Lesson 21

Review of Divine Essence – 10-12:22

 

Chapter 5 is the basis of spirituality which is the essence of God and our personal relationship with Him.  Chapter 6 dealt with the essence of spirituality which was living in the Word.  The essence of spirituality in the Bible is not some mystical experience; the essence of spirituality in the Bible is adherence to the Word of God, taking it in, constantly using it.  Chapter 7 dealt with a conflict of spirituality in which you find yourself automatically locked in conflict; whether we like it or not we are in conflict. 

 

I was talking to some students after a seminar and the Christian is the only true radical in the world. In a very real sense we are total revolutionaries on all fronts because out entire intellectual position is utterly opposed to every other position in the world.  There is no other system of philosophy on earth that holds to a doctrine to creation out of nothing, only Biblical Christianity does and Old Testament Biblicism.  Therefore from the start we are at utter antagonism, at utter odds with the entire world system of thought.  There is no other system in the world that says and gives a basis for moral values apart from Christianity.  There are a lot of moral standards in the world but there is no base for moral standards apart from a personal God.  This is the trouble on the campus.  Many students, realizing that there is no basis for morality, there is no basis for standards, just draw the logical conclusion, therefore we will go out and raise hell.  This is a logical conclusion if first you don’t have the base for moral standards and that base is a personal holy Creator.  Without that everything goes; everything depends on that.  So never fall for the line that says it doesn’t matter what you believe it’s only how you live.  Nonsense!  It’s always what you believe and it really doesn’t matter how you live.  If there’s one way you want to discount it it’s from the other direction but everything hangs on what you believe. 

 

Chapter 8 dealt with the first kind of error that you can get yourself into and that is forgetting that we are creatures; that’s the first kind of error and you remember the famous slogan, “Man shall not live on the basis of bread alone but on the basis of everything that proceeds out of the mouth of God.”  The second kind of error that man can make and that is forget that he is a fallen creature.  This is the error we discussed with the two tablets and with the breaking of these tablets.  We showed how the Old Testament is a treaty formed between God as the great king and the vassal tribes, twelve vassal tribes God made a treaty with.  These tribes, when Moses came down from the mountain, when these tribes rebelled and Aaron got all the people together and the girls tossed their earrings in the fire and out came this bull and Aaron sat around and said gee Moses, I don’t know what happened, we put these earrings in the fire and look what happened, it just happened to come out of that fire.  Of course Moses didn’t buy this and Moses condemned the nation and at that time he smashed the treaty. 

 

And I told you that I always felt reading the Scripture that Moses got mad and the reason he broke the tablets is he was infuriated with the people.  Of course, I was projecting myself into his position and he would come down and take these tablets and just smash them.  That’s not why Moses broke them.  He might have been mad but he did not break the tablets because he was mad.  He broke the tablets because that was the customary thing to do in the ancient world when a treaty had been violated.  Any time one of the vassal kings in the international world violated the great king or the one who had made the treaty, that treaty, the carbon copies of it or the clay copies would be broken.  That breaking of the tablets is very significant.  It indicates legally there was no further relationship between God and the nation.  That nation was condemned.  However, also in chapter 9 you find the mercy of God.  God is a merciful God and He listens to Moses when Moses makes intercession for the nation.  At this point the entire nation’s salvation depends on the prayer of one man and the mediator, the one who makes the prayer is Moses. 

 

We drew a logical conclusion from this and said this is what happens to us if we are believers in Jesus Christ and we sin.  Theologically there would be no basis for our continuing salvation apart from the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ actively mediates in the throne room for you and for me.  It’s interesting and richly rewarding to meditate upon the fact that Jesus Christ never tires of making intercessory prayer on our behalf.  No matter how many sins we do He continues to intercede for us at the Father’s throne and this is the basis for salvation; this is the basis for eternal security, the Mediatorship of the Lord Jesus Christ as the Great High Priest, covered in extensive details in the book of Hebrews.

