Lesson 18
Danger #1 to Spirituality – 8:1-10
We’re still in the section of Deuteronomy outlining basic spiritual
principles. We’re spending lots of time
here because we want you to get used to the idea that all the Law stems from an
inner mental attitude because later on we’ll get into the details of the Law,
the details of life and all these details of life are going to be very
confusing unless you keep this in mind that everything begins with a mental
attitude and that when these details are taken to extremes we develop legalism,
etc. We’ll discuss all sorts of
questions, controversial questions, etc. but all these must be discussed after
we understand that spirituality stems from a mental attitude.
In chapter 5 we found that spirituality was defined and this definition
is going to play a large role in what happens in chapter 8. We said that spirituality is looked upon in
both Old and New Testaments as involving a personal relationship between God
and man, and if this personal relationship is not with some sort of an
idealized God but a God that has definite standards of righteousness and
justice. And since God has these definite standards this puts strictures on our
personal relationship. It means that we
are just not free to do anything we want to in life because if we have a
personal relationship with someone and we want to please that person we have to
understand that person’s character. And
since we are in a personal relationship with a God of the essence involving
these things it puts certain strictures on our personal relationship, certain
limitations and this is going to be before us tonight.
In chapter 6 we found that the essence of spirituality was living in the
Word. This meant that Moses, as far as
He was concerned, spirituality’s greatest manifestation was a person’s attitude
toward the Word of God. This attitude
would be revealed first of all in taking in the Word of God. Does a person systematically take in the Word
of God? Is he interested in the Word of
God or for example in our day does he just come to church to be seen of a few
people, make the right contacts, say the right thing, etc. and go home. Or is he interested in taking in the
Word. This is a big factor in
spirituality and it is a sign of spirituality.
The second factor that Moses pointed out in chapter 6 was is it digested
and by this we mean is the Word of God once taken in thought about, organized
into categories, so that you can apply these things later in life. The third thing that Moses emphasized, not
only do you take in the Word of God, not only do you digest it, but do you use
it in evaluating human viewpoint. You’re
bombarded all during your day with either human viewpoint or divine
viewpoint. Tonight we are going to see
the beginning of human viewpoint. We’re going to expand this and you’ll see the
basis for what we ultimately will say in the basic series but here’s where we
get it, in chapter 8.
In chapter 8 we find one of the greatest axioms of human viewpoint. But you’re getting bombarded with both of
these viewpoints and your success as a believer is directly proportional to
your ability to analyze this, find out when you get human viewpoint that you
are able to identify it as human viewpoint and able to separate it from divine
viewpoint. This is evaluating and judging.
Then the fourth thing that Moses emphasized is living out the
implications of the Word. This means
that if the Word says certain things, then if we are to live consistently with
that Word it means to us personally in every situation in life. And finally, the fifth thing, are we quick on
confession or when we get out of fellowship say oh, I love to stay out of
fellowship and I’m going to see how long I can stay out, just for spite against
the Lord. I’m not going to confess my
sin, I know I should but I’m not going to.
This is an attitude of carnality.
So the fifth thing in living the Word is quickly utilizing the Word when
you slip and understanding that you’re out of fellowship and what you do about
it, 1 John 1:9.
In chapter 8 we come to one of the great chapters in the Old Testament
and this chapter contains the heart of unbelief. We’re going to divide the chapter into three
sections. The chapter can be divided from 8:1-10; then from 11-18 and then
19-20. The first section is looking
forward to the occupation of the land.
The second section is looking backward upon the wilderness wanderings
after they’re in the land. Then finally,
verses 19-20 is a conclusion. But all of
this is meaningless unless we come across the standpoint as we being of human
viewpoint and what it is.
I want to outline three of the five elements of human viewpoint. We
divide human viewpoint into two sections.
We are only covering one section in chapter 8; we’ll save the other ones
for chapter 9. The first category of
human viewpoint is a denial of creature hood.
