Lesson 15
Living the Word –
[Begins in middle of sentence] by Moses in approximately 1400 BC. At this time Moses laid out the basis for the
Law. The book of Deuteronomy is actually
not the text of the Law. There are many,
many laws that
There are only four sources of law in the world. The first source is direct revelation from
God; only one nation in the world ever had the benefit of a direct national law
from God and that is the nation
An example of this would be drug addiction; this is an example of what’s
happening in our country today because people have avoided and destroyed a
consensus based upon Scripture, Reformation law given to us through Great
Britain, down through the origin of the United States Constitution, on down
through 1930. And now we are going over
and moving into this phase which means disaster, it means suffering and it
means many people are going to be hurt in the United States and elsewhere
because men have forsaken absolute categories for law.
And finally the fourth source of law is the individual. This is where the individual says I’ll do
what I want to and this inevitably leads to anarchy. This is what many of the left-wing student
groups of the United States college campuses are doing today. I want to again remind you that they are
doing nothing more than being logical.
We can condemn these students but just remember that for the last 20-30
years your college administrations in this country have done nothing but
destroy Bible Christianity; they have ridiculed the supernatural, they have
maligned Scripture, and they have destroyed the testimony of many
Christians. I know Christian academic
members who have been fired; there’s your academic open-mindedness. This has been going on in this country for
20-30 years.
The newer generation of students are simply saying if there are no
absolutes, if there is no source of authority, then I can do what I want
to. What are you going to say? You have no come back. The students are right, they can do anything
they want to because there is absolute no basis for right and wrong once you
have destroyed Scripture. Once you have
destroyed revelation from God, as one person said, what we have done in phase
three of law is hang moral values in mid-air.
That’s basically what happened.
We’ve said you have to do this and you have to do that; no reason for
it. Why should I do this? Oh, I don’t know, it’s a good thing to
do. This is what I mean by hanging moral
values in mid-air, you can’t hang moral values in mid-air and a lot of the
young people are smart enough to see this and that’s leading to the student
revolts.
In Deut. 6 we have part of this Law explained to us. Deuteronomy is divided into several sections;
this book is actually written in the format of an Ancient Near Eastern
Treaty. We didn’t know this until about
1953 when scholars began to discover that this book is organized along the
lines of an international treaty, i.e. you would have one great nation called a
great king, and he would make treaties with all these vassal kings in the
ancient world, somewhere in the first and second millennium before Christ. For example, one of the great cases in
ancient history was the Hittite Kingdom, now in Anatolia or Turkey, and this
great king, Suppiluiumas made treaties with these various kingdoms, such as
Edom, Moab, etc. These would be the kind of kingdoms that he would make
treaties with. And whenever they would
define the relationship legally between the great king and the vassal king it
would be in the form of a treaty and Deuteronomy is in that same format.
What does this mean to us? It
means that when God revealed Himself to Moses and he had Moses write this down
in the form of a treaty, God was saying something. God was saying that I am king; God is
king. Down here you have the twelve
tribes of Israel, and God set up a legal relationship with these twelve tribes,
a relationship which has never been duplicated in history. The United States is
not God’s country; no other country in the world is God’s country. There is only one God’s country in history
and that is Israel; Israel and only Israel.
Today we live in the Church Age and we have believers from many races,
many nations, and today God is no longer working through a national entity as
He was before 30 AD.
During this period of time you have God working with these nations, the
twelve tribes, and He defines His role through the book of Deuteronomy. Chapters 1-4 are the introduction to the
book, giving the historical basis. Chapters 5-26 are the corpus of the Law;
here are the details worked out for you.
Chapters 27ff is how the Law was to be enforced, how the Law was to be
signed, and how the constitution was to be put into effect. Chapters 5-26 is the section we’re working
on. This section can be broken down in
half; chapters 5-11 and chapters 12-26.
Chapters 5-11 give you the mental attitude that must be on the inside of
the individual in order to make a nation work.
This is important because Moses, who founded the nation Israel, realized
that no nation on earth can ever persist in history unless there is something
on the inside of the people. Therefore
he emphasized in chapters 5-11 that there’s a certain mental attitude that must
be on the inside before you can have a law abiding nation. In chapters 12-26 Moses goes on to detail out
the various laws. This is why the format
of the book reads in 12-26 if such and such happens, then you do this; if such
and such happens then you do that.
That’s a legal format and that is why chapters 12-26 are written in that
form.
In chapter 5-11 each chapter deals with a principle. In chapter 5 we have the principle that
everything, spirituality begins with a personal relationship with God, who is a
holy God. Let’s put it this way: a
personal relationship with a holy God based on positional truth. You cannot have a personal relationship with
God until you have the terms of that personal relationship defined. Those are defined by positional truth. For Israel, Israel was a select nation and
there were certain defining truth that controlled Israel’s destiny. For us as Christians, since 30 AD we have
other truths that control our lives, different from the nation Israel. But everything hangs on this—personal
relationship with a holy God. And this
is the essence of the Old Testament saints and it is the essence of the New
Testament.
