Deuteronomy

The Abomination

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 28-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 028

Dictation Name: RR187P28

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. Oh give thanks unto the Lord, call upon His name. Make known His deeds among the people. Sing unto Him, sing praises unto Him. Talk ye of all His wondrous works, glory ye in His holy name. Let the heart of them rejoice that seek the Lord. Let us pray.

Almighty God our Heavenly Father who of Thy grace and mercy have made us Thy people. Hath given us such great promises in Jesus Christ. Has declared that we are Thy people throughout all time and eternity. We gather together in Thy name, to rejoice in Thy mercies. Thou knowest us oh Lord better than we know ourselves. Thou knowest our needs, do Thou minister unto them. Thou knowest our hurts, we beseech Thee to heal us. Thou knowest our hopes, grant oh Lord that they be in terms of Thy holy purpose. Thou knowest our loved ones and their needs and we beseech Thee to draw them ever closer to Thee. Make them Thine. And now Lord grant that we behold wondrous things out of Thy word. Teach us, instruct our hearts. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Our scripture this morning is Deuteronomy 7:17-26. Our subject: The Abomination. Deuteronomy 7:17-26.

“ If thou shalt say in thine heart, These nations are more than I; how can I dispossess them?

18 Thou shalt not be afraid of them: but shalt well remember what theLord thy God did unto Pharaoh, and unto all Egypt;

19 The great temptations which thine eyes saw, and the signs, and the wonders, and the mighty hand, and the stretched out arm, whereby the Lord thy God brought thee out: so shall the Lord thy God do unto all the people of whom thou art afraid.

20 Moreover the Lord thy God will send the hornet among them, until they that are left, and hide themselves from thee, be destroyed.

21 Thou shalt not be affrighted at them: for the Lord thy God is among you, a mighty God and terrible.

22 And the Lord thy God will put out those nations before thee by little and little: thou mayest not consume them at once, lest the beasts of the field increase upon thee.

23 But the Lord thy God shall deliver them unto thee, and shall destroy them with a mighty destruction, until they be destroyed.

24 And he shall deliver their kings into thine hand, and thou shalt destroy their name from under heaven: there shall no man be able to stand before thee, until thou have destroyed them.

25 The graven images of their gods shall ye burn with fire: thou shalt not desire the silver or gold that is on them, nor take it unto thee, lest thou be snared therin: for it is an abomination to the Lord thy God.

26 Neither shalt thou bring an abomination into thine house, lest thou be a cursed thing like it: but thou shalt utterly detest it, and thou shalt utterly abhor it; for it is a cursed thing.”

This is a very important passage; the subject of course is the abomination. Now when we think of abomination we think of it humanisticly. What is it that is horrible? But God insists that we think biblically in terms of His word. An abomination is that which He calls it. Before we come to that we have in verse twenty a strange statement which is difficult to set in a time sequence but it is a basic and important part of the understanding of this chapter. The Lord thy God will send the hornet among them until they that are left and hide themselves from thee, be destroyed. The hornet was a symbol of the pharaohs. The archeologist John [unknown] made this clear some years after World War One in his excavations and Sir Charles [unknown] after him did the same. The whole area of Canaan and Syria had been under Egyptian power. Well the practical effect of Egypt’s collapse as a result of the plagues among Egypt and then the destruction of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea crossing meant that they had to pull in whatever troops they had. So that the forces that were in Canaan which they possessed and in Syria had all been pulled back to Egypt. So the various Canaanite states which had long depended upon Egypt as their overlord to protect them now were left without the army that had long been their defense, Egypt. Moreover the Canaanites were morally bankrupt even though economically rich and militarily incompetent, apparently. The hornet or the Egyptian military power had reduced the Canaanites to a point where a numerically fewer people, the Hebrews, could easily overthrow them. Now the reference, the hornet or Pharaoh in his power was of course understandable to Israel. And this is the important point; it was a startling commentary on God’s providence. Egypt had been the great oppressive power; its overthrow had required the supernatural actions of the Lord. Now their way into Canaan was made easier because Egypt had earlier shattered the Canaanite powers. Their ancient oppressive enemy Egypt was now Israel’s blessing.

