Lesson 17

Blessing a Victory in War – 7:12-26

 

We will finish Deut. 7 which deals with one further aspect of spirituality.  Each chapter between chapters 5-11 deals with something that is on your inside.  There’s your heart, spiritually, and if you want to operate as a believer, you have to have certain things functioning on the inside.   Moses realized this so before he gave the Word of God to his nation, before he set forth a consti­tution, he realized that you just can’t have details of life surrounding this.  You can’t have, for example, as he will enumerate in chapters 12-26, fellowship with other believers, loved ones, sex, food, home, job, money, government, friends, enemies and all these things that surround the center of your life these are the details of life that every one of us faces.  But before we can deal with any one issue we have to deal with the inside of the heart.

 

So in chapters 5-11 Moses is going to deal with the various factors of the mental attitude under girding spirituality.  In chapter 5 he said that the first thing that you always want to remember about spirituality is that it’s based on a personal relationship.  It’s not an automatic mechanical thing; it’s a personal relationship with God.  The second thing that he wanted to point out in chapter 6 was living in the Word, which means that the essence of spirituality is that you will proceed in your life to build your life mentally and in all other ways on the Word of God, and you proceed from the Word of God out into life.  You live out the implications.

 

In chapter 7 we deal with the conflict.  War is inevitable in the Christian life and a lot of believers don’t like it but that’s the way it is and it will always be that way until the rapture.  We are in a fight and a struggle until the time that God removes us from phase two.  If you don’t like a fight you’d better get used to it because you’re in it, by position.  Therefore, if we have to fight we have to understand the terms.  We found in 7:1-11 that we are identified with God’s plan.  For example, in the Christian life at the point we receive Christ He puts us into union with Christ.  Jesus Christ now is in the new creation; we are in the old creation, we are in a condemned physical universe, a universe that is dying, it’s under the curse of Eden, Gen. 3 and many other things, condemnation. 

 

So this whole system is condemned and yet we have to sit down here.  Therefore we have a position down here, we gave to stay in this circle, the will of God for us within the old creation, yet our position is up here.  This leads to a struggle because who dominates the whole creation?  Satan dominates the old creation but yet we are positionally part of the new, therefore the old creation hates the new because the old creation knows the new creation will replace it.  What do we mean by this?  Actually there’s only one part to the new creation right now and that is Jesus Christ in His resurrection body.  But Satan realizes that if you have accepted Christ as your Savior you are identified with Jesus Christ; Satan hates you, not because you stepped on his toe or something but because he sees Christ every time he sees you and you to him are one of the most obnoxious people in the world and he will do anything he can to try and destroy you or your ministry.  So you are in a struggle.  That’s a fact.  The problem is what do you do from here.

 

So in verses 12 and following we have two principles of spirituality in the middle of conflict.  The first one is found in verses 12-16 and it deals with how to obtain blessing in the middle of war.  If we are in this war and things are in a tumult around us, then how do we have blessing?  It’s given here, the general principles.  Of course the details will be enumerated later. 

Verse 12, “Wherefore it shall come to pas, if ye hearken to these judgments, and keep, and do them, that the LORD thy God shall keep unto you the covenant and the mercy which He swore unto thy fathers.”  The most important word in this verse is the word “if” because here is your if clause and here we are introduced once again to what we’ve done over and over again, and we’re going to go over it again and that is the difference between the Abrahamic Covenant and the Mosaic Covenant. 

 

The Abrahamic Covenant is an unconditional covenant which was established in approximately 200 BC with Abraham.  The Abrahamic Covenant promised three things unconditionally.  It said to Abraham and his descendants that they would be historically preserved forever.  No matter what happened in history these people would always be in existence down through history and the nation that tries to destroy the Jew will be destroyed.  Then we have the title to the land; the Jews are promised a certain section of real estate on this earth, and finally they are the channel through which God will bless the world in worldwide blessing.  There are many other things in the Abrahamic Covenant, but this summarizes three of the basic things.  By an unconditional covenant we mean that when God says this to Abraham God guaranteed it would come true. God said regardless of volition down the line, etc. I’ve taken all that into consideration when I designed this and this outcome is sure and certain.  That is an unconditional covenant.