If you do not have a real, vital, personal relationship with God, you
can take all the morality, all the good rules and everything else and throw it
in the garbage because that’s basically what the Bible is saying, that we are
not interested in some sort of game, we’re not interested in pretending. If there is a personal relationship with God,
if God is, then we must get serious and if He isn’t then forget about it. The New Testament hangs its whole faith on
the resurrection of Christ. The New
Testament expresses this by saying that if Jesus Christ did not literally
physically rise from the dead, then all of Christianity is absolutely wrong.
That is found in 1 Cor. 15. This is why
Christianity hangs itself on a historical fact.
If Jesus Christ never rose from the dead we might as well shut the
church down, throw out the Bible and forget it.
That’s the only honest way to respond to the claim of early Christianity.
In the Old Testament they did a similar thing. They hung everything on the fact that God
verbally revealed Himself at Mt. Sinai so that if you were there and had a tape
recorder you could have recorded the words of God in Hebrew on that tape. That’s what it means by saying God revealed
Himself in the Old Testament. When God
got up on Mt. Sinai He gave what is called the Decalogue, or “Ten Words.” He didn’t give all the Law public, He gave
only Ten Words and He gave these before a million people that were out in the
middle of the Sinai Peninsula. When He
got through they knew He had spoken. And
from this point onward in their national history everything was ground on
this. If God never really spoke out loud
so that you could hear Him, hear His voice, the whole thing comes tumbling
down. So both the Old Testament and New
Testament are grounded on miracles in history.
Now we come to chapter 6. Chapter
5 dealt with a personal relationship that the basis of spirituality is a
personal relationship with a holy God based on positional truth. Chapter 6 deals with the essence of
spirituality and we have said that the technique or the summary statement for
chapter 6 would be “living in the Word.”
Chapter 6 breaks itself down into various parts. We covered half of chapter 6 last time so I
will just review part of it. Chapter
6:1-3 deals with the benefits of living in the Word. Verses 4-9 deal with the practice of living
in the Word. Verses 10-15 deal with the danger of blessing to living in the
Word. And 6:16 down through 19 deals
with the danger of adversity to living in the Word and the last 5 verses deal
with the results of living in the Word.
In chapter 6:1-3 we found that one of the great benefits of living in
the Word is the utilization of time. For
in verse 2 it says, Do this “that you might fear the LORD thy God, to keep all
his statutes and His commandments which I command you, you, and your son, and
thy son’s son, all the days of your life; that your days may be
prolonged.” We said what this is not
saying; that is not saying that that if they were obedient they would have a
long life span. That is talking about
the span of time in the land; in other words, Israel’s destiny was controlled
by certain covenants. If this nation disobeyed
God’s Word they would be thrown out of the land. If they kept God’s land they would be
preserved in the land. If they violated
God’s word they would experience military defeat, they would experience
physical and economical catastrophes.
But if they obeyed God’s Word they would have blessing. God is the God of history, therefore He can
manipulate creation and He can bless them agriculturally, He can give them
perfect climate, He can improve the fertility of the soil, etc. And all these great promises were given to
Israel.
How does this apply to us? It
means, when you see that statement, “that thy days may be prolonged, that you,
as a Christian today, if we are operating in the will of God, our lives count
from the divine viewpoint. If we fail
and get out of fellowship with God, you’re either in fellowship or out of
fellowship, if you are out of fellowship your life doesn’t count, it’s a waste
of time. So from this we derived four
principles of the doctrine of utilization of time.
The first one is found in James 4:14 was that life is brief. The second one we found in Matt. 6:27, is
that you cannot add to your life. There
is not one thing you can do. You can
take all the vitamin pills you can want to, you can do everything you want to
but you cannot add to the divinely foreseen length of your life. It’s a very interesting principle. You can always subtract from your life but
you can’t add to it. The third thing was
found in Psalm 90:10ff and Eph. 5:16 where the only possible way to use time in
your life moment by moment is to walk in the power of the Holy Spirit in the
will of God. Finally, the fourth point
was in Matt. 6:33 and that is a very simple principle, some people often forget
it, that life can only be lived in the present.
You can’t go back and change something in your life, you don’t know
what’s coming up in the future, you can only live right now, this moment in
history. Those are the four principles
that the Bible gives on the utilization of time.
So “that your days may be prolonged” simply means and would apply to you
in the sense that if this is your life, here’s the length of your life, your
Christian life from the time you accept Christ, you may be 20 years old at the
point you accepted Christ as your Savior. You live to be 65; there are 45 years of your
life. What does it mean that your life
be prolonged? It means that there’s
going to be a certain percent of those 45 years that count for God and the rest
of it is just a waste of time and that’s what it means and one of the great
benefits of living I the Word. It means
your life counts. We have Christians
fiddling around, wasting time and the seconds tick off, the minutes turn into
years and people waste their lives. It’s
a sobering fact that Scripture doesn’t give a second chance. After death
there’s the judgment; after death you don’t have a second chance.