This means that all of human viewpoint basically is a means by which an
unbeliever or believers in practice or in thought deny the fact that God is
Creator and they are creatures. And it
shows itself in three ways. These are three of the five sections of human
viewpoint.
The first way it shows up is in attitude toward reality, toward the
universe. This would say that the
universe is an independent machine instead of a creation. It is a machine that goes on by itself,
physical laws run it, there’s no such thing as miracles, God is not free to
intervene moment by moment to work His perfect will through history. This is a presupposition but it is a presupposition
or an axiom that underlies all of our problems as believers in the world.
The second element of human viewpoint is found in an attitude toward how
I know. We would say this, I know because I
am the authority. I am the final authority, I determine what is right and wrong, I submit to no other intellectual
authority. This shows up in an attitude
toward God’s Word and if you will examine this statement very carefully, if you
look at this very carefully you notice something about this statement. If you really believe this statement whole
heartedly you would automatically deny the existence of God. No person can believe this statement in its
entirety without automatically being an atheist because if you believe this,
that you are the authority you’ve already excluded the possibility that God
could be the authority. It’s one or the
other, so therefore you’ve automatically in practice become an atheist.
The third section on how this shows up, I determine what is right and wrong. That follows from the second
point, obviously. But these are three
things you will actually notice and begin to see these things in people that
you witness to, etc. It’s very
interesting, some of these people can be very dogmatic and yet when you boil
all dogmatism down it turns out that they may be three assumptions and that’s
al they are, because I dare anyone to prove any one of the three. You can’t; these are unprovable, they are
only assumptions that an individual makes and can never be proved.
Therefore the point that we want to understand is that the unbeliever
erects these solely on the basis of faith to insulate him from the Holy
Spirit. And he does so because at the
point of God consciousness he can go positive or negative. If he goes negative volition and says I don’t
want to know God, then according to Rom. 1 since the creation is constantly and
clearly testifying to the existence of God, the person has to do
something. A person could never stand
the pressure of the witness of God and common grace without insulating himself
from it and the way he insulates himself is to manufacture these things in his
mind. This prevents, it keeps God out of
the way so the person can live without being bothered. This is a fundamental axiom of human
viewpoint.
And this is the axiom; this first category of human viewpoint, denial of
creature hood is what God is attacking in Deut. 8, “All the commandments which
I command thee this day shall ye observe to do, that ye may live, and multiply,
and go in and possess the land which the LORD swore to give unto your
fathers.” We’ve seen this again and
again.
Verse 2, here’s the introduction to the specifics of this chapter. “And thou shalt remember all the way which
the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee,
and to test thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou would keep His
commandments or not.” We have a lot of
information in verse 2 about the wilderness wanderings. So far we’ve said the wilderness wanderings
were a disciplinary feature. But it had
a lot more to it than that; it had a redeeming feature in the sense that God
was trying to eliminate and purge out human viewpoint and here’s how He did
it. “You will remember,” this is a
command; this is a command to when they get in the land, they’re going to
shortly cross the boundary and come into that land and when they do they are to
remember something, and this means they are to remember it and keep on remembering
it. This is a lesson that they never
should forget.
“Thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these
forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee.” Let’s look at “to humble.” That is the purpose of the testings of the
wilderness wanderings, to humble you.
Let’s look at the word “humble.” First of all we notice it is a purpose
clause. This is the reason why they were
put under pressure in the wilderness.
They were put under pressure to humble them and humbling here has the
idea that here’s a person, maybe leaning on a crutch, and what God is doing by
humbling is He’s coming along and kicking that crutch out so the person
falls. Then the person may get up and He
may pick out some other thing to lean on so God comes along, kicks and there
goes that crutch. The idea here is to
keep these people from leaning on these crutches, to get them to lean on the
Lord and not on these crutches. The word
to humble means to kick out the prop, kick out the support, dissolve the
strength of someone so that he will realize his need and his true dependence.
