Lesson 16
The Believer’s Holy War – 7:1-11
Chapters 5-11 deal with the mental attitudes that are supposed to exist
in order to ensure a victorious ministry and existence of the nation
We have diagramed it this way; this represents the heart of man, you
have the inner love, the mental attitude on the outside, and you have the
details of life on the outside. You have
fellowship with other believers, you have loved ones in your family, you have
money, jobs, sex, recreation, relaxation, friends and you have all these
details of life that are around but these details can only be controlled toward
God’s glory when the heart is right. The
heart is the center of the wheel and all these things are spokes. And it’s ridiculous to talk about one
particular issue, we’ll get into all these issues, marriage, divorce, etc. but
it’s ridiculous to talk about all these fine points until we have clarified this
inside factor.
In Deut. 5 the principle was that the whole entire relationship with the
nation
Chapter 6 that we’ve been dealing with the last couple of times dealt with
what is involved in spirituality? In
other words, for the nation
The fifth thing, they were to live out the implications of the Word of
God in all areas, all the details of their life. Take the detail of loved ones, the detail of
money, what is the Biblical attitude toward money, do you know the doctrine; do
you live in accordance with it, etc. A
lot of Christian organizations know the doctrine of money but they don’t live
in accordance with it. The sixth factor
in chapter 6 is that their confession is to be immediate, they’re not supposed
to play around in carnality and disobedience, because if they live in the Word
they will know when they are out of fellowship, and because if they have
conducted steps one, two, three, divine viewpoint judging human viewpoint, they
will be alert to know when they are not spiritually right, therefore their
confession should be almost immediate.
These are the six parts to the phase of living in the Word in chapter 6.
In chapter 7 we come to another part of spirituality. Chapter 5, the personal
relationship or the basis of spirituality; chapter 6, living in the Word or the
essence of spirituality and now we come to chapter 7 and here we deal with the
conflict of spirituality. Beginning in
verse 1, here we have the conflict and why it is. In other words, immediately we run into the
problem, if a believer is going to spend his life fighting, why. So the first six verses of chapter 7 deal
with why the conflict occurs, it has to be explained. Why does the conflict occur?
For example, as a Christian, here I am as a believer, when I accept
Jesus Christ I am put in Christ positionally, Christ is now a new creation; however
I still live in the old creation in my experience. When Jesus Christ died He died to the old
creation and He rose again to the new one and by the new creation we mean
resurrection body, etc. all the trappings of a totally new world. Jesus Christ is the first person, He’s the
first part of the new universe but I live in the old universe. Therefore, since
I live in the old universe and yet spiritually I’m in union with the new, I
have another circle down here that represents my experience. Down here, which is actually a projection
from the top circle, my position, it has an area of living that if I’m going to
live consistently with my position it means that down here in the old creation
my life should show something.
The moment this happens, the moment I live in accordance with the will
of God in the old creation it produces conflict. It must produce conflict. Why?
Because the entire old creation is oriented against God’s Word and if
you are oriented with God’s Word there will be an automatic conflict. The conflict arises not because of your
personality; the conflict arises because of your union with Christ. This is very practical. It means that no matter how scintillating
your personality is, no matter what your situation in life is, how gentlemanly
you may act, you are locked automatically into a life and death struggle. You are locked in the middle of a war; and
you may be like some people in this country, not sure whether you should be in
the war or not but that’s tough, you’re in it.
From the moment you accept Christ you are in this war. We might not like it but it’s a fact of life,
we are in a war. Why? Because we are living down here in the old
creation, yet positionally we’re part of the new. The old creation is dominated by Satan and we
have a tremendous spiritual conflict that’s going on.
In the Old Testament this spiritual conflict showed up as an actual
physical warfare and this is what we want to deal with tonight. As we go through this chapter I will show you
how these principles carry over in the Christian life, but before I show you
the application I want to show you the interpretation first. Scripture has only
one interpretation but it may have thirty to fifty-five different
applications. What you want is the one
interpretation and once you know the interpretation of a section of God’s
Word, you can apply it however you see fit in your life. But you have to know the interpretation
first.
In the first six verses we have God’s briefing to the nation explaining
to them don’t think it odd that you are going to have conflict. In verse 1 Moses says, “When the LORD thy God
shall bring you into the land where you go to possess it,” this was the Promised
Land. You might think that at the point
of blessing they would have peace. Yet
when they cross the Jordan and they enter into that land there’s going to be
conquest, there’s going to be war, people are going to get hurt, people are
going to be maimed, people are going to be horribly tortured, people are going
to suffer. And it’s not going to be a
very pretty picture. In the ancient
world when they fought a battle they didn’t have helicopters to come in and
lift out the wounded men, they just lay there and screamed or bled to death
until somebody either chopped their head off or somebody dragged them back till
they could die because they got gangrene in their wounds or something like
that. Those are the facts of life of
ancient warfare so this is what they have to look forward to and it’s not a
very pleasant thing. So God wants to
prepare them for it.
