Numbers: Faith, Law, and History

Scepter of Dominion

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: Sceptre of Dominion

Genre:

Track: 05

Dictation Name: RR181C5

Location/Venue:

Year:

Let us worship God. Let us go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us. For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, and goodwill toward men. Let us pray.

All glory be to thee, O God the Father Almighty, who hast given us thine only begotten son, Jesus Christ, that we might live through Him. Glory be to thee, O Lord Jesus Christ, who didst become man that we might become the sons of God. All glory be to thee, O Holy Spirit, who dost now live within us and direct us and rule in our hearts. We praise thee Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and in this blessed season, rejoice in all thy mercies, thy government, and all thy promises to us, which are in Jesus Christ. Yea and Amen. Our God, we thank thee. In Christ’s name. Amen.

Our scripture is from the book of Numbers 24:17-25. Our subject: The Scepter of Dominion. Numbers 24:17-25. The Scepter of Dominion. “I shall see him, but not now: I shall behold him, but not nigh: there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Scepter shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of Sheth. And Edom shall be a possession, Seir also shall be a possession for his enemies; and Israel shall do valiantly. Out of Jacob shall come he that shall have dominion, and shall destroy him that remaineth of the city. And when he looked on Amalek, he took up his parable, and said, Amalek was the first of the nations; but his latter end shall be that he perish for ever. And he looked on the Kenites, and took up his parable, and said, Strong is thy dwellingplace, and thou puttest thy nest in a rock. Nevertheless the Kenite shall be wasted, until Asshur shall carry thee away captive. And he took up his parable, and said, Alas, who shall live when God doeth this! And ships shall come from the coast of Chittim, and shall afflict Asshur, and shall afflict Eber, and he also shall perish for ever. And Balaam rose up, and went and returned to his place: and Balak also went his way.”

In these verses, we have a particularly remarkable prediction concerning the birth of our Lord and his place in the plan of God. This is not a well-known passage. After all, it is very difficult to explain these verses away if you are not inclined to believe in the supernatural, or you find it embarrassing, because here is a prophet, Balaam, an unwilling prophet, used by God to declare a number of things.

First, that Amalek, a great nation, is going to be destroyed, the first among nations. If Velikovsky was right, the Amalites were the shepherd kings who took over Egypt shortly after Israel left. They were a power of such vast dimensions and yet they disappeared so thoroughly that very little is known about them. More than a century ago, a French scholar collected all the little bits of information about they and it filled two volumes, but still no connected history.

He also prophesies the coming of one who shall be both God and man, and king over all things. This is a remarkable prophesy. The man who made it was a strange person. Balaam was a man who knew that the living God is what He declares Himself to be. At the same time, while aware of the power of God above and over all things, that is, knowing the reality of the supernatural, Balaam looked also and especially to power from below, to occultist power. We have thus two key areas coming together in one man, one man who is being paid by Balak, the king, to prophesy evil concerning Moses and the twelve tribes. Then, as I indicated, this prediction is not a popular one. Not only is Christ’s coming predicted, but his total victory.

Now, an area of life that exists today that occupies more and more of our minds and our lives, and our world is the realm of escapism. Philosophies that will vindicate escapism, so that even those who profess to believe in the supernatural and in the God of the scriptures, still use that to justify defeat and escapism. This prophesy, therefore, is not popular with them. But this prophesy is especially relevant to our time, because the hostility to the supernatural is intense in our day. Many people believe, especially those who are in power, that determination must come only from within history, not from outside of history, not from above.

As M.D. Ashlamand{?} has observed, “The essence of modernity, Daniel Bell has remarked, is that nothing is sacred.” Let me repeat that. The essence of modernity, Daniel Bell has remarked, is that nothing is sacred, and this pervasive desacralization is immensely powerful in all western countries, and indeed throughout the world.” Well, given that desacralization, it’s easy to understand why this prophesy concerning the coming of our Lord is not popular. But this is not all. Not only is power from beyond history denied, but power from within history as for more than two or three centuries been sought on a progressively lower and lower level. It was denied first to Christians, seized then by secular states and rulers, then by the middle class, and then by the lower class and minority groups.

