Deuteronomy

Obedience

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 104-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 104

Dictation Name: RR187BD104

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. Give unto the Lord all ye kindreds of the people. Give unto the Lord glory and strength, give unto the Lord the glory due unto His name, bring an offering and come into His courts. Oh Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness, fear before Him all the earth. Let us pray.

Almighty God our Heavenly Father we give Thee thanks for another week of providential care. We thank Thee that we live, move and have our being not in our wisdom but in Thy grace, mercy and understanding. Thou art good and gracious unto us who so often cannot be good to ourselves and our Father we thank Thee. Give us grace so to walk day by day that we commit our hopes, our needs, our fears unto Thee. We thank Thee that in spite of all our waywardness Thou art ever faithful. Teach us to walk with Thee, in Christ’s name, Amen.

Our scripture is Deuteronomy 29:10-29. Our subject: Obedience. Deuteronomy 29:10-29.

“ Ye stand this day all of you before the Lord your God; your captains of your tribes, your elders, and your officers, with all the men of Israel,

11 Your little ones, your wives, and thy stranger that is in thy camp, from the hewer of thy wood unto the drawer of thy water:

12 That thou shouldest enter into covenant with the Lord thy God, and into his oath, which the Lord thy God maketh with thee this day:

13 That he may establish thee to day for a people unto himself, and that he may be unto thee a God, as he hath said unto thee, and as he hath sworn unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.

14 Neither with you only do I make this covenant and this oath;

15 But with him that standeth here with us this day before the Lord our God, and also with him that is not here with us this day:

16 (For ye know how we have dwelt in the land of Egypt; and how we came through the nations which ye passed by;

17 And ye have seen their abominations, and their idols, wood and stone, silver and gold, which were among them:)

[Rushdoony] (I’d like to stop there to say the bible is a very plain spoken book and when it reads idols there it’s not entirely an accurate translation of the Hebrew, the Hebrew reads to put it politely ‘their dungy gods’.)

18 Lest there should be among you man, or woman, or family, or tribe, whose heart turneth away this day from the Lord our God, to go and serve the gods of these nations; lest there should be among you a root that beareth gall and wormwood;

19 And it come to pass, when he heareth the words of this curse, that he bless himself in his heart, saying, I shall have peace, though I walk in the imagination of mine heart, to add drunkenness to thirst:

20 The Lord will not spare him, but then the anger of the Lord and his jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven.

21 And the Lord shall separate him unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant that are written in this book of the law:

22 So that the generation to come of your children that shall rise up after you, and the stranger that shall come from a far land, shall say, when they see the plagues of that land, and the sicknesses which the Lord hath laid upon it;

23 And that the whole land thereof is brimstone, and salt, and burning, that it is not sown, nor beareth, nor any grass groweth therein, like the overthrow of Sodom, and Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboim, which the Lord overthrew in his anger, and in his wrath:

24 Even all nations shall say, Where fore hath the Lord done thus unto this land? what meaneth the heat of this great anger?

25 Then men shall say, Because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them forth out of the land of Egypt:

26 For they went and served other gods, and worshipped them, gods whom they knew not, and whom he had not given unto them:

27 And the anger of the Lord was kindled against this land, to bring upon it all the curses that are written in this book:

28 And the Lord rooted them out of their land in anger, and in wrath, and in great indignation, and cast them into another land, as it is this day.

29 The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.”

Our text is concerned with the covenant oath. The Hebrew word for used for oath means very literally also curse. To take an oath is to place one’s self under a curse if there is any faithlessness to it. In verse twelve we are told that the purpose of the day’s rite is that thou shouldst enter or pass into covenant with the Lord Thy God and into His oath which the Lord thy God maketh with thee this day. The word oath in the Hebrew appears also in verses twelve, fourteen, nineteen, twenty and twenty one and it is translated in our text both as oath and as curse. In Deuteronomy 11:20 we are told: “Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God, Him shalt thou serve and to Him shalt thou cleave and swear by His name”. The phrase to swear by his name means to adhere to Him, to be totally loyal and faithful to Him as a matter of life and death. An oath places our life on the line as a surety of faithfulness. Oaths could be taken only by free men because only free men can give their word without reservation. In verse ten Moses declared ye stand this day all of you before the Lord your God. Now we can understand what verse twelve says. J. A. Thompson translates it very literally as ‘for your crossing over into the covenant of your God and into His curse’. This places the covenant under a God centered context. We do not choose God He chooses us. We are placed in the realm of blessings but we dare not see ourselves as only blessed. We are under the penalty of the curse for disobedience, for faithlessness. Mankind is already under Adam’s curse. If being delivered by Christ we reject the renewed covenant in Christ by our disobedience we are doubly accursed.