When you go into the land, “and hath cast out many nations before thee,”
and he lists seven here, “the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites,
and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites,
seven nations greater and mightier than you.”
Verse 2, “And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before you, you
will smite them,” here begins the command in verse 2, “you will smite them and
utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy
unto them.” Now “utterly destroy” is a
word which is going to be a motto of this whole war and it’s called the charem principle, and you want to
understand this word because this word summarizes holy war. Charem
means, in its etymology, to shut off, and this is how we got the word which we
call “harem,” where a king would have all his girlfriends in a little tent and
whenever he wanted a date he’d just walk in and he had dates ready-made. He had them all shut off because he didn’t
want any competition; when he wanted to date so and so he didn’t want to bother
with any other man and since he was king he had the absolute authority. So he had the most perfect dating system
imaginable, he could walk in and pick anybody out he wanted to. And they had to go out, they couldn’t say oh,
I don’t want to, I’ve got a headache.
They had to go out with him on a date no matter how obnoxious he was or
anything. So harem meant that he shut
off all these girls inside a tent, and the word harem means to shut off.
How did this come to mean “utterly destroy?” It came to mean “utterly destroy” by the
doctrine of holy war. Charem means
that God has set out certain people.
Here were the Canaanites, the Hittites, etc. and all their possessions
and God had set them, or enclosed them, or shut them off total
annihilation. In other words, when these
people went in there they couldn’t take spoils.
You may say isn’t it horrible that when they went into a city that they
were commanded to kill every-body, not just the people, the cattle, everything
went. If they had grain in the
granaries, burn it; total annihilation. Why total annihilation? The total annihilation was because all the
grain, all these people, all these economic prosperity was not their property,
it was the Lord’s property, He had judged it.
Therefore they were not to save it from His judgment. It’s not a question of Israel being immoral.
Too many people get the idea that this is immoral; this isn’t the right thing
to do. I heard one minister in a
fundamentalist church say that God didn’t really mean this. Oh yes He did. Saul found out what He meant when He did not
obey. Holy war means physical
annihilation and it is absolutely moral because it is ordered by God; whatever
God does is moral by definition, therefore holy war is moral. God’s character, righteousness and justice
always control what He says; if He says “kill,” then that makes killing
authorized, regardless of what sentimentalists may say who are members of the
human race. When God says judge He means
judge. Therefore when He said judge all
these things and annihilate them, it wasn’t that He was trying to be nasty. It was the principle that He had already
condemned them. To understand this in detail
let’s review the ten principles of holy war.
The first principle is that in the Old Testament here’s the conflict:
Israel versus the Gentiles, especially the Canaanites. In the New Testament the corresponding
analogy is between you as a believer versus angels. You didn’t know that you were fighting
angels, but you are fighting angels and this is a story in itself, the war that
the Church faces. Whenever you witness,
what does the Bible say is a person accepts Christ? The angels in heaven rejoice; now why do you
think angels rejoice because a soul is saved if they aren’t intimately
connected? They are very intimately
connected with all evangelism. Who is it
that takes the Word of God out of the heart of a person to whom you
witness? It’s Satan.
Why does Satan want to take your gospel presentation and remove it from
the mind of the person that you told it to?
Because he doesn’t want the person to believer. The angels have tremendous interest in
evangelism. They are interested in
obstructing you, isolating you, keeping you from telling unbelievers about
Christ and they are interested in short-circuiting believers. They are interested in getting believers
fouled up with false doctrine, etc. Satan has counterfeit ministers, a
counterfeit communion table in 1 Cor.
Satan has a counterfeit religion. Satan has counterfeit religious
organizations, the United Nations, etc. to do what he tried to do at the tower
of Babel. The tower of Babel was the
first time world government was attempted and God passed judgment on world
government because of a very simple spiritual principle. You cannot have one-world government because
you will have one-world culture; if you have one-world culture you will have
the entire system of humanity open to satanic influence. God has carefully protected the human race by
dividing it up culturally at the tower of Babel. The way He did this was the distortion of
linguistic patterns in the human race.
And when God deliberately put these categories of linguistic patterns in
the human race He set up the cultural boundaries which from time immemorial
have led to competition, warfare, etc.
One-world government is always anti-Biblical and has been from the tower
of Babel.
In the Old Testament you have Israel fighting the Canaanites, we fight
the angels and in particular how this shows up is in evangelism. For example it shows up in testing; case in
point, Job. Angels watch you so that
when catastrophe comes into your life they want to find out how you respond, do
you claim God’s grace, do you claim a promise or do you panic, do you try to
take it out on someone else or do you try some other human system. They’re interested in this, so you are
fighting a battle whether you like it or not, you’re locked into the struggle.
So that is the first principle of holy war, who are the protagonists.