 

However the Mosaic Covenant is not that; the Mosaic Covenant actually has two parts, the cursings and the blessings.  There are four things the Mosaic Covenant by way of promises.  It promises a military victory for the nation Israel; if they will obey then military victory is guaranteed.  They will occupy the land, if they obey.  They will have prosperity if they obey.  And they will be a worldwide testimony; they will have a testimony in the world.  Those four things are true only if, not guaranteed, only if the nation obeys the Law. This is why we say the Mosaic Covenant is conditional because it’s not a guarantee, it’s only said “if” you do this, then you’ll get this.  This is the blessing.

 

They can go over into cursing by disobeying the Word of God and when this happens it reverses all four of these things.  Instead of military victory they have military defeat.  Instead of occupying the land they are put into dispersion, as the Jews are today.  You have instead of a world testimony it’s a reproach to many of the nations.  Instead of prosperity you have calamity of all sorts, economic and business.  These are the either/or conditions and it would correspond to your life and the fact that we are either walking in the power of the Spirit or we’re walking in the flesh. We have an either-or to, and when we are walking in the flesh then we experience cursing and we experience discipline like the nation Israel did.  So these two things are important. 

 

When it says in verse 12, “wherefore it shall come to pass, if ye hearken to these judgments, and keep, and do them, that the LORD thy God shall keep unto thee the covenant and the mercy.”  What does that mean?  It sounds like the Abrahamic Covenant is conditional and it’s not true. When the Mosaic Covenant is operating and the nation is in fellowship with God and they are receiving blessing by means of the Mosaic Covenant they are fulfilling the Abrahamic Covenant.  In other words these three things are true under condition of blessing in the Mosaic Covenant.  Also in the Millennium these things are true.  So they go together except the Mosaic Covenant is not the guarantee.  The Mosaic Covenant simply spells out the either/or situation, blessing or cursing but you cannot have both.

This, therefore, is the way of blessing.  If they are in the middle of conflict, then under the Mosaic Law God will take care of the conflict, notice the cause effect here, God will take care of the conflict if they take care of their spiritual responsibility.  Here’s the point.  Only they can take care of the spiritual responsibility because of volition.  Here’s an Israelite, in his heart if volition and only he can choose, only you can choose, your parents can’t choose for you, your children can’t choose for you, the government can’t choose for you. Only you can choose. So the principle that we have is that the blessing, no matter what the situation in life is, is a function of your volition.  If you respond to God’s Word, if you trust Him, if you claim these promises, etc. and you’re in fellowship, then blessing, otherwise cursing, so it’s up to you.  When a person is in fellowship as a believer then God takes care of the other things, such as military victory for the nation.  God would take care of the military victory if, first, they would take care of their responsibility. 

 

Verse 13, “And he will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee,” this is very significant, particularly the last phrase, “He will also bless the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy land, thy grain, and thy wine, and thine oil, the increase of thy cattle, and the flocks of thy sheep, in the land which he swore unto thy fathers to give thee.”  Why is that verse put in there?  It this just some­thing out of the Old Testament?  No, this verse is put in there to destroy Baalism.  Baalism was the religion of the Canaanites and the whole purpose behind Baalism was to worship Baal.  By the way, there were many Baal’s, Baal was simply the word for lord and the word Baal means lord so there would be a group of farmers in this part of the country and they’d have a calamity, their crops wouldn’t come up, something would happen, they would have a problem so they’d have some difficulty.  The test was here is a problem of adversity.  Now will that farmer come in the middle of all this disaster, will he go to Baal, who in the ancient world stood for fertility or would he trust in Jehovah.  That’s the choice he has to make and it’s usually made on this issue of fertility and that’s why this verse is in there because this is where it occurred most often.  You can see how this operates, a businessman in an agrarian economy, therefore what’s the issue? Productivity!

 

If you want to change verse 13 to make it contemporary you’d put productivity under a capitalist system.  So you have this question, what do I do when adversity hits, do I go to Baal or do I go to Jehovah?  Baal was this man who had a lot of girlfriends; one was [can’t understand word] who came down in ancient history as Venus the goddess of love.  That should suggest a few things that Baal was interested in.  So Baal had his cult started and the people would conduct all these sex practices, etc. and the purpose was if  you did all this activity then the gods would get interested and they would conduct the activity and then the fields would be fertile.  To us it sounds absurd but that is the heresy of that time.  And it’s very much related to evolution.  The more I study evolution and the more I study Baalism the very, very strong similarities come out because in both cases it’s a worship of process.  It’s a worship of process over creation; evolution is a deification of process and Baalism is also a deification of process.  The two are very intellectually related.