That’s the idea behind “humble,” to kick out the props. Here is how God usually kicks out the props
and He did in this chapter. And that is
the details of life. Here we have them,
here’s the inside of the heart and on the outside of your life you have all
these details; you have fellowship with other believers, you have loved ones in
your families, you have sex, you have money problems, you have jobs, relaxation,
health, all these categories of human life, you have law and government and you
have friends and all these things surround you, the details of life. Every
person has these and every person has to cope with them, but they are all coped
with from the center outward. What Moses
is saying here is God is going to humble
How He usually humbles people is He takes out one of these, a person
gets fired from the job, the company goes bankrupt or something. Whoops, there
goes the prop, somebody was depending on a detail of life and all of a sudden
God says okay, I have seen you depend on that so long I’m going to take
it. So He takes it out of the way, you
fall down and feel miserable for a while until you realize that’s just a detail
of life, I’m still a believer in Jesus Christ, I’m still regenerated, the Holy
Spirit still indwells me, I’m still baptized, sealed, and I go down through
positional truth and I realize that the taking away of one detail of life
hasn’t altered my position in Christ.
And it hasn’t altered any of value of the promises of God. So now I just trust the Lord and He will
supply my need. If I have a legitimate
need He will supply it. He can take away
health and this is a detail of life.
A person can become sick and this is why many aspects of the healing
movement today are wrong. There is such
a thing as bona fide healing and God
definitely does heal in answer to prayer but not always. Why? Because it falls
in the category of props. Sometimes God
has to bring on illness because a person is not ready to be healthy. They are not ready spiritually to be healthy
because if they were, this would become a prop, they’d rely upon their
strength, their human strength, etc.
You might put food in here, food is always related to money, he may
remove food and you may go hungry. This
is what God did to His Son in the wilderness for forty days; He took away
food—detail of life. These are details
of life; even if they are removed it never changes your position. This is why we emphasize position, position,
position, over and over again because the details of life are usually
automatically emphasized. The rest of
our life we emphasize the details so as balance we emphasize position. Now let’s see what He did here. In Jesus case He took away food. Now God in these forty years took away two
other details of life from the Israelites, let’s see why.
Continuing in the verse, “to humble you, to prove thee, to know,” there
are a couple of infinitives there and to fit all this together we have to
organize it. The purpose: to kick out
the props, there’s the purpose, to kick out the props, “to test you,” and the
word her is nacah which is the Hebrew
word to test. So here goes the details,
let’s take health. There goes the
health; a person gets deathly sick so the health has been removed as a detail
of life. So there goes the prop. Why?
“To test.” To test for what?
“to know what was in thine heart,” and to know here is yada‘ and when yada‘ is used for to know in the Old Testament it means to know in
life, to know by experience, to know in real life situation. It’s not just sheer abstract knowledge. It’s concrete knowledge in life itself, to
know by experience. Now obviously God is
omniscient. You know the essence box;
one of the attributes is omniscience.
God knows what’s in a person’s heart.
He doesn’t have to give a test to know.
What God is interested in is that He wants to see it manifested in
history so that your life will be a testimony not just to Him but will be a
testimony before angels and before men.
So this is why yada‘ is used
here, “to know what is in your heart” by experience, “whether you would keep
His commandments, or not.” This is the
idea, “to humble.”
Then in verse 3 we have exactly what the humbling was all about. “And he humbled thee, and allowed you to
hunger,” so here’s a detail of life, He’s going to cross out food. There goes food. You can figure out the problem, here we have
thousands upon thousands of people in this wilderness with no food. They can’t go to a grocery store; they don’t
have anything, no place to buy food.
