law has also been antinomian. Now given such views in the arts, in the field of law, and within the church, it is not surprising that Leviticus is not a popular book. It is seen as dull and repressive. When men believe we are living beyond good and evil and the goal of civilization is to throw off the shackles of law in the realm of politics and society and the realm of the arts. And the realm of the church. And in every sphere. Then Leviticus is hardly an appealing book. Because it tells us not only is law important “in its every jot and tittle,” as our Lord said, but that law is the way of holiness.

In the Bible, the word ‘spiritual,’ one of the most abused words of our day has reference not to a higher plane of living by people but the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit working in us. Modern conceptions of spirituality are very commonly humanistic. They have reference to man’s own efforts to live on a higher level, as though spirituality per se, apart from the triune God is anything desirable. The devil, we must remember is a spiritual creation.

R.K. Harrison has said concerning Leviticus, at first it tells us that not merely is God a living, omnipotent person, but He is the essence of holiness, and man must be in conformity with His holiness. Secondly, it sets forth the sacrificial system. The first seven chapters of Leviticus are entirely concerned with the sacrifices. Then further chapters deal with related subjects. All of which are of very little interest to modern man. And yet, so much is set forth in the sacrificial system that opens up our time and our world and makes so much credible to us that we fail to see today because we don’t understand those chapters. That they are urgently important for us. They tell us the price of sin. That it is death. That God provides sacrifices of forgiveness. And they tell us what life means in ways that we do not today comprehend. They tell us, again, according to Harrison that there is no forgiveness with sins which repudiate covenant mercies. There is no antinomian forgiveness in any sphere. And finally, that no person can be his own savior or mediator. God provides us with a sacrifice, with a savior, and with the mediator.

In Leviticus 19:1, 2, we have a summary of the whole purpose of Leviticus in these words,

“1And the Lord spake unto Moses saying,

“2Speak unto all the congregation of the children of Israel and say unto them, ye shall be holy for I the Lord your God am holy.”

We have been created in God’s image, and we are to develop the implications of that image in every sphere of life and thought. And to do so, we must obey God. We must obey God’s Law.

Joseph Parker, a century ago, in commenting on Leviticus said, and I quote, “We are held in bondage today by a mistaken conception of personality. When we think of that term, we think of ourselves.” In other words, modern man when he thinks of personality defines it in terms of man. Man is a person and a personality is man expressing himself.

But we are persons only because we have been created in God’s image. We cannot develop our personality, our person-hood apart from God. Since personality is definable only in terms of the fact that we are in God’s image, then we cease progressively to be persons. We de-personalize ourselves as we depart from the faith. We have a progressive de-personalization of man. And this is what our culture is doing. It is not an accident that John Dewey denied the very concept of a person and personality, nor that the behaviorists insisted that consciousness itself was an epiphenomena which had to be dismissed and was irrelevant to psychology. Why not? If man were to be defined materialistically, the concept ‘personality’ had to be dismissed.

Duchamp was right. He saw that all these terms had to be eliminated. In fact, finally he concluded you had to draw up language. He sought to create a language without reference to meaning and to God and could not; finally abandoned the quest.

And so, modern philosophy, modern psychology do not deal with the concept of personality. They are unwilling to confront it. What does it mean to be a person? What is a person? They now use consciousness as a term, and they are not as strict as they were in the 20s when, in the 20s and in the 30s they abandoned the term. The popularity of Freud in the 30s led to its reintroduction, although Freud himself had a totally materialistic account of it. But we are persons only because we are in God’s image. And we cannot develop as persons apart from God and His Law, His Spirit.

The slogan of the 60s and early 70s was, “I want to be me,” which was really a denial of person hood. Since man is nothing in and of himself, he is a creation of God, or the creature of God. And man can only be a true person in Christ. To not deny God therefore, is to deny ourselves. Dewey was thus very logical. Having denied God, he had to deny man as a person.

The shorter catechism asks the question, “How did God create man?” And the answer is, “God created man male and female after his image in knowledge, righteousness and holiness with dominion over the creatures.” Man cannot develop his person hood except in terms of God and His {?} Word. Even as God separated man from the dust of the earth to make man a living soul, so God summons covenant man in Leviticus to separate himself to the covenant Lord and to become holy even as God Himself is holy. The law or justice of God is the way therefore of holiness. Thus Leviticus, while superficially a dull book from the perspective of modern man, is a book, to borrow a title from a modern writer, on How to Be a Real Person. Because only God through His word can define what is a person. It is to be defined in terms of Himself and in terms of faithfulness to His nature as set forth in His Law word. It is to put on the communicable attributes of God: knowledge, righteousness, holiness and dominion. Let us pray.

