Notes …. Deuteronomy 28 … Cause & Effect World

 

Historicsim — The view that history is “the whole show” all there is. Historicism is the view that there is no God outside who is governing and sustaining History. According to Historicism, all History is determined by the immutable laws of some kind of Hegelian Historical fate. The dirty secret of Historicism is that it is the Historian who gets to craft those supposedly immutable laws of Historical fate via his written history and so History is read with the Historian as God and so a History textbook is in point of fact a Theology textbook.
 
History is best understood, not by spatial metaphors (Rise, Decline and Fall — Gibbon) or organic metaphors (born, growing, decaying and dying — Comte, Spengler). These metaphors hide from us the Historian’s unstated religious standard for what constitutes “Rise, Decline, and Fall” or the unstated religious standard for “birth, growing, decaying, and dying.” As such the pagan Historian can sweep the reader along without the reader realizing that he is not reading a book on History but rather a book on Theology where the Historian is God.
 
All of Scripture, including Deuteronomy 28, teaches us that History is best understood through the lens of divine judgment unto cursing or blessing. History is not a matter of impersonal time plus chance plus circumstance, as the atheist might suggest. History is not, as Historian Arnold Toynbee said, merely, ‘one damn thing after another.’ Rather History is riven with the actions of a personal God who intimately governs the affairs of men. This God … our God, “changes the times and the epochs; He removes kings and establishes kings; He gives wisdom to wise men And knowledge to men of understanding (Daniel 2:21). This God … our God, “raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap; he seats them with princes and has them inherit a throne of honor. “For the foundations of the earth are the LORD’s; on them he has set the world.” (I Samuel 2:8).
 
And this God … our God has told us that His rule throughout History, though never completely plumbed and understood by men, is a rule that is rational and has a ethical cause and effect relationship. This is what we read in Deuteronomy 28.

Because God’s people have always understood God’s rule as rational and having a ethical cause and effect relationship they have always read History in just such a way. Now, they perhaps were not always correct regarding how they traced out the hand of God’s movement in History but they nonetheless understood History as matter of God’s personal dealing with men.

Examples,

Habakkuk,
The people of Judah had grown wicked, violent, and corrupt. There was no justice in the land that was supposed to be known by God’s name. Habakkuk couldn’t take it anymore. These people shouldn’t be allowed to disregard God’s law. Surely God would set things right.

So Habakkuk pleads with God, asking Him to save Judah from her own wickedness. God answers, but not in the way Habakkuk expected.

To judge Judah’s wickedness, God says He will hand them over to the Chaldeans: a nation even more wicked, violent, and corrupt.

Positive

1 Samuel 7:6, 10b:

3 And Samuel said to all the house of Israel, “If you are returning to the Lordwith all your heart, then put away the foreign gods and the Ashtaroth from among you and direct your heart to the Lord and serve him only, and he will deliver you out of the hand of the Philistines.” 4 So the people of Israel put away the Baals and the Ashtaroth, and they served the Lord only….6 And they gathered together to Mizpeh, and drew water, and poured it out before the LORD, and fasted on that day, and said there, We have sinned against the LORD. And Samuel judged the children of Israel in Mizpeh.  7 Now when the Philistines heard that the people of Israel had gathered at Mizpah, the lords of the Philistines went up against Israel. And when the people of Israel heard of it, they were afraid of the Philistines.

10B But the LORD thundered with a great thunder on that day upon the Philistines, and discomfited them; and they were smitten before Israel.

Because of this observation that God’s judgments were rational and could be traced to cause and effect the Puritans developed doctrines that taught,

The sword of God’s justice lies quiet in the scabbard till sin draws it out. Affliction is good for us: ‘It is good for me that I have been afflicted’ (Psa. 119:71). Affliction causes repentance (II Chron. 33:12). The viper, being stricken, casts up its poison; so, God’s rod striking us, we spit away the poison of sin. Affliction betters our grace. Gold is purest, and juniper sweetest, in the fire. Affliction prevents damnation (I Cor. 11:32). “ –  Thomas Brooks

And so if they were afflicted or if that which they thought of as punishment would come into their lives they would examine their lives to see if there was sin that need to be repented of in order that God might bless them again.

This mindset was captured by R. L. Dabney, who could say following our great fratricidal war,

“‘A righteous God, for our sins towards Him, has permitted us to be overthrown by our enemies and His.'”

R. L. Dabney

They inherited this mindset from passages like Deuteronomy 28.

Now we are going to spend a little bit of time looking at Deuteronomy 28 but before we do I want to say that there is also danger lying in this mindset that I’ve just teased out. The danger in this mindset is the potential development of a Health, Wealth, and prosperity theology that teaches that those who prosper are automatically seen as blessed by God while those who don’t prosper or who have calamity visit them are being chastened by God. This is certainly too simplistic of a reading of this theology. God often has reasons for afflicting His people that cannot be definitively traced to His displeasure. There are times God brings His severe mercy into our lives in order to grow us in sanctification.

Oh, what owe I to the file, to the hammer, to the furnace of my Lord Jesus! who hath now let me see how good the wheat of Christ is, that goeth through His mill, and His oven, to be made bread for His own table. Grace tried is better than grace, and it is more than grace; it is glory in its infancy. (Samuel Rutherford)

In such times and with such events God is not displeased with us but is working to take us out into the deeps of His unmerited favor to fashion and shape us according to His good pleasure.  Sometimes in our lives — maybe even many times, we, like Job, are never given the definitive reasons why God has wounded us and must remain content that God does all things well.

