Deuteronomy

That Ye Might Know

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 103-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 103

Dictation Name: RR187BD103

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after. That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord and to enquire in His temple. Wait on the Lord, be of good courage and He shall strengthen thy heart. Wait I say, on the Lord. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God we give thanks unto Thee for the multitude of Thy mercies. We thank Thee that our times are in Thy hands who doest all things well. Give us grace therefore to take hands off our lives, to commit them into Thy keeping, to rejoice in Thy providential care and to know that in all things Thou art righteous, merciful and loving. Our God we praise Thee, in Christ’s name, Amen.

Our scripture is Deuteronomy 29:1-9. That Ye Might Know. Deuteronomy 29:1-9.

“These are the words of the covenant, which the Lord commanded Moses to make with the children of Israel in the land of Moab, beside the covenant which he made with them in Horeb.

2 And Moses called unto all Israel, and said unto them, Ye have seen all that the Lord did before your eyes in the land of Egypt unto Pharaoh, and unto all his servants, and unto all his land;

3 The great temptations which thine eyes have seen, the signs, and those great miracles:

4 Yet the Lord hath not given you an heart to perceive, and eyes to see, and ears to hear, unto this day.

5 And I have led you forty years in the wilderness: your clothes are not waxen old upon you, and thy shoe is not waxen old upon thy foot.

6 Ye have not eaten bread, neither have ye drunk wine or strong drink: that ye might know that I am the Lord your God.

7 And when ye came unto this place, Sihon the king of Heshbon, and Og the king of Bashan, came out against us unto battle, and we smote them:

8 And we took their land, and gave it for an inheritance unto the Reubenites, and to the Gadites, and to the half tribe of Manasseh.

9 Keep therefore the words of this covenant, and do them, that ye may prosper in all that ye do.”

The covenant made at Mount Sinai is renewed by Moses at the borders of Canaan. The law of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers was given at Sinai. This same law with further details is summarized in Deuteronomy as God’s unchanging covenant law. God’s law expresses God’s nature in justice and charity. The people are reminded of God’s judgments against Egypt and of all His miracles there. Men tend to discount the past or to naturalize its providential and miraculous character. Some years ago an attorney wrote an account of the apparently miraculous events, inexplicable things that had happened that had preserved this country from its earliest years. The book disappeared without a trace. People do not want to look back and see what God has done in the past. Maybe He should do something for them now but they don’t want to remember past blessings. The persistent habit of man is to reduce history to human action rather than God’s supernatural acts. Man seeks to occupy the place of God in the determination of all things. So even if men believe in God they want Him to do something for them now and then retreat into the background so they don’t have to admit how much they owe to God. Verse three speaks of the great temptations which Thine eyes have seen, the signs and those great miracles. Temptations once had a broader meaning and it means here trials, testings, provings. God puts us to the test because this is His way of preparing us for His service or for His judgment. And remember: our life here may be limited, ninety years and a handful beyond that, but we are very, very wrong in seeing that as the limit of life.

We live forever and therefore we are prepared for time and eternity. These testings were applied to Egypt and Egypt failed. God’s miracles only intensified Egypt’s hostility and opposition. Remember, it was very early in the ten plagues that prominent Egyptians told Pharaoh this is the hand of God, of some God we don’t know. Well, having seen all these things Israel still continued self-blinded. Cornelius Van Till spoke of history as a process of epistemological self-consciousness. This is a marvelous term, it means self-knowledge of what we are and what we believe. The man who has epistemological self-consciousness has come to know himself. Most men hide from that knowledge. I know that Bill Richardson while he was still a state senator loved this term because he could silence anyone who was hostile and criticize him by saying what you lack is epistemological self-consciousness [laughs] they never know what it meant and they’d open their mouth two or three times and sit down. Sin is a moral rebellion against God and a desire to be one’s own god. Man then tries to know everything apart from God, as a result, he forfeits knowledge because things have no meaning apart from God. Man having stripped the world of meaning then knows himself as his own god and law and all else is unknowable and brute factuality. Now the term brute factuality is one that has been quietly been dropped in recent years because it tells too much. But if you are not a believer in the god of scripture you believe in a world of brute factuality, that is, all facts are meaningless. Nothing has any meaning, they are all brute, that is, meaningless, senseless facts.

Man who disposes of all things as brute factuality has a universe restricted to his own consciousness. Refusing to know God, man can neither know the world nor himself. Egypt refused to recognize God in spite of his plagues on Egypt. In verses four through eight Moses reminds Israel of their similar blindness yet God was merciful to them. He reminds them that God alone makes fallen man righteous. No man becomes good by saying that evil is bad nor could Israel become just by condemning Egypt. There had been many miracles over the years which Israel had not seen as miracles. First during forty years in the wilderness neither their clothes nor their shoes had worn out. Deuteronomy 8:4 also refers to this fact. It is not a popular bit of data. I’ve known ministers who claim to believe the Bible who winced at this fact. People do not want to be grateful for small everyday favors, only for major gifts of their own choosing, Lord give me this big thing that I’m asking for, or little thing, and I’ll thank You for it, and then go my way of course. Too particular a providence means that God is always watching over us. Too particular a providential care makes most people uncomfortable, their self-pride is threatened. Second, manna replaced bread. Their wilderness life made the manufacturing of not only the making of bread impossible but the manufacturing of wine and strong drink impossible also. Now the bible definitely does not condemn such things and in fact Paul tells Timothy drink a little wine for the sake of thy stomach and thy oft infirmities. Well we now know what men knew centuries ago and the Persian armies of Syros the Great and others marched always carrying wine because red wine is a natural antibiotic.

