Leviticus; The Law of Holiness and Grace

The Meaning of Firstfruits

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Genre: Lessons with Q & A

Lesson: 57

Track: 57

Dictation Name: RR172AE57

Date: Early 70s

Let us worship God. Thus saith the Lord, ye shall seek me and find me when ye shall search for me with all your heart. Jesus said blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we come to Thee that we might be filled, for we hunger and thirst after righteousness, after Thy justice. We pray Lord that in a world that is torn apart by the injustices of men, Thy truth and Thy justice may speedily prevail. We thank Thee that Thy kingdom rules over all, that Thy holy purpose shall be accomplished, and that the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. Make us faithful in Thy service, confident in Thy Word, and more than conquerors through Christ. In His name we pray, amen.

Our scripture is from Leviticus 23:9-14, and our subject, “The Meaning of the Firstfruits.” Leviticus 23:9-14:

“9 And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying,

10 Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, when ye come into the land which I give unto you, and shall reap the harvest thereof, then ye shall bring a sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest unto the priest:

11 And he shall wave the sheaf before the Lord, to be accepted for you: on the morrow after the Sabbath the priest shall wave it.

12 And ye shall offer that day when ye wave the sheaf an he lamb without blemish of the first year for a burnt offering unto the Lord.

13 And the meat offering thereof shall be two tenth deals of fine flour mingled with oil, an offering made by fire unto the Lord for a sweet savour: and the drink offering thereof shall be of wine, the fourth part of an hin.

14 And ye shall eat neither bread, nor parched corn, nor green ears, until the selfsame day that ye have brought an offering unto your God: it shall be a statute forever throughout your generations in all your dwellings.”

These verses refer to the waiving of the omer or sheath, which was held on the sixteenth day of the month Nisan. The word ‘omer’ in Exodus 16:36, was defined as a tenth of an ephah, and an omer was a dry measure, about 6 ¼ pints, and an ephah about 7 ½ gallons English measures. The sheaths usually were of barley, which was the first grain to ripen. It was waved before the altar from side-to-side and up and down. Then a portion was burned on the altar and the rest given to the priests as food.

In verse 13 there is a reference to two tenth deals of fine flour, which is about 14 pints English measure, and the fourth part of an hin which is 2 ½ pints.

The prohibition in verse 14 concerning eating of the grain had reference to the new harvest. The old grain or flour could be eaten.

The Law here distinguishes between three types of offering:

         Firstfruits

         Tithes

         Gifts

The tithe is God’s tax and gifts are offerings beyond the tithe. And the firstfruits was the first part of the tithe. God got not the left-overs, but what came off the top—the first.

The three great annual feasts were

         The Passover

         The Feast of Weeks

         Tabernacles

All three were harvest festivals. They were signs of God’s ingathering of the peoples.

The waving of the omer is also known as the Feast of Unleavened Bread. It is a part of the sacred calendar. All time in the Bible is God-centered.

Now, last week we saw that we do not understand the meaning of the Sabbath because in modern world, we have buried everything, the meaning of things, because the close relationship is no longer there. The relationship is inescapable still between work and survival. Without work, the world would soon be reduced to famine and hunger—to nothing. But man, in antiquity could see this relationship. He could see that if he did not work, there would be no harvest. The relationship was a close and an immediate one. And that’s why the Sabbath was an act of faith. You had to trust God that if you rested so many days a year, and one year in seven, God’s provision would still take care of you.

Well, similarly, we have lost (especially in those Western countries that have today a great deal of prosperity), the meaning of time. And so we no longer have a respect for time. Time means progression. It means development. It means growth. These are harvest festivals. They celebrate the fact that work has produced results after a period of time so that a harvest is possible; an elementary fact, but an important one, because the goal of Man apart from God is to break that association, to arrest time. The Tower of Babel—every Statist effort since then has been to arrest time.