In other times we may be able to look back and understand God’s severe mercy. An example of this is all the woundedness of Joseph. Beaten by his brothers. Sold as a slave. Unjustly accused of adultery. Thrown into the foulest of prisons but finally lifted up in order to be God’s agent to save the Hebrews. Joseph can finally say to his brothers that all of this was a matter of their intending evil but God intending good.

Having given those qualifiers we do understand though that disobedience has consequences.

Here in this passage God is speaking to His people. And here He warns them of the consequences of disobedience to His law.

Note here that God is NOT anti-nomian. He is not against His law. Indeed, so highly does He esteem His law that He places a nexus of cause and effect between the disobedience of His people to His law and their circumstantial demise. This is so true that it should be the case that when we see God’s hand heavy upon us that we should ask ourselves if there is any way in which we have dishonored God and His Law.

Another thing to note here is the corporate and covenantal nature of this chastisement. When God’s people walk contrary to God’s law so that God visits them with calamity it is often the case that there are individuals who are caught up in that covenantal chastisement who were, individually speaking,  not direct participants in the corporate covenantal sin. We think here of Daniel and the three faithful Hebrews carried into Babylon as God visited chastisement upon His disobedient people. One can think of Jeremiah, who was faithful to God but carried into exile into Egypt.

Well, as we look at this segment of Scripture particularly we see that,

I.) Cause and Effect Govern God’s people

15 “But if you will not obey the voice of the Lord your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes that I command you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you.

As we said at the outset, we do not live in an impersonal time + chance + circumstance world. This world, and our lives are lived before the face of God and so the world is ablaze with the handiwork of God in all our living.

The modern “Christian” man desires to live life as if it is disconnected to this divine cause and effect. We seldom tremble at the notion of sinning against God’s law because we don’t really believe that at a foundational level God governs the universe. We, might believe it at some abstract level, but we don’t really believe, concretely speaking, that God governs the affairs of men in such a way that every wind of sin is responded to by the whirlwind of God. The Scriptures repeatedly remind us that “God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth that shall He also reap.” We have forgotten the basics that this life is both the Theater of God’s grace and the theater of God’s judgment.

When we strip God’s law from this world so that the obedience of it or the disobedience of it has no impact the result is that we lock God out of this world.  The world then has no meaning except that which we sovereignly give to it by our own fiat word. If God’s law has no cause and effect impact in this world then we should not be surprised when we see a rash of Ministerial sin which is high handed against God and man.  When God’s law is deleted from this world God sovereignty becomes a hollow phrase that nobody really takes seriously.

But here in Deuteronomy we read that God’s cause and effect do govern God’s people. And the ironic thing here is our insistence that God’s law no longer governs us as a Church in all of our living brings upon us the very consequences that we see here.

We note again then that we live in a world of cause and effect. Not man’s cause and effect but Gods. So we see here that the curse is a reality. It cleaves to the sinner, pursues him, chases him down, ruins and and eventually even slays him as we see in ver. 45.

5 “All these curses shall come upon you and pursue you and overtake you till you are destroyed, because you did not obey the voice of the Lord your God, to keep his commandments and his statutes that he commanded you.  

Now of course some will contend that this is all Christian boogeyman God superstition to which we reply that all of History bears this out and while it might be the case that the wheels of justice grind slowly it also remains true that they grind exceedingly fine. It remains true that we can be sure our sins will find us out.


Author: jetbrane

I am a Pastor of a small Church in Mid-Michigan who delights in my family, my congregation and my calling. I am postmillennial in my eschatology. Paedo-Calvinist Covenantal in my Christianity Reformed in my Soteriology Presuppositional in my apologetics Familialist in my family theology Agrarian in my regional community social order belief Christianity creates culture and so Christendom in my national social order belief Mythic-Poetic / Grammatical Historical in my Hermeneutic Pre-modern, Medieval, & Feudal before Enlightenment, modernity, & postmodern Reconstructionist / Theonomic in my Worldview One part paleo-conservative / one part micro Libertarian in my politics Systematic and Biblical theology need one another but Systematics has pride of place Some of my favorite authors, Augustine, Turretin, Calvin, Tolkien, Chesterton, Nock, Tozer, Dabney, Bavinck, Wodehouse, Rushdoony, Bahnsen, Schaeffer, C. Van Til, H. Van Til, G. H. Clark, C. Dawson, H. Berman, R. Nash, C. G. Singer, R. Kipling, G. North, J. Edwards, S. Foote, F. Hayek, O. Guiness, J. Witte, M. Rothbard, Clyde Wilson, Mencken, Lasch, Postman, Gatto, T. Boston, Thomas Brooks, Terry Brooks, C. Hodge, J. Calhoun, Llyod-Jones, T. Sowell, A. McClaren, M. Muggeridge, C. F. H. Henry, F. Swarz, M. Henry, G. Marten, P. Schaff, T. S. Elliott, K. Van Hoozer, K. Gentry, etc. My passion is to write in such a way that the Lord Christ might be pleased. It is my hope that people will be challenged to reconsider what are considered the givens of the current culture. Your biggest help to me dear reader will be to often remind me that God is Sovereign and that all that is, is because it pleases him.

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