Lesson 8

True Natural Wisdom – 4:1-8

[4:1-2, “Now therefore hearken, O Israel, unto the statutes and unto the ordinances, which I teach you, to do them, that ye may live, and go in and possess the land which the LORD God of your fathers gives you. [2] Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish anything from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you.”] Turn to 1 Chron. 29:29 and I’ll show you how it turned out in history, how God protected His Bible, how God protected the book that you hold in your hand, how He made sure that every page that you have in your Bible was part of His message to you personally. If you want to do further research I recommend R. Laird Harris’s book, Biblical Canonicity, put out by Zondervan, a very good work. “Now the acts of David, the king, first and last, behold they are written in the book of Samuel, the seer, and in the book of Nathan, the prophet, and in the book of Gad, the seer.” You say wait a minute, what are those books, we don’t have those books. That’s right, we don’t have those books, those are lost books but those books, those records but out by a living prophet, a genuine prophet of God, the Bible was preserved by these prophets in their memoirs.

For example, when President’s die or get out of office they always write their memoirs. These prophets kept a diary and wrote their memoirs and here are three of them. Samuel wrote one, Nathan wrote one and Gad wrote one. Later on other people took these books and developed the Scriptures from them. In other words, God preserved His Scripture by living prophets. You have to have, in the Old Testament, a real prophet to write inspired Scripture. That is the test. Is a book canonical or not, is a book inspired or not. The test is who wrote it? Another test that was used in history is does it conform to the prophetic tradition beginning with Moses. Moses was the first prophet, and you remember the great prophecy of Deuteronomy when it says there shall be like unto him another prophet, listen to him. That ultimately was fulfilled in Jesus Christ but that mechanism was set in motion by which a prophetic tradition was carried on down the centuries and these men, such as Samuel, Nathan and Gad kept records.

I want to show you one more; once again you will see this. I have about 20 verses but I won’t go through them but I think these two get the point I’m trying to make. 2 Chron. 9:29, “Now the rest of the acts of Solomon, first and last, are they not written in the book of Nathan, the prophet, and in the prophecy of Ahijah, the Shilonite, and in the visions of Iddo, the seer, concerning Jeroboam, the son of Nebat?” Those records were written down and they were kept and guarded and protected by living prophets. This is why the canon of Scripture closed in 90 AD and why since 90 AD not one book has been added to the Bible because in 90 AD or thereabouts the last living apostle and prophet died, that Apostle John. And when John died the Church no longer had a prophet left and all of the rest of the living prophets that you hear about after that point are not genuine, because if they were genuine then the Bible by its own tradition would be added to, even today. You must have a living line of prophets to have Scripture. And this is why when God temporarily terminates His work with Israel in 90AD there are no more prophets to guard, protect and to generate Scripture.

This is why all this talk you hear today about the gift of prophecy and this and that is really a cheap form of trash. It’s a cheap imitation and I don’t hesitate to use those adjectives to describe it. It is cheap trash because it is a degradation against the true prophecy of God’s Word. It’s a pathetic imitation, a sorry counterfeit to the true gift of prophecy has temporarily died in history. It will be resurrected again. But we live in a so-called time of silence in which our only criteria and guide is the Word of God. That’s why God was so insistent that this Word never be added to or never be diminished. No one has the authority to change God’s Word and this goes for modern theologians. When I stand in the pulpit if I have added or subtracted from the Word of God you are not required at all…, you can reject it.

You can reject it anyway, but when I am within the will of God and I am exegeting a Scripture, I as pastor of this church do not have the authority to change this text. I only have the authority to study it and pass it on to you; that’s the job of a pastor, not to run around and visit, and do these things, although the pastor may do these things. That’s not his first priority. The job and role of the pastor is to do one thing primarily, to study and to teach, to study and teach, study and teach. That may sound narrow, but if the pastor doesn’t do it, who is going to do it? No one is going to stay at home and study if the pastor doesn’t study. The pastor’s job is to study, study, and study and to teach and that’s his job, that’s what he’s been called to do. He hasn’t been called to be an evangelist. There’s no sense in getting up here and preaching the gospel every Sunday; it’s ridiculous when 95% of the people here are Christians.

