Leviticus; The Law of Holiness and Grace

Jubilee and the Covenant IV

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Genre: Lessons with Q & A

Lesson: 76

Track: 76

Dictation Name: RR172AP76

Date: Early 70s

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

Oh Lord our God unto whom all glory and honor belongeth, we come into Thy presence rejoicing in Thy mercies and blessings. We thank Thee that the government is upon Thy shoulders. We thank Thee that all things move in terms of Thy sovereign purpose, and the ends of the earth shall know that Thou art God. Make us ever joyful in Thy Word and by Thy Spirit more than conquerors. Bless us now by Thy Word and by Thy Spirit, and grant that we may behold wondrous things out of Thy Law and may be empowered to hear and to obey. In Christ’s name, amen.

Our scripture is Leviticus 26:40-46. Our subject, “The Jubilee and Covenant,” our fourth study of “Jubilee and Covenant.” Leviticus 26:40-46:

“40 If they shall confess their iniquity, and the iniquity of their fathers, with their trespass which they trespassed against me, and that also they have walked contrary unto me;

41 And that I also have walked contrary unto them, and have brought them into the land of their enemies; if then their uncircumcised hearts be humbled, and they then accept of the punishment of their iniquity:

42 Then will I remember my covenant with Jacob, and also my covenant with Isaac, and also my covenant with Abraham will I remember; and I will remember the land.

43 The land also shall be left of them, and shall enjoy her sabbaths, while she lieth desolate without them: and they shall accept of the punishment of their iniquity: because, even because they despised my judgments, and because their soul abhorred my statutes.

44 And yet for all that, when they be in the land of their enemies, I will not cast them away, neither will I abhor them, to destroy them utterly, and to break my covenant with them: for I am the Lord their God.

45 But I will for their sakes remember the covenant of their ancestors, whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the heathen, that I might be their God: I am the Lord.

46 These are the statutes and judgments and laws, which the Lord made between him and the children of Israel in Mount Sinai by the hand of Moses.”

The Bible has many subtle nuances, and they deserve very careful attention. Our text today has reference to repentance and restoration into the covenant. The central requirement is clearly stated: it is a confession of sins. There are, however, certain very important aspects to this confession which have been routinely neglected and are not commented upon by the commentators.

The first and foremost requirement is (in verse 40), that there must be a confession of their own sins. There can be no blaming of the past. To confess primarily, or essentially, the sins of ones ancestors, parents, or forbearers is no confession at all. As a result of Freudianism and virtually all modern psychologies, today confession is to confess the sins of our forbearers. This is what it means to go to a psychiatrist. It is to go to a confessional. And what do you do? You confess the sin of your spouse or of your parents, or of your environment or your nanny, or whatever the case may be—of someone else. That’s the essence of the Freudian confessional. It is hypocrisy, it is Phariseeism, it is the evasion of personal responsibility and personal guilt. But in the 20th century, this is what confession is about. It is a very common practice, personally and collectively, to place the guilt that is ours upon our forbearers, so the problem is seen as the guilt of our colonial forbearers for creating national problems; or our slave-owning ancestors if we have them or factory operators in our past. And so on and on.

Both nationally and personally, the peoples of the 20th century see the moral stance as one which is very easily attained and is not a moral stance, it is Phariseeism. It means to lay all our sins on our past, on our forbearers.

But this is not confession. It is sin. So God makes it clear there can be no restoration by such false confession. The primary and essential confession of each generation or person must be of its own sins. Anything else is sin compounded.

Then second, only when we have confessed our sins can we confess the sins of our fathers, because only then are we prepared to rectify those things. Moreover, we can confess the sin of our forbearers if we recognize them to be our present sins also (however altered therefore) may be.

James Moffett, in his translation of these verses, rendered this sin common to the Israelites before their time and the presently-standing generation in these words: Their life of defiance against me, for they have walked contrary to me. In other words, he says there has been a persistent defiance of the will of God. This has been in the previous generations; it is present in this generation. So that if we confess the sins of our forbearers, it is to say that we are a party to them. In other words, our confession of the sins of our forbearers required that we identify ourselves with them, that we have been in indifference, or defiance to God. All particular varieties of sins are summed up in this fact: they mean indifference to, or defiance of God. And He never allows this to be forgotten. So that we can never confess the sins of the past unless we first confess ours and recognize that we are fully a party to them. Indeed, that we compound them.

Then third, there is no real break between this confession in verse 41, which is a continuation. It is a continuation of the confession because it is the recognition that God has walked contrary to, or in defiance of, a faithless people and that His judgments have led them into captivity. It is His purpose to humble them and to have them accept the judgment overtaking them. If then their uncircumcised heart be humbled, and they then accept of the punishment of their iniquity. The fact that the people might call themselves believers means nothing if they are disobedient. In fact, as I Peter 4:17 tells us, judgment always begins at the house of God. God particularly resents the sins of those who call themselves His people and are indifferent to His Law, who feel that being God’s people is a kind of status, that God saves them to do as they please and despise His Law. The greater the blessing, the greater the curse, we are told by our Lord in Luke 12:48, and the greater the responsibility, the greater the culpability.

