Numbers: Faith, Law, and History

The Religious Calendar

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: The Religious Calendar

Genre:

Track: 54

Dictation Name: RR181AD54

Location/Venue:

Year:

Let us worship God. One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in His temple. Wait on the Lord. Be of good courage, and He shall strengthen thine heart. Wait, I say, on the Lord. Let us pray.

O Lord, our God, we give thanks unto thee for the wonders and marvels of thy providential care. All the days of our lives, thou hast ruled and overruled to guide us in the way that we should go. Thou hast protected us from ourselves and from a multitude of evils, so that we might better serve thee, so that in all things we might know that thou art God. Teach us, therefore, so to number our days that our hearts may always turn to thy wisdom. Give us grace to humble ourselves, to hear thy word, to rejoice in thy goodness, and to know in all things that thou art on the throne, and that thou doest all things well. In Christ’s name. Amen.

Numbers 28: 16-31. Our subject: The Religious Calendar. “And in the fourteenth day of the first month is the passover of the Lord. And in the fifteenth day of this month is the feast: seven days shall unleavened bread be eaten. In the first day shall be an holy convocation; ye shall do no manner of servile work therein: but ye shall offer a sacrifice made by fire for a burnt offering unto the Lord; two young bullocks, and one ram, and seven lambs of the first year: they shall be unto you without blemish: and their meat offering shall be of flour mingled with oil: three tenth deals shall ye offer for a bullock, and two tenth deals for a ram; a several tenth deal shalt thou offer for every lamb, throughout the seven lambs: and one goat for a sin offering, to make an atonement for you. Ye shall offer these beside the burnt offering in the morning, which is for a continual burnt offering. After this manner ye shall offer daily, throughout the seven days, the meat of the sacrifice made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the Lord: it shall be offered beside the continual burnt offering, and his drink offering. And on the seventh day ye shall have an holy convocation; ye shall do no servile work. Also in the day of the firstfruits, when ye bring a new meat offering unto the Lord, after your weeks be out, ye shall have an holy convocation; ye shall do no servile work: but ye shall offer the burnt offering for a sweet savour unto the Lord; two young bullocks, one ram, seven lambs of the first year; and their meat offering of flour mingled with oil, three tenth deals unto one bullock, two tenth deals unto one ram, a several tenth deal unto one lamb, throughout the seven lambs; and one kid of the goats, to make an atonement for you. Ye shall offer them beside the continual burnt offering, and his meat offering, (they shall be unto you without blemish) and their drink offerings.”

In these verses, verses 16-25, the concern is with the passover. Then, in verses 26-31, the Day of First Fruits, or Feast of Harvest, for which our modern name is Thanksgiving. IN state schools today, the explanation for Thanksgiving is paganized. Supposedly, the Indians taught the first settlers to celebrate Mother Earth’s bounty. Now this is routinely taught in state schools, but this kind of misrepresentation is increasingly common and deliberate. When men forsake God they forsake the truth, all truth, because for them, there is no longer any difference between good and evil nor between truth and lies.

There is a relationship between these two holy days; the passover and the harvest feast. Both have to do with gratitude, and the giving of thanks. Passover, or now holy communion, means giving thanks to God for His sovereign grace in our salvation. On the Day of First fruits, or harvest feast, celebrates God’s goodness to us in the earth’s bounty to us.

Passover began with the Feast of Unleavened Bread, although technically, the Feast of Unleavened Bread followed it, the one on the fourteenth day of the first month, the other, unleavened bread, on the fifteenth. For seven days, however, unleavened bread was eaten. Unleavened bread is, of course, what we have in communion. However, the Feast of Unleavened Bread marked the beginning of seven weeks of celebration, God’s grace and mercy being extended for a week of weeks, according to Deuteronomy 16:9. Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread are virtually identified in Mark 14:1 and 12, and especially in Luke 22:1 where we are told the Feast of Unleavened Bread drew nigh, which is called the passover. Because of our salvation the passover, the joy of harvest followed for seven weeks.

Now, the passover is a sacramental feast. It was celebrated as such. St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 5:7-8 explains its meaning as well as the Feast of Unleavened Bread in these words: “Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”

In Israel, it was customary in the old days, to go through the house with the children, with a lamp, looking for any leaven. Now, obviously they knew where the leaven was, but it was a way of saying, “We will look in every cranny and every nook, and every closet, everywhere in the house,” because what this represents is searching for all in our lives that is not satisfactory in the sight of God, and purging it to live a new life in Him. The leaven in Egypt, Israel was taught, had to be left behind to signify a break with their past, that they were now a new people. It is the old leaven which is eliminated, for they are now a new people and have a new life. The passover is thus a dividing line, as is Christ’s cross and His atonement for us. We are now a new creation. The feast celebrates the fact of our new creation and our eternal life in Him.