To say that a state, by fiat legislation is going to make it unnecessary for men to work, that they can provide by acts of state, cradle-to-grave security and provisions for all people, and what they are doing everywhere is progressively to penalize work, to penalize enterprise, and to destroy the relationship between time and growth, time and advance, time and responsibility. So that every dream man has had, Marxist dream, the Great Society, the Great Community, is a dream that is anti-time. And the hostility to time is marked on the parts of these people because they are hostile to growth. They believe that once they get in power, they will be able to, by their fiat word, create the perfect order; solve all problems.

I mentioned last week in some detail the relationship between work and survival. Brings to mind an illustration I’ve used again and again and I think it sums up the Modern Age more than any other thing that’s ever occurred.

When they were rioting, the students at Berkley in the early 60s, one reporter—not a Conservative—questioned a group of these radical students who were calling for a recognition of the Triple Revolution and the fact that work was no longer necessary, and it was a Capitalistic plot to keep people working and to educate for work when the university should be turned into a place where people were educated for permanent leisure, to enjoy life with perfect and total freedom. And the startled reporter asked a question. “No work? What about food?” And the one young woman looked at him haughtily and with disdain said, “Food is.”

Now, that sums up the goal of Statism, the goal of Humanism. It believes in a world where things just are. Ortega y Gasset in Revolt of the Masses spoke of the new barbarians who took for granted all the culture and all the work of the past as though, like the air, it was a part of the natural environment and would not disappear.

That’s why these great festivals are Harvest Festivals. They are Sabbaths as well, and they celebrate work accomplished. That’s life under God: you work and there is a harvest. No work, no harvest; no work, no Sabbath, no work, no life. And we’ve broken that relationship. We’ve become so sophisticated we cannot read what scripture teaches us and understand any more. A harvest makes life possible. “Man cannot live by bread alone,” we are told both by Moses and by our Lord. But he cannot live without bread. He is a creature. Hence, there must be work. Hence, there must be a harvest. And the harvest must be consecrated to God to set forth our resolve to live for Him and under Him, to recognize that His conditions of life are the conditions of life; anything else is death. This is why Statism spells the death of Man. It goes against the provisions of God.

The presentation of the sheath recognized work as God-honoring and of what God required of us, so you took the firstfruits of the harvest and the priest waved it before the altar to say ‘Thy people have worked, and Thy people shall continue to work until Thy kingdom comes and Thy will is done on earth as it is in Heaven.’

God is the sustainer of all things. The earth and the fullness therefore are the Lord’s and man can take nothing for granted, and he is guilty of trespass if he does; hence, this festival. Hence, the fact that the great festivals of the Bible are Harvest Festivals—they honor work, something we’ve lost sight of, lost the meaning of.

And today, labor is seeing that having helped create a kind of order, and your modern-style manufacturer having helped create a Statist order by being ready to accept subsidies and promote them. Both capital and labor are finding that what they represent is obsolete. They’re too work-oriented. And Congress has no respect for work. And so, we are destroying work—destroying it. And this is evil.

In the New Testament, these verses are seen as very important in their implications. They are referred to again and again. Paul, in I Corinthians 15:20 tells us that Christ is the firstfruits of them that slept, and that by His victory, He sets for the goal of God’s harvest, the total victory of His people over sin and death and a new creation. We are God’s new humanity in Christ and His harvest is to culminate in a new creation for the new humanity, because Christ is holy, we should be holy. We are members of him, and we have the firstfruits of the Spirit, Romans 8:23 tells us. We are a privileged people if we should but know it.

Furthermore, James, in James 1:18 says, “Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.” So, Jesus Christ in God the Father, God the Spirit, have given us a new life to make us a kind of firstfruits of His creation. We have been reborn by the Word of Truth. Now, the reference is to Genesis 1:26-28 where God declares, “… Let us make man in our image … and let [give him] dominion,” dominion over all things, to subdue the earth, and to exercise dominion over it. So we have been recreated in the image of God, to exercise dominion to work. This is why the reference is to the Harvest Festival.