Oh Lord, Thy Word is Truth, and Thy Word is a light and a lamp for our feet and for our way. Make us ever joyful in Thy Word that we may grow in terms of it. That we may by Thy grace become strong persons in Thy kingdom, instruments of Thy justice to the ends of the earth and of Thy redeeming power. Bless us to this purpose, in Christ’s name. Amen.

Are there any questions now, about our lesson?

Yes.

[Questioner] As I recall, {?} Freud considered himself the new Moses. And wanted to separate all his patients from any rules whatever.

[Rushdoony] Yes, ah, Freud regarded himself as the culminating leader of Humanism. He said the three great, ah, prophets and leaders of Humanism were Copernicus, Darwin and himself. He also said, in a sense that he was also the destroyer of Humanism. Because he had shown man that he was nothing.

Now, he made Moses, in his book about Moses, to be an alien; a non-Jew. And in a sense said, “I am the true Moses, who has come to say there is no law, and there is no meaning, and there is no truth and there is no future.” In his correspondence, I believe with Einstein, about world peace and the future, what he said was, and he indicated, this was his prophetic message, “There is no hope for man in the future, man will not have peace. Man will destroy himself because he is governed by the will to death.”

So, ah, Freud, I’ve, I’ve always had a certain admiration for him because among the Humanists, he’s the one who saw the logical end of their thinking. He saw it as death. And he believed that that’s all there was for man, once man awakened from the dreams and myths of religion.

Any other questions or comments?

It’s not surprising, by the way, that, uh, you have the kind of thinking that Freud represented. When you realize how man of the modern philosophers and psychotherapists, theoreticians of psychiatry, and, ah, psychoanalysis and the like have been mental cases, have done time in an institution, have gone mad, have been subject to all kinds of delusions.

Yes.

[Questioner] Well there is recently a rash of comment about Freud [cough] stressing his anti Christian

[Rushdoony] Yes, and Freud made it clear that, ah, his purpose was to reduce guilt to a medical problem, a scientific question, and thereby eliminate the need for religion and religious practitioners. He said that until the problem of guilt was dealt with scientifically, men no matter what you said to disprove God would still go to a religious practitioner because guilt would drive them there.

Yes.

[Questioner] I couldn’t help but think or reflect on the fact when you made the comment that when we depart from God, we de-personalize ourselves. That we see this in every aspect of society today, from every level of government, to business, to professions, and even in personal relationships where man through his being controlled by a system and organization in the world today has de-personalized himself from even his closest contacts to the extent that we have become numbers, so to speak, instead of people.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Another interesting fact in this whole, uh, picture, which we’ll be dealing with in a couple of months, that I can’t resist in terms of our present discussion to throw it out, Freud having said that guilt is the key problem which keeps Christianity alive and any of the advanced religions had to be rendered a scientific problem. What he did was to substitute the, ah, psychiatric couch for the confessional. Historically, up to this century, all churches stressed the necessity for confession of sin in some form. Now, even among the Catholics it’s beginning to disappear--which tells you what a disaster we are facing in the field of Christian faith. In that, what Freud pinpointed, this thing that was keeping men in the churches, because, or going to the churches, or going to the faith, because sin had to be dealt with. The churches are now forgetting about it. Sweetness and light and a Gospel of Love is sweeping one church after another, where the fact of sin, atonement, confession, restitution and so on, are all neglected. But, I’m jumping ahead in about two months as we deal with the sacrificial system, or sinner, we’ll be deeply involved with what Leviticus has to say about those key problems--things that we have simply forgotten about because we haven’t studied Leviticus carefully.

Any other questions or comments?

Well, if not, let us bow our heads in prayer. Oh Lord our God how great and marvelous Thou art. And Thy ways perfect. All-wise, and all-merciful. Teach us so to walk in faithfulness to Thee that we may be that which Thou has called us to be, more than conquerors in Christ. Grant that, oh, Lord, Thy knowledge, Thy justice cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. And make us instruments in that {?} in that kingdom. 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.