The pastor’s job is not to preach the gospel; of course the gospel truth comes out every time he teaches the Word if he does it properly. But that’s not the role of the pastor; some pastors beat everybody over the head, we’ll sing a few more hymns, etc. Do you know why they do this? I can be frank with you because I know ministers, I talk with them. Because they’re lazy; it takes a lot of work to study. That’s a frank answer; I can give you all the pious answers, etc. They even taught some of them to us in seminary, how to make excuses to your board, etc. There is one thing that you’re called to by God and I am going to be judged by it, and that is God wants to know if He has given me the gift of teaching He wants me to use that gift of teaching. If He’s given me the gift of evangelism then I have no business being a pastor, I’ll go out and be an evangelist. Billy Graham was offered a pastorate in Illinois and he recognized early in his ministry that he had the gift of evangelism and one of the hallmarks of Graham’s greatness is that he recognized he had the gift of an evangelist and he left the pastorate to be an evangelist.

An evangelist is fine and a pastor is fine, but a pastor is not going to be a good evangelist and a pastor is not going to be a good evangelist. You can’t mix the two because the two are two distinct different gifts. This goes back to the doctrine of gifts and why it is not the will of God to have an evangelist service and have everybody trot down the aisle every time they walk through the door. This is what happens when people don’t understand what the will of God is for them and their spiritual gift. Therefore we are never to alter the Word of God and as pastor I have no authority, according to verse 2 and other passages of Scripture to change what I give you. My job is only to study it and to pass it on.

Verse 3, “Your eyes have seen what the LORD did because of Baal-peor, for all the men who followed Baal-peor, the LORD thy God hath destroyed them from among you.” this is a warning; verses 3 and 4 are a warning to these people. By the way, these people at Peor, Peor is the place, Baal is the name, we’ll get into him a little later; you think pornography is going on in our day, you ought to see what the Baal people out. Baal was a word for lord and he had a neat system that they created. In order to generate religion Satan always has to appeal to various instincts. So Baal had two prime instincts, an appeal to legalism and an appeal to antinomianism or licentiousness. Those who wanted to be saved by works, he had one system for those. Those who wanted to be saved by going out and raising hell, he had one system for those. So they had these great orgies and this was the way they’d worship Baal. Baal is kind of an interesting person in history, how Satan used this personage to get people to himself.

These people at Peor, it’s Baal-peor, it means Baal at the place of Peor. There were different Baal’s, everybody had a Baal. They had a Baal over here at one place and a Baal over here at another place, today it would be the Baal of Lubbock, the Baal of Amarillo, etc. Each locality would have its own Baal. This was the Baal at Peor and these people followed him and the Lord said all right, if you want to follow Baal, fine, you follow him right to death, and the Lord killed 24,000 people. This is just a polite little warning put in here in verses 3-4, don’t play games with God, you’re a holy nation, Israel, and you’ve been called to a position in God’s plan and don’t play games the wrong way because you are the one that is going to get hurt.

[Verse 4, “But ye who did cleave unto the LORD your God are alive, every one of you this day. [5] Behold, I have taught you statutes and ordinances, even as the LORD my God commanded me, that ye should do so in the land to which ye go to possess it.”

Verse 6, “Keep, therefore, and do them; for this is your wisdom and understanding in the sight of the nations,” and beginning at this verse and proceeding through verse 8 we are going to have what it means to be a wise nation. I want to show you in verses 6-8 what the wisdom of a nation really is. “Keep, therefore, and do them; for this is your wisdom and understanding.” “Wisdom” means skill in living, that’s basically the best way to translate it. Wisdom means skill in living. Speaking of education, to the Jewish person of the Old Testament children were never considered to be educated until they knew how to live. It’s very interesting, you read the Old Testament, no emphasis is placed upon the techniques, the reading, the writing, and the arithmetic. I studied some Hebrew arithmetic and how they used it in the Old Testament. They had these techniques but isn’t it interesting in God’s Word where the emphasis was placed. The emphasis was placed on learning how to live, teaching children the techniques of life; teaching children the concept that they have to operate on, etc. What do we do? We have five days a week and we drill the kids full of techniques and maybe half an hour on Sunday they get a few principles from the Bible. And we wonder what’s happening to the nation. It’s very easy to see, you can go back to the Old Testament for that.