 

Now we come to the last section of this series and this chapter is going to deal with a summary, that is the either/or of spirituality.  The either/or of spirituality is expressed in these two chapters.  These two chapters are going to conclude the section.  This whole section has been on the heart, “thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul.”  Heart means, if you take the essence of man and look at man’s soul, these are the things that are contained in the heart: first, let’s look at the soul itself.  You have volition, conscience, and you have satisfaction in personal relationships, you have temporality, you have rationality and memory, you have mobility, you have power and you have continuity.  Those are the characteris­tics or attributes of the human soul.  Of those there are some that are extracted from this and called “heart” in Scripture.

 

Heart equals volition, conscience, satisfaction in personal relationship, rationality and memory.  All those are contained in the word “heart” in Scripture.  “Heart” in Scripture does not necessarily refer to emotions.  In fact, out of the 154 times that it is used in the New Testament, 120 of those times it refers to intellect.  In the Old Testament there is no word for intellect and therefore heart is used.  So believing with all your heart, etc. simply means that you believe this way: you have rationality and you understand the message.  To see this, turn to Rom. 10; we’ll go through a verse I’m sure you have heard again and again and you’ve always heard it in the wrong context.  This verse has been used by every evangelist to justify coming down the aisle.  I’m going to turn that verse right around and use it to prove that you don’t come down the aisle.

 

Rom. 10:9-10, “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. [10] For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.”  I’ve heard it said that if a person doesn’t have the courage to come down the aisle that’s a sign the person isn’t saved.  If a person doesn’t have the courage to stand up for Christ that’s a sign that he’s not saved.  This may very well be true but you can’t get it from this verse because this verse says in no unclear fashion that confession is necessary for salvation, so if you want to make coming down the aisle fit in this verse you’re going to have to say logically that a person can’t be saved unless they do come down the aisle. So you’ve got yourself in a position.  Here Paul says confess, believe.  Then he says belief is for righteousness and confession is for salvation. 

 

What is the story here?  We’ve got this verb “confess” and it’s in a conditional clause and it means that this is necessary for salvation.  So what are we going to say, that this justifies coming down the aisle.  Does this justify what some churches say, that you have to confess by being baptized before you can be saved?  No, because as I have said again and again, if people would only spend time to study the Old Testament before they get into the New Testament they wouldn’t have these problems.  But the Old Testament takes a lot of time to study and most people are lazy, including preachers.  In the last few weeks it seems like I’ve met more lazy preachers; I had one preacher tell me yesterday that Jesus was a modernist and a liberal and couldn’t be a fundamentalist.  I was giving this seminar on the authority of Scripture and he didn’t like it; he didn’t like the authority of Scripture so I said what’s your authority; he didn’t have any authority.  My last seminar was on how to study the Word and he didn’t like that so he came up and told me that Jesus was a modern­ist and a liberal.  I said what do you mean by that.  I told him if you can cite me one evidence from Scripture or one extra-Biblical evidence I will personally sit down and let you lead the seminar. 

 

As a professor at Dallas Seminary said in very picturesque terms, although maybe this isn’t apropos from the pulpit, but they have constipation of the mind and diarrhea of the mouth.  This is what goes on with a lot of these people; they are afflicted with this all over the place.  This is what happens when these people get up in pulpits and then we wonder what’s happened to Christianity. Why is it that the Christians aren’t doing anything today?  They’re not going to do anything; the sheep just follow the shepherd.  So if the shepherd is out sitting under a tree the sheep are going to be out there too; sheep are going to be wandering all over the place and it’s because these men are not doing their job.

 

This is a beautiful example of this because all it takes is about two or three hours in Deut. 30 to understand this and the key to it is just one verse before this, verse 8, “But what saith it? The word is near thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart; that is, the word of faith, which we preach.”  That happens to be a quote from Deut. 30 and you’ll see this occur again and again, particular in the next section of Deuteronomy, Moses insists that it’s in your mouth.  What does this expression mean?  If you check this out carefully in Deuteronomy, what it means is that you can verbalize the message, meaning you understand it.  To the ancient Jew you did not understand anything until you could repeat it back. And this is what it meant, if you confess it simply means… this is not confess in the 1 John 1:9 sense of the word, this means to speak. 

