Deuteronomy

Forsake Not the Levites

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 41-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 041

Dictation Name: RR187W41

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. One thing have I desired of the Lord, that have I sought 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 will strengthen Thy heart. Wait I say, on the Lord. Let us pray.

Almighty God our Heavenly Father, we give thanks unto Thee that all the days of our lives Thy hand is upon us for good. Thou art He who dost make all things work together for good for them that love Thee, for them that are called according to Thy purpose. Our Father we know that we cannot understand all Thy ways and all the things that happen in this world. But we know that in Thy providence they work to fulfill Thy purpose so that even the wrath of men shall praise Thee and the remainder of wrath Thou shalt restrain. Teach us therefore to walk always mindful that Thou art God, that Thou wilt never leave us or forsake us, so that we may boldly say that the Lord is my helper I shall not fear what man will do unto me. Our God, we thank Thee. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Our scripture this morning is Deuteronomy 12:17-19. Deuteronomy 12:17-19 and our subject: Forsake Not the Levite.

“Thou mayest not eat within thy gates the tithe of thy corn, or of thy wine, or of thy oil, or the firstlings of thy herds or of thy flock, nor any of thy vows which thou vowest, nor thy freewill offerings, or heave offering of thine hand:

18 But thou must eat them before the Lord thy God in the place which the Lord thy God shall choose, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant, and thy maidservant, and the Levite that is within thy gates: and thou shalt rejoice before the Lord thy God in all that thou puttest thine hands unto.

19 Take heed to thyself that thou forsake not the Levite as long as thou livest upon the earth.”

We have considered these verses just last week, we have on two or three previous occasions with other texts in the Pentateuch dealt with the Levites and we shall deal with them at least twice again in the very near future because the bible has a great deal to say about them. What the Bible teaches about the Levites is now largely forgotten. Who were the Levites? They were descendants of the tribe of Levi, the priestly line came out of Levi but the Levites as a whole were not a priestly class. Their functions varied, very mundane tasks associated with sanctuary, being the treasurers, being the ones where if someone did not to administer the tithe for himself, the tithe was given to the Levites who then took care of whatever was to be done, whether it was for the support of the sanctuary or for charitable purposes or educational purposes, the Levites were the administrators. On top of that according to Deuteronomy 3:3-10 they were the instructors of Israel, that’s the term applied to them, they were the scholars. It’s hard for us to realize how important this has been throughout church history. Almost immediately the early church had a whole group of philosophers, scholars, these men were writing to defend the faith against the onslaught of the enemies. And they had the pagans in a debate which according to Charles Norris Cochrane in his book Christianity and Classical Culture the pagans lost! They were the scholars. But some of them were also the custodians of the sanctuary; they included a great variety of functions associated with the faith. This is how you had your scholastic philosophers, whatever you may think about them, in the middle ages. Saint Thomas Aquinas, [unknown], and a great many others, and this is how you had so many great scholars in the Reformation, the Reformation was the work primarily of scholars, Luther a professor, Calvin a scholar and in fact, Calvin called for what more recently has been called a clerisy.

A clerisy, people whose function it is to become the champions of the faith. Instructors, from the level of children on up through the universities, the instructors of Israel, Moses said. And in fact, Calvin began as such a one, a scholar, but then with all the battles being waged in Geneva with the libertines and others trying to launch a kind of operation destruction he took over the pastorate so he could have a little more in the way of a public forum from the pulpit every Sunday morning and evening and once a day during the week during those years. Expounding the scriptures, instructing the people, so that he saw himself then as a Levite, an instructor, and a pastor as well. In fact, he said the church had to have scholars and one reason for the retreat of the faith in recent generations has been that this office has been totally forgotten. The verses of our text must be seen in connection with verse twelve and in fact many another, in verse twelve first of all, “And ye shall rejoice before the Lord your God, ye and your sons and your daughters and your men servants and your maidservants and the Levite that is within your gates for as much as he has no part nor inheritance with you.” Other texts speak of the poor that are to be included, the aliens, foreigners who do hold to the faith and so on. So this law requires and we shall return to these aspects because there is so much in the scriptures, now forgotten, about the function of the Levite or the clerisy or those who are called to be Christian school teachers or like our John Upton who was featured on 20/20 Friday night workers in charity, rescuing the unsalvageable orphans of Romania.

