Lesson 19

Forgetting the Creature Principle – 8:11-20

We want to review where we are and where we’re headed. This chapter of Deuteronomy, chapter 8, is the section of Deuteronomy that has to do with spiritual principles. The basic principle in Deuteronomy 8 is associated with what is going to happen in Deuteronomy 9 so we’ll take these two together by way of summary. In Deut. 8 you have the first danger of spirituality which is a confusion on the issue of who is Creator. We call this the Creator/creature distinction, by the way, absolute distinction, the only distinction in the history of religion and philosophy. You will never find this distinction made in any other system. It’s only made in Biblical Christianity. So you have the Creator/creature distinction.

Then you have in Deut. 9 the problem of the self-righteousness person. These are two dangers that every one of us face as believers. We will get on the kick where we think it’s our power that’s done something, our works that have done something and this is denial of the problem dealt with in Deut. 8. And in Deut. 9 we deal with a Christian that says oh God just has to bless me, I’m so good, I’m such a wonderful person, God couldn’t do without me. Deut. 9 is written to solve that little problem.

We continue in Deut. 8 with the problem of what you do when you have the person’s heart, mental attitude on the inside of the heart and you have on the outside all the details of life. We have fellowship with other believers, we have relationship with loved ones, we have the issue of sex, the issue of food, of money, of job, of relaxation, health, relationship to government, relationship to friends. All these are the details of life; all of these will be treated by Moses beginning with chapter 12. But Moses is not going to deal with these details of life until first he deals with the inner mental attitude. This is why these chapters stress mental attitude. Everything starts on the inside; you never start from the outside. This is why Christianity is not a system of morality; if it were then Moses would just have to run through all the details and say when you get in this situation you do this, in this situation do this, etc. But Christianity is a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Therefore it requires knowledge of mental attitude.

We covered verses 1-10 which looked forward to the time when they would be in the land. The key verse was verse 3. This is a verse you’ve probably heard people quote again and again, “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.” God had an interesting way of demonstrating this to the nation Israel. He took them into the wilderness for forty years and He used the technique of removing one of these details of life. God frequently does that to believers. If you haven’t had the experience, stand by because He might do it some time with you, and that is that He will take one of these details.

Here He took food, that’s a detail of life, it’s a legitimate need, but He removed it. So here these people were and they had no food. God will frequently do this to a believer, it might be in the area of health, God may take away your health. He may take away money; He may take away your job, He may take away any one of these details but what’s the point? The point is that He wants you to be able to trust Him to meet that need, and in so doing you will learn through sheer experience of doing this that He is Creator and sufficient to meet our every need.

That’s why in verse 3 it says “that He might make you know,” it’s a lesson that He wanted these people to learn, He wants to “make you know that man does not live on the basis of,” not “by” but “on the basis of bread only, but on the basis of everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the LORD does man live.” Therefore the issue becomes one of removing certain obstructions. The reason why God has to do this is that we get our eyes on one of these things. It’s very easy today to get your eyes on government around April 15; it’s easy to get your eyes on loved ones. Young people in society today it’s an easy time to get wrapped up in sex. No matter what it is, one of these details of life will occupy our minds and our mental attitudes. So what does God have to do? He has to remove that out of our attention to get our attention focused back on Him. This is why very frequently these things happen. It’s one of the eleven reasons why Christians suffer.

In Deut. 8 He has removed food from this nation and this was a tremendously critical thing because you can imagine about one or two million people out in the middle of the desert where there’s no water, you just don’t walk in and turn on the water, you have no water, you have no food. The ironic thing about it is that these people had money, they had gobs of money. They could have bought every supermarket from the Tigris-Euphrates Valley down to the Nile River. But there was no supermarket and God made sure there wasn’t any around because He stuck them out in the middle of a desert so there was absolutely no human solution to the problem. Therefore they had to trust the Lord with it.

