Numbers: Faith, Law, and History

The Judgment on Hypocrisy

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: The Judgment on Hypocrisy

Genre:

Track: 26

Dictation Name: RR181N26

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.

Oh God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee that thou who hast made heaven and earth and all things therein, hast made thyself known to us, hast sent us thine only begotten son, Jesus Christ, hast given us the gift of thy Holy Spirit, and hast made us heirs of all things. Grant that in Jesus Christ we may exercise dominion and bring all things into captivity to Christ, our Lord. Make us joyful in thy service, and confident unto victory. In Christ’s name. Amen.

Our scripture is Numbers 14:26-45. Our subject: The Judgment on Hypocrisy. Numbers 14:26-35. “And the Lord spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying, How long shall I bear with this evil congregation, which murmur against me? I have heard the murmurings of the children of Israel, which they murmur against me. Say unto them, As truly as I live, saith the Lord, as ye have spoken in mine ears, so will I do to you: your carcases shall fall in this wilderness; and all that were numbered of you, according to your whole number, from twenty years old and upward which have murmured against me. Doubtless ye shall not come into the land, concerning which I sware to make you dwell therein, save Caleb the son of Jephunneh, and Joshua the son of Nun. But your little ones, which ye said should be a prey, them will I bring in, and they shall know the land which ye have despised. But as for you, your carcases, they shall fall in this wilderness. And your children shall wander in the wilderness forty years, and bear your whoredoms, until your carcases be wasted in the wilderness. After the number of the days in which ye searched the land, even forty days, each day for a year, shall ye bear your iniquities, even forty years, and ye shall know my breach of promise. I the Lord have said, I will surely do it unto all this evil congregation, that are gathered together against me: in this wilderness they shall be consumed, and there they shall die.

And the men, which Moses sent to search the land, who returned, and made all the congregation to murmur against him, by bringing up a slander upon the land, even those men that did bring up the evil report upon the land, died by the plague before the Lord. But Joshua the son of Nun, and Caleb the son of Jephunneh, which were of the men that went to search the land, lived still. And Moses told these sayings unto all the children of Israel: and the people mourned greatly. And they rose up early in the morning, and gat them up into the top of the mountain, saying, Lo, we be here, and will go up unto the place which the Lord hath promised: for we have sinned. And Moses said, Wherefore now do ye transgress the commandment of the Lord? but it shall not prosper. Go not up, for the Lord is not among you; that ye be not smitten before your enemies. For the Amalekites and the Canaanites are there before you, and ye shall fall by the sword: because ye are turned away from the Lord, therefore the Lord will not be with you. But they presumed to go up unto the hill top: nevertheless the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and Moses, departed not out of the camp. Then the Amalekites came down, and the Canaanites which dwelt in that hill, and smote them, and discomfited them, even unto Hormah.”

God sometimes punished people by giving them what they want. Israel had said earlier, “Would God we had died in this wilderness.” God gave them what they asked for. A grim prediction that the entire rebellious generation, other than Caleb and Joshua, would die in the wilderness is repeated four times, in verses 29, 32, 33, and 35. God kept His word. They all perished outside of Canaan. The Lord held these people to their own word. The spies had spent forty days in Canaan, schooling themselves into petulant rebellion, and so God gave them forty years in the wilderness.

Verses 26-35 are addressed to both Moses and Aaron, but the Hebrew of verses 28 and 29 seems to indicate Moses primarily. God returns contempt for Himself with contempt for an ungrateful people. The ten faithless spies were at once stricken by a plague and they died. These men were all leaders in their respective tribes and clans. Their death made clear that God was not to be trifled with, that He spoke bluntly and earnestly. No one who had treated God with contempt would be spared.

There were six hundred thousand male adults in Israel, and the judgment extended to them all except for Caleb and Joshua. None were spared, on the grounds that they had not been vocal in their complaining. God requires us all to make a stand, and we cannot hide our cowardice in a mob. No exceptions were made, although no doubt many felt that an exception should be made in their case because they had said nothing.