So the only time you have to influence and make your waves, to use a
modern analogy, would be between the time you accept Christ until the time you
die because when you die because when you die as a Christian you go to be face
to face with the Lord and you can’t make any more waves in history. Your record has been fixed forever. The only time that you can make decisions
that really count are right now. This is
why phase two of God’s plan of salvation is so important. Between the time you
trust the Lord and the time you die, all that time can be used to count for
Him. And it’s up to you how you want to
use it; if you waste your time and fiddle around and play with Christianity
like it was a toy, like it was a religion and
you come to church and tune out when the Word of God is taught, etc.
your life isn’t going to count for beans.
You’ll be saved all right, and you’ll get before the judgment seat of
Christ and where’s you’re production?
Zero! That’s going to be the
tragic story of a lot of Christians.
Time in your life is precious, very precious and it is a commodity that
can only be bought by being filled with the Holy Spirit.
So Deut. 6:1-3 deal with the benefits of living in the Word. Verses 4-9
deal with the practice of living in the Word.
What does it mean to live in the Word?
We discovered a principle in verse 7 by which the ancient nation was to
teach and communicate its faith to the young people through the medium of the
family. Verse 7, “And you will teach
them diligently unto your children, and you will talk of them when you sit in y
our house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you
rise up.” We changed the translation
because in the original language of the Old Testament, which is Hebrew, it uses
a different preposition at this point.
“We shall talk in them” is the way it should be translated, “not of
them.” This sounds like you sit down at
the dinner table and you have your children around the table and you sit and
tell some Bible stories. That may be
fine but that’s not the point. It’s not
that you talk about the Word of God,
it’ means you talk in terms of the
Word.
What does this mean? It means how
you look at life, it means your children when they listen to you and they see
what is your response to the person in the office, what is your response to
various things that come into your life and they’re going to see whether you’re
operating on divine viewpoint or human viewpoint, one or the other. Divine viewpoint you look at life from God’s
viewpoint give in the Bible; human viewpoint, you look at life from the human
way; you can be infiltrated by human viewpoint and this is what torpedoes the
virility of a lot of our faith in that the divine method of teaching is found
in verse 7, a very, very important verse.
This is the most important verse of the Old Testament showing you how
they taught. The main teaching wasn’t
even a formal classroom situation. It
was simply that the children sat around and gradually absorbed a viewpoint of
life from their parents. And this is the
most effective way of teaching because you don’t sit down and say now for five
minutes we’re going to learn. The moment
you do that everybody tunes out and the whole thing is scraped right at that
point.
But the way they taught was a far more subtle way. The way they taught was that these children
would notice, they’d imitate and they’d pay attention at all sorts of odd
moments when their parents would talk about something. When their parents would communicate, how
they felt; they would notice that the parents always looked at life from a
certain viewpoint instead of another viewpoint and this is how they were
basically taught and this is the principle here, “talking in terms of the Word
when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way,” when you sit in your
house is the morning and evening, when you walk by the way, this is an agrarian
economy, when the family was out in the fields working, when they were out
hoeing, plowing, etc. and somebody complains we haven’t had rain in so many
weeks, and they had could have human viewpoint which would be Baal and say we
have to have some sex orgy to get the gods working so we can have rain or we
have divine viewpoint, trust the Lord, the Lord can supply our needs including
our physical needs because He is a God who can work miracles, even within
meteorology and within the physics of the atmosphere. This would be a point of view that would be
communicated, not by a formal classroom but by simply the children absorbing
this viewpoint from their parents.
Today I would break human viewpoint down into four things; modern human
viewpoint that you’re getting and your children will be getting consists of
many ideas. It would be silly to go
through all the various systems of human viewpoint except we can breakdown the
axiom or the foundational beliefs. If
you’re smart and you’re a Christian, it would behoove you to pay attention to
what some of these human viewpoint principles are because they are cropping up
all over the place. All you have to do
is take some television program and study the narrative and you’ll see how this
is injected. Don’t think you are going
to prevent your kids from getting it, you can’t and it’s silly to do so because
then you raise hot house Christians. The
trick is to deal with the ideas forthrightly in the light of the Word. Here are the four basic ideas that human
viewpoint consists of today.
The first one is that the universe is a machine and that it is closed to
God and it is run by chance or law, physical law, chemical law, etc. That’s human viewpoint, anti-scriptural to
the core. The universe is not a machine,
the universe is a personal creation; not that it has personality but it is a
creation by a person, God. The universe
is not a machine that goes on by itself. The universe is a creation. Avoid using the word nature; we use this word
a lot in Christian circles. Nature does
this; nature does that. What’s
nature? That’s just a pagan idea, nature
doesn’t do anything. God does
things. So change your vocabulary,
instead of using the word “nature” use the word God’s creation and if you start
using that in your vocabulary there’s an attention produced and people begin to
realize that you look at life differently.
So your vocabulary reflects how you think.