 

To the Jew there was no word for think and in the Hebrew there is no word to really think in our sense of the word.  They used the word “say in your heart,” that’s the Hebrew idiom to think.  So when the Old Testament saint said I am thinking he was saying I am saying in my heart.  Thinking was always conceived as speaking.  So you don’t have to buy this line that we believe the Scriptures are inspired in their doctrine and ideas but we do not believe in the inspiration of the words.  How can you believe in the inspiration of the ideas without the words?  Ideas and words go together, you cannot separate the two.  Either both are inspired or both are not.  You can’t have this split.  And the proof of it is that in the Old Testament they had this idiom, “say in your heart.”  Belief and thinking in the heart were always conceived of as speaking.

 

Therefore in Rom. 10:8 where he quotes Deut. 30 he’s saying the word is near unto you. What does this mean?  Back to Deut. 30:11, here is the Old Testament context for this passage.  Remember this is the end of the sermon, Moses is just about ready to quit and he wants to summarize and he says this: “For this commandment which I command thee this day, it is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off.”  What’s the point?  The point is that it’s known to you.  Verses 12, “It is not in heaven, that you should say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it.”  It is not in heaven, in other words if things were in heaven in the ancient world they were conceived of as unrevealed truth.  If it was in heaven it was up in the counsels of God, it had not yet been revealed to the counsels of men and therefore men did not know it.  The issue here is do you know the Word of God? 

 

Verse 13, “Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou should say, Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it?”  There again the issue is on do you know it, do you have access to it.  Finally, verse 14 you’ll recognize because this is what Paul quotes over in Romans, “But the word is very near unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.”  This is not saying that they do it, it’s in the mouth and heart that they might do it.  And “in thy mouth and in thy heart,” mouth means here that you know it, this is just a function for your intellect, comprehend, and heart is used here for the volition, believe.  So here you have rationality operating, and here you have volition operating and that is what Paul is talking about.   “If you confess the Lord with thy mouth” means if you understand it so you can repeat it back. 

 

Application: when you witness to some one about Jesus Christ a tremendous thing to remember is after you have explained the gospel ask the person to repeat it back.  If the person can’t repeat it back the person does not understand and cannot believe.  If the person can repeat it back he may not believe it but at least you’ve discharged your responsibility before the Lord, you have shared the gospel and that person knows it.  So that’s what this means.  “If you confess” means if you understand it to the point you can repeat it back, and you believe, then you can be saved.  That has nothing to do with coming down an aisle; that was never intended.  Paul never had aisles.  In the first place they didn’t have aisles in the synagogue so he couldn’t have people coming down the aisle. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that an evangelist has no right to use coming down the aisle.  That’s his business.  I’m just saying that this has nothing to do with your salvation.  The point is do you know it and can you believe it.

 

Back to Deut. 10:12, “And now, Israel, what doth the LORD thy God require of thee, but to fear the LORD thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve the LORD thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul.”  And at this point Moses is going to begin the conclusion of this section.  It’s very important we understand this because we are going to get into coming sections, because when Moses gets into chapter 12, from chapter 12 through chapter 16 he is going to deal with a topic; in chapters 17-20 he’s going to deal with something else, all the way down to 26.  He’s going to deal with some of the most fascinating material that we can explore as Christians today.  He is going to deal with what holds a nation together.  In chapters 12-14 he is going to define what is the basis of unity for any national entity. And during these chapters you will see something that is missing from our society and why the United States can never exist as one nation until this is straightened. 

