Deuteronomy

God and the Weather

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 36-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 036

Dictation Name: RR187T36

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord and to enquire in His temple. Wait on the Lord, be of good courage and He shall strengthen Thy heart. Wait I say, on the Lord. Let us pray.

Almighty God our Heavenly Father we come into Thy presence mindful of the frailty of life, the evil of the times, the power of the ungodly and we come to be refreshed. To know anew how great Thou art, that the nations before Thee are as nothing, that it is Thy will that shall be done and men and nations who stand against Thee shall in Thy time perish and be done away with. Teach us therefore to look unto Thee, to know Thy word, to trust in Thy government and to be faithful in Thy service. In Christ’s name we pray, Amen.

Our scripture this morning is Deuteronomy 11:10-7 and our subject: God and the Weather. Deuteronomy 11:10-7.

 “For the land, whither thou goest in to possess it, is not as the land of Egypt, from whence ye came out, where thou sowedst thy seed, and wateredst it with thy foot, as a garden of herbs:

11 But the land, whither ye go to possess it, is a land of hills and valleys, and drinketh water of the rain of heaven:

12 A land which the Lord thy God careth for: the eyes of the Lord thy God are always upon it, from the beginning of the year even unto the end of the year.

13 And it shall come to pass, if ye shall hearken diligently unto my commandments which I command you this day, to love the Lord your God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul,

14 That I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the first rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil.

15 And I will send grass in thy fields for thy cattle, that thou mayest eat and be full.

16 Take heed to yourselves, that your heart be not deceived, and ye turn aside, and serve other gods, and worship them;

17 And then the Lord's wrath be kindled against you, and he shut up the heaven, that there be no rain, and that the land yield not her fruit; and lest ye perish quickly from off the good land which the Lord giveth you.”

Our text today is a step towards understanding both the offense of Deuteronomy and the insistence of Deuteronomy on God’s providence. Moses here declares that the weather is under God’s personal providence. Now the worldview of humanism is very much at odds with this. For the humanists, there is a scientific reason for everything. By scientific is meant an impersonal cause or causes producing random effects. A name is given to some phenomenon and therefore that explains it. But does it?

In my university days I was taught a course on psychology, it was a required course and in the course and the textbook it was asserted that consciousness was merely an epiphenomenon. An epiphenomenon was defined as a side effect of the activities of the brain muscles and having no real meaning. It was like, say, a little twitch you might get in a muscle. Consciousness was thus by definition reduced to something meaningless and impersonal. Now, that kind of thinking has not disappeared, it has just disguised itself because it was so much ridiculed in the twenties and thirties. Scientism uses the same technique to depersonalize all of life and in fact will not deal head on with the fact of life. It cannot explain it. But our text militates radically against all of this. It tells us very plainly that our weather is an aspect of God’s government and providence. The psychology course I had to take at Berkeley dealt with human action in non-human terms as stimulus and response, totally muscular. It accounted for everything without mentioning meaning, purpose or consciousness let alone God and His purposes. Such scientism is as far afield as can be, it is deliberately blind to meaning. Our text here as a contrast between two kinds of weather, first the weather and farming of Egypt is cited. In Egypt the Nile was dependent on weather far upstream from Egyptian territories. It was only about a hundred and forty years ago or so that the sources of the Nile were first discovered. Up until then no one knew where the sources of the Nile were. And the Egyptians in antiquity and for countless centuries took the Nile as a matter of fact. Not as something dependent on various conditions.

