Lesson 3

Grace rejected – 1:18-21

We want to recall where we’re going in this book because unlike a lot of the history of the Old Testament this particular book has a tremendous doctrinal argument. In fact, there is probably more doctrine in this book of Deuteronomy than in many of the New Testament epistles. It’s strange because your first impression of Old Testament books like this is well, that’s interesting, there are a lot of stories and a lot of history, etc. But this book is very, very pertinent to some of the problems that we face in our time and probably is the most far reaching in doctrine of any of the books of the Old Testament. In other words, this book lays out the basic doctrines of all the Old Testament. When you study Isaiah, Daniel, and you study many of these later prophets, the expressions, the exact vocabulary is borrowed from Deuteronomy. So this is, therefore, a very basic thing. It sets up and defines terms, it sets up and defines the basic categories and gives us a knowledge of exactly how Israel understood their position in history. It will also give us many applications today in our own society.

We have divided this book into several sections; by way of review the first section, 1:1-1:5 is the preamble of the book. We are treating this book after Meredith’s Kline’s book, The Treaty of the Great Kings. The outline isn’t new, it isn’t revolutionary, but it does give you the nature of the book of Deuteronomy. The book of Deuteronomy is written in a legal format of the time. This doesn’t mean that Moses got up there and preached this reading a prepared sermon. This is a verbatim or nearly verbatim report of Moses’ preaching, but his structure…, in other words he organized his message along the lines of an international treaty. It’s not legally written down in the sense of a document; Moses didn’t stand up and read it. After he preached it, of course, the Holy Spirit put it into writing. The legal format is a general description of the book. This is important because it focuses on the relationship between God and the nation.

The first section, 1:1-1:5 is the preamble. In a legal treaty this was the section of the treaty or the contract that would define the great king; it would define the nature of the king, it would describe who he was, etc. The second section was 1:6-4:49, actually the first four chapters of the book. This section we dubbed the historical prologue after the second section of these legal treaties. This section always had its objective in these legal treaties a delineation of the relationship between the great king and the vassal king, or the party whom he made the treaty with.

Then 5:1-26:49, the great bulk of material of this book is the stipulations; these are the laws that are written down. If you do this then you should do this; if you do this then you should do that. We’ll get into some very interesting laws there; some of you who are a little prudish are going to be shocked when we go through some of these passages but we’re going to go through. The fourth section is the ratification procedures, 27:1-30:30 and this gives you the way in which the treaty would become legally effective. When you buy your home you have to go through a format, you have to sign certain things, you have to have certain people there, etc. and this section of Deuteronomy depicts the legal requirements for this treaty to go into effect. Finally, 31:1 to the end of the book, 34:12, we have the section which deals with the provision for keeping the treaty in force. In other words, every time a generation of the nation would die off, does the treaty have to be re-ratified? This is answered in 31:1-34:12.

We’ve covered the preamble and last time we got well into the historical prologue. The historical prologue is the second section of the treaty and this historical prologue can be diagramed in the following way. You can visualize what is happening here in this Law by visualizing God as a great king and visualizing the nation; this nation is made up of twelve tribes and these would be analogous to the international political law of the time as separate kingdoms. And God, the Great King, would make a treaty with all these kingdoms. The treaty that He uses to define His relationship with these twelve would be described in this kind of a treaty. And the historical prologue has one objective. The historical prologue is to examine history up until the time the treaty is made; not after the treaty. The issue is a brief review; before the treaty is actually made, before the stipulations are actually given, God works to do something for the nation and what He’s going to do is show His grace.

The first part of his historical prologue is to indebt the vassal king to the great king. In the international treaties of the time, here is an actual treaty in the secular world and you can listen to the words as I read a few sentences and then compare it with the historical prologue and I think you’ll get the impact of the historical prologue section. This was a treaty which you can find in Ancient Near Eastern texts; it’s by Pritchard and is the standard authority in ancient history. For example, if you ever want to find the Hammurabi Code with the official translation, if you ever want to find any ancient text translated this is the standard reference, Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Text.

This is a treaty made between Mursilis, who was king of the Hittite Empire and another king who was a vassal king. “Since your father had mentioned to me your name with great praise, I sought after you. To be sure, you were sick and ailing, but although you were ailing, I, the Sun-God,” now these people have tremendous humility in the ancient world and this is not the Sun-God, this is an actual king but he calls himself the Sun-God. “I, the Sun God, put you in the place of your father and took your brothers and sisters and the Amurru land in oath for you.” He goes on to explain what he has done for this vassal king. He says in other words, after I have gone to all this great length for you, what are you going to do for me. That argument is very familiar and that’s the argument God is doing for Israel. He is saying because I have done all this for you, what are you going to do for Me.

To catch the original phraseology of this turn back to Exodus 20 for this is the first time this Law went into effect and you’ll see right at the beginning of the Ten Commandments God is doing exactly the same thing because back in Exodus was the first time the treaty went into effect. What we’re seeing in Deuteronomy is the second time the treaty went into effect or the re-ratification. Exodus 20, this is the introduction to the Ten Commandments. By the way, now we also know from comparative archeology, some people have always thought verse 2 was the first commandment. In the Protestant condition we have never said verse 2 is the first commandment, but some have. And it’s wrong and can be definitely proven wrong on the basis of archeology, it has nothing to do with the Ten Commandments, this is the introduction to the treaty. “I the LORD thy God, who have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage,” there God defines Himself by giving His name, Jehovah, capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D in your Kings James Bible.