Charles Hodge wrote, “A feast was a portion of time consecrated to God. To keep the feast means let your whole lives be as a sacred festival, consecrated to God.” Thus, the meaning of “to keep the feast” means, what is celebrated on a day must mark all our days. The passover and communion is to be kept with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. We are purged of the old man. We break with our Egypts and the old leaven is left behind. Quoting Hodge again, “Sincerity is purity, transparent clearness, something through which the sun may shine without revealing any flaws. Truth is in the scripture far more than veracity. In its subjective sense, it means that inward state which answers to the truth. That moral condition which is conformed to the law and character of God.” Now that’s a tremendously important point in understanding scripture, because truth means more than factuality; two plus two equals four. It is an inward thing. We respond to the truth, or when confronted to the truth if we are outside of Christ, we respond with anger, with rage, with charges. We will not face up to the truth because the truth is not in us. So, confront someone with the truth, and what pours out is ugliness.

There is a grim fact about the Feast of Weeks, or First Fruits, or Harvest as it is variously known. It could not be observed during the Babylonian captivity nor after the Fall of Jerusalem, 66 to 70 A.D. because there was no harvest to celebrate. When we depart from God, then in time, God separates us from any harvest to celebrate. This is a fact which Israel then and now has forgotten to take note of, and the church is forgetting also. The year was marked by a sacred calendar. Time, coming from God, was celebrated in terms of His works of redemption and blessing. The Christian calendar has had a similar character. Since World War 2 in particular, the calendar has been secularized and paganized steadily, and to do so is to incur the wrath of God.

Chapters 28 and 29 have, as their purpose to stress the importance of a sacred calendar. We will return at a later date to the meaning of the sacred calendar and of a calendar. Both a calendar and god’s covenant law rest on the fact of atonement. Apart from the atonement, man is lawless. He is anti-God. He is an enemy to God’s law. To despise God’s law is to despise His atonement, because the atonement satisfies God’s law and redeems us to live in holiness, in God’s law as our way of life. Communion and harvest rest on Christ’s atonement.

In one way or another, the basic holy days that were festivals were all connected with farming or ranching. Israel was required to remember that these things went together with the blessing of land. Biblical religion is land-oriented. As a slave people, while possessing an area to live in; Goshen, Israel were not free since its labor and its harvest were both taxed. In terms of God’s law, tax on land or on its produce is a lawless act, since “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein.” To tax what God gives to make life possible is a tax against life in terms of scripture. The tithes and offerings required by God are because He is our great landlord. He is the author of all life and of all blessings. As Lang observed, “When God sows plentifully upon us, He expects to reap accordingly from us.”

God must be recognized therefore, as the source of all life and blessings, as the great landlord, and therefore, as our sovereign and Lord. As Eiler wrote, “In virtue of the principles of the theocracy, all the powers of the state are united in Jehovah, even when the congregation acts, it is in His name. He is first the lawgiver. His legislative power He exercised through Moses. The fundamental law given through Him is inviolably valid for all time. As God’s covenant with His people is eternal, so also are the covenant ordinances. They are, as the expression frequently runs, everlasting laws and statutes for Israel and the future generations. The Pentateuch knows nothing of a future change in the law, nor of any abrogation of it even in part. Only the attitude of the people toward the law was to be different in the last times.”

Well, as we have seen, the religious calendar and the season of joy began with the combined feasts of passover and unleavened bread. Passover signifies the fact of man’s new life, of redemption, and the Feast of Unleavened Bread break with our old life. We are now citizens of the kingdom of God and members of Christ in His new creation. The calendar, therefore, with these two festivals, celebrates a break with the past. This is the meaning of the sacraments of the church also, a break with the past, a baptism into new life and communion with Christ and with one another as members of a new community. Just as there is a discontinuity between God and creation, the one is uncreated being and the other, created being.

