Deuteronomy

The Requirement of Obedience

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 38-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 038

Dictation Name: RR187U38

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. Lord I have loved the habitation of Thy house and the place where Thy honor dwelleth. I was glad when they said unto me, let us go unto the house of the Lord, praise ye the Lord. Sing unto the Lord a new song and His praise in the congregation of saints. For the Lord taketh pleasure on His people, he will beautify the meek with salvation. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God we pray that the place where Thy honor dwelleth may become all the earth, let the darkness of men may be cast down and Thy righteousness, Thy justice shine forth as the noon day sun. Grant oh Lord that we serve Thee faithfully in this cause and in Christ Jesus we be more than conquerors and that His kingdom prevail over men. In His name we pray, Amen.

Our scripture this morning is from Deuteronomy 11:26-32 and our subject: The Requirement of Obedience. Deuteronomy 11:26-32.

“ Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse;

27 A blessing, if ye obey the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you this day:

28 And a curse, if ye will not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn aside out of the way which I command you this day, to go after other gods, which ye have not known.

29 And it shall come to pass, when the Lord thy God hath brought thee in unto the land whither thou goest to possess it, that thou shalt put the blessing upon mount Gerizim, and the curse upon mount Ebal.

30 Are they not on the other side Jordan, by the way where the sun goeth down, in the land of the Canaanites, which dwell in the champaign over against Gilgal, beside the plains of Moreh?

31 For ye shall pass over Jordan to go in to possess the land which the Lord your God giveth you, and ye shall possess it, and dwell therein.

32 And ye shall observe to do all the statutes and judgments which I set before you this day.”

Moses declares that man’s choice is between obedience and disobedience. And this means a choice between blessings and curses. Since all men are created by God all men face this choice. Israel’s decision brought greater repercussions in both directions. In Deuteronomy 28 we have a fuller statement of what this means. Joseph Parker stated the matter very ably and clearly when he wrote that man is not meant to be a moral inventor, a maker of morals, that he has to accept a revealed morality and offered righteousness. That God has been so kind to him as to arrange the whole way of life. But men seek to be moral inventors because man’s original sin is to be as God, to be his own god, his own determiner and his own inventor of law and morality. But new situations do not necessitate new morals as situation ethics hold. I believe the founder of the school of situation ethics died recently from AIDs. Antinomianism denies to God the power to determine good and evil. It is more in harmony with fallen man than anything else. God gives the motive for obedience, blessings. Man’s preference however is for his own will to be done, not Gods and he chooses to disobey. In the Bible a curse is much more than a verbal statement it is the active and personal force of God’s judgment at work in history. It is at work against men and nations and sometimes against the earth itself in the punishment of men. In [unknown]’s words the law then is not simply a legal code to pattern Israel’s behavior, it is the key to the fullness of life that awaits Israel on the other side of the Jordan River. Fallen man’s key to life is held to be his free choice which in essence means the choice to dissent from God. Man wants the freedom to make decisions without consequences, he wants to determine what follows from his free choice rather than to face predetermined conclusions. This was in the last century a major argument among the student generation of revolutionary character. That consequences were social conventions. That the consequences that people talked about need not necessarily follow. Of course there is a great book written to demonstrate the falsity of that, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Moses makes clear that there are no consequence free options, man pays a price for his free-will, he cannot decide against God and for himself without paying the price.

There are no consequence free options in God’s creation. The form of this choice is covenantal and a covenant is a treaty. Ancient treaty making involved a statement of curses and blessings or penaltys and rewards for disobedience and obedience. Modern treaties have no such penalties and are not strictly speaking treaties since they are made for convenience and without moral penalties. No true treaty exists any longer because treaties now have no penalties, no rewards, nothing. When God says behold I have set before you a blessing and a curse he tells us we have a God-ordained choice, to obey or disobey so that the terms are set by God himself, not by man. Man wants as his choice the power to create alternatives of his choosing, whereas God declares the choices and the consequences are of His ordination. Centuries later, God through Isaiah described such people as men who say ‘stand by thyself, come not near me for I am holier than thou’, these are a smoke in my nose, a fire that irritates me all day. This is of course self-righteousness or Phariseeism or as Isaiah said, from whom the term comes, holier than thou. This is the attitude of humanism. We see it all around us in our contemporary politically correct self-created elite. Geography comes into the matter, as in verse twenty nine, reference is made to the two mountains Gerizim and Ebal. Gerizim to represent blessings and Ebal to represent curses. They were aptly chosen because Mount Gerizim had fertile slopes while Mount Ebal representing curses stood barren and sterile. In Deuteronomy 27 we see the practical application of this. Samuel Rolles Driver whose dates were 1846 to 1914 was a very influential Old Testament scholar who influenced churches deeply with his modernism. In fact in my student days both at Berkeley and at the seminary Drivers name was held in great respect as one of the monuments of the last century. Well, Driver held with respect to Deuteronomy and the law that and I quote:

“Duties are not to be performed from secondary motives such as fear or dread of consequences. They are to be the spontaneous outcome of a heart from which every taint of worldliness has been removed and which is penetrated by an all absorbing sense of personal devotion to God.“ Unquote.

