Deuteronomy

Redeeming the Time

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 52-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 52

Dictation Name: RR187AB52

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. Oh give thanks unto the Lord, call upon His name, make known His deeds among the people, sing unto Him, sing songs unto Him, talk ye of all His wondrous works. Glory ye in His holy name. Let the heart of them rejoice that seek the Lord. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God we give thanks unto Thee for the blessings of the week past. With a certainty of thy providential care and mercy. We pray our Father as we come into Thy presence for our loved ones, for our country, for those in places of authority that their hearts may be governed by Thee. Give us grace day by day to endure patiently, to walk triumphantly and in all things to know that we are more than conquerors in Christ. In His name we pray, Amen.

Our scripture is from Deuteronomy 16:13-15 and our subject: Redeeming the Time. Deuteronomy 16:13-15, Redeeming the Time.

“Thou shalt observe the feast of tabernacles seven days, after that thou hast gathered in thy corn and thy wine:

14 And thou shalt rejoice in thy feast, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant, and thy maidservant, and the Levite, the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, that are within thy gates.

15 Seven days shalt thou keep a solemn feast unto the Lord thy God in the place which the Lord shall choose: because the Lord thy God shall bless thee in all thine increase, and in all the works of thine hands, therefore thou shalt surely rejoice.”

In strong and repeated stress the Bible speaks of holy days, it speaks on time generally with a great deal of emphasis and this is common toe the whole Bible. Time is very clearly of great religious importance; time and change are inseparable in the human mind. We are sharply aware of the passage of time by the fact of change. We may say with a fictional [unknown] that I don’t remember growing older but a look in the mirror reminds us of the great changes in us. For pagans time and change have been the enemy. Added to this has been the belief as witnessed Aristotle [unknown] history in an eternal reoccurrence of all things. Men have devised clocks to measure time but they have been unable to define or understand time. The universal relativism of modern science makes definition difficult or impossible. Time is something we’re all aware of, we know that today its today and yesterday it was yesterday but modern physics has trouble with the concept of time. If you began with an ultimate relativism then everything, no matter how profoundly you are able to understand things, becomes a problem. The word clock comes from the French ‘cloche’ meaning a bell. Time in the medieval era was for the ordinary man regulated by church bells. However heavy his work its frame work was God’s world. Bells reminded men of time’s pattern and meaning in relationship to Jesus Christ who is the Lord of time and of history. Music marked time also for men and musical notes had and have a time value and the value of time is religious and theological. In one area after another things disintegrate when your concept of time loses its theological moorings. If God has no meaning or at best minimal meaning for the life of men then time also loses its meaning. If the ultimate fact of the cosmos is simply nothingness then time also becomes a futility whose end result is nothingness. However much time is standardized by clocks with God time soon becomes an empty and inexplicable thing. Events are dated and occur within the context of time and any loss of meaning for times means the loss of meaning for events and persons.

But the Bible stresses the theological nature and meaning of time, it is an aspect of His creation. Not only the fall but also redemption, restitution, restoration occur within time. Time is a religious, a theological fact, it takes us from creation to the new creation in all its fullness, it serves God’s purpose. This means that while we live in time it is not our possession nor property. Time is given to us by God as an aspect of His redemptive grace. It either blesses us or aggravates our reprobation. This is why so much attention is given to time in the law and in all the Bible. Our text begins with a commandment: thou shalt observe the feast of tabernacles seven days. Our anniversaries, birthdays and other commemorations cannot supplant or obscure the fact that God commands our time. And His law, and His purposes must be central to time. This first commandment in our text is to observe the God appointed times. Our times must be dominated by obedience to God and His law. We have not created either ourselves or time and our will therefore must not govern our time nor ourselves. When we are too full of ourselves and hopes and plans we have little place for God’s purposes and we pay a price for this. Time stripped of God is alluding death. Modern man keeps trying to push back the force of time. Somehow to control it. One of the first areas of science fiction was time travel. Somehow to be a lord of time rather than a subject of it. The feast of tabernacles comes after the harvest, God’s order calls for this, the harvest precedes the feast in God’s order and when men revolt against God’s order they often rebel against the natural order of things. In this text our second commandment is: thou shalt rejoice in the feasts. Rejoice can perhaps be translated as brighten up, this is a law!

We are to view things, our lives, our situations, not humanistically but rather theologically. Maybe things do look very bleak but the commandment is brighten up! Stop looking at what you see and realize that God is behind all things. As the old hymn says: standeth God within the shadows keeping watch upon His own. Whatever the personal, national, international, economic or political problems may be we are to rejoice because God is on the throne and He is Lord of history. The life of Moses was a grim and difficult one and this is reflected in Psalm 19. All the same when Moses also says:

“So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

13 Return, O Lord, how long? and let it repent thee concerning thy servants.

14 O satisfy us early with thy mercy; that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.

15 Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil.