 

This is important to us, verse 13, because it says look, God will handle your business problems, God will handle all of your other problems if you will let Him do it.  He is perfectly capable of doing it and He will do it.  All the things that you see enumerated in verse 13, if you want to translate its impact into your life just list any kind of things that can happen to you in the way of calamity, economically, etc. 

 

Verse 14, “Thou shalt be blessed above all people; there shall not be male or female barren among you, or among your cattle.”  This is a tremendous promise to the Jews, that they will have a blessing above all people and ultimately when world peace is come, according to Paul in Romans 11 which teaches that the only thing that is holding up world peace at this moment is Israel’s unbelief.  From the theological point of view, if Israel would receive nationally Jesus Christ as their Messiah it would automatically set off the conditions for the Millennium, etc.  Of course we know prophetically that isn’t going to occur until the last part of the Tribulation.  But still it’s true theologically that the stumbling block to world peace is the unbelief of Israel because Israel has been ordained to be the channel of blessing to the world and the channel is clogged with unbelief and God’s grace can’t flow through a clogged channel so therefore the world is being cursed today largely because of Israel’s unbelief.  The Gentiles are in unbelief too, but Israel is a stumbling block in this manner. 

 

Therefore an expression of love to Israel in obedience to God in our day would be an evangeliza­tion of the Jew.  I once had a Jewish professor come to MIT when I was studying there and we arranged a meeting with some Jewish students and this professor.  He was a Hebrew Christian and if you want to see someone who is really grounded in the Word of God, who has to be grounded, it is a Heb Christian.  He picked out the topic “Are Christians anti-Semitic,” and this was a good hot topic, we’ll see what this guy had to say.  Everybody came loaded for what they thought was going to happen.  The only problem is they got surprised because when the professor got up to speak he said “yes, Christians are anti-Semitic any time they refuse to witness to a Jew about Jesus Christ.”  That took the wind out of a lot people’s sails.  As a Jew who had received Christ as Savior he knew what the issue for his people was.

 

In verse 15 we have another very practical illustration, “And the LORD will take away from thee all sickness, and will put none of the evil diseases of Egypt, which thou knowest, upon thee, but will lay them upon all those who hate thee.”  You may or may not be aware of a doctor that did a lot of research on this verse, Dr. S. I. McMillan who wrote the book, None of these Diseases, and he correlated and showed that today if people observed the specifications of the Mosaic Law they would be healthy.  For example, if the Mosaic Law was followed there would be processes of quarantine; you have quarantine mentioned in the Old Testament.  This was not followed in the Middle Ages and whole cities were destroyed in the Middle Ages because the Old Testament was never preached.  Had the Old Testament been preached these cities would never have had these black plagues and everything else because they would have practiced the quarantine principle.  Sanitation, no army in the modern world until after Civil War had such a thing as sanitation procedures for the army and the result was that many thousands of soldiers died before they ever got to battle because of all sorts of diseases that are associated with poor sanitation.  All of this would have been stopped had they realized what God told Moses. 

 

Now God didn’t tell Moses now Moses if you just have a powerful glass you’ll see bacteria.  Moses was not instructed on the causes but Moses was given the general principles.   He was given principles of sanitation, principles of quarantine; he was given the principle of circumcision and preventing cancer, etc.  He was given the principle against alcoholism; he was given the principle of denial of fornication; it’s interesting, fornication leading to venereal disease.  He was given the principle of relaxation, the Sabbath was an enforced period of relaxation.  That had a tremendous effect on the nation of preventing psychosomatic illnesses, etc.  He also had dietary regulations and here you guide your nutrition.  We’re going to see these little details in the Law; they aren’t just trivial things that are nice for a Sunday school class.  These things are important and they prove something.  It’s very interesting, for example Dr. McMillan found that if you take a graph and take an infant from the day that he is born, 1st day, 2nd day, 3rd day, etc., the Mosaic Law says on the 8th day he will be circumcised.  And it’s very interesting that the clotting of the blood reaches it maximum on the 8th day, so if that infant is circumcised any other day he runs the risk of bleeding.  Who told Moses about this?  This is one of the proofs for the divine origin of Scripture.  There was only one person that could have told Moses about this because Moses did not have any knowledge of blood chemistry.  He didn’t know about prothrombin and all the stuff that’s involved in blood clotting.  Moses found it because the Creator who made babies and who made human blood spoke to Moses and said this is the way you’re supposed to do it.  This is one of the great signs of the divine authorship of Scripture.

