Obedience and Life

Moses in his last words to Israel cites two witnesses to bear out his words concerning Israel’s inheritance. He again refers to these two witnesses in Deuteronomy 31:28 and 32:1. Above all in Deuteronomy 3:19, he makes clear that these two witnesses, heaven and earth, which outlast man’s lifespan are as Gods creation a witness for Him. 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 thou and Thy seed may live. To choose God means to choose life and blessing. To turn away from them is to choose death and cursing. This implies the individuals as well as to nations. Men may seek to make the issue a complex one, but Moses insists on its simplicity. They must begin by recognizing that they are privileged people, and it has been all of grace, no merit on their part. No other nation has had the revelations and privileges, Israel had known. And for them to despise their covenant status before God would mean greater judgment and disasters. For disobedience with its root in gratitude. They would be scattered among the nations. Our Lord states that as a fundamental premise of Gods way, that for unto whomsoever much is given of him, shall be much required and to whom man have committed much of him, they will ask the more. This is how God deals with us, with Israel and with the Church. The greater the privilege, the greater the responsibility, and the accountability. So let the church and the United States beware. As one aspect of the covenant peoples responsibility, Moses cites that they must avoid images. The images of antiquity were presented to tow forces, the state, and aspect of nature. So they were state worshiped and nature worshiped, which we have with us today.

Man found then and in our own time, especially with the renewal of environmentalism and Gaia or mother earth worship, which scientists from our best universities take part. The reliability and certainties of the natural order are very compelling to many people. The order of natural phenomenon they saw then as aspects of a cosmic natural and inherent power, that had to be worshiped. The Fathers of the early church were against this belief, which was common to the philosophers of Greece and Rome, which shifted the ultimate order of necessity from the realm of nature to the triune God. And one of the great works of this century C.N Cochran and Christianity and Classical Culture, gave and excellent about of this battle and the Christian victory. What happened was of course, that is against the Christians with their belief in predestination by God, they asserted freedom, that they wound up these pagan philosophers of Greece and Rome as the determinist. Because since they put necessity in the order of nature, it meant that having made man a part of that order, his freedom was gone. He was governed by natural necessity. But having made God the order of determinism, predestination. Man then had a secondary freedom and therefore man had power in history. In the world of the enlightenment and especially with Isaac Newton the realm of necessity again became, nature. So, not surprisingly, images are reappearing in the new paganism, and in some of these scientific environmental meetings, they have been displayed and paraded. Now no generation is born into a virginal historical context. Even Adam's world was a given order with a variety of precondition. In verse thirty one Israel is told that the covenant of centuries earlier made with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob binds them also. They are born into a given context. Even as all of us are. And that context gives us responsibilities, duties and accountability from our birth on.

One of the great errors of our time, a very great error, is the belief in a radical individualism, together with a radical statism and in both spheres the imagination is that we are starting from day one, that we can create a totally new beginning. This came to focus with the French revolution, when they proclaimed with the triumph of the revolution that it was year one and day one. In the Russian revolution they tried the same thing, the belief that by supposedly wiping out the past, you begin with no given context. And that’s the error of our anarchistic individualism today and of our anarchistic statism. The idea we can start from scratch. We can wipe out the past, we create the context, supposedly. In addition, Israel has received Moses says two great and remarkable witnesses to Gods covenant, faithfulness. First there is the deliverance from Egypt and second there is the revelation at Mount Sinai. If they are disobedient in the face of these things, it will lead to judgment, in Hoppies words, and I quote: “Disobedience will mean that Gods power will be turned against Israel, just as easily as it was once manifested for Israel.” Unquote. And Gods power has been used for the church, and for this country and other countries. And it can just as easily turn against it, as it is now. In verse thirty two we have an interesting statement, which speaks of the day that God created man. This is very clearly an assumption of one day creation. Those who try to lengthen the days of Genesis into ages, have no ground anywhere in scripture for such a view. It is an accommodation to Darwinism. God created man in one day, this text makes clear. The sixth day of creation. In verse twenty five, God declares that with time passing and peace and prosperity, in their possession of Canaan.

The people would forget their covenant God and fall in step with a false faith of the Canaanites. About thirty, thirty five, years ago, Robert Ardrey, with whom we cannot agree in respects, spoke of man as bad weather animals. And there is an element of truth to this. Adversity sometimes, but by no means always pushes people back to the essentials. Whereas prosperity and peace can make them arrogant, proud and self-sufficient, adversity is humbling and often humiliating to man. When the depression hit in 1929, it was interesting what it did to people. As joblessness increased children returned to the family home and doubled up, two and three families. Family life prospered. At the same time, church attendance increased, and the logical expectation was that crime would increase with so many jobless people, and it actually decreased. Now we have no assurance that’s going to happen in the 90’s, because we have a more lawless people. But adversity at times can push people back to their essentials. Paganism has often been an expensive faith, in terms of its cost to worship earth or appearance. But it is a cheap faith, in that it requires no inner change. The pagan is never a changed man, acts, rights and experiences replace the fundamental transformation, being reborn.

