Systematic Theology – The Land

Man Defiled

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: 18-19

Genre: Speech

Track: 18 of 19

Dictation Name: 18 Man Defiled

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Year:

Let us begin with prayer. OH Lord our God we give thanks unto Thee that Thou art ever mindful of us, that there is nothing under heaven that is too great nor too small for Thee. In this confidence we come, knowing that Thou art more mindful of us then we are of ourselves. We cast therefore our every care, our every hope, our every burden upon Thee. Bless us, arm us by Thy word and by Thy spirit and strengthen us in Thy service. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Our scripture today is from Ezekiel 4:9-17, Ezekiel 4:9-17 and our subject is Man Defiled. We have dealt with the defilement of the land, now we speak about man defiled. Ezekiel 4:9-17.

“Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentiles, and millet, and fitches, and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof, according to the number of the days that thou shalt lie upon thy side, three hundred and ninety days shalt thou eat thereof.

10 And thy meat which thou shalt eat shall be by weight, twenty shekels a day: from time to time shalt thou eat it.

11 Thou shalt drink also water by measure, the sixth part of an hin: from time to time shalt thou drink.

12 And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man, in their sight.

13 And the Lord said, Even thus shall the children of Israel eat their defiled bread among the Gentiles, whither I will drive them.

14 Then said I, Ah Lord God! behold, my soul hath not been polluted: for from my youth up even till now have I not eaten of that which dieth of itself, or is torn in pieces; neither came there abominable flesh into my mouth.

15 Then he said unto me, Lo, I have given thee cow's dung for man's dung, and thou shalt prepare thy bread therewith.

16 Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, behold, I will break the staff of bread in Jerusalem: and they shall eat bread by weight, and with care; and they shall drink water by measure, and with astonishment:

17 That they may want bread and water, and be astonied one with another, and consume away for their iniquity.”

The fall of man lead to sin, to death. It meant that man and the world were now out of communion, out of joint. Death is a corrupting and a defiling fact and therefore in the law the priest as a type of Christ was to keep himself separate from both sin and death. In fact he was forbidden to have contact with the death or with the dead man except a very close relative. God established His covenant to separate man from sin and death unto Himself and the covenant requires sanctification, it is an instrument of anti-defilement. Man by his fall defiled the earth and the earth is to be made holy to the Lord by man’s faithfulness to the covenant law. God’s law is both a means of dominion and sanctification, however: although God gave to fallen man His covenant, a renewed covenant, men persist in sin and as a result the fall is compounded and man’s life is under judgment before God. Paul in speaking of this in Hebrews 10:26-21 said:

“For if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins,

27 But a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries.

28 He that despised Moses' law died without mercy under two or three witnesses:

29 Of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace?

30 For we know him that hath said, Vengeance belongeth unto me, I will recompense, saith the Lord. And again, The Lord shall judge his people.

31 It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

This judgment that Paul speaks of in Hebrews is for those who despise the renewed covenant. Those who are the covenant people of both the Old and the New Testaments and especially the New. The original covenant was with Adam before the fall, the covenant was renewed with a succession of men thereafter and supremely in Christ. The judgment God pronounces in Hebrews 10:26-31 is against those who defiled the covenant God made with fallen mankind. This judgment is pronounced more than once in the Old Testament. Perhaps the most devastating account of it is in our scripture, in Ezekiel 4:9 through following. Commentators have again and again tried to take away the literalness of this or to alter the plain meaning because they find the meaning of this passage so repulsive. As a result too little attention has been given to what it means because on aesthetic grounds people are repelled by it and they turn away from it. This prophetic account comes four years before King Zedekiah began His revolt against Babylon. It is an account of the coming siege and the captivity that followed. It describes conditions of enforced famine and preparation for this in the prophetic work he was to do.

Ezekiel was first commanded earlier in the passage to shave his beard and also to shave his head. This was an act of self-defilement because the biblical account in the law and elsewhere makes clear that the shaving of the head is defiling. It destroys what God created as a crown of glory for men and for women. But then we come to the diet and this is the key, the heart of the passage. The diet is a famine diet. It amounts to twelve ounces of bread daily as the sum total of the food and also one and a third pints of water daily and no more. But the bread is the horror. The bread is to be made up out of little bits of remnants of whatever they could find, little bits of wheat, of barley, of beans, whatever, taken and molded together into a kind of cake, a loaf and then baked and it is at this point that commentators turn away from this passage because the baking was to be done on human excrement, dung, according to the original prescription and when Ezekiel cried out against this God altered it to be cow’s dung. Now of course we are familiar with the fact that cow chips and earlier buffalo chips have been used in this country and all over the world as a fuel. In the plains when settlers came westward trees were scarce and as a result they would pick up buffalo chips, build a fire and put their frying pan or pot over the fire.

But this is not what the text is talking about. It’s talking about something that people have done very often in the woods but with wood. You build a fire and then after the fire is a bed of hot ashes you throw your loaf or your meat on top of the ashes. Some of you have probably done that at one time or another when you’ve been up in the mountains, I know that I have. However, in this case the only fuel left is dung. Now when the cake or loaf was thrown into the dung it picked up bits of it and the ashes of it and the flavor was polluted. It became repulsive both in smell and in taste. Now, this is the extremity to which the people are going to be reduced, God says to Ezekiel. No nation in antiquity had stricter sanitation laws then Israel, in this case the southern kingdom Judea. Very strict laws prevented them from ever allowing any human excrement to remain unburied. But here in siege conditions you have this situation and you have the people finally having no fuel and resorting to that and God says this is what is going to happen. We have thus a horrifying picture of extreme rationing of food, of a water shortage, of famine. We are told by Jeremiah that there was cannibalism during the siege, that all kinds of horrors prevailed. We thus have a very grim fact here, now what is the meaning? When Ezekiel was commanded to shave his head he was commanded to defile himself in the sight of God.