 

In verse 16, at the end of this thing the way of blessing under conflict do you come to the last temptation that everyone faces in the middle of a conflict.  “And you shalt consume all the people whom the LORD thy God shall deliver to thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them, [neither shalt thou serve their gods; for that will be a snare unto thee.]” and here is the greatest enemy of the Christian life, sentimentalism.  Sentimentalism is doing more to destroy this country today than any other factor.  It is cranked out by liberals and the gimmick that liberalism has used in this country to generate sentimentalism is to take Christian words that they know will create connotations in your heart and will create certain emotions and use those words.  You have sentimental people who are unbelievers just goo all over the place every time someone says let’s go out and love the people and give five million dollars to this country, etc.  So we have a lot of sentimentalism and particularly it occurs in war. 

 

God wanted to make sure that they followed His Word over all sentimentalism and He said look, I don’t want your eye to have pity and it’s in the tense which means continuous action, I don’t ever want your eye to look on these people with pity, kill them.  Kill, kill, kill when you come into the Canaanite land, and it was going to be brutal warfare because they were executing God’s will and they were to exercise it with no compromise.  There we have a case where sentimentalism can become an enemy of the Word of God. 

 

Verses 12-16 are important because they give you the principles of blessing in conflict.  How are the people going to be blessed in conflict?  To deal with the Word of God first and God will take care of the rest.  What sustains those in the military is the Word of God up here, and I think this is a vivid illustration of what should sustain us.  What’s going to sustain us?  We may not get shot at; well you are getting shot at but in a different way.  What are the bullets that are coming your way?  For example you have pressures of time, you have pressures in business, and business gets harder and harder each day, the men have a harder and harder time because the government keeps making it harder for you, inflation keeps taking away more and more, etc.  There are all sorts of things that come you way and they may not be made of lead like the bullets in Vietnam but nevertheless it’s just as real spiritually, so why not use the same principle. Why doesn’t the same principle hold here, with less pressure, than it holds with the men who are fighting for their life?  It does work, it’s just a lot of Christians have never been exposed to it or if they have been they just get tired of listening.  But when the chips are down it’s the Word of God that always comes through, every time. 

Verses 17-26 and here we have not blessing in the emphasis but victory.  “If thou shalt say in thine heart, These nations are more than I; how can I dispossess them?”  Here’s the obvious thing, they are facing a combat situation and they get faint heart, the mental attitude goes.  Many times you as a believer may have faced this situation, how can I go on.  Many times you may have been to the point where you wanted to toss in the towel, you’d had it.  You can’t stand the local church, you can’t stand the preacher, you can’t stand your husband, your wife, the little brats in your house and you can’t stand a whole lot of other things and you’re just ready to toss in the towel.  It’s the same thing.   Here these Israelites are saying “these nations are more than I; how can I dispossess of them,” this sets up the answer because a person has to get to this point first before they’re going to realize the riches of divine grace. 

 

Verse 18, “Thou shalt not be afraid of them, but shalt well remember what the LORD thy God did unto Pharaoh, and unto all Egypt.”  Here we have a principle based on the plan of God that goes back to this diagram.  The principle that you find in the New Testament and the Old Testament is here you are and you get clobbered, you’re somewhere on the line between the time you accept Christ and the time you die, and you get hit, all of a sudden everything just hits you right here.  What’s the principle to remember?  Go back to this point and say to yourself God did the most for me when He saved me and therefore every little problem in here is trivial.  After all, look where you were.  Here’s God’s character, God is sovereign, God is righteous, just, loving, God is eternality, God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and immutable, and here you were as a sinner.  A big barrier separated us, the barrier of imputed sin from Adam, the barrier of personal sin, the barrier of spiritual death, the barrier of physical death, the barrier of lack of righteousness, and there you were, right behind the eight ball and the worst possible thing because there was no solution possible, period.  So what happens?  Jesus Christ bore the sin and then in Christ we have regeneration to solve the spiritual death problem, you have resurrection to solve the physical death problem, and we have imputed righteousness to solve the lack of righteousness problem.