The phrase, “who has brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” that description will show you why God is indebting the nation to Himself. In other words He’s saying look Israel, before I make these Ten Commandments to you I want one thing clear between us and that is that I was the one brought you out here, I was the one that released you from bondage in Egypt, I was the one that did all these things for you, therefore this gives me the right to make commandments. So you see, the historical prologue is important.

Now we come to Deuteronomy and the first four chapters are historical prologue. This is interesting. In Exodus 20 what does the historical prologue mention? It mentions one thing, Exodus. Deuteronomy 1-4 is going to mention something else. If you start with verse 6 you notice where the prologue begins, “The LORD our God spoke unto us in Horeb, saying, you have dwelt long enough in this mount.” Therefore in this historical prologue where does the narrative pick up? The narrative picks up at the point of leaving Sinai. So you see the historical prologue to this book begins where the prologue to the first time the treaty went into effect ended. The first time God made this treaty was with Moses at Sinai. This is the original treaty given in Exodus 20-23; scholars call these three chapters the book of the covenant. When this treaty went into effect it followed the legal format of that time, the second millennium kind of format and the format had this historical prologue which stated, I, the Lord thy God, have brought you out of Egypt and I have brought you to Sinai. And that action is described to preface the Ten Commandments. Before God commands them He is going to show them that they are indebted to Him, a grace work.

What has happened? Why do you have in the book of Deuteronomy a second treaty written in exactly the same format but when you go to look at the historical prologue section, chapters 1-4, you discover very rapidly that this does not include the Exodus? Why is it that in 1:6 the historical prologue no longer goes back to Exodus, it goes back to the removal of the nation from Sinai? The reason is this. The nation was locked into legal agreement with God at Sinai. This nation came up to a place what is now the Gulf of Aqaba, it’s called Ezion-geber and Ezion-geber is where Solomon had his great naval fleet and then they moved up to a point called Kadesh. Up until that point is reached they are locked into agreement by the first treaty. Now comes the threat and we’ll see this threat in the passage tonight because at Kadesh-Barnea the nation rejects and the nation says no, no, no, we’re not going to go into the land.

At this point God could have legally declared the treaty null and void, and at this point, therefore the treaty is threatened because the nation no longer is obeying the Lord. The nation no longer has submitted itself to His will that they go and conquer this nation. They had a mission before them; the mission of Israel was to conduct holy war. We don’t have the concept holy war today and among many liberals it’s an anathema. But there is such a thing as holy war and it means war to annihilate every individual. And when Israel went into here she was not only to annihilate men, she was to annihilate women, children, dogs, cats and everything else that they could find. They would go in here and clean out everything because this was holy war.

Now they stopped right at the boundary and it’s significant because Kadesh-barnea was the southern most point of the geography of the terrain here. Therefore stopping here they never got into the final phase of that first treaty. At this point God could say all right, that treaty is null and void, I break it, and the nation would be lost. Therefore, since this treat occurs to the nation, God re-ratifies the treaty and this is why you have the book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is a pledge. Deuteronomy shows God’s grace that the first treaty which runs from Exodus 20 up through the Kadesh-barnea incident, that this treaty which was threatened legally, the whole basis of the treaty was threatened by the rejection at Kadesh-Barnea is now reinstated. Deuteronomy is the reinstatement of this first treaty. It’s written in exactly the same form, repeats many of the exact same principles, but some of them are different and this is why many of your liberals, if you have a course in religion on the campus or somewhere else the liberals always say the book of Deuteronomy was written in the time of the Kings by some hypothetical D. Most conservatives think D just stands for a dud, but D is supposed to be the source of this book, an imagination of the liberals entirely.

Deut. 1-4 are going to bring us up to date and show us that when God goes to invoke the stipulations that begin in chapter 5, He is going to do so because through chapters 1-4 He has brought the nation to Himself again. In other words, if He had gone ahead in chapter 5 and said okay, if you do this boom boom, He wouldn’t have clarified the legal basis for the Law. So in order to clarify the whole issue God is going to review chapters 1-4, the history of the failure of the nation. This history is going to begin at Sinai and take us up through the Trans Jordanian conquest. This is the history where God takes them up to Kadesh-barnea, they fall, and then when they fall God says all right, you’re going to stick around for forty years and you’re going to have some spanking and I’m going to discipline you for forty years and then after these forty years are up we’ll move along to the east and up around Edom, etc. and come in from the east.

Here is the story of the transition between the first chance the nation had and the second chance. This is why Deuteronomy is so important because it is a testimony to God’s grace. Grace operated under the Law. A lot of people have gotten the idea from a wrong note in Scofield’s Bible which is contained in John 1 of the old edition that there was no grace under Law and that people were saved by keeping the Law. Scofield never intended to teach this but unfortunately if you’ve ever written something you know that if you write 5,000 sentences the probability is that one of them is going to be wrong. And Scofield slipped and in his famous note of the old edition slipped and made this boo-boo and everybody has called attention to it, but dispensationalists have never, NEVER taught salvation by works under the Law, and the whole book of Deuteronomy argues against that position.