The second point of holy war is that the strategy in the Old Testament
was two-fold; it’s given in Deut. 20. Briefly explaining Deut. 20 there was a
two-fold strategy that controlled Israel’s foreign policy. Toward the nations
of the Canaanites they were to utterly destroy them; they were to never give
them a chance. When the Israeli armies moved up to a city, without question
they were to kill everyone in that city.
You might as well face it; this is what the Bible is saying. They are not to give anyone in the city a
chance; even if he surrenders he is to be killed. That’s kind of gory but this is exactly the commission
of holy war. But toward nations outside
of the land, part two of their foreign policy said they would give the cities a
choice, they’d come up to the city and say are you going to surrender to us or
not. If they said no, then they went
into the city and killed and then they only killed the male population. The female population was kept for slavery
and various other functions. So we have
the two parts of the foreign policy of Israel.
Our foreign policy, you might say, that corresponds to this in the New
Testament is that we are commanded to be in total opposition to the world
system, at every point; this means in the mind, the activities, etc. a total
opposition. This is given for the
Christian in 2 Cor. 10:5; 1 John 2:15.
The third principle of holy war is that the Old Testament recorded these
in a book called “the book of the wars of the Lord” mentioned in Num.
21:14. Our battles are recorded in the
book of Revelation, Rev. 12; here your battles and every act you ever do is a
believer is recorded and you will be judged at the judgment seat of Christ for
it.
The fourth principle of holy war, fundamentally it is Jehovah’s battle,
not Israel’s. It is never said to be
Israel’s, it is always the Lord’s battle, and the same with us; it is not our
battle, it is our Lord’s battle. He is
the One who is the head of the Church and it is His right to use the troops
where He wants to, how He wants to. This
explains a lot of things. For example,
it explains why you have young promising Christians who, for example will go
into a mission field and suddenly be slaughtered and looking at it from human
viewpoint people will say oh what a horrible waste. When these missionaries were killed in
Ecuador, Life Magazine and others would say oh what a horrible waste, a couple
of these men had master’s degrees, etc. what a waste going out to the natives
and getting killed. It wasn’t any waste;
if it was a waste Jesus Christ would never have led them out there. Jesus Christ is the head of the heavenly army
in this generation and He has the right to dispatch and use His troops the way
wishes and He never makes a mistake. So we can be assured that it was not a
waste.
The doctrine that it is Jehovah’s battle in the Old Testament is found
in many places; one of the great promises of Scripture is 1 Sam. 17:47, “For
the battle is the Lord’s.” Who said
this? David. When Goliath challenged him
and when David was under pressure, what did David say to Goliath and to his
brethren that were around him? The
battle is not Israel’s, Saul, don’t worry about it, the battle is not yours,
Israel, don’t worry about it, the battle is not yours, “the battle is the
Lord’s” and the Lord will fight for you.
Exodus 14 is another example, when you had that tremendous situation on
the north end of the Red Sea and you had the whole nation Israel pinched
between two natural barriers, water here and coming this way were Pharaoh’s
chariots. God blocked off this with a
strange pillar of fire so that He had a natural barrier to the north, to the
south, He had water to the east and to the west to block Pharaoh’s forces He
had this column of fire. And Moses got
up and said the Lord is going to fight for you. Why? Because the people merited
it, because God feels sorry for these people trapped here? No, because they are locked into His war,
they are His troops, He is going to protect them, He is going to do the
fighting and He did.
The fifth principle of holy war is that in the Old Testament Jehovah
conquered with a presence of His ark.
You had an ark that looked like a coffin, long, it had a place for
handles for people to carry it, and on the top they had two creatures. We don’t
know what these creatures looked like, maybe the sphinx, maybe like some
bird-like creatures, but they were a replica of cherubim who are a group of
angels; these are the angels that guard the throne of God. The cherubim, one on the right side and one
on the left, looked down on a gold plate and it was this gold plate that the
blood was sprinkled on, etc. and here you have the doctrine of God’s
propitiation in the Old Testament. God
is satisfied with the blood that is put on here.
This ark was visualized as a throne of God, and God’s Shekinah glory, we
don’t know what that glory looked like, apparently it was some sort of a light
or a cloud that rested between the cherubim; because God didn’t want an image
of Himself He gave the Shekinah glory, it is called. Shekinah means that which dwells. So God’s glory dwelt there and God was looked
upon as though he were seated on the ark.
So when the men moved out to battle, out comes the ark. Who’s sitting there? The Lord is sitting there.
What’s the corresponding function for us as believers? God conquers by the indwelling Holy
Spirit. The Shekinah glory used to dwell
in the temple, but the temple is destroyed so where does the glory dwell now? It dwells in you; if you are a believer in
Jesus Christ the glory dwells in you.
You say wait a minute, you taught me that God has sovereignty, God is
righteous, God is just, God is love, God is eternality, God is omniscient,
omnipresent, omnipotent and immutable, and if God is righteousness and justice,
how can God who is righteousness and justice, the Holy Spirit is God, therefore
He shares God’s attributes, how can the Holy Spirit who is absolute
righteousness come inside my heart when Jer. 17:9 says my heart is “desperately
wicked and deceitful?”
