Deuteronomy

The Solution

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 105-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 105

Dictation Name: RR187BE105

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. Oh Lord open thou my lips and my mouth shall show forth Thy praise. For Thou desirest not sacrifice else would I give it. Thou delighest not in burnt offerings, the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart, oh God, Thou wilt not despise. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God we give thanks unto Thee that all things happen of Thy ordination. That Thy purposes are all together good, that Thou hast ordained that heaven and earth shall be shaken so that only the things that are unshakeable might remain. That all things pass through fire so that only that which is pure gold might remain. Give us grace faith and hope that we may stand in the time of testing that we might know that Thou art God and that it is Thy will that shall be done. Our God we thank Thee, in Christ’s name, Amen.

Our scripture lesson is Deuteronomy 30:1-20. The Solution. Deuteronomy 30:1-20.

“And it shall come to pass, when all these things are come upon thee, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before thee, and thou shalt call them to mind among all the nations, whither the Lord thy God hath driven thee,

2 And shalt return unto the Lord thy God, and shalt obey his voice according to all that I command thee this day, thou and thy children, with all thine heart, and with all thy soul;

3 That then the Lord thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and will return and gather thee from all the nations, whither the Lord thy God hath scattered thee.

4 If any of thine be driven out unto the outmost parts of heaven, from thence will theLord thy God gather thee, and from thence will he fetch thee:

5 And the Lord thy God will bring thee into the land which thy fathers possessed, and thou shalt possess it; and he will do thee good, and multiply thee above thy fathers.

6 And the Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, that thou mayest live.

7 And the Lord thy God will put all these curses upon thine enemies, and on them that hate thee, which persecuted thee.

8 And thou shalt return and obey the voice of the Lord, and do all his commandments which I command thee this day.

9 And the Lord thy God will make thee plenteous in every work of thine hand, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy land, for good: for the Lord will again rejoice over thee for good, as he rejoiced over thy fathers:

10 If thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to keep his commandments and his statutes which are written in this book of the law, and if thou turn unto the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul.

11 For this commandment which I command thee this day, it is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off.

12 It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it?

13 Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it?

14 But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.

15 See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil;

16 In that I command thee this day to love the Lord thy God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commandments and his statutes and his judgments, that thou mayest live and multiply: and the Lord thy God shall bless thee in the land whither thou goest to possess it.

17 But if thine heart turn away, so that thou wilt not hear, but shalt be drawn away, and worship other gods, and serve them;

18 I denounce unto you this day, that ye shall surely perish, and that ye shall not prolong your days upon the land, whither thou passest over Jordan to go to possess it.

19 I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live:

20 That thou mayest love the Lord thy God, and that thou mayest obey his voice, and that thou mayest cleave unto him: for he is thy life, and the length of thy days: that thou mayest dwell in the land which the Lord sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them.”

The curse appears very early in history in Genesis 3 and often thereafter but the curse is not God’s last word to man. And this chapter makes clear that although Israel’s future will see them under God’s curse the curse is not God’s final word to any nation. If they repent there will always be room for them. Israel is told very plainly that it is a wayward people but that God’s grace is greater than His curse. It is this chapter that Nehemiah 1:8-9 cites. There Nehemiah prays to God saying:

“ Remember, I beseech thee, the word that thou commandedst thy servant Moses, saying, If ye transgress, I will scatter you abroad among the nations:

9 But if ye turn unto me, and keep my commandments, and do them; though there were of you cast out unto the uttermost part of the heaven, yet will I gather them from thence, and will bring them unto the place that I have chosen to set my name there.”

Verse seven of our text is a notable one, God says very plainly if they repent he will not only forgive them their sins but will transfer their judgment onto their captors. They will then inherit the curses which had previously been on Israel. In J.A. Thompson’s words the outcome of obedience is blessing, the outcome of obedience is blessing. To believe that God has now become antinomian and does not want obedience is monstrous; such a faith is destructive of character. Verses fifteen through twenty make clear that commitment means obedience, it means more than a verbal profession, it means our way of life. Verses eleven following make clear that there is no excuse for disobedience. The covenant law is not a changing one, it does not vary from generation to generation. It is not impossible to keep and man has a plain and clear cut path to follow. The requirements of the covenant are simple. The consequences are very great, both in blessings and in curses. The witnesses to the covenant or the covenant oath are both heaven and earth, verse nineteen tells us.

God’s creation works to bless our faithfulness and to curse our disobedience. We find an example of this a little later in the book of Judges in the song of Deborah where she declares triumphantly: the stars in their courses plot against Sisera. The very make up of God’s creation works against the ungodly. God’s appeal to obedience is cited in verses nineteen and twenty:

“I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live:

We are here confronted with the mystery of human responsibility. God predicts what He has ordained, Israel’s apostasy, captivity and restoration but Israel is fully responsible for its sins yet God decrees them. A biblical perspective requires us to accept but God’s total predestination and our human responsibility whether or not we understand the meaning of this. Proverbs 20:24 tells us:

“Man's goings are of the Lord; how can a man then understand his own way?”

In verse twenty God promises long life for obedience. Before this in verses eleven through fourteen we have what Sir George Adam Smith, almost a century ago, called ‘the conscious of the law’. That’s an important phrase. There is no such thing as the content-less conscious. If there were there would be no conscious. If men therefore deny God’s law they are denying a content to their conscious.

