Leviticus; The Law of Holiness and Grace

The Ground of Law

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Genre: Lessons with Q & A

Lesson: 32

Track: 32

Dictation Name: RR172R32

Date: Early 70s

Let us worship God. Grace be unto you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ. Give unto the Lord the glory due unto His name. Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. God is a spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him is spirit and in truth.

Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God we come unto Thee, knowing that Thou art on the throne, that the world around us is manifesting its evil, its capacity for suicide and that it has no place to go except to Hell. Thy grace has made us new. Thy grace has made us strong and we pray our Father that by Thy grace our nation may again become strong, that all things in all nations be brought into captivity to Jesus Christ who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords. We thank Thee for this time of judgment and we pray Lord that by Thy grace, out of this judgment may come a new birth of freedom in Christ. In His name we pray. Amen.

Our scripture lesson is Leviticus 18:1-5. Our subject; “The Ground of Law.” Leviticus 18:1-5:

“1 And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying,

2 Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, I am the Lord your God.

3 After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye not do: and after the doings of the land of Canaan, whither I bring you, shall ye not do: neither shall ye walk in their ordinances.

4 Ye shall do my judgments, and keep mine ordinances, to walk therein: I am the Lord your God.

5 Ye shall therefore keep my statutes, and my judgments: which if a man do, he shall live in them: I am the Lord.”

Leviticus 18 is a catalog of sexual sins. As a result, it is not a popular chapter. Within the past decade, the pastor of a large church, a man I know was dismissed, a week after he read Leviticus 18 and preached on it. He was accused of a negative, rather than a positive emphasis in his preaching. Because of the fact of confidentiality, he could not state that the initiative for the dismissal came from guilty men, no go into the fact of their sins. This chapter is also notable because it follows immediately after the ritual for the Day of Atonement. According to the Jewish rituals of old, Leviticus 18 is one of the readings for the Day of Atonement. Atonement mandates certain things. Atonement is a moral fact with moral consequences. The covenant people are told bluntly that their lives must be different.

The premise of all Law in the Bible is in verse 2. “I am the Lord your God.” These words precede the Ten Commandments. They are repeatedly the prefix of various sections of the Law. God is the sovereign. He is the creator. He is the covenant Lord, and therefore He must be obeyed. So that when he says, “I am the Lord your God,” He says therefore it is my law which must govern you.

In the past century, Gustav {?} said, “The words in verse 2 have a double import. They apply in the first place to the whole Decalogue. Thus, they contain the general presupposition of the Law; the ground of obligation for Israel which lies in the nature of His God, and the fact of His redemption. But in the second place, they are the special ground of the command not to worship other gods besides Jehovah. The foundation of all law is God, the Lord. As a result, there are two emphases which are made. First, that this God is our covenant God. Therefore He must be obeyed. And He commands us; He never gives advice. God does not say, “Weigh my opinion with that of others, then make up your own mind.” No. He says, “I am the Lord.” And He requires obedience. Second, God is the Holy God; the only True God. And His holiness requires our holiness.”

Holiness is a moral fact, as we saw last week. The pagans stress holiness as dread, as the presence of the supernormal and that sort of thing. But in scripture, holiness is a moral fact. Of the pagan cultures, we are told in verse 3, “Neither shall ye walk in their ordinances.” In other words, only God’s Law must be obeyed! The laws we live by manifest our religion. Where two religions exist side-by-side, one will, and must inevitably convert the other, because a land cannot function very long if two contradictory systems of law prevail. The churches today have been, for a few generations, content with Humanistic Law, with Statist Law. As a result, the churches have been progressively converted to Humanism. This has been a natural development. If they live by Humanistic Law, they are, step-by-step going to be converted to Humanism!

Porter has said, concerning the meaning of the words in verse 5, “Ye shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments: which if a man do, he shall live in them,” that it means, “Keeping the divine commandments brings prosperity and success, which is what the Hebrews primarily understood by life.” While Porter has not stated it as well as it could be stated, he has nonetheless set for the meaning of life as we encounter it in the Bible. It is not marginal existence that the scriptures mean, but prosperity and success—a triumphant life in Christ.

Leviticus 18 gives us the laws of marriage. These are given after the laws relative to worship and atonement because true worship, true atonement, has moral results. Now, modern thought is dedicated to separating religion and morality. The philosophy departments the world over nowadays, almost always teach that religion and ethics are not necessarily related, that ethics is a totally separate and a rational discipline, whereas religion is a faith discipline. Indeed. The major thrust of modern thought is not only to separate religion and ethics but to make worship aesthetic; to stress the aesthetic experience in its relationship to religion, to worship. This is why art is so important in the modern world, in a false way—in an antichristian way—because art (aesthetics) has become the substitute in modern man’s thinking for true religion. And in this view, the art world deliberately separates itself from ethics, from morality. In fact, plots its separation from morality, because aesthetics must be pure. Ideas have consequences, and philosophical thought bears fruit and light. And we have for generations had this taught that ethics is over here, and worship and aesthetics over here. And should we be surprised that religion is increasingly antinomian and aesthetics is increasingly antinomian?

When worship becomes an aesthetic concern, we must say, well, worship is not to be unaesthetic; to reduce worship to an aesthetic experience is to say that it is Man who must be pleased, rather than God worshiped. Religion in the modern world is seen as an aesthetic experience and such an emphasis makes Man sovereign. The repeated statement of the Law is, “I am the Lord your God.” In these verses we have it in three of the five—verses 2, 4 and 5. This tells us God is sovereign. Again, dullness is not a merit in worship. But the believe that worship must be interesting and aesthetically appealing to a congregation is false and evil because it says that worship must be required to please Man, not God, and this is too common a view. Man-centered worship is a lie. And Paul tells us that to serve Man in worship becomes idolatry, as he declares in Romans 1. “Professing themselves to be wise,” verse 22 of Romans 1, “they became fools, 23 and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. 24 Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: 25 who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.” Paul is here describing man-centered worship. It leads to idolatry.

