Numbers: Faith, Law, and History

Ingratitude

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: Ingratitude

Genre:

Track: 19

Dictation Name: RR181K19

Location/Venue:

Year:

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

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, by whose grace and mercy we have been made a new creation. We give thanks unto thee for all thy mercies unto us through Jesus Christ, our Lord. We thank thee that all our todays and our yesterdays are in thy hands, and our tomorrows come from thee, and thy purpose is altogether holy, righteous, and good. We thank thee that thou art He who dost make all things work together for good to them that love thee, to them that are the called according to thy purpose. Bless us now as we give ourselves to the things of thy word and kingdom, and grant us thy peace. In Christ’s name. Amen.

Our scripture is again, as last week, Numbers 11:1-9. We shall spend some time on this chapter, but we’re repeating these verses twice because they set the temper for what will follow. Numbers 11:1-9, and our subject: Ingratitude. “And when the people complained, it displeased the Lord: and the Lord heard it; and his anger was kindled; and the fire of the Lord burnt among them, and consumed them that were in the uttermost parts of the camp. And the people cried unto Moses; and when Moses prayed unto the Lord, the fire was quenched. And he called the name of the place Taberah: because the fire of the Lord burnt among them. And the mixt multitude that was among them fell a lusting: and the children of Israel also wept again, and said, Who shall give us flesh to eat? We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick: But now our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes. And the manna was as coriander seed, and the colour thereof as the colour of bdellium. And the people went about, and gathered it, and ground it in mills, or beat it in a mortar, and baked it in pans, and made cakes of it: and the taste of it was as the taste of fresh oil. And when the dew fell upon the camp in the night, the manna fell upon it.”

One of the facts very obvious in any reading of the Bible is God’s hatred for ingratitude. A number of words are used to describe this sin. Here it is translated as “Complained.” In other instances it is “murmured,” and so on. Irving L. Johnson commented on this, “But the sin they brought on was no light matter. This was the sin of murmuring, a sin made up of the two ingredients of unbelief and ingratitude. Unbelief because the people were beginning to doubt whether God would really fulfill His promises. Ingratitude for they had already forgotten what a favored people they were, and how many blessings were daily coming their way.” What is notable and very notable here, is that God takes note of not Moses, because Moses had become used to the people’s sin, and their whining, on this occasion did not urk Him especially. He’d gotten used to a whining people. God, however, reacted at once, and with judgment. We are simply told the fire of the Lord burnt among them. We sometimes get angry quickly and other times, we’re slow to anger. We get used to people taking advantage of us, or doing wrong, but God’s patience is longer than ours and His judgment is sure.

The fire of the Lord, we are told, burnt among them. What this was specifically, we do not know. We’ll return to that later. God does not regard it as important for us to know anything more than this. God hates and judges ingrates. A comment of Robert A. Watson, almost a century ago, is a classic: “They, Israel, will have God for their protector, they will worship Him, but, let Him make their life smooth. Much has had to be born which they did not anticipate, and they grumble and speak evil. Generally, men do not realize that their murmuring is against God. They have no intention to accuse His providence. It is of other men they complain who come in their way, of accidents so-called for which no one seems to be responsible, of regulations well enough meant which, at some time or point prove vexatious. The obtuseness and carelessness of those who undertake but do not perform, and there does seem to be a great difference between displeasure with human agents, whose follies and failures provoke us, and discontent with our own {?} and its trials, and at the same time this has to be kept in view that while we carefully refrain from criticizing providence, there may be underlying our complaints, a tacit opinion that the world is not well made nor well ordered. To a certain extent, the persons who irritate us are responsible for their mistakes, clearly, but just among those who are prone to err, our discipline has been appointed. The gird at them is as much a revolt against the creator as to complain of the heat of the summer or the winter cold. With our knowledge of what the world is, of what our fellow creatures are, should go the perception that God rules everywhere and stands against us when we resent what, in His world, we have to do or to suffer. He is against those who fail in duty also, yet it is not for us to be angry. Our due will not be withheld. Even when we suffer most, it is still offered, still given. While we endeavor to remedy the evils we feel, it must be, without a thought, that the order appointed by the great king fails us at any point. The punishment of those who complained is spoken of as swift and terrible. The fire of the Lord burnt among them and devoured in the uttermost part of the camp.”