In the last century, for example, Gustav Flaubert, the French novelist who is middle class to the core, all the same said, “Hatred of the bourgeoisie is the beginning of wisdom.” Men to not want historic determination from above, from God, and they seek it progressively below. Least of all do they want history to be determined by God and His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ.

Christmas has become, therefore, a season for celebrating humanistic goodwill, not the birth of Christ the king. However, at the heart of Jesus Christ and His birth is the obvious fact that God is absolutely in control. He governs all things, and His son is the head of the new humanity. He is the last Adam, and He has come as king over all kings, and the absolute lord over all lords.

Balaam’s prophesy, made unwillingly, tells us first that a star and a scepter shall arise out of Jacob. Both the star and the scepter are symbols from ancient times for power, for authority, and for rule. The early church saw this ordained power of the Christ child set forth in the coming of the wisemen from the East. They brought gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh, to signify that this babe was both priest and king, and also sacrifice.

Second, Balaam’s prophesy tells us that the future king is He that shall have dominion, and shall destroy him that remaineth of the city. No limits are placed on His dominion. There is no specified or restricted territory. His dominion is total in extent and power. The language of verse 19 is very strong. This coming ruler shall blot out the remains of the city or the last survivor of the world Babel. The reference in its immediate sense is to Numbers 22:36, a city of Moab. Moab here is a type of all opposition to God, to His government, and His authority. Its rebellion leads only to its disappearance. The areas of opposition shall disappear totally.

This is a prophesy of the absolute elevation to total world power in time and eternity, of the king whose coming and birth is prophesied and ordained is by God. We are thus told that the coming of Jesus Christ, his incarnation and birth, is not simply a lovely side story in the course of history, but the total negation of history’s direction since the Fall. It is the story of the inevitable conquest and government of all things by the Messiah, or Jesus Christ.

It should be clear by now why this story is neglected. It is an unwanted prophesy. Every attempt has been made to alter its meaning and to explain it away, but none are successful. The ungodly cannot explain it away. No matter how through their presuppositions, they try to date this prophesy, as not made by Moses supposedly and made a few centuries later, it doesn’t work. It’s still very clear that centuries and centuries and centuries before our Lord’s coming, this was said. Then too many Christians do not like it because they want to be raptured, rather than see the battle through to victory.

I referred earlier to Daniel Bell’s statement, “The essence of modernity is that nothing is sacred.” The world must be stripped of all traces of biblical faith. Jesus Christ must be reduced to a myth, a total rationalism, and naturalism must be affirmed in order to shut God out. On all sides, we see this desacralization vigorously pursued but, at the same time, there is another trend on the part of the ungodly; an effort to resacralize the world by calling evil things holy. An anthology for college and university use was put out a few years ago, and the key poems in that anthology which set the temper for the entire collection, were by Alan Ginsburg, a homosexual, and his thesis, of course, is everything that is, is holy, by which he meant everything, such as homosexuality, everything that has been forbidden. The holy was relocated on the side of evil, so the concept of the holy is now in process of being transferred from God to Satan, from good to evil, and we cannot understand the direction of history in our time without grasping this fact.

The latter part of this prophesy, verses 20 through 25, tell us certain things about Amalek and the Kenites, and so on. The details of these verses have been the subject of controversy because their plain meaning is rather difficult for some people to take. The most important element is that the destruction of Amalek is foretold. The first among the nations, the greatest power is how it is described, and the greatest power at the time of Moses, and for centuries thereafter, four and five centuries later, still a power, and as late as the time beyond the Babylonian captivity, and it was a man of Amalek who became next to the king in Persia, a great force in history. The fact that we know relatively little about the direction of the history of Amalek and its origins does not negate the fact that it was once the greatest power and was feared for generations. No one now, among the most liberalist of scholars, will discount the fact that there was an Amalek. They’re not as bold as they were two centuries ago when they said, Assyria was a myth and Babylon also. The evidence now is too compelling as to the reality and the greatness of those powers.

We know this about Amalek very definitely, that it had a particular hatred for God. Ancient Hebrew stories tell us that Amalek in particular hated Israel for its covenant with God, because the covenant’s sign was circumcision. Amalek gleefully castrated Hebrew captives and tossed the circumcised members into the air towards heaven, declaring to God with obscene curses, “This is what you like, take whom you have chosen.” Power from below was the essential aspect of Amalek’s faith, and hence God’s implacable judgments on Amalek, and this judgment is tied to our Lord’s incarnation. Amalek represents the essence of aggressive, evil, militaristic power, and against this is set a child born, whose reign shall extend through conversion, regeneration, and, in time, will lead to the total destruction of all the Amaleks of history.

