Deuteronomy

Membership in the Congregation

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 73-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 073

Dictation Name: RR187AN73

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. Grace be unto you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most high shall abide unto the shadow of the Almighty. Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God in whom we live and move and have our being. We thank Thee that we are at all times surrounded by the ocean of Thy government, Thy providential care and Thy grace and mercy. Teach us to take hands of our lives and to commit them into Thy keeping. To know that Thou art God and that Thy purposes for us are all together righteous, good and holy. We gather together our Father in Thy name to rejoice in Thee and to learn of the things of Thy kingdom. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Our scripture is Deuteronomy 23:1-6. Our subject: Membership in the Congregation. Deuteronomy 23:1-6. Membership in the Congregation.

“He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord.

2 A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the Lord.

3 An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to their tenth generation shall they not enter into the congregation of the Lord for ever:

4 Because they met you not with bread and with water in the way, when ye came forth out of Egypt; and because they hired against thee Balaam the son of Beor of Pethor of Mesopotamia, to curse thee.

5 Nevertheless the Lord thy God would not hearken unto Balaam; but the Lord thy God turned the curse into a blessing unto thee, because the Lord thy God loved thee.

6 Thou shalt not seek their peace nor their prosperity all thy days for ever.”

The assembly of the Lord referred to in this text means the covenant community both civil and ecclesial. These laws therefore have reference to church and state equally. They do not govern faith but simply membership. All of the persons excluded could be believers¸ they were indeed welcomed into the covenant community, the book of Ruth gives a beautiful illustration of this. To enter into the congregation means to become a potentially governing member of the covenant, an elder or a ruler, for example. We would call it voting membership, an eligibility for office. The purpose of these laws is to protect the community from becoming diluted by people whose moral background is a poor or bad one. In verse two for example a bastard is excluded to the tenth generation. This was a major restraint on immorality because it meant that your descendants could not then until the tenth generation hold positions of authority in church or state or in the covenant community. This did not exclude their ability to be accepted, to succeed, to have eminence, but it forbad them from taking over in the realm of government. For example David was the tenth generation after the birth of [unknown], a bastard. His was a distinguished ancestry in spite of this fact, a very prominent and wealthy people. David’s father Jesse was a wealthy and notable sheep man. His great grandfather Boaz was clearly a man of great character and imminence. The purpose of the law was to protect society, it was not an infallible protection but it was still a good one. It is interesting to note however that Jewish and Christian scholars have done all they can to confuse the meaning of the simple word bastard.

Some have held that it refers to the children of incestuous unions well others have referred it to inter-racial unions. All this is nonsense; we can safely assume the usual meaning for the word. It has been a practice over the centuries on the part of scholars, Christian and Jewish, to reduce the meaning of texts wherever they can to mean as little as possible so that the law is rendered to all practical intent inapplicable. We still see this among biblical scholars both Catholic and Protestant. Another problem with this text with regards to pastors relates to western American history. Some years ago on the American frontier isolated ranchers were far from a town where a marriage license could be attained. They could be two and three days away and during certain seasons the roads would be impassable. A circuit rider and later on a Sunday school missionary would perform the service. There was then no civil record of a marriage or of the births of their children, let me add, that in certain of the mountain country areas of the deep south they do not believe in civil ceremonies, only in church ceremonies. Within my lifetime I have known how some people in trying to get the necessary papers about their birth or their parent’s marriage have been horrified to discover that there was no record, no civil ceremony and they have therefore concluded they were bastards. This however is not true. These were stable frontier marriages and the states recognized them. In verse one the law bars eunuchs from membership. They could not be eligible for office in church nor state. While eunuchs have in history have in times been great leaders normally their lack of a stake in the future have made them present oriented and practical existentialists. Castration was forbidden in the covenant community. For their faithfulness God makes remarkable promises to eunuchs in Isaiah 56:63 following.

In Acts 8:27 following we read of the conversion of a prominent eunuch, a high officer, under Queen [unknown] of Ethiopia. There is a great deal of hostility in some circles to this law and a great deal being done today on ostensibly medical grounds to gain public approval of castration. These laws have been called by some Israel’s immigration laws. They are emphatically not that. Immigration laws protect a nation by state discrimination which can be good or bad. Whereas these laws establish the discrimination on the family level. The key to survival is the family and its integrity. Membership in the covenant community is through the family and therefore is through the family and therefore these protective laws apply to the family. If the family does not maintain standards the nation cannot. In verses three to six we have the very specific exclusion of two peoples, Ammonites and Moabites, for ten generations. This refers to Ammonite and Moabite families, not apparently to girls of these peoples who married into the covenant people and abandoned their earlier beliefs. In the case of Ruth we see that the bastard status barred office to the tenth generation in the family, David, of all [unknown]s descendants. At the same time Ruth having abandoned Moabite faith to become a covenant believer was regarded as a mother in Israel. The patriarchal nature of the family in those days meant that the woman took the man’s status. The ban on mixed marriages or on unequal yoking applies where the wife was not a convert.