This was a kind of opinion that led to antinomianism and to our century. Driver represented the triumph of humanism in Biblical studies. Notice how first of all he replaces simple obedience with a spontaneous outcome. This tells you why discipline has disappeared from the schools. Everything is supposed to be spontaneous. Learning and obedience alike. Well how far would we get if we reduced man’s reactions to commands not to kill or commit adultery to a spontaneous desire only. Man’s natural goodness is assumed by Driver. This may have been true let us assume at Oxford in Driver’s day when it was a church dominated town. But even Driver should have known better had he known himself. Second, Driver apparently equated humanity with the angels in assuming a heart from which every taint of worldliness has been removed and has been penetrated by the all absorbing sense of personal devotion to God. In my student days both at the university and in seminary Driver’s words were more respected than the Bible. We should not be surprised at what our world has become. The last I noticed some of Driver’s works were still in print and apparently still as influential as ever. He was one of the although unknown by most people architects of the twentieth century. An older more traditional perspective on this text is given by [unknown] about the same time as Driver wrote. When he titled this text as the Dread Alternative Before Every Man our Lord repeatedly calls attention to this choice, as does John in John 3:18-21. Man was created to be a moral being and moral choices are inescapable for man. They do not disappear when he denies them. God’s test of men is in terms of their choices. If they are of Christ they reveal it in their works, their fruits. The commandment therefore is plain spoken: ‘and ye shall observe to do all the statutes and judgments that I set before you this day’. The statement is not an appeal, it does not say ‘think about it and make God happy by doing what He suggests’. Rather it is a blunt commandment, do it. Man is not asked to reflect on what God says or to understand it but to obey it.

Contemporary education stresses the participation of the child who is urged to comment on the teaching, express opinions and teach the body of knowledge of which he knows very little as something to be judged, to be taken only at will. The result is ignorance because the self-importance of the child is cultivated rather than his self-discipline. Education for ignorance and arrogance is the result. The antinomianism of the churches has been a major force in this evil development. We have a child centered education in the schools and not only God but subject content has lost their rightful place. But life is neither child centered nor man centered and it is an illusion to think so. Life is God-centered, it serves His purposes or incurs His judgments. Curses and blessings, rewards and punishments are therefore inseparable from life. The disaster of public education has been its abandonment of rewards and punishments. In the 1950s a woman, a friend of mine, was called to the school for consultation about her young boy who was described to her on the telephone as having a problem, he was a social deviant. She hurried to the school in shock and alarm wondering how can my sweet child, my dear boy, have been involved in perversion. She found that her son’s problem was that he was reading books during recess instead of playing. That made him a social deviant and now the moral degenerates are the normal and those who disagree with them are the deviants. We can see why education has been going downhill since the 1950s. Such rewards and punishments as do exist are not in terms of any valid standard. As a result the moral universe is turned upside down by contemporary education, statist education, the media and one area of life after another. We should not be dismayed or distressed at the consequences, they will be judgment and they will cleanse the earth. Let us pray.

Our Father we thank Thee that Thou hast set before us curses and blessings and through Jesus Christ Thou hast called us to a life of blessing. Give us therefore strength, courage and patience as we confront a world in which the heathen rage and take council together against Thee and against Thy anointed. Give us faith and courage that we may be more than conquerors in Christ, in His name we pray, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Question] In normal daily business contracts or covenants were there typically penalties as part of the covenant or did they go by the biblical law standard?

[Rushdoony] Yes that’s a very, very good point. The only sphere today in which there is still a lingering trace of rewards and punishments, cursing and blessings are in business contracts and even there the courts are messing that up. So it’s harder and harder to hold anyone to a contract. It is also a treaty and therefore it has of necessity rewards and punishments. If you abide by the contract the relationship flourishes, certain benefits accrue to both parties, if you violate it then the curse of the law should overwhelm you. But with our courts today it’s virtually impossible for this to take place so the one area where the contractual character remains is being steadily destroyed. Yes?

[Question] Maybe one of the reasons is that the judges aren’t held responsible for what they do properly or improperly?

[Rushdoony] In almost every case now there is a growing breakdown of interpretation. Just as with the constitution all kinds of fanciful rights have been read in to the terms so that they nullify the letter of the law, the same is true of contracts. It is one of the grim facts that today for example the first amendment and the guarantee of freedom of religion is being done away with by definition, zoning laws are increasingly barring churches from business areas because supposedly so much dead space during the week damages business and from residential areas because they could disturb people who want to sleep till noon on Sunday mornings and at the same time their freedom of speech to propagate the faith in every public sphere is being denied. It’s been years now that we’ve had the mandatory requirement that peaceful parades and demonstrations that did not block traffic did not have to be licensed; now they have to be licensed. We have had in the past five years things like the case in Los Angeles where some Christians, members of the Jews for Jesus group were, 1988 I believe, arrested because they were handing out leaflets on the Pearce College campus targeting especially I believe Jewish students but all unbelievers.

The sad fact is that none of the students there protested except one, the son of immigrants born in the Middle East, an Arab and he was so outraged because this was a violation of what he believed America represented that he grabbed the leaflets and started passing them out while the Jews for Jesus were being handcuffed, so they handcuffed him and took him an Arab with the Jews down to the police station. I wish we had more Americans like that young Arab but little by little court interpretations are invalidating contracts and the Constitution. Any other comments or observations?

Well if not let us conclude with prayer.

Our Lord and our God we thank Thee that although men void the covenants, contracts and treaties of this world Thy covenant stands and Thy rewards and punishments, curses and blessings are unfailing. And Thou wilt in Thine own time deal with these workers of iniquity. 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.