Lesson 20

Self-righteousness 9:1-24 & 10:1-11

We’re going to pick up the pace a little bit and go through chapter 9 and half of chapter 10. Deut. 8 and 9 are crucial because these two chapters both tell us errors; in chapter 8 there is one error and in chapter 9 there is another error. Both of these errors are very important because every one of us as Christians, as believers, are in danger of making these two mistakes. The first mistake in chapter 8 was that man does not live by bread alone and the issue there was forgetting that we are creatures and trying to do things in the energy of the flesh, trying to work up human gimmicks to replace God’s power. This has always been a danger in religion, it is a danger in any Christian group, I don’t care what the name of it is, who is in charge of it, or who’s running it. No matter what group it is you will always face this danger and it is the alert mature Christian leader who will watch for this danger.

For example, you can get involved in this by noting that all things aren’t well with the church so therefore we’ll have to step in. We could say we don’t have enough teachers in this church so therefore we have to go around knocking on doors and pestering people to teach. We’re not going to do that because we operate on the principle that we are creatures and if something is going to be done the Lord is going to do it. If people are motivated by teaching of the Word to develop their gift if they have the gift of teaching, then we are not going to go around and bang on their doors and ring doorbells and call them on the phone and annoy them.

We always have to keep a balance. The tendency always is when something doesn’t happen or something doesn’t come through is to step in and do it yourself. A lot of my friends in the ministry have gotten themselves in this and wore themselves ragged because the tendency is if something goes wrong over here the pastor is supposed to do it, it something’s wrong over there the pastor is supposed to do it, if something’s wrong in the old ladies group the pastor is supposed to go over there and sip tea, and if something is wrong somewhere else the pastor is supposed to do that to. It turns out the pastor has no business doing all those things because his job as unto the Lord is to teach the Word. So you find me most uncooperative in filling gaps where they exist. I refuse to do it; my job is to teach the Word of God and that’s what I intend to do. We have people in the course of their ministry that get themselves buried in an avalanche of junk and after 3-4 years in the ministry they go off and sell life insurance. The reason is that they’ve allowed themselves to be buried. I never intend to allow myself to be buried; I’ll go on teaching the Word of God regardless.

This is the attitude that you should have whatever your gift may be. We have notices in the bulletin that we need some Sunday school teachers and some people in daily vacation Bible school. So we have a meeting and 3 people show up. This is all right…this is all right, except that we won’t have any Bible school. But it’s interesting because inevitable after I make an announcement that we are not having Bible school this year, some people say why not, you’re not having your baby sitting down there the first week of June. That’s exactly what we are telling you. If there are no teachers we just don’t have Bible school. I am not going to go around and ask people to teach. We are not going to go around and have pledge cards or anything else. Either there are teachers or we have no school, period.

This illustrates a principle and the principle is that if the Lord does not raise up people we just don’t do the job. People ask why don’t you have some sort of a youth program to which I always reply, would you like to be the head of it. Oh no, get someone else. Well until “someone else” comes along we’re not going to have a youth program. We’re not going to strain at the seams putting on all the programs and everything else if there’s no leadership. You always find that 3 or 4 families of the church are the ones that always do it and I’m not going to wear down my good men by putting them in 25 other tasks. Those men work hard and we have some families in this church that have given everything to this ministry and I’m not going to permit them to be run over and permit them to be the dump trucks in which every little task in the church gets dumped.

We have a group of people in this church with different spiritual gifts. We know every person has a gift and it’s up to them to develop this gift. But we are not going to put anyone under any particular pressure because it would violate a principle of the Word of God based on Deut. 8 and that is that we are creatures and God’s work must be done in God’s power in God’s way. For example, if you feel pressured to do something, someone calls you and flatters you a little bit, tells you we can’t get along without you, would do this job, etc. this would be the flesh, that’s all, and you would be motivated on the basis of human salesmanship to do a job. This is what we are avoiding. We make known the needs and if people don’t go with it we just don’t have it. This is the basic program that any group should follow. This is why I cannot understand why Christian organizations come around and beg and beg and beg for money. If I was running an organization and I had a deficit I would just cut down operations, that’s all, very simple, if the Lord’s people don’t give the Lord’s people just don’t get blessed, that’s all. This is why in any Christian activity you shouldn’t have to beg for money. The Lord’s work is going to go down if you don’t get behind, etc.

If they are operating in a doctrinal way according to Deut. 8 the best way to do is just cut down; if people don’t support, fine, shut it off and go somewhere where there is positive volition. There’s the way to operate according to scriptural principles but we find very few people willing to do this. They get some sort of a pet program started and they’ve got to propagate their little pet program and if it’s $3,000 in debt every month we’ve still got to propagate it, the Lord raised it up, etc. One of the criteria as to whether an organization is in the Lord’s will or not is whether the Lord supplies. If the Lord does not supply, fine, shut down and move somewhere else.

We have a tremendous illustration in the book of Acts of how this principle is operated. We have the Jerusalem church, a local church that was the head of everything in the early era of the Christian church. Out of Jerusalem came all of the great apostles, even Paul. Paul went there to consult with the early church leaders. But we find something interesting; up the coast 100-200 miles is a place called Antioch and at Antioch a group of Gentiles trusted the Lord along with Jews and they had another church and this church began to get with it and move out following Acts 1:8 and began to evangelize the community. After they got through evangelizing the suburbs of Antioch, for which we have archeological evidence, they moved northwestward and sent Paul and Barnabas up into what is now Asia Minor, Turkey, then they went over to Greece and they kept on going all the way over to Italy. This Antioch church, because it was so spiritually blessed, began to take over leadership from Jerusalem; this church slid right down. It’s very interesting. The apostles never stopped it from sliding. The Jerusalem church fell and the apostles let if fall because they recognized that if the local believers do not get with it, then we do without it.

