Systematic Theology – The Land

God and the Land

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: 4-19

Genre: Speech

Track: 04 of 19

Dictation Name: 04 God and the Land

Location/Venue:

Year:

Let’s bow our heads now in prayer. Oh Lord our God we give thanks unto Thee that Thou art on the throne and that Thou art using us as Thine instruments in this world. We thank Thee that Thy kingdom is here in our midst and is growing and reaching out to more and more people to make them citizens of the new creation. Guide us day by day that we may serve Thee with glory and thanksgiving and in the confidence that greater is He that is with us and in us than He that is in the world. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

This morning we continue our studies in the theology of the land with a study of God and the Land and our scripture is Leviticus 26. Leviticus 26, God and the Land.

“Ye shall make you no idols nor graven image, neither rear you up a standing image, neither shall ye set up any image of stone in your land, to bow down unto it: for I am the Lord your God.

2 Ye shall keep my sabbaths, and reverence my sanctuary: I am the Lord.

3 If ye walk in my statutes, and keep my commandments, and do them;

4 Then I will give you rain in due season, and the land shall yield her increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit.

5 And your threshing shall reach unto the vintage, and the vintage shall reach unto the sowing time: and ye shall eat your bread to the full, and dwell in your land safely.

6 And I will give peace in the land, and ye shall lie down, and none shall make you afraid: and I will rid evil beasts out of the land, neither shall the sword go through your land.

7 And ye shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword.

8 And five of you shall chase an hundred, and an hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight: and your enemies shall fall before you by the sword.

9 For I will have respect unto you, and make you fruitful, and multiply you, and establish my covenant with you.

10 And ye shall eat old store, and bring forth the old because of the new.

11 And I set my tabernacle among you: and my soul shall not abhor you.

12 And I will walk among you, and will be your God, and ye shall be my people.

13 I am the Lord your God, which brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, that ye should not be their bondmen; and I have broken the bands of your yoke, and made you go upright.

14 But if ye will not hearken unto me, and will not do all these commandments;

15 And if ye shall despise my statutes, or if your soul abhor my judgments, so that ye will not do all my commandments, but that ye break my covenant:

16 I also will do this unto you; I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning ague, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart: and ye shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it.

17 And I will set my face against you, and ye shall be slain before your enemies: they that hate you shall reign over you; and ye shall flee when none pursueth you.

18 And if ye will not yet for all this hearken unto me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sins.

19 And I will break the pride of your power; and I will make your heaven as iron, and your earth as brass:

20 And your strength shall be spent in vain: for your land shall not yield her increase, neither shall the trees of the land yield their fruits.

21 And if ye walk contrary unto me, and will not hearken unto me; I will bring seven times more plagues upon you according to your sins.

22 I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle, and make you few in number; and your high ways shall be desolate.

23 And if ye will not be reformed by me by these things, but will walk contrary unto me;

24 Then will I also walk contrary unto you, and will punish you yet seven times for your sins.

25 And I will bring a sword upon you, that shall avenge the quarrel of my covenant: and when ye are gathered together within your cities, I will send the pestilence among you; and ye shall be delivered into the hand of the enemy.

26 And when I have broken the staff of your bread, ten women shall bake your bread in one oven, and they shall deliver you your bread again by weight: and ye shall eat, and not be satisfied.

27 And if ye will not for all this hearken unto me, but walk contrary unto me;

28 Then I will walk contrary unto you also in fury; and I, even I, will chastise you seven times for your sins.

29 And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat.

30 And I will destroy your high places, and cut down your images, and cast your carcases upon the carcases of your idols, and my soul shall abhor you.

31 And I will make your cities waste, and bring your sanctuaries unto desolation, and I will not smell the savour of your sweet odours.

32 And I will bring the land into desolation: and your enemies which dwell therein shall be astonished at it.

33 And I will scatter you among the heathen, and will draw out a sword after you: and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste.

