Numbers: Faith, Law, and History

The Culture of Holiness

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: The Culture of Holiness

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Track: 30

Dictation Name: RR181Q30

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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.

Our Father, we thank thee that thou hast made known thy grace, mercy, and love unto us through Jesus Christ, our Lord. We thank thee that through Him, thy word unto us is grace and peace. We thank thee for the presence of thy Holy Spirit, for thine infallible word, for the assurance that thou wilt never leave us nor forsake us. So, we come joyfully into thy presence to praise thee and to rejoice in thy word. In Christ’s name. Amen.

Our scripture is Numbers 16:36-40, and our subject: The Culture of Holiness. Next week it’ll be The Culture of Rites. The Culture of Holiness, Numbers 16:36-40. “And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto Eleazar the son of Aaron the priest, that he take up the censers out of the burning, and scatter thou the fire yonder; for they are hallowed. The censers of these sinners against their own souls, let them make them broad plates for a covering of the altar: for they offered them before the Lord, therefore they are hallowed: and they shall be a sign unto the children of Israel. And Eleazar the priest took the brasen censers, wherewith they that were burnt had offered; and they were made broad plates for a covering of the altar: to be a memorial unto the children of Israel, that no stranger, which is not of the seed of Aaron, come near to offer incense before the Lord; that he be not as Korah, and as his company: as the Lord said to him by the hand of Moses.”

This is an unusual and very important text. It is also a very comforting one when it is understood. It is very plainly declared to be a warning to all future generations coming to the sanctuary. All the censers that Korah and his two hundred and fifty associates; leaders or princes of the tribes or clans, were to be melted down. These were made of bronze and were to be used to make a covering for the altar of burnt offering.

A man was assigned to this task; Eleazar, one of Aaron’s sons. Eliazar later succeeded Aaron as high priest. Although God had rejected Korah and his associates, and had sentenced them to a swift death; incineration, the censers, having been offered to God were holy, even though the men who offered the incense were presumptuous, evil, and sentenced to death. God will have His due of all men, even when they reject God and when He rejects them. How and when He does this is his sovereign prerogative, but He will have His due.

For this reason, Eleazar is commanded to collect the bronze censers. He had no option but to obey God or suffer His judgment. God claim on what was offered to Him, even by evil men, was irreversible, but this is not all. IN verse 37, Eleazar is ordered to “scatter thou the fire yonder, for they are hallowed.” The fire in all the censers had to be scattered in order for the fire to go out. In Antiquity and until recently, a fire was not allowed to go out casually. Before matches were invented, starting a fire was a slow process and therefore, an old fire was not usually put out. It was used to light a new one. However, even though the intentions of the men were evil and presumptuous, the fire had been dedicated to God, so together with the censers, it could have no other use. Whatever is dedicated or given to God cannot be used in other ways. It is a part of the heresy of democracy to make what belongs to God common property.

This was done by Red China in turning all churches into community buildings, and it is being done by churches which treat God’s sanctuary as a multi-purpose room. Originally, although it’s been tempered somewhat, the church buildings of Red China were apportioned in terms of who could make the maximum use of it. Therefore, if it were the Community party, they had it on Sundays, and the congregation might get it on Tuesday evening after ten o’clock. There have been attempts, legally, to move in the same direction with regard to the nature of church buildings, here in this country. Whatever is given to God, however, is for all time His property. We have a trace of this fact, once a Christian premise, n the law respecting all non-profit groups, which is still in force. All these groups, whether Christian or secular, on dissolution, their property or assets must, by law, go to a similar non-profit group.

One of the great and neglected classics is Sir Henry Spelman’s The History and Fate of Sacrilege. It was first written in 1632, and last published in 1888. Occasionally, scholars will refer to it, they cannot contradict it. Spelman traced the history of all those families who took the church lands expropriated by Henry VIII. Henry VIII assured his success by making large numbers of men his fellow profiteers from the seizure of church foundations, buildings, and lands. Now Spelman wrote not too long after this was done. As compared with the noble families, he refused to participate in this sacrilege. The participating families were clearly cursed in a variety of ways, including a failure of errors. By 1632, of the four hundred and seventy families out of five hundred and seventy peers who were involved in the sacrilege, sixty-seven had no heirs, and more failed to have heirs subsequently, and their lines died out. Disaster struck these sacrilegious families to a far higher degree than any kind of misfortune hit the others, and all this in a relatively short span of time. By the end of Cromwell’s time, the devastation that had hit these families was considerable.

Sacrilege is no light matter. The fact that our age is blind to it no more alters the grim reality of this kind of judgment than blindness of one’s eyes eliminates the sun from the heavens. The premise of God law is “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein.” We are stewards in His house, stewards of His property, and we are given permission to use and do certain things and abstain from others. Sacrilege despises God’s property rights. It creates its own rule. It is lawlessness. As Paul says in Romans 2:21-23, “Thou therefore which teachest another, teachest thou not thyself? thou that preachest a man should not steal, dost thou steal? Thou that sayest a man should not commit adultery, dost thou commit adultery? thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou commit sacrilege? Thou that makest thy boast of the law, through breaking the law dishonourest thou God?” All lawless men and churches are guilty of sacrilege, but sacrilege is especially serious wherever what is set apart for God’s use is put to other purposes.