“Keep, therefore, and do them; for this is your wisdom and understanding, and the word “understanding” is a word which means to discern. This means that you will have the ability to come into a situation in life and see where the real issue is. In other words, you can look and get rid of all the false issues and cut right down to the real issue. If you’re involved in a company situation, employment, something on your job, you may be encountering a problem in the home, discernment means that you have the ability to go down through that problem, pick your way through all the details down to where the heart issue is. That’s discernment. So what God is saying in verses 6 is that if you keep this Law, then the keeping of the Law is your wisdom and understanding. In other words, living in the Word of God as a nation will produce wisdom and it will produce discernment in the sight of the nations.

Notice something else, the word “the nations.” Here is the great commission of the Old Testament. Notice something about the great commission in the Old Testament. Do you notice to whom it was given? It was given to a nation and do you notice how they were to witness. They were to witness in all areas of their life. It wasn’t that they were to buttonhole somebody in the hall and say hey Bud, are you saved? You can witness and we need more witnessing but I want to show you something that witnessing just alone, by itself, is not going to do the trick. Witnessing has to proceed off of a solid foundation.

In the history of the Church, when was the most efficient missionary activity done? It was done 100 years after the Reformation. After the Reformation, the great reformers, Calvin, Knox, and Luther laid the basis for a Christian culture in which art, music, literature, everything was teaching God’s Word and was influenced by God’s Word. For a while you can say the reformers never evangelized beyond the boundaries of Europe but what they did was establish a tremendous educational base, a training base, so that European culture, particularly the northern part, northern Germany, northern France, England, the early parts of Ireland, by the way, Saint Patrick was an evangelical. And some of the early missions to Ireland, of course these people preceded the Reformation but they generally fall into that same period of time and when the Reformation is added to it, John Knox, the Presbyterian who came down and was converted and studied under John Calvin in Switzerland, moved north to Scotland and set up in Scotland the modern day Presbyterian Church.

These men emphasized a total witness, a total witness that is given here in verse 8 and that is a witness in all areas of culture, applying the Word of God to politics, applying the Word of God to economics, to marriage, to the home, to education, applying the Word of God to every area of life. This was to be the testimony of the nations and if you look at the great commissions, the great commission says discipling all nations. Remember to whom was it given? It was given to Jewish disciples, Matt. 28, disciples who knew the great commission of the Old Testament and therefore could interpret the great commission properly and say what Jesus Christ meant there was you are to go out and evangelize, evangelize, evangelize, but when you’ve moved into a culture to evangelize it, your next step is to build a Christian culture. You are to train people to take over in various areas. It’s been our failure in the 20^th century to follow up evangelism with this massive proper Biblical follow up that has led to disaster after disaster.

We have seen in Africa, for example, missionaries expelled. Those missionaries worked with all their heart but the trouble was that many of them were not well trained. Many of them were deceived by communism, by the World Council of Churches, who come by and steal all the churches from the independent missions. Many of these missionaries had a very difficult time and one of the great tragedies of the African failure has been that missionaries never had a chance to develop a solid Christian culture in Africa. So when these African nations get their independence they go back to tribal tumult and one tribe cuts off the heads of the other tribe. Do you realize in the Nigerian and Biafran armies you have thousands of born again Christians fighting and killing each other off? Many of the commanders of the Nigerian army are mission school graduates who pray before they go into battle. People have been won to Christ but where’s the follow up. It’s not all the missionaries fault; we’re not blaming the missionaries. In the squeeze of 20^th century politics those missionaries never had a chance to follow up. Here is one modern example of where the great commission has to be total.

When we evangelize we have to follow it up with training, training, training and training. This was to be the witness to the nations in verse 6, “wisdom and understanding in the sight of the nations,” and they’ll hear these statutes and [they will] say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.” In other words, their culture was to be so fantastic that tradesman going through the Midianites, other people that would trade through Israel, Israel was on the great caravan routes between Asia, Europe and Africa, and as these men would come down through the highways and had to go through Israel, they’d look at this nation and say what a wonderful nation this is. I might remind you that this tremendous system of evangelism, we don’t know much what happened but we do know, if you look at a world map and you look at the Mediterranean, you see Africa down here, Europe up here, Asia over here, and all the trade routes focused right there and God picked that place for His chosen nation because that was the place He was going to reach the world through. It was through this area that ultimately these traders brought back to Asia concepts that were derived from the Old Testament.