Last time we dealt with verses 6-18 and this was the gracious offer of God. These first 18 verses have a point; from verses 6-18 God is saying look, didn’t I keep My word, I promised that I’d supply your every need, didn’t I keep it. This is an argument, God is going to indict the nation, show they are without excuse, then show that He came in grace to bail them out of the problem and finally that they should respond to this. Verses 6-18 that we covered dealt with God’s offer and the basic argument was this: God kept His covenant.

Tonight we’re going to see something different. Tonight we’re going to see the principle of 2 Tim. 2:13, “If we believe not, God abides faithful, He cannot deny Himself. When God declares something in His Word, He’s going to stick by it. We might not, but He is going to. So God is going to stick by it and we’re going to see from verses 19ff how God stuck by His original agreement and how the nation did not.

Verse 19, “And when we departed from Horeb,” this is the departure, up until verse 18 we’ve dealt with the organization of the nation, the great increase of the nation, etc. “And when we departed from Horeb, we went through all that great and terrible wilderness, which you saw by the way of the mountain of the Amorites,” this particular “great and terrible wilderness” is this area south of Kadesh, it’s along the western edge of the long finger of the Red Sea, now known as the Gulf of Aqaba. The Gulf of Aqaba is called in this text the Red Sea, Yam Cuwph and Yam Cuwph is the general word both for the Red Sea and the north eastward extension. The nation is going up now, the west side of this extension, the Gulf of Aqaba and they’re going through what has been described as the “great and terrible wilderness.”

That this is a true description and not any exaggeration can be found in E. H. Palmer who in 1871 traveled this same route and deliberately tried to reproduce the events of the nation, tried to camp in exactly the same places as far as archeology is concerned that they knew. And this was his conclusion, his description of this “great and terrible wilderness.” “The country is nearly waterless with the exceptions of a few springs in the larger wadis, but even here water can only be obtained by scraping small holes or pits in the ground and bailing it out with the hand. All that is obtained by the process is a yellowish solution which baffles all attempts at filtering.” Wouldn’t you love to take two million people through a terrain like that, and not have any supplies? Well God supplied their need but you can see He took them through a great and terrible wilderness and in Deut. 8:15 this is amplified.

And then they came to a place called Kadesh-barnea. I want to explain something about this map which is going to be different from the maps in your Bible. Kadesh-barnea I have shown just to the northwest of the north tip of the Gulf of Aqaba. If you check your Bible map you see that Kadesh-barnea is not there. You will see that Kadesh-barnea is up in a place right around here and there’s a discrepancy between these maps and my position. The reason for this is not just my position but the position of some of the men who have done recent research in this thing and that is that this previous position of Kadesh does not fit with the text. For one thing this is why it doesn’t fit. In Num. 20:17 Moses calls to Edom and says look, we are a nation that has come up to your border and we want permission to go along your throughway. The throughway in that time was called “the King’s Highway.” Unfortunately The King’s Highway begins down here at the north end of the Gulf of Aqaba. So why would Moses request permission to go up The King’s highway if he was about eighty miles off to the west? He would have to be right close by.

Furthermore in the list of camps in Num. 33 the camp before Kadesh-barnea is listed as Ezion-Geber which is here. You have all these camps that are spaced like this and you come up to Ezion-Geber and now all of a sudden in Num. 33 it says and then they camped at Kadesh-barnea, but Kadesh-Barnea shouldn’t be eighty miles off, it should be within this general area to follow the continuity of the Num. 33 passage.

And finally, another evidence is in Deut. 2:8; these are evidences that the classical location of Kadesh-Barnea is wrong, “And when we passed by from our brethren, the children of Esau, who dwelt in Seir, through the way of the plain from Elath, and from Ezion-Geber,” that shows that Israel was in Ezion-Geber, but if you look at Num. 33 you find they were at Ezion-Geber before they were at Kadesh. Therefore, since they went along and went over to the south and east of Edom, this is the path that they ultimately chose, they must have been in the vicinity of Ezion-Geber. For these and several other reasons we prefer the location of Kadesh-barnea to be further south than the classical one and nearer the north end of the Gulf of Aqaba. It doesn’t do too much except it does explain some of the problems in the book of Numbers.

In verse 20 is what Moses is telling the people. This is the crucial point. This would be akin in our age to a believer who had trusted the Lord as his Savior, who had been trained, who had spent time in the Word, in prayer, etc. and had reached a certain level of maturity where God could really begin to use him. If you want to apply these truths in Deuteronomy the analogous case in your situation would be a believer who has reached the level of maturity where God can really begin to use him. We’re going to see what happens when this nation has reached this point.

Verse 20, “And I said unto you, You have come to the mountain of the Amorites,” the mountain of the Amorites you could also translate as “the mountains,” plural, “of the Amorites, it’s just a region, a mountainous area, “which the LORD our God does give unto us.” “Does give us” is a Hebrew participle which means in the process of giving. Any time you have a participle in Hebrew it means continuous action, going on, on, on, on, on, on. So what the author is saying, Moses is saying the Lord, right now, is in the process of giving us this nation, this land.