They had money, by the way, they had a lot of money but they had no
supermarket, couldn’t go any place to buy food. They had a lot of money but no food. They couldn’t eat their money because it was
in the form of metal. So here they were,
they could have bought food for years with the money they took out of
“And He humbled you, and suffered you to hunger, and fed you with manna,
which you knew not, neither did thy fathers know,” now this manna is an odd
looking thing and I am not going to speculate what manna was. Many scholars have tried to speculate on this
but there is just not enough information in the Bible to determine what manna
was. There is one thing that by
deduction we can know and that was whatever it was, if you had it for a vitamin
pills it would be the most fantastic medicine you could possibly have because
it supplied all of the nutrients necessary for the human body. So if you could figure out what it was and
the FDA would allow you to market it, you would have a wonderful vitamin pill
that would solve a lot of problems. But
what this manna was no one knows; evidently it was a supernatural miracle of
God and in Num. 11:4-9 you see one of the characteristics of this manna. I’ll fill you on the name manna. We’re not exactly certain where this name
came from but it is the Hebrew word for “what is it” and some people have speculated
on the basis of Exodus 16:15 that when these people walked out there and saw
this stuff on the ground they said what is it, what is it, what is it, so it
became “what.” The word manna actually
means “what is it” and it was related to the question people asked when they
went out to see it. So the very word
“manna” is “what is it;” no one knows.
In Num. 11:4-9 we have a very interesting fact about this manna and that
is something that shows you how gracious God is. He knocked the props out from every person in
Israel. Everybody was in the same boat.
“And the mixed multitude that was among them fell to lusting, and the
children of Israel also wept again, and said, Who shall give us flesh to eat?” After a while the manna wears off and they
don’t like this. You can imagine the
same thing for breakfast, lunch, supper, for breakfast, lunch, supper and this
goes on day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.
After a while it gets a little boring. I
suppose they said to some of the ladies, can you fry this stuff today, and then
tomorrow they’d try to boil it, then they’d do whatever you could do with it,
that’s the limit of my cooking vocabulary.
This gets a little old after a while so these people started saying
look, let’s get meat. That’s what “flesh” means, meat. Never mind the manna, let’s have some
meat.
Verse 5, “We remember the fish which we did eat in Egypt freely….” Here they go thinking about what they had
before they were saved. Oh what a
wonderful life I had as an unbeliever, didn’t have to come to church, didn’t
have to do this, didn’t have to do that, what a wonderful life. “We did eat freely in Egypt,” of course they
did not eat freely, they were slaves in Egypt and they ate what was given to
them by the slave owners. So this is
just sheer manufactured sentimentalism; they “ate freely.” That’s a lie, they didn’t eat freely, they
were slaves. But this is what pressure
does to people. People always want the
grass on the other side of the fence and they always forget what it really was
like over there. This is a beautiful
example of it, they had forgotten completely what it was like in Egypt. “We did eat in Egypt freely, the cucumbers,
and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions and the garlic.” It sounds like they had a regular feast every
day in Egypt, yet we know they didn’t like Egypt either because when they were
there they were complaining, complaining, complaining.
Verse 6, “But now our soul is dried away; there is nothing at all,
besides this manna, before our eyes. [7] And the manna was as coriander seed,
and the color thereof as the color of bdellium. [8] And the people went about,
and gathered it, and ground it in mills, or beat it in a mortar, and baked it
in pans, and made cakes of it; and the taste of it was as the taste of fresh
oil. [9] And when the dew fell upon the camp in the night, the manna fell upon
it.” The thing to remember about this
whole thing is that in spite of this complaining, complaining, complaining, God
goes on in grace supplying, supplying, supplying and supplying. Here you have the patience of God. He has deliberately cut out the prop from
life, it is as though you had a detail of life removed from your personal life
and after a while you get tired of whatever God brings into your life to
replace it. You may be sick, therefore
this restricts you and after a while you start chafing at the restriction and
you start griping about it, groaning about it, complaining to other people
about it, complaining to the Lord about it, and yet God goes on supplying and
making up for that lack in various ways in your life. You’re not satisfied with the way He’s doing
it but He goes on with it anyway.
In Joshua 5:12 you see the schedule of the manna finally
terminated. This is what makes me think
it is not a natural item. Some people believe there was a certain juxtaposition
of natural causes that led to [can’t understand words] on the basis of Joshua
5:12, “And the manna ceased on the next day after they had eaten of the old corn
of the land; neither had the children of Israel manna any more, but they did
eat of the fruit of the land of Canaan that year.” The very day that they got into the land and
began to live off the land the manna stopped.