Beginning in verse 11 it deals with a slightly different viewpoint, same lesson but this time Moses is warning them so that when they get into the land and get blessed they won’t forget this lesson. “Beware that thou forget not the LORD thy God, in not keeping His commandments, and His judgments, and His statutes, which I command thee this day.” “Beware” is an imperative verb and it means take guard. This means and implies something for you, it implies the fact that we have to exert some effort, we have to understand doctrine from the Word of God the first thing. A lot of people don’t like to think so therefore a lot of people don’t know doctrine so they’re eliminated in the first step. The second thing is we have to apply doctrine, but all of this “beware” is a warning, it’s an imperative mood, I want you to “take guard that you do not forget the LORD thy God,” in particular that you do not forget this lesson that He has taught.

Verse 12, “Lest, when you have eaten and are full and hast build goodly houses, and well therein,” now why is he mentioning these things? Because one of the blessings of the Abrahamic Covenant, remember we are dealing with two covenants, the Abrahamic Covenant, concluded about 2000 BC and the Mosaic Covenant which was concluded with Moses, actually acting as representative of the nation about 1400 BC. The Abrahamic Covenant is important. You may not think it was important that a prominent business man in the Middle East around 2000 BC entered into a covenant with God but the point is that out of this Abrahamic Covenant came Jesus Christ.

The Abrahamic Covenant promised three basic things: Abraham’s physical seed, it promised that they would be the channel of worldwide blessing; this is important because all spiritual salvation comes out of Israel. All of it! Who wrote the New Testament? They were Jews with one possible exception, Luke. So you have the blessings coming out. And at the Second Advent of Christ when He literally, physically returns to the earth to set up His world government, again the solution to man’s problem will come through Israel. What is it that is holding up world peace today? Basically it’s Israel because they refused as a nation to acknowledge their Messiah and it turns out in history at the Second Advent then they acknowledge and then Israel becomes a channel of blessing. The other thing that they have is that they are going to be a perpetual people; they will never be erased from history.

I quoted a man who was won to Jesus Christ because of a study of history and he discovered when he studied history an amazing thing, and that is that no matter how small the Jews were at any point in time they always survived. This is a historical that has never worked with any other people. This person realized that if you study history there is a strange survivability about the Jewish people. You can have your Hitler’s and they come and go; the Jewish people have been the rock that has broken many a hammer that has tried to hit it. So Israel is going to survive; they may get thrown out of the land by the Arabs but they’ll be back. The Jews will always survive and this is why any nation that attempts to eliminate the Jew will find itself eliminated. Anti-Semitism is always anti-scriptural. This is why many of the conservative elements in this country have never learned that yet because some of them are very anti-Semitic. As long as conservatism is anti-Semitic they cannot expect the blessing of God.

The third thing besides the worldwide blessing and the perpetual people was that they had an eternal title to some land. They had some land and this land extends from the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, you think the land that the Jews acquired in the 7-day war was great, that’s just peanuts compared to what God says that they ultimately will own. They own everything from the Tigris-Euphrates southwestward down to the River, called the Great River, just east of the Nile. So all of this title belongs to Israel; God has a title and He has ordained that Israel have it; not necessarily today but ultimately when history is culminated they will have it.

There’s the Abrahamic Covenant and this determines that out of the physical seed of Abraham will come blessing. These people will be blessed and we call this an unconditional covenant. Why? Because it does not depend upon their obedience. It turns out in history they obey and it is fulfilled, but God makes the stipulation with no “if.” In this contract there aren’t any “ifs,” if you do something, then you violate it. There are no “ifs” whatever; there will come out of Abraham’s bosom people who will fulfill this. This is an unconditional covenant.

Now we have the Mosaic Covenant or the Law given in the Pentateuch. The Mosaic Covenant is conditional and the Mosaic Covenant gives two alternatives. First it gives the alternative of the fact that they can occupy the land or they can be thrown out. That’s one choice the nation has. The Mosaic Covenant has one big fat if, “IF” you are obedient to the Word, then prosperity; if you disobey then cursing and discipline. So you have occupation of the land or they’ll be thrown out and the other thing that you can have will be prosperity, or you will have calamity; prosperity in business and that is what is spoken of here in verse 12, “When thou hast eaten and are full and has built goodly houses,” in the vernacular of this time and this culture this was an expression for economic prosperity. Therefore one of the provisions of the Mosaic Covenant was that if this nation adheres to the Word of God, then they will be prosperous.