In verses fourteen and fifteen this covenant demand is inherited by our posterity. Now this is an important statement. Our posterity are now in a position to receive both blessings and curses. Our lives have future consequences, this means that a people who have been in the covenant and have rejected it are going to inherit God’s judgment and this has happened to some peoples in history. Of course Israel was under the covenant and rejected Christ. The Curs or Kurds as they say in English was once a Christian people, they are now landless and hated by everyone around them even though their neighbors are all Muslim because they have become a totally faithless people towards anyone and everyone they deal with. Man can never step outside of God and His government. The atmosphere and environment of our lives is God and His covenant. To depersonalize that world is to falsify it. But man seeks to remove himself from the world of guilt and the curse by reducing the world to brute or meaningless factuality. If life is meaningless then our sins are meaningless. The oath is also a confession of loyalty and gratitude for what God has done. They are therefore reminded of God’s miraculous deliverences in the first nine verses of this chapter in Egypt and in the wilderness. In choosing God man chooses life. God reminds the people though that He chose them for life. Apostasy means serving other gods whom they knew not. As we’ve already seen Moses calls them dungy gods. D-u-n-g-y. They are gods whom they have not confessed nor truly known.

The reference is to an ignorant adherence to false faiths. The reason for their abandonment of God and their adherence of these false faiths is to escape from the covenant God and law whom they knew. Man’s dislike of the God of scriptures stems from knowing him too well. Mark Twain put it very well, he said it’s not those parts of the Bible I don’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts I do understand. Man seeks to flee from the living God to the harmless gods of his imagination. Verse twenty six can be paraphrased in these words: for they went and served other gods and worshipped them. Gods whom they did not know and gods who had given them nothing. Their apostasy to false gods was in essence therefore a choice of their self-will against the living God but the choice is in essence is between God and themselves. In terms of man’s original sin his desire to be his own god and law, man chooses other gods as a façade for himself. The premise of covenant faithlessness is cited in verses eighteen and nineteen of our text:

“Lest there should be among you man, or woman, or family, or tribe, whose heart turneth away this day from the Lord our God, to go and serve the gods of these nations; lest there should be among you a root that beareth gall and wormwood;

19 And it come to pass, when he heareth the words of this curse, that he bless himself in his heart, saying, I shall have peace, though I walk in the imagination of mine heart, to add drunkenness to thirst:”

We have an image here of man saying ‘well whatever God says I can be my own blessing’. But these verses go totally against the premise of modern man whose main premise is that our problems are essentially intellectual ones. Our concern then should be with understanding. As against this the bible tells us that our problems are moral and religious ones.

Where we do not understand it is usually because we do not want to understand. Humanistic intellectualism neutralizes all moral problems and calls for a rationalistic solution or a scientific and technical one. In this scheme of things the offender is the one who insists that the moral and religious aspects of a question be given priority. Now in ancient Greek thought man’s salvation was an intellectual thing. Man by philosophy was going to save himself and this is why the concern with philosophy. This is why in Plato’s Republic you had what is implicit in all the Greek thinkers, the philosopher kings will rule all. There will be soldiers who will do their bidding and at the bottom level the great masses who are incapable of salvation who will just be ruled. This was their premise, of course we know that Plato who wrote the Republic and Socrates his mentor were both homosexuals but the body had nothing to do with morality, only the mind, as far as they were concerned. And the western world has inherited that premise and it is enthroned in the world of academia. Verses twenty two and twenty eight speak of religious education, a willingness to learn from god’s judgment. If we reject the fact of God’s judgments we blind ourselves to the realities of God’s world. The emphasis through Deuteronomy and our text is on the obedience of faith. Our everyday life is full of things we use which we do not understand. We do not wait until we understand electricity to use it nor do we postpone driving a car until we master its mechanics. Few users of computers know the intricacies thereof and so on and on.

