Numbers: Faith, Law, and History

Leadership Succession

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: Leadership Succession

Genre:

Track: 51

Dictation Name: RR181AB51

Location/Venue:

Year:

Let us worship God. Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory, for thy mercy and for thy truth sake. Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of thy name, and deliver us, and purge away our sins for thy namesake. Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth. It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man. O taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man who trusteth in Him. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto thee that day after day, thy mercies are new every morning. Thou hast been good to us who so often, cannot be good to ourselves. We come to thee, our Father, mindful of our need, mindful of our infirmities, our hopes, our sorrows, to cast our every care upon thee who carest for us. We pray, our Father, that thou wouldst deliver us and our country from the hands of ungodly men, and make us again a godly people. Bless us as we study thy word. In Christ’s name. Amen.

Our scripture is Numbers 27:12-23, and our subject: Leadership Succession. “And the Lord said unto Moses, Get thee up into this mount Abarim, and see the land which I have given unto the children of Israel. And when thou hast seen it, thou also shalt be gathered unto thy people, as Aaron thy brother was gathered. For ye rebelled against my commandment in the desert of Zin, in the strife of the congregation, to sanctify me at the water before their eyes: that is the water of Meribah in Kadesh in the wilderness of Zin.

And Moses spake unto the Lord, saying, Let the Lord, the God of the spirits of all flesh, set a man over the congregation, which may go out before them, and which may go in before them, and which may lead them out, and which may bring them in; that the congregation of the Lord be not as sheep which have no shepherd. And the Lord said unto Moses, Take thee Joshua the son of Nun, a man in whom is the spirit, and lay thine hand upon him; and set him before Eleazar the priest, and before all the congregation; and give him a charge in their sight. And thou shalt put some of thine honour upon him, that all the congregation of the children of Israel may be obedient. And he shall stand before Eleazar the priest, who shall ask counsel for him after the judgment of Urim before the Lord: at his word shall they go out, and at his word they shall come in, both he, and all the children of Israel with him, even all the congregation. And Moses did as the Lord commanded him: and he took Joshua, and set him before Eleazar the priest, and before all the congregation: And he laid his hands upon him, and gave him a charge, as the Lord commanded by the hand of Moses.”

At the beginning of this section, it is well to call attention to an obvious fact to all the biblical literature. Namely, it’s very detailed and repetitive character, as in verse 21, “at his word shall they go out, and at his word shall they come in, both he, and all the children of Israel with him, even all the congregation.”

Now scholars call this the Hebraic style. This merely gives it a name. It does not explain anything. The answer is that it is specific and repetitive because it is legal language. All the Bible from the beginning to end is God’s law word, and it has the character of legal language over the ages, specific, detailed, and repetitive.

The judgment on Moses is the saddest part of this book. We can, with justice, say in part that it was merciful. Moses was spared the problems and the headaches of the conquest, and this is certainly true. All the same, it meant that Moses would not be present at the climax of all his labors. Moses had been guilty of anger and despair at a point where God’s grace and miraculous power were being made manifest. He had looked to the people rather than God. He had limited his vision to the facts before him instead of seeing all things in terms of God’s supernatural and total power. He had given too much weight to the sin of the people, and too little weight to the power of God. This was serious, because Moses was the leader of God’s clerisy. At all times, his vision had to be governed not by the evils of the human scene before him, but by the power and the promises of God.

In a Christian sense, we can echo the poet’s words, Wordsworth’s, “The world is too much with us.” It is a disastrous fact and true. We must not cloud our vision by seeing only what this world is and what it does. To do so is to ignore God and His world. There is always more to history than what we can see. For example, the book of Esther never once mentions the name of God. It goes out of its way to avoid doing so even as it shows the marvelous predestinating providence of God working behind, in, over, and beneath all things to make all things work together for good in terms of His sovereign purposes. That’s why Esther is such a marvelous book. You read it, it seems to be totally bare as far as anything of religion content is concerned, and the author deliberately made it so, but what you see is the interweaving of all things to accomplish God’s purpose in a remarkable way.