The universe is not a machine, the universe is a creation, it is not
closed to God, it is open to God. There
has never been a time anywhere in the entire physical universe that has not ben
open to God’s manipulation. God can work
through any physical law; there is not any physical law that walls in God. Therefore the universe is not a machine, the
universe is a creation, it is open to God and it is not run by chance of law,
it is run by God’s providence. This is
one of the crucial things. All human
viewpoint that you run up against isn’t going to be this clear, it will be all
frosted over with details and you have to use your brain to dig down and you’ll
find if you dig deep enough eventually you’ll come across this little
pearl. Here it is.
The second one is that man learns or man knows by his own
authority. That is, he himself is his
own authority; man knows by his own authority and works outward from
himself. He works outward, i.e. you can
depict the knowledge cycle as this.
Here’s man standing here and as he grows intellectually he erects larger
and larger circles around himself and he moves out this way and man moves out
and synthesizes all knowledge, experience and data under the authority of his
own mind. This is known in history as
rationalism. The Biblical counterpart to
this idea is that man knows first because God has given a basic framework in
Scripture. A basic framework in Scripture
consisting of creation; consisting of a plan in history, consisting of a
consummation and end to history and because man knows this, man has a framework
intellectually in which to work. It’s
like an artist. If an artist doesn’t
have a frame where is he going to paint the picture, on the ceiling, the floor,
the wall? That’s man’s dilemma today, he
doesn’t know where to paint the picture; he has no frame. The Bible gives you a frame.
The third great human viewpoint idea which you will find is the fact
that suffering and decay are inherent properties of this universe. That is,
they have always been and always will be.
That when God created the universe He created it with suffering; when
God created the universe He created it with death. When God created the universe He created it
with decay. This is another
assumption. The Bible answer to this is
no, God created the creation perfect and it was by an ethical fall, or a moral
fall of man that precipitated decay. The
universe decays today because of the influence of the fall of man. That is the source of suffering and decay.
These three human viewpoint principles are all over the place and you
have to understand them. If I were a
young Christian on a college campus I would memorize them and be able to spot
them in any classroom I ever went into.
I would be able to go into any textbook that I ever read and find it on
every page. And after studying a block
of material I would be able to say this block of material has this idea, this
idea and this idea that’s wrong in the light of God’s Word. That’s the way a Christian should
study. Unless a Christian is trained to
think in these viewpoints he is asking for misery because sooner or later all
this stuff works like poisoning. It’s
like arsenic; arsenic never kills you with the first dose. You just have to take enough of it and
eventually it will kill you. It’s the
same thing; Christians are taking in human viewpoint over here, human viewpoint
over there, here’s some in the classroom, here’s some on TV, here’s something
in the paper. You can’t take papers, TV
and schools away; you have to deal with the thing. Therefore Christians have to
take human viewpoint and watch it and never let the human viewpoint come into
your mind without at the same time digesting it, without at the same time
evaluating it. Example: TV program, 20
minutes of TV can give you enough human viewpoint to keep a discussion going
for an hour. Unless a TV program has
been analyzed by the parents many of these TV programs are just setting your
children up for spiritual sorrow and heartache later on. This is what it means to fight the
world. It’s an intellectual fight.
Many times in our fundamentalist circles we associate worldliness with
“don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t dance, don’t go on the beach because the girls
are in bathing suits,” etc. and people say ooh, that’s worldly, that’s
terrible. And they always forget here’s the worldliness, right up here. Their kid may be getting worldliness six days
a week and they say my kid wouldn’t go to a school dance, and they think
they’re safe. They’re not safe; their
kid is bombed with human viewpoint all during the week. So this is where the fight is and this is why
fundamentalism is so weak in this country, because it has never identified the
true enemy. Never once has it identified
the true enemy and until it does we will continue to be a weak group in this
nation.
The fourth area of human viewpoint is answering the question, how do I
live, and the human viewpoint is that you hang a system of values in
midair. No reason for it, you just think
it’s good to do this so you just hang it in midair and tell people that’s the
right to do. It’s a good thing for
people to get married instead of having promiscuity, no reason given. It’s a good thing that people don’t steal, no
reason given, it might be inconvenient to the one that’s stolen from or
something but no serious reason given.
That’s another fourth fallacy of modern human viewpoint, hanging values
in midair. It’s dishonest to hang morals
on midair with no base. These are the
four great cornerstones of human viewpoint and you will find these if you
probe deep enough in every system of thought today. This is what it means in verse 7 to talk in
terms of the Word. It means that when
you look at life you purge your viewpoint of these four ideas everywhere you
find them.
Verse 10 begins the third section and this deals with the danger of
blessing. Satan always has a one-two
punch for the believer. The first punch
consists of blessing you and the second punch of putting you under adversity
and suffering. It always works this way;
it’s never reversed. More Christians
wind up in the toulies spiritually because of this one-two punch. When you are blessed, after you have had
victory, after you have been blessed you are very vulnerable because where have
you got your eyes? You’ve got your eyes
on the blessing, not on the one who gave it.