God is not a statistical God of approximation, God is exact. Therefore this is not just a natural
phenomena, this is a miraculous phenomena that began on a certain day, went on
down through history and ended on a certain day.
I am familiar with the fact that in mythology we have many, many nations
that record the manna incident. They may
also have got in on the manna deal during this time. Some believe that due to the tremendous
cataclysms surrounding the Exodus many nations were devastated. There were earthquakes, volcanic eruptions,
etc. climates failed and so you had the destruction of crops all around the
world, both western and eastern hemispheres, so therefore God supplied every
nation with manna to a certain degree.
This may or may not be true, but if we are to accept the history behind
many mythologies evidently manna was manifest on this continent, in ancient
Africa and in Asia and Europe. We have
myths from these various lands that relate the story of the manna; undoubtedly
they did not get it from the Scripture so therefore they must have got it from
their personal experience.
In Deut. 8:3 we have this manna; a detail of life has been knocked out
and it is replaced by manna. “And He humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger,
and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not,” and there’s one of the great
secrets. The point here is to introduce
something new. Here the Israelites have
their fellowship, they have their loved ones, they have sex, they have money
and their jobs, whatever they did out there, putting up tents, taking them
down, something. So they had food taken
out. This left a gap in the details of
life so God filled that gap with something they did not know, and the testimony
is in the very word itself, “what is it.”
So God gave “what is it” to them, three times a day they had a good does
of “what is it.” Manna was given to
these people that “they knewest not, neither did thy fathers know;” why is this
given? Because the sign of God’s supply
is something that’s unusual, something that happens that’s completely out of
the ordinary and this is supposed to be a sign to them that I, the Lord your
God, am supplying this to you, your fathers didn’t have this, how come you have
it? Because I am supplying it to you.
Now we have the reason, “that He might make thee know that man doth not
live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the
LORD doth man live.” We want to make one
adjustment in the translation at this point.
This is yada here, “He may
cause you to know in your experience,” and it is in a hiphel stem. Hebrew has various stems, it has the normal
stem which would be you know something.
If you put it in the hiphel stem you just a few little letters and it
changes the verb meaning to He causes you to know, it’s the causative stem. So whenever the verb switches to the hiphel
we know the purpose behind it; God causes these people to know by
experience. He actually wants them to go
through the experience of having at least one detail of life removed and have
the experience of having to depend on the Lord to supply that detail of
life. Get the picture of the test
because we’ll get to the proof of it in a moment.
“That He might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only,” not
“by” bread but “on” bread, the preposition is “on” and it means on the basis of
bread alone. Man does not live by bread
alone only but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. This word that proceeds out of the mouth of
God includes much more than just the Word of God. This is much more than the Word of God. This includes the Word of God, but the actual
Hebrew says “every utterance out of the mouth of God.” Many utterances out of the mouth of God were
never written down; we don’t know what they were. We have utterances of the Word of God that
aren’t the Word of God but cause things in our life.
For example, the book of Revelation, what happens in Revelation? The seals are broken and suddenly there is a
command and the command is to the angels, “Go forth and destroy,” and the
angels go forth and destroy. That was a
result of an utterance of the Lord.
There is a command into the natural world to cause a physical effect, so
that too was an utterance of the Word of God.
This manna is part of the utterance of the Word of God. God said I want manna and there was
manna. And this is the concept of the
utterance of the Word of God; this includes the Word of God but it’s greater
than that. It includes not only the
written promises you have before you but it includes the commands that God
gives to creation. So man lives not on
the basis of bread but on the basis of everything or every utterance out of the
mouth of God.
Here we have the doctrine of God’s creatorship. Why do you suppose this lesson had to be
given to believers? You’d think that
maybe this would be good for unbelievers to learn, God is creator, etc. No, it’s given to believers because one of
our tendencies after victory in the Christian life, remember chapter 7 was the
conflict of spirituality, now they have the victory and the tendency is always
to let down after the victory and relax.