 

Therefore Jesus Christ did the most for you at the point that you received Christ. Therefore how trivial are these problems that we face when we get in the middle of phase two and get hit with something.  You can see this many times, God so loved us when we were yet sinners, etc. Rom. 5:10.  Rom. 8:32, “He that spared not His own Son but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him freely give us all things.”  What’s the point?  The point is that He did the most back here, that’s the big crisis point in your life.  This isn’t a crisis, these are just little tidbits.  The real crisis was solved here.  You are on the victory side by position already; the worst is behind. 

 

This is something to remember when we get in the doctrine of death.  Death for you is a straight line; you can drop dead tonight but it’s a straight line into heaven.  So the relationship with you have with your Lord now is the one you will have for eternity and it’s a continuous relationship.  The chasm is behind you, not in front of you.  This is a tremendous source of encouragement in this situation and he was simply saying look, when I crossed Pharaoh, who did I knock down.  Pharaoh in the Bible is always a picture of Satan.  In fact it’s very interesting, in these movies, on these Pharaoh’s they have this striped headband.  Did you ever notice what’s right here?  It’s a snake.  Throughout history Egypt has the symbol that the Scriptures call the symbol of Satan and it’s no accident because Egypt played a role down through history of being in the height of Satan’s kingdom and God released Israel from this kingdom, the most powerful kingdom of the day, and if He did that then certainly these Canaanites are just pabulum for Him. 

For example, you have Egypt.  Up here you have the Hittite empire. Egypt subordinated all these Canaanite tribes; you have a tribe here, a tribe here, a tribe here, who conquered these tribes?  Egypt did. Therefore here is the logic.  If God conquered Egypt who conquered these tribes, then can He conquer these tribes for you?  If He solved this problem, He solved the man who was able to subjugate these tribes, certainly He is able to solve the problem with these small tribes.  God has solved the biggest problem, therefore He can solve the least problem.  That’s the principle that we find in verse 18, and in the whole Christian life, Rom. 8:32 etc.  [Verse 19, “The great temptations which thine eyes saw, and the signs, and the wonders, and the mighty hand, and the outstretched arm, whereby the LORD thy God brought thee out; so shall the LORD thy God do unto all the people of whom thou art afraid.”] 

 

Verse 20, “Moreover, the LORD will send the hornet among them, until they who are left and hide themselves from thee, are destroyed.”  This may strike you as funny, what is He sending a hornet among them.  God uses in holy war the instruments of creation.  Hornets were one technique that God had.  God always uses natural weapons and during the holy wars of Israel He used such things as this, He used serpents, fiery serpents, and He used other things, various insects.  We have from [can’t understand word] folklore that the Amalekites at this time were so bombarded with ants that we had millions and millions of people exit from the Arabian Peninsula along about this time, solely due to the fact that there were thousands and thousands of ants. They had ants in their soup, ants in their pants and everything else; they had ants all over the place. So the Arabs decided it’s time to take off so they moved out and went northwestward and left the area.  Some scholars believe that these Arabs that left are actually the Amalekites that Moses meets on the way out of Egypt.  But we have adequate testimony that there were many elements of creation involved. 

 

One famous element was the sun.  In Joshua the sun stood still which means that the Lord some­how moved the axis of the earth.  You may think that was just an optical illusion but it wasn’t because you can trace folklore and you find in the western hemisphere they had a long night at precisely the time in the eastern hemisphere they had a long day.  It doesn’t require a big hairy theorem in geometry to figure out the fact that the earth must have got changed in the shift in its orbit.  So God is able to utilize natural creation to strike and to accomplish His purposes. 

 

In the future when is this going to happen again?  The Tribulation, and this is why the Tribulation is the epitome of holy war.  When you read those horrible things in the book of Revelation and shudder, that is holy war come to its ultimate fruition and Jesus Christ Himself takes personal command.  That’s when the angel blows the trumpet and these plagues hit the earth.  Why is that?  Why does God hit man through natural mediums?  Because God is Creator and He’s saying by this who is the Lord of history, who is the one who controls creation, I made this creation I will run it according to My plan and if I have to turn it against you man, I will do that too. 