But in Genesis 3:5, we have a counter-offer of Satan, who says the truth has been suppressed. So now, we have a different definition of the truth. The truth is what Man says it is—ye shall be as God, knowing, determining for yourself what is good and evil, what is right and wrong, what is law and what is not law.

But James tells us, we now have a different definition of truth, and the truth is not our construct, but every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God, and it is remaking us. We’ve been re-born in terms of that truth and we are being reconstructed day by day in terms of that word of truth. So this means that Man is now under the Law of God. This law, which now governs the redeemed man, is the expression of the nature and the being of the triune God, and of our nature as we grow in grace and knowledge. It is now for us, as James says, “the perfect law of liberty.” We are now in harmony with life, as I Peter 1:23-25 says:

“23 Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth forever.

24For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away:

25 But the word of the Lord endureth forever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you. “

Both Paul and James tell us that Christians are the firstfruits whom all creation will follow, including the ground beneath our feet. God, who created all things, ordained that Christ and His people, a new humanity, should lead the way to the rebirth and the renewal of all things so that the very creation around us groans and travails, waiting for that fullness to be ushered in by the working of the Sons of God.

Now this is not a mystical vision of the future, it is God’s work of redeeming grace and our response of faithfulness, our response to His every word. And it leads to a great conclusion: a cosmic renewal. The heavens and the earth are made new.

When James 1:18 tells us that we are to be “the firstfruits of His creatures,” the word ‘creatures’ there in the original has reference to all God’s created things apart from man. All creation is going to follow us in this renewal. And God’s purpose is cosmic, not merely man-centered. But because man is created in God’s image, he is the starting point—in Christ—of this new creation. And all these, and the many, many references in the New Testament to the offering of the sheaves, they represent the necessity of seeing God as the Lord and provider, the necessity of a change of all things, a necessity of work, that a harvest may be reaped. It tells us also that in Christ we ourselves become the firstfruits, the required offering to the triune God and it makes clear that our redemption is the beginning of the regeneration of all things. In Revelation 14:4, the redeemed are again called, with reference to the firstfruits. This ritual—the firstfruits unto God and to the Lamb, the firstfruits unto God and to the Lamb.

In Revelation 21 through the end of Revelation 22, we have the conclusion and the regeneration of the entire cosmos into conformity to God and the Word of Truth. This is the meaning of time. It is a progression. It requires work. It requires development and growth so that we may reap the harvest.

The modern world is a no-growth world. No growth in economics, zero growth and minus zero in population; in one area after another, no growth, no time. Let us arrest time; go to, we will make us a city in which time will be arrested, and God brings judgment and confusion on every such dream.

Let us pray.

We thank Thee, our Father, that Thou hast begotten us through the Word of Truth. Make us strong in Thy Word, that we may apply Thy Word to every area of life and thought and bring all things into conformity to Christ. Teach us to work, and to rejoice in work, knowing this is our life and our calling. This is Thine appointment for us. Call us out from the Babylon of no growth and confound the babylons of this world, and establish Thy kingdom, Thy power and glory in and through us. In Christ’s name we pray, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

Yes.

[Audience] You pointed out how the believers today are called the firstfruits (or a kind of firstfruits) in the New Testament. Would there also be a connection between uh, the firstfruits practice of the Old Testament with some application to tithing of our income today?

[Rushdoony] Yes, the tithe is a firstfruit also. So in one area after another, it has a very real application and the firstfruit cannot be just of our time or our harvest, but of every aspect of our life. God has priority. That’s what it means.

Any other questions?

Yes.