Verse 21, “Behold, the LORD thy God has set the land before thee. Go up and possess it, as the LORD God of thy fathers hath said unto thee; fear not, neither be discouraged.” We want to look at that command in a negative way; that negative “fear not, neither be discouraged” is different from another command given a few verses later. Let’s see how it’s different. In verse 21 we have what is known as ’al and then the verb, and it means don’t do this, it means, referring to a specific event, and says don’t do this. That’s different from another participle which looks like this lo, it’s exactly reversed and this is translated like this. And when lo’ is before the verb in the Hebrew this means a principle, never, never, never, never, never do it. When ’al is used it means just the specific act, don’t do it now. You can guess now, knowing this, in what way are the Ten Commandments expressed. The Ten Commandments would be expressed by lo’ because the Ten Commandments express a principle, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t ever do it, it’s an absolute negation. This negation is a relative one, it depends on the situation.

In verse 21 it is ’al because Moses is referring to this one crucial point in the history of the nation and that nation is about to cross the boundary. Here they are, the north end of the Gulf of Aqaba and they have reached this point, they have moved up from the south and they have just reached the boundary of the land. Now he says for heaven’s sake, you people have fell by the wayside before, you’ve rebelled, you’ve rejected the Word but when you get to this boundary don’t you dare reject now because now you’re just about to enter into your authorized ministry. You have been given a ministry by the Lord to knock out the Canaanites, to claim this land to show the glory of the Lord. So in verse 21 the command is for that specific event.

But in verse 22 we have something. Here’s where things begin to slide. “And you came near unto me,” and this is the spy incident of Num. 13, “every one of you, and said, We will send men before us, and they shall search out the land,” you remember the story, they sent the spies into the land and they did a little reconnaissance, they spied out the terrain, etc. and brought back evidences and some of them gave Moses some static, in fact all of them except Caleb and Joshua. They came back and said oh man, you should see what’s over there, look what God brought us to. We’re going to see some of the things that God brought them to. Their report was true; it was their mental attitude that was wrong. What is the difference between Caleb and Joshua and the rest of those boys? They all had the same information. We’re going to see when we find out who those Anakim are, that those men when they came back and said there are giants in the land they meant it, there were giants in the land in those days, all over the place. And when they walked in there and saw these guys you can imagine looking up, some of these men were about nine feet tall. On the basketball court it’s one thing but when you see them dressed in about 120 pounds of armor it’s another thing. This got some of them a little shook up. They all came back but they all had the same facts. Caleb and Joshua weren’t blind; they weren’t going around and pretending they didn’t see anything. Caleb and Joshua knew exactly what the situation was but they also knew the power of the Lord so they came back with the right mental attitude. So facts didn’t mean a thing in this incident, it was the mental attitude.

In verse 26 we have the divine viewpoint analysis of their rejection. “Notwithstanding ye would not go up,” and that “would not” is that negative lo’, means absolute negation, you had no intention ever of going up, “but rebelled against the commandment of the LORD your God.” This situation that begins to occur here in verse 26 is depicted in the Old Testament in at least three other incidences. Here you have one, Saul is another and Solomon is a third. In all of these cases these believers committed what is known as the sin unto death, spoken of in 1 John 5, and what this would be translated is Christian, how to be miserable for the rest of your Christian life.

I have seen this operate in a friend of mine who trusted the Lord at MIT just after I did. He was called to the ministry in no uncertain terms and he said no, I want a career in engineering. He decided to fight the Lord’s call and the Lord let him do it. God never tampers with volition, if you want to go out and kill yourself, fine, He’s not going to stop you. He may put a few stones in your way so you bump yourself on the way but God is not going to coerce volition. This young man decided on a career in engineering after he knew what God’s will for his life was. Today he is in the insane asylum, still a believer but wouldn’t you love to live the rest of your Christian life in the funny farm and that’s exactly where he is simply because he got to the most crucial point in his life where God could use him and he rejected. So God says okay, I brought you into this world so that you could be a minister for me and you’re not going to play, and he’s in the insane asylum. All the Christian prayers are not going to get him out; there’s only one thing that’s going to get him out, when he wakes up to the fact that he wants God’s will for his life.

We’re talking about real life results in this thing. This nation is going to go through suffering, Solomon went through it, it’s described in 1 Kings 11 where Solomon finally got to the point where he is surrounded with all these women, etc. and it says the women took his heart away. What it means is that in order to marry these women he had to make alliances with their fathers, and in order to do this he had to worship their gods. So every time he had a wife he had to build her a new shrine, so he had shrines all over the city of Jerusalem and finally he started worshiping them himself. The Bible very clearly depicts Solomon as saying he “did not follow the Lord fully as his father, David,” and that’s an important statement because if you notice, what did David do?

David was not sinless perfection and yet the Scriptures say Solomon “did not follow the Lord fully as his father, David did,” but you know David didn’t follow the Lord fully so why does the Scripture say this? Because the Scripture when it says “follow the Lord fully” means that you live out your life in Phase Two which begins at the cross, the time you accept Christ, and goes until death or the rapture, whichever occurs first, during this time you continually seek out God’s will for your life. This is what it means to follow fully after the Lord. Now David did, he got in trouble with Bathsheba and he committed adultery with her and killed her husband, etc. but you notice something about David. David did not let that sin get him down, and David recognized that sin and confessed his sin: Psalm 51, Psalm 32, Psalm 38. David was disciplined the rest of his life for that but nevertheless David got back, David said all right, I confess, I acknowledge responsibility for this and he recovered.