There’s a theological problem and God had to solve that problem in
history. How did He solve it? Romans 6 says Christ died to the sin nature
and when Jesus Christ died to the sin nature it meant He paid not only for your
individual personal sins but He paid for your sin nature. He could because He didn’t have a sin nature,
therefore Jesus Christ paid for your sin nature by substitution as He paid for
your individual personal sins and since He did this the price has been paid so
therefore the Holy Spirit can come to indwell you. If that had not been solved and the Holy
Spirit would come to indwell you and this had not been paid the Holy Spirit
would have to kill you because He has to judge sin wherever He finds it. So the
indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit depends on the work of Christ. In the Old Testament there were a few saints
who were indwelt but they were indwelt only in a promissory fashion based on
the promised work of Christ.
But the death of Christ is important, not just for phase one of
salvation but for phase two. You
couldn’t possibly be a temple of the Holy Spirit unless first Jesus Christ paid
the penalty, not only for your sins but for your sin nature. Had He not done so
the Holy Spirit who is righteousness and justice could never have gotten on the
inside; the moment He got on the inside of your heart He’d have to kill you because the universal law, “the wages of
sin is death,” and the sin nature would automatically haul down God’s wrath on
you. So the indwelling Holy Spirit is
how God conquers in our day. 1 John 4:4
says “He that is in you is greater than he that is in the world.” Who is it talking about? The Holy Spirit who is inside you is greater
than he that is in the world, Satan and Satan doesn’t like that. This is why Satan hates believers who know
doctrine and can apply it. Wherever you
are, you may be a housewife, a businessman, you may be somewhere else but I’m
telling you from the Word of God that Satan hates any believer, any believer who knows what he is doing
because Satan knows that “he that is in you” is greater than he is.
The sixth principle of holy war is that holy war is different from
legitimate war in our time. The
political wars of our day are not holy wars because the protagonists of the
conflict are not condemned universally.
In the holy war you have Israel and the Canaanites but these Canaanites
went on negative volition back in Abraham’s day. In Gen. 15:16 it says Abraham, I’m going to
take you and move you down to Egypt until the iniquity of the Amorites, which
is another name for the Canaanites, it’s a generic name for that whole group of
people, until their iniquity blossoms full. What does it mean? It means that God is going to sit down there
with Israel and He’s going to wait, and for 430 years He waits until this
entire culture is made up of all unbelievers.
There’s not a person in there with positive volition and there’s not a
person in there that if you preached the gospel would ever respond. In other words, when this nation went into
Canaan, if you were an evangelist, putting it in today’s terminology, you could
preach there until every one of those people dropped dead and you would never
get one convert. This was the condition
spiritually of this nation and that is why God could judge them en toto because it did no good for them
to stay around; since they had all gone on negative volition there was not a
chance of them ever going on positive volition so therefore God said kill them,
remove them from the earth.
This is what happens in the Tribulation, for seven years after the
rapture of the Church, the Church goes to be with the Lord and for seven years
the situation gets worse and worse and finally the book of Revelation says all
worship the beast except those whose names are written in the Book of Life, and
all of those who worship the beast are people on negative volition. When Jesus Christ comes at the Second Advent
He kills, He is going to have such a slaughter at the Second Advent that it is
going to take months of cleanup. Blood
is going to flow ankle and hip deep in many places, the Bible says in prophecy.
There is going to be slaughter on a massive scale. Why? Because these people are on negative
volition, they will never receive Christ, therefore they are annihilated. This is the moral justification for holy
war. Holy war is morally correct because
it is directed toward those who will never believe. That is not true of war today. This is why you cannot have today so-called
holy war, because God doesn’t give you the omniscience to know whether the
person might believe or not. But in the
holy war it was different, they were sure that the Canaanites… you can imagine
some of these Jewish young men in the army moving in there and they’d go into
these cities and they’d see these young nice beautiful looking Canaanite women
and they’d say look at those beauties, you mean we have to kill them too? Yes.
Everything has to go because these people are on negative volition, all
their possessions are identified with negative volition and therefore they have
to be judged.
The similar situation follows for us as believers because our opponents
are also judged. Who is judged? The
fallen angels are already judged by Christ on the cross. Satan is already
judged, we have the sentence in Matt. 25:41, the Lake of Fire has been created
for Satan and his angels, so Satan is already condemned. Therefore we are
simply attacking angelic beings as they are manifested in our society through
false doctrine, etc. these demons are already condemned forever.
The seventh principle; armies in holy war were given the provision of
perfect confidence. We covered this in
Deut. 2:31; 3:2 etc. these armies were given provision of total confidence. The corresponding element for us as believers
is found in Romans 8, “For we are more than conquerors through Him that loved
us,” etc. You have the parallel.
The eighth principle of holy war is that the faithless weak believers
are always dismissed from the battle.