So Gods wants us to understand that He is Creator and as believers we
are to live our lives as one sentence saying God is my Creator. That sounds like innocent little words but it
means a lot. For example, it means as
creature I’m down here; it means as creature God, by His sovereignty runs
creation, not my volition. My volition
does not run creation, God’s sovereignty runs creation. I am not my own authority because God is omniscient;
I have only rationality and memory. But
my rationality and memory is not omniscient and I don’t know everything,
therefore if I’m to know anything God is going to have to tell me, and He has
to tell me the order out in that world, He has to show me His plan for life, He
has to show me many things.
Unfortunately a lot of unbelievers in our day don’t realize this, but if
you stop and think, there is no basis for living apart from the Word of God. I have said there’s no basis for law apart
from the Word of God. The only reason
you have societies existing that deny the Word of God is simply because they
borrowed a concept from the Word and they haven’t given due credit where it’s
due. But in order for law to really
exist you have to have a lawgiver and you either have man as the lawgiver or
God as the lawgiver. If man is the
lawgiver you have totalitarianism; if God is the lawgiver you have democracy and
freedom. So you have to have a lawgiver
and you have to have many things in life but it all comes from this doctrine,
God is Creator.
This is the lesson to learn and this undercuts the heart of human
viewpoint. This is the argument behind
chapter 8. God is going to so engineer their experience so they’ll never have
an opportunity to even get involved with human viewpoint, because they’re going
to be so hep on this idea that God is Creator and their basis for living is Him
and Him alone, not by anything else.
Let’s go back to the details of life.
Take food, there’s a detail of life. The argument in verse 3 is that man
is not going to live on the basis of food.
I could just as well say job because that’s what a lot of people think
they live on today. We could just
re-read verse 3, I have fired you from this job to make you know that man does
not live on his job alone but by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of
God. You can run it over to health and
reread verse 3 again, I have made you to know that man does not live on his
health alone but on everything that proceeds out of the mouth of God. This is a tremendous verse and it orients you
to all of these details of life. You can
pick any detail of life and do the same thing.
God is just taking one of the details because people usually remember
when they get hungry and it’s one that’s quite easy to administer. So God, verse 3, is manifesting by removing
the details of life, food, He is manifesting His creatorship.
Verse 4, here’s another detail of life that He did, “Thy raiment grew
not old upon thee, neither did thy foot swell, these forty years.” Here’s your clothing. How you would like a nice set of clothes that
you could wear for forty years and it would never wear out? That shows you we’re dealing here with
absolute miracles all down the line. You
cannot explain this naturally. This is
not something that’s natural, this is supernatural. There’s one miracle right after another going
on here. You show me a piece of cloth
that doesn’t wear out after forty years.
Even armor rusts, everything wears, yet this cloth did not wear. Another interesting thing, “neither did thy
foot swell, these forty years.” They
were walking over hot sand and they’d walk and walk and walk, and they didn’t
have any Scholl’s corn plasters out in the middle of the wilderness, therefore
God took care of their health. This is a health need. They could have had
tremendous foot trouble, all the podiatrists in the world would have had a
business out there in the desert treating foot troubles but no, God kept them
in good health.
Here again is another miracle, and this is once again to show you that
God can either do one or two things for you.
He can keep those details in your life or He can remove them. If He removes the details of life then He can
supply the needs because Phil. 4 says my God “shall supply all your need,” and
“need” there is referring to the details of life, every need that you have God
can supply. Verse 4, “Thy raiment grew not old upon thee, neither did thy foot
swell,” those verbs not only indicate that those things did not happen, it
indicated that they never happened to any person any time during the forty
years, it’s a perfect negative which means it absolutely never happened once,
period, it was perfect. God’s plan is
always perfect and we are not to be surprised at this.