 

Then in chapters 17-20 we are going to see the basis for social justice in the Biblical sense of the word.  It’s a little different from the social gospel that you’ve heard because the basis for it is capitalism and free enterprise.  Then you’re going to see civil rights; he has a whole section on civil rights.  You’re going to see some interesting things there because I am going to take you through the Bible and show you how this differs from the modern concept of civil rights.  Then finally the obligation or allegiance of a citizen in chapter 26.  These are all details of life; these all deal with these things that we have referred to.  Here’s your life and you have issues of fellowship with other believers, you have loved ones, you have sex, you have money, you have jobs, you have relaxation if you can find time, you have health, you have relationships with law and government as a citizen, you have your friends, and all these things are details of life.  And you have to, as a Christian, be able to operate in all these areas according to the will of God.  These things are important, yes, but Moses is concentrating first on the heart.  Get the heart attitude right and all these details straighten themselves out. 

 

This section is the last part of the section on the heart, and this is why he says Israel, I’m concluding now and I want to summarize, what more does the Lord want of you but these things.  What are these things: “to fear the LORD thy God” is the basic point, that’s the Old Testament expression for faith.  It isn’t the word to fear in the sense that we use the word to fear; it’s a sense of respect His character… respect His character!  And notice something in Scripture, respect for God comes before love of God.  You cannot love God if you disrespect Him. This is something that modernism always leads to.  They emphasize love, oh, we’re going to love, we have a loving God and all the rest of it.  They don’t have a loving God, impossible!  How can you love someone you don’t respect?  Being perfectly blunt I have never seen a liberal that I considered one who loved God; never!  They disrespect Him, they make snotty remarks about Him, and they’re always passing around theology pamphlets, etc. attacking His person. They don’t respect God and therefore they can’t love Him and they show that they can’t love Him. 

 

So it starts out with a respect, verse 12, “Respect the LORD thy God,” and later on down in the list you have love.  You “respect the LORD thy God, to walk in all His ways,” walk in His ways refers to the details of life, “and to love Him,” there’s your heart attitude, and finally the last section is a summary of the whole thing, “and to serve the LORD thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul,” with all thy heart is the inner mental attitude and with all thy soul are the details of your life because soul means life. 

 

Verse 13, “To keep the commandments of the LORD, and His statutes, which I command thee this day for thy good.”  How do we keep the commandments of the Lord?  Once again we go back to the concept of living in the Word.  What is living in the Word in the Old Testament?  The first thing you have to take in the Word, intake.  This is where a lot of Christians fall down.  We have people that come in here on Sunday morning and never open their Bible during the week.  It’s interesting, when you talk to these people the human viewpoint starts coming out.  These people don’t spend time in the Word, it’s obvious what’s happening and they’ll get themselves in a jam and come crying and wonder what happened.  It’s very easy; you can’t put out what you don’t take in.  If you don’t take the Word of God in, and I don’t mean you have to take it from me, I’m talking about the people that don’t take it in period. 

 

This is the first thing, to take in the Word of God.  Then we have the second thing and that is to digest it.  How do you digest the Word?  You simply do it by meditating upon it and organizing it in your mind categorically so that you are able to walk into any situation and apply it.  And you walk into another situation and you’ve got some doctrine, you have little boxes in your mind, doctrine here, doctrine here, doctrine here, this is why we divide the plan of salvation up into phase one, phase two, phase three.  I use that designation because to me it’s the easiest way of remembering and sorting out Biblical truth.  You have all your phase one truth that concerns the point of salvation.  You have all your phase two truth that concerns living the Christian life.  And you have all your phase three truth that concerns dying and dying grace.  So for example if you talk to someone who’s dying in the hospital.  You don’t talk to them about phase one if they’re a believer, you don’t talk about phase two because their phase two is all over, so you pick out doctrine out of the box, phase three, and you can share with them the Word of God.  This is what it means to digest, to organize it in your mind.

 

Third, this is to use it mentally.  This is mental criticism. This means that all day long here you are and here’s your brain and it’s taking in human viewpoint, from the newspaper, from TV, from everything else and you’ve got to have something neutralize that and the only thing you can have on the inside is the divine viewpoint of the Word of God and when the divine viewpoint is in your brain, you memorize Scripture, or in the form of categorical doctrine, then human viewpoint comes in and you’ve got something to compare it with.  