34 Then shall the land enjoy her sabbaths, as long as it lieth desolate, and ye be in your enemies' land; even then shall the land rest, and enjoy her sabbaths.

35 As long as it lieth desolate it shall rest; because it did not rest in your sabbaths, when ye dwelt upon it.

36 And upon them that are left alive of you I will send a faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies; and the sound of a shaken leaf shall chase them; and they shall flee, as fleeing from a sword; and they shall fall when none pursueth.

37 And they shall fall one upon another, as it were before a sword, when none pursueth: and ye shall have no power to stand before your enemies.

38 And ye shall perish among the heathen, and the land of your enemies shall eat you up.

39 And they that are left of you shall pine away in their iniquity in your enemies' lands; and also in the iniquities of their fathers shall they pine away with them.

40 If they shall confess their iniquity, and the iniquity of their fathers, with their trespass which they trespassed against me, and that also they have walked contrary unto me;

41 And that I also have walked contrary unto them, and have brought them into the land of their enemies; if then their uncircumcised hearts be humbled, and they then accept of the punishment of their iniquity:

42 Then will I remember my covenant with Jacob, and also my covenant with Isaac, and also my covenant with Abraham will I remember; and I will remember the land.

43 The land also shall be left of them, and shall enjoy her sabbaths, while she lieth desolate without them: and they shall accept of the punishment of their iniquity: because, even because they despised my judgments, and because their soul abhorred my statutes.

44 And yet for all that, when they be in the land of their enemies, I will not cast them away, neither will I abhor them, to destroy them utterly, and to break my covenant with them: for I am the Lord their God.

45 But I will for their sakes remember the covenant of their ancestors, whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the heathen, that I might be their God: I am the Lord.

46 These are the statutes and judgments and laws, which the Lord made between him and the children of Israel in mount Sinai by the hand of Moses.”

This chapter as well as Deuteronomy 28 were fulfilled quite literally and specifically in the history of Israel. Because they were so very clearly and literally fulfilled modernist scholars have insisted that they were written after the event, that only after the captivity could these things have been written. Not believing in predictive prophecy this was their logical conclusion. Their theory led to their conclusions, not the facts because the evidence is clear cut of the antiquity of these books only their refusal to accept them has led to the thesis that they had to follow after the events. They had to be written after the captivity ended. Thus even the liberal critics of such chapters of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 admit one thing: they are a clear cut prediction of what actually happened. Or that they describe what happened after the event. Now, what is neglected in all the controversy pro and con in regards to what the unbelieving critics say is this: that when God gave these passages of scripture He said this is what’s going to happen to Israel if they become apostate but this also what is going to happen to everyone who calls himself by my name. To every people that calls itself Christian. To every people that declares itself to be a covenant people as virtually every modern country in the western world does in some form or another. We have a presidential oath of office, by that we make ourselves a covenant people.

Now a covenant breaking people. That presidential oath of office in its biblical meaning invokes all the blessings and the curses of Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26 upon the country that invokes them by taking, by making use of the oath. The coronation service in Great Britain does the same thing. In all the western countries in one way or another the country binds itself to the covenant and therefore to the blessings and curses of the covenant. And what does this covenant affirm? It declares there is a relationship between God, man and the land. That when men are faithful to the law of God there are blessings. When they are faithless, there are curses. They are cursed in a variety of ways, in their health, in their work, through the land and the weather. There is thus according to scripture an essential relationship between man and the earth, a symbiosis which rests on man’s relationship to God. Communion or lack of communion governs what happens to us. Disharmony with God means disharmony everywhere and harmony with God means harmony everywhere. In the land, in the weather, and in all things. In my book ‘The Biblical Philosophy of History’ I called attention to the fact that natural disasters have increased since World War II phenomenally. Earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes and so on. This is a fact that even non-Christian writers have at times made note of. The bible tells us why. There are certain characteristics in man’s relationship with the land, with the earth. Man has a memory. The past can be utilized by man to learn and to command the present and to govern in terms of the kind of future he wants.