So, too, there is a break in history between the unredeemed and the redeemed. For the redeemed, there is a break with their fallen past, but a break in which God uses our past, for we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose. For the Christian, time always has a meaning far greater than himself, than humanity, than the whole cosmos. We are the people of life. In us, there is growth, because we are alive in Christ. For those outside of Christ, there is no growth. Instead, there is progressive death, so that as we look at the ungodly, what we will see is a progressive deterioration, because they are dying, even as we grow in our knowledge of the Lord, we grow in life and finally put on immortality. Let us pray.

O Lord, our God, thy word is truth, the glorious truth, the truth, and we praise thee. We thank thee that thou hast summoned us from the world of death, and we pray for those who are loved ones who are still in that world. Our Father, make us beacon lights of grace, so that they may either see the light and come to it, or depart from us to everlasting darkness. We thank thee for one another. We thank thee, our Father, that we have, not only a joyful life together here and now, but all eternity in thee. In Christ’s name. Amen. Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] I see an interesting corollary in the leaders in Russia, going to have a difficult time returning the land to the people, the state’s going to have to, in order to survive, they’re going to have to put the land back into the hands of the people, because they’re literally starving to death. They’ve stolen all that they can from their neighbors and bankrupted them, and now they want us to feed them so they can bankrupt us, but they haven’t really addressed the basic problem, that the land belongs to God and they’re going to have to put it back into the hands of the people before they’re going to get any food to eat.

[Rushdoony] If the reports are to be believed, there are a lot of people who want some kind of Stalin, because without a Christian revival there, they’re not going to want a different life. They have been living in a kind of society dedicated to death, and they’re not going to understand a society of life without a Christian renewal, and so they’re not facing up to the fact of why there is hunger, why there is inflation, where their food came from in the past, and therefore, they really have no future. Now, the Ukraine was once the breadbasket not only of Russia but of Europe, rich productive land, but it has not been able to feed itself or Russia, and which of the people there, in charge, is ready to face up to that fact. In fact, the envy of the handful of people who have, under an order that Gorbachev revoked, least land to do some private farming. The envy towards them is intense. They have been reared in a society of hatred, conflict, and envy, and that’s all they can express. So, they will turn on their present leaders, and will turn on any future ones, and they will not change until they come to Christ. It is interesting that the one area behind the Iron Curtain that retained its productivity, and maintained it against all opposition and regulation at a high level, was eastern Hungary, the reformed area. Solid, old fashioned Hungarian Calvinists. They were not going to be stifled in their productivity. Well, without that kind of faith you cannot have freedom, and it is because we are losing faith that we are losing our freedom. The Soviet Union is now a different kind of union, supposedly in name, but actually it’s still the old order. It has not broken from its ungodliness, and our country is moving in the same direction as is the whole world, and what we see these people dreaming is that somehow, a union is going to bring about a new order. We see here in this country, the leaders, both Bush and the democrats, working towards and increasing union, not only with Canada but with Mexico, and economic union, and now negotiations are underway with Australia and New Zealand, and then Latin America is to be brought in while the European community is going to bring in all of Europe, and we are trying to prop up the old union that was the Soviet Union, and to promote other unions elsewhere until they all merge into a one world order. It is as though, if you have a piece of rotten lumber, you will make it more usable if you get a whole pile of rotten lumber to build with, and that’s the thesis in terms of which they’re operating. They want to build a Tower of Babel and, how true this is I don’t’ know, but someone said in the European community literature, he saw the image of the Tower of Babel used. Yes?

[Audience] Well, you also made a comment last week that destroys any optimism you could have that I don’t think they’ve learned a thing. He warned the directors of the state-run farms that they had either better become more efficient or else. Now, if they haven’t learned how to make them efficient in seventy years, they’re certainly not going to learn how to make them efficient just because he warns them. The only conclusion I can come to is that Russia is going to degenerate into an internal civil war, internal strife. They haven’t broken down the old order yet, and they’re going to have to break down further till where there is no more control from the top, and the people are going to have to get the land back before it becomes productive again.

[Rushdoony] Well, it’s either going to break down or with the KGB, an army still in place and virtually full force, they may take over and you might have a military dictatorship to solve it, but you won’t. It will continue to see fragmentation and civil war.

[Audience] I don’t think it will fall on its own weight. The KGB and the army has to eat, too, and if nobody is producing any food, they’re going to be just as hungry as anybody else.

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

Our Father, we give thanks unto thee that thou art on the throne and that thy word is truth, and we thank thee that, in a world where truth is despised, thy truth still stands, and men either are shattered by it or believe and obey it. We thank thee that thy verities are unchanging, that thou art the same yesterday, today, and forever. Our God, we thank thee. 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