Deuteronomy

Priest, Prophet and Self-Satisfaction

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 32-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 032

Dictation Name: RR187R32

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. Give unto the Lord, O 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. O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness: fear before him, all the earth. Let us pray.

Almighty God our Heavenly Father we give thanks unto Thee for the blessings of the year past and also for the trials, for the troubles we have had. For we know that Thou dost make all things work together for good for them that love Thee. For them that are the called according to Thy purpose. We therefore give thanks unto Thee for all Thy yesterday’s knowing Thine ordination and they have an eternal purpose for us in Christ. We look unto Thee for all our tomorrows, knowing they come from Thee, that their purposes are all together righteous and holy and it is Thy will that shall be done and even the wrath of men shall praise Thee. How great and marvelous art Thou oh Lord and we praise Thee. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Our scripture this morning is from Deuteronomy 9:7-29. This is from the farewell sermon of Moses. Deuteronomy 9:7-29, Priest, Prophet and Self-Satisfaction.

“Remember, and forget not, how thou provokedst the Lord thy God to wrath in the wilderness: from the day that thou didst depart out of the land of Egypt, until ye came unto this place, ye have been rebellious against the Lord.

8 Also in Horeb ye provoked the Lord to wrath, so that the Lord was angry with you to have destroyed you.

9 When I was gone up into the mount to receive the tables of stone, even the tables of the covenant which the Lord made with you, then I abode in the mount forty days and forty nights, I neither did eat bread nor drink water:

10 And the Lord delivered unto me two tables of stone written with the finger of God; and on them was written according to all the words, which the Lord spake with you in the mount out of the midst of the fire in the day of the assembly.

11 And it came to pass at the end of forty days and forty nights, that the Lord gave me the two tables of stone, even the tables of the covenant.

12 And the Lord said unto me, Arise, get thee down quickly from hence; for thy people which thou hast brought forth out of Egypt have corrupted themselves; they are quickly turned aside out of the way which I commanded them; they have made them a molten image.

13 Furthermore the Lord spake unto me, saying, I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiff necked people:

14 Let me alone, that I may destroy them, and blot out their name from under heaven: and I will make of thee a nation mightier and greater than they.

15 So I turned and came down from the mount, and the mount burned with fire: and the two tables of the covenant were in my two hands.

16 And I looked, and, behold, ye had sinned against the Lord your God, and had made you a molten calf: ye had turned aside quickly out of the way which the Lord had commanded you.

17 And I took the two tables, and cast them out of my two hands, and brake them before your eyes.

18 And I fell down before the Lord, as at the first, forty days and forty nights: I did neither eat bread, nor drink water, because of all your sins which ye sinned, in doing wickedly in the sight of the Lord, to provoke him to anger.

19 For I was afraid of the anger and hot displeasure, wherewith the Lord was wroth against you to destroy you. But the Lord hearkened unto me at that time also.

20 And the Lord was very angry with Aaron to have destroyed him: and I prayed for Aaron also the same time.

21 And I took your sin, the calf which ye had made, and burnt it with fire, and stamped it, and ground it very small, even until it was as small as dust: and I cast the dust thereof into the brook that descended out of the mount.

22 And at Taberah, and at Massah, and at Kibrothhattaavah, ye provoked the Lord to wrath.

23 Likewise when the Lord sent you from Kadeshbarnea, saying, Go up and possess the land which I have given you; then ye rebelled against the commandment of the Lord your God, and ye believed him not, nor hearkened to his voice.

24 Ye have been rebellious against the Lord from the day that I knew you.

25 Thus I fell down before the Lord forty days and forty nights, as I fell down at the first; because the Lord had said he would destroy you.

26 I prayed therefore unto the Lord, and said, O Lord God, destroy not thy people and thine inheritance, which thou hast redeemed through thy greatness, which thou hast brought forth out of Egypt with a mighty hand.

27 Remember thy servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; look not unto the stubbornness of this people, nor to their wickedness, nor to their sin:

28 Lest the land whence thou broughtest us out say, Because the Lord was not able to bring them into the land which he promised them, and because he hated them, he hath brought them out to slay them in the wilderness.

29 Yet they are thy people and thine inheritance, which thou broughtest out by thy mighty power and by thy stretched out arm.”