In the time of high waters Egyptian farmers had no problems, the irrigation waters came down the Niles, flooded vast areas, deposited all sorts of nutrients and then as it receded the irrigation water was directed into the fields. [unknown], big wooden pieces were used to block the ditches and direct the water in one direction or another. A farmer with his foot could push in a check or knock it out so that he really controlled the flow of water with his foot. So the irrigation of the fields was a man conceived thing as they saw it. The Nile was a given, the continual flow of water was a fact of life. The remoteness of the head waters of the Nile made the farmer less aware of the dependence on the rains that fell in Central Africa. But second, as against this, Canaan was and is a land of hills and valleys. Irrigation can still be utilized but the dependence on rain fall is an obvious one. The Israelites would have to look to the sky for rain and they would therefore be more abundantly and obviously aware unless they blinded themselves of their need to depend on God. This fact should prompt them to faith and obedience but of course as Moses later predicts in Deuteronomy 28:15 following the Hebrews did not look to God but like the Egyptians rather to themselves. Men prefer to have things under their control then in God’s hands. This was the appeal of the fertility cults. Their premise was that human action could be made efficacious in all and every area of life so that the basic issues are in men’s hands. They believe that man could control weather because the fertility cults were directed towards two things. The right kind of weather and the right kind of state. According to Sir George Adam Smith, an English man of a century and a half ago almost, whose perspective was not orthodox I quote:

“The Egyptian peasant could scarcely understand a living personal relationship between the individual and the deity, thus the Egyptian grew up under conditions unfavorable to the development of his spiritual life, but such as would fortify his understanding and practical industry.”

Now, if Smith were right then it should have followed that the sciences developed greatly in Egypt but this is not true. Only in one sphere did they develop a considerable technology, construction for the glory of the Pharaohs with the moving of rocks weighing thirty tons but nowhere else. They were no more remarkable than were other peoples of antiquity in their knowledge of things scientific. But Smith was right in stressing the impersonal nature of the relationship of the people of Egypt with anything supernatural. God promises rain in its season according to verse fourteen and the latter rains in March and April, the result will be God says, grass in the fields for their livestock and rain for their crops. Now in the earlier years of the twentieth century the annual rain fall in Jerusalem was about twenty five inches about the same as in London, England. What it is now I don’t know because statistics from Israel are not that freely available. Now in making his promise, God requires a threefold obligation of obedience in this text and in the whole chapter. Each obligation begins with the words therefore shall ye or ‘therefore thou shalt’. These three obligations are given in verse one, then in verses eight and nine and finally in verses eighteen and twenty one. The first is to love God and to obey Him and the two are identical. We cannot love God and disobey Him. The second is more specific in commanding obedience. It is their source of strength. Then third, there is the requirement that the children of the covenant be taught obedience. In fact, these three have been called by more than one scholar the three fold obligation of obedience, so that Deuteronomy is very, very firm as is the whole Bible in stressing obedience as the hallmark of faith. But it is this obedience that men want rid of.

They want God like an insurance policy that they can tuck away and use only when needed and the rest of the time they want to forget him except when they pray and then they want Him to obey them! It is for them, better to suffer impersonal but potentially controllable natural elements then to be dependent upon God. This is an ancient attitude. As an example of it, I’ll cite Horiatis. Horiatis in his visit to Egypt found such an attitude among the Egyptian priests who are not religious leaders in any sense we can recognize. He was told and I quote:

“For having heard that all the lands of Greece were watered by rain, not by rivers as their own was, they, the Egyptian priests said, that the Grecians at some time or any other would be disappointed in their great expectations and suffer miserably from famine. Meaning that if a deity should not vouch safe rain in them but visit them with a long drought the Greeks, this is the Egyptian priests speaking, must perish by famine, since they had no other resource for water except from Jupiter only. And for the Egyptians that was idiocy, to be dependent on the gods? They were dependent on natural forces. This is why the Egyptian power in its greatest is notable for the impersonality of things. You never have the feel that here were individuals, personalities. For them the world was an impersonal natural order and the ultimate in stupidity was to believe that personal forces at any point governed things. So you see the issue is not a new one. From antiquity men have seen it as God versus man and they have chosen man as did the Egyptians and as did Israel. Men do not want a Garden of Eden from God unless they can control it and remake it. This is why in verses sixteen and seventeen Moses warns the Hebrews against paganism. All forms of paganism are variations of humanism. In one form or another they stress man’s essential autonomy. J. A. Thompson rightly stressed the fact of God’s total and sovereign control of all spheres. We live in a personal universe, a personal God, who determines the laws, who governs personally in and through all things. Thompson said these verses give expression to the belief which is found in many areas of the Old Testament that there was a close connection between loyalty and obedience to the Lord and material blessing. God was sovereign over both nature and history and could make the weather and other natural phenomena serve historical ends.” Unquote.