 

So this is why holy war is always accomplished in the Bible through natural medium.  We suspect at one point in the book of Revelation there is an exception, for in Rev. 19 it speaks of an invasion from outer space and what this consists of we don’t know but the earth will be invaded from outer space through an angelic force; it’s some force that will appear in much the contemporary form of our military because in Rev. 19 it says the kings of the earth gather together to do battle against the Lord and against His army.  Now if the Lord came and it’s some sort of a situation like at Bethlehem and the heavens were opened and suddenly you saw angels, the armies of the earth wouldn’t be gathered together.  The reason the armies of the earth are gathered together in Revelation to do battle against the Lord and against His armies is because they obviously think they can win. Therefore what form must the Lord and His angels appear in Revelation.  They must appear in a culturally semblance form so that they come actually appearing, at least with military weapons that seem to be equal to the military weapons of the time, whenever that occurs in history. 

 

Therefore God’s holy war goes on and it uses in verse 20 the hornets, which was a horrible insect.  For example, we have some scholars who have said that this hornet was so bad that in parts of the Arabic desert they would have these nests on the ground and somebody would be riding along and a horse and there’d be these little holes all along the desert floor and inside these holes these hornets would have their nests.  And some horseman would go by and the horse’s foot would go down, it wouldn’t hurt the horse because it wasn’t that deep, but the first horse over would knock this nest open and everybody behind him got bad news.  So usually they had to send out scouts ahead of their armies across these areas so that if the scouts tripped these hornets he could take off and he wouldn’t leave a whole cloud of hornets for the men coming behind.  This is the way they had to feel their way across and this is a very dreaded insect of the time.  So this is not just some little amusing incident, this is a very serious weapon that God has.

 

In verse 21, “Thou shalt not be frightened by them; for the LORD thy God is among you, a mighty God and awesome [terrible].”  Here once again we have emphasis on God’s essence.  The two words “mighty” and “terrible” emphasize His omnipotence.  We have had in previous discussions, Deut. 4:31; 6:15; 5:9, 4:24, etc. we’ve had all the divine attributes listed and here again we come across omnipotence.  “For the LORD thy God is omnipotent,” and here we have the great secret behind a lot of victories.  As believers these people could get up at 2:00 o’clock in the morning and recite, God is sovereign, justice, love, He’s eternality, He’s omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent and He’s immutable and they could apply this in their life.  Any believer who can do this can take practically anything life has to offer.  You don’t even have to know a promise.  All you have to know is these attributes and for what they stand.  All you have to know is God’s character and you hardly even need a promise; you don’t even need Rom. 8:28.  You have all the promises wrapped up in God’s very character.  So it’s an important doctrine for believers to understand. 

 

Now we come to the last part of these verses where God says I’m going to put these nations out little by little and He explains why.  This is to not destroy the land, etc.  But verse 25 and 26 conclude with a warning.  “The graven images of their gods shall ye burn with fire; thou shalt not desire the silver or gold that is on them, nor take it unto thee, lest thou be snared therein; for it is an abomination to the LORD thy God.”  Verse 25 warns us what we have been warned about again and again in this chapter: Israel, that land is condemned.  This principle I’ve never seen in a Christian devotional.  I don’t know why but this is a principle that John is trying to teach in 1 John 2:15-17 when he says “love not the world, neither the things that are in the world,” etc.  Why does John do this? Because the world is condemned.  Human viewpoint is condemned and Christians are wasting their time to fiddle with all this stuff.  That’s the concept of worldliness in the Bible, it’s not a bunch of taboos, you can’t do this and you can’t do that and it sounds like God’s a meany, he won’t let you have fun, etc. That’s not the point.

The point is that all of these things are part of a condemned system and as believers we are actually putting our hands on material that God has condemned.  You can do this with your mind.  If you sit and watch the average television program and unless you analyze the program you’ve absorbed this. We have all sorts of ways in our time of doing this, getting our hands on an abomination to the Lord.

 

Verse 26, “Neither shalt thou bring an abomination into thine house, lest thou be a cursed thing like it, but thou shalt utterly detest it, and thou shalt utterly abhor it; for it is a cursed thing.”  The word “cursed” is this old familiar word charem, and that’s the word which means cut off, isolate it.  Charem is something that God has said this is Mine, you can’t touch it.  It’s the word from which we get harem, where the king would have all his girlfriends and he would say no other person bothers my girls, they in that tent you leave them.  This is why it was called a harem because it meant you leave those girls alone.  And we have the same principle here except the harem here is Canaan. And the charem is very strange, God is going to destroy, He wants those things destroyed and the reason why He gives these bloody commandments to kill, kill, kill, destroy, destroy, destroy, burn, burn, burn, the reason for all of this is that it’s charem, these aren’t the Jew’s property to keep. 