You’ve got your eyes on the blessing, not on the Blessor so what happens? You’ve taken your eyes off the Lord at this
point, adversity comes along and then all of a sudden you wonder what’s
happened, because you’ve got your eyes off the Lord under blessing conditions.
In verses 10-15 Moses outlines the first part of this punch. “And it shall be, when the LORD thy God shall
have brought thee into the land which he swore unto they fathers, to Abraham,
to Isaac, and to Jacob” and here’s the blessing, you are going into “great and
goodly cities, which you did not build.”
They walked in and just took over all the cities; historically this
happened, 1400 BC. Verse 11, “And houses
full of all good things, which thou filledst not, and wells digged, which thou
diggedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not, when thou
shalt have eaten and be full.” Do you
see this? Blessing, blessing, blessing,
they didn’t do a thing, here’s grace.
They didn’t do one thing to merit this and yet God blessed them and He
blessed them and He blessed them.
But then verse 12 Moses says now I want you to beware of something. “Beware lest you forget the LORD, who brought
you forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage. [13] Thou shalt
fear the LORD thy God, and serve him, and shalt swear by his name.” “Swear by His name” is a synonym for
belief. “Swearing by His name” means
that they would erect a system of jurisprudence of the nation on the name of
Yahweh, or the name of Jehovah of the Old Testament, showing that they were in
allegiance to Him. By the way, that shows
you the commandment, “thou shalt not swear on the name of the LORD thy God” is
not talking about taking oaths in court because here in verse 13 you’ve got a
command to “swear by God’s name.”
Verse 14, “You will not go after other gods, of the gods of the people
who are round about you.” Why is
this? Verse 15, “(For the LORD thy God
is a jealous God among you),” now why is He said to be a jealous God? Because God’s character, as we have outlined
it several times, He is sovereign, He is righteous, He is just, He is loving,
He is eternality, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, and immutability. These
are the attributes of the characteristics of God. Two of these characteristics,
righteousness and justice, are denoted in the Bible by the word “holy.” This is what it means; God is jealous in the
sense that He is never going to tolerate any unrighteousness. And in particular He is not going to tolerate
it with His own people who are in a personal relationship with Him; He will
never tolerate it.
You have the equivalent of this in the New Testament in 1 John 1, “God
is light, and in Him is no darkness at all,” John says, giving you the basis of
Christian spirituality. The point here
is that “God is a jealous God” means God is absolutely righteousness, God is
absolutely just, “les the anger of the LORD thy God be kindled against thee,
and destroy thee from off the face of the earth.” Why is God angry at this? Because God’s plan of salvation is erected on
the grace principle. What is grace? This
is what characterizes Christianity from every other religion in the world—the
grace principle. Grace means God does
the doing, man does the receiving. The
reverse of grace, which is legalism, is man does the doing and God does the
receiving. The Bible always presents
grace; God does the doing, man does the receiving. This is the story of salvation. Jesus Christ died on the cross, He gave His
life for us; He didn’t give it to us because we were such beautiful
personalities, because we merited it, because we did all these good works. Jesus Christ gave His life so that all who
believe in Him might receive eternal life. That’s grace.
The trouble is you have religion in the world and religion in the world
is always trying to negate the cross. The world is always trying to say no, we
don’t need that cross, all we have to do is have good works, if we get 3,000
good works before I die God is going to accept me. That’s nonsense! The Bible says God is absolute righteous and
holy and therefore He will not tolerate anything that comes short of His
standard. There is only one personality
in the universe who has ever fulfilled perfect righteousness and justice, that
is Jesus Christ, and since He is the only one who ever fulfilled it, salvation
can only be by Him. There’s Christianity
versus religion; there’s grace over legalism or over the works principle. That applies to the Christian; that applies
in the Christian life. How do you operate
as a Christian? Do you operate on the
grace principle or do you operate on the legalistic principle. Are you doing great things for God or is God
doing great things for you? That’s a
question to ask. We have these Christian
testimony meetings and some believer will get up and tell what he’s doing for
God and it amounts to nothing more then a “bragamony”, because it’s one big
brag session on what he has done for God.
That violates the grace principle, absolutely an abomination to the
Lord.
This is what God is pointing out to these people: when you get in that
land I don’t ever want you to forget who gave you this; you didn’t get it
because you put a little seed on the field and got a few plants, you got it
because I provided the fertility. You
didn’t get it because you invested $500 in an irrigation system; you got it
because I worked out the precipitation patterns to bring it at just the right
time. You didn’t get these homes because
you hired a carpenter to put your house together. You got it because the Canaanites put it
together; I gave this house to you and don’t you ever forget it. This is the point God is making here, that
when you are in the midst of Christian blessing never forget the Blessor and
here’s one of the greatest dangers.