But God kept the people in the wilderness cold sober. So that ye might know that I am the Lord your God. Facing life cold sober requires faith because sobriety means self-awareness. People who run away from God are also running away from self-knowledge, from an epistemological self-awareness. Logically they should have died in the wilderness, sobriety kept them aware of their radical dependency on God and they fought against that knowledge. Moses says that ye might know the Lord God and what He is doing for you. This knowledge Israel in its best days generally avoided. Then third, verses seven and eight tells Israel that God had given them a great victory over two kings, Sihon and Ogg and their lands became the possessions of the tribes of Reuben and Gad and the half-tribe of Manasseh. This favored status had been openly confirmed. How grateful would they be, not very grateful. Fourth in verse nine they are told to take warning and to be careful in keeping the covenant law. They are dealing with God not with men and heedlessness thus is very dangerous. In verse four Israel is told that they have failed to see clearly in the events in Egypt God’s miraculous work. The events were viewed apparently as natural ones once they were in the past. In our time men have naturalized history to eliminate God. I recall shortly after World War Two hearing a veteran describe how his agonized prayer for a miracle was answered. He laughed as he told intensely he prayed facing what seemed to be certain death. But later his native unbelief reasserted itself and he refused to believe that his remarkable deliverance was more than chance.

He therefore by ascribing it to chance absolved himself of a necessity to be grateful because there is no point in gratitude to chance. Now when the universe is naturalized we can eliminate both guilt and gratitude where not guilty to- because we’re not responsible to anyone and we need not to be grateful because no one has done any favor. We’re the only conscious thinking beings in the universe, ostensibly. If no god exists than there is no Lord to whom we are accountable and man can be ungrateful and they can deny their guilt. If there be no God there is no person to whom we must have a continuing relationship of gratitude. Virtue is eliminated by the premise of unbelief. When our Lord declares that the hairs of our head are all numbered He tells us that the universe is totally the work of and governed by God the Father. We cannot remove moral considerations from the smallest aspect of creation. The doctrine of the covenant tells us that life is totally under God and His law. Nothing exists outside of or apart from God’s government. We must therefore see all things religiously, that is, morally and theologically. The heresy of the enlightenment was its insistence that man’s reason is the universal standard for judgment. The intellectual has therefore exulted himself to the position of the overall judge of all things. The grim fact is that once priority is transferred downward from God to man it continues downward in terms of what Cornelius Van Till called integration downward into the void. The mob replaces the intellectual, primitive man the mob, animals replace man and so on downward into mindless chaos.

But men prefer chaos to God because first there is no need to be grateful to chaos, to chance. Gratitude comes hard to fallen man. The fallen person is unwilling to be grateful to you or to me or to anyone who’s ever been a blessing to them. How much more so are they unwilling to be grateful to God? Then second, if all is chance, if there be no god than man is the working center of the cosmos. Milton’s Satan expressed this faith clearly when he said better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven. Well by rejecting God men have chosen hell as their supposed area of dominion and they are busily making a hell of earth. But as God says in His word all they that hate me love death. Ours is the future under God, let us pray.

Our Father, we give thanks unto Thee for this Thy word and for its truth. Make us a grateful people, teach us to come to Thee not only with our needs but also with our thanks. To know that indeed we are blessed by Thee. We thank Thee that Thou hast called us in Christ to be more than conquerors. Guide us therefore in the ways of service and victory, in Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Question] I understand that Dr. Kissinger has written a very long book entitled Diplomacy and in the index there is not a single reference to religion.

[Rushdoony] Yes, well that’s why he and his kind and his cohorts are going to disappear from history. They cannot command it because they move against God. Any other questions or comments?

We need to recognize that as we come to the end of Deuteronomy and we will follow with the study of the gospel of John, we need to recognize once again that this book is the hated book because it has nothing of the miraculous to make them say we don’t want the supernatural but it has so much that reminds man that he is a responsible person and he must be a grateful person. It brings the law home as the way of life and makes clear to man that any departure from God’s law is the way of death and this is not a popular message. Well if there are no further questions or comments let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, it is good for us to be here for Thy word is truth. We thank Thee for Thy mercies and blessings. Give us a grateful and a joyful heart, make us mindful not of our poverty as against the mighty of this world but of our wealth in Christ against all the forces of darkness. Make us joyful in Thee. 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.