The demand for fullness of understanding of the Bible is thus an evasion. Nobody seeks fullness of understanding in any field except their specialty. Certainly we seek to know the Bible better always but we do not wait on believing in God until we have mastered every verse of the Bible. In verse twenty nine we are told:

“29 The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.”

In virtually all things total knowledge is an impossibility for man. This is most true where the triune God is concerned. This does not mean ignorance, where God is concerned whatever we know of God is totally consistent with all his being. We are inconsistent creatures, we try to move in a certain direction but we often fall by the wayside. We stumble, we do things that we know we should not do, but God is totally consistent with all His being, He is perfection. There are no surprises in God, if you know a little of God you know that everything about God is true to that which you know. We cannot know Him exhaustively but if our thinking is biblical we can know Him truly. We are told in First John 2:20:

“But ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things.”

God’s people do not and cannot know all things exhaustively but they can know them truly because God’s world like God has an inner coherence and meaning, not to the extent that God does, but there is a coherence. We do not know the future but we know who ordains it and governs it and the moral law that is totally over it. We are given God’s revelation and we can understand what we are given to understand. David Pane said of verse twenty nine: its chief point is that we can see quite enough.

If we give ourselves to the word of God we see! We may not understand every chapter and verse of the bible but if we accept it and we don’t try to explain any of it away we see truly. It follows therefore that the eyes of the Israelites and our eyes were directed not towards tomorrow’s surprises but towards today’s responsibilities. The Bible speaks in terms of our needs and duties. False religions speak to satisfy man’s curiosities. Let us pray.

Our Father, we thank Thee that as Thy people we do know all things because we know Thee, we know the goal of all creation and its purpose. We know why we are here and what God expects of us oh Lord God. Thy word is truth, Thy Son is incarnate truth and we are by Thy grace and mercy made members, citizens of the new creation. Our God we thank Thee, in Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Question] Now in a court of law maybe there’s some validity to why people don’t want to take an oath, maybe they’re not conscious of it but maybe they have a feeling that if they lie they would be under a sort of curse and if their testimony isn’t going to be the truth.

[Rushdoony] Well I don’t know all the reasons why people refuse to take an oath, very often it’s because they don’t believe in God.

[Same man] Yeah but Christians should be willing to..

[Rushdoony] Then we know that one group very early in the seventeenth century felt that taking an oath was wrong. The Quakers. But of course they believed that they had an inner light and therefore could have revelations as to what the truth was. So their word even if they had taken an oath would not have been worth much. For a long, long time in the courts of the United States something you rarely hear about anyone who was an unbeliever either could not testify or if he were permitted to testify the judge would warn the jury that this was not a man whose word could be trusted. This was routine through most of our history because they understood the meaning of an oath and men knew that an oath if you step outside of it, if you break it, brings God’s curse upon you. Yes?

[Question] Well to the loss of faith, the loss of idea of honor.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The loss of the idea of honor, a very, very serious problem. There is a book at a university press written by a friend of ours, someone on our mailing list, and it is a study of the concept of honor in southern history basically but the general concept as well. I’m sorry to say the university press knows it’s an exceptionally good book but has been sitting on it for a year at least and has not yet published it. But it is an important concept which once was very, very important in Christendom and is a word now almost forgotten. Any other questions or comments?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Could you say that again I’m not entirely sure I understood it.

[Same Question] They all require you stand up when court commences now. It used to be an old requirement to stand up.

[Rushdoony] Well it is in most places, when the judge comes in in most courts everybody must stand.

[Same man, unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] You can expect anything there. [Laughter] [

[Same man] I knew that!

[Rushdoony] I haven’t been in a court yet, and I’ve been all over the country, not in the Bay Area, and everyone must stand when the bailiff commands it and the judge enters.

[Same man] Well my point is, what I’m trying to get across is, is that regardless of how evil they are it is still God’s court so out of respect we should stand.

[Rushdoony] Yes, that’s right I agree. Yes. Yes. Well if there are no further questions, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, we thank Thee that being in Thy covenant we are under Thy blessings when we are faithful. Thou knowest oh Lord the burdens of every heart here. In Thy sovereign providence Thou hast ordained all things for our eternal good. Give us grace not to be overcome by bitterness but to overcome evil with good. To be faithful unto Thee knowing that Thy covenant promise to us for faithfulness is a great and marvelous promise. Hold us ever in the hollow of Thy hand. 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.