According to Romans 1:18-21 God’s witness is in every man’s being but men suppress it in their unrighteousness or injustice. If they are antinomian, anti-law, they insistly substitute for God’s law their own feelings and intuitions as the equivalent of a sound conscious, the result is Phariseeism and evil. The law gives content to our conscious. As Hoppe noted the law is designed as a guide to human life. It is not mysterious not inaccessible but is open to all. It is a very practical guide to daily living, it is the way of life open to all. Moreover as Hoppe points out life means life in the Lord and death is simply life without God. The law is life because it is an aspect of life, of God’s creation. It is the condition of life, the good air we breathe so that to forsake the law is to forsake life. Because the law is not alien to life nor an imposition upon it. The law as the condition of life means that is the health of our being. In Romans 10:5-10 Saint Paul quotes Deuteronomy 30:11-14 to set forth the supremacy of the gospel as the regeneration of man’s heart. The law of God is the way of life for the redeemed man. It is in his heart and in all his being, it is not alien to man. In verses eleven through fourteen Moses presents the way of the Lord, obedience to the covenant and its law as the easy and natural way which it is. Because we are created in God’s image to serve and obey Him, because of the fall it has become the hard way, because it goes against our will to be our own God and law. Our warped being leads to a warped response and only our regeneration makes us willing to be obedient. Mankind was made to serve and obey God. When man the creature attempts to play God he plays the fool and moves under judgment and death.

Greek civilization made the solution to the problem of this world one of knowledge. Man’s salvation was thus from ignorance into factuality, into knowledge. This would mean if it were true that our university professors are the holiest men in society and all graduates have an edge on everybody else in holiness and it takes no great wisdom to know that that is not the case. If man’s problem is ignorance, not sin, then there is no moral guilt in ignorance. The state and its educators are not regenerative but therapeutic. They provide healing by education. Because of our departure from Christianity we now have a therapeutic state and therapeutic schools and neither do any healing. In this perspective man is not a sinner but a patient. This view only aggravates man’s predicament because his problem is a moral perversity not a question of ignorance. As a result this failure to face up to the human problem is aggravating the problem. Moses here states simply that for the fact of moral dereliction for man and society the solution is a very simple one: believe and obey God. But our society today is determined on the wrong answer. It is a question of education, of ignorance. We have thirty years ago a president, Kennedy, declaring at a university that all our problems are really technological ones so it’s simply a question of man taking the knowledge he has now and using it to solve all the problems. That’s why since his day the federal budget has increased so dramatically, because if all the problems are simply technological ones throw money at them.

Use education, use technology and you’ll solve all the problems. As a result the problems have been aggravated. They will not be solved until we go back to the Lord and His word, to the son of God and the law as our way of sanctification. Let us pray.

Our Father we thank Thee for Thy word. We know that as a people we are far afield. Recall us to Thy word, to Thy son, to Thy kingdom. Deliver us in Thy righteousness. Grant oh Lord that Thy judgment clear the field for the triumph of Thy kingdom. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes. Because then it is a moral education. It is an education that does not tell man that the fault lies in something else or in someone else. Not too long ago a crime figure who was testifying against the syndicate and also to the crimes he had been a party to concluded by saying that it wasn’t really his fault his father didn’t play catch with him [laughter]. Yes?

[Question] The therapy, the therapists help the bureaucrat.

[Rushdoony] Yes. He creates a bureaucracy because you’re not a free moral agent, you’re not a responsible person, you need a vast bureaucracy and therapists to take care of you. So you have the therapeutic state and the term is not one that I coined, its freely used nowadays as though it proved how good they were just to say we are a therapeutic state or a therapeutic schools.

We’re having so much of this now and it combines with another great evil: equalitarianism. Eric [unknown] it is reviving, he tells me, his book on equality that came out in the early thirties. Which at that time he very correctly saw as a great threat to freedom because in the name of equality your freedom will be taken away because you’re doing better than others. In one of the recent U.S. News and World Report John Lio [sp?] has an article on how on demand children who are seriously handicapped or mentally disturbed are allowed to go into classrooms with other children as their right. And they are totally destructing the classrooms, wreaking a great deal of damage, making learning impossible for the other students and yet on appeal these parents of such children win every time and their child is placed back in the classroom. In one instance the teacher had to take a leave of absence because of physical collapse from the strain. But this is equality and this is therapy, the therapy of being with normal children. And the two things are wreaking a great deal of harm across the country in one area after another, yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes. So we have the bed of Procrustes. If you remember the Greek mythology the inn where anybody who stopped by there was a bed and you were either stretched to the limit of the bed or your foot were cut off so that you’d fit the bed so that nobody survived the bed of Procrustes, the land lord. And that’s what the United States is doing to us today. Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Question] When will the madness end?

[Rushdoony] Well God’s begun judging it right now and He’s going to smash it. Well, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father we give thanks unto Thee for Thy word. We thank Thee for the healing power of Thy spirit and of Thy word. We thank Thee that Thy kingdom is one without end and that Thou hast called us to be citizens thereof. Make us ever valiant for the truth, firm in the defense of the things that are of Thee, constant in our faithfulness to our Lord and His word. 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.