It’s important to realize that man does not live by bread alone. In Deut. 9 we come to an even more subtle problem. Here in Deut. 9 not only do we have the fact that man is a creature and we always have the tendency in Deut. 8 to forget that you are a creature, that God’s work has to be done with God’s power. But in Deut. 9 we have something far more subtle and this is that these people said oh yes, the Lord’s going to do this, the Lord’s going to that, etc. but then they added something. And this little addition to that sentence nullified the whole thing because they said God is going to bless us because look who we are, we are so fantastic that God just has to pour out His blessing on us because we are so righteous. We deserve blessing so God has to bless us. And this is the self-righteousness error made in Deut. 9 and Moses has a most devastating reply to this error which we will now study in Deut. 9:1-Deut. 10:11.

This section can be divided into two parts, the first one goes from 9:1-6 where the principle is stated and from 9:7 all the way over to 10:11 you have the historical proof of the principle. So your first six verses give the principle, the rest of the chapter and the rest of chapter 10 give you the historical basis for this principle. Let’s look at the first six verses where we find the principle developed.

“Hear, O Israel: Thou art to pass over the Jordan this day, to go in to possess nations greater and mightier than thyself, cities great and fortified up to heaven. [2] A people great and tall, the children of the Anakim,” who were the Anakim? The Anakim was a mysterious race that inhabited Palestine, evidently they began shortly after 2000 BC and lasted on down through Israel’s history. They played a very important role in the history of this nation because out of this race eventually came Goliath and many of his brothers. Goliath was not the only giant, he had six brothers and they were all as strong and powerful as he was. The Bible gives us how the first one was killed but many of David’s soldiers had to face Goliath’s brothers. Talk about “big brother” defending you, he had three or four of them and after they killed Goliath his father sent down some of the other sons.

This race of Anakim started out here in a place called Hebron. After Abraham’s time in 2000 BC these people began to rise. We know they were not in existence in 2000 BC because all of the early chapters of Scripture give no indication of their existence. They started with a man who had the name of Arba and we don’t know where this man came from. But Arba evidently was some sort of a genetic freak and he was a giant of a man and he founded this city called Hebron. And he had sons, and these sons multiplied and gradually spread out all over the central part of the Palestine area. Shortly after Deuteronomy was written the Jews would make a westward penetration. The conquest of the holy land was in three parts. Joshua was a strong military man, he had a lot of sense and wisdom in this regard, and he recognized that the way to conquer Palestine….

By the way, if Jordan is ever to conquer Palestine this is the way Jordan, King Hussein, must go because even today this is basically the only thing which will conquer Palestine. The Jews know this and this is why if you study a military map of the Near East as it exists today you will find the defenses around Jerusalem. Many of you have wondered why it is that the Jews have conquered the west side of Jordan, the Jews in the 7-day war got all of this territory and they refused to give it up. There’s a reason why they refused to give it up because they know that it is a beachhead, they know if the Arabs begin to invade and begin a westward penetration, just as Joshua did in 1400 BC, they can split the land in half. That’s what Joshua did. There are highlands here and here’s where your defenders or the people who occupy the land always set up their first line of defense along these mountains. So what you do is run armies westward through here and break the nation in half. Once you’ve broken the nation in half then you can eliminate both north and south sections and this is what Joshua did. He drove his armies westward and knocked out this whole central area. Then he began to move southward and he mopped up this whole area to the south and then he turned his armies around and moved north and eliminated the north half. This is exactly the strategy that Israel so fears that the Jordanians are going to use and this is why the Golan Heights have been captured by the Israelis. They know if you have artillery and you have rockets in this place, you can command any invasion route moving westward. This is why I doubt you will ever see Israel give up by treaty the land that they took in the 7-day war, particularly this area because they are far too sensitive to being eliminated as Joshua did in 1400 BC.

Standing in the way of Joshua’s initial westward penetration was a group of these Anakim and these Anakim were very strong and very large men. We noted they range in height from nine to twelve feet. They were enormous men, they were strong men and they were able to fight, they had access to iron, the Jews at this time did not have access to iron. Somehow the Anakim had tie-ins with the Hittites and therefore through the Hittite Empire and Anatolia were able to get much iron. So these people were very strong warriors and Joshua knew that if he could only penetrate through these Anakim, then the holy land would be his. But he had to somehow knock out this central area and in order to do this he had to devise some strategy to destroy the Anakim. His strategy was to rely on the Lord. You remember what the Lord did; in one of the battles He stopped the sun and He actually interfered with the rotation of the earth. We know this because mythology in the western hemisphere has a long night; mythology in the eastern hemisphere has a long day. So it’s evident that men didn’t just make up this kind of mythology. There was evidently some perturbation in the earth’s rotation, not that the earth stopped but that it could be perturbed on its axis of rotation. Something happened here and this shows you that God was with the nation and He would help them conquer the Anakim because He was the Lord of creation and could utilize the weapons of creation.

