Numbers: Faith, Law, and History

The Culture of Rights

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: The Culture of Rights

Genre:

Track: 31

Dictation Name: RR181R31

Location/Venue:

Year:

Let us worship God. Serve the Lord with gladness. Come before His presence with singing. Enter into His gates with thanksgiving and into His courts with praise. Be thankful unto Him and bless His name, for the Lord is good, His mercy is everlasting and His truth endureth to all generations. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, teach us in the face of all the adversities of life the horrors of the ungodly, to be still, and to know that thou art God, that it is thy will that shall move in and through all things to accomplish thy purpose, that even the wrath of man shall praise thee. We thank thee for thy word and for thy spirit, that by thy grace, thou hast called us to be members of thy family, thy kingdom. Give us growth, day by day, that we may serve thee as we ought, and with all our heart, mind, and being rejoice in thy mercies. In Christ’s name. Amen.

Our scripture is Numbers 16:41-50, and our subject: The Culture of Rights. The Culture of Rights. Numbers 16:41-50. “But on the morrow all the congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron, saying, Ye have killed the people of the Lord. And it came to pass, when the congregation was gathered against Moses and against Aaron, that they looked toward the tabernacle of the congregation: and, behold, the cloud covered it, and the glory of the Lord appeared. And Moses and Aaron came before the tabernacle of the congregation. And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Get you up from among this congregation, that I may consume them as in a moment. And they fell upon their faces. And Moses said unto Aaron, Take a censer, and put fire therein from off the altar, and put on incense, and go quickly unto the congregation, and make an atonement for them: for there is wrath gone out from the Lord; the plague is begun. And Aaron took as Moses commanded, and ran into the midst of the congregation; and, behold, the plague was begun among the people: and he put on incense, and made an atonement for the people. And he stood between the dead and the living; and the plague was stayed. Now they that died in the plague were fourteen thousand and seven hundred, beside them that died about the matter of Korah. And Aaron returned unto Moses unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation: and the plague was stayed.”

The death of Korah and his associates taught Israel nothing. Men in revolt against God refuse to be taught. Theirs is not the culture of holiness but the culture of rights. They felt entitled to make claims on God and complaints against Moses and Aaron. Their doctrine of God was also very defective. First, in all their complaints, they have very little to say about God. Their malice is directed primarily against Moses. Second, then and now, many people have had and do have very defective views about God. For them, God exists to ratify man’s will, to see to it that man’s will is done on earth and also in heaven. If God is good, He will underwrite all of man’s demands. This is what they believe. If they are told otherwise, they blame the prophet, the priest, or the pastor who witnesses to God’s sovereign nature and purpose.

Israel therefore, could not believe that God killed Korah and his associates. After all, what was wrong with the demand for equality and democracy? Therefore, their charge against Aaron and Moses was, “Ye have killed the people of the Lord.” The rebels were, for them, God’s people. They were insisting the rebels on the equal holiness of all men before God, and that was a noble idea, it was held. Moses and Aaron were evil men because they were refusing to acknowledge this fact. Somehow, by means unknown to the people, they had killed two hundred fifty-one important leaders.

Martin {?} used the right word in describing what the people did. This was a revolt. A revolt. It was directed against Moses and Aaron, but it was essentially an affirmation of rights. Sin and crime should not be punished, for all the congregation are holy every one of them, and the Lord is among them, they declared. In a culture of rights, those who believe in justice and judgment are the evil ones. Men and their rights take priority over good and evil, over all moral considerations. Given this fact, it is not surprising that many intellectuals have held that the Marquis De Sade is the great philosopher psychologist of the modern era. Well before Max Sterner and Frederick Nietzsche, Sade proclaimed the death of god and the extinction of all ideas of good and evil. Now, this is a necessary conclusion to any logical belief in the rights of man. It massacres the good and defends the evil.

John Calvin saw this episode as indicative of the senselessness and the arrogance of hypocrites in the Lord’s congregation. Commenting on verse 41, he wrote, “In two ways they betray their senselessness, first, by substituting Moses and Aaron as guilty of the murder in place of God, and secondly, by sanctifying these putrid corpses as if in despite of God. They accuse God and Aaron of the slaughter, of which God had plainly shown himself to be the author, as they themselves had been compelled to feel, but such is the blindness of the reprobate with respect to God’s works that His glory rather stupefies them than excites their admiration. The foulest ingratitude was also added, for they do not consider that only a very few hours had elapsed since they had been preserved by the intercession of Moses from impending destruction. Thus, in their desire to avenge the death of a few, they call those the killers of the people of the Lord, to whom they ought to have been grateful for the safety of all. Again, what arrogance it is to count among the people of God as if against His will, these reprobates, when He had not only cut them off from His church, but had also exterminated them from the world and from the human race, but thus do the wicked wax wanton against God under the very cover of His gifts, and especially they do not hesitate to mock Him with empty titles and outward signs as the masks of their iniquity.”