[Audience] Well, there’s really been a closing off of the idea of the future.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] The actuarial statistics of Social Security assure us that it will collapse, and yet there’s no provision made against it. Uh, there are people who protest against nuclear power and also protest against having the utility rates raised. Uh, they’re protested against the S.S. {?}, the Concorde and the others. They said they’re going to destroy the universe or something. And the {?} is running out in 5- or 6- or 7-years. But mainly, there’s a cut-off against the future. A zero population coupled with Social Security, for instance, means an over-supply of old people and an under-supply of young people, yet nobody seems to be bothered.

[Rushdoony] Very true. They don’t think in terms of the future at all. When men depart from God, they depart from the future. They…

[Audience] They lose faith in the future.

[Rushdoony] They lose faith in the future. They don’t want to think about it. They become existentialists. Life is an endless moment: the present. And so they live in terms of it. They don’t want to think about consequences. Somehow, the Government is going to take care of everything tomorrow.

[Audience] Well, this happened to the Jewish people when they were expelled from their area. Then they began, I noticed, they paid no attention to their great-great grandfathers, nor did they talk much about the future. They, uh, sort of had {?} they referred to their parents and to their children. That’s it. Now that’s a very short span.

[Rushdoony] Yes, and that is in violation of what has made for their survival: the family. And that is also becoming commonplace in every group everywhere. That was what destroyed the great civilization that Ancient Persia was. They became present-oriented, not family-oriented; in fact they became militantly anti-family. The Greeks and the Romans took the same attitude, and again and again in civilization, this present-orientation; this blocking out of the future has had that kind of impact.

For one thing, you begin to be hostile to the aged because you don’t like to be reminded of age. Then, death and dying—you conceal that. When you realize that in many times in civilization, in times of health, a deathbed was an occasion of great family reunion. And contrary to the present tendency, it was regarded as a very sad thing if you died suddenly, no matter how great the pain, if you died slowly, it gave you an opportunity to say goodbye to your friends, to give counsel to your children and your grandchildren, and it was a major occasion—a major occasion. There’ve been one or two books written about deathbeds, their role in society at one time and their disappearance. It used to be that many Catholic and Protestant books and many Jewish teaching dealt with the sayings of the old when they were dying or when they faced death because it was considered very important. It was a transmission; it was a blessing of the generation to come and that’s all gone. Put them away, hide them, because let us not be reminded of the future we face. So we have no future when we take that attitude.

Yes.

[Audience] Ah, apropos of that, I saw a slogan on a t-shirt that {?} … slogan was “future isn’t what it used to be.”

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes, that’s very good! No, under Humanism, the future isn’t what it used to be. There is no New Jerusalem down the road, and it is interesting that whereas a great deal of utopian thinking used to exist, now when men write about the future, it’s like a Brave New World and 1984 by George Orwell. They see it as a horror. And then the key of course is what Orwell did with the book. He turned 1948 around to get his title, 1984. He was saying this is the future, the horror we have now—magnified.

[Audience] Well, Orwell’s great defect was that he had no faith.

[Rushdoony] Yes, exactly. One scholar, in writing an analysis of the life and thinking of Orwell, said of all modern writers, he was the most theologically oriented because everything was religiously geared, but without faith in God. So that he concluded by saying, “Orwell has been more religious and more theological than most of the well-known theologians of this century.” And yet, he was the one who professed no faith.

Yes.

[Audience] Not to get off the subject, there were three great harvests that you mentioned that the ancient Israelites celebrated: The Passover, The Tabernacles, and The Firstfruits. I can see the application to today of Passover, with the Lord’s Supper and Easter,

[Rushdoony] Atonement.

[Audience] …Atonement, and could you elaborate on the other two? Of Tabernacles and harvests?

[Rushdoony] Well, Firstfruits we’ve dealt with today and Tabernacles in gathering, the great in-gathering of all the peoples rejoicing together.

Well, if there are no further questions or comments, let us bow our heads now in prayer.

Our Lord and our God, we thank Thee that we have a future in Christ; that time for us brings us only closer to the realization of our harvest, of Thy kingdom, and of our great Sabbath. We thank Thee, our Father, for Thy grace. 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.