Whether we are a Moses or an ordinary believer, we must see God’s providence in every situation, so that even the evils which seem to surround and threaten to overcome us must be viewed as a God-sent opportunity to grow in Him. We may prefer to have God remove them to spare us the troubles and the grievous problem. But God sends them to enable us to become better priests, prophets, and kings under Him, to prepare us for greater service.

We are told that the complaints came from all the camp, including the uttermost reaches of it. It came, we are told, from the mixed multitude and from the children of Israel. They were dissatisfied with manna. They wanted the fish which, in those days, was so abundant in the Nile so that a man could live off of fishing. A little fishing each day and he could provide meat for his family, and the cucumbers, melons, leeks and onion, and garlic which were so easily grown in Goshen. For them, God’s deliverance should have been from bondage to wealth and plenty. If God is God, their reasoning was, why doesn’t He give us everything? Why doesn’t He remove all problems? In Exodus 16:3, Israel had complained at the lack of food. Here, they complained about the lack of variety. The word translated into English with two words; mixed multitude, is a term used more than once in scripture, but in this instance, it translates a Hebrew word which is only used once. It appears only once in the Bible, and in modern language, a term which did not exist then. It means riff-raff, or rabble. Scum, in other words. It therefore cannot be equated with the term “mixed multitude” as used elsewhere in the English Bible, and referring just to the foreigners who joined Israel. It no doubt included many such purposes, but it applies to all the riff raff, whether Hebrews or foreigners.

We are then told that Israel, as a whole, joined in them in weeping over their lot, in whining over their diet: manna. In verses 7-9, we are given an account of the manna and the varieties of ways in which it could be prepared. By God’s grace and providence, they were freely given a highly nutritious food daily, and their response was to complain, weep, and whine. It is very important to note that the whining began with the riff-raff and spread to everyone. Influence is a very powerful factor in any society. It is exercised always by the strongest persons. If there be no sizable minority of determine, vocal, and strong men, then the riff-raff become the determining power in that society, in that city, in that nation, state, county, or town.

As of 1988, there were 91 million adults in the United States of 18 years and older, who identified themselves as born again Christians, up from 40 million in 1968, just 20 years earlier. Unless those 91 million begin to command society for Jesus Christ, God will account them to be riff-raff in His sight. The use of the word riff-raff here, it’s only usage in the Bible is not an accident. It is God’s word in His infallible scripture to describe ingrates, ungrateful people.

In this crisis, with death in the camp, Moses prayed earnestly to God and God answered Moses’s prayer. The name of this place is called Taberah, meaning “a burning.” The people had been ungrateful, discontented, and complaining, and God gave them a real cause for grief: death in the camp. This was, however, simply the first of several expressions of ingratitude. Moses here and later acted as the intercessor with God for Israel. Intercession is futile where there is no confession, repentance and a renewed heart. As I pointed out last week, when I was a child, I heard someone say ungrateful people are dangerous men.

Israel finally had to die in the wilderness, leaving the younger generation to enter the Promised Land with two exceptions: Joshua and Caleb. The first one tells us the people complained. This is both an accurate and inaccurate rendering. What we are literally told is the people is as those who complain about evil. God’s providence is a judged evil because life is not on their terms, so they whined. Notice that the people cried unto Moses, not directly to God. Their complaining had been against God, that Moses was somehow required to prevail again with God on their behalf. The miracle of God’s patience is an amazing and a great one.

The reference to garlic is interesting. Its use was common to much of the Mediterranean world at that time, but not to the Romans. The ancients recognized what modern medicine recognizes, the very great health benefits in onions and garlic and they use them very freely, but there was an exception as I said, the Romans, and the Romans despised the garlic-eating peoples, and they especially showed contempt for the Jews, for their use of garlic. This is perhaps one of the most curious reasons to justify racial hatred, but it was the one used by the Romans.

Of the peoples complaining, Rabbi Rafael Pelcovitz has said very bluntly, “They were looking for a pretext to remove themselves from God.” They wanted deliverance, not only from Egypt, but from God. This is a very important observation. People want God to deliver them from their human problems and oppressors and then leave them free to live their life to live as they please, and this is the essence of antinomianism, and this is why it has such a very great appeal. This complaining and ungrateful generation was sentenced by God to die in the wilderness, although they were not told of this judgment until later.