Age after age, the ungodly have raged against the godly because of their hatred for God, and therefore, for His faithful ones. The great ninth century theologian, Gottschalk Fugentius, for his faithfulness in a time of unfaithfulness, to the biblical doctrines of predestination and grace, was tried by a church council in Pickerty, in 849 A.D. in the presence of the king, Charles the Bald, and imprisoned until his death, October 30, 847, twenty-eight years later. Is it any wonder the church went into what is called by the Catholic scholars also, the Pornocracy? God’s truth has commonly been unpopular in both church and state. We are in a war, although many churchmen shy away from that fact. They go on preaching and living as though the world were not collapsing outside the doors of the church.

But, to avoid the war with men is to face war with Almighty God, a war which no man can win. This is the great war of the ages. We are told in verse 42 that when the congregation was gathered against Moses and Aaron, that they looked toward the tabernacle of the congregation. Ronald B. Allen’s comment here is very important. He said, “Verse 42 speaks of the men turning toward the tent of meeting. This may merely mean they looked toward the tent, but it may mean that the crowd was about to take over the territory, to seize the tent as their own holding.”

Now, such a seizure would have been a logical conclusion of the belief that all the people were equally holy. It meant a move to end the exclusive priesthood, and to affirm the equality of all. The reformation belief in the priesthood of all believers must not be confused with this false belief. The Reformation doctrine held to the equal access to God by prayer of all men, to the duty of all men to function as His priests, prophets, and kings in their particular calling, and to be the priests in their families. It was not an equalitarian doctrine, but an insistence on the duty of all men to be holy.

Notice that the charge against Moses and Aaron is, “Ye have killed the people of the Lord.” The rebels are exalted into the status of God’s chosen ones, and Moses and Aaron are the ungodly ones. It is with good reason that Dr. Ron Paul has said that today, criminals in prison have more rights than an unborn baby.

In this revolt, the moral order is turned upside down. The very men responsible for God’s judgment on the nation are called His chosen ones. As. C.J. Ellicott observed, “It is difficult to conceive a more striking illustration of the depravity of the human heart than is afforded by this outbreak of the same spirit of rebellion which had so signally been punished the preceding day.” This is the kind of radical and willful blindness God speaks about to Isaiah saying, and he said “Go and tell this people, ‘Hear ye indeed but understand not, and see you indeed and perceive not. Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes lest they see with their eyes and hear with the ears, and understand with their heart, and convert and be healed.” This rebellion was against God, but the immediate targets were Moses and Aaron. Men strike against God’s people because they cannot strike directly against God.

As one modern rabbinic scholar has pointed out, many rabbis have wrongly used this text to exalt their own authority as successors to Moses, rather than seeing it as a revolt against God’s law authority and judgment. God’s wrath was immediately in evidence as a plague which struck down thousands. Before it was over, fourteen thousand, seven hundred were dead, not counting those who had died with Korah earlier.

We are told that the plague was stayed by Aaron at Moses’ command by making atonement for the people. There are three aspects to this. First, this is the only known use of incense for atonement. Normally, incense did not atone. Here it was incense with fire from the altar of sacrifice, so that it did represent atoning sacrifice.

Second, Aaron is vindicated as priest and as the priestly mediator between God and man, a type of the Messiah to come. Aaron’s exclusive title to the high priestly office had been challenged. Aaron’s appointment by God, not Aaron’s person, is now vindicated. Those who survived lived, because of Aaron’s intercession. The survivors had no more merit than those who died. Only God’s mercy kept them alive to die later in the wilderness.

Then third, reference is made in verse 46 to the fact that there is wrath gone out from the Lord. Now references to the wrath of God are not common in the modern church, but in a culture of holiness, the wrath of God is a serious consideration and fact. In a culture of human rights, the wrath of God is replaced by the wrath of men. Rioters and demonstrators make a great show of righteous anger in the name of their rights. Similarly, as women’s rights and children’s right have been asserted, we have seen similar expressions of outrage and wrath. The culture of rights is a culture of wrath, of violence, and of lawlessness. God’s wrath is treated as a shameful matter, whereas man’s wrath is seen as righteous anger. Our moral world is turned upside down when the wrath of homosexuals and pro-abortionists is seen as a just defense of their rights. And today, whenever we turn around, we read about the wrath of men, not the wrath of God.