You find this in Deut. 20, when the military commanders lined the troops
up before they were to go into war they’d go right down the line and say do you
believe that we can do this? Yes, you’re
in. Do you believe that we can do this?
No, then you’re out. Do you believe this
is the Lord’s will, that He’s going to bless us? No, you’re out. Do you believe this is the Lord’s will, that He
is going to bless us? Yes, you’re in.
They’d go down the line and eliminate all believers who couldn’t trust
the promises. This got rid of a lot of
problems before they even started.
Then we have the ninth principle and that is the weapons in holy war in
the Old Testament involved the entire natural creation. It involved insects, earthquakes,
astronomical phenomenon, etc. In the New
Testament our resources are given in Eph. 6.
Finally the tenth principle, getting back to the charem principle, the charem
principle holds and that is that holy war always culminates in total
annihilation. Our holy war is not going
to be finished by the Church; our holy war is going to be finished by the Lord
Jesus Christ. He’s going to get His
Church and the Church forms the basis of it and actually the Church forms the
reason why Christian can get victory in the Tribulation; you have to have the
Church before the Tribulation for that reason.
So during the Tribulation Christian actually totally annihilates and
this is the end of the holy war. He
wins!
Therefore, the charem
principle as we have been given it in verse 2, “you shalt utterly destroy
them,” means you will respect the fact that these people have been condemned by
God and you have no right as believers to tough condemned property. That’s the principle and this is the
principle in 1 John 2, “love not the world, neither the things that are in the
world,” and do you remember how John concludes that little three verse thing,
“because the world is passing away,” not “will pass away,” it “is” present
tense, is right now passing away; 1 John 2:17 “it is now passing away.” Why is the world passing away? Because the basis of the world’s backbone has
been broken and as believers, although we can’t see this in our visual perception,
we are conquering the world through history.
Verse 3, “Neither will you make marriages with them; thy daughter thou
shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.”
This shows you the mode of marriage in the Old Testament, it shows you how
people were married and it shows how the marriages were decided, for in verse 3
it says you will make marriages, your daughter you will not give to his son,
his daughter you will not take unto your son.
So you see the point here is that the parents are the ones that determine
marriages in the Old. It does not mean
necessarily that the parents paired off children irrespective of the children’s
desires, but it shows you that the parents are the ones that determined
it. You have the best example of this
with Samson. Samson gets his eyes on some nice Philistine girl and he comes
home to mamma and he says hey mom, I know this nice girl down there in
Philistia and she’s a real knock-out, I want to marry her, etc. Who does Samson go to? Samson is a strong individual but isn’t it
interesting, he has to clear it with his parents first. He was a prophet and he still had to clear it
with his parents. This is the way it was
done in the Old Testament, out of respect for the institution of family under
the Mosaic Law.
In verse 4, “For they will turn away your son from following Me, that
they may serve other gods; so will the anger of the LORD be kindled against
you, and destroy thee suddenly.” Here in
verse 4 you have the explanation for this requirement. The explanation is spiritual and here we get
into the problem in intermarriage. Why
was intermarriage forbidden in the Bible?
Intermarriage in the Bible in verse 3 was forbidden because of spiritual
reasons, not physical. The proof of this
is the book of Ruth. Ruth is written
actually historically to discredit the legalists because who was Ruth? She was a Moabitess. Why is it she can marry a Jewish young
man? Because Ruth was spiritually
regenerated. Ruth was a believer and the
whole argument to the book of Ruth in the Old Testament is that if a Gentile
accepts Christ as known in the Old Testament then they are admissible to the
community. The general principle that
Moses laid down that he didn’t want intermarriage was the fact that it was a
spiritual problem. Unbelievers cannot
marry believers, etc. As a minister I
can marry an unbeliever and an unbeliever, and I can marry a believer and a
believer but I have been forbidden by the Word of God to ever marry a believer
and an unbeliever. That’s unequally
yoked. That goes for young people who
are dating; don’t get involved with unbelievers. You are asking for trouble. My advice to people who are dating—respect
the Biblical principle and you’ll have a lot more happiness.
Verse 5, “But thus shall ye deal with them: you shall destroy their
altars, and break down their images, and cut down their idols [groves], and
burn their carved images with fire.”
Their images here is a word for pillar, and these pillars always
represented a male deity. Why this was
so we’re not sure. Some scholars believe
that these pillars actually were considered to be houses, that the god actually
lived inside the pillar. We have a hint of this because the book of Revelation
uses as an imagery of a believer. In
Rev. 3:12 we are said to be pillars and it’s the same kind of vocabulary, so it
may very well be that the ancients conceived of these rock pillars. By the way, do you know who set up one of the
first pillars? Jacob, at Bethel;
remember he set up the rocks, that was the first pillar. So evidently what
happened since Jacob’s day it became apostate.
He started the practice and then the unbelievers got hold of it and they
made a magic charm out of it and so by Moses day they had to condemn the whole
thing.