Joseph Parker observed that the people began with complaining and went on to lusting. The word lusting here means desiring. They not only complained against God, but went on to an agenda in their hearts and minds as to what God should do for them if He really loved them. In other words, “God, prove that you love us, do what we want.” They had declared at Sinai their assent to none other gods, but now their own will or desire was their god. As Parker said, “To criticize providence, who is fit for that high judgment? Providence is a large word. It is like the horizon, encompassing all things with a line that cannot be touched, including all things yet without bond or token of humiliation. Who can criticize the providence of light, that marvelous power that lights up the world in the morning, curtains it off with a veil of darkness night by night, blesses its soil with fertility, fills its channels with streams and rivers, feeds the roots of the tiniest flowers, paints the wings of the frailest insects, leads like the cloud by day and like the fire by night, that numbers the hairs of the head of every child living in the Father’s house? Who has mind enough, penetration enough, judgment enough to call God to His bar and pronounce sentence upon the infinite? We are vexed by details, we are blinded by the immediate dust of the road. We are not called to judgment, but to acquiescence, to acceptance, to gratitude, to hope. To criticize God is to usurp the divine throne. Let who will pass there insane judgments upon the infinite scale of light. Let it be ours, where we cannot understand to believe, where we cannot direct, to accept, and in all things to kiss the rod and bless the hand that licks it. This is not the surrender of reason. It is the baptism and consecration of understanding.”

What these means, what these words declare is that every trying situation gives us an opportunity for growth, for growth in the Lord, whereas rebellion destroys us. St. Paul, who underwent trials, tortures, and hostilities, as very few men every have, is also the man who speaks more powerfully against the complaining spirit. He says, for example, in Philippians 4:11, “I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.” At one time, Numbers 11:1-4, as I said last week, was commonly used as a necessary lesson for the Christian.

In verses 1 through 3, the first of judgment is mentioned but without any details. We simply know that the camp was struck with judgment. We know only two facts about this fire, and they are of tremendous importance. First, Israel had for its protection and guidance the pillar of fire by night, and the cloud by day. To God’s faithful people, this pillar was a guide and protection. It set forth God’s presence to defend and protect His chosen people. Second, as Hebrews 12:29 tells us, “Our God is a consuming fire.” To the unfaithful, to the apostate, to the ingrates, and to all who despise God’s blessing, God is a consuming fire. We have reference again to God’s destructive and final judgment on the ungodly in the last judgment. Its intensity and finality is given with vivid imagery in Revelation 20:10, which refers to the Lake of Fire. We must remember that the complaining of the people was about manna, God’s gracious provision. They whined, but now our soul is dried away, because all they had to eat was manna. They were only a little more than a year away from slavery, and their attitude towards God was one of vicious ingratitude. They felt sorry for themselves, who were the privileged people of God.

Years ago, after much dealing with sinners, I realized that basic to all of them was one thing: self pity. Life was unjust, they felt, because neither God nor man appreciated them and always rolled out a red carpet for them. As a result, I began to tell such persons that the worst cancer of all was self-pity. It destroys all who insist on indulging in it. Certainly, it destroyed the generation that left Egypt. It will destroy our generation also unless we repent.

I was happy to see in the April’s Reader’s Digest, an article which I urge you to read. It’s on page 122. “Today’s Professional Victims.” It’s on the self-pity and the ingratitude for all that they have, that radical feminists, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, and other actives who are taking us on a guilt trip into a minefield where, no matter where we step, we’re in trouble. It speaks out forcefully against that whining. I urge you to read it. It reminded me a of a poem written a long time ago, which I found in an anthology, The Treasury of American Poetry. About fifty-five years ago, as a student, I picked up a book of poetry written by a woman whose birth was probably about 1753, and who died in 1784; Phillis Wheatley. She was brought here to this country as a slave when she was a child. Her mistress saw her intelligence and educated her. She began to write poetry which, while not great, was better than average. Her poems were printed, and George Washington made a point of meeting her and praising her. She was freed. Now, here’s a girl who was taken by slavers and brought here to this country, but she wrote a poem on being brought from Africa to America, and I can assure you it does not sound like your black activists today.

“'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

"Their colour is a diabolic die."