Egypt had prepared the way for them to the conquest of Canaan. It had conquered and provided them the military protection for Canaan so long that while they were economically rich they had lost the ability to defend themselves. Just a little later Rahab described to the spies of Israel how the Canaanites felt about people before whom Egypt had fallen. According to Joshua 2:9-11:

“ And she said unto the men, I know that the Lord hath given you the land, and that your terror is fallen upon us, and that all the inhabitants of the land faint because of you.

10 For we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red sea for you, when ye came out of Egypt; and what ye did unto the two kings of the Amorites, that were on the other side Jordan, Sihon and Og, whom ye utterly destroyed.

11 And as soon as we had heard these things, our hearts did melt, neither did there remain any more courage in any man, because of you: for the Lord your God, he is God in heaven above, and in earth beneath.”

Well we are too often absorbed with our fears, our grief’s, our problems to the point that we forget that God works at every end of the matter. So that we feel one part of it that may be grief and trouble but God is working at the other end in the terms of His sovereign purpose. And he will bless us thereby. As a result, our deliverance and our prosperity come from unexpected sources. God always works every angle and every end of every matter. Those whom Israel feared in turn feared Israel and with better reason. These enemy peoples were also the enemies of God. This is an aspect of our battles we must never forget. If our enemies are the enemies of God whatever they call themselves they will in His good time be destroyed. Their religion being a false one, whatever its pretenses, everything used therein is an abomination to God. Now in verse twenty six not only is the term abomination used but also accursed thing. And thou shalt utterly abhor it, we are told. An abomination means something unlawful, something unclean, abhorrent, something evil. It is a word that can be used of many things such as idols or acts such as lawless sex, or eating forbidden foods or of ungodly marriages and so on. It can also refer to unjust weights and measures.

To wearing things pertaining to the other sex and much more. Such things are important to God because they are his laws. We may not see them as important but God does and He calls them abominations. And the term abominations may refer to things we regard as trifles but they are not trifles in the eyes of God. For practicing abominations Canaan had become an abomination in God’s sight and thus judgment was necessary. In brief, if we regard history and our lives humanistically we impoverish ourselves. We don’t see that God is working at every end of things, we only see what hits us or hurts us, only what the moment brings us when God is working in through all things. Well, it’s a sure fire recipe for defeatism if we see only what we can see. To deny God’s power at work through history is itself an abomination, a dirty repulsive and evil thing. The concept of an abomination is sidestepped by humanistic culture; a humanistic culture finds offensive only that which offends humanistic man. This entire chapter stresses something which Joseph Seymour Pratt the Third has called ‘strength through isolation’. Strength through isolation. God as He works will often bring about things that we experience as grief whereby he separates us from persons and things that we don’t want to be separated with or separated from. But we don’t see the whole of the story and God does. And so he separates us so that we might have strength through isolation. We are told to look to God through our strength, not to man. The humanistic approach leads to compromise and to dangerous alliances. An absolute loyalty to God is therefore to set forth as necessary. And three grounds for such a faithfulness are stressed. First, in verses seven through eleven, the people are told that God has demonstrated in all His dealings that He is absolutely true to His covenant promises. He had initiated the covenant in grace. Man could in canvas all of it with sin. Then second, God’s covenant according to verses twelve through fifteen gives material blessings including physical health. It is very wrong to reduce God’s blessings to the spiritual realm because the Bible clearly does not. We cannot tell God how to bless us, we might want Him to bless us in a particular way but HE can bless us in ways that sometimes bring a lot of pain for a time but make us the richer for it. We are plainly told in Psalm 47:4 He shall choose our inheritance for us. He shall choose our inheritance for us. God does not discriminate against either material or spiritual gifts because both realms are His creation and both are avenues of His blessings.