Some have rendered remain long in the land as having grown old in the land. It means that the pattern of life and prosperity, become for the people an aspect of a natural order, rather than the grace of God. This will provoke God we are told because He is a jealous God. He demands exclusive allegiance. To grow old in the land, means that man sees his success as coming from himself and the natural order. This accounts for his readiness to become explicitly or implicitly pagan. C.H Waller rendered, ‘remain long in the land’ as ‘shall slumber’. The people will be asleep to the true faith. J.R. Dumalo gave the most literal translation, perhaps: ‘Slumbered in the land’. What Moses assumes from start to finish is the chain of generations, accountable to God, and subject to His judgments. Our modern individualistic perspective makes this a strange concept today. We don’t think of a chain of generations. Our day one mentality, the world began when we were born and the state is going to begin again, when the right people take over and all will be as though it were the garden of Eden. In fact one writer has said that, in so much current day thinking, political and psychological, belief is that if certain things are done, we will create in effect a humanistic garden of Eden and a new world, and this has been openly stated. Henry Miller the pornographer said that if we had a total breakdown of civilization, all writing, all science, all technology, everything disappeared and you had two centuries of total anarchy in which men were total animals, then humanity, having forsaken its civilized past, would have a true garden of Eden. Well, each new generation now, sees itself and supposed freedom and independence of the past. And the result is both shallow and dangerous thinking. That freedom, presupposed by this anarchistic view of history is very faulty. The chain of generations is not a binding chain, but a foundation to build upon in terms of which to grow. We are not to forsake the knowledge of that fact, or to act as though it totally governs us.

Verses 39 and 40 are very important also. God does not say to Israel ‘believe in me and I will be grateful’, we are told that: “It is the fool that has said in his heart that there is no God.” The world for fool in the Hebrew means both stupid and wicked. James tells us that to believe in God has no merit, nor saving fact, because he says. Thou believest there is one God, thou doest well. The devils also believe however and tremble. God never says believe and I will be grateful you will be saved, or that our belief will save us. Only God’s grace redeems and regenerates us. What God clearly demands is a grace created faith that renders obedience. God demands obedience as a test of faith, as our Lord makes clear in Matthew 7:15 to 23. We are always surrounded by Gods two witnesses, heaven and earth. We are summoned to believe and obey, God the Lord. We live, not in a cosmic democracy, but in a universal theocracy in which God not man is the sole sovereign and King.

Let us pray. Almighty God our heavenly Father, we thank thee that we live in Thy world. Not in a world of chance, not in a world of man’s imagination. But in Thy realm, the place where Thy work shall be done. The place where Thy holy purpose for the recreation of all things shall take place. Make us Thy instruments, that we may by Thy grace be used to bring all things into captivity to Jesus Christ our King, in his name we pray, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Man from crowd] I’m not so sure this is a question so much as a statement. The Democratic spirit that pervades the United States and has, and seems to go down to our toenails of resistance, to a king, seem to play into the hands of trying to set up any kind of government other than Gods government, especially in this country.

[Rushdoony] Yes, towards the end of the last century, about a hundred years ago, and especially in the first decades of this century, the idea of a cosmic democracy encouraged and promoted by God was very prevalent. And one of the most popular writers, a minister who was the featured front page columnist in all of the first papers, which were quite numerous in those days wrote a book about the democracy of God. And this type of thinking became very, very prevalent. Now it led to another great evil, a belief that the concept of the democracy required that everything be governed by committees, the more men in decisions the better. So that the ideal form of handling everything was by committees.. committees of congress, committees of the church, committees of this that and everything. To the point that if anything were decided apart form a committee, it was somehow suspect.

I recall about ten years or more ago, someone from a church who had a statist within the church, telling us that their church had appointed a committee to study the subject of homosexuality. And Dorothy immediately spoke out and said: “Well you’ve already made a bad decision.” and he looked quite blank at that and Dorothy said: “Well, God has already settled the matter. What right has the committee to discuss the matter and to pass judgment?” But of course that’s the routine methodology of all the churches. The most obvious thing a committee is going to make a report on it. Now that faith in committees is a form of saying, faith in man. It goes back to Jean Jacque Rousseau who said that the state, putting it in our language, is infallible when it embodies the general will. The general will is not the majority vote, he made that clear. It is what the majority of people if they were thinking right, would want. In other words what the intellectuals say they should decide.

Well that kind of thinking Rousseauvian, general will thinking, now governs church and state and business, everything. So that committees, boards, govern; no longer individuals under God. And its leading to a delusion of responsibility so that this democratic spirit leads to mass tyranny, to group rules and the elite who decide what the general will is, have a soul right to say what the general will constitutes. They alone are sufficiently self-conscious to determine that. There is a scholar, count Eric (Cuenelt Ladeen?) an Austrian aristocrat, a brilliant scholar, whom Dorothy and I have known for some years, who wrote an essay that I wish he would turn into a book. He is a catholic and he said he wasn’t happy about coming to the conclusion, that he said. The future of the world is going to be decided by the thinking of two men, Crusoe on the one hand and John Calvin on the other. The one has absolute faith in man, the other an absolute faith in God. And I think he was right. Any other questions or comments?

Well, if not let us conclude with prayer. Our Lord and our God, it is good for us to be here. Thou art the Lord and Thy word is true. Teach us, day by day to walk in faithfulness to Thee. Make us more than conquerors in Christ. Grant that we and our children’s children to the end of time may be thine. That that which we have received we may pass onto our children and they unto their children's children for untold generations yet to come. Thou hast made us rich and we thank 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.