Leviticus; The Law of Holiness and Grace

Jubilee and the Covenant I

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Genre: Lessons with Q & A

Lesson: 73

Track: 73

Dictation Name: RR172AN73

Date: Early 70s

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, oh Lord, in the morning will I direct my prayer unto Thee and will look up.

Let us pray.

Almighty God our Heavenly Father, we rejoice in the abundance of Thy blessings. Indeed, they are new every morning. Thou hast guided us all the days of our life and hast been good to us who so often cannot be good to ourselves. And we praise Thee for Thy providential care. Bless us in this joyful season. Make us mindful of how rich we are in Christ. Prosper our work, we beseech Thee. Watch over our loved ones, wherever they are, and draw them ever-closer to Thee and make them Thy servants. Bless us now by Thy Word and by Thy Spirit, in Christ’s name. Amen.

Our text this morning is Leviticus 26:1, 2. Our subject, “Jubilee and Covenant.” “Jubilee and Covenant,” Leviticus 26: 1, 2:

“1 Ye shall make you no idols nor graven images, neither rear you up a standing image, neither shall ye set up any image of stone in your land, to bow down unto it: for I am the Lord your God.

2 Ye shall keep my Sabbaths, and reverence my sanctuary: I am the Lord.”

Many modern scholars view the Pentateuch, or the five books of Moses as a collection of documents brought together rather haphazardly, and so they fail to see its unity. They miss the necessary relationship between the laws and they see nothing of the total inter-relationship between one part of the law and another.

One scholar, Wenham, has cited the meaning of these first two verses as the necessary consequence of obedience and disobedience to the Jubilee Law. That here, in a nutshell, the issue is stated. And he titles these two verses, “The Fundamentals of the Law;” “The Fundamentals of the Law.”

We are summoned out of idolatry and into the keeping of God’s rest, which means that we take hands off our lives and rest in the Lord. We have confidence that it is not our fretting, not our worrying that accomplishes anything but the purposes of God. In verse 1 of these two verses, idolatry is forbidden.

The word for idols here, ‘elalim’, or ‘elilim,’ means “things of naught,” worshiping nothingness. Anything that we worship apart from God is a thing of nothingness. If we worship the works of men’s hands, if we worship our own power, the power of the State, of armament, we worship things of nothingness. Several varieties of images, or pillar or obelisks are cited. But we do not here have a prohibition of sculpture, but of idolatry because the key fact is that we are not to bow down unto them. There can be no manufacture or erection of any such image for religious devotion.

In verse 2, the Sabbath is required. The reference is, as should be apparent from our study of the Jubilee, to more than one day in seven. It refers to the Sabbath Years and to the Jubilee as well. And this is the precondition for reverence for God’s sanctuary.

Now, these two verses are the preface to the rest of Leviticus 26 which promises blessings for obedience and judgments for disobedience. The German scholar of the last century, Langey, commented, “That the bearing of God toward Israel was an impartial bearing, which could only be obscured through the idea of a national god is proved even by our section with its threatenings in presence with the development of the history of Israel itself. They have been brought out of Egypt and Canaan must become their land. But when they apostatize, they must lose Canaan and be scattered among the heathen. Not only the impartiality indeed, but the jealousy of Jehovah must be made manifest in this: the idea or key of the whole history and destiny of Israel is vengeance of the covenant. The people could fall so low because they stood so high, because they were the first fruits, the first-born son, the favorite of God. But for this reason especially, the promise of their restoration is bound up with the prophesy of their curse.”

Now, Langey put his finger on a key fact that people like to downplay now: vengeance of the covenant. God makes clear that whether Israel or the Church or any person departs from His covenant, the vengeance of the covenant will be operative. This is why the dispensationalists are so very, very wrong—horribly wrong! Because they believe that the promises are unconditional, and the whole of Leviticus 26 as all of the law and the prophets makes clear the conditional aspect of it.

Now, we cannot have a disobedience to the Law and blessing and prosperity. This is a fact that is being recognized by both Christians and Jews of late. The Jewish Jubilee Year, according to the computation of a few Orthodox scholars, ended in 1987, when Yom Kippur was celebrated. It is interesting that some of the Orthodox Jews in Israel attempted to keep a Jubilee, but they lost faith and at the last solicited funds from American Jews to pay the farmers who kept the Jubilee to do so. But at least they recognized that in some fashion the law had to be kept.