But basically, three groups of peoples had to be remembered by the faithful in their rejoicing before the Lord. First, the needy, widows and orphans, the poor, the aged without family and so on. Second, aliens or strangers who are residents in the land, and third, the Levites, God’s clerisy. In the early church the agape feasts were one aspect of this practice. In time, the church forbade their continuation but in the beginning as we meet with them for example, in Corinthians, they had been church potlucks to use a contemporary term held after services at first weekly. They were finally banned after two or three centuries by church leaders because they had become disorderly and drunkenness had been common and destructive. And this fact is important. Charity is never an easy matter. Christians can be generous in charity but the poor and the needy are not thereby to be classified as also as good because they are needy. That’s a serious error of our time! If people are on welfare our politicians insist they are by nature good people and they can be hoodlums. So the early church had to stop the agape feasts because these people were coming in simple to exploit it. Well the poor can be good and needy but they can also be bad and greedy, they can be sinful, lazy and exploitive. The church then besides extensive charities in various ways urge the needy who were not reached by all their charitable work through the deacons to place themselves at the church door to receive alms. The rational was the church goers would know who the local free loaders were and they would not give to them and they also would know who the truly needy, the crippled or otherwise unfortunate neighbors. Church goers were familiar with the local people who were truly God’s poor and those who were rogues. These practice faded sometime after the Reformation and with the rise of state controls of begging or the migration of the poor from one district to another and so on and on. And no satisfactory plan of dealing with the needy has been developed since. But Christians were so dealing with it all through the centuries and this country to about 1825. Christian agencies provided help, education, welfare and also law which we won’t go into at this time.

But what is clear in Biblical law as we shall see on other occasions when we come to those rules that poor relief is to be from person to person, from Christ’s congregation to those who are in need. This means that it is not institutional but personal, those who are fraudulent and shiftless are excluded by their neighbors who know their nature. Then second, it is local in character. The people in each community know the nature of the people therein, they and the local charitable groups they create know the people they deal with and that makes exploitation less likely. Then third, however else this charitable help was rendered in rejoicing before the Lord together with the needy included in the family meal, the rich and the poor were united in the Lord. They sat down as a common family together. And I can remember when that was still practiced, when the needy who came to church, widows would be routinely invited by one family or another into their home to have the Sunday dinner together. And I know until just a few years ago in many of the valley churches it was routine each Sunday for the farmers to bring a few boxes of food, vegetable produce, fruit, grapes, you name it. And I’ve seen churches where the amount was so great that it would from this wall to that wall, from here to there with paper bags provided so that anyone could take what they needed. This was once the practice all over the country. There is a fourth aspect of biblical laws concerning charity, they were not essentially charity but faith in action, the fundamental unity of faith in the Lord meant that the rich and the poor are alike His family and this is the fundamental ecumenicity, not of institutions but of believers. This common meal varying in its frequency required once in three years was simply one aspect of many things where the poor were to be helped. Others included out right gifts, gleaning, interest free loans, and much, much more all of which scripture still specifies. There is another aspect to these feasts of rejoicing, servants and employees were to be included by their employer. In the earlier years of the 19th century this practice in the United States meant that workers at a man’s store or factory had Sunday dinner with their employer.

This was very commonplace. In time this disappeared but it was replaced because people felt the need for it, by an echo of it, not much of one, but the company picnic or sometimes the company dinner. All this comes as a relic of biblical practice. Again, we see that the purpose was far more than charity, it is community in the Lord and this makes clear what it accomplishes, the unity of society. Rich and poor, bound together. When the state replaces community this leads to the bureacriticizaiton of life, the state destroys the familistic authorities of life and then there is a need for a bureaucracy to replace the natural authorities of our world. From the head of the household, the man, being the one who did these things and from whom Christ worked in this world it became the state and a soulless bureaucracy, and remember this was done in the early days of this country when every community was overwhelmed with a flood of immigrants from abroad. If it could be done then why not now? The obligation to center the eating of communal offerings in the sanctuary means that the religious character of all charity is not to be ignored. The motivation is not primarily human need although it meets that but community in the Lord. And the feast is no ordinary eating but a form of communion. The Levites had to be included because their presence made clear the religious nature of the meal. But this is not all. As Samson Raphael Hirsch, a Jewish commentator, pointed out, the people of Israel were largely engaged in farming, sheep and cattle, and it would have been easy for them to see the Levites as unproductive and useless. They were people who worked with their hands, they were productive, and these were intellectuals. Or were they? By binding them together this way it required that the Levite always be in touch with everyone. That his scholarship be not abstract from the world but essentially related to it. These commandments are restated in the following section, verses twenty to twenty eight which we will deal with next week and again in other texts we will deal with them later. Obviously God felt that particular stress was due here, He obviously felt that this is something important for any and every society.

