Deuteronomy

The Whole Truth

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 23-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 023

Dictation Name: RR187M23

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. Who shall ascend in to the hill of the Lord or who shall stand in His holy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart, who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity or sworn deceitfully. He shall receive the blessing from the Lord and righteousness from the God of His salvation. Let us pray.

Almighty God our Heavenly Father who by grace and mercy hath made all things, has made us to be Thy people and has surrounded us with Thy mercies and Thy providential care. We come into Thy presence knowing that we are deeply in need of strength, of grace, of mercy, of knowledge, that we might cope with the evils of this world and Thy name and power and become more than conquerors in Christ. Bless us to this purpose, in His name, Amen.

Our scripture is Deuteronomy 5:22-33. Our subject: The Whole Path. [????] Deuteronomy 5:22-33.

“These words the Lord spake unto all your assembly in the mount out of the midst of the fire, of the cloud, and of the thick darkness, with a great voice: and he added no more. And he wrote them in two tables of stone, and delivered them unto me.

23 And it came to pass, when ye heard the voice out of the midst of the darkness, (for the mountain did burn with fire,) that ye came near unto me, even all the heads of your tribes, and your elders;

24 And ye said, Behold, the Lord our God hath shewed us his glory and his greatness, and we have heard his voice out of the midst of the fire: we have seen this day that God doth talk with man, and he liveth.

25 Now therefore why should we die? for this great fire will consume us: if we hear the voice of the Lord our God any more, then we shall die.

26 For who is there of all flesh, that hath heard the voice of the living God speaking out of the midst of the fire, as we have, and lived?

27 Go thou near, and hear all that the Lord our God shall say: and speak thou unto us all that the Lord our God shall speak unto thee; and we will hear it, and do it.

28 And the Lord heard the voice of your words, when ye spake unto me; and the Lord said unto me, I have heard the voice of the words of this people, which they have spoken unto thee: they have well said all that they have spoken.

29 O that there were such an heart in them, that they would fear me, and keep all my commandments always, that it might be well with them, and with their children for ever!

30 Go say to them, Get you into your tents again.

31 But as for thee, stand thou here by me, and I will speak unto thee all the commandments, and the statutes, and the judgments, which thou shalt teach them, that they may do them in the land which I give them to possess it.

32 Ye shall observe to do therefore as the Lord your God hath commanded you: ye shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left.

33 Ye shall walk in all the ways which the Lord your God hath commanded you, that ye may live, and that it may be well with you, and that ye may prolong your days in the land which ye shall possess.”

Moses here recalls the delivery of God’s Ten Commandments and also the rest of His law at Mount Sinai. Moreover, God there appointed Moses as the mediator according to verses twenty eight through thirty one. He said also let Israel therefore obey and prosper. Moses is recounting incidents of about thirty eight years earlier. The older generation to whom he then spoke had all died except for himself, Caleb and Joshua. All the same, Moses spoke as though they were the ones to whom God then spoke. There is an important biblical presupposition involved here. A people’s past is also to a degree always their present. In particular because of God’s covenant the people’s past is also always their living present. It is important to understand the significance of this covenantal reality in order to appreciate history. To illustrate: the United States from the days of the first settlements in New England and Virginia will within a generation be four hundred years old. Before God its history involves its total life from its early covenantal settlement to its present apostate ways. The present generation was not born into an empty world nor do the immigrants coming in enter into nothing more than its present material culture. The present is a product of the past to a large degree. The nations are like men to whom varying numbers of talents are given as in the parable of our Lord in Matthew 25:14-30. And the Lord will hold them accountable for their past and present. I had one history teacher years ago in secondary school who insisted on speaking of the past as the living past, even though we might be ignorant of it. It governed, it colored, it helped determine so much in the present. And I shall always be grateful for his teaching. Every accounting by God is a total one, it begins with our past and includes its totality into all the present. Apart from the atonement and our sanctification we stand as impossibly heavy debtors to God. For this reason Moses spoke to the generation before him as fully a part of the generation past, as though they were one and the same.

The anarchist individualism of our time makes us mindless of the importance of our past and of our future histories as peoples. And the mandate is still the same. Israel must hear and obey to prosper, the people of God must hear and obey if they will prosper. Their days and ours cannot be prolonged apart from faith and obedience. Israel at Sinai feared God because of a bad conscience and with good reason. Therefore they asked Moses to be their mediator. To be face to face with God and His law and His justice was too much for them. The law of God is an indictment of man and his sin. Plato’s republic has no laws nor does Aristotle’s politics because neither had a doctrine of the fall and of man’s sin. For them, the problem was not controlling evil but a matter of arranging society. It was to ensure social help by the harmonious development of men and also the state. True balance with reason and control would ensure the flowering of man’s natural goodness. There were then thus the origin of the middle way, of being moderate about everything. The philosophical elite would provide the guidance, the Greeks believed. Well since the enlightenment man has had a like belief. It has seen the fault not in man but in the bad arrangement of things. The lack of the sufficient application of reason and science to society and also our troubles are due a belief to the prevalence of Christianity. At the beginning of the century Andrew Harper of the University of Chicago wrote and I quote:

“But in our modern day men like [unknown names] have demanded that mankind should yield service to them and then by the furtherance and development they thereby attain, they promise to work the deliverance of men from superstition and unreality and the bondage of ignorance. [unknown name] is typical. He preached and practiced in the most uncompromising manner the doctrine of self-development. He thought he could serve humanity in no way so well as by making everyone he met and all the experiences he encountered minister his own intellectual growth. Instead of saying with Moses, blot me out of your book but spare these dim idolatrous masses, he would have said, let them all perish but let me become the origin of a wiser, more intellectual, more self-restrained race than they. He consequently pursued his own ends relentlessly from his early years and retained results so immense that almost every domain, thought, speculation and science is now under some debt to him. But for all purposes of inspiring moral and spiritual enthusiasm he is practically useless. His selfishness however high its kind accomplished its work and left him cold, unapproachable, isolated.” Unquote.