Then third in verses sixteen through twenty six we are summoned to be faithful because God is always faithful and always present in all his power as He did to Pharaoh, to Egypt, to Ogg, Sihon, Amelik and others so shall the Lord thy God do unto all the people of whom thou art afraid! There is more to life than we can see and we must always walk by faith. Verse twenty two is a remarkable one:

“And the Lord thy God will put out those nations before thee by little and little: thou mayest not consume them at once, lest the beasts of the field increase upon thee.”

God had summoned Israel to a total and immediate victory. But He knew their weaknesses. He knew they were not going to be faithful, that after their initial victories the people would settle into their designated areas and be less willing to help others conquer the rest of Canaan. As a result, the conquest which was supposed to take place in one generation took several generations. God in His foreknowledge refers to this and cites it as something He’s going to use to bless them. Thou mayest not consume them at once lest the beasts of the field increase upon thee. Now that’s a real problem and its one we’re going to face in the years ahead, we’re beginning to face it already as we up here in the mountains know. Because of the environmentalists a great many animals including the mountain lions are increasing to such an extent that they are now in the valley, they’re on the university campus at Sacramento and a couple people have been mauled! The cities have lots of meat for them. Cats, dogs and people. What are we doing? We are creating something like God spared Canaan from and we’re doing it from our own folly. Too quick a conquest would leave unoccupied land and wild animals would then have the opportunity to increase at a dangerous rate.

Modern man has an exaggerated opinion of himself. He thinks he can destroy things so easily. He believes he has tremendous powers to destroy, he cannot destroy the earth, he cannot really pollute it. I was interested to read recently that the air itself has self-purifying qualities. And has one scientist has said if all the aerosol cans in the world were taken and put to use at the foot of Mount Saint Helens they wouldn’t equal the smallest emission or eruption. We are seeing a return of many wild animals once believed to be gone from much of America. And we are seeing an increased destructiveness by many of these proliferating animals. It was a blessing of God to Israel that the land was not emptied by conquest; it was allowed thereby not to revert to wilderness. Now a related myth to that of the paradise of wild animals is that of the virgin soil. No virgin soil has ever existed anywhere since God created the earth. It was virgin soil on the day of creation. Animals can be very destructive of the soil, of vegetation and of trees. In verse twenty six there is a very stern warning. Neither shalt thou bring an abomination into thy house lest thou be accursed thing like it. In other words, if you bring an abomination into your house you become abominable. God is always the significant friend or significant enemy of man. And it is His wrath we must fear not mans. Therefore as far as these peoples of Canaan are concerned, verse eighteen says thou shalt not be afraid of them. The antidote to fear is to remember God and what He has done. When they walk in faithfulness to the covenant God and His law, verse twenty four says there shall be no man able to stand before thee until thou have destroyed them. This is a remarkable promise from man’s perspective but from God’s it is simply an aspect of His covenant faithfulness. We live in a fallen world, a sinful world. A world that is militantly at war against God. God’s view of men and nations is not a sentimental one. Neither is it a superficial, a surface one. We see appearances primarily, it takes time for us to know what’s in the heart of people but God knows. All things are naked and open to His sight. And all men must either serve the Lord or they serve themselves. They either war on God’s side against all that He calls an abomination or they themselves become an abomination. God gives to no man nor nation the option of neutrality, it does not exist.