The Anakim went down, they were mostly eliminated by Joshua, chapter 11, i.e. around 1350 BC most of these people were wiped out. The ones that were left begin to flee. After a while they get the point, you can’t very well hide a nine or ten foot tall man. So they eventually moved southwestward down to a place called Philistia. We have the account of their migration in the book of Joshua. When they went down to Philistia an interesting thing happened because these Anakim were warriors. The people who conquered Philistia or the Philistines as we now know were the fugitives of the Trojan Wars. These were Greeks, actually the Greek nobility, and these were the uncircumcised Philistines, they are actually of Greek ancestry and came across the Mediterranean and settle in this area. They first went southward after the Trojan Wars and were driven off, many of them were related to what we know as the Spartans, a very tough group of people.

They went down and started in settling in the Nile delta. The only problem was that at that time Egypt was quite strong and Pharaoh sent his chariot forces up into the delta and cleared them out and drove them away. He told them you aren’t welcome here and to back it up he sent his army to prove that they weren’t welcome there. So they got the point and they began to shift over this way and that is how we have the origin of Philistia. It is this group of Greek related warriors that caused Israel so much trouble throughout her history.

These people join up with the Philistines and intermarry with the Philistines so that by the time of David we have in that time, 1000 BC or approximately three centuries later, we have a whole family of these giants, one by the name of Goliath and he is the most famous. Another man is Ishbi-benob, these men didn’t have easy names, they had complicated names because their names meant something. Ishbi-benob was Goliath’s brother. Then they had another guy by the name of Saph, and he was in the family and his other name was Sippai. He’s known by two names in the Bible, Saph or Sippai. The third brother of Goliath was Lahmi and he was the third brother and we have another one and we never have his name mentioned in any text of Scripture so I call him Mr. X. And Mr. X was a very oddball kind of a person because he had six fingers and six toes, and this suggests one of the reasons that you have this giant race is that they are genetic freaks. The account of them, for those of you who are interested is given in 2 Sam. 21 and 1 Chron. 20. In those chapters you will find the destruction of the entire Goliath clan.

Please remember it’s not just David versus Goliath; it is the armies of Israel versus many of the giants. Now do we have archeological evidence that such people existed. Yes we do. They have found skeletons of this size in the holy land. In fact, they have found skeletons of human form with giant swords all over southern Europe dating from the time of the Greeks so therefore, although it’s not too well known, there is archeological evidence to substantiate Scriptural claims that such a giant race once existed.

These are the people, the “great and tall people” of verse 2 that they are afraid of. They were so afraid of these people in the ancient world that they had a saying, “who can stand before the children of Anak?” Nobody can stand before the children of Anak. This became an idiom that was sung across the ancient world and so when the nation of Israel began their westward penetration into the land they faced this tremendous problem.

Verse 3, “Understand, therefore, this day, that the LORD thy God is He who is going before thee,” and that is a Hebrew participle which means continuous action. “He is constantly, moment by moment going before you; as a consuming fire He shall destroy them, and He shall bring them down before thy face. So shalt thou drive them out, and destroy them quickly, as the LORD hath said unto thee.” This is one of the great reasons for a holy war and one of the cardinal characteristics of holy war is that it is a war waged with God on one side. God operates and manipulates through many armies down through history; you can see Him operating in the 20^th century through various movements and if you correlate this with prophecy and if you correlate it with the geography of Isaiah and Jeremiah you can pretty well figure out the movement of God in our century. But it is not as sharp and clear cut as it was during holy war. In holy war God was clearly and definitely on one side and He was out to utterly and totally destroy the other side. This is why in the book of Revelation when you have all those plagues poured out upon the earth; this is why we know that is not the Church Age because the plagues of the book of Revelation are plagues that are connected with holy war; the Church is never connected with holy war, only Israel. This is one evidence that the book of Revelation is describing the Age of Israel and a Tribulation situation.

Now verse 4, “Speak not thou in thine heart,” this is the tendency, they are going to go in and they are going to be amazed because as they begin to move westward they suddenly discover that all of a sudden people are destroyed before them, cities fall down, the enemy is panic stricken because God is on their side, and it’s just as though they touched a trigger and an atom bomb blew up. They are just awed by the power. And this is a warning that Moses says, when this happens to you listen, “Speak not thou in thine heart, when,” not after, a better English translation would be “when the LORD thy God hath cast them out from before thee, saying,” (quote) and this is what Moses fears these people will say, “‘For my righteousness the LORD hath brought me in to possess this land….” Moses uses a negative command here, don’t you ever say. In the Hebrew you have two ways of expressing negation. You had what we call lo, long “o” and when this prefixed a verb it meant never do this. For example, the Ten Commandments are written with the absolute negation. And Moses says make this a principle, never, never attribute a victory (applied to ourselves) in the Christian life or never attribute a victory in any spiritual sense of the Word to your righteousness. God does not have to bless you because of who and what you are.

This is the whole point he’s saying. God is going to bless them but it’s not going to be because they’re righteousness. It is going to be because He is judging these other people, “but for the wickedness of these nations the LORD doth drive them out from before thee.” In other words these people are on negative volition. We are told in Genesis 15, back in 2000 BC God told Abraham, listen Abraham, I promised all this real estate to you, your sons are going to live here but I want to tell you something Abraham, you’re going to have to spend a 400 year vacation in Egypt and you’re going to have to cool it down there for four centuries because I’ve got a work to do with these people. These Amorites that dwell in this land, and the Canaanites etc. have got to reach and peak in their negative volition. In other words, they have got to reject and reject and reject and reject until they develop such a powerful rejection that it pollutes the whole culture.