I would suspect this is one of the great reasons why so few Christians are
blessed. Every once in a while you’ll
see some Christian and he’ll be poor in many areas, particularly financially or
some other area, and here he sits down in church, maybe in the back pew. And here’s Mr. Rich, here’s the rich man and
the poor man. The poor man gets his eyes
on Mr. Rich all during the service because that person owns more land, that
person has more in their bank account, etc.
He gets his eyes on him and he covets, he covets, he covets and he
wonders, why doesn’t God bless me? Why
doesn’t God bless me in a material way?
Do you know one reason is because God couldn’t trust him with the
money? It’s as simple as that. One of the reasons why God doesn’t bless many
people….
Some of the most miserable people in the world are wealthy people because
your problems multiply by the square of the wealth that you have, you have to
fight the income tax people, etc. so we have the problem of wealth; wealthy
people are often very unhappy people.
But if you are to operate as a Christian victoriously, if you are to
operate as unto the Lord, when you are rich you are going to need a lot on the
inside; you’re going to have to have a lot of discernment, you’re going to have
to have a lot of insight, a lot of divine guidance. So this poor person, he’s not equipped to
handle the problem and God is blessing him by not giving him the wealth. This is very frequently why God cannot bless
Christians, because He knows the minute He blesses you we are going to get our
eyes off of Him and to Him it’s a lot more important that we have our eyes on
Him than it is to be blessed. That’s the
way He runs history and that’s the point, that’s the big value of history.
In verses 16-19 we have the opposite.
There’s always the balance in Scripture. From verses 10-15 we have the
danger of blessing. God says when I
bless you never forget; don’t you ever forget who it was that blessed you. Now comes the opposite; here’s the adversity. Here’s the pressure that’s going to
come. Here’s another danger. “You will not tempt the LORD your God as you
tempted Him in Massah.” Let’s look at
the Hebrew for a moment. The word “test”
or “tempt” in the Hebrew is nasah. In the King James you have the word Massah,
and in the Hebrew what that is mas’sah
indicating two, so you have the s and
the s in the Hebrew, you have the h and the h, there are no vowels in the
Hebrew language, you have n here, you have m
here. The place is named for the test,
that’s what it means, “the place of testing,” Massah, from the verb nasah, to test. What happened at Massah? Turn to Exodus 17 just to see what the
problem was.
Exodus 17, here you’re going to see one of the great moments in the life
of the nation Israel when they were tested by adversity and you are going to
see how they responded, which is terribly and tragically like too many of us
when we meet adversity. Verses 1-7, “And
all the congregation of the children of Israel journeyed from the wilderness of
Sin,” that’s not “sin” in the sense we think of it, it’s a proper name, “after
their journeys, according to the commandment of the LORD, and encamped in
Rephidim: and there was no water for the people to drink.” Now here’s a situation geographically. They have just move out into the wilderness,
somewhere out here they have reached a point where they have no water. You may not think that’s too bad but if you
stop and think, there’s a million people and no water, you’ve got quite a
problem in logistics. Water doesn’t come easy.
It doesn’t usually rain in that area so here’s the problem: no water.
So you’ve got a potential disaster.
But notice why they are there, is this a mistake? Oh no, look at verse 1 very carefully,
“according to the commandment of the LORD,” they are there by the will of
God. This adversity has come into their
life because they are in the will of God, they’re not out of the will, this
isn’t God disciplining. There are 11
reasons why Christians suffer, only one is due to discipline, there are ten
other reason why you suffer in life and they have nothing to do with discipline. These people are suffering but it is not
because they are out of fellowship, yet.
At this point they are in fellowship, they are moving in the will of God
but God brings a catastrophe, God brings an adversity into their life. How do they handle it?
Verse 2, “Wherefore the people did chide with Moss, and they said, Give
us water that we may drink. And Moses
said unto them, Why chide ye with me? Wherefore do you put the LORD to the
test?” What’s the point? Here’s the testing; instead of applying
divine viewpoint they apply human viewpoint.
What was that first idea I gave you?
That the universe is a machine; it is closed to divine manipulation. What is divine viewpoint? It is open moment by moment. Here’s the point, are the people going to go
with human viewpoint or divine viewpoint at this point? Are they going to say I’ll apply divine
viewpoint to my situation, I have no water, I am deprived of a necessity of
life but because I believe and operate on divine viewpoint I believe God is
going to provide for my need. God
provided for our need in crossing the Red Sea.
When the people were packed up against the western shore you remember
what happened: God blocked of Pharaoh’s chariot force. There was a mountain here, there was a
mountain here, and they couldn’t move this way, and God blocked it off by fire
until the waters were cleared up, then they moved through the water. God took
care of that. That was something they
didn’t do; God did it because He could manipulate physical creation.
Now here comes a test; and what do they do? They come to Moses, hey Moses, will you turn
of the facet, where’s the facet around here?