The bronze cover for the altar made for the censers was a continual reminder to those who would see with seeing eyes God’s penalty on sacrilege. It was also a reminder to the priests if they would pay attention. In Bishop Hall’s words of a couple centuries ago, “It is a dangerous thing to usurp sacred functions. The ministry will not grace the man. The man made this grace the ministry.” It is thus a serious error to see the mere fact of ordination as conferring grace. Much of the church’s trouble stems from this error.

With respect to the censers being made into a bronze cover for the alter, Marion said, “The pall{?} of sin had to be transformed at the Lord’s command into the positive feature of a warning sign.” In Psalm 76:10 we are told, “Surely the wrath of man shall praise thee. The remainder of wrath shalt thou restrain.” According to Kirkpatrick, this verse means all rebellion against God’s will must, in the end, redound to God’s glory, and it serves to set His sovereignty in a clearer light. What this means is that all things work together for good to accomplish God’s purpose, including all the evil that men do. The amazing fact that St. Paul emphasizes is that this is also true for us, for God’s elect people. In Romans 8:28 he says, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to His purpose.” Whether or not this is partially, fully, or not at all true in time, it is true for all eternity. According to Exodus 29:37, “Whatsoever toucheth the altar shall be holy.” The same statement is made in Exodus 30:29, and in Leviticus 6:18 and 27. Anything withdrawn from the sphere of the profane, from outside God’s sanctuary becomes thereby holy. This means, for example, that baptism separates us from the profane world, to make us members of God’s holy congregation, and any profanation of ourselves is sacrilege.

Now the implications of this are very, very important. In the modern perspective, the concept of holiness has been replaced by the doctrine of rights, and man now moves in terms of a doctrine of rights as we shall see in detail next week. Rights means, in practice, interests, personal concerns. Man’s will is exalted to the place of the final moral standard, and a culture of rights means, as John H. Hallowell pointed out in The Decline of Liberalism as an Ideology, complete subjectivism and immorality. Now, Hallowell wrote this in the thirties, calling attention to what had happened, in what was the most advanced country in one respect after another in all the world; Germany, and he saw it as a foretaste of things to come.

A cultural of holiness looks beyond autonomy, or self-law, to theology, or God’s law. In a culture of holiness, men look to God for direction. In a culture of rights, they look to men. In Haggai 2:10-14, we are told, “In the four and twentieth day of the ninth month, in the second year of Darius, came the word of the LORD by Haggai the prophet, saying, Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Ask now the priests concerning the law, saying, if one bear holy flesh in the skirt of his garment, and with his skirt do touch bread, or pottage, or wine, or oil, or any meat, shall it be holy? And the priests answered and said, No. Then said Haggai, If one that is unclean by a dead body touch any of these, shall it be unclean? And the priests answered and said , It shall be unclean. Then answered Haggai, and said, So is this people, and so is this nation before me, saith the LORD; and so is every work of their hands; and that which they offer there is unclean.”

Now, these words are very relevant to our text and to our time, and to the church over the centuries and today. What man of himself communicates to things and men is sin. He has no inherent justice in himself that he can communicate to others. No morality, no merit that he can ever transmit to anyone saying, “Because you’ve entered into the precincts of this sanctuary or my house, or my rule, I transmit this holiness to you.” Holiness is not communicated by men or by institutions, but by God, and it is therefore to God that we must look for the basis of our culture. Rights create, at best and at their highest, an eccentric or off-center culture whose direction is downward. The culture of holiness looks to God’s grace and law, to His justice and to mercy.

Jude 11 has a reference to this episode and calls it the gainsaying of Korah. The word gainsaying in the Greek text is ante logia. In the Greek, anti meaning against, and logia a the root meaning expression or word. It therefore means rebellion or disobedience against the word of God. Now this hostile word of Korah had been, “Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them.” Now, even had this been true in Israel or in the church, it could not be used to undermine authority nor to insist on an equality of all men, one with another, or before God. In the culture of holiness, as against the culture of rights, the goal of society is not democracy nor equality. It is justice, God’s justice and God’s order, not man’s disorder.

We see again the very great importance of Numbers. We shall see it again next week when we deal with the culture of rights, as the people demanded it. A slave people demanded equality. They insisted on their equal rights before God. They rebelled against the authority of Moses, a God-ordained authority, and they died in the wilderness. Let us pray.

Our Father, we thank thee that thy word always speaks to every generation, to every age, to every person. Give us hearing ears that we may hear and be conformed to thy will. Open the hearts and minds of this generation. Awaken them by thy judgment, that they may turn unto thee and we may again be a people wherein righteousness dwells. Grant us this we beseech thee. In Christ’s name. Amen. Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] Well, the rebellion was not really against Moses, it was against God.

[Rushdoony] Yes, it was against God, and a great deal of the rebelliousness, whether of children against their parents, or parents against the various conditions of life is a rebellion against God. One of the beautiful things that I’ve been reading since 1951 was published after his death. Wilson, the Bishop of Sodor and Man, in the late 1600’s and early 1700’s, a man of very great sanctity. In his private devotional manual, dealt very, very extensively with the fact that it was necessary to look to God for grace, and even though he was a high churchman, he knew better than to look to the church, and throughout his Sacra Privata, as it is titled, he lays stress on the culture of holiness, and the fact that man has no claim on God, and God has every claim on us. Are there any other questions or comments? Well, if not, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, we thank thee that thy judgment is underway, against the culture of rights, and it is thy holiness that shall prevail. Thou hast declared through thy servant, the prophets, that everything in due time shall be holiness unto thee. Give us grace to develop in ourselves and in our families, our culture, the way of holiness, that we, our families, our possessions, our work, our {?} may be holy unto the Lord. 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