Solomon did not; Solomon went into a tailspin on this thing. He reached this point and he fell away from the Lord; it means he went on negative volition, he said I don’t want to live out the rest of my life for the Lord and the Lord said fine, you’ll be miserable. God could have killed Solomon like He did Saul except 1 Kings 11 says something. It says Solomon, I’m going to take your kingdom away but I’m not going to do it in your lifetime for the sake of your father, so God’s special favors to David saved Solomon. But God cold have dealt with Solomon just as he did with Saul, just cleared him out.

And we have the same thing in this nation, and they are going to face this, verse 26, they “would not go up,” and this is the point in our lives where we would become spiritually mature to the point where God is calling you to some area. This doesn’t mean and you don’t have to feel intimidated that unless you’re called to the ministry or unless you’re called to the mission field that somehow you’re a second class believer. Don’t you buy that. Wherever you are, on your job, wherever it is, can be God’s will for you. [Blank spot] Why did you save me God, because now I’ve come into this area of suffering and I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t trusted in Christ and you led me out here? Missionaries would be prone to this, here they are out in the middle of the desert surrounded by scorpions or something, and it’s very easy for a missionary to get his eyes on himself, out there alone where there’s not much fellowship, all of a sudden they start feeling sorry for themselves. It’s a very easy thing to do; it’s easy for any of you to do. You get discouraged, etc. and blame it on God, He’s the patsy.

Verse 28, “Where shall we go up? Our brethren have discouraged our heart, saying, The people are greater and taller than we; the cities are great and walled up to heaven; and, moreover, we have seen the sons of the Anakim there.” Our brethren have discouraged us because they have spoken of these great cities. Why is this discouraging? Because the nation is going on a military campaign and the military campaign for that day were siege campaigns and this nation did not have the military weapons to conduct sieges. Therefore, since they were not militarily prepared for this kind of warfare, the Canaanites lived in a feudal system, they were not prepared for this warfare, they had no weapons whatever for this kind of thing. So now what are we going to do?

They had great cities and fortified; it’s just like we have all these people and can’t use them. We’re the same way today, we have all sorts of weapons except politicians have tied the military’s hands so the military is in the same boat that the Israelites were here, we’ve got great tall cities and can’t use our weapons. Here they didn’t have weapons; today we can’t use the ones we have. So you’ve got the same picture, can’t do anything. So what’s the next thing? This is human viewpoint, in any situation you have two ways; you can look at something from the human viewpoint or the divine viewpoint. The same problem looked at different ways: human viewpoint, no weapons; divine viewpoint, trust the Lord. Do you know how God was going to do this? How did He handle Jericho? Did they need any siege weapons to get through the walls of Jericho? No, they didn’t need any; the Lord took care of that. Today you can see the walls of Jericho, and they are lying out, flat, not caved in as they would have been had an army invaded the city. Those walls are lying out, flat out, just like somebody came down with a giant hand and squished it and the walls just went out. That’s been proven by archeology. So Jericho is a living memorial to what God would have done. God would have solved the problem but they wouldn’t trust Him.

Then they add this strange phrase at the bottom of verse 28, and we saw the sons of the Anakims there. There’s something wrong with that word, it shouldn’t have any “s” on it; the Hebrew plural is “im,” you don’t need “s.” Anak is singular, Anakim is plural. Let’s see who these sons of the Anakim are. We have to get this because we want to see how these Anakim played a tremendous role in the history of Israel. This is what’s going to take so long going through this prologue of Deuteronomy. You have to chase down these names; a tremendous amount of history is packed into these verses.

The Anakim were a race of giants. We’re going to go through the history of the Anakim in five parts, just so you can visualize who these Anakim were. First turn to Joshua 15:13. We’re going to study the Anakim; I want to show you that these were real people, this is not imagined. I’ve heard Bible teachers get up and say oh, there were no giants in the land, they just thought they saw a giant. No, they saw real giants. That was a fact. The lesson to learn here isn’t that the facts were misinterpreted; it was the attitude with which they approached and accepted the facts.

Joshua 15:13, “And unto Caleb, the son of Jephunneh, he gave a portion among the children of Judah, according to the commandment of the LORD to Joshua, even the city of Arba, the father of Anak, which city is Hebron.” From this verse we learn, connecting it with Num. 13:22 that Hebron was founded by the father of the Anakim and Arba was this man’s name. It means four actually, but Arba was the father. Why this guy suddenly appears in history we don’t know. These Anakim were genetic freaks in many ways, they had all sorts of strange characteristics. So this man may have just been a biological freak, but Arba was one of these mutations, perhaps and he started this whole line of the Anakim off. He also founded Hebron.

The second thing to note is that the Anakim were not in the land when Abraham was. Other giants were, the Rephaim, but not the Anakim. Therefore, this coupled with Num. 13:22 tells us that Arba must have been born somewhere between the time of Jacob and Moses, or the 400 year period between 1800 and 1400 BC. Somewhere in that bracket of history this Arba came on the scene and who he was we don’t know; all we know is that he gave forth to one of the greatest races of giants that have plagued Israel down through history up until the time of David.