If man were suddenly to lose all memories civilization would crumble overnight. Without memory man could not continue in a civilization. On occasion science fiction writers have dealt with the idea of a mass amnesia created by some kind of mishap and then the consequence, the crumbling of civilization. The inability of men to understand the cities and the technology in the midst of which they live. Learning would perish, families would disintegrate and man would have no history, if he lost his memory. God has on the other hand total self-consciousness but no history, unlike man. God has no history because God does not grow and God does not change. I am the Lord, I change not we are told in Malachi 3:6. Hebrews 13:8 tells us that God is the same yesterday, today and forever. Man unlike God does not have total self-consciousness but he does have self-consciousness and he has a history, he changes, he grows and that history gives to man knowledge, experience and wealth. Man’s assets owe a great debt to memory and to a sense of time but man’s memory can also create problems for man. Because man is a sinner he has a sense of guilt and his guilt makes man, the sinner, unredeemed man, past bound. As a result, whenever we have a culture that is unregenerate it is past bond and it repeats the errors of the past and it neglects the present. So man’s memory which is basic to his growth and his civilization can also be a detriment in that he lives in terms of the past and his history endlessly repeats itself.

On the other hand the earth has no self-consciousness and no true memory. The past is buried. The leaves fall to the ground and rot, the rains and the snow turn the past of the earth into a fine mold, the past is plowed under or it is buried. But the cycle of the seasons and the fact of growth give to the land and to the earth a future orientation, growth, a harvest, fruit, leaves, rainfall, the sun and so on. The land pays the price for man’s sins, the land has only a present life and a future growth. Memory is both man’s blessing and his curse but the land has no such life. The dead flower and the dead grass mean nothing and a dead chick is soon forgotten by the hen. The dead fish float up out of the school and the school goes on. Not only does sin makes man past oriented but fearfulness does also. Whenever you have an era where men are fearful about the present and the future what men do then is to go on a nostalgia craze, and nostalgia is very much in nowadays because man is very, very fearful about the future. This affects man in every area of his life, for example, in office furnishings suddenly the very modern type of furniture is out. It left when the economy began to falter and now nostalgic furniture which evokes the past is very much in again because nostalgia comes in when man is fearful of the present and of the future; and very often where there is fearfulness as well as guilt men go beyond nostalgia into an idolatry of the past.

Old China deserved to die, it was an idolatrous culture in every sense of the word and basic to its idolatry was its worship of the past. Much of Europe is in the chains of such an idolatry. England, unhappily, one of the greatest countries the world has ever known is now on the grips of such an idolatry. It can evoke the past and it has turned itself into a kind of museum. Not only Old England but New England has done this. New England is perhaps the deadest part of the United States, tragically so, because it once was the leader and now it is a museum. Those who worship the old in the north and the old south in the south are guilty of the same kind of idolatry. It is interesting that the leadership in the New South is increasingly Baptist in orientation because the Baptists by and large increasingly don’t idolize the old South, they’re creating a new one. So, memory can be a problem when it leads to idolatry. Idolatry of the past is a confession of present impotence. There is an interesting popular song that occasionally when I’m traveling in the car I hear and it’s something about the vintage years of yesteryears and how marvelous the girls were in such and such a year and that was the year that was, in other words, and I always think the man who is singing that and enjoys that song is not only old but probably impotent because this idolatry of the past, this belief that it was good back then means that you’re no good now. Unhappily the world of our time is in the grips of nostalgia about the past or an idolatry of the past which is even worst. What they worship when they look back to their past or to the past of England or New England or Old China or the old South is the worship of the great I was. Well a lot of people do that with their families but God identifies Himself always as the great I Am.