Thus, to confess the sins of our forbearers, according to scripture, is no easy confession. It is preceded by our own confession and it requires that we recognize that we ourselves have lived in indifference to or in defiance of God’s Law, that what there was in the past, we have compounded, we have developed even further. The particulars may be different, but the fact of indifference to or defiance of God is greater.

Then fourth, only then will God remember His covenant and also the land. “Then will I remember my covenant with Jacob and also my covenant with Isaac, and also my covenant with Abraham will I remember. And I will remember the land.” This is a very important statement. God irrevocably links His covenant with both the people and their land, with man and the earth. The world around cannot be separated from God nor from His covenant and Law and to attempt to do so is to invoke His judgment.

To reduce the purpose of God’s salvation to man’s soul alone is to deform the faith, to make it resemble a pagan mystery religion and to invoke the judgment of God. What does God say? Yes, He will remember them. If when His judgment falls, they turn to Him. But the land also shall be left of them and shall enjoy her sabbaths, while she lieth desolate without them. And they shall accept of the punishment of their iniquity because even because they despised my judgments and because their soul abhorred my statutes, thus a part of the confession of sin is the acceptance of punishment.

And today, what is taught in the churches is that if you turn to the Lord, he’s going to wipe out the punishment, He’s going to forget about the consequences. God says He will return if they confess His name and heal the land. And people forget what it means for Him to heal the land, that it is left idle for a time. The particular sins all have a particular judgment. And if we repent as a people tomorrow, it isn’t going to lead to the elimination of the vast debt that we as a people and as individuals have accumulated. It will not wipe out the false economy. It will not wipe out the implications in every sphere of our sinful course of action. So we cannot treat scripture as a fairy tale, where a magic wand eliminates consequences. The world around us, in other words, cannot be separated from God and we cannot reduce the meaning of scripture to the salvation of our souls alone.

Even though men repent, God remembers, we are told in verse 43, His covenant with them, but the consequences of their sin must run its course. And their captivity and the necessary sabbaths of the land must follow.

God does not say because all is forgiven, all is forgotten. Now God does, in eternity, wipe out, and the remembrance of our sins is gone. Rather He declares to us here in time because all is forgiven, after judgment there shall be mercy. But there shall be judgment. In this instance, the land shall have its rest. In any case, while God’s atoning grace wipes away the guilt of sin, it does not remove the consequences of our sin. If we destroy our sight by our sin, forgiveness will place us in God’s grace, but it will not restore our eyesight to us. And so in this instance, the land must have its sabbath. Our repentance will not remove that necessity, but it will give us God’s mercy and grace. What antinomianism does is not only to set aside God’s Law but it also disregards the necessary penalties of the Law for lawlessness.

Then next we must say that God, for all that, is mindful of His repentant people, even as they are under judgment. And yet for all that, when they be in the land of their enemies, “I will not cast them away, neither will I abhor them to destroy them utterly and to break my covenant with them, for I am the Lord, their God.” They may be in the hands of, and in the land of their enemies, but even while the penalties continue, so also His covenant mercy continues. He does not annihilate or destroy them completely, however much they deserved it. Jeremiah, in Lamentations 3:22-27, caught the meaning of this passage and expressed it, as he described the horror of the fall of Jerusalem, the fire, the pillaging, the rape, the deaths, and then said, “It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning, and great is Thy faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, saith my soul, therefore will I hope in Him. The Lord is good unto all them that wait upon Him, to the soul that seeketh Him. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord. It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.”

There is here of course, a grim and inevitable logic. When a people profane God’s covenant, His earth and themselves, God treats them as profane. They are cast out and trodden under foot of men, as our Lord said in Matthew 5:13. The profane are profaned. Both the people and the land must be resanctified. They must become holy. And this requires time and faithfulness. And this is an aspect of God’s discipline which He imposes upon men.

Thus we see that the promise of a continuing penalty is very clear, but with it also the promise that He will remember His covenant with their ancestors in the faith. “But I will,” as verse 45 declares, “for their sakes remember the covenant of their ancestors whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the heathen, that I might be their God. I am the Lord.”