In these verses Moses reviews the history of the apostasy of Israel at Mount Sinai. They had every reason in the world to be faithful to God, He had delivered them from slavery in Egypt, He had led them miraculously through the Red Sea and through the wilderness. He had brought them to the mountain, there to give His law. And after Moses had gone up into the Mount, been there for a period of time they wearied of waiting for him and made a golden calf, began to worship it and to practice fertility cult rites. They had broken the covenant and the penalty for breaking the covenant is the death penalty and so God said I shall destroy this people. But Moses intervened; he became a mediator both for Aaron his brother the high priest and for Israel. He pleaded not in the name of the people but in the name of God’s own honor. The Egyptians will say you led them out into the wilderness to destroy them because you hated them. Your honor is at stake. And God listened to Moses. Now this chapter is a very important one, a kind of index to history. A very important index. Why? Well the most blessed nation of the ancient world is shown to have a long history of disobedience. Although their history from Egypt to the borders of Canaan and into Canaan was a series of miracles we find no reference anywhere to anyone but Moses looking back with awe and gratitude to what God had done. Instead, the Hebrews showed themselves to be consummate ingrates, whiners, cowards and fools. Only for the sake of His word to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob did God bless them. There is more here of very important key, an index, to history. We have a contrast between the faithfulness of Moses, God’s prophet and Aaron the high priest. Aaron was the forefather of all priests in Israel. Now the function of priests is to maintain an orderly sequence of worship.

And this is now the function of the ministry. But the function of the prophet is to challenge the complacency, the self-satisfaction of people and institutions. Churches get set in their way, self-satisfied, thinking they are better than others and they become like the Pharisees who look down on the public. Institutions and nations become the same. They look upon themselves as a godly people or a superior people and a great nation and they are marked by self-satisfaction which is the root of Phariseeism. And what is the function of the prophet? To challenge people, oh yes you may be better than your neighbor but you’re not what God wants you to be. And that’s the prophetic function in history. Paul called for the ministry of the church to have not only pastors, elders, deacons but prophets. Now prophet is not just one who predicts things, a prophet is one who speaks for God apart from an institution. Two institutions, two individuals. And this is what church state and people do not like: a prophetic voice. A prophet challenges the short comings of the age. Too often what the clergy do, the pastors, or the priests is just to live with the shortcomings of the age, to settle down in self-satisfaction, we’re doing a good job, fine, okay, we’ll continue to grow. And with that they fall into Phariseeism. Now neither the church of the Old Testament nor the Christian era have been fond of prophets. They challenge the status quo; they are disruptive of institutional peace and routine. This is not to say that Aaron was an evil man, he had moments of weakness, he was in the main faithful but not forceful. It was Moses, God’s prophet who again and again challenged the evils of Israel. This is not Aaron.

In verses seven through eight Israel is bluntly reminded of its past sins. Three words bring out the warning: Remember and forget not. Nations and peoples and individuals are very prone to remember things about themselves that are pleasing and flattering whereas God requires that we remember our sins and God’s grace and to avoid forgetfulness, complacency and self-satisfaction. There is another aspect of these verses which we must take note of it, the intensity of feeling and the resultant dedication. In verse eighteen, for example, Moses’ radically fasting seems impossible to us. We are not given to such total commitments. Before World War Two it was a little more common to hear of ordinary Catholics and Protestants fasting for some time because of an intense concern. Somehow they seemed to have a supernormal ability to survive untroubled and without any outward indication of what they were doing. You did not know unless a family member told you they were fasting. I can recall on the farm, a lot of the farmers thereabouts back in the twenties, if a child were very seriously ill or if their wife were, it was not unusual for them to fast a week, two weeks, three weeks, praying constantly and nobody thought anything about that, you didn’t find that in the cities but it still survived in the countryside. We haven’t had that kind of thing especially since World War Two. We have had imitations of religious fasting by some leftists and prisoners to call attention to their cause but Christian fasting is relatively uncommon. Moses stresses that Israel’s redemption was an act of mercy on God’s part. No credit or virtue belonged to Israel, God not Israel is the righteous one and it would be sin for Israel to take any credit to itself.

When Moses came down from the mountain and found Israel engaged in fertility cult worship he broke the two tablets of stone on which the Ten Commandments were written. Because the covenant was broken! It was now null and void. And the death penalty for its violation applied therefore to Israel. It was because of this penalty Moses immediately fasted and prayed, he became the intercessor with God for Israel to prevent the execution of the death penalty. What we see first is that Israel was prayed for by Moses to prevent its immediate annihilation. He clearly recognized that God’s justice required Israel’s death. And second, Moses made particular intercession for Aaron. At the same time, Moses destroyed the golden bull calf, then third, he reduced the lump of molten gold to fine powder. He then threw that gold into a vast running mountain brook to make retrieval of the gold impossible. Edward Blair has rightly called attention to the fact that Deuteronomy like the New Testament stresses that salvation is the unmerited gift of God. It is his grace. Israel’s success was God’s work; God’s providence had prepared the way for Israel and the people could not take credit for God’s grace, mercy or care. Verse fourteen is especially telling here. God tells Moses ‘let me alone that I may destroy them and blot out their name from under heaven and I will make of Thee a nation mightier and greater than they’.