This is why in history this is the unique point in history where you have holy war authorized. People say the God of the Old Testament was a bloody God. People who say this have no concept of the justice of God. This entire civilization was on negative volition. The women were on negative volition, the men were on negative volition, the children were on negative volition, the whole culture was saturated with it. The whole intellectual environment was negative volition. So you had this tremendous rejection and there actually was no person, we know this from various Scriptures in Judges, etc. that there was not one person among all the people that lived in Canaan that would believe. This was how hard they had become. And whenever this happens in history God has His prerogative of removing that culture from the earth. So at this point God removes them but it is because God is using Israel to judge them, not because Israel herself is so good.

Verse 5, “Not for thy righteousness, nor for the uprightness of thine heart, do you go to possess their land, but for the wickedness of these nations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee, in order that He may perform the word which the LORD swore unto thy fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” This is the Abrahamic Covenant given in 2000 BC, you can check this in Genesis 12, 15, 17 and 22 where the Abrahamic Covenant is explained. The Abrahamic Covenant is the promise that God gives that He is going to give this real estate to the nation. Unfortunately there are some squatters on that real estate right now, people with negative volition; God is going to remove them.

Verse 6, the conclusion of this first section, “Understand, therefore, that the LORD thy God is giving thee not this good land to possess it for thy righteousness; for thou art a stiff-necked people.” This is what Moses [can’t understand word.” In the Hebrew it doesn’t say stiff-necked, “you are a people who constantly bend your neck.” It was used of an ox out in the field or any other animal that you had in a harness that would refuse to move, refuse to serve. It is always used of believers, never unbelievers, because the picture that you have here of the animal, the animal is already in the harness. That is a picture of a believer united to the program of God and once he is united to the program and work of God he refuses and says no, I am not going to do it. So God says you are just like that animal that bucks and I have a job for you to do and you refuse to do it and therefore you are a person who literally hardens his neck, or bends his neck. This is, therefore, a title of a people in phase two.

Now verses 7 through the end of the chapter are going to relate a long incident. I am not going to through it verse by verse, we’ll touch verses as we go down through. Let me give you the outline and background for this so it’ll make more sense as we go through. When the Jews came out of Egypt, here’s the Nile delta and the Red Sea apparently extended further northward that it does now. This is what we now call the Gulf of Aqaba and this is called Yom Suph in the Hebrew, the Red Sea. The Jews came across here from Egypt. When they got out here to a Mount called Sinai the Lord gave them the Ten Commandments. Moses was authorized by God to announce to the people that they were going to enter into a covenant with God. God spoke “Ten Words” it says in the Hebrew, not Commandments. We might say ten phrases. These were the only words in the Old Testament spoken directly by God to the entire nation. The Ten Commandments were so real that had you had a tape recorder and apart from the fact that God didn’t intervene, if you had had a tape recorder and a microphone and held it up you would have heard the literal words of God in Hebrew speak to these people. This was God speaking the “Ten Words.”

Then God stopped and the Bible says He never spoke again because the people said You’re too holy for us God, we have to have a mediator. So Moses went up on Mt. Sinai and Moses went up to get the rest of these commandments. Also, God wanted to write these down on tablets. We’re going to come to an interesting thing; some of you think five commandments are written on one tablet and five on the other, you’re going to get a shock. But Moses went up to Mt. Sinai to get a written copy of this treaty and while he was up there (while daddy’s away the mice will play), Moses went up to the mountain and guess what happened back at the ranch? The people began to go on negative volition and you had poor little Aaron who was a very weak leader, he let the people do anything. When Moses came down and demanded to know, Aaron, what’s the matter with you; you just formulated, and it says in the Hebrew, a bull, a gold bull. Not a calf, a bull. The reason for this was the bull was part of the fertility cult of the ancient East and Aaron had all the ladies take off their jewelry and melted this down and formed a gold bull, and this was their god. And Moses said to Aaron, hey Aaron, what’s the story here; I left you in charge of these people, I come back and what’s happened, the first thing I know they have a gold bull.

Aaron came back and said Moses, I’m so sorry, you see what happened was I took all of these gold earrings, etc. and we put them in a fire and it just happened a bull came out of the fire. This is what he said, he told Moses I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened, I can’t understand it, just put a little gold in the pot and look what happened to come out. He just couldn’t understand it. This is what Aaron’s excuse was to Moses. Obviously Moses didn’t buy it but nevertheless you can see what a nitwit Aaron was. This was Aaron’s whole line of defense. As we go through this text you’re going to see something because when Moses came back down and these people had sinned, etc. Moses broke the tablets. Tonight we’re going to find out what breaking the tablets means.

Verse 7, “Remember, and forget not, how thou provokedst the LORD thy God to wrath in the wilderness; from the day that thou didst depart out of the land of Egypt, until you came unto this place, ye have been rebellious against the LORD.” This is a Hebrew participle, “you have continually been rebelling against the LORD.” Isn’t that a flattering evaluation of the nation? But that’s what Moses told them. You people haven’t stopped rebelling, ever since I led you out of Egypt you’ve griped, you’ve rejected the Word, you’ve done this and done that and everything but what you were supposed to do. Reject, reject, reject, reject!

Verse 8, “Also in Horeb ye provoked the LORD to wrath,” and you could say “Even in Horeb,” the region around Sinai, “you provoked the LORD to wrath, so that the LORD was angry with you to have destroyed you.” And here’s the incident now.