The third provision was that they would have military victory; military victory over all their enemies. The provision of course opposite this, if they were not obedient to the Word they would have defeat. By the way, regardless of how many arms they had, regardless of how well trained their armies were this would always work. In 1 & 2 Samuel and Kings you see history written as the prophet reviews history and shows you how this worked out every single time. You will see men plotting in the State Department of Israel, trying to make treaties with the Pharaoh thing, we need help now and we’ve got to go down and depend on Pharaoh in a mutual aid pact, and every time they did it as a nation they fell because God said listen, I’m the God of history and I have told you people that I want you to do something and if you don’t do it then you are going to be cursed, I don’t care how many treaties you’ve made with how many great powers; the great powers will go into discipline.

Then they had also the fourth thing of the Mosaic Covenant was that they would be a testimony to the world. Israel in prosperity spiritually would be a fantastic testimony to the world and in defeat they would be an abhorrence. People would walk by, as the prophets say, the Assyrian army would come in and look around and say is this the nation that Almighty God has chosen, this little nation here? So they would become an abhorrence to the rest of the Gentiles around them.

Verse 13, “And when thy herds and thy flocks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold are multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied,” there you have economic prosperity; there you have financial prosperity, silver and gold. In the latter part of Deuteronomy you’re going to see something fantastic about economic and gold supply as it was taught to the nation Israel. You will see how crucial God had currency, in other words, God had very, very strict laws controlling currency and anybody that would tamper with currency by devaluating the currency, by adding dross to the silver, this was the way they had of spreading the silver around, people wanted $1001 instead of $1000 so you’d just take one thousandth dross, add it to the silver and you get the extra coin. But you’ve devaluated the currency, just exactly what this nation is doing by inflation. God says that is an abomination to Him. Why? Because when a person, for example you may earn $2,000; that $2,000 is your money that you have earned by your effort. But if you hold that and you don’t spend it on something, buy something and the government inflates it you’ve lost, the government has stolen from you. You have invested your labor in $2,000 and when you go to spend it it’s only worth $1,800, somebody stole $200 worth of labor from you. The American people for the last 50 years in this country have been stolen left and right by a planned economy, by planned inflation. You will see God’s attitude toward this, it’s most interesting. And I know that most of the modern economists would say well, this is just fundamentalism in the wrong [can’t understand word]. Nevertheless we take this as the Word of God and I think there are good sound moral arguments for it.

Verse 14, and here we begin to pick up the bad attitude. “Then thine heart be lifted up, and thou forget the LORD thy God, who brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.” Blessing, one of the great dangers of the spiritual life is blessing. I have seen this again and again in counseling, people will come crying to you, pastor, what shall we do now, everything has fallen apart, etc. and you counsel with them and pray with them and then the Lord blesses and you don’t see them around for the next 30 years until something else happens. And then they’re knocking on your door again. That’s the job of a pastor and if people come to you as a Christian, that’s your job, you treat people in grace and go ahead anyway. But the point is that people always forget the Lord in the middle of blessing. This is why it makes a lot of people wonder how long God is going to bless this country. So, “thy heart be lifted up, and thou forget the LORD thy God, who brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt,” the danger of forgetting God, amplified in verse 15-16.

Verse 15, “Who led thee through that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents, and scorpions, and drought, where there was no water; who brought thee forth water out of the rock of flint; [16] Who fed thee in the wilderness with manna, which thy fathers knew not, that He might humble thee, and that He might test thee, to do thee good at thy latter end.” Notice what happens here. What is it they forget? First, number one, He brought them out of Egypt. That’s the first thing they forget. The second thing listed, “who led you through the wilderness.” The third thing that He did, He brought water out of rock. The fourth thing He did, listed in verse 16, is feeding them with manna.

Why do you suppose the author of Scripture is so specific? Because Scripture always deals with specifics; they forget certain specific acts that God has done and these are miracles that God has done and they prove something. They prove that if you take the character of God that He is sovereign, righteousness, just, love, eternality, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent and immutable and they also prove what man is. In place of sovereignty, if you are a person in the essence of your soul you have volition. In place of the righteousness and justice of God you have conscience. In place of love you have satisfaction that can only come from personal relationships with other people. In place of the eternality of God you have temporality in your soul. That means you can live only one moment at a time, God can live all moments at a time. In place of omniscience you have rationality and memory. In place of omnipotence you have power. In place of omnipresence you have mobility. And in place of immutability you have continuity, i.e. you can exist from one moment to the next but there’s no guarantee of your stability from one moment to the next. God is the most stable person because He’s absolutely stable.