16 Let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their children.

17 And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.”

We have no right to time independently of God and to plan our days apart from His sovereign purposes. We are not our own Saint Paul tells us for we have been bought with a price. If we are not our own much less is time our own. If God be the Lord as He declares Himself to be, to plan and to number our days apart from His calling is to be abandon Him and to be abandoned by Him. In Ephesians 5:15-16 Paul also tells us:

“ See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise,

16 Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.”

To walk as fools is to walk like the ungodly. Like those who say in their heart ‘there is no god’. The reference in the psalm is not to avowed atheists but to practical atheists, to people who leave God out of their thinking and planning. To redeem the time means to buy it back, to restore it to its place under God instead of under our direction or the devils. It is interesting that a couple of centuries ago and earlier one of the greatest compliments anyone could pay about another man was that he or she is a great redeemer of time. They didn’t waste time. Morally the times are evil and if we leave God out of the picture we are fools. He must have priority in all things and certainly over us and time because we are alike His creation. Then third our text commands the inclusion in the feast of our family, the servants, the widows, the orphans and the alien. Because time and history are not our possession nor are we our own, we must serve God’s purposes therein. This means charity. Having received from God we must give to others and this is a command. Biblical charity is not a statist matter but a family concern. If we leave our future to the politicians we will have only an intensification and expansion of our present evils. Only by assuming our responsibilities under Christ to exercise dominion in every sphere can we have Godly order and freedom. A responsibility surrendered is a slavery assumed. For us the requirement of the central sanctuary has been fulfilled in Christ who is our new temple and our sanctuary as well as our high priest. When men crucified Him they destroyed the old sanctuary which is resurrection reestablished in His person. Then fourth our text tells us that faithfulness means that the Lord Thy God shall bless thee and we will be blessed in every sphere of our lives. To seek or to desire God’s blessing without first giving His due obedience is not only to sin but to blaspheme. An antinomian approach to God is forbidden as Paul writes:

“What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we that are dead to sin live any longer therein.”

Antinomianism shows the consistent contempt for God. IT confuses grace with a lawless acceptance and it cheapens whatever it touches. Godly society has a duty to redeem the time, to buy back and restore time and history to its rightful place under God. If charity is left to the state the poor will increase and be evil like those around them. And community and society will be superseded by the state. As we saw last week our years are more and more governed by the state, by the IRS, so that time is no longer seen as God’s gift to us but something the state governs and controls and we march to the state’s tune. To redeem the time means to bring it back under God’s control. Then indeed can we rejoice, brighten up, as we regard our days. Let us pray.

Our Father we give thanks unto Thee for Thy word. We thank Thee that our times are in Thy hand. Give us grace therefore to seek time as a gift from Thee. To use it in Thy grace, to make of it a means of serving Thee and not a thing of emptiness for us. Bless us then in Thy service in Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes and what used to be a matter of family and church custom and tradition is now increasingly a matter of statist law. So that I know that one professor who was begged by his son and a couple of his friends for something to do to earn some money and they said you’ve been talking about having the garage painted and the fence, why don’t you let us do it, when he investigated he found out it was a major task because of the child labor laws to do so. So he dropped the plan but the kids went ahead on their own and he paid them on the sly. Now this is how time is controlled, he could not even have his son do it and pay his son without running into serious problems. Are there any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] The word Catholic means universal. So we need to recognize that that is the true meaning and the church has always said it is universal, that its King is king of all creation and over all men. And we should not surrender a word because of misuse anymore that the peace[unknown] talk about peace and about love, should we surrender those words.

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] I think most people know what those words mean in terms of scripture and we have no right to surrender what belongs to God.

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] No its an adjective. Any other questions or comments?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony]First of all we cannot say between two career choices one is morally wrong and one is morally right. It can be a choice between two good things. Now one may prove to be better than the other or one may prove after a year or two or three to be a dead end and you need to change. How then are we to regard it? Well we are told that God, Romans 8:28, makes all things work together for good for them that love Him, for them that are the called according to His purpose. So that when we move in faith in any situation we are redeeming the time and it is never wasted because God makes it work together for good. So it becomes a great blessing and the worst thing that happens to us God takes and uses in the long run for our good in time and in eternity. Yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes. It was much more than four hundred years it went up to eight and nine hundred. God before the fall had, before the flood had conditions all over the face of the earth that made for longevity. There are some who say and there seems to be evidence for this that there was a canopy, a vapor canopy over the earth, which means there was a temperate climate from pole to pole and you do have evidences in Antarctica of once tropical or semi tropical vegetation and other things there. In Siberia they found frozen mammoths with buttercups in their mouth, frozen in the flood in a thousandth of a second. So the conditions made for longevity. After the flood as things settled down to what they are now the longevity dropped off steadily until it became what it has been in history for the most part. Well, Isaiah tells us that as men bring everything progressively under the dominion of Christ man’s longevity will again be restored so that we shall see a great increase in the lifespan in time to come. The reason being that there is an emphatic correlation between the prevalence of sin and the condition of man. Any other questions or comments?

Well if not let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father we thank Thee for the blessing of time and we pray that we may use it as Thy gift. That we may day by day serve Thee faithfully in our calling. Grant that our children’s children to the end of time serve Thee and redeem their time. 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.