The third thing to remember about this is that Caleb and Joshua eliminated them. Turn to Joshua 11:22, they conducted a campaign. Joshua’s campaign into Israel was a three-fold campaign. He moved into the land from the east, he crossed at Gilgal and he made a forward thrust over to Jericho which is about here. This broke the land in two. He depended on breaking up the different feudal states of the Canaanites, so he made his first thrust westward to cut off the north and the south. Then he turned south and he began to work it over and he went all the way down to Kadesh-barnea from inside the land, back up and then into the north for the third phase of his campaign. So Joshua had broken the back of the Canaanite resistance. He had not cleaned up all the pockets; there were many, many pockets of Canaanites left but he had broken the back and controlled the major highways by the time he died. So Joshua had a very significant campaign.

In phase two of his campaign, after he went westward and cracked the nation in two was to move south. Hebron is located just about there, and it was this place where Anak and many of these giants dwelt. So Joshua came down there and finished them off. Joshua 11:22, “And at that time came Joshua, and cut off the Anakim from the mountains, from Hebron, from Debir, from Anab, and from all the mountains of Judah, and from all the mountains of Israel; Joshua destroyed them utterly with their cities.” This is quite a large group of people by this time; they had grown in several generations to occupy many cities.

Verse 23, “There were none of the Anakim left,” but notice the last of the verse, “in the land of the children of Israel; only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod, there remained some.” Here is where you begin to get the setup for another man who occurs in history that you know by the name of Goliath. He is a descendent of the Anakim. These giants, after they were defeated a few of them fled southwestward to these areas, Gaza, now known to us as the Gaza strip. But down here is Philistia and these giants fled down here because the Philistines were Greeks. These were survivors of the Trojan War who had come eastward from the world of Homer, and the Iliad & the Odyssey, etc. and the Philistines were these men who were actually Greek descendants and they admired soldiers. So they said sure, we’d love to have you around, just put on some of our armor and do our fighting for us. So the Philistines welcomed with open arms these Anakim.

Later on down in history there would be one of these Anakim who would give birth to five sons. If you turn to 2 Sam. 21:16 you’ll see the last time in Scripture where the Anakim come out. We’ve gone from the time of Joshua, which was about 1400 BC down to the time of David, 1000 BC, 400 years these giants have dwelt in the land of Philistia. In 2 Sam. 21:16 we have the second of these. This man had five sons; one was named Goliath. We all know him; David had a little sling-shot experience with Goliath.

In verse 16 is another man, “And Ishbi-benob,” he was the second person in this family. We’ll call him Ish for short. “Ishbi-benob who was of the sons of the giant, the weight of whose spear weighted three hundred shekels of bronze in weight, he being girded with a new sword, thought of slaying David.” In other words, he was intent on slaying David. Verse 17, “But Abishai, the son of Zeruiah, came to his aid, and smote the Philistine, and killed him.” David wasn’t the only one that killed these giants. “Then the men of David swore unto him, saying, Thou shalt go no more out with us to battle, that thou quench not the light of Israel.” The “light of Israel” refers to his kingship, his monarchial rights. These men were afraid. David was getting old, he had already slain Goliath and they were worried, now look David, you’ve shown us the way, we can slay these giants by trusting in the Lord, but David, you just stay back, we’re afraid you’re going to lose you on one of these expeditions. So by the time the second giant had been killed they retired David from the scene.

Verse 18, “And it came to pass after this, that there was again a battle with the Philistines at Gob; then Sibbecai, the Hushathite, slew Saph, who was one of the sons of the giant.” Saph is the third one in the family. He is also called Sippai in 1 Chron. 20, the parallel passage.

Verse 19, “And there was again a battle in Gob with the Philistines, where Elhanan, the son of Jaare-oregim, a Bethlehemite, slew the brother of Goliath, the Gittite, the staff of whose spear was like a weaver’s beam.” Here’s Lahmi, he is the fourth member of this family, and then we have a very interesting man who we don’t know the name of, we’ll just call him Mr. X, he’s described in verse 20, “And there was yet a battle in Gath, where was a man of great stature that had on every hand six fingers, and on every foot six toes, four and twenty in number; and he was born to the giant.” That shows you that this involves some sort of genetic disturbance in the human body, the fact that this man had these kind of children.

Therefore we relate this back to the whole line of the Anakim and say that they probably were some sort of a genetic mutation that developed in Hebron between the time Israel went down into Egypt and the time she came back. These lived to plague this nation down through it’s history. The first one to go, the first one of these men to be killed would be Goliath. Interestingly enough the Bible records the first giant to be killed was killed by a man of faith, David. The first of the Rephaim who were giants east of the Jordan was killed by Moses, a man of faith.

So these giants are living memorials to problems. They would correspond in your life to the great problem that you can’t face. They would correspond to the 9 and 10 feet high problems that you may face during the week to which you have to claim God’s promises to solve. So these giants have a very good meaning for you as a believer. It means that you may face a Goliath, it may not be in the form of a person, it may be in the form of a crisis, a financial crisis, it may be a personal crisis, but you’ll face Goliaths in your life. And your procedure in facing these are to be the same as David, to trust in Him claiming the promises of God.

The fifth thing about this whole line of Anakim is do we have any archeological evidence that these people existed? Can we go back into history and report the existence of actual literal real human giants. There are three sources that say we can. The first one is given in NBD which is The New Bible Dictionary. Unfortunately, although this is the pride and joy of conservative scholarship at the moment, the article in this particular area has no bibliography. So this man makes this statement, I’ll give it to you for what it’s worth, I have tried to trace it down and find out where he got his information, I do not know, he did not give a bibliography. But it says: “There has been discovery in Palestine of human skeletons of similar structure in roughly the same period. To get an idea how tall these men were, Goliath was nine and three-quarter feet.” So these are the kind of skeletons that have been found in Palestine.