Now,’ idolatry’ can mean “worshiping graven images” or it can mean “enthroning our own will, our tastes and our wants as supreme.” All such worship leads to a moral degeneracy, which Paul says in Romans 1, culminates in homosexuality where in men “burn” he says, but in the Greek, literally “burn out.” It is the end of the road for a culture. Just as Leviticus 18 prefixes its commandments concerning sexuality with the requirement of strict adherence to the covenant of God and His Law, so Paul declares, “The just shall live by faith,” and then he cites the degeneracy of the faithless. In both Romans 1 and Leviticus 18 we have a strict correlation between faith and life declared. Now, the sexual practices condemned in Leviticus 18 were common to both Egypt and Canaan, especially Canaan.

The Biblical Doctrine of Man finds very easy verification in all of history, namely that Man is totally depraved. The meaning of ‘totally depravity,’ of course, is that Man is governed in every sphere of his life by his sin, by his will to be as God. Therefore Man needs God’s Laws, not his own will. Man who was created in the image of God is born with the desire for dominion, but fallen man wants ungodly dominion, which means domination and exploitation. George Orwell saw the meaning of this ungodly dominion, when he described the goal of Socialism as ‘a boot stamping on a human face forever.’

As we go into Leviticus 18 it is important to remember that these are laws concerning marriage rather than sex as such. Paganism always deals with sex; the Bible, with marriage. Paganism deals with self-realization in every sphere; the Bible, with life under God.

The goal of our Humanistic culture today in this sphere is to broaden the sexual options of men, women and children as steps in human liberation. Implicit in all of this is a concept of sovereignty; the sovereignty of Man—his freedom to express himself. Now, this is the premise of ancient paganism, of paganism in antiquity and now. It is an expression of the desire to be as God, to trample under God’s Laws and over other men. In Genesis 19:4, 5, the men of Sodom demanded the right to sodomize Lot’s guests. Why? Because they said Lot saw himself as morally superior and they were going to humble him and demonstrate their power. So we see in Genesis 19:9.

Men by declaring themselves sovereign, reject God, and with God, his Law. They declare themselves sovereign, because their will must be done. My will be done. Camus stated it very baldly when he wrote, “Since God claims all that is good in man, it is necessary to deride what is good and choose what is evil.” Thus we can understand why unbelief insists on the triumph of evil. It is its way of waging war against God. But God declares that He alone is sovereign, and it is His Will that must be done. This holy and good Will of God is His Law.

Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God, we give thanks unto Thee for Thy Word. And we pray that Thy Will may be one, Thy Law manifested and upheld in our lives and in our society. We thank Thee for Thy judgments. They are true and righteous all together. Make us joyful in Thee and in Thy Word and zealous in Thy service. In Christ’s name, amen.

Are there any questions now concerning our lesson, or any comments? Yes.

[Audience] Well, part of the restoration would have to be the restoration of the marriage between religion and art, or between Christianity and art. The communists took control of art and still hold it paramount in their system and they have (I forget, I think we were talking about John Welsh, and recently just saw Leni Riefenstahl’s “The Triumph of the Will” which Ann and I saw in San Diego, and it’s the greatest organization and spectacle possible to see. And it’s taken direct from religion. And I think it was one of the great errors of Protestantism and the Reformation that it turned against art.

[Rushdoony] Yes, I think there are two things we have to recognize here. Ah, it is a tragic and serious error to separate religion and art. It’s disastrous for both. On the other hand, it is equally disastrous to do what Tolstoy did and to say that art must be moral without tying it to the faith. So that, ah, both are perversions. Both destroy the unity of things. And, ah, Tolstoy had some very good points in what he had to say, but he did basically a disservice to both Christianity and art and has been used regularly to, ah, further the separation of the two.

[Audience] Art for art’s sake.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] And, now it’s got into a, art as totally divorced even from reality.

[Rushdoony] It’s not without significance that one of the greatest champions of art for art’s sake, the one most identified with it was Oscar Wilde, a homosexual. Others of that circle, ‘art for art’s sake,’ were of like character.

[Audience] Well, there, I have receive a very bitter letter from, ah, a representative of an art group in the East, in which he pointed out that homosexual and lesbian foundations are sponsoring plays, music, films, and all sorts of things, and he said, ‘where is the Christian?’

[Rushdoony] Yes. Any other questions and comments?

Well, as things get worse, hopefully some will recognize that we have a responsibility in this field and be ready to endow activities in this field. One of the problems in the modern age is that we have too many people who are economic totalitarians. And they believe anything that cannot pay its own way has no right to exist. Logically, therefore, they conclude that in terms of their logic, uh, foundations have no right to exist, the arts have no right to exist, and that churches have no right to exist unless they go on a for-profit basis and deny themselves any tax-exempt status. I’ve often been tempted to ask these libertarians, ‘why don’t they kill their own children?’ There’s no economic basis for their existence because they cannot support themselves.

Are there any other questions or comments? Well if not, let us bow our heads in prayer.

Our Lord and our God, we thank Thee that as we confront the world and its problems, and as we face our problems, we have the assurance that Thou art greater than all these things and it is Thy Will that shall be done. Give us greater knowledge of Thy Will as set forth in Thy Word, greater faithfulness to Thee day by day and a greater joy and confidence in Thy purposes for the world and for us in Christ Jesus. 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.