This is why the only personal relationship you will ever have in your life that will be stable will be your relationship with the Lord. Don’t ever try to replace a relationship with the Lord with a relationship with another person, even if it’s a husband and wife. No other personal relationship will ever have it because no other person that you can ever enter into a personal relationship with ever has immutability. The person will be up one moment or down the next or less so, depending on their stability, but you’re never going to have an absolutely stable individual. Only the Lord is a stable individual and it’s only your personal relationship with the Lord that is going to give you stability in time.

The danger of this is that we have some people that hang everything on a personal relationship. You go to the college campus and you find some people with a philosophy that if I just meet the right person of the opposite sex, all my troubles are ended, therefore I’ll hand everything on this. So boy meets girl and they have a nice personal relationship and everything goes on until it gets a little rocky. And because they haven’t prepared themselves they get all upset, shook, etc. and we have this manifested in marriage. People get married and they think this is the love of the century and they have a little trouble and all of a sudden they discover there’s no such thing as a perfect personal relationship. And guess what they say? We have to get a divorce. So we are going to have a perfect personal relationship or we’re going to smash it all to pieces. That’s what a divorce is, it’s just smashing a perfect personal relationship and that’s what’s behind a lot of divorce, not all of it, but a lot of it. Why is this? Because people fail to realize that your basic stable personal relationship can only be with the Lord. Nobody else will be dependable. There are going to be times when the closest friend of yours will act as a traitor; when the person that you most rely upon will let you down. What are you going to do? Walk around the rest of your life with sour grapes, mad because so and so let you down. So you go around and gossip and malign… You don’t get sour grapes because you’re in a personal relationship with somebody and they let you down once or twice or five million times. That’s not the point. If you’re in a personal relationship with the Lord that won’t bother you. So if you’re upset because you have a personal relationship with somebody and they let you down, it’s not maturity that is showing because if you had a stable Lord with the Lord you wouldn’t be worried about someone letting you down. This is something you want to realize, our spirituality is a personal relationship with Him.

We’re going to deal with the right side of the essence box and the right side of the human soul because here’s the issue in Deut. 8. In Deut. 8 we are face to face with the issue that these right hand characteristics are characteristics that are utterly different. These match, this is the basis of our personal relationship with the Lord, but these characteristics differ and you always have to make this distinction. In Deut. we are going to come to these principles. The first thing we have is that God is omnipotent. That’s one of those divine attributes. Our human attribute that corresponds with that is human power, i.e. the ability to make real in history, real decisions, real efforts to write your own record, to make your own waves in history and that is your blessing that you have because you are a created soul. But there’s always a tendency to confuse your power with God’s omnipotence. And there’s always something as a believer you have to realize and keep in balance. Yes, you do have the ability to make waves, you do have the ability to do things, but remember who has the ultimate power: it is God! So in this chapter we are going to see this lesson proved.

Verse 17, “And thou say in thine heart,” this is what’s going to happen, these people are in the land and they’re going to get a bad attitude. They’re going to say look at this, I am the one that put the fertilizer out on the field, I am the one that planted these crops, I am the one that did this and that, my business is prospering and I thank nobody but myself for it. So this person brags on his own power. This is what’s happening in Deut. 8, they say in verse 17, “And thou say in thine heart,” that’s your mind, “My power and the might of mine hand has gotten me this wealth.” What’s the point? The point is they’re confusing, they’re not Creators, they are creatures and they have no right to mar this distinction. God is omnipotent, He’s eternality, we are temporality. God lives in all moments at the same time; you can only live your life one moment at a time. God is omnipotent, you have power. God is omniscient; you have rationality and memory, a finite mind. He has omnipresence, you have mobility, you can only be in one place at one time no matter hard you’d like it to be otherwise. These four characteristics that are important. It’s looking at these four characteristics, the other characteristics are the basis of your relationship with the Lord; these characteristics are what distinguish you from God and this is what you always have to keep in your mind very, very clear. You do not have omnipotence.