In verse 5 thru the end of this section there’s an analogy made and this
analogy forms the basis of Heb. 12 in the New Testament. “Thou shalt also consider in thine heart,
that, as a man chastens his son, so the LORD thy God chastens you.” There are two things to notice about
this. First, the word “to chasten,”
which is yacar, and yacar in the Hebrew means severity but
with a purpose. It does not mean just
brutality. It means severity to teach a
lesson. We might say military training
would be yacar, severity to teach a
lesson. It’s not just severity, but it’s
severity for a reason, to teach something.
It’s not arbitrariness, it’s planned pressure. So verse 5, “as a man will chasten his son,
so the LORD thy God is chastening you.”
Here’s the shift in tense. The shift in tense is a participle. What does that tell us? That means continuous action, it goes on and
on and on and it is going on right at the moment Moses is talking. So here they are, for forty years this has
gone on, Moses says we are right here and when you get in the land God is going
to continue to teach you this thing.
Why did Moses bring this up?
Because he knows just as soon as they cross this border, see Moses is
going to die right about here, and after he gets through this sermon, this
sermon is going to be so long he’s going to drop dead at the end of it, and
when he gets through he’s going to die and there will be nothing else left as
far as national leadership other than a man that he’s ordained and even then
it’s suspicious whether the people will accept him, and that’s Joshua. So it’s coming to the second stage and when
they get over there Moses is afraid of something. He’s watched these people behave and he knows
what’s going to happen. They’re going to
say oh yes, we had a lot of pressure back here but no problem, we’re in the
land now, we’ve got our blessings, we can relax. That’s exactly what Moses doesn’t want. He says I don’t want you to do this because
this is the nature of your personal relationship with God, “as a man chastens
his son, so the LORD thy God” has not only chastened you these forty years, He
is going to continue to chasten, chasten, chasten.
Here’s a principle that you can take in your life. Do you know that you can reduce the suffering
your life that God has to administer if you can learn the lessons through the
Word. If you can learn a spiritual
lesson through the Word, that means God doesn’t have to teach you an
experience. So there are two blessings
to knowing the Word. First it eliminates
many lessons that God would otherwise have to give you in experience because
you won’t listen to the Word, so you’ve got to learn in some other way. God may have a curriculum established for
you, it’s up in heaven, and He says I want you to learn this year 25 things
about Me. You say well I don’t want to
learn 25 things about You. He says fine,
then I will teach them to you whether you like it or not so we’ll take you
through the school of hard knocks. If
you don’t like to listen to the Word, you don’t like to learn, you don’t like
to remember, you don’t like to recall, fine, I’ll teach it so you’ll never
forget. So God begins by, again,
removing one of the details of life.
That’s one way you can reduce it; it doesn’t reduce it all because God
still wants us, even though we know the Word, to go through these
experiences. But it will reduce some of
them because many experiences of the Word are actually unnecessary.
The second thing learning the Word of God does it will prepare you for
the time when God does remove a detail of life.
If for example you have grasped this lesson tonight of the wilderness
wanderings and Israel getting this detail of life pulled out, no food yanked
out, there’s a detail of life. What
happens? God supplied their needs, God
supplies, supplies, supplies, supplies.
You know this principle, so you go home, all of a sudden a detail of
life goes out of your life. So what do
you do, you remember, God supplied the Israelites, He was Creator then, He is
Creator now, He’s immutable, He never changes, so the same thing that He did
for them can be the same thing He can do for me and therefore the promises are
valid and I’ll go on trusting. This is
the point that we can learn from this and this is one of the great blessings
from examining the Word. We can reduce suffering in our life not only initially
by avoiding the test, but if we do get in the jam and the pressure does get on
we’ve got something on the inside to meet it.
We don’t fall apart like a lot of Christians, they get in something, oh,
where’s a psychiatrist, I mean a Christian psychiatrist or something else like
this. I’ve got this tremendous problem
and I have to go find some nitwit who calls himself a Christianity psychiatrist
and he’s neither a Christian nor a psychiatrist, or I have to go to somebody
else to solve my problem. You shouldn’t
have to. You should not have to if the
promises really work and you really know them.