God makes a very telling point in stressing the fact that He is in control. It is His will alone that shall be done. More than a century and a half ago, Joseph Parker, in dealing with this text, observed that what we see here, and what God does here offends us morally, he said. We want, he said, a happy finish here and now. Our vision is time-bound; whereas, God sees from eternity to eternity, and Moses had an eternal reward awaiting him, but we see in terms of time only. Moses’ death would be on top of Mount Abarim, or Nebo, the modern Neba. However, before the actual time of death and the subsequent invasion of Canaan, there was an interval of some time wherein Moses, in Deuteronomy, reviews the law and gives it key additions. Deuteronomy’s discourses are given to the families and to the children for their instruction. His instruction is in God’s law. Its universal application, it’s necessity for man to live under God.

Abraham Kunan, a scholar of the last century and a very skeptical one where the Bible was concerned, observed once that there were only three religions with a universal faith: Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedism, all based to some degree on the Bible. All others are partial in scope and limited in their application. Well, some would disagree with Kunan and restrict this catholicity to Christianity, but it is noteworthy that all three, in some degree, recognize the biblical revelation, but only Christianity does so fully. Without biblical faith, men and religions have both a false and a limited perspective and future, and this is not all.

Biblical faith makes a man’s life and death alike significant. This is especially true of Christianity. In Christianity, as in the Bible, a death bed benediction and instruction is very important, and until recently, it was regarded as a sad event to die suddenly without the opportunity to gather round all one’s descendants to instruct them and bless them, and this was a routine fact. There are instances when, not only in the medieval era but since, men amazingly clung to life when they should have died, to await the arrival of all their loved ones for the instruction and blessing.

But we now have a reverse situation because of the prevalence of humanism. It has stripped life of meaning, and especially death. A very important figure in avant-garde was Marcel Duchamp. He was, at the least, a transvestite, going under the name of Rose Selavy. He was possibly a homosexual. His life was dedicated, by his own statements, to the death of meaning. He wanted no meaning to life, to death, to anything. Least of all, art. The goal of his art was that it should be a realm of non-understanding. Duchamp, of course, opposed the idea of law. For Duchamp’s desire to transform himself into a female one, to obliterate differences, there is a great deal of evidence. He was against all interpretation as futile, because interpretation had to do with the world of meaning. He said he liked machines because they had no taste and no feelings. Machines, he said, are also anonymous. He insisted that there are no problems, because problems, he said, are inventions of the mind, and he was against mind and meaning. We are told that he actually thundered against retinal, or focused and realistic painting, because it was governed by the eye and he said, “The eye needs to think, to unify, to be intelligent.” While he loved the machine, he was against what he called bad sciences, which he said are exact sciences, which operate according to order and measure. Duchamp was the modern mind developed to the full of its implications and of its presuppositions, with no regard for life, death, or the future, and this is why our age is suicidal.

I learned just this past week from a doctor, that AIDS testing is entirely anonymous. When you go to be tested, you are given a number, and they refuse to take your name down. So when you get the results, you’re a number and it will not be known who has it. This is to strip life of its meaning, survival of its meaning. It is a disregard for life.

What marks Moses from this point on is his zealous concern to prepare all the people, and us, and all mankind, to the end of time, to their responsibilities to the past, present, and future. He prepares all who will listen, and he ordains Joshua as his God-given successor. He lays his hands on Joshua. The Hebrew uses different words for the laying on of hands and blessing, and the laying on of hands to transfer guilt to a sacrificial animal, or to commission a successor. There is no self-pity whatsoever in Moses here, or anywhere else. His one concern is the future of God’s kingdom, and the greatness of Moses is very clear in this text. A man who was reared as a prince of Egypt. He had become an outlaw for his people’s sake, then their deliverer and their leader whom they did not appreciate. Now he faces death with serenity.

His prayer in verse 16 and 17 is for a godly successor. What was now needed, of course, was a military leader, a military leader who was a man of God, and this was Joshua. This has been called the first example of what was later called apostolic succession, but this was one ordered by God, not by man. This succession is neither by blood relationship, as with kings, nor by election as with churches. It is entirely God’s ordering. So, while a parallel is clear, an identification of the two kinds of succession would be false.

In verse 17, the true leader and successor is described as one who goes out before then, that is, leads the way. He is a trailblazer, not a follower. What we have today is a singular lack of leadership because officials are governed by polls, by the media, and by intellectuals who believe that wisdom was born with them and may well die with them.