And if you are with the Lord you are not with the great I was but with the great I Am. He who is, I am that I am God says to Moses. He is the eternal one yet totally present in every moment with all His being. But all past bound peoples and cultures become the great I was. The environmentalists belong to the school of the great I was. They have a dream about nature as it once was, which is mythical. We know from the Lewis and Clark Expedition what the west was like when they came out, how the buffaloes churned the buffalo grass after they consumed it down to its roots and created a cloud of dust that could be seen hundreds upon hundreds of miles away and the Lewis and Clark expedition found that there was not even enough left to feed their horses, they had to peel the bark off the poplar trees near the streams where trees survived after the buffaloes to feed their horses. And the water of the rivers was too polluted with buffalo urine very often for the horses to drink. That was the west as the environmentalists want to recall us to. It was not the lush thing that they imagine it was, none of the past was what they dream it to be. But as good Platonists they have created an ideal and this is the ideal that once was, ostensibly, and they’re going to return the world to it, which means they are going to destroy the present and the future in the name of an imagined past. But such people have no future under God. They omit God as well as men in their dream of the world of tomorrow, they are guilty of sin and all sin is at heart idolatry, the original sin.

Leviticus 26 begins by proscribing idolatry. Idolatry is the root of all disintegration, it then goes on in verses three to five to say that faithfulness means blessing in the land and in the weather. Verses six through eight, if they are faithful they shall have peace and no danger from enemies external and internal. Verses nine through ten speak of the blessing of fruitfulness, of many children and rich harvests. Fruitfulness in every area of life and thought. Verses eleven through thirteen declare that God hslal then dwell among them to keep them in safety. But in verses fourteen through twenty six we are told that if we are disobedient and faithless God will curse us. Terror, plagues, enemies and more including depopulation will result. Verses twenty seven through forty three speak of the culmination of these things in cannibalism and the destruction of the cities and captivity so that the very land is given its Sabbaths. Then finally in verses forty four through forty six in all this God seeks their restoration. Thus we are told here that the land is not neutral. The creation is not neutral, the weather, everything around us, serves God and has an influence upon us as we are faithful or unfaithful. Paul tells us in Romans 8:22-23:

“For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.

23 And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.”

Paul here says that the whole of creation is suffering because of the fall of man and it groans like a woman in labor waiting for the rebirth as a new creation. Only those of mankind who are redeemed share in that anticipation of a cosmic renewal but all other men are governed by the love of death.

Because they are fallen sin and death govern their being and their future. They lack a true future and are past and death bound. The cultures of all such fallen men reflect their orientation to death as do their approaches to the men and other men, to politics, to economics and art. All one has to do is to turn on television or go to an art gallery or to look at our politics and economics, to see the love of death as the governing force in the lives of men. But Paul declares in these words that the ground beneath our feet is governed by a movement towards the great recreation of all things. We live thus in a future oriented creation, because God has put an intellect even in the earth and the ground beneath our feet and to the degree that we grow in the Holy Spirit we share in that future orientation. We are then weaned from our idolatry to the past into the joyful anticipation of the future under God and we are then more than conquerors through Christ who loved us according to Paul in Romans 8:37. There is a singing verse in the song of Deborah in Judges 5:20 that describes the fact that the whole cosmos works in terms of God’s purpose, they fought from heaven, the stars in their courses fought against Sisera. Time itself serves God. God is beyond time and is the creator of it. Man lives in time and he can be past oriented which is dangerous and suicidal or he can be exclusively present oriented and thus heedless of consequences. The environmentalists as we have seen are past bound, exploiters are present bound. But the world was not empty when we came into it and we must leave it richer when we go. The godly man is future oriented and respectful of the past and mindful of the present, we know that time never stands still nor can anything in creation.

We cannot arrest time, we cannot arrest the world and freeze it, a timeless utopian social order or a static natural order is something that at tempts the impossible and is sin. Change and growth are God ordained aspects of the temporal order and they are inevitable for man. Thus we as the children of God must press forward knowing that all things change but when we are in the Lord all things work together and change together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to His purpose. We dare not be past oriented. We dare not be guilty of nostalgia and idolatry, for us the best is yet to come in Christ. Let us pray.