Verse 18, “But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God; for it is He who giveth thee power to get wealth, that He may establish His covenant which He swore unto thy fathers, as it is this day.” This is important, it’s not an accident that in verse 18 we have something mentioned. Notice, “covenant which He swore to your fathers.” Which covenant is that? Is that the Mosaic Covenant or is that the Abrahamic Covenant. It’s important. There’s only one covenant that was ever sworn and that’s the Abrahamic Covenant. So here’s the Abrahamic Covenant. Notice something, this is one of those sandwiched situations we find in Scripture so often, where you have a verse and it’s packed between a verse that precedes it and the verse follows it.

I’m looking at the verse that follows verse 17, and in verse 18, the following verse, has a remark about covenant. But look back in verse 16 which is the verse that precedes verse 17 and what do you have mentioned. A strange clause tacked on to the end of verse 16, “to do thee good at thy latter end.” The “latter end” is a Jewish way in the Old Testament of expression prophecy or the doctrine of eschatology or where world history is moving. What this sandwich does is to show you the context of this thing. The “latter end” is the fulfillment of the Abrahamic Covenant. The “latter end” is when the nation is in the land, they are totally regenerate, they have inherited God’s blessings, history has come to its culmination. And this is what God has in mind. He has the long perspective.

Here is the point when you receive Jesus Christ as Savior. Your life goes on to the time you die or the rapture, whichever occurs first, then you go off for eternity. All the events that happen in here, in this phase two interval, have one purpose in mind; preparing you for phase three. God has His eye over here, just as here God has His eye on the fulfillment of the Abrahamic Covenant and He’s going to put this nation through the college of hard knocks. He is going to put pressure on them; He is going to do things with them, but all for a purpose. These are not random events, there is not a statistical chance operating in Scripture. That’s not the Scriptural view of history. In the Scriptural view of history there is no such thing as probability, everything is totally 100% exact in the plan of God, there are no loose ends.

Every event that happens in your life if you are a believer has a purpose. This is why if you are a believer and these things come into your life you have the right to claim Rom. 8:28. What is the basis for that verse? What is the basis for that promise? Phase three, you’re not going to see these things be good, there are going to be some things in your life that are downright horrible and you wouldn’t dare call them good. You’re going to see things come into the lives of other Christians that are going to be horrible, suffering, misery, adversity and these things are not good, but that’s not what Rom. 8:28 said. Rom. 8:28 says these horrible things that come into your life are working together for good, future.

It’s the same thing God is doing in verse 16, “to do thee good at thy latter end.” These are the reasons for this testing and this is why it’s so hard to second guess God. People ask why did this happen to me. It’s hard to tell, sometimes you can tell, and sometimes you can’t. Nevertheless, here in the context the point is that God has a plan for your life. He had a plan for Israel and He was going to invade Israel with different problems, put pressures on them for what was going to happen out here. The same thing in your life. You can take all your life with all these little details around it. For example you can take food, health, jobs, money and so this is removed. Well, you can’t live without money, you’ve got to have money, you’ve got to have a medium of exchange. Do we trust the Lord to provide when it goes? This is a detail of life, a detail is a necessary thing but it’s only a detail and it means that God may take these things out and He’s going to see if we will trust Him to fill in the gap.

In phase two for Israel God wanted to warn them against what happened in verse 17, “And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand has gotten me this wealth.” Why do you suppose God so designed Israel’s history to eliminate verse 17, in other words, all of the things that came against Israel were designed to avoid them coming to the conclusion that you see in the text of verse 17. There’s a reason for it and that is that when they get out here in phase three they cannot turn back and say Lord, I helped your plan. I am here today in heaven because I did some great things for God. I’m here in heaven because I did something for the Lord, I did this, I did that, I did something else. There are no bragamonies in heaven, only testimonies. Bragamonies mean that you brag what you do; testimonies you tell what God has done. That’s the difference.