 

And if people like Saul and others say oh but look, it looks so good, I like that Cadillac that that Canaan guy had, it’s a brand new model and our cars are shot, we’ve been out in the desert, we’ve got dust in the radiator and everything else.  After all we’re going to settle down and be farmers, why not just pick up a few things. God is saying that is not your property, you have no right to do it, that is Mine, I order it destroyed.  That is the means of this holy war and the destruction principle.

 

From this we can gather many lessons and one of two lessons I want to pick up.  The first lesson applies to us individually as believers; we, this applies to you and me, all of us as individuals, I’ll get a group application in a moment, but as individuals we are in this war.  Where’s the war, what are your enemies?  One is the flesh, one is the world system that actually is an amalgamated thing, the world system is actually made up of flesh and Satan, and then you have Satan himself. Satan can attack you as a believer directly.  He can put pressure on you; he usually does it two ways, he puts circumstantial pressure on you, or like Job, he can affect your health.  The flesh is dealt with according to Romans 6 where you say in effect you are crucified positionally, you don’t have to crucify yourself, so you overcome the enemy of the flesh which is the temptations that spring up within you by claiming Romans 6 and the doctrine in it. 

 

The world system is something different. There it requires an active mental activity on your part.  You have to actually engage the world and judged and evaluate, and there’s where the Christian, the one place you are called upon to criticize.  Yes Christians are called upon to criticize, criticize the world system, evaluate it.  Most believers criticize each other but not the world system.  But the world system is actually the object of criticism and it should be.  We misdirect our criticism but that is where criticism should be directed.

 

Now we come to the group application.  Those are the three enemies that you face and all those enemies are ultimately opposed by the Word of God. They are opposed on the basis of the Word of God; they are opposed through the filling of the Holy Spirit, utilizing the attributes God has given you.  Now the group application.  And here come to an incident that has happened recently in our country and I want to use this as an illustration why we as believers, if anybody in our country today should have a proper mental attitude toward conflict it should be a believer.  We are brought up in a fight.  We fight from the day we receive Christ until the day we die and yet in our country today we have a whole attitude against fighting. We have an attitude against this war business that is going to work to our destruction. 

 

About January in 1968 a group of military officers decided they had seen enough of Vietnam and they decided that as retired military officers they were free to speak.  They worked out a program and submitted it to every major news wire and TV network and every magazine in the United States.  You never read about it because they were denied at every point because the ammunition these men had was so fantastic and it shows the stupidity of our country that you can see why the left-wing press and controlled media wouldn’t dare print this.  But Science and Mechanics decided to print this bombshell, a revelation by these military men. Before they printed it they investigated it.  The investigator talked to twelve men; all these men were talked to independently, they did not know the investigator went to each one of them yet all of them say the same thing, the Vietnam War could be won in 6-8 weeks.  Every one of them independently said this.  What was their program? First that we declare war on North Vietnam because it makes legal any further military activity.  Second point is we block the point of Haiphong.  Then take a two pronged attack, a northward penetration and at the same time you fake an amphibious landing at the Port of Haiphong.  But nobody has the guts in this country to do this, what would China do; what would Russia do. 

 

You get into the same mental attitude that the Christians often face toward faith.  It’s the same thing and don’t think it’s not related.   Here we have a graphic illustration that as a country we do not have the guts to face anyone in a confrontation.  Do you know why?  It’s related to the spiritual factor. We don’t have any convictions.  Before you stand up to someone and you say I’m standing here and I don’t care who you are, I’m standing here.  Before you can take a stand like that you have to know why you stand and we don’t have that today.  We don’t have anybody with conviction.  The Christian has to develop a tough mental attitude and he has to develop this mental attitude in one way and one way only.  He has to know the Word of God and he has to apply it daily in his life and it’s only through that that he will develop the proper mental attitude.  But that is a God-honoring mental attitude. 

 

To get right down home, where you see this in our own lives is where we have problems and we have adversities and we do not want to buckle under and claim a promise.  We yield to the adversity and we let the pressures knock us off balance instead of standing up to them on the basis of the promises of the Word of God and Christians whine, we have cry-baby believers and they get their feelings hurt and they go somewhere else and all the rest of it.  And it is all because people don’t have doctrine or they refuse to apply it.