“You will break down their pillars, and cut down their groves,” the groves
represent the female deities and these posts actually were more like trees, and
these trees were representative of the female deities and instead of breaking
down they are cut down and they are burned.
So you have your male and female deities. The reason for this is the sex worship of
Baalism. Baalism sex worship centered on
the concept that in nature you have to have fertility; in order to grow you
have to have fertility. Fertility can
only be accomplished in nature, they said, by the gods being fertile. So how are you going to get the gods
fertile? These people would have these
sex practices, etc. and they believed that if they had enough of these the gods
would get interested and start a time up wherever they were and then they would
have fertility. This is why you had all
these tremendous Canaanite practices.
You had sex with animals, sex with people, etc. all sorts of horrible
things went on in the Canaanite practices and we have tablets showing and
depicting this and describing it. Of course
you can imagine some of the reasons why people became Baalism, but the
theoretical reason was that you would get the gods and the gods would then
cause the fields to be fertile, etc. So
if a farmer was in an economic pinch and he didn’t have any fertilizer for his
field and his crops weren’t growing right he was under economic pressure. So what would he do? The issue for the Jewish farmer of the Old
Testament was do you trust God who created the heavens and earth to supply your
need or are going to go over to the Baalism gimmick. So these groves and these pillars are a part
of the Baalite worship.
Verse 6 is the reason, “For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy
God; the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto Himself,
above all people who are upon the face of the earth.” There is the reason for the fight. It is because of their position as a holy
people, they are God’s holy people, not because of something they have done but
because God has chosen them to do this.
And this automatically means that they are going to have a fight on
their hands.
Verses 7-11 we come to the identification with God more carefully
explained. In these verses if you read
the text you will see that God is now explaining why He is identifying Himself
with these people. “The LORD did not set
His love upon you nor choose you, because you were more in number than any
people; for ye were the fewest of all people.”
Here we have election. Verse 8,
“But because the LORD loved you, and because He would keep the oath which He
had sworn unto your fathers,” what is the oath that He had sworn to your
fathers? The Abrahamic Covenant.
The Abrahamic Covenant promised three things; it promised that the Jews
would be the means of worldwide blessing.
The Abrahamic Covenant also promised that they would have real estate,
they would have a section of real estate on earth given in Gen. 15 and 17 and
the first thing that the Abrahamic Covenant meant was that the Jews would
survive history. There would never be a
century go by in history where Israel was destroyed. Israel would always exist down through
history and I might add will continue to exist because God, when He culminates
His program of history, when the Second Advent comes Jesus Christ is going to
have to use Israel to rule the world. So He has to keep it in existence for His
tool.
This is why anti-Semitism that we find in our day is satanic. Satan
would like nothing better because Satan can thwart the plan of God at two
points in history at the moment. Today Satan has two options. The first option is to neutralize the
Church. He can try to neutralize the
Church by destroying all evangelism and by creating confusion in the ranks of
believers by false doctrine, by world religion. Satan would like nothing better
that to have one ecumenical church; any form of ecumenicalism in our day is
satanic and is therefore against God’s will.
The second way he can thwart the plan of God is to destroy the nation Israel
because if he destroys the nation Israel there will be no one to make a
covenant with and there’s got to be a covenant made. Jesus Christ is going to have to come back to
living nation Israel with believers. There’s
going to have to be a believing remnant in the Tribulation made up of believers
in Israel.
So Satan has two objectives in this age: to confuse the Church through
world government, to confuse it through ecumenicalism and to short circuit
evangelism. His second strategy is to
try to kill the Jew. Therefore every
Arab-Jew war you find Satan is involved in it and this is one reason why the
United States should stay out and not get itself involved in anything. We are asking for trouble to get involved in
any Arab-Israeli war. Satan is trying
desperately to kill the Jew. Satan wants to do these two things and he wants
desperately to do them and everywhere you find ecumenicalism and everywhere you
find anti-Semitism you are finding people, I don’t care how respectable they
may be to you, they are the tools of Satan.
By the way, Satan is a respectable person. Many people think Satan is the kind of person
that goes down to the local tavern, he’s the
When we get into what we fight as believers, we fight the flesh, the
world and Satan and the three are different.
The flesh has nothing to do with Satan. Satan takes advantage of the
flesh but you’re going to have the flesh in the Millennium. The old sin nature is going to be present in
the Millennium, Satan is not. So the
flesh and Satan are two different things and you fight the flesh in a
completely different way than you fight Satan.
Satan may take advantage of the flesh but never confuse the two. We are told to fight Satan, we are told to
flee the flesh and we are told to criticize the world. We’re told to mentally fight the world. So we
as believers have three targets that we have to fight and Satan is one of them
and Satan is after us and we are after him.
But in this day, back in Moses’ time in verse 8 we have the nation
Israel, not the Church, and here Moses describes their position by saying God
“had sworn unto your fathers,” Abraham, “the LORD has brought you out with a
mighty hand,” that would correspond with our calling today, “and has redeemed
you out of the house of bondage” that would correspond to our justification,
“from the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt.”