Therefore in phase three there wants to be a situation where no one can ever draw the conclusion that they helped their way through phase two. It’s the same thing with Israel; Israel does not want to be in the position out here, for example in the Millennial Kingdom and they say I now why we’re the head nation on earth in the Millennium, we were so good; if it wasn’t for us the world would have fallen apart. God is going to show them oh no, who was it that baled you out every time you got in a mess? I was. Whose power was it that delivered you from Pharaoh? My power, and you can go on down through verses 15 and 16 and enumerate all those things that are mentioned there as examples of God’s omnipresence.

Verses 19-20, the final warning of this chapter. “And it shall be, if thou do at all forget the LORD thy God, and walk after other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify against you this day that you will surely perish.” In verse 19 we have a change in the translation. “If thou do at all forget,” we have this situation in Hebrew that I’ve mentioned several times and it deals, when you have a verb and the author will add on to the verb the verb, so you have the verb and then it’s repeated again. This is called the infinitive absolute construction. The infinitive absolute construction in the Hebrew language always amplifies the mood of the first verb. So the point here in verse 19 is “if you ever forget one thing then you will surely perish.” That’s what God is saying. Do you see? He is insistent that people remember, which goes acknowledge to the role of a local church.

What is the job of a pastor of a local church if he wants to really minister to his people. We have a lot of gimmick boys in the pulpit that want to have contests, etc. we give candy bars to everyone that brings somebody, etc. We run through all these things. Is that ministering to people? No! God wants you to remember, remember, remember His word. And this is why from this pulpit you get it over and over and over and over again. So if you forget it at least it’s not because I didn’t do my job. You will be forced to remember these things because of the repetition. So the role of the pastor is to call to mind the acts of God and here in verse 19 we have the final warning Moses imparted to the nation. Moses would die. This book of Deuteronomy is one sermon, talk about a long sermon. Try reading through the book of Deuteronomy with a clock and figure out how long it takes you to read through. That is how long Moses preached this sermon, and after he preached he dropped dead. This is one final address and then he would die.

This is a warning now, “I testify against you this day that you will surely perish.” The word “testify” is important, because when you get into the prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah, etc. those are the testimonies. This is a prophecy of the prophets. And in verse 19 he is going to testify, how is Moses going to testify? He is going to testify through his writings and these later prophets, such as Isaiah, are going to go back in their day and the nation is falling apart and they’re going to start scratching their heads and say there’s something wrong. So they’re going to go back and study Moses’ writings, and they study Moses so much and so diligently that the very Hebrew, if you translate Hebrew in Isaiah and you translate Hebrew in 2 Kings you will see that they copy verbatim Moses own vocabulary. And this doesn’t come because they’re copying in the sense they’ve got the book before them. This comes because those prophets studied and studied and studied. The average view of a prophet today is that this is some magician, he walked around the nation and let rabbits out of hats, etc. and made all these miracles. Oh no, the image of a prophet in the Bible is one who studies the writings of the prophets before him and he carries on the tradition. He is in the strict sense a traditionalist, one who carries on the inerrant Scripture. He is not a traditionalist in the bad sense, he does not carry on human tradition but he does carry on the divinely revealed tradition. This is characteristic.

The conclusion of chapter 8, verse 20, “As the nations which the LORD thy God is destroying,” it’s a participle, “is destroying before your face, so shall you perish, because you would not be obedient to the voice of the LORD your God.”

For application of the New Testament turn to 2 Cor. 12. Here you see the same principle. I am amazed the more I study the Old Testament the less new the New Testament seems because many, many things in the New Testament are simply repeats of the Old Testament. I want you to take this principle and remember that the problem here is that whenever we get into the position of thinking ourselves to be self-sufficient we’ll always wind up frustrated because we never are. So here in 2 Cor. 12 you will see how Paul takes the same principle given in Deut. 8 and applies it to himself. Verse 1, “It is not expedient for me, doubtless, to glory. I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord. [2] I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knows)—such an one caught up to the third heaven.” This was evidently some time in Paul’s ministry where he’s almost killed and at this point he doesn’t know whether he died and the Lord resuscitated him or whether he was just out and had fainted or something. Verse 3, “And I knew such a man (whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knows)— [4] How he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter. [5] Of such an one will I glory, yet of myself I will not glory, but in mine infirmities.”