The second evidence which I give more weight to than The New Bible Dictionary is Sir Henry Howorth’s book, The Mammoth and the Ice Age. This book was written in the last of the 19^th century and Howorth was a man who went around specializing in tracing out odd findings because at that time he was interested in undermining the then-new uniformitarian geology. And Howorth found again at levels dating about this time in history giant bones which were found in Europe. Many of these bones were unearthed as early as the French Revolution and the American Revolution and have been unearthed periodically since that time. These bones appear to date from the time of the Greeks, which would be just about this time. Remember while the Trojan War is going on over in Greece these activities of the judges is going on over in Israel, dating from the time of the Greeks and some of these heights range as much as fifteen feet. So here human skeletons range about as high as fifteen feet.

So we have various evidences, scarce though they be, that there have been found in history real human skeletons. How do they know these are human and not ape? Because found on them are implements that fit the size. For example, helmets, swords, that have been made and buried with these skeletons.

The third evidence which can also be used, although it doesn’t directly prove the height is what is known as the Egyptian execration texts and the execration texts were cursing texts. When you wanted to curse an enemy you made a statue, and you took that statute and you swore to that statue that I’m going to put a plague on you and you took that statue and smashed it and you would write the curse on the statue. You would name so and so, we’d call it burning in effigy today, you’d make that statue of so and so and then you’d write on it, and then you’d smash it. Pieces of these smashed statuettes have been found and they’re called the Egyptian execration texts. Pharaoh used to do this; he used to curse various people in Israel and one of whom is called Eanak, and this is the one extra biblical evidence we have that these Anakim actually existed. There was a ruler called Eanak whom Pharaoh cursed. So we have some supporting evidence that the Bible is very serious when it’s talking about these Anakim.

The whole point of this Anakim is this, that the facts are there for anyone to see. It is your volition that determines your response to the fact. You have a volition with positive and negative; you can go positive and look toward God and His grace, or you can react negatively and turn out human viewpoint. It’s up to you, God isn’t going to curse you, God isn’t going to coerce your volition, God is going to allow you to choose. You can look at the facts from a human viewpoint and say I’m going to try to solve this problem myself, I’m going to try to work this out myself on my own, etc. Or, I will go positive and I will trust the Lord, and I will do faithfully what He requires me to do and leave the rest in the Lord’s hands. It makes for a very relaxed life, that you don’t have to go around worrying about things beyond your jurisdiction. So this is the way that you can respond and this is the way Israel was responding, except they went on negative; they cranked out human viewpoint when they saw the facts. The facts are the same, the attitude was different.

Verse 29, “Then I said unto you, Dread not, neither be afraid of them.” And in verse 30 Moses gives them a promise. Verse 30 is the promise that the nation should have claimed in this situation, just like when we face a problem God has given you promises. “Casting all your care upon Him for He cares for you.” “All things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are called according to His purpose.” God gives you those promises and you are to use them. You can accept or reject them, but when it gets to the judgment seat of Christ, Christ is going to be interested in one thing—what did you do when He engineered those circumstances to come into your life? Did you respond negatively and say I’m going to solve it, reject the promises of God, or did you accept and trust in the promises of God. That, basically, is the struggle of the Christian life.

In verse 30 Moss gives the promise, a tremendous promise to them. “The LORD your God, who goes before you, He shall fight for you, according to all that He did for you in Egypt before your eyes; [31] And in the wilderness, where thou hast seen how that the LORD thy God bore thee, as a man doth bear his son, in all the way that ye went, until ye came into this place.” And in verse 30 you notice something, it says “The LORD your God, who goes” and this again is the Hebrew participle, it’s action that goes on and on and on and on. So we could translate that “The LORD your God who is going before you,” and the word is walking. God is pictured in the Old Testament as a man of war. Do you remember what happened? Joshua was alone one time and he all of a sudden heard this noise and turned around quick and there was the captain of the Lord’s host standing before him, and Joshua said whose side are you on? That man, by the way, is the preincarnate Jesus Christ. That is how Christ appears in the Old Testament, as a man of war, and significantly this is how Christ again appears in the book of Revelation when He comes again, He’s riding a white horse and on His garments are written The King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, but notice also He has a sword in His mouth that goes out to slay the nations. That’s war.

This is the picture you’ll never get of Christ from liberal theology today. Christ is this nice little sweet man, holding some little baby in his arms, and that’s Jesus Christ and everybody says isn’t He sweet. I have yet to see, with few exceptions, an artist paint Jesus Christ the way the Scripture depicts Him, because you see many of these artists lived in the Middle Ages and in the Middle Ages they were dominated by an alien anti-Biblical theology, and these men thought it was holy and right to make their characters effeminate. So Jesus Christ is pictured in a very effeminate way. Even Michelangelo doesn’t do such a hot job of this.

Jesus Christ in Scripture is pictured as a man’s man, strong man; he must have been to work in a carpenter shop 30 years. He must have been a strong man to bear the cross because He bore that cross after He was beaten up. In Isaiah 52, the last part of that chapter says that He was so beaten up that His face was a pulp. Have you ever seen an artist draw Christ on the cross with His face a pulp so that you couldn’t make out the features. That’s the way it would have to be done if you were to fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah 52. So we have, therefore, the Lord appearing as the man of war.