Consider the differences between those gathered around the table in the sanctuary, the Hebrew farmer or rancher, reasonably successful and prosperous, the poor and the needy of the community, his servants and the Levite or Levites, the scholars of Israel. There was a great gap between them, economically and intellectually, one could say, but that gap was constantly bridged by faith, by the requirements of a common life. And today our scholars are eggheads with a contempt of the common man, with a contempt of the middle class especially who are immediately next to them in status and despising the middle class for their success and that is why the middle class is the constant target for penalties. God’s purpose was to bridge the gap between these peoples economically and intellectually. God’s purpose was to bridge the gap in terms of himself as the unifying force. All were to see in one another fellow members of the covenant, the sacramental nature of a common meal is very clearly evident and this is all important. The meal took place every third year by law but it was not restricted to that time and in the early church as we saw earlier the agape feasts could take place weekly or at stated intervals. The meal stressed a relationship one to another in the Lord. The reference to verse eighteen to the Levite which is within thy gates means the Levite whose calling is to serve in that particular area. In verse seventeen the meal is called a tithe. This is part of the second or poor tithe. This does not mean that the Levite was a poor man even though he might be well be either poor or rich. His presence was mandatory in order to stress the religious nature of the meal and of the charity. [unknown] rightly called this second tithe a theocratic tax. It was the tithe to which Amos 4:4 refers. The fact that charity is a tithe to the Lord again stresses the God-centered character of all such giving in biblical law.

As John Peter Lange said a long time ago, the emphasis is on the one place, the one sanctuary of the one Lord. In verse eighteen God declares that He himself will choose the place of the one sanctuary, so that nothing is left for men to do but to obey. God prescribes the tithe, the food, the guests, the place. For man He prescribes obedience. This order concludes by requiring that the Levites be always present. So in every point God commands what we are to do. At the same time this is a festival, a time of thanksgiving. Thanks are given to God not only for His bounty that makes the feast possible but also for the commandments which keep us on the pathway of righteousness and justice. We do not thank God because we have prospered on our own but we by His grace and law have been blessed and guided into better ways. We are to forsake not the Levite because the Levites are our instructors in the way God prescribes for us. Let us pray.

Our Father, we thank Thee for Thy word, that Thy word points us not only to our salvation but to the way of a Godly life here on earth ,towards righteousness and justice, in every sphere of life and thought. Make us ever joyful in Thy word and faithful to it. That in Christ Jesus we might be more than conquerors. In His name we pray, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

[Question] Yeah on the topic of charity, I was wondering, what steps could be taken today so that medical costs would be cheaper for those that can pay and available for those who cannot without going to some ludicrous socialist scheme.

[Rushdoony] Yes, as you know we’re working in several areas and I hope someday something can be done in the medical sphere because what we have is a situation where because of the Hill-Burton Act which provides funds for building hospitals the federal government has thereby obtained the power to dictate to all hospitals, Christian and non-Christian, and they do. So we need to look ahead and say we as Christians have got to start rebuilding hospitals which will once entirely Christian institutions. And to take no Hill-Burton funding, thereby gain the freedom to practice medicine as we see fit. So if you begin by taking money from the state you are totally under their control. This is why so many of the hospitals belonging to Catholic orders have had a fearful time in the courts trying to fight the federal controls. Any other questions or comments?

[Question] I was wondering if you would read the Isaiah 56:1-8?

[Rushdoony] Isaiah 56:1-8:

“Thus saith the Lord, Keep ye judgment, and do justice: for my salvation is near to come, and my righteousness to be revealed.

2 Blessed is the man that doeth this, and the son of man that layeth hold on it; that keepeth the sabbath from polluting it, and keepeth his hand from doing any evil.