Verse 9, “Know, therefore, that the LORD your God, he is God, the
faithful God, who keeps covenant,” here’s one of the great reasons why we as
believers are existing today. Do you
know one reason why you’re sitting out there in the pew and you haven’t been
killed off? Because Jesus Christ keeps
covenant. What does this mean? It means
when you sin who’s at the Father’s right hand making intercession for you. Who is it that defends us? Who is our advocate? Every time we commit one of the twelve
thousand sins we commit each week, who is it that is our advocate in
heaven? Jesus Christ, and that is the
only reason you are sitting there; that’s the only reason I am standing up
here, because of what Jesus Christ has done for us during this past week. Jesus Christ is our defense attorney, and it
is He, because He keeps covenant, He completely covers your sins before the
Father. He keeps covenant, day in and
day out, He doesn’t get tired of it. The
days when you commit 150 sins an hour and the days when you’re all right, all
of the time Jesus Christ keeps covenant, and He keeps covenant here and He kept
it in the Old Testament.
God “keeps covenant and mercy with them who love Him and keep His
commandments to a thousand generations.”
Do you remember the words of Jesus Christ in John 14:21, “He that loves
Me keeps My commandments.” Do you know
what He’s quoting from? Right here,
Jesus Christ quoted from Deuteronomy extensively.
In verse 10 we have judgment, He “repays them who hate Him to their
face, to destroy them; he will not be slack to him who hates him; he will repay
him to his face.” What does it mean
“repay them to his face?” It sounds like
He comes up and slaps you. That’s not what is meant. Repaying one to his face means that you bear
your own guilt. This is the answer to
those people who always say that God brings wrath upon the second, third and
fourth generation, etc. Here is a very
clear instance in the book of Deuteronomy where the guilty party must pay his
own guilt. What does this mean? Two
things; it means as an unbeliever he is going to face Jesus Christ at the Great
White Throne in Rev. 20, and the unbeliever who has rejected Christ is going to
come to the Great White Throne and Jesus Christ at the Great White Throne is
going to have one question. What is the
basis that you trusted in. The
unbeliever is going to say my good works.
You see, sins are not in view in Rev. 20, you can’t even find the word
in the chapter, reason being Christ paid for the sins. But at the Great White Throne good works are
going to be judged and at the Great White Throne these unbelievers are going to
say I trusted in my 3,000 good works and Jesus Christ is going to say yes, but
My standards are up here and you fail.
That’s what happens at Rev. 20, the unbeliever gets paid to his face for
his rejection; he gets paid and must take the blame not because of his sins but
because of his rejection of Jesus Christ.
The believer, we also pay for our sins in another way, not that we “pay”
for our sins judicially but we are disciplined. Believers don’t get away with a
thing. People often say that you guys
that teach eternal security are teaching a person that once always saved, that
means he can go out and raise hell and all the rest. That’s not what we’re
saying, because the corollary to eternal security is certain discipline.
It worked in the nation Israel, God said Israel is going to survive, Abrahamic
Covenant. But He also said if you play
games with me in history and fool around and you’re going to get clobbered and
that’s the other side of the coin of eternal security, Heb. 12 for the
believer. We are God’s children but that
means, although we can never get out of the family, that’s eternal security,
but the other side of the coin is the father can discipline his son and that is
the correct balance for eternal security.
Then we come to the law of culpability, and I want to conclude this
section of the chapter in verse 10, He “repays them who hate him to their dace,
to destroy them,” I want to use this as a takeoff point to review the law of
culpability because this is often misunderstood and this is the law that is
given in the Ten Commandments, “I am the God who repays to the third and fourth
generation.” What does this mean, when
it says here in verse 10 He “repays to them who hate him to their face?”
The law of culpability is given to us in God’s Word in many parts. The basic section for the law of culpability
is grounded right here in verse 10, those who sin bear their own guilt. So however you interpret the Ten Commandments
about I am the Lord your God that pays to the third and fourth generation, you
have to interpret it so it will not clash with verse 10.
Therefore the first point of the law of culpability is only those
deserving believers are going to get it; only those deserving unbelievers are
going to get it.
The second thing, the law of culpability that God repays to the third
and fourth generation means not that you have the father, you have his son, you
have his grandson and you have his great-grandson, here’s your four
generations, the law of culpability says I will curse down to the third and
fourth generation. What does this
mean? We’ve already said what it can’t
mean because of verse 10. It can’t mean
that if father is negative and grandson is positive volition that grandson is
going to get his father’s sin. That is not… that would violate verse 10. So what does it mean? This means that when the grandson or the
great-grandson or the son engages in the same sin their father did they get the
same kind of discipline amplified. We
see this operating down through church history; we see it operating in
Israel. You have a father who may be a
liar, like Abraham was. Then his son
comes along, Isaac, and Isaac is just a little bit more of a liar. He gets his old sin nature from his father. Then the great-grandson down the line here,
Jacob, he turns out to be such a liar that’s what his name means. He’s a cheater. So Jacob really was a liar and then you have
Jacob’s sons and what are they? They
can’t do anything but lie. So you might
say you have an escalation of sin down to the fourth generation. And God disciplines. God disciplined Abraham, made him
miserable. God disciplined Isaac, God
disciplined Jacob even more, and God really disciplined the children. Why?