Now we have in this famine and siege condition and the baking of bread as here specified and prophesied as coming to pass the enforced defilement of the people, God deliberately bringing about the conditions to defile them. Now what is the meaning? When men disobey God they defiled themselves, we have a worldwide self-defilement today. We have defilement in the form of all kinds of sins, defilement of the land in the form of abortion, in the form of homosexuality, in the form of one sin after another which today is treated as evidence of a right exercised, of human freedom, as self-realization. God brings judgment on men and nations who defile themselves and who defile the earth and his judgment then is to defile them in their own sight. Why? Remember we have here an account of two kinds of defilement in this incident in Ezekiel. Earlier we have the requirement that he shave his head, defile himself, now that’s a harmless kind of defilement from the standpoint of men but its contrary to God’s law. Now men see their self-defilement as now only harmless but as beneficial, as pleasure and profit and so they commit adultery and abortion and homosexuality, they steal, they lie, they defraud others and they see it as pleasure and profit, not as self-defilement. They reject God’s judgment, that sin defiles them and the land, in favor of what they regard as advantages of sin. They’re concerned about their future, about their freedom, about exercising their prerogatives to enjoy themselves and so they sin for pleasure and for profit.

Instead of seeing God’s law as holy and good they see it as a burden. But God speaking through Ezekiel says His law and His Sabbath are evidences of His love to His covenant people. We read in Ezekiel 20:10-12:

“Wherefore I caused them to go forth out of the land of Egypt, and brought them into the wilderness.

11 And I gave them my statutes, and shewed them my judgments, which if a man do, he shall even live in them.

12 Moreover also I gave them my sabbaths, to be a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am the Lord that sanctify them.”

What God is here saying my law is not given to inhibit or hurt or punish man, it is given to be a blessing, to be the way of life but men defile themselves by disobeying God’s law and refusing to see it as defilement, it is pleasure and profit. To call God’s law given as a blessing as a burden and evil is to invoke God’s wrath and judgment. Because such men do not see God’s law as a blessing and do not see their sin as a defilement God brings in a greater defilement which is aesthetically repulsive to them to bring home the fact of their pollution. And hence hunger, cannibalism, eating bread which would normally turn their stomach and hungering for it, thus the meaning of this episode, this prophecy is that men which defile themselves and who refuse to repent are then defiled by God with His judgments.

We live in an age where men have defiled themselves and are proud of it. They are exercising their freedom, they see themselves as the Avant-garde, ahead of rest of mankind, as liberated. This prophesy tells us what God will do to such people if they will not repent. If men will not cleanse the land of evil and iniquity God declares He then brings greater evils upon them to destroy them and to cleanse the land. Self-defilement is followed by God’s absolute defilement and destruction of the people. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God we thank Thee that Thy word is truth. We live in a time when men have defiled themselves and have done so proudly and boastfully. Oh Lord our God bring repentance and regeneration, lest Thy judgments, Thy defilement destroy this people and the world. We thank Thee that Thou hast called us to Thy covenant, make us faithful thereto and triumphant in Thy service to the end that we may roll back the forces of sin and death, that we might summon men out of their self-defilement into Thy covenant lest the land be defiled. Grant us this we beseech Thee in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Any questions now? Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] [laughs] Yes, Mary Ellen?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Total apostasy, they were committing every kind of sin and Ezekiel goes on to describe how under the very pretense of worshipping God they were indulging in fertility cult worship and more.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes. The law required that if a fellow believer sold himself into servitude as a bond servant he was to be released on the seventh year but instead of releasing them they were keeping them in slavery. When Jeremiah told them of God’s judgment upon them for that they released them but subsequently they took them back into slavery when the threat of the Babylonians disappeared. So they only had a repentance in a time of fear and were as unrepentant as ever when the problem was over. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] The question is how could God ask someone to do something contrary to His law even in little things like this. Because the prophet here represented the people and he was to show them in his own person the kind of judgment that was to come upon them because of their unrepentant character. So just as Jesus Christ is very man of very man although sinless had to become the sin bearer so in a sense Ezekiel the prophet here was the sin bearer for the people. Yes?

[Question] I noticed in verse sixteen of our text that the term son of man is used and the word Son is capitalized in my translation, it seems…

[Rushdoony] Yes here however it doesn’t have the same meaning as it does with regard to our Lord in the New Testament but here he does represent the people. He is representing in his person Judea.

Any other questions or comments? As I indicated at the beginning this is one of the passages that is usually passed over, people don’t like to face up to it because it is aesthetically repulsive. But God here is making clear to us what self-defilement leads to. God defiles them beyond their imagination. Things that they think are too far out become the grim reality. Well if there are no further comments let us bow our heads now in prayer.

Oh Lord our God Thy word is truth and Thou hast declared that sin leads to death and Thou art the judge. Give us grace therefore to be faithful unto Thee, to proclaim Thy saving truth unto all men and nations, to destroy the forces of defilement and to make ourselves, this people and this land holy unto Thee. Bless us in this task, in Jesus’ name, Amen.