For example, archeologists have now found in the ancient areas of China temples patterned after Solomon’s temple. Where did they get that from? They got it because trading had gone through there, and as far as we can tell in ancient history Israel did have a testimony and that she did reach many nations with the gospel in her day, for the temple of Solomon is laid out in the doctrine of soteriology. The very layout of the temple talks of Jesus Christ’s cross, so we know at least centuries ago ancient Chinese civilization had a hearing of the gospel, before Jesus Christ, because of these great things that have been found. So Israel was a testimony.

Verse 7 describes in one way in which they were a testimony, “For what nation is there so great, who hath God as near to them,” in other words the testimony was that this nation was unique because God responded to the nations physically. What am I saying? I’m saying that in climate, in the physical universe, God blessed this nation. I can find evidence of this. I have studied meteorology; it was my profession before going into the ministry, and you can go back in ancient meteorology records and you will find a very interesting thing. Here’s the eastern end of the Mediterranean and here’s Israel, and they were promised seven year cycles of climate. In other words, for six years God would so bless all their crops that the seventh year the land would lie fallow.

The seventh year the farmers were not permitted to plant anything, the land was to rest. And in order to survive, in order to live through this seventh year, the crops had to be so good in the six years that the farmers would have a surplus left over for that seventh year. Now it turns out, ironically enough, that if you look at the meteorology records that we have of the cultures along the coast, they all have a seven year cycle. It’s very interesting. In fact, these cultures were so amazed by this that they worship in seven year cycles. They thought that whatever it was that was controlling this was condemning them every seventh year because all of a sudden the rains wouldn’t come in the seventh year and they wondered what’s the matter. Why is it every seventh year something happens around here. So they evolved religions that were based on the seven year cycle. You can read these in Baalism, etc. and it all testifies that God physically blessed the nation.

Through this was a testimony. Imagine walking through a nation, for today in our country, imagine God so blessing the business economically that every seventh year nobody would have to go to work. Wouldn’t that be wonderful, every seventh year you could stay home for a whole year’s vacation. You’d wonder how am I going to survive for that seventh year. Because God would so bless your business that your profits would be enough over the six years to tide you over that seventh year. That’s what it means to say God is near to this nation.

Finally verse 8, “And what nation is there so great, that has statutes and judgments as righteous as all this law, which I set before you this day?” With this we want to conclude by an application to our country. I want to conclude by showing you that the testimony of Israel was a testimony that centered on the right concept of Law. Let’s look at the law principle a moment and watch where our country is going.

As far as law is concerned, it can only come from four parts. Law can only be made in four ways. The law that’s written by, say your local city government; the law that’s written in the state capital, the law that’s written in Washington DC is only basically a product of one of four processes. Either it’s a product of direct revelation, and this was only true for the nation Israel, God only revealed actual law through the prophets to only one nation. So that is not available to any Gentile nation, this was only true of Israel. Another way is consensus, based upon Scripture, or Scriptural norms. We call that reformation law or the law that great out of the Reformation. There are certain absolutes that God has revealed, “Thou shalt not kill,” “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” these are universal absolutes and the will of God and therefore they are the basis of law.

The third way in which law can be built is consensus based on human viewpoint or self-centered viewpoint. In other words, the philosophy is built around man; man-centered viewpoint, self-centered viewpoint; consensus built on sociology, religion, built upon the will of the various class that’s governing, etc. That’s another way in which law can occur.

The fourth way is anarchy, or individual. Everyone decides what he wants to do himself. Those are the four ways in which you can generate law for a national entity. Where we are headed in our country is a switch from two to three. In other words for about the time of the early fathers, before the Constitution, on down through about the end of the 18^th century, just after the Constitution you had most of American law built upon consensus. It was built upon consensus that was grounded in Scripture, in God’s Word. It was what we call a tradition that has come down from the Reformation. This is the great strength of America, the original Puritan ethic, you will hear this referred to sarcastically by modern people who want to tear apart everything this country stood for. You’ll hear them slander this by the words, oh, that was the old fashioned Puritan ethic. When you hear that, prick up your ears because you are about to hear a man destroy America.