In verses 35 to 38, God emphasizes the fact that the judgment is irreversible. On no account would He alter His decision. Israel refused to believe that God was any different than themselves. Even as they easily changed their minds, they assumed that God would do the same. Moreover, they reckoned without God’s omniscience and power. God declares in Psalm 50:21, “These things hast thou done, and I kept silence; thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself: but I will reprove thee, and set them in order before thine eyes.” What men do in secret, God reveals to them and others openly. God did not allow Israel to forget this incident. It is the subject of much of Numbers 32. Later, Moses reminds the younger generation of this in Deuteronomy 1:20-46. Again, in Psalm 95:8-11, we have a blunt reference to this apostasy and also in Psalm 6:21-24. Since the Psalms were the songbook of Israel, they were compelled by God to sing about their sinful past, even as they praised God.

However, in the New Testament, there were also reminders of this event, as a part of the church’s past, which must not be made an aspect of its future. Paul speaks of it in 1 Corinthians 10:1-11 and again it is stressed in Hebrew 3:7-4:13. Access to the land is a blessing, and Deuteronomy 28 stressed this fact. In our urban era, we tend to forget that all human life is land-based. To separate a people from the land, or to lay a blight or a drought on the land is a severe judgment on men. Blindness to this fact is a sign of intellectual pride and arrogance, and a forerunner of disaster. We live in a time when the importance of the land to life is not understood. As an arrogant girl rebel of the 1960’s at the University of California said haughtily, “Food is.” She believed in a work-free world. Such foolishness begs for judgment.

In verse 27, God calls Israel “this evil congregation.” Being a nominally covenant people no more made them good than calling a church “Christian” makes it good when it despises God’s law word. God did not give either the ten spies or the adults of Israel an opportunity to repent. His patience is not eternal. Hebrews 12:15-17 tells us that after a time, God allows no repentance to stand.

When God required them to move forward, they drew back in the fear of battle. Israel wanted perpetual miracles. God had declared that in His providence, the land would be theirs. They wanted a ready-made solution, whereas God was leading them into a providential opportunity. Their problem was unbelief. They could not believe that the God who had delivered them from Egypt could take them into Canaan. Unbelief always justifies itself by accusing and indicting God. Israel charged God with malice, hypocrisy and deception, in verses 1-4. As Moses reminded them years later in Deuteronomy 1 through 27, “And ye murmured in your tents and said, ‘Because the Lord hated us He hath brought us forth out of the land of Egypt to deliver us into the hand of the Amorites to destroy us.’” Their sin was not merely a fear of the Canaanites, but doubting God. There is no victory for such men.

In verse 33, Israel’s behavior is called “whoredoms,” and therefore, God, in verse 34 declares, “Ye shall know my breach of promise.” Because of their behavior, God’s promise had been voided. They were now impotent men. Having abandoned God, God abandoned them. This is now the problem with men, churches, and nations in the Western world. They are deserters, expecting to be treated as princes, and the world will soon trample them underfoot unless they first submit to God. False repentance is deadly. We see, in verse 40, an example of this. Now the fighting men were going to prove to God and to Moses that they were repentant. “Lo, we be here, and will go up unto the place which the Lord hath promised: for we have sinned.” This was not repentance, but disobedience. They mouthed the words “we have sinned,” precisely as they disobeyed God. They thought that an attack on Canaan would commend them to God and repeal His death sentence, and give them victory. They were commending themselves to God by disobediences disguised as an act of faith. They were simply trying to avoid the consequences of their sin.

It seems ironic and amusing now, that at the beginning of the twentieth century, Paul Ehrlich was hailed as one of mankind’s greatest benefactors, for finding a cure for syphilis. It was to be the beginning of a golden age. It was believe that now humanity could indulge with free sexuality with impunity. Now, however, instead of two forms of venereal diseases, we have more than twenty-five. Israel was concerned with the consequences of its sin, not the fact of contempt for God’s promises. Their statement, therefore, that “we have sinned” was pragmatic, not religious.

Years ago, I had to deal with a man, flagrantly guilty not only of adultery, but a great many other things. Everything he did to his wife and family showed that they were there for him to wipe his feet on. So, after much counseling with him, he finally said, after I confronted him again and again, and again with his very many offenses, “Okay, so I sinned. Now can I go home to my family?” It was that easy as far as he was concerned, so I said it, “What’s the roadblock now?” This was Israel’s attitude. Moses was not fooled and Moses said, “Wherefore now do ye transgress the commandment of the Lord? but it shall not prosper. Go not up, for the Lord is not among you; that ye be not smitten before your enemies. For the Amalekites and the Canaanites are there before you, and ye shall fall by the sword: because ye are turned away from the Lord, therefore the Lord will not be with you.” This was a tardy attempt on their part to follow the counsel of Caleb and Joshua, but it was a false repentance.