As I read that I thought of Charles Francis Adams, the grandson of John Adams our second president. It was said of him, he was Unitarian to the core, whenever he entered any room in Boston on the hottest day of the year the temperature immediately fell ten degrees.

In every age salvation has been by God’s grace alone. This was emphatically true in Moses’ day as it is in our own. Israel’s salvation was an act of sovereign grace. Their response was to be, as ours must be, the obedience of faith. In verse thirty two ‘ye should observe to do therefore as the Lord your God has commanded you’ can be rendered as ‘careful to do therefore as the Lord your God has commanded you’. Richard Clifford has called attention to a detail in the very literal reading of the latter half of verse thirty two. That it should read: ye shall turn neither right nor left in the whole path which the Lord ye God hath commanded that ye walk. According to Calvin the greatest benefit and the highest honor God gives to a people is to enter into covenant with them and to give them his law. The marginal notes to this text in the Geneva Bible reads as follows and I quote:

“He requireth of us nothing but obedience, showing also that of ourselves we are unwilling there unto. As by obedience God giveth us all felicity so of disobeying God precede all our miseries.” Unquote.

In the early church the most common form of preaching was about the two ways . On the one hand the way of sin, death, self-will, lawlessness, and unbelief, and on the other life, righteousness or justice, obedience, faith and godly service. Obedience is due to God because our salvation is an act of sovereign and free grace. As Thomas Scott said so well and I quote:

“The word of God is spoken to us that we may learn, retain and practice it. For in this all religion is ultimately centered and without it the whole is but a dead carcass, not only worthless but abominable.” Unquote.

This is a blunt statement for our time when everyone wants to insist on easy believism. Modern man now defines things in terms of his self or his experience whereby God defines everything in terms of his word and will and what we do about it. Verses twenty two through twenty seven tell us of an interesting aspect of a giving of the Ten Commandments. When given at Sinai all Israel heard the terrifying voice of God in giving the Decalogue. They then in terror asked that Moses mediate the rest of the law to them. Thus only these Ten Commandments were heard by all. It was shortly after that they grew impatient with Moses’ return that they turned to the golden bull calf worship and fertility cult practices. The law as a whole is a unity not a collection of miscellaneous precepts. It sets forth the nature and the justice of God. It requires understanding as a unit and then we can understand why love is the fulfilling or putting into force of the law.

The law is God’s plan for the conduct of life on earth and it is a design for dominion and victory. It requires God centered living and it centers the life of man and society on God. The law insists that men face up the consequence of their actions. This knowledge is the beginning of true history apart from this history was in the past simply a chronicle, a register of events, not an account of a developing meaning. This is why all the ancient records are called chronicles. They simply record events they don’t deal with the meaning. That name therefore is misapplied to the two books of Chronicles, because while they do list and register names and events they also deal with the meaning. This is why historiography was born with biblical faith and the decline of faith leads in time to a decline in historiography because no meaning remains to life and to events. Let us pray.

Our Father, we thank Thee that we do not live in a meaningless world but that Thy total meaning undergirds all events and every moment of our lives. Give us grace then to face our todays and tomorrows in the knowledge that it is Thy will that shall be done. It is Thy kingdom that shall prevail, it is Thy people against whom the gates of hell shall not be able to hold out. Make us therefore strong in faith and faithful in Thy service. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions about our lesson? Yes?

[Question] Well I don’t think history has much of a chance now that even recent history is rewritten.

[Rushdoony] Yes, modern historiography is contemptuous of all meaning except a man imposed one and then you have a conflict of any number of peoples who want to impose meanings. And an honest historiography is not tolerated. The news yesterday indicated that David Irving had been expelled from Canada and he had been accused of being a racist, a Nazi, which is as farfetched as anything can be. This is an intolerance of anybody’s attempt to understand the meaning of events. Any other questions or comments?

[Question] Well then the nation that loses history it’s like a man with amnesia.

[Rushdoony] Yes, very good. If you didn’t hear that ‘a nation loses its history or forgets it, it’s like a man with amnesia, no memory of its past’. And of course this is what is being done to us now. Our state schools here and abroad, everywhere are dedicated to destroying the past of Christendom. With the result that they are producing barbarians because a barbarian is a man with no historical memory. Any other questions or comments?

Well if not let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, teach us to number our days and to apply ourselves to wisdom. Grant that through Thy word we understand past, present and future so that in Christ Jesus we do become more than conquerors. We thank Thee that Thy word is truth and Thy word is a life for us so that in a very, very dark era we can see the way and we can triumph. Bless us mightily, increase our vision, our faithfulness and make us joyful. 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.