The law says in verse 2, “ye shall reverence my sanctuary.” The Hebrew word here which is translated as reverence can mean, and basically means “to fear.” Fear my sanctuary. And this is important to note, because we have soft-pedaled the word reverence or revere, which once very closely was allied to fear.

Modern man sees a church as a man-made building established and built by a congregation of men. And this is a man-centered and a Humanistic view. God’s sanctuaries are witnesses to His presence on His earth among His covenant people. To build a church is thus to establish the visible evidence that God will bless or curse a people in terms of their obedience or disobedience. It is a witness to His Lordship, to His ownership of the world and of us. It is an invocation of blessings or curses as the case may be. So building a church, establishing a church in any fashion is a very serious matter. And the law here says first ye shall keep my sabbaths, which means to acknowledge God’s government, ownership and Law. It means recognizing that the conditions of our existence and prosperity are God-ordained, that we cannot prosper apart from Him. We worship, then, no other gods. Only God and His Law govern us. For, to set up other laws is a form of idolatry.

Men make idols, of course, of their own minds, of their wills and laws. And then they ask other men to bow down to them. Rousseau so persuaded himself that he was virtue incarnate that he went so far on one occasion as to say that if anyone doubted that he was virtuous, they should be hanged. Now that of course, is consummate idolatry.

Second, we are commanded to fear God’s sanctuary, that is, the fact of His presence therein by His Word and Spirit.

Modern men fear the State very commonly and with good reason, given its increasing tyranny. The power of God, however, far outweighs the power of the State, and the power of God has a universal and eternal sway. Collin Dalglish therefore said of these two verses that they are the essence of the whole law because here, everything in Leviticus up to the Jubilee, and everything beyond in Leviticus is summed up. Thus, we must say that verses 1 and 2 require far more than modern sabbitarianism. (They are hostile, moreover, to formalism. For a man to allow his land to rest during the seventh year, and himself to rest, meant that his trust in God is a very active one.)

And yet, remember I began by saying many scholars refuse to see the law as anything but a helter-skelter collection put together by a variety of different men. And some have said that there is no special relationship between one part and another and that these two verses, according to some, are out of place; have no relationship to what goes before or after. But Morgan was wiser in saying, “The great promises show how conditions of well-being are ever entirely dependent on obedience to the government of God.” In the synagogue lectionary, these two verses were read together with all of Leviticus 25.

Now these two verses were once very important to the faith and they had a hold on believers which is now lacking. The reason is very easy to discover. The most important thing now to the Church is the unity of believers, the unity of churches, ecumenicity. Basic to all of this is the idea of peace and unity among men, whereas for scripture it is peace and community with God—a very different thing. And that requires that we live according to His Law-Word with all men.

In terms of the Bible, idolatry is any effort to give preeminence to anything above God, including any doctrine of community, any person, any institution or law, any ecumenicity, any idea of a human unity will be, in terms of God’s Law, idolatry. For the Bible, all society, or all community is a covenant; a covenant with God. It is either a covenant with God in terms of His grace and law, or it is an anti-God covenant. It is an idolatrous one.

The modern age began with a social contract theory, which is a humanistic rendering of the covenant doctrine. It says that the social contract is between men, not between God and man, and this is a very important deviation. Now, contemporary political thought denies the validity of the social contract as a historical fact among primitive men. But they do believe with the social contract theorists, that men create their political order in terms of their needs and hopes, that it is a humanistic contract. The only other major non-Christian political theory is derived from Aristotle. And Aristotle held that man is a political animal, so that he does not establish community, he is born into it, just as a wolf is born into a pack. It’s a natural, a biological fact. And these two ideas have had a tension and conflict in the modern age that men form, humanistically, a social contract, or that men are simply born into it like animals are born into a pack or a litter.

However, these two views and the basic thinkers here are Aristotle and John Locke, are beginning to coalesce. The John Locke view was, and I quote from Locke, “All power given is given with trust for the attaining of an end being limited by that end, whenever that end is manifestly neglected or opposed, the trust must necessarily be forfeited and the power devolve into the hands of those who gave it.” But as I indicated, in recent years, these two theories, the biological and the humanistic social contract have merged. The force of the Aristotelian view has been used to promote doctrines of historical inevitability; most notably, Marxism. At the same time (and Marxism is a perfect synthesis of the two), the elite rulers after Rousseau, it is held, expressed the general will of the social contract so that the elite rulers are a manifestation of the general will and the incarnation of that general will. So these two humanistic views have come into focus and they represent a radical form of tyranny.

