Systematic Theology – Covenant
The Covenant and the Land
Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony
Subject: Systematic Theology
Lesson: 03-22
Genre: Speech
Track: 3 of 22
Dictation Name: 03 The Covenant and the Land
Location/Venue:
Year:
Oh Lord our God who art our strength and shield, our comforter, our defender. We come to Thee beseeching Thee to be with these embattled churches, Christian schools and parents. We pray especially for Lester Roloff thanking Thee for His faith and His stand and beseeching Thee to defend Him and give him a mighty victory. We pray our Father for each and every one of us here that by Thy grace we may see the issues of our time, witness a good witness and in the face of the powers of Caesarism and humanism might be more than conquerors through Jesus Christ our Lord. Bless us now as we give ourselves to the study of Thy word, grant that we may behold wondrous things out of Thy law. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Our scripture is from the book of Joshua, the first chapter, verses one through nine. Our subject is the Covenant and the Land. The Covenant and the Land.
“Now after the death of Moses the servant of the Lord it came to pass, that the Lord spake unto Joshua the son of Nun, Moses' minister, saying,
2 Moses my servant is dead; now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give to them, even to the children of Israel.
3 Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have I given unto you, as I said unto Moses.
4 From the wilderness and this Lebanon even unto the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, and unto the great sea toward the going down of the sun, shall be your coast.
5 There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life: as I was with Moses, so I will be with thee: I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.
6 Be strong and of a good courage: for unto this people shalt thou divide for an inheritance the land, which I sware unto their fathers to give them.
7 Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law, which Moses my servant commanded thee: turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper withersoever thou goest.
8 This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.
9 Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.”
Now in our last meeting we began our study in the doctrine of the covenant which we will spend perhaps the rest of this year dealing with. The doctrine of the covenant is basic to the scripture; the bible is a covenant book. From beginning to end it is a covenant, God’s covenant with man. The word covenant therefore is an important word for us to understand. Briefly to review some of the basic meanings of the covenant that we dealt with last time: a covenant is a legal fact. It is a contract. It is between two parties. There are two kinds of covenant, one can between equals, Tom Blake and I could enter into a covenant, we will set the terms of that contract and we’re both bound by it. But it can also be as it is in the Bible between two peoples or powers that are totally unequal. When it is between two unequal powers one so great that there is no comparison between them and the other it is not only a covenant of law but of grace. So that if a king, an emperor, finds a poor beggar and feels gracious towards him and says I’m going to enter into a covenant with you, then the king is acting out of grace, then the law of the covenant or the contract is not something that the two of them work out together, it’s the king who gives it. Now, God’s covenant with man is a covenant of grace because God is the Lord, far above, greater and above man and yet at the same time because it is a covenant it is a covenant of law. The very fact that God enters into a covenant with man and gives him His law is an act of grace because what does a covenant involve? Well an old fashioned term for covenant was blood brotherhood.
Two men who entered into a covenant together would come; they would work out a law relationship which would make them from that time closer than brothers. They would be bound to each other for life, ready to die one for another and they would either cut their thumbs or their wrists and put them together to mingle their blood and they would say we are now one blood and if either of us breaks the covenant his blood must be shed because that is the penalty for breaking the covenant. Now, when someone enters on a human level into a blood covenant with you obviously they are putting a great deal of confidence in you in that they are saying I’m ready to die for you if need be, to put my life on the line for you and you’re going to be ready to do it for me. But when an emperor does that to a common beggar and even more when the sovereign God of the Universe enters into such a covenant with man and says you’re going to serve me unto death and be faithful to my law or you die but I will be ready to die for you, to rescue you, to save you, then it is a most remarkable fact. A covenant is always a covenant of blood, it requires death for violation. We’ll drop that aspect, we’re going to come back to it at a later date, the meaning of the blood of the covenant because too often it is just barely touched on. Now, tonight as I said we are discussing the covenant and land because land is a part of every covenant between greater and an inferior. When a king or an emperor entered into a covenant with say, a noble man, or a knight, he would say if you are faithful to the covenant I will bless you and I will give some land. Does that sound familiar, why yes it should because that’s what feudalism was in part, feudalism was a kind of covenant.