It is interesting that an international conference on AIDS was just concluded in Italy recently. They declared they could not come to the United States next year if we continued to ban people with AIDS from the United States, from immigrating here. The press reported that, but they did not report another conclusion of that conference, that by the end of the nineties, in eight and a half years, they feel it quite likely that one billion, not million, but billion people will be dead with AIDS and it is not the end of its destruction.

The culture of rights is a culture of autonomy from God and from man, from duty and from responsibility. It is suicidal, and it manifests a love of death, and it was the love of death that kept the news media and that international conference from publicizing all their results. Proverbs 8:35-36 declare, “For whoso findeth me findeth life, and shall obtain favour of the Lord. But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate me love death.” Let us pray.

Oh Lord, our God, in a culture filled with the love of death on all sides, make us in Christ Jesus lovers of Him, of life, of Him who is the truth and the only way to thee. Make us joyful at thy judgments, knowing that thy purposes are altogether righteous and holy. Give us grace, day by day, to meet our daily tasks, our burdens, our problems, knowing that greater is He that is with us and in us than he that is in the world. Our God, we thank thee. In Christ’s name. Amen. Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] If we assume that AIDS is God’s wrath on men, then we need money to try to find a cure for AIDS, then it becomes a futile gesture because, in effect, we’re trying to oppose God’s wrath.

[Rushdoony] Well, that’s a difficult question to answer because first of all, those who are working on AIDS prevention are so heavily infiltrated and governed by the homosexual community. So, they’re not interested in protecting us. On the one hand, they are against protecting the people and knowledge that will protect us, whereas on the other hand, they are working to produce some kind of vaccine, hopefully, that will end it. So, we can say all advances in health are good, and yet, we are seeing it being done now for evil reasons, yet the good that will come out of it in spite of them will be God’s purpose. Yes?

[Audience] The argument for equality and the campaigns for equality are really the same as the rebellion that you’ve just {?}.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] So really an argument for equality is an argument against God.

[Rushdoony] Very well put, and this is why as we shall see progressively, the book of Numbers is a sadly neglected book and is very devastating in terms of what we see in the world around us, because we face the very same problems, and the people of the world today are very much like Israel in the wilderness. They are asserting every evil doctrine, and are holding to these doctrines with passion. Yes?

[Audience] The highway to Hell is paved with good intentions by sincerely good people.

[Rushdoony] Yes, it was and is, and men may be determined to turn the world into Hell, even as in reality they are turning it into heaven, because of their false faith. I’ve been reading, the last two, three days, rather tardily, a book published two or three years ago, Valladares’ Against All Hope. Are any of you familiar with that? It’s a remarkable book written by a man of great faith, but pathetic at many points as he describes, for example, the hope of one man to escape so that he could go to the conference of American states, and tell them what was actually happening in Cuba, as if it would make any difference and they would step in and end it all, as though all they lacked was knowledge, and the thought for men being subjected to the horrors they were in prison by men who were sadistic to the “nth” degree, it was an amazing hope. They were saying, We believe in the goodness of all these politicians, when what they were seeing daily was an evidence of the end result of the politics of humanism. To men, that was one of the most horrifying and saddest notes in the book, that there were some who thought, “If they only knew, then this would be ended.” Yes?

[Audience] It’s an oft repeated phenomenon.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] The old goat’s {?} dragged to their death and the La Bianca’s kept saying, “If only Stalin knew.”

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes. And it is to me, amazing, how commonly someone who gets ahold of a copy of the report will write and say, “You and your writers are very intelligent, but you’re missing the boat because you’re not exposing the conspiracy,” as though all we had to do was expose this or that conspiracy, and the world would be enlightened and all would be well. To me, that kind of thinking is the epitome of humanism. They are humanist to the “nth” degree, and to all due respect to Robert Welch, whom I knew and argued with more than once, it’s not surprising that his greatest hero is Ralph Waldo Emerson, the humanist par excellence. Not surprisingly, he believed that exposing the insiders was the answer. It was a very futile hope.

[Audience] A businessman in Chicago brags about the profession of Al Capone with much {?} and Al Capone was the most exposed person in the world, but yet he was allowed to exist, so that kills the idea of exposure right there.

[Rushdoony] Yes, it was only when apparently, although now some deny it, that Herbert Hoover was outraged at the impudence of Capone in Florida, that the FBI or the IRS went after him, and they got him on tax charges, not for crime. Any other questions or comments? Well, if not, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, it is good for us to be here. It is good for us to think for a time, only of the things of thy kingdom, of thy word, and of thy spirit. Send us forth in thy peace and strength. Make us joyful and confident in thee and thy kingdom. 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