Verse 9, “When I was gone up into the mount to receive the tables of stone, even the tables of the covenant,” what are the tablets of the covenant? I’m sure you’ve gone to Sunday school and seen these pictures that depict the Ten Commandments, I even think Cecil B. DeMille in his Ten Commandments had this, you have five commandments written here and 5 written there, etc. These are supposed to represent the two tablets. That is not the way the Ten Commandments were written. We now know, because as we have said the book of Deuteronomy was written in a treaty form. We know from archeology that when these treaties were made two copies of the treaty were made. For example today you would say you make a letter and a carbon copy of the letter.

In archeology we find that two tablets were always made of every treaty. So you have what we call the great king and you have a vassal king, the person down here who’s the low man on the totem pole to which he makes this treaty. The great king and the vassal king would put on a clay tablet a summary of the treaty, not the whole treaty; you couldn’t get the whole ting on a clay tablet. But they fit the essence of a treaty on a clay tablet. So one clay tablet would be for the great king and one tablet would be for the vassal king. And there are many of these tablets archeology has found and they’re found in duplicate. But where were the duplicates kept? The great king would take one tablet and put in his temple. For example you have the Hittite empire and in the areas around Eastern Turkey where the center of the Hittite empire was you have these tablets, gobs of them, that these kings made and they are on record; they kept a library where all these tablets were so that if something happened some day, they’d go in the library and find out where their tablet was and what’s the story with this nation, what’s our relationship with this nation. Unlike some countries these people kept records and they knew history.

Therefore the great king had these things on record in his temple. Then the vassal king would take his copy and put in his temple. Each one of these kings had a temple. Now here’s the exciting thing. When God, who stands for the great king here, makes a treaty with the thirteen vassals, or the twelve tribes, Moses plus the twelve tribes, He makes two copies of a summary statement of the treaty. Now where do these two copies go? Here’s the startling thing.

If the great king has to keep these in temple, where is God’s temple? God’s temple is in the Ark of the Covenant, essentially the center of the Tabernacle. So where is God going to keep His copy of the treaty? In the Ark. Now where is the temple of the nation Israel? The Ark of the Covenant, same place. So this is why in this case, different from all other cases, you have both copies of the treaty filed in the same location because God’s location, His library is right there, and the nation’s library is right there, so the two tablets are placed together. The two tablets do not have five commandments on one and five on the other; they both have ten because each is a copy of the other. It’s a totally duplicate copy. Now what happens?

Verse 10, “And the LORD delivered unto me two tables of stone written with the finger of God, [and on them was written according to all the words which the LORD spoke with you in the mount out of the midst of the fire in the day of the assembly.]” now it’s very interesting this occurred because these were always written by the great king for the vassal and the analogy follows here. God is doing the writing, not Moses. So the Ten Commandments or the Ten Words are the words spoken by God to the nation in the hearing of all and when Moses goes up to the mountain God is the one who puts those words into writing. This is important because I don’t know whether you are aware of it but one of the great philosophical debates of the time, particularly modern theology, is can God speak to man. Of course the whole Bible is founded on this presupposition and if this presupposition is wrong, as modern philosophy teaches, you might as well throw the Bible in the wastepaper basket and stop playing games with some sort of emasculated Christianity. You either have Biblical Christianity or you have atheism.

Those are the only two alternatives you can possibly get. This mixture of oil and water never works and eventually is going to break down. God always speaks in words in the Old Testament, this is very crucial to understand where we collide with modern thought. Here is the collision between Biblical Christianity and modern thought. When I am teaching or discussing in conversation the gospel to a person who is really a thinker, one who thinks in modern categories, I will always first clarify the issue and have him understand what I am saying. What I am saying is that God has spoken in history in real words and if he doesn’t believe that I go no further until we’ve dealt with that question, then I tell him the gospel.

Verse 11, “And it came to pass at the end of forty days and forty nights, that the LORD gave me the two tables of stone, even the tables of the covenant. [12] And the LORD said unto me, Arise, get thee down quickly from here; for thy people,” watch the switch, “for thy people which thou hast brought forth out of Egypt have corrupted themselves. They are quickly turned aside out of the way which I commanded them; they have made them a melted image.” You parents can understand the terminology. You know when the husband comes home and he’s tired and what does the wife say, “do you know what your son did today.” All of a sudden it’s your son, this transference of ownership, it’s strange how it always happens. But the same thing happened here and God said look Moses, these people have been fooling around and they’re your people Moses. And God really meant it; this wasn’t just being facetious because later on we understand why.

Verse 14, “Let me alone,” God said, that I may destroy them and blot out their name from under heaven, and I will make of thee a nation mightier and greater than they.” What is He saying? He is saying that at this point these people broke the covenant. A covenant is a legal document. It is in the strict sense of the word legalism. There’s a place for legalism and here’s one place for it where you have a legal format, a legal document and they broke this and under this covenant there was no mercy. The Abrahamic Covenant said that God would have to raise up out of the seed of Abraham a nation. All right, God could have fulfilled the Abrahamic Covenant by raising up another nation out of the loins of Moses. He could have done it just as easily as He had done, and destroyed the whole mess of them right there. This is how close they came.

Tonight we’re going to see something. We know the doctrine of confession; tonight we are going to learn what goes on upstairs when we sin. Here is one case of it where God said I am through, I have had it; these people have broken My covenant and I am not legally obligated to these people.

Verse 15, Moses says “So I turned and came down from the mount, and the mount burned with fire; and the two tables of the covenant were in my two hands.” And here’s where Moses does that strange thing. I often read this and wondered why, why did Moses get so mad that he throws the tablets down. I always conceived it that Moses was so mad at these people that he just took these tablets and just threw them, probably at the nearest person he could find. That was my image of why Moses destroyed the tablets, but that is not true. [Verse 16, “And I looked, and, behold, ye had sinned against the LORD your God, and had made you a melted calf; ye had turned aside quickly out of the way which the LORD had commanded you.”]