And the lord would say to the peasant I am in covenant with you and you are going to work this land but I am going to protect you from anyone coming in and killing and robbing you. But you are going to give me so much of your produce, and he would say but that land is going to be yours and your children, and your children’s children and nobody can take it from me, you belong to the land and the land belongs to you and you together belong to me. And he would say to a knight who would fight for him, you be a faithful knight and I’m going to bless you with some land. A covenant between a greater and a lesser is always marked by a gift of land. A covenant is a covenant not only of blood but of land and how does the bible begin? God creates Adam, He sets him in the Garden of Eden, He says first of all to exercise dominion and to subdue the earth but first of all He gives him a garden, a pilot project and tells him to dress it and to keep it and to learn the classification of the animals, to name them because to name in the bible and in Old Testament and New Testament times meant to classify. Alright Adam, here, you are going to have because of our covenant the earth, but first as a test area this garden. But man on a trial basis on the Garden of Eden as God’s covenant vassal fell. He sinned, he rebelled against almighty God. The pilot project for his training and his growth in faithfulness, in faith and obedience proved to be instead the door to death for him. And the grant was revoked, he was turned out of the Garden of Eden into the world and he was told that the world which was to be his was now going to be hostile to him. Thorns and thistles it would bear to him and when Cain continued even more in sin the curse increased and he was told he would be a fugitive and a vagabond upon the face of the earth.
Instead of the land being his it was going to be a place where he was going to be restless, hunted, fearful and accursed. The land promised was renewed, was it not, to Noah after the flood and he was told the whole earth in due time was going to be renovated in terms of God’s covenant. But the area was again narrowed as with Adam, when Abraham was called he was told indeed his heirs, his descendants would be as the stars and as the sand on the seashore, innumerable, but it was also going to begin with a specific patch of ground, Palestine. That grant was renewed to Isaac , to Jacob and later to Moses and the whole of the law was given as the condition of blessing in the possession of that land grant. Then on the eve of moving into the land God renews it in the commission to Joshua which we read. It is a commission of trust, it gives the terms of the covenant of grace and law. God is Lord of the land, not the Canaanite inhabitants. The Canaanites are rebellious, they are lawless tenants, they have abused God’s law and God’s property and God says they are to be evicted, dispossessed. Centuries later Nebuchadnezzar spoke of the meaning of dispossession. In Daniel 4:17 he said:
“This matter is by the decree of the watchers, and the demand by the word of the holy ones: to the intent that the living may know that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will, and setteth up over it the basest of men.”
Now in the renewal of the land grant to Joshua the Lord God stresses some central and basic facts.
First, He says, in the second verse, that is He who gives the land.
“2 Moses my servant is dead; now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give to them, even to the children of Israel.”
It’s not your conquest that gives it to you, it is my grace. So it is I who give the land. The Lord grants them the title. The second fact is that the grant requires faithfulness to God’s covenant law. It is God’s earth and therefore there is only one person on the face of the earth who has the right to make laws: God, not man. We are told in verses seven and eight:
“7 Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law, which Moses my servant commanded thee: turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper withersoever thou goest.
8 This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.”
Psalm 1 is a commentary on that.
“1 Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.
2 But his delight is in the law of the Lord; and in his law doth he meditate day and night.
3 And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.
4 The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away.”
So very definitely success, prosperity, depend upon God’s blessing. The earth will only curse those who violate God’s covenant. The land is given to man for God’s covenant purposes, not for our own. We are not our own we have been bought with a price. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein. We can never regard our lives or our properties as anything but a trust, a covenant trust from almighty God.