I know that the Puritans overdid certain things, but that is not what these people are after. They know the Puritans overdid certain things. No one denies that. But what they’re after is the whole concept that lay behind the Puritan revolution. The Puritans gave us the concept of law. The King James Bible, who made that? The King, the King of England, King James authorized it in a back to the Bible movement in England. Out of that back to the Bible movement in England in the 17^th century came the Puritans. The Puritans came to New England and set up a basic structure for law in the United States. John Calvin was largely responsible for a lot of this and he wrote the following things. This gives you a picture of the way, if you had been living at the time of the Constitution you would have thought. If you had been living at the time of the Constitution this is the way the college professors would have thought.

John Calvin said, noting that law varies from nation, he didn’t say that all law has to be patterned exactly after the Bible, but he said this: “They all agree in denouncing punishment against those crimes which are condemned by the eternal law of God, such as murders, adulteries, false testimonies,” etc. Now Calvin said that this law can take on different forms in different countries, yes, but ultimately it’s based on absolutes that are in Scripture and Scripture alone.

What’s happened in our country? We have shifted over to concept three, consensus based not upon Scripture because we no longer have a Christian majority, but consensus based upon what is sociologically expedient. This was best dramatized by looking at some of the activities of the Supreme Court. If you go back to a man by the name of Oliver Wendell Holmes, just so you don’t think things are modern, Oliver Wendell Holmes was a Supreme Court justice from 1902-1932. And he said certain things and you can tell by this that immediately by 1900 in this country you begin to see the shift. You see the Christian majority died out in the 19^th century. Our last great revival we had in this country was just before the Civil War when approximately one to two million people accepted Christ. When a million people accept Christ you’ve got a revival. This was the last great revival this country has ever seen. When those Christians died off, by 1900 most of those Christians would be old and dying off, so by 1900 in this country you no longer have a large Christian influence and by 1900 you begin to see the shift.

This man is a Supreme Court justice, watch what he says. Here’s his definition of law about 1920. “Law is only a prophecy of what the courts will do in fact, nothing more.” Law is only a prophecy of what the courts are going to do, that’s all. This is a Chief Justice. Do you see the shift? Law is not a reflection of the absolute will of God any more, it’s just a direction of the court, that’s all. This is what he said, to clarify exactly what he meant, he went on to say: “The jurists who believe in natural law,” that’s what we’re talking about in a different sense, but he was referring to what we’re talking about, “the jurists,” that’s you people, “who believe in natural law seem to me to be in that naïve state of mind that accepts what has been familiar and accepted by them and their neighbors as something by must be accepted by all men everywhere.” In other words, you’re used to the idea that “thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not commit adultery,” and you’re naïve if you think that’s the will of God for every member of the human race. But here’s a Supreme Court justice, so you can see the shift.

And then to show that he really meant what he said, he said this, and he was discussing a particular law in this hearing, “Of course, I know and every other sensible man knows that the Sherman Act is damned nonsense, but if my country wants to go to hell I am here to help it.” That’s a Supreme Court justice, “if my country wants to go to hell I’m here to help it.” You see the shift in the law. If he had said that a hundred years before he’d never be on the Supreme Court. But that’s what’s happening in our day.

To make matters even more interesting, Chief Justice Vincent, 1946-1953, said this: “There is nothing more certain in modern society than the principle there are no absolutes.” Chief Justice of the Supreme Court! Do you see what’s happened? We no longer live in a Christian country. You’re fooling yourself. You’re no longer fighting for status quo; you’re no longer fighting to preserve your country, that’s over, that fight is gone, we’ve lost our country. What we are now, if you’re thinking of a holding strategy you’re wrong. Our strategy as Christians now is not a holding strategy. Our strategy as Christians now is that we are the rebels, we are on the outside; we are the rebels, we’re the real ones that rebel in our society. We’re the ones that society largely cannot stand and increasingly it will become obvious. So our job is to take the offensive. We’re not holding our country for God; we’re attacking it for God. The Christian strategy has to shift because our country has shifted.