Verse 17 “And I took the two tables” or the tablets “and cast them out of my two hands, and broke them before your eyes.” The reason why Moses did this goes back to the legal practices of the Ancient Near East and when a covenant was broken the kings would smash those clay tablets that they had made to commemorate the treaty. This wasn’t an act in anger per se; it was an act of a legal nature in which the treaty was formally declared to be broken. And when Moses comes down he takes both tablets and smashes them because the treaty has been broken. And at this point the nation is hanging, in the words of Jonathan Edwards, over the pit of hell on the end of a thread. This is exactly the situation of the nation for they face judgment with no legal comeback. They have no base; the treaty that promised them blessing is gone.

In verse 18 we have the most fantastic picture of Moses. Moses is a fore view of the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, for when we sin as believers this is what Jesus Christ does for us. Moses did it for his nation. “And I fell down before the LORD, as at the first; forty days and forty nights I did neither eat bread, nor drink water, because of all your sins which ye sinned, in doing wickedly in the sight of the LORD, to provoke Him to anger. [19] For I was afraid of the anger and hot displeasure, wherewith the LORD was angry with you to destroy you,” but here’s the word of grace found in verse 19, “But the LORD hearkened unto me even at that time,” not “at that time also.” But in the Hebrew this connotes the sense that even at this time God heard me.

When you sin, there’s no reason why God has to hear you; there’s no reason why God has to hear me unless God Himself has established a legal relationship. And here’ it’s interesting; Moses says the treaty was broken, God didn’t have to listen and yet even here God listened to me. And God was very wroth, etc. [Verse 20, “And the LORD was very angry with Aaron to have destroyed him; and I prayed for Aaron also at the same time.”] Verse 21, “And I took your sin, the calf which ye had made, and burned it with fire, and stamped it, and ground it very small, even until it was as small as dust; and I cast the dust thereof unto the brook that descended out of the mount.”

Verse 24, he summarizes the situation, “Ye have been rebellious against the LORD form the day that I knew you. [25] Thus I fell down before the LORD forty days and forty nights, as I fell down at the first, because the LORD had said he would destroy you. [26] I prayed, therefore, unto the LORD, and said,” and watch the prayer, in this prayer we are going to see the only basis of appeal that Moses could have had. Here’s the most interesting thing. Put yourself in Moses’ shoes for a moment. Try to visualize yourself as Moses. What would you have done? I know what I would have done, I’d have gotten on a horse and take off for Egypt and say I’m going to start all over. That’s great God, just knock them out of the way and we’ll start all over. That’s my natural reaction and it’s probably yours too. But Moses stood around and he did something fantastic. He turned around and he went to the Lord in prayer and the basis of his prayer was the master plan of God. Remember the master plan of God we’ve gone over many times and that is God has His plan for creation and the plan for all of creation, the entire physical and spiritual universe is that God may glorify Himself, and “glorify” is a technical expression in the Hebrew and in the Greek which means that God is going to shine forth knowledge of Himself. [Blank spot]

This is why the New Testament says that every knee will bow to Jesus Christ. It is not teaching every person will be saved; it is teaching that even in hell, the people in hell for eternity have to bow. They don’t want to bow but they have to and this is what makes hell hell, because against their will Christ forces them to bow down. This is the picture we have for eternity where in eternity these people will have a revelation of God. God is not absent from hell. Hell is a state where people in negative volition go but don’t think they don’t see the revelation of God. They see God’s righteousness and His justice, that’s where His righteousness and justice are revealed for all eternity to the people of hell. They are revealed to us in heaven but through the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ and this is why in heaven Jesus Christ in His resurrection body will always bear the marks of the work on the cross. We won’t in our resurrection bodies; His body will be the only body that is marked for all eternity so that when we turn around we will recall the righteousness and justice of God were poured out on Him.

So the righteousness and justice of God will be revealed and this is why the Bible is such an offensive message. This is why when I was freshman in college I was driven away from Christianity, when I first realized this. Unknown to me this was the first step toward my salvation. Nevertheless the first message of Christianity that I really perceived was that you either say that Christianity was totally true and everybody else is totally wrong or you say that Christianity is wrong and we have sort of a law of average prevail elsewhere. Christianity is very offensive; the Old Testament is very offensive in this regard. It has no compromise.

Here we see the same thing; the master plan of God says that God will glorify Himself, period. He does this by plan of the angelic conflict, and He also deals with the plan of salvation. The angelic conflict pertains to angels and the plan of salvation pertains to man. These two plans side by side go on down through history and serve to explain much of contemporary history for us and gives us a very firm framework. All of this goes back to the master plan of God and Moses is going to go back to this. He has no other place to go in his prayer.

Verse 16, “I prayed, therefore, unto the LORD, and said, O Lord God, destroy not thy people and thine inheritance, whom thou hast redeemed through thy greatness, whom thou hast brought forth out of Egypt with a mighty hand.” What he’s saying here is Lord, You have started to redeem this nation, step one, You had the plagues of the Exodus, the Passover; step two was the Red Sea incident; step three was the provision in the wilderness up to this point and what Moses is saying is Lord, you’ve carried out step one, step two, and you’ve started to carry out step three, why stop in the middle of your plan; why mar your plan with an imperfect conclusion. You’re a perfect God, would it make sense for God in history to start moving in one direction, stop and turn around and move in another direction. Does it make sense for a perfect God to have an imperfect plan? It would mar your testimony God; it would mar your program of glorifying yourself. This is the basis for Moses prayer.