Almighty God our Heavenly Father wean us we beseech Thee from all idolatry, Thou knowest that we with our imagination create graven images and bow down and worship them. Give us grace to smash all graven images, especially those of our own making. Make us joyful in the present and confident and triumphant in our anticipation of every tomorrow, knowing that our times are in Thy hands who doest all things well. Make us ever mindful that creation is Thy habitation and ours also. That all things that happen are a part of Thy great cleansing so that in the new creation Thou and all mankind may dwell together in peace and in harmony. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes, emphatically so, because mining is a godly endeavor when it is done in terms of godly premises. God created heaven and earth and He has made it rich so that we might utilize its wealth for the kingdom of God.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] And with each generation we find that we have not exhausted what we’ve taken out. What oil men and miners once did a few hundred feet in the ground now they do a few thousand, or they did then a few thousand feet and then a few miles in to the ground and we haven’t begun to tap the resources of the earth, we’ve barely scratched the ground. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Very, very important point, I hope you caught the implications of that. There is a great deal of nostalgia of the past but no examination of it and to illustrate that, the world War II example that you cited, Otto, is very telling. Because I believe the reason why there is such a nostalgia for World War II histories, biographies, is that it was the last time we as a people were caught up in a great moral cause or at least we thought it was a great moral cause, everyone was united, whether they liked it or not because the whole nation was mobilized against evil. That made us good, you see. The Nazi’s were the bad boy s and the Japanese and the Italians and we were the good guys. And war always creates a tremendous uplift for people, mental problems lessen, because suddenly everybody who’s had problems is a good guy.

We’re the good guys, the Americans against the bad guys out there. Now we’re caught in the moral dilemma of our own making. We have a host of problems that we’ve created with our votes and with our own actions so there is a real nostalgia for World War II and I think, if I may add one thing, this is why in spite of all the peace talk after World War I and all the peace talks now when a war comes they will be ready to go into it with fervor because it’ll give them again a moral kick. People with no moral foundations will get a moral kick out of it, yes?

[Question] well the one of the strange things to come out of World War II is the arguments that the soviets were on the side of the [unknown] and that we were on the side of the [unknown] because we were fighting with the Soviets.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] No. But they will find some way of getting a moral kick out of it. The peace [unknown] in the thirties in Oxford signed and pledged that they would never fight for their country and were among the first to volunteer a little later. And I believe we will see that same kind of thing once again if we unhappily are in another war. Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Science fiction is an escape out of this world, and so it doesn’t make any difference whether they call it future or past it’s out of this world. The popularity of the science fiction films is that it’s clear cut contrast to the point of Manichaeism, between good and evil. And you again get a good moral kick out of it without any moral commitment. And this is what people want, a moral kick without moral commitment, yes John?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes. Both the so-called futuristic science fiction films and the nostalgia films have one characteristic: there is no sense of reality. They’re in a world of imagination, not the real past or the real future. Purely in the world of the imagination. They’re escaping from time and responsibility. Yes, John?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes, one more comment.

[People talking back and forth]

[Rushdoony] The decadence is portrayed as reality because if this is reality then there is no need to be honest, no need to be virtuous in any respect.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Continues talking]

[Rushdoony] Yes, Otto?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes. Well our time is up let us bow our heads now in conclusion and then afterwards any of you who would like to see this, we have here from the front page of the financial section of the Vancouver Sun, a picture of John Saunders Quade and an article about him. Let us bow our heads in prayer.

Our Lord and our God it has been good for us to be here, we thank Thee for Thy grace, Thy government and the certainty of Thy victory. Give us joy in Thee day by day and make us ever mindful that greater is He that is with us then He that is in the world. In Jesus’ name, Amen.