Only in the doctrine of the covenant is there freedom for man. Man cannot be the source of law—God alone is the Lord, or sovereign. And until men in their politics as well as in their theology again become covenantal, they are going to be subjected to the humanistic doctrines of the general will tied in with man as biologically necessitated. And the result will be Marxism will continue its sway. Marxism has an inevitability to men who do not hold to the biblical doctrine. This is why the academic community in varying degrees has given ascent to the various tenets of Marxism without openly becoming communist. It is inevitable that this be true. And we must say that those who are doing it are more logical than those who are still holding to conservative doctrines, because if you abandon the doctrine of the covenant, the only viable alternatives are the social contract theory, and Aristotle’s man-as-a-political-animal, now brought together in Marxism. How can you resist that apart from a faith in a supernatural God whose law and whose covenant must govern all things?

Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God, we give thanks unto Thee that Thy Word speaks so plainly. Oh Lord, we have blinded ourselves to Thy Word and we have been ready to follow the ungodly when we step outside of the church. Teach us in every sphere of life to think in terms of Thy Word. Deliver us into the freedom of the covenant, we beseech Thee. In Christ’s name, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

Yes.

[Audience] Well, the result of following this man-made paradise idea is beginning to fall down.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] It’s beginning to collapse on itself.

[Rushdoony] Yes, and we’ve never had a more opportune time to present the biblical doctrine. The Chinese word for crisis is a beautiful one, “dangerous opportunity.” And this is a time of dangerous opportunity. The hostility to the biblical position will never be greater, because they will see the threat of it more clearly than they ever have. But never before is the biblical doctrine more necessary.

Yes.

[Audience] …an observation. I couldn’t help think while you were talking of the events in Washington this past week, signing of the INF Treaty, an indication of a desire for salvation in human covenant.

[Rushdoony] Yes, and it is specifically forbidden in scripture to make any treaties or alliances with ungodly peoples, because when you do it with a person of another religion, you are forgetting that words, ideas, doctrines, laws, have different meanings in different cultural and religious contexts. So to make a treaty with someone of another faith is idolatry, according to the Bible, because you are in effect saying we’re going to worship their gods by acknowledging the validity of their kind of thinking and we’re going to trust in their kind of thinking, which means you’ve abandoned the truth of your own. And you’re saying there is another truth than that which we have affirmed and we’re going to respect it. So every treaty with someone who does not believe in the God of scripture is declared throughout the Bible by the prophets as well as by the Law to be an extreme form of idolatry.

Yes.

[Audience] When Christ said be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers, this may be what He was referring to.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

Any other questions or comments? Yes, Bill.

[Bill] It seems like within Christendom itself, there seems to be almost a, maybe, I’m trying to think how to explain it best, but it seems like Christendom itself is going in two different directions as far as what they believe and their views on the INF Treaty and everything, it doesn’t seem like there’s as much middle ground any more.

[Rushdoony] No, what we are seeing is the Church is going in two different directions. One in the direction of humanism—all-out Humanism and the other a feeble, sometimes return to the whole Word of God.

An age of crisis is an age of polarization. It’s when men fear polarization the most because they recognize that it’s a time of choice and they don’t want to make a choice.

Any other…

Yes.

[Audience] {?} comment indirectly of the INF Treaty centering on the people who’d attended an embassy party for the Soviets and the conclusion was that to condone evil is evil. To bond with evil is evil. To ignore evil is evil. And that’s essentially, this is Satanism.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes, it is. These things that are going on in Washington are not religiously neutral. There is no neutrality. They represent a clear-cut choice of very evil and satanic options.

Incidentally, did any of you see the article by the former editor of the Indianapolis paper, on Reagan in National Review?

[Audience] Stan Evans.

[Rushdoony] Stan Evans’ satire on Reagan; very choice and with a tremendous point. Because while he’s ridiculing everything that they’re doing, he is calling attention that in their bumbling way, they are following a satanic course.

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

Our God, we thank Thee for Thy Word. It is indeed a light upon our way. Grant that we walk in that light, and by Thy Spirit become more than conquerors in Christ. 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.