In verse 30 we have this depiction, He’s walking, so Moses says look, all the way from Sinai, wherever you went in the wilderness, God was walking, He was walking with the camp. You can just see the picture of this great commander walking with his troops ahead, invisible, yet He’s really there. This is the picture that Moses is giving and he’s saying look, what did God do for you when you went through the Red Sea. When you were back over here and Pharaoh’s chariots were coming at you and you had your backs to the water, where were you going to go? Most of the people were crying and Moses said “You stand still and you see the salvation of the Lord.” That’s a very interesting command because where else could they go? Where were they going to go, they could only do one thing, stand still and see the salvation of the Lord.

It’s these times, by the way, in your Christian life, I don’t know if you’ve had this experience but sometimes in your Christian life you may find a situation where you can do nothing but stand still. In this situation, all of a sudden you see whatever happens must be God’s grace and He works. So Moses says look, what did God do there? He parted the waters, He walked through the water for you and as the Lord walked through the water the water just parted. And when the Lord turned around Pharaoh was buried in the waters. That’s what He did for you at the Exodus.

And then he says in verse 31, “And in the wilderness, where you have seen how that the LORD God bore thee, as a man does bear his son,” and he’s going to go on later in Deuteronomy and say everywhere God walked with you your shoes didn’t wear out, your clothes didn’t wear out, you walked through this wilderness where you couldn’t get water. You figure out how many gallons of water had to be used by a couple of million people out there. Where do you suppose that water came from? Supernatural provision! Where do you suppose their food came from? Supernatural provision, manna. So he’s saying God has provided everything up until this point, so why not just trust Him a little more.

We have the same thing in Rom. 8:32, “He that spared not His own Son for you but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things.” It’s the same principle in Rom. 8:32, God has done the most for us in the cross and this incident in Kadesh-barnea would correspond in our lives to some crucial experience entering into the service of God. And it looks bleak and things look bad and you may be discouraged. But you think back, what has God done for you at the cross, He died for you, He removed every sin, past, present and future that you will ever commit. He personally had you in mind when He died on the cross and when He said it is finished He meant it is finished. He went to the depth for you at the cross and He has gone to the depth in providing the means by which you personally trusted in Christ. God provided not only salvation, He provided an opportunity for you to believe. So God has provided and provided and provided. And when we come down to the point in our lives where we can be of real service to Him the question is: are we going to reject.

Verse 32 is their answer, “Yet in this thing ye did not believe the LORD your God, [33] Who went in the way before you, to search you out a place to pitch your tents, in fire by night, to show you…” who did this and who did that and you did not believe the Lord, and that is in the Hebrew participle. So here you have another action that goes on and on and on and they reach this point and they are what I call “flake-out” believers. They go so far in the Christian life and they see all of a sudden where the Christian is going and whoops, that’s the end. Those people are dedicating themselves to perpetual misery and they will never be happy in the Christian life. God can do one of two things for them, He can kill them as He did Saul, as He did Ananias and Sapphira in the book of Acts, or He can leave them around as just miserable, rotten, stinking specimens of the Christian life. You see these people, they’re sour grapes disposition, they get up in the morning and they can’t think of anything but complain, complain, complain. They don’t go to Church because all the hypocrites are in the church; they don’t study the Word of God because it’s too hard, they want to watch TV. They are really miserable people. You shouldn’t condemn them; you should feel sorry for them because they are dedicating their lives to perpetual misery.

There is one corollary to this that you want to remember and we covered it; God never tampers with volition. It’s part of His master plan never to tamper with volition and we saw this from Rom. 9, the potter and the clay. We saw how out of the same lump were two vessels made and both have volition, and God is not going to tamper with volition and this means if we are believers that you enter the Christian life at this point and you go on down through the Christian life until the time you die or the rapture, whichever occurs first. During this time you are going to have to live and you are going to have to follow the principles of Galatians, “whatsoever you sow you shall also reap.” Salvation yes, and in many of these cases people will be saved but they will be saved so as by fire, 1 Cor. 3, and they will be miserable people. Why? Because they will not trust in God’s grace. It’s so simple.

Sure the giants are in the land, the Anakim are they, they’re really there, those walled cities are really there, but you have a God who did what He did to Jericho operating with it and God wants us to glorify Him. He’s going to deliberately put things in your life that will be impossible. That’s part of the game. That’s why you’re in the game. That’s why you joined the team, so that you can have impossible things put into your life so that God could solve it His way and thereby glorify Himself through your life. That’s the name of the game in Christianity and that was the name of the game as far as these people were concerned in the Old Testament. And they flubbed.

It’s like a batter getting up to home plate and he sees the pitcher pitch the ball and he doesn’t like that, he goes to the dugout, he’s not going to play, because look at that nasty man throwing the ball at me. It’s just like a lot of Christians, God’s throwing the ball to me, isn’t that nasty of Him. I get up here with my bat and He’s got all that nerve to throw that ball at me. How stupid. Yet this is exactly what believers do, they get all the way up to the plate, ready to hit the ball and God throws the ball to them and then they blame God for throwing the ball.

This is the story of Kadesh-barnea and next time we’re going to see God’s grace and how He restores the nation through 40 long arduous years of discipline.