Remember, Christians, Negro's, black as Cain,

May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.”

Those were the words of Phillis Wheatley, whom, by God’s grace we will some day meet in heaven. Let us pray.

Oh Lord, our God, we thank thee that, by thy grace, thou hast made us as thou didst make Phillis Wheatley, one of thine own. Keep us from the great sin of ingratitude, turn our nation away from its ungrateful ways, and teach us to rejoice in thee, and to thank thee, and to praise thee. Oh God, how great thou art in thy blessings and mercies, and thy providential care, in thy deliverances, and we thank thee. In Christ’s name. Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? It’s interesting, by they way, that Phillis Wheatley is not forgotten, and the reason for it is she does not fit the modern mold of alienation and ingratitude, of whining and complaining about the world, because she was a joyful and a happy girl, and woman. He married name was Peters, but she began writing when she was hardly more than a child, and her work was highly regarded very early. Any questions or comments? Yes?

[Audience] Why did the Romans not like garlic and onions?

[Rushdoony] Why did the Romans dislike garlic? We don’t know. They looked down on everyone. Just as the Greeks had divided the world into two groups; Greeks and Barbarians, so did the Romans; Romans and Barbarians. They knew the Greeks had a great deal of philosophy and learning, which they borrowed and used, and they liked nothing better than a Greek to teach their children, but they despised everyone else, and their hostility to all the surrounding peoples had a number of reasons, but garlic was one of them. They were superior to the garlic eaters. So, they were particularly contemptuous of Jews whom they resented, because the Jews would not regard it as a privilege to be under the Roman Empire. So, while they hated all the subject peoples, despised them, they especially held it against the Jews, that they were garlic-haters. So much for rationality. Yes?

[Audience] Coriander seed is used as a condiment today. I wonder if it’s the same seed, if it’s survived intact from those times.

[Rushdoony] Various people have debated that. What we are told it was “as coriander seed,” resembling it. It was something that was divinely given and which was an all-purpose, nutritious food, so that they could live entirely in terms of it. Elsewhere, we are told that there was a honey flavor to it, so it was a remarkable gift, one of a number, but an ungrateful person or people can be satisfied with nothing. I like the old joke about the man who was very friendly with another business man, and he had a devastating catastrophe happen. His business was destroyed, I forget how, in a way that was not fully covered by insurance. So, he went to his friend and asked for a loan, knowing his friend was very well-to-do and he’d helped him, and he said, “No.”

And he said, “But look, who was it loaned you money to get you started years ago?”

“Well, you did.”

“And who was it when your son didn’t have the money to go to college, that gave him the money to go to college?”

“Well, you did.”

“And who was it, when your wife ran off with some body else, was there to comfort you, and to help you out in the settlement?”

“Well, you did.”

“Well then, why won’t you help me out now?”

“Well, what have you done for me lately?”

Now, that’s a very common mentality, and that was the mentality of Israel at this point. Yes?

[Audience] It’s gotten to the point of absurdity. For instance, in the welfare syndrome, where you have welfare rights activists, and you have groups down in Berkeley, for instance, who hold night classes to train people how to plunder the public treasuries, and it teaches people all the angles to get money which they’re really not entitled to.

[Rushdoony] Yes, in the 70’s when there was a recession, and in Richmond, California which, I believe has many automobile assembly plants, there were a great many people who, for months, were laid off, and a particular church there, with a Christian school, immediately went around to some of the food wholesalers, and got all kinds of damaged cans and gifts of food stuff, and clothing and what not, and advertised over the local radio and television that food would be available, and clothes at such and such a point, to the unemployed, and when people came and saw that it was a church, they found some turning away angrily and claiming this was a fraud, because it was charity, and they felt they were entitled to food and clothing, and more. So, they were being generous and thoughtful, and they were being insulted by people because, it was a gift, it was a charity, and they felt it was their right. Well, our time is up. Let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, thy word is truth, and thy word speaks as it did to the problem in Israel in Moses’s time, to the problem in the United States and the world over today, for we have become a nation filled with ingratitude, unmindful of all thy mercies and blessings. Lord, recall us to the spirit of thankfulness. Humble those who need humbling. Bless those who need a blessing. Make us again a nation founded on thy word and a beacon light of grace to all the world. 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.