So he says in verse 27, “Remember thy servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; look not unto the stubbornness of this people, nor to their wickedness, nor to their sin, [28] Lest the land from which thou broughtest us out say,” he’s thinking now of the Egyptians taunting the Jews and saying ha-ha, we told you so, and he said look Lord, if you let us down out here in the desert, look what’s going to happen, these Egyptians are going to say “Because the LORD was not able to bring them into the land which He promised them, and because he hated them, He hath brought them out to slay them in the wilderness.” This is a remarkable prayer, this is a man who thought and this is the most enviable characteristic I find in the prayers of God’s Word. As I read these prayers it’s humiliating to think of my own prayer because these prayers are prayers by people who have thought this thing through and when they pray they come before the throne of grace fully prepared, having thought through the alternatives, just as though you were to go to an interview with the head of a corporation; you’d have prepared what you were going to say because the person that’s chairman of a corporation or a boss, he hasn’t got time to listen to some person slobber all over the place. He wants to know who are you, what’s your qualifications, etc. And these people when they come to God in the Scripture come prepared and they are able to step before the presence of God and say Lord, this is what we want and this is why we want it.

You’ll see this well-thought out prayer ends, verse 29, “Yet they are Thy people and Thine inheritance, whom You broughtest out by Thy mighty power and by Thine outstretched arm.” What he’s saying is Lord, he develops this concept of a master plan, You could cut this short, yes You could Lord, and You could start over, yes You could, and You would perfectly fulfill all Your promises, there wouldn’t be a conflict, that’s true, but if You stop here You would give occasion for blasphemy on the part of the unbelievers and they could look around and say ha, maybe the God of Israel wasn’t such a big God after all, He wiped out Pharaoh and the Red Sea but when He got over there and had a tough time out in the wilderness He dried up and blew away. So therefore in order to protect God’s program of glorification Moses prayed this prayer and this is the basis of his appeal.

Now we come to the 11 verses in chapter 10 that depict the results of his prayer. There are many things here, I want to summarize them for you and point out something as we go into this. Some of you will be exposed to the theory, if you haven’t already, of multiple authorship of the Old Testament, i.e. people by the name of JEDP; these are four hypothetical read actors that supposedly compiled most of the Pentateuch and a lot of other literature of the Old Testament. For example, if you get a course in religion in college this is what you get. They always say “D”, D is the Deuteronomos, and they say D is around 621 BC and D wrote and made up Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy is a wholesale fabrication. And the basis for dividing the text up like this, I call it splitting the Bible with a razor blade, but the reason why they cut up the Bible like this is because they come to chapters like chapter 10 and seeing these first 11 verses and they say, oh, if you look here you’ll notice things are out of chronological order.

For example, in verse 1, “At that time, the LORD said unto me, Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first, and come up unto me into the mount, and make thee an ark of wood.” But then they say, and they will get some poor college freshman in the classroom that doesn’t know anything and they’ll say look, if you’re really thinking you’ll look back to chapter 9 and look carefully at verse 25 and you will find in verse 25 that Moses has already been up on the mountain for forty days. And if you compare this with Exodus there’s a conflict in sequence, and the conflict in sequence is that in Exodus you have God speaking to Moses here, then you have Moses go up on the mount for forty days. Here you have Moses up on the mountain and then God speaking to him: oh oh, contradiction!

Here is the reason why the text is put this way. In the Hebrew you have logical sequence, not chronological sequence. That is something to remember whenever you deal with these kinds of arguments. There is a logical sequence but not a chronological sequence, so the thing may be out of order chronologically but it’s in order logically and the nearest thing that probably would be familiar to you that you would be read that would be like this would be your newspaper. If you’ve had journalism you know that in a news story they will summarize and put the interesting features in the first paragraph. Then he’ll develop later on, and if you read the news story as a chronological history, you’d have a problem because they aren’t interested in developing a chronological sequence; they’re interested in holding your attention to get you down to the end part. So this is a sermon, this is preached. The entire book of Deuteronomy is one sermon. What would you do if I preached 21 chapters? I know what some of you would do, you’d be having a good sleep.

But the people in that day could stay awake because this was the only medium of communication. They didn’t sit in front of a boob tube six hours a day and let the electrons do all the thinking for them. These people had to think orally, they had to memorize things. For example, many of them memorized the entire Old Testament and could quote it verbatim. And not only did they memorize it but some of it counted every letter in every book and so we have, if you look in some of the Hebrew texts you will find notices in the margin where they counted every letter. And they got out and they had 10,250 letters and they were supposed to have 10, 251 letters they threw out the text. In order for the text to be approved they had to have exactly the right number of letters. That’s how exact these people were, that’s how close they paid attention to the Hebrew text. This is why you can hold in your hand an accurate Bible. So these people paid very close attention.

Moses said, therefore, in verse 1, “At that time the LORD said unto me, Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first, and come up unto Me into the mount, and make thee an ark of wood. [2] And I will write on the tables the words what were in the first tables which thou didst break, and thou shalt put them in the ark. [3] And I made an ark of acacia wood, and hewed two tables of stone like unto the first, and went up into the mount, having the two tables in mine hand.” This is out of chronological order, but don’t be flustered by it, this is simply logical order because Moses wants to drive to a point. What’s the point? Verse 5, “And I turned myself and came down from the mount, and put the tables in the ark which I had made,” why does Moses say this? Because in verse 5 we have covenant renewal. And at this point that covenant is now put back into effect.