3 Neither let the son of the stranger, that hath joined himself to the Lord, speak, saying, The Lordhath utterly separated me from his people: neither let the eunuch say, Behold, I am a dry tree.

4 For thus saith the Lord unto the eunuchs that keep my sabbaths, and choose the things that please me, and take hold of my covenant;

5 Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters: I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off.

6 Also the sons of the stranger, that join themselves to the Lord, to serve him, and to love the name of the Lord, to be his servants, every one that keepeth the sabbath from polluting it, and taketh hold of my covenant;

7 Even them will I bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer: their burnt offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted upon mine altar; for mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people.

8 The Lord God, which gathereth the outcasts of Israel saith, Yet will I gather others to him, beside those that are gathered unto him.”

Now a little later on as Isaiah gives us a vision of the future under Christ he tells us that the lifespan of man will be greatly increased because as of the power of sin and the world at large is broken the hold of death on us will be lessened and Isaiah says the sinner dying at a hundred will be accounted to have died young. Well this chapter is related to that and Isaiah is saying that my justice is going to be revealed in those days and it will be so dramatic that the foreigner will no longer feel foreign, able to say the Lord have separated me from His people because he will be so much a part of them, the faithful unite them. And the unich will not be able to say I am a dry tree because he will be so richly blessed that he will have a name better than sons and of daughters, I will give them an everlasting name that will not be cut off. In other words, he takes them as representative of a class living at that time who could not have progeny but who are like those who would be regarded as having no future in society who suddenly are people with a glorious future. And the foreigners who be members of the covenant and they will be joyful, he says, in my house of prayer. And their gifts will be accepted because my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations, all peoples. That’s what the word people means there, every group under the sun and God who gathers the outcast of Israel who’ve abandoned the faith and are no longer believers will not only gather them but others so that there will be a glorious ingathering at that time.

[Question] Is this the first time that they really bring out that they are going to bring in the gentiles also?

[Rushdoony] No it’s repeatedly stated all through the Bible, beginning with the vision to Abraham that his seed would be of the stars of the heaven, enumerable. And later on it is made clear that they will be of all peoples, tribes and tongues. The great enemy of Israel was Egypt and yet in, I think it’s in Isaiah 19:18, Isaiah says out of eight villages in Egypt seven will praise the Lord, in other words, the conversion will be so great and extensive and so we are given a remarkable vision. It’s 1918 and its five cities will speak the language of Canaan, swearing to the Lord of Hosts, one shall be called the city of destruction, in other words five out of six. So it is a glorious vision of Christ’s triumph. Any other questions, we have just a brief time left. Yes?

[Question] Back on that medical thing, I was just wondering if you had any specifics as to have the federal dictates are driving the prices up and specifics on how Christians would practice medicine differently to bring us back in line.

[Rushdoony] Well of course one of the problems now is that in the impersonal world of Medicare prices can be highly inflated. On Friday I was talking to a friend, in fact he was our doctor, he’s retired since Christmas although he’s younger than we are but he has a bad heart condition. He refused to go under Medicare, provided his own charity, now the law requires every doctor to be under Medicare so he had to take Medicare patients and when he filled out the forms and they paid him for it, he would write the check over to the patient and then send his bill with it and his bill was always much, much less. Because the Bureaucracy would pad it, they’d live off of it and they would reward the doctor too for being part of the scheme whereby the taxpayer was taken. So he found that the difference was dramatic. Now I’m not on Social Security or Medicare although I may be forced onto it within a year and what I’ve found earlier is that doctors were very happy and they would take dramatically lower sums because they would not have to file forms and wait indefinitely to be paid. Now their conscious troubles them and they are very unhappy if someone is not on a federal handout. Yes, very quickly?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] If you are forced unto Social Security, yes, take it! But if you can stay off of it as I’ve done so far…yes there’s a difference. We’re not called to be rebels over something like that. Well our time is up, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father we thank Thee that however bleak the present seems to be we know that because Thou art on the throne it is Thy son and Thy kingdom that shall triumph. That the gates of hell cannot prevail cannot hold out against him and it is Thy will that shall be done on earth as it is in heaven. How great and marvelous Thou art oh Lord and we praise 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.