This law is very revealing as we hold it up as a standard to our time. Because we are in process of trying to convert the country into a matriarchy, at present in many areas it is virtually impossible for a white male Christian to gain work and the areas, beginning with the academic, into which this is spreading are increasing. About fifteen years ago when I spoke at a major army basis, gave a series of lectures to the officers, they were almost all, the younger ones, Ph.D.’s who had been unable to get a job anywhere, black and white Ph.D.’s. What this will mean in time is that we will have a matriarchy with women providing the support and headship in families. There is reason to believe that this is a deliberate kind of direction. A ban on Ammonites and Moabites to the tenth generation is important. The Berkeley version reads no Ammonite or Moabite shall enter the congregation of the Lord down to the tenth generation. The reasons given for this are first, that although they were a people closely related by blood to the Hebrews, they cited with the Canaanites against their kin. They refused to provide Israel with bread and water in the way as they moved from Egypt to the borders of Canaan. Then second, Ammon and Moab hired Balaam to curse Israel. Both countries were still aware of the faith of Israel and their own ancestral faith. They had abandoned it and so they sought out Balaam who still had a semblance of Jehovah worship. They thus sinned with knowledge in that they recognized the reality of the true faith while seeking a life of freedom from God. Then third we are told nevertheless the Lord your God will not hearken unto Balaam but the Lord thy God turned the curse into a blessing unto thee because the Lord thy God loveth thee. This verse confronts us with the curse. Modern man wants to believe in a purely this worldly causality whereas the curse bluntly confronts us with God as the absolute cause of all things.

Too often people relegate curses to the Old Testament but we see Paul, for example, in Galatians 3:10-13 declaring that to break God’s law is to place ourselves under the curse, under everything that the Old Testament pronounces. Christ’s atonement frees us from that curse to make us His people. This however does not make the law null and void except as an inditement, a hand writing of ordnances against us. The law to the redeemed is their charter of liberty, the perfect law of liberty according to James. Deuteronomy 28:15 following gives us the meaning of the curse on a lawless society. Ammon and Moab were under God’s curse because they refused to give a very simple form of help either freely or for money. Their ill will led them to hire Balaam to curse Israel but their perspective was humanistic. They believed that the power to curse rested especially with certain seers and prophets, psychics, rather than with God. Their promise was that this world will have powers enough to bring a curse upon any. They had no other premise than a naturalistic one; they believed that whatever god lived could be manipulated if he got the right psychic. This meant a control of God by this world, a belief that the primary determination of all things is from man rather than God. We have this premise with us still with Armenianism, Scientism, Sociology and other spheres of thought. Leviticus 22:14-46 also gives us the premise for God’s cursing, namely, disobedience to His law. Psalm 1 gives us the two ways of life, the way of blessing is a delight in the law of the Lord, whereas the ungodly are accursed and are like the chaff which the wind driveth away. Endurance and permanence in history are with God’s blessed ones.

Then we are told with respect to the accursed ’thou shalt not seek their peace nor their prosperity all thy days forever’. The Berkeley version reads ‘never in all your days may you seek their peace or prosperity’. We are not permitted to help God’s enemies. Modern foreign commercial and personal policy is to favor those who can further our purposes irrespective of their evil character. Writers on foreign policy routinely demand that we set aside all considerations other than national self-interest in dealing with the nations. They see moral standards as an impediment. We have strayed a long ways as a nation. There is an important side light on verse one. At the time of the early church non-Christians, that is the Roman authorities, knew that the castrated were not permitted to enter the clergy although in the pagan cults they were very welcome. As a result the Romans routinely castrated the clergy to disqualify them from their calling. At the first Council of Nicaea, canon one ruled that such men could continue in their work because it was a violence done to them. If however, they castrated themselves to conform to pagan demands and to avoid death they had to be demitted. Much later the Apostolic Canons restated this ruling although it was made an exception for men born eunuchs although there was no biblical warrant for this. This law has a long history in Christendom up to the 1600s because first it was seen as a royal privilege to set aside the biblical laws dealing with sexuality so that if you were royalty you could then set aside the laws with regard to bastards, the laws with regards to a number of sexual practices including homosexuality. In time although at first the church was a powerful force imposing God’s law on the pagan tribes and kings as they brought them into the kingdom, high church men began to claim the royal privilege.