The attack was made and it was a disaster. Moses and the ark remained in the camp. God was not with the army, and apparently neither were Caleb and Joshua. The Amalekites and the Canaanites defeated them, and chased them off with serious casualties. Calvin, is dealing with this episode, called attention to the root problem; unbelief, and he stated clearly that there is no success for men who disobey God. He added, “And yet so does hypocrisy blind men’s minds that they imagine they were correcting and compensating for the evil, which they actually doubled. Moses then relates how they received the reward which they deserved, as much as to say that although they might be slow to learn, still they were made acquainted by the reverse which they experienced, how fatal a thing it is not to obey God, for fools never learn wisdom, except beneath the rock.”

Robert Young’s literal translation of verse 25 reads, “And the Amalekites and the Canaanites who were dwelling in that mountain come down and smite them, and beat them down unto Hormath,” or even more literally, the Israelites were hammered to pieces. That’s what the text is saying. It was a crushing and a humiliating defeat, and it came from God.

The significance of this event was not lost on some of the rabbis. Rabbi Akivah said that the wilderness generation lost both in this world and in the world to come, but not all rabbis have agreed with Him.

Turning again to Psalm 106:24, we have a plain explanation for the events of this chapter, “Yea they despise the pleasant land. They believed not His word.” The marginal reading for the “pleasant land” tells us more vividly what Canaan was in that era. It reads, “a land of desire.” Their self-will lost them a highly prized {?}. Our modern ideas of Palestine are very remote from the ancient reality. The Turks denuded for us everywhere destroyed brooks and streams and turned many an area into a desert. It was then, however, a land of desire. God had exposed the hypocrisy of Israel and He pronounced sentence upon it. He will not less judge and destroy the hypocrites of every era. Let us pray.

Our Father, we beseech thee in thy grace and mercy. Recall Christendom again to its savior. Make us again a godly people, and give us the victory, and make us triumphant the world over to the end that thy kingdom may prevail from pole to pole. In Christ’s name. Amen. Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] God hates tolerance.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Very definitely, and they were cowards and God showed His contempt for them, and with that, they were finished. He wanted no more of them and of that entire generation because of their cowardice, which comes from unbelief. He wiped them out, and that’s something that people forget now. They feel that their cowardice can be concealed by hiding in a crowd, and hence, in an age of cowardice, mobs rule, because no better way exists than hiding your fear of being a man. Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Audience] Well, that’s one of the reasons, I think, for the rise of crime. The people do not respond.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes, they pull themselves into their own lives, and are blind to what’s happening around them, and they think, “Well, I’m still safe.” I have mentioned before, and it’s worth mentioning, how in Cleveland, when I spoke to a conference, inner city, blacks predominantly, at the dinner table I sat down with this black woman who is, by appearance, everything that an old black nanny would resemble. She weighed 250, 275 pounds. She was tall, she was big, she was very black, and she had moved into this apartment building and found that it was a place where the halls had been used by street people as a public toilet, where prostitutes brought their customers into the hall, where drug peddlers abounded, and she found one or two other women in the building who were Christians and brought them together for a prayer meeting, and then they took some clubs and bats, and drove out all the whores and the drug peddlers. They cleaned up the halls, and then they went out into the street and they cleaned up both sides of the block, and there wasn’t a prostitute, a pimp, or a drug dealer who dared set foot in that block, and now they were working on the next block, organizing the women there and beginning the clean-up. Now, one lone black woman did that. There’s no reason why it cannot be done from coast to coast. She was magnificent. I always remember he with delight. She was a woman who radiated her faith, and she was not afraid. Any other questions or comments? Well, if not, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, we pray that thou wouldst fill thy churches with faith and courage. Separate from thy church all who are polluting it with their unbelief and their cowardice, and make of thy church a mighty army. Grant that the kingdoms of this world, indeed speedily, 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