It will also lead to the destruction of others. Edom is cited. Now this is a very interesting prediction, one very important to us. The current Atlantic Monthly has almost the entire issue devoted to an account of the seminaries in this country; Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish, a very grim account. The author did not intend it perhaps to be so, but it was very grim because here are these people, identifying and they are training the future priests, pastors, and rabbis, everything in the faith with everything that represents power from below, not the supernatural God. They’re teaching feminist theology, black theology, liberation theology, every kind of evil doctrine. Well, this is Edom. It’s Edomite thinking. Why? Because Edom was the brother, Esau or Edom, of Jacob. Very close to the faith but outwardly totally alien to it. And the Edomites eventually were absorbed more or less into Judea. They, in fact, provided the dynasty of kings, the Herodians, King Herod and his son and grandson. By that time, both Judea and Edom had become Edomites in their faith, having the form of godliness, to use Paul’s words, but lacking the power thereof.

So Edom symbolizes those who are outwardly of God’s people, outwardly of the Israel of the Old Testament, and the church, the Israel of the New, but inwardly, not of it at all. Inwardly, they belong to the enemy, and the church is full of such, and Edom is to be put aside. Everything it has will belong to the enemy. Now this is a prediction made 1400 B.C.

In our time, men vehemently deny that God is the Lord. Power for them comes from this world or from the subhuman natural forces, from the occult, and the demonic. There is, to use Van Til’s marvelous phrase, and he is full of them, “There is prevailing now an integration now down into the void.” What we are clearly told, however, is that the incarnation marks the beginning of the movement which will be a mighty reversal of all things. The ungodly seek power from below and wage unrelenting war against the Son of God and His kingdom, but the king has come and His enemies, all of them shall be dispossessed. “For unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given, and the government shall be upon His shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. Of the increase of His government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David and upon His kingdom to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even forever.” The zeal of the Lord of Hosts will perform this. Let us pray.

Our Father, we thank thee that the word has been passed, the word of judgment, against Amalek and Edom. We thank thee, our Father, that thou art on the throne and it is thy justice, not man’s injustice that shall prevail. Give us joy, therefore, in this blessed season, that now and always we may walk in the light of thy victory, light of the star to whom all power, authority, and government have been given. Our God, we thank thee. In Christ’s name. Amen. Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] There are considerable number of prophesies being announced today, and none of them are very optimistic.

[Rushdoony] Yes. That’s an interesting phenomenon because when the rebellion against God became an open thing in western culture, the predictions were as optimistic as possible. Now the world was going to be free for an unlimited humanistic progress, and with the doctrine, or myth of evolution, it was believed that it was going to be forever onward and upward. Now, however, all that faith, that hope is gone, and so the prophesies are uniformly very, very grim. The first novels written about the future, most of them in the last century, predicted a marvelous future, a future in which it would be difficult to imagine the kind of evils that say, were existed in 1800. In recent years, all the utopian thinking has given way to very, very grim accounts. I referred to this fact in terms of what prose writers were saying how they were debunking the supposed myth of progress about ten, twelve years ago, and two or three people listening to the tapes sent me some paperbacks of science fiction, and these were especially interesting because the future predicted in these science fiction books, say 25 A.D., was the most horrible and ugly future imaginable. Wars would be on an intergalactic scale, monstrosities that we can barely grasp would become routine, so that humanistic man, as he envisions with world totally without God, totally without religion, sees life on the grimmest terms imaginable. It is an interesting phenomenon. Someone should write a study of what has happened, but I think the most discouraging aspect of doing such a thing would be to wade through some of this science fiction.

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

Our Father, we thank thee for the joy of Bethlehem, for the knowledge that the Son is born unto whom all the government is given, and that of the increase of His government there shall be no end. Teach us, therefore, day by day, to be strong in this hope, ever confident in thy victory, and ever faithful in thy service, to the end that the kingdoms of this world might become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His 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.

End of tape