What’s Moses going to do? What do
they think; he’s got a big water tank in his tent or something? Moses can’t supply them with water, that’s
stupid. How are they going to get water
from Moses? Moses, would you give us
water, we need some water Moses. What’s
Moses going to do? Moses can’t supply
their water. What is the point? They test God and Moses says why do you come
to me, why do you test the Lord. Now
what’s the test that they’re giving to the Lord? The Lord has tested them and they’re testing
the Lord. What are they doing? They’re testing His patience, that’s what
they are testing, seeing how far they can get, just like kids do to their
parents. You tell them to do something
and they sit there and just see how long they can avoid doing what you tell
them to, and they’ll test your patience and finally you just have to apply the
hand or do something to enforce what you want.
They’ll sit there to see how far they can get away with it and that’s
just the way believers are. They will
see how far they can get away with things as unto the Lord.
Now verse 3, “And the people thirsted there for water; and the people murmured
against Moses, and said,” that’s a very polite word “murmur.” It’s not the word in the Hebrew. You’ve heard the expression bitching, that’s
probably the best translation, the most accurate translation of this text in
the Hebrew. They sat there and they gave
him all sorts of static. They went back
to their tent and they bitched and bitched inside their tent and they
complained and complained and groaned and groaned and they said all things of
nasty things about Moses, it’s Moses’ fault, why did Moses lead us out here,
it’s all Moses fault. It’s the deacons,
it’s their fault; it’s the committee’s fault, it’s somebody else’s fault. That’s always the story.
Now watch, verse 4, “And Moses cried unto the LORD,” that’s the only
thing he can do, “saying, What shall I do unto this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” Look what God tells Moses to do. Isn’t it
interesting? You’ve heard this story
before, you’ve heard about Moses going to the rock and getting the water, but
have you ever noticed what else God told Moses to do?
Verse 5, “And the LORD said unto Moses, Go on before the people, and
take with thee of the elders of Israel; and thy rod, wherewith thou smotest the
river, take it in thine hand, and go.” Get all your deacons out there and all
your committee chairmen and bring them right out in front. Isn’t this interesting, here you have Moses
out here and he’s at his tent, he probably has a command tent up here and all
the people are out here, all these million beady eyes looking at him and here’s
Moses. What’s Moses going to do? He says hey, where are the deacons? Come on boys, come on up here. So he gets them all lined up in front. [Blank spot]
If God withheld His blessing from us except the times we are in His will
we’d have a pretty sad experience. God
blesses us often times in carnality.
This is why I have said again and again, never evaluate a religious
movement by the blessing it gets.
Repeat: NEVER EVALUATE A RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT BY THE BLESSING IT IS
GETTING! People say this must be of the
Lord, a lot of success. Don’t you ever
fall for that argument. That is not an
argument. God can bless people, He can
bless carnal people, He’s a God of grace.
God blessed David and he was a polygamist so does that mean that every
man here should go out and take a few more women?
That’s nonsense; God blesses because He is a God of grace and you cannot
argue from blessing back to the correctness of a man’s position. The only way you can evaluate a religious
movement is in light of the Word of God.
This is why I have warned people about the tongues movement and why they
say these people are blessed, and why in South America the tongues people are
multiplying at 400% etc. That is not a
legitimate argument. The only argument you
have to evaluate any religious movement is the Word of God. Don’t ever say in your mind so and so must be
in the will of God because he’s being blessed. That is not a legitimate
deduction. Often it is but it is not
always. You could say well let’s all get
together and start griping and groaning, maybe we might get water from the rock
too. Would that be a legitimate
argument? That’s the same thing you’re
doing if you’re evaluating religious movement by blessing.
So this is the Massah story and this is the testing of adversity. Now go back to Deut. 6. Here we have Massah; Massah means testing and
in the middle of testing in verse 16 Moses says don’t ever tempt God like you
tempted Him back at Massah. Don’t come
around and start griping because God has led you into some area of life and all
of a sudden you have a financial catastrophe or you have something else, a
breakdown of health, psychiatric problems, you may have all sorts of things
that come into your life. Your loved
ones may suffer; you may have tremendous things that come into your life just
like these people had at Massah. What do you do in the middle of that
adversity? What did Moses tell the
people in verse 16? Don’t test the Lord,
don’t test the Lord by griping about it, test Him by trusting His
promises.
Verse 17, “Ye shall diligently keep the commandments of the LORD your
God, and his testimonies, and His statutes, which He has commanded thee. [18,”
And thou shalt do that which is right and good in the sight of the LORD, that
it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest go in and possess the good land
which the LORD swore to give unto thy fathers.”] Verse 19, “To cast out all the enemies from
before thee, as the LORD hath spoken.”
In other words, God is going to provide for your every need.
Now we come to the last part of the chapter, verses 20-25 and here are
the fantastic results of this chapter and the results of living in the
Word. “And when you son asks thee in
time to come, saying, What mean the testimonies, and the statutes, and the
judgments, which the LORD our God hath commanded you?” What is this talking
about? This means that a life lived in
the Word of God will produce a response in others and you’ll never have to
worry about people. Often times you can
precipitate a conversation, we’re not knocking that idea, but often times you
will have tremendous opportunities for testimony because someone will notice
the way you handle the details of life.