Well when we go through history we find indeed that man’s waywardness seems somehow to coincide with plagues, epidemics, natural disasters and so on. It’s been that way over and over again from the most ancient records. Is that a coincidence, that these happen at one and the same time? The belief in man’s power is a primary ingredient in self-righteousness or Phariseeism. God stacked things against such an attitude on the part of Israel by giving them Canaan instead of Egypt, so that He thereby left them without a shred of excuse in their subsequent apostasy into Phariseeism. Of course in any part of the earth the weather should teach men humility but it does not. One of the minor pleasures Dorothy and I have had in the past few years was listening in the evening to the news to get the weather report knowing that the percentage of accuracy is exceedingly low. And only once have we heard a weather man or woman apologize for their fearful inaccuracies. Matthew 5:45 is sometimes cited against our text, our Lord there declares: “For He (God) maketh his son to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust.” Now this has nothing to do with times of judgment. In the normal course of affairs our Lord is saying the weather affects all equally. In the normal course of human dealing we are just to all alike. This does not mean that we do not prosecute criminals but in our normal dealings we deal justly with all men unless they are unjust we then deal with them justly still in terms of the penalties of the law. Our Lord does not say that God never judges men through the weather; in fact His reference to Noah is very clear on that. This text tells us how far we have come from a biblical view of history. God’s determination of the weather and of history are not every day asserted by people. And God’s contact with man is too often limited nowadays to a vague influence on the soul. This is emphatically not biblical religion. The verse that sums it up best of course is in Deborah’s triumphant song, the stars in the courses plot against Israel, God having created the universe, everything in creation serves His end, His purpose. Let us pray.

Our Father we thank Thee for this Thy word. We thank Thee that all things are in Thy hands and Thou doest all things well. Teach us to know the limits of our abilities, the totality of Thy government and the glory of Thy providence. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

[Question] Mark Twain said everybody talks about the weather and nobody does anything about it.

[Rushdoony] Yes and one person in the past few years observed that nothing better indicates the futility of man’s ability to control things in the weather, I wish I could recall the exact wording but it was a very telling statement.

[Question] I’ve always thought the essence of mystery is where did the wind come from?

[Rushdoony] Are there any questions or comments?

[Question] This isn’t on subject too much but Barak, he wouldn’t go out to battle unless Deborah accompanied him, was she the judge at that time, was that her authority?

[Rushdoony] She was a prophetess. And we have reference to a couple of prophetess’s in the bible, we are also told that when women come to the forefront that way it is an indication that men have failed their responsibilities and second, that God is still being merciful to them by sending them women of great wisdom to give them guidance as Deborah did and as did [unknown] later on and others. Any other questions or comments?

You can see of course from this text as well as those we’ve previously studied the reason why Deuteronomy has been a particularly hated or at least attacked book of the Bible. There is practically nothing in Deuteronomy from beginning to end of any kind of event that you can say here is an example of a supernatural act, there’s more of that in Exodus and other books but Deuteronomy, a series of sermons by Moses, clearly states that God is in charge. That there isn’t a single sphere of the world where behind the scenes God completely controls everything. And that’s the point that is so offensive about Deuteronomy. Men want a God who if he exists at all just is a kind of vague nice influence on the human soul, an inspirational source and nothing more. The God of Deuteronomy is far more than that and that’s His offense. Well, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father we thank Thee for this Thy word. We thank Thee that our times are in Thy hands, that all things are. For Thou alone art able to govern, art able to rule, to create, to make new. And so we look unto Thee, Thou hast promised to make all things new. Give us faith to serve Thee towards that end. 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.