Then next it is faithfulness that insures victory. The Lord God is faithful to His covenant, we are told in Hebrews I will never leave thee nor forsake thee so we may boldly say the Lord is my helper I shall not fear what man may do unto me. And here in verses three and verse five, six and nine we have the same message. Every place that the sole of your foot shall trend upon that have I given unto you as I said unto Moses. The fifth verse:
“5 There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life: as I was with Moses, so I will be with thee: I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.
6 Be strong and of a good courage: for unto this people shalt thou divide for an inheritance the land, which I sware unto their fathers to give them.”
“9 Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.”
Men who have gone forth and conquered in the name of the Lord have done it in terms of these promises. They’ve lived by the book, they’ve kept the law of the book, they’ve meditated therein day and night and they have moved forward in the confidence that if God be for us, who can be against us.
The blessings are very, very great and so too are the curses. There are two great chapters in scripture which summarizes the blessings and the curses of God upon faithfulness and unfaithfulness, Leviticus 26 and especially Deuteronomy 28. With God there are no half-hearted ways or half-hearted measures. Now, this commission given to Moses we find in the New Testament in abridged form. This is called the commission and what our Lord declares at the end of Matthew, Matthew 28:18-20 is the great commission. It’s shorter. It presupposes this with differences. Now, he says:
“ Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
Christ is the new Adam, the last Adam. The Adam who resists the tempter, the Adam who is faithful to the covenant, the Adam who comes and undoes the work of the first Adam who broke the covenant and God in the person of His own son who was very God and very God and yet very man of very man so that both as God He died for us and as man He was the one who obeyed the Lord perfectly and shed His blood for the remission of our sins so that we might be restored into the covenant and that the grant of land might be renewed to us; and so go ye therefore to all the world, to all nations, make disciples of them all. Teaching them all things that I have commanded you and lo I am with you always, to the very end of the world. In Revelation we have the same story told. There are seven vials, seven bowls of wrath, seven judgments, what do they mean? Why they recall the last seven plagues on Egypt.
The first three plagues hit both Egypt and Israel and they were mild, the last four hit all the ungodly and they laid Egypt waste, left Egypt in ruins. And God says in Revelation I will overturn, He says in Ezekiel and in effect this is the whole theme of the judgments of Revelation:
And we are told emphatically in Revelation 11:15:
“The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever.”
The earth is the Lords, it is not private property nor communistic property, it is the Lord’s property, and we are stewards, trustees strictly accountable. God owns the land and the Sabbaths of the land must be kept. As owner He determines the use of our bodies, of the land around us, of all things because He is the Lord. We are tenants and we either go by His book or we are evicted. Because the land is the Lords we cannot defile the land, it must be kept holy, separated unto the Lord. Over and over again the scripture warns us that we are not to defile ourselves nor to defile the land as in Numbers 35:34:
“Defile not therefore the land which ye shall inhabit, wherein I dwell: for I the Lord dwell among the children of Israel.”
The word wilderness in the Bible means unsown, unworked, unplowed, not yet subject to man’s dominion in Christ. God through Isaiah pronounces a curse on the nations in chapters 15 through 24, why? Because they have sinned against God as persons and in their use of the earth and He says He will evict them.
And their lands will again become a wilderness because of their sin until there is a godly people to exercise dominion over it in terms of the word of the Lord. The covenant of God is concerned with everything, the land, our souls and our bodies, our families, our callings, our churches, our civil governments, our schools. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein. Are there any questions now first of all concerning our lesson? Yes?
[Question Unintelligible]
[Rushdoony] Yes, a covenant of grace.
[Question Unintelligible]
[Rushdoony] Yes. Because we are reinstated by Christ and the Covenant He also says occupy until I come, you see. Occupy. This is my world, go out, convert them, occupy. We’re told to take over because we are heirs, we are sons and daughters of the king and it’s his land, his earth, so we are to occupy. Now that doesn’t mean that we are to say Lord it’s too hard or it didn’t work out, no. We’re just to do what we’re told.
[tape ends]