This is what Moses is trying to say, that as a result of the forty days prayer and his intercession on the mountain, now God made a second copy of that treaty and the treaty is once again in force. The man saved his nation by an act of prayer, and he at that time came down to the point where there was no legal base… for example, when we sin and get out of fellowship, and no believer is immune to sin, everyone has his weak and strong area; you have a weak area and you go out and you sin, maybe it’s gossip, maybe it’s something in your mind, mental attitude sin, but you sin. Now I want to show you the like passage in the New Testament. Turn to 1 John 2:1-2, here’s what’s going on, you may have thought confession seems kind of trivial. It is trivial as far as we are concerned, but you have to understand what’s going on. When you and I use confession and we use 1 John 1:9 look what’s happening above. “My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” Advocate is a Greek word for defense attorney. Verse 2, “And He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.”

What John is saying is that in the throne room of God, if you can depict it this way, you would have the Father, you would have yourself there, you are the accused, you have sinned so you face the righteousness and justice of God and on your right hand stands your defense attorney. Who is the defense attorney that represents your case before the Father? Jesus Christ. And when the charge comes that so and so, here’s Charlie Brown and he’s sinned 751 times today, so at the end of a twenty-four hour period here’s Charlie Brown’s case up in the throne room. Satan always loves to get into this, Satan is the accuser, he can’t stop accusing anyone and he says oh God, look at Charlie Brown, your famous little boy down there, and look what he’s done. Satan is the original tattletale. So he comes up and brings your case before the Father. So the Father says all right, this is a violation of my absolute righteousness. On what basis do you stand here? Jesus Christ steps up and He says Father, he stands on the basis of My shed blood. This is what goes on when you sin. So though to us the act is finished at the point of confession you have to realize that it’s cheap for us but very expensive for God after the initial decision for salvation is made.

In Heb. 7:25 you see this doctrine again, “Wherefore, he” this in the connotation, the context of a high priest, He, Jesus Christ, “is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them. How is the basis of your salvation? Because Jesus Christ is making intercession. By the way, this should decrease any pride you might have in your prayer because it’s not your prayer that solves the problem. You see, God just tells you all I want you to do believer is just acknowledge responsibility and you let Me take care of the rest. But while you’re doing that look what’s going on topside. This is what’s going on: the Son is making prayer for you and if He stopped praying I’d hate to say what would happen to us.

The Son has a job to do and His job is to uphold phase two; His job is still to continue the program of God onto its completion. We say eternal security, yes, on the basis of the promised work of God but part of the promised work of God is the continuing intercession of the Son and the Son is going to intercede in order to bring this plan to its conclusion, but if the Son didn’t intercede, of course He won’t, but if the Son didn’t intercede the plan of God would come to a screeching halt. Your salvation and mine hinges on a continual intercessory ministry of God the Son. So next time you feel that all your friends have forsaken you and you feel that everyone’s turned their back on you, just think God the Son hasn’t turned His back on you, He’s still praying for you and He will continue to pray for you forever.

Heb. 4:15, “For we have not an high priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. [16] Let us, therefore, come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.” The reason we can come boldly to the throne of grace is because there’s already someone there who has gone ahead of us, Jesus Christ. There are other references, Rom. 8:34, etc.

Let’s finish the last few verses of Deuteronomy. These last few verses are designed to show us that Moses’ intercession secured the salvation of the nation. Verse 6, “And the children of Israel took their journey from Beeroth Beneja-akan to Moserah; there Aaron died, and there he was buried, and Eleazar, his son, ministered in the priest’s office in his stead. [7] From there they journeyed into Gudgodah; and from Gudgodah to Jotbathah, a land of rivers of waters.” You say why is this in here? Why stick these verses in here? There is a reason for it. The reason why Moses sticks these verses in here is to show that not only was the covenant put back in the Ark and in force but the Aaronic priesthood continued uninterrupted, and he’s saying that when Aaron died his son took over, just as though there had been no sin. God completely kept up the priesthood.

Verse 8, “At that time the LORD separated the tribe of Levi, to bear the Ark of the Covenant of the LORD, to stand before the LORD to minister unto him, and to bless in His name, unto this day.” This is out of chronological sequence. Verse 9, “Wherefore Levi has no part nor inheritance with his brethren; the LORD is his inheritance, according as the LORD thy God promised him.” What’s he saying there? Again Levi goes on continually. Levi was instituted before this sin incident, but he says look, Levi is still in the same position. And all of these historical details are packed in these last few verses of this section to show one thing, that there’s continuity, that as Levi was installed so Levi remains today.

And that is your story believer, because if you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ you are in the plan of God. At the point where you have accepted Christ, you’re out here, and I don’t know your background but I know from the basis of the Word of God that you got three or four thousands if not millions of sin between this point and this point, and the very fact that you can sit in that pew tonight and exist as a believer not under the judgment of God is because all during this time when you sinned there was somebody interceding for you at the right hand of the throne, Jesus Christ and the doctrine of Mediatorship. This is what keeps you going as a believer, not your prayer. If our prayer kept us going we’d fall flat before the evening was over. The prayers that keep us going as believers are the prayers of the Lord Jesus Christ and this is why we can come boldly to the throne of grace and this is why we can say “if we confess our sins, He will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

Next time we’ll continue with this last section of the first half of Deuteronomy.