And the standard by which to judge all things is God and His word. That’s the yardstick. It is not what we see nor what men claim to be, we must remember that from the moment Christianity triumphed and became the religion of the Roman Empire on until this day one of the best hiding places from God has been the church. Men hide in the church! I recall some years ago a reporter who said there were more people professing Christ in Washington D.C. and in Congress then in any other city in the country. And he then added, but there’s not a thimbleful of Christianity in all Congress. I was reading last night about the man who is the biggest pork barrel operator in Congress who last year got seven hundred million dollars in pork barrel legislation for his state. Well, he’s not home as much as he used to be because he’s in Congress all the time but before he went to Congress he had a men’s bible class and in no time at all he was the sensation of the state. From about a dozen or so he took it to five hundred and it was still growing when he left. Of course that’s how he got into Congress, he was a spell binder. But how much Christianity in a man who may be golden tongued as this man is, who steals seven hundred million dollars from the treasury of the United States for pork barrel things in his state? We see the circus, God sees the heart. And God works to separate us who are His own from those who are abominations in His sight and from things that are abominations. So that history is constantly a movement, very often painful for by God opens up things so that we see them clearly and we know what we’re dealing with. So that we are separated by His mercy from those things from which we should be separated. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God, we know that Thy ways are all together righteous and holy and that nothing occurs in all of history, not a sparrow falls or a hair from our head falls apart from Thy providence. And Thou hast a purpose in all these things. And Thy purpose for us is all together good. Give us grace therefore so to walk in the confidence that Thou wilt in Thy good mercy make us stronger, more successful in Thy kingdom and more faithful in and through all these things. How great Thou art oh Lord and we thank Thee. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] I think it’s a good one. Are there any other questions?

[Question] Well God appears to be the ultimate chess master. If the situation where Canaan was invaded by the Egyptians so that the Canaanites could be corrupted and the Israelites could come in later and conquer Canaan and then they became complacent, these were all object lessons, this is all a series of object lessons which is all worked out in advance.

[Rushdoony] A perfect match of everything. Everything done so it fits in terms of God’s purpose. Man sees it as terrible, he doesn’t understand it. As Luther said: God’s working in history is like a printer setting type (and in those days type was set by hand and it was all backwards), and he said when you see the page of type that has been set it is all backwards, you cannot read it, but then in eternity it is printed out and you see the perfect meaning. Yes?

[Question] It was said that the greatest human chess masters are twenty five moves ahead, with God it must be an infinite number of moves ahead all the time.

[Rushdoony] Yes, Canaan was a corrupt place to begin with and God said He was going to allow them to continue in their corruption until their time was fulfilled, their corruption had reached its maximum. Well somewhere along that line Egypt possessed all that area, moved in with its armies. It was a very rich, a very prosperous area, it was also the major trade route of the world. For centuries the trade between North Africa, Asia and Europe moved through that area. So whoever possessed it had a great deal of wealth. Well, Egypt gained it, it ruled, and because they were already corrupt once they were not able to defend themselves someone else was doing it for them, Egypt, they became soft and flabby. So they were very rich and very corrupt and had no capacity really to defend themselves. All that in the providence of God.

[Question] Is there a message in there that no country should ever guarantee the safety of another?

[Rushdoony] [laughs] That’s a good point. More than once a great power has taken over an area or as acted as a protector for it and the area has lost the ability to defend itself and it has not been helped thereby, not at all. We for example, because it’s in the news today, Haiti took over. Haiti with the marines early in the century. And Haiti was corrupt when we did take it over but it’s been even more corrupt since than ever before in all its history! Now there’s no question, when the marines were there they had good rule, they put in telephone system which still functions to this day and electricity and in some areas plumbing so the marines were in a sense a blessing. In fact one area was ruled by a sergeant as a king, virtually, and his word was law and they were very sorry to see him go because he had provided good law and order they had never experienced before. But, by these things they destroyed the marines did, what little ability the Haitians had to govern themselves. So they’ve been a particularly corrupt regime since, and I would say in that case what you said is born out by history. Any other questions or comments?

Well if not let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father it has been good for us to be here for Thy word is truth and Thy word by Thy spirit speaks to our hearts. Gives us that which we need. Is a light upon our way. Our Father, in Thy light indeed we shall see and have light. Guide us in our daily walk; give us grace to take hands of our lives and to commit them to Thy keeping. And bless us as we serve 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.