Let me alone is in the Hebrew literally, loosen your grip. Loosen your grip from Me. And this gives us a vivid image of the intensity of Moses’ prayer. It was as though he had grabbed ahold and would not let go until His prayer would be answered because Moses was concerned with God’s honor. Not Israel’s safety. To destroy Israel would undo the great miracles of deliverance that God had wrought. Moses recounts all this so that the new generation might with humility assume their past. They were not a great people, rather they had a great God. When we examine the besetting sin of Judea and the New Testament era we find it is very clearly Phariseeism. Phariseeism is a form of hypocrisy and self-righteousness. It is precisely this self-righteousness that Moses here condemns. When God is merciful and gracious to a people they cannot claim this favor on God’s part as a merit on their part. Self-righteousness before God inverts the moral scale and has man contributing to God’s cause and adding to his work, which is evil. Self-righteousness makes a claim on God and this is the opposite of true religion. Moses he remembers, stresses memory, remember, he declares, your guilt and God’s grace. Now, his purpose is not to make them a guilt-ridden people but rather to require of them a reliance on God’s grace. Without God’s forgiveness and grace we are both guilt ridden and given to suppressing our guilt under a façade of self-righteousness. To remember in faith our guilt is also to know God’s forgiving grace and to rely on Him rather than on ourselves. God clearly stresses the reprobation of the Canaanites and He does this to warn Israel that when what he regards as not a people’s pretenses, their claims, but their lives. If Israel violates God’s covenant grace and law Israel will be no less reprobate than the Canaanites. Approbation comes only to those faithful to God’s covenant. Moses by reviewing Israel’s faithlessness to God’s covenant was dredging up humiliating memories. Not simply to degrade them but to enable them to view themselves as God’s grace rather than their false pride.

Moses’ purpose was to strengthen them in their faith. In verses twelve and twenty three Moses cites the places of their rebellion against God. Taberah, Massah, Kibrothhattaavah, Kadeshbarnea, and so on. But these were not the only instances of grumbling and unbelief. But they were enough to make clear that Israel’s history was not one of merit, whatever their pride might be. But Israel’s error was one common to man’s history and to be found in many peoples and nations. Success is assumed to be natural inherit quality of a particular people. This assumption is an out growing of a belief that man, not God, determines history. It follows then that a people’s rise to imminence and power are due to their natural virtue rather than to God’s sovereign plan and purpose if people’s ideas are true. But men are unwilling to recognize that the natural inclination of men and nations are more towards to Nineveh and Sodom than to God. Left to themselves, people move in the same direction as Sodom and Gomorrah. On their own the peoples of this world are like the nations of Canaan. No man nor no nation earns this earth or heaven, history is not a human product but a divine plan. Seen humanistically history can only lead us to despair, seen biblically we know God is at work and all His ways are justice and truth. In the vortex of history we see the priestly mentality to work in every sphere, certainly in both church and state, there is no lack of manpower dedicated to the belief that what they, the institutionalists represent is part of an unending and blessed order. They work therefore to maintain that order and to further its power. As against this, the prophetic spirit witnesses against the established order in the name of the triune God. Clearly priests in the Old Testament and pastors now are needed but without the prophetic voices the people will perish. A people’s self-satisfaction and self-righteousness will have prevailed. Consider, how little Moses and the prophets are the subject of preaching. The prophetic voice is not a popular one because the prophetic voice constantly calls for us to conform ourselves more fully to the word of God and it challenges our complacency and our Phariseeism. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God we give thanks unto Thee for Thy word. We give thanks unto Thee that Thy word speaks unto our needs. Corrects us in our waywardness and blesses us into Thy service. Give us joy in Thy word and by Thy spirit strengthen us in Thy service that in Christ Jesus we may be more than conquerors. In His name we pray, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

[Question] Was Moses mistaken when he thought that he had changed the mind of God?

[Rushdoony] Moses knew that what God ordained would happen no matter what. But he also knew that it was his duty to speak for the honor of God. We come here to the great mystery which only the reformed faith has confronted, namely, that we cannot fathom the fact of human responsibility combined with God’s absolute predestination. Both are real! It’s a mystery beyond us. Philosophers have been able to call attention to the fact that apart from the combination of the two we either have a world of total chance which would collapse, it could not exist, or we have a world of total fatalism and determinism in which human beings are illusions and consciousness is an illusion. As prior to World War Two the whole school of psychologists pursuing things logically declared that consciousness was mythical, it was an epic phenomenon. People were delusions, really, and we were to be understood in terms of drives and this was what began the animal experimentation with rats especially, and by analogy we were no different. But it is only as we insist on our full responsibility and God’s absolute determination on all things that you can account for the richness of all things. Other theologies have always chosen one or the other extreme but the Reformed faith has insisted we take the whole word of God. We do not stress this strand or the other all. Any other questions or comments?

Well if not, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, we rejoice in the truth of Thy word. We thank Thee that in a dark world we have the lamp of Thy word. We thank Thee that our times in Thy hand, we commit ourselves and our loved ones into Thy omnipotent care knowing oh Lord that Thou knowest us better than we know ourselves and Thy care exceeds infinitely our own self-care. Give us grace therefore day by day to take hands of our lives and to commit them into Thy keeping. And 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.