There are two final evidences and then we’ll conclude [blank spot] and he was also, just to make his life interesting he didn’t have anything to do so he went around and joined ten communist front organizations. So this was the second source the Supreme Court used. The third source they used was E. Franklin Frazier who was a sociologist and he wanted to outdo Mr. Bremmel so he joined 18 communist front organizations. This was the third source of the Supreme Court’s decision. The fourth man was a Swedish sociologist, Myrtle, and he wrote the book the Supreme Court used. He was an import from Sweden, he wasn’t even an American citizen and he came to our shores to tell us how to run our country, and when he got here he didn’t like the Constitution so he said that old document is impractical, unsuited to modern conditions; it’s a plot against the common people was Mr. Myrtle’s evaluation of the Constitution. He wrote a book with 16 other men, every one of them was a member of a communist front organization.

So you begin to see where we’re going. When people begin to throw out the Bible it’s one thing, but then they turn around and start using these people for sources. That’s quite another thing. Then finally we have the last of the evidences and that’s a man by the name of Frankfurter. Isn’t that something you eat? This is a man’s name, a very famous judge of the Supreme Court, 1939-1962, and Felix Frankfurter’s life represents where we’re headed as a nation. Frankfurter started out and notice, he’s a man who would do away with absolute law, the kind that we have in the Old Testament, do away with it, get rid of it. But watch what happens when he does this.

In the 1930’s, to cite one case, he wrote a book against labor injunctions; in 1940 he encountered one of these situations in the court and decided in favor of them. After writing a book that he was against them, it came up in court and he decided he was in favor of them. In 1956 he decided against them again. The man can’t make up his mind, because he’s lost his absolute. If you lose your absolute you’re just like a boat without an anchor and you go around all over the place. One professor said Felix Frankfurter taught law at Harvard, he didn’t teach law he taught Felix Frankfurter. That’s exactly what the point was. This man has lost his absolute, we’ve lost our moorings.

You can’t through out the Bible, you can’t throw out absolute law without disaster and you are seeing disaster. We are seeing this because men have thrown out the concept of absolute law and they’re shifting around, they’re trying to build on consensus. The people who shout law and order, just law and order isn’t going to solve it because the student radical sees the weakness of the whole thing. He says what right do you have to tell me what to do and you have to be honest with yourself, you don’t have any right to tell him what to do if there’s no such thing as absolute law. You only have an answer to the student radical if you say we have a right to tell you what to do because we have been authorized by God as a government. God has laid out what we are to do and what we are not to do, and therefore we are to design our laws around His law and that is why we have the authority. But there is no answer to the student radical if you don’t accept the Bible as a base. You’ll see this country move in several directions. My prophecy of the way we’re headed is this, that you’ll see anarchy for a while, but the majority of people aren’t going to put up with anarchy and we’re going to go to law and order; law and order will eventually crush anarchy but this law and order will be founded on consensus, no longer on Scripture but on anti-Christian consensus. And that is where we are going to have trouble because society is going to solidify and get harder and harder on a basis of anti-Christianity.

Where will this show forth very practically for us? It’s going to show forth first in public education. The state will now come to you as a parent and say you have no right to raise your children the way you want to raise them; we will raise your children because all is for the good of the state and you parents don’t have any right over your children. Those minds are the minds of citizens of the state and the state will educate your children. The state will tell your children what they are to believe and not to believe. You parents will lose your authority and that is where the future conflict is going to come. It’s going to come over the issue of do we as parents have authority from God over our children or does the state have its own man-made authority over their lives. This is where the struggle is going to be.

This emanates from the Law and I’ve taken extra time to go into this because I want you to see that what we’re covering in the Mosaic Law is important; it has application today, it has application that is in the most crucial we’re going to face as Christian citizens. We ought to get every bit of insight we can from this law. We ought to study this law and study it because this Law was given to a nation to instruct the nation in wisdom. We need wisdom and we still have the right to vote in this country and as long as we have the right to vote it is our obligation to vote in a manner which will be compatible with the wisdom of God’s Word.