That’s the way this book of Deuteronomy is structured. This whole section, chapters 5-11 deal with
the heart of man, what goes on in the inside, the mental attitude.
But chapters 12-26 deal with the details of life, it deals with the
fellowship you have with other believers, it deals with your loved ones, it
deals with sex, with money, with your job, with relaxation, times of
relaxation, given in chapters 12-26. It
deals with your health, it deals with your relationship with government, and
other people, friends. All these are the details of life, every one of us face
these details of life but the details of life take their place when the inner
mental attitude is right. That is why
Moses in chapters 5-11 deals with the inner mental attitude. In chapters 12-26 we’re going to deal with
all these things, loved ones, marriage, family, sex, money, job, all these
things are going to be dealt with but only after the inner mental attitude has
been clarified.
And in order to deal with the details of life Moses says that you must
live in the Word. What does he mean by living in the Word? I would break down into six things that Moses
emphasizes by living in the Word. I
would make an analogy between eating, it means take in the Word of God and this
means a systematic Bible study, whether it’s individual or under the man who has
the gift of pastor-teacher, this church or some other church wherever you can
get the Word of God. If my personality
bothers you and you can’t stand me, my suggestion is to go somewhere else. If you have a personality clash with a
minister or anybody, it is more important for you to get the Word of God than
to be worried about some personality. So
if personality gets in the way… it’s not too mature but nevertheless if you
have to choose you take the route of getting the Word.
The second thing I would make the analogy to digestion. Take the Word of God and digest it. How do
you digest the Word of God? Isaiah 28:10 tells you, “Precept upon precept, line
upon line,” it means that you categorize the Word of God, it means that you
don’t take in verses and have a big pile of junk in your memory. It means that you organize it, you have box
that you label, phase one, and in that box you have all the truths that pertain
to your salvation. You have another box
in your memory that you label phase two and that gives you all the truth that
you will need as a Christian between the time you accept Christ until the time
you die. You have another box, labeled
phase three, all the truths that pertain to death and dying grace. For example, if you were called in to a hospital
to a person who was about to die, what do you tell them? You have to have this truth and you can’t say
oh, my theology book, I left it in the office.
You can’t do that, you’ve got to have it with you.
The third thing that you want to do living in the Word is practice
divine viewpoint judging human viewpoint.
Make sure that you evaluate. A Christian should be one of the most
critical thinkers in the world because he monitors every idea that he gets and
measures it by the standard of the Word of God.
The fourth thing of living in the Word, that you diligently believe the
promises. We’ll go into some of these
promises, but it means that you have faith in the promises. This means when you get into a problem of
adversity you can know some of the promises of the Word of God, like Romans
8:28. You know 1 Pet. 5:7. Those are some of the great principles of
living in the Word, you meet catastrophe with these promises. You have to do
this, and practice with this in the little things of life because sooner or
later when a disaster comes in, a major disaster that can strike as quick as an
automobile accident, a major disaster can come into your life and then it’s too
late to practice. You will have had to
have developed the habit and the maturity and the growth of going
systematically to the Word of God automatically so when you get into a
situation, when a crisis hits and you can’t think anymore, you automatically
respond with the Word of God. That’s
something fantastic to see and I have seen believers do this.
Then the fifth thing that Moses emphasized and that means to live out
its implications. This means that you
carry its logical implications into your life, all areas, all the details of
life and that will be covered in Deut. 12-26.
Finally, the last thing that he emphasizes is a quick confession of
sin. If you operate in the will of God
and if you do these things, if you take in the Word, if you digest the Word
intellectually, if you practice habitually judging and evaluating human
viewpoint, you will know when you get out of fellowship fast. It doesn’t save you, many times, from getting
out of fellowship, but it saves you in the sense that once you’re out of
fellowship you can recognize it. This is
one of the dangers a new believer has. A
new believer will go along in life and they’ll get out of fellowship and not
realize it, go on and on until they hit some major sin, and wonder how could
this happen to me. The answer is that
they were out of fellowship here and didn’t realize it. So you can sharpen yourself up in
understanding yourself spiritually the more this is done.
This is living in the Word which is emphasized in the whole book of
Deuteronomy and it’s one of the things that Moses wants us to understand, and
the result of this will be verse 20, people cannot help but notice this because
a life lived unto the Lord in the last half of the 20th century is
going to say a lot more than it did the first part of the 20th
century because our lives can have stability, can have joy, can have purpose,
can have meaning without a drug experience, without a sex experience, without
listening to some music in self-hypnosis, without any of these things that the
last half of the 20th century is emphasizing as the only means by
which you can secure perfect inner happiness.
People are going to look and they’ll automatically see it and they’ll
ask questions. This is the result of a
life lived in the Word.
So Deuteronomy 5, personal relationship with a holy God; Deuteronomy 6,
living in the Word, and next time Deuteronomy 7, the conflict, the holy war
that the Christian faces, the holy war that