Then in the final verse, “these are the statutes and judgments and laws which the Lord made between Him and the children of Israel on Mount Sinai by the hand of Moses.” God speaks of what He gave to Israel, and gives to the New Israel, the Church as statutes and judgments and laws. Now in a sense, all three words describe the same thing but with a slightly differing stress. The word ‘statutes’ refers in Hebrew to something which is an enactment, an appointment, an ordained way. ‘Judgments’ has reference to statutes as government, their function as a governing power in a society. And ‘laws’ refers to the familiar word ‘Torah’, meaning “a precept or law.” Together, the three words carry the meaning of an empire of law, covenant law, given as a blessing to man. When God speaks of giving to Israel, as He does often in scripture, statutes and judgments and laws, He speaks of it as a blessing. He has given them an empire of law to protect them, to prosper them and to further them. And when men treat blessings as a restraint, then God’s wrath moves against them, when they have despised what was given as a blessing.

Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God, make us mindful that all Thy Word is given as a blessing unto us for our prosperity, our guidance, for our victory over all enemies within and without. Bless us mightily in faithfulness, that we as Thy people may be victorious in Christ. In His name we pray, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

Yes

[Audience] Well, consequences now are treated as calamities.

[Rushdoony] A very good point. Consequences are indeed treated as calamities because people live in a world where causality, they believe, no longer exists.

Haddis, in an introduction which I thought was a masterly one, to a translation of three Greek novels, called attention to the fact that the Greek world really had no sense of causality, and that was why the three novels had no consequential character. And this is what’s happened all over again in our time. Consequences disappeared. Causality is no longer considered important. Everything is relative.

Yes.

[Audience] Well, the Greeks believe the gods are basically malignant.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

\[Audience] That they were jealous and spiteful and so forth.

[Rushdoony] Yes

[Audience] So all calamities were the result of an evil god.

[Rushdoony] Against innocent people!

[Audience] Right.

[Rushdoony] That fact of innocence was very important. For example in plays like Orestes and others, the man who outrages the gods because of what he has done has done it in all innocence, without knowing what it was all about.

[Audience] Well, the argument was that talent was an offense to the gods.

[Rushdoony] Yes, well, the modern novel shows the same perversity. Not causality, but a basic perversity in the universe.

The loss of causality of course, leads to the fairy tale world that the Greek novels had. And again we have it because even these novels of perversity are fairy tales. They’re unreal. So whether it’s a happy ending or an ugly ending, it is a fairy tale.

Any other questions or comments?

Yes.

[Audience] I think there’s an interesting fact in verse 43 where it says, “the land will enjoy its sabbaths.”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] Either God will get His due one way or another. Either we can give it to Him willingly and joyfully and receive a blessing, or He’s going to take it…

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] …His due, in the form of judgment, and getting back to Otto’s comment, consequences can either be calamity or blessing, depending on whether we’re willing to give God His due.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And you see, antinomianism has joined in with the world. It wants a fairy tale world, not reality. They don’t want consequences. And so they’re rejecting blessings as well.

Yes, Mark

[Mark] Ah, in verse 44 it says that when they are removed from the land, He will not cast them away. Has God cast Israel away, or has just the definition of Israel changed?

[Rushdoony] Israel has changed. It has been cut out, Paul says, and we have been grafted into the vine, which is Christ, because our Lord says “I am the vine.” We are grafted in, so that we are the Israel of God, and Paul at the conclusion of Galatians addresses the Church as the Israel of God.

[Audience] As far as the time frame of that, is that the New Testament era with Christ, when we were grafted in? Or is there any particular time frame when the Gentiles were cast off—uh, grafted in?

[Rushdoony] I’m not sure I unders---

[Audience] Were the Jews, were the Jews set aside in the Old Testament, when they—after the rejection, it was 400 years in which there was no prophecy at all.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] Had they been cast off before Christ?

[Rushdoony] No, but they were turning from Him, so they were then cast off, in Christ. That’s why in Hebrews, when it speaks of the judgment, it speaks of the Old Testament era ending with the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple. And the great shaking of the nations culminates with that. And then the new shaking of the nations begins, so that the things which are, which cannot be shaken may alone remain.

[Audience] Do you think Hebrews was written after the fall of Jerusalem, or anticipating it?

[Rushdoony] Anticipating.

Any other questions or comments?

Yes.

[Audience] There’s a group called Intercessors for America that takes II Chronicles 7:14 as their motto and when they speak of the healing of the land, when people humble themselves and pray, I think they’re thinking also of political healing, healing in the teaching. Is that correct?

[Rushdoony] It’s a total healing, but we must never forget that it says, ‘the land.’ That’s the primary thing, because God’s covenant includes emphatically the land. It’s very, very clearly present in the law and the prophets. So there has to be a healing there also.

Any other questions or comments? Well if not, let us conclude with prayer.

Oh Lord our God, we thank Thee that Thy Word is truth. And Thy Word governs all of life and all the earth, that Thy Word governs even the remotest stars; for we are told that the stars in their course fought against Cicera. We thank Thee that Thy purpose is in all creation and that Thy purpose shall prevail. Make us ever joyful, our Father, that Thou hast called us to be the people of Thy kingdom and has commanded us to serve Thee with all our heart, mind and being. 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.