And more than one pope did also in making cardinals and bishops of their bastards. With the enlightenment others asserted their claim to the ancient royal privilege so that the nobility began to exercise the same kind of claim. However there were soon other claimants, the [unknown] in France, the thinkers of the enlightenment claimed the royal privilege for themselves, and very soon in the world of art the same claim was made, that they were exemptions. All this in direct violation of scripture which also asserts to whom much is given, of him, shall be much required. Let us pray.

Our Father, we give thanks unto Thee for this Thy word. We pray that we as families may work to strengthen our households. Make them more faithful and loyal to Thee in all things so that we may be as Thy word intends, the great force for reformation. Grant us this in Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Question] In Patrick Henry’s day there were no women sitting in the legislatures, either the state or the federal.

[Rushdoony] It was a patriarchal society that you had in early America and that’s one reason there’s a growing hostility in some studies to that era. Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes. That is a part of the inheritance of the royal privilege. I’m amazed that no one has ever written a history of it, perhaps because they don’t want to call attention to the fact. But at the time of the enlightenment some of the writers spoke very plainly about how the lords felt they were exempt from the laws that God had ordained, including the laws of incest. There is quite a literature on that. And nobody has bothered to deal with it, it’s covered over. But it goes hand in hand with the feeling that in terms of Plato’s republic the philosopher kings have privileges that the mass of workers, the third class, have no right to, they must be kept in line, they must be kept subservient and working. And that kind of thinking has been far more prevalent than most people are aware of. The kind of thinking that began very openly in [unknown] who felt that the select circle of aristocrats and priests were entitled to privileges the people were not and they were there to be used became very, very vocal in the enlightenment. And the artists picked it up in the last century and made it an article of faith; they had to express their contempt for everyday life. They had to regard it as bourgeois to be moral. There is an interesting side light on that, that is very revealing as long as sports was the province of the nobility and the lower classes there was no rules, and sports were brutal and murderous. The idea of being good sport, a fair play, came when the middle classes in England began to show an interest in sports and insisted on cleaning it up and although in boxing, for example, it’s the Marquis of Queensbury’s rules, historically the nobility wanted the bloodiest, brutalists, kind of boxing imaginable which involved a mixture of boxing and wrestling, hitting below the belt, kicking, gouging, everything, no holds barred.

It became so outrageous that the first reaction of the middle classes in England was to abolish boxing. When it was reintroduced it was only with the requirement of strict rules and fair play and referees to make sure that the rules were abided by. This was a major revolution in the western world that we hear almost nothing about, because it meant one law for all, and this was one of the reasons why the middle classes early on incurred such a venomous contempt from the nobility. Hutt in dealing with child labor and so on points out that the aristocrats were the ones who instituted the regulations because they went after the middle classes in Parliament, they created commissions to determine what was happening in the coal mines and in labor, they found the worst possible examples which were not representative of industry as a whole and then tarred the entire middle class and the manufacturers in particular with being the enemies of mankind with their evil practices. It was an aristocratic hostility towards the middle class objective, one law for all. On the other hand the intellectuals and the artists began to heap scorn on the middle class and the business world because of this requirement of theirs, of one law for all. So it’s a very, very important aspect of our history, one where the Christian community has contributed greatly, that has been neglected. I have over the years read books on the history of sports, just finished one, read one sentence about the impact of the middle class on totally changing sports from an area that was murderous, literally, to something that now qualifies, and the word sporting is a product of that middle class revolution, to make good sports out of people. It is totally overlooked because it represents a world they want to bury.

Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Question] Well that karate, teaches hand fighting plus foot fighting.

[Rushdoony] Well it has strict rules and if you go into a course you are told very strictly that this is to be for self-defense only. Now that doesn’t mean it was strictly that in the Far East, but as it is taught here, the instructors are very, very particular to tell to them you are not to use this aggressively.

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Well in the Far East it would be murderous very commonly, yes. Let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father we give thanks unto Thee for Thy word. We pray our Father that once again we may see the standard of one law for all raised defended and extended. Make us faithful in serving Thee and upholding Thy kingdom. We thank Thee that Thy son has made us members of that holy realm. 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.