Verse 6, “Therefore thou shalt keep the commandments of the LORD thy
God, to walk in his ways, and to fear him. [7] For the LORD thy God brings thee into a good land,” and
here’s the temptation, here’s the test.
You never thought a person could be tested by prosperity but here’s a
test of prosperity. Can you imagine,
this doesn’t seem much to you, but try to put yourself in the place of people
that were out wandering around in the sand for forty years, no water, no food,
they had to have manna, and they wore the same clothes. The wife had one dress and she had to wear it
all forty years and it didn’t wear out, didn’t go out of style, you didn’t have
to buy your wife any clothes. That was
one of the great blessings. The women
might not have liked it but I’m sure the men enjoyed it. [Verse 7, “For the LORD thy God bringeth thee
into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that
spring out of valleys and hills.”]
We come to verse 8 and here’s some more blessing, “A land of what, and
barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of olive oil and
honey,” all these wonderful things. You
can imagine out there in the desert with manna, manna, manna, manna, manna, and
all of a sudden you see this nice feast put in front of you. Verse 9, “A land wherein thou shalt eat bread
without scarceness; thou shalt not lack anything in it; a land whose stones are
iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig bronze.” Everything is supplied, even industry. Even the natural resources for a growing
industry are provided here; perfect provision!
Now a translation change in verse 10, “When thou hast eaten,” it should
be actually “And you will eat and you will be full, then thou shalt bless the
LORD thy God for the good land which he hath given you.” If you want to check this I suggest the RSV
at this particular point, it has a very good translation of verse 10. It is not “when,” the “When” clause shifts
beginning at verse 11, that’s the next thing we’ll deal with, but verse 10,
“You will eat and you will be full and you will bless the LORD thy God for the
good land which He has given you.”
We can make an interesting application.
We can take these same things, not only individually but
nationally. I don’t know how many of you
can trace your family tree very far but I’m sure a good percent of you can
trace it back several generations, at least to the point where you realize that
many of your forefathers came from Europe.
I’m sure you don’t have to be a historian to know why they came from Europe. They came from Europe because Europe was a
cesspool; Europe has always been a cesspool, yet we have the cultural elite in
our country today telling us lets get back to the European way of thinking, to
the European concept, ecumenicalism has come from Europe. Practically every major heresy has come from
Europe. Our ancestors came from Europe
to get out of the mess. Now we take
vacations there; I don’t know why.
The first people that came to our coasts from Europe were the Puritans
and they were all good students of the Word of God. A Sunday sermon for a Puritan was about 4-6
hours and everybody paid attention because over they years they had developed a
span of concentration and they were used to this kind of teaching. They started and set up this country on good
sound principles. Our country had
natural resources, and many, many blessings, and still has. But although we are not locked into the
relationship of verse 5, “thou shalt consider in thine heart, that, as a man
chasteneth his son, so the LORD thy God chastens you,” we are not locked into
that covenant relationship of father son as God was to Israel, but don’t think
that God is not interested in the general social conditions of the
country.
He has given us blessing but it’s basically in similar terms to the
blessings He gave Israel and the blessings have a little price tag on
them. As long as you play ball with Me,
you can enjoy your blessings. We find
this in Acts 17, in certain passages of Gen. 10 and 11, we find it all down
through the Old Testament, that God operates this way in a general way with the
Gentiles. It’s not as sharp as with
Israel but it’s still there. And in our
country it is not the question of lack of resources, the question is a lack of
spirituality. If we had the spirituality
the resources would take care of themselves.
If we had spirituality a lot of our political problems would take care
of themselves. If we had spirituality a
lot of our financial problems would take care of themselves. As we get into the details of the economics
of Israel we will find something, that the reason for inflationary spending in
this country is basically lust of the flesh.
You can blame it on everything else but basically it boils down to the
fact lust of the flesh is operating, everybody wants more money, more money, so
the value of the dollar goes less and less.
We’ll see how this operated in Israel and how God forecast it. God predicted it was going to happen to
Israel and it’s going to happen in practice to any nation on earth.
So we come down to the basic problem that we need spirituality in this
country.