Same sin, they engaged in the same sin of their fathers.
Now, the third and fourth cursing generation was in contrast to the
thousand generations you find in verse 9, God “keeps covenant and mercy with
them who love him and keep His commandments to a thousand generations.” There’s the other side of the coin. You have God cursing down to the third and
fourth generation, but God is willing to bless to the thousandth
generation. There is where you have the
mercy of God in the Old Testament.
People say the God of the Old Testament is a God of wrath, usually some
nitwit college professor that had about two days study of the Bible and that
makes him an authority just because he has a PhD after his name. And he gets up and tells these kids there’s
no virgin birth or something and comes up with this jazz that the God of the
Old Testament is a God who was a meany back there, a God of war, etc. Nonsense, you just have to look at the titles
of the way God is addressed. God curses
to the fourth but He blesses to the thousandth.
Then we come to the fact of why, how do you explain this? There are only basically two explanations,
one is suggested by Dr. Temple which is a reasonable one using the Abraham,
Isaac, Jacob analogy, that it involves heredity, that it involves the fact that
as parents you pass on your old sin nature to your children. Your old sin nature has an area of strength;
it has an area of weakness. The strength
means that you just are naturally resistant to certain sins. There are some
sins that are just no temptation to you.
You may not have the sin of stealing, it’s the last thing… you could
walk through here and there would be money everywhere and it wouldn’t phase you
at all. That’s your area of strength.
But you may have an area of weakness; it might be gossip and
maligning. You see something isn’t right
and you have to talk to six dozen people, and you spread around the bad news
and every time it gets repeated it gets amplified, etc. Your weak area may be gossip; you just can’t
keep it zipped up. So now you have some
children. Guess what, they start
inheriting your strengths and weakness patterns and you say I don’t know what’s
wrong with my son, I don’t know what’s wrong with my daughter, and they just
inherited your sin nature, that’s all
and they’re just showing the areas of strength and areas of weakness that you
have. So this is one explanation.
Another explanation is suggested by Professor Kline and I think
amplifies Dr. Temple’s statement and that is the sociological factor. The third and fourth generation in the
ancient near east were the maximum number that could fit in one tent. They all lived together and great-grandfather
was the head of the clan. There was a strong, strong family relationship and so
not only do you have the hereditary factor of the children inheriting the areas
of weakness and strength from their parents, but you have it amplified by them
watching their parents. They have three
generations as they sit here and the old man is sitting back in the tent, the
younger generation is out taking care of the finances or something, and they
have a chance to watch the parents operate.
So they pick up the tendencies to sin that are already in their sin
nature and they begin to manifest them.
This is why, and it’s a serious thing to understand about heredity in
Scripture, and that is that the sin nature is definitely hereditary and has
definite patterns of continuity from one generation to the other. We can trace this in American history; you
can trace it in individual families. One
of the greatest families to do a historical study on is the Herod family and you
can see the old man Herod who died in 4 BC and you can see how he transmitted
that same kind of sin nature down to his son, Herod Antipas and the rest of
them who are met with in the book of Acts and you find every one of the Herods
doing the same sin and you find them all judged by God. One of the Herods drops dead in the book of
Acts. Why? Because he stands up and
blasphemes. And you hear why did God
curse that man in Acts, all he did was say he was God once, a lot of people say
that, why pick on the Herod in the book of Acts? Because he is part of a family who down from
the third and fourth generation persisted in one sin after another and the
pattern was enforced down through the generations. We can find it in our
country in certain well-known families, how this pattern of lust, for example,
a lust for power, you will find it in certain families in the United States and
you will find the sons operating the same way the father does and you will find
their sons with this lust for power that manifests itself in certain political
decisions, etc. and you can see how discipline goes again and again in the same
family.
Therefore this same pattern of discipline holds up in our day and it is
not just confined to the Old Testament.
Verse 11, the conclusion to this section, “Thou shalt, therefore, keep
the commandments, and the statutes, and the judgments, which I command thee
this day, to do them.” Notice he gives a
reason; you are to keep these commandments to keep holy war, to not compromise,
to carry out God’s judgment because you are now in God’s plan. As believers tonight you are in the plan of
God. You are in Christ. This makes us, whether we like it or not,
part of a holy war. There are three
totally different ways of fighting the flesh, the world and Satan. Where we get
in trouble is where we try to fight Satan as though we were fighting the flesh
and we fight the flesh like we’re supposed to be fighting Satan and it always
fails and people wonder why. You fight
Satan with a totally different strategy than you use to fight the flesh. These three types of strategies deal with the
believer today.