The result is dereliction, not advancement. No form of government can overcome this moral problem. It is faith and character that alone supplied the necessary ingredients for leadership. The current emphasis on elections as the key to salvation, the salvation of the body politic, can only be called absurd. Would the Mafia or any criminal league be improved by elections? Elections are not of themselves an evil, nor should we say so. Far from it, but the modern temper from the days of the defenders of the divine right of kings to the present belief in some kind of divine right of democracy is absurd, if not evil, as have been the remedies of fascism, national or international, socialism, dictatorships, or anything else. Rule and authority are moral facts, this modern world will not face up to and denies vehemently. But rule and authority cannot be gained by any formal polity, whether it be in church or in state.

The three forms of church polity are episcopacy, Presbyterianism, and congregationalism. They are alike polities, highly productive of great evils when they are separated from God’s law word and practiced by men lacking in faith and character. We have seen all three produce monstrous evils in history.

Not surprisingly in our time and in other times that have been decadent eras, there is an absence of good leadership in church and in state because the people will not have it. Israel only had it at this point because God provided it.

A campaign is underway now, the primaries in New Hampshire. Shortly after returning home Friday night, I had a long distance call from John Lofton who had just returned from the campaigning and from writing a story, a long one, for the Guardian up there, a leading New Hampshire paper, and he said the campaign was a ridicules one, because Quail and the republicans, as they went from place to place, were notable as fools. They had a stock argument. “Borrow on the equity of your house and start spending money and the economy will start booming again. It’s only because you people are not spending that the economy is in a bad state.” It was absurd. It was laughable. Whereas, Pat Buchanan, everywhere, impressed people because he talked sense, because he dealt with the real issues, and when one prominent reporter remarked to John Lofton that, “Buchanan’s the only one who makes any sense,” and John said, “Can I quote you on that?” There was an explosion, “Don’t you dare!” The people will not have good leadership. Israel only had it at this point because God provided it.

Not surprisingly, as the book of Judges makes clear, on their own, the Hebrews were quickly enslaved. The chosen people demonstrated that, apart from God’s grace, they were worthless. Their existence was simply all of grace. So, too, has been the existence of Christendom, of this country, and if we fail to realize it, we, too, will pay the price.

Some years ago, an attorney who was a history buff, was impressed by a number of forgotten facts in American history no longer mentioned, the fact, for example, that a French fleet was on its way to wipe out the New England colony and then all the English settlements. It was a season of good weather, but unexpectedly, when these colonies, without any defense, were facing a massive fleet, an unprecedented storm came up and wiped out the fleet, and he went on and listed all the providential acts in the founding of this country in its early years, and warned that unless we were mindful of the providence of God, we would face the judgment of God.

The Hebrews were mindless of that providence, and they faced God’s judgment. We shall see what occurs here. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee for thy word. We pray that his country may be restored by thy mercy, that godly men may come to office, and that we may be a people again, given to righteousness, to justice. Be merciful unto us, O Lord, we beseech thee. In Christ’s name. Amen. Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] I’ve never seen any figure on the percentage of Americans who vote.

[Rushdoony] I don’t’ believe I have. I’ve seen it for state elections, but not on a national basis. What I have seen is a statement occasionally that the percentage who vote is dropping steadily because people feel that their votes make no difference, that their leaders respond not to them, but to an elite, and executive orders replace votes. Yes?

[Audience] Numbers I have seen by elections in ones in between presidential elections, and it drops to about 23% of the eligible voters. In other words, 23% of the registered voters, and big turnout would be around 40% in the case of a presidential election.

[Rushdoony] Well, that indicates a loss of faith in the system, and that is the prelude to the death of an order, when people feel that they can no longer trust the system to do what it is supposed to do. We are seeing an increasing breakdown of public confidence. They reaction in New Hampshire, apparently thus far, indicates that, but whether when it comes to voting it will mean anything, we shall soon see. Well, if there are no further questions, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, we give thanks unto thee that thou art our God. Grant that we grow in grace and in our sense of responsibility, that we do thy will faithfully. Give us grace to know that in and through all things, thou art at work, and the judgment upon the ungodly will not fail and that it is thy kingdom that shall prevail. 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.

End of tape.