What’s the point? Here Paul is and here’s the infallible apostle. He is in phase two, somehow in his ministry, probably at the time that he was nearly stoned to death the Lord just gave him a glimpse of phase three, evidently the Lord just took him over and gave him a glimpse of what phase three would be like and then He brought him back. And Paul says I want to glory in my weaknesses. Verse 6, “For though I would desire to glory, I shall not be a fool; for I will say the truth. But now I forbear lest any man should think of me above that which he sees me to be, or that he hears of me. [7] And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure.” By the way, I hope you notice carefully what is said in verse 7. If people would just understand verse 7 it would knock out all of the phony healing campaigns that you hear about. So and so gets healed at this campaign and we all get together and have a camp meeting and everyone comes down and people pass out from the emotion and all the rest of the junk. There is such a thing as divine healing, God does heal in answer to prayer, but, and this is an important BUT, I have never seen a divine healer preaching today who has ever acknowledged the theology of verse 7. Never, their whole pitch is if you’re not wholly 100% physically well it’s lack of faith brother, you don’t have faith, if you had enough faith you’d be well and all the rest of it. That’s simply phony all the way from start to finish. Did Paul have perfect faith? Yes he did and yet it says in verse 7 God sent a thorn in the flesh, a physical infirmity. Why?

To minister to Paul, that’s why. So the highest goal in the Christian life is not 100% health. If these divine healers would just be consistent. Take this list; you have all the details of life, fellowship with other believers, loved ones, sex, money, food, job, recreation, health, relationship with government and friends. They pick health and they say unless you have perfect physical health then there’s something wrong, you’ve got sin in the life. That’s one detail of life, if I logically apply this theology I’ll say have you got riches, there must be something wrong if you don’t have enough money. I can say have you got enough sex, wouldn’t that be an interesting sermon in the middle of healing campaign, brother, have you got enough sex? But they wouldn’t do that. So this is just being consistent. Do you see how foolish this is? You can apply it to anyone, do you have friends, if you don’t have friends brother, you don’t have the faith. You can go to any one of these details of life, if they have the right to do it with health, then I have the right to do it with the other details of life. There’s absolutely no difference, none whatever.

So here we have the situation, verse 7, where Paul has had health removed. Why? Because of the reason, “lest I should be exalted above measure.” Verse 8, “For this thing I besought the Lord three times that it might depart from me.” He went through the whole route. Verse 9, “And He said unto me,” this is the Lord’s answer, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.” If you understand the details of life you can see what the Lord is saying to Paul. He’s saying “My strength is made perfect in weakness.” How? Because the Lord is going to do something. Let’s take a job, the Lord removes your job and that leaves a gap in your life, and you need a job. This is a legitimate need. But the Lord says “My grace is sufficient,” and in that weakness, that gap, that provides Me an opportunity to come in and provide for that need in a miraculous way and there’s where My power is made manifest. It’s the same thing with health.

These details are very important to understand and you do not have to have all the details of life as a sign of perfect faith. “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength” that’s omnipotence, “is made perfect in weakness,” and the word “perfect” here means manifest. In other words My omnipotence is manifest to you in your weakness, and if it wasn’t for your weakness, then My strength… just reverse the verse to get the sense. Suppose we say My strength is made perfect in weakness. Rewrite the verse, if you had no weakness, how would the Lord’s strength be made perfect. This is the point, if the weakness is not there it excludes the power of God. So the weakness has to be there so God can manifest Himself to us. This is exactly the wrong point of theology that many of these healing campaigns do. People who are attracted to the healing movements of our day are always people who are weak and sickly and not healed. The greatest percent of the followers of these healers are people who themselves are sick and have never been healed. These people can exploit and exploit these people. I personally warn you against this. Don’t you ever fiddle with them, for one reason; you will wind up with the biggest guilt complex of your life because after these people get through working you over you will really begin to believe that you don’t have faith and the real reason why you are sick is because you don’t have enough faith. And once you get into that situation you are in bad shape spiritually. So my advice to you is pray, but always pray for healing within the will of God and be ready to accept that it might not be His will to heal you. It may be, but it might not be. And if isn’t, then your prayer should be Lord, show me the reason for it, and show me how this will work together for good.