 

The fourth thing is to claim the promises of God.  This means when the pressure comes on and something happens in your life and all of a sudden you feel the blows of adversity and suffering, you remember Romans 8:28, “All things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to His purpose.”  It doesn’t say that thing is good and Christianity never advocates a system of self-hypnosis called positive thinking.  That is not Christianity.  Christianity is realistic and it says this is bad, this is ugly.  I want you to remember the one time Jesus Christ wept that’s recorded in Scripture is the time when a friend of His died. And the reason Jesus Christ wept was not just because that man died but because the other people were suffering and Lazarus, remember, his sister came out and said Lord, if you’d only been here my brother wouldn’t have died, and then it says one of the shortest sentences in the English Bible, “Jesus wept.”  Why did Jesus weep?  Here you have the Creator, the one who could have changed it all and yet His is weeping, because suffering hurts Jesus Christ and it is not in the will of God. We have brought suffering upon ourselves in Adam, that’s the source of suffering, and it causes God hurt as it causes us hurt.  Therefore promises in the Word are real promises.  We deal with real suffering. We’re not self-hypnotizing ourselves and saying it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist.  It does exist and the Word of God is so tremendous that it admits it exists and then it says take all your care and cast it upon the Lord, for He shall sustain thee.  This is the challenge that every believer faces in this life moment by moment, to claim these promises of the Word. 

 

Then finally confession.  If you have taken in the Word you will know when you are out of fellowship because the Holy Spirit will take that Word and utilize it and you will be able to evaluate yourself if you are out of fellowship or not.

 

This is what it means to keep the commandments of the Lord in verse 13, “and His statutes, which I command thee this day for thy good.”  Then in verses 14-15 he begins to develop the doctrine of divine essence again.  Notice how divine essence has come up again and again and again.  Here he says, “Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens belong to the LORD thy God, the earth also, with all that therein is. [15] Only the LORD had a delight in thy fathers to love them, and he chose their seed after them,” do you see the contrast?  He is saying that the God is God of the universe.  To the Jews that was a fantastic statement but to you that should be a lot more fantastic because you live in the space age and you know the expanse of the universe.  So this statement takes on even more tremendous significance because this means that the God of outer space, the God who has created galaxies and galaxies, this God has chosen this planet and in history chosen this race, and in our age chosen you to be His instruments.   That is a tremendous statement.  And that should give you meaning and purpose to your life, that you are a chosen one.  If you have believed in Jesus Christ you are elect; elect means to choose, and this means that God chose you out of all the possibilities in the entire universe He picked you.  God has a purpose for your life and this election stands behind it. 

 

Now we come to verse 16 and we have to stop for a moment to explain something. “Circumcise, therefore, the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiff-necked.”  This is a command given in the Old Testament.  It is a command that is given in the imperative mood.  This means that you are to do it.  How do you circumcise the foreskin of your heart in the Old Testament?  It is never given to a New Testament person, only to an Old Testament person. Why?  It goes back to the dynamics of spirituality in the Old Testament.  I was asked by a student about the Old Testament saint, did they have new natures.  The evidence of Scripture is that they didn’t but they had an equivalent.  The enabling work of the Holy Spirit obviously was working in the Old Testament. For example, you take the Old Testament saint, he had his heart; he had a heart in the Old Testament but it wasn’t the new heart of the New Testament because the new heart of the New Testament came in with the new covenant of Jer. 31 and Ezek. 36.  So this new heart is something peculiar to our age.

 

Nevertheless, in the Old Testament the Holy Spirit didn’t indwell, but the Holy Spirit had an enabling ministry by which the Old Testament saint could live for God. We’re not given the details of this because under the Old Testament economy the emphasis wasn’t upon the individual, it was upon the nation.  But the Old Testament saint had an enabling ministry of the Holy Spirit that caused him to have victory over the sin nature.  So when Moses said, let me appropriate this, he said “circumcise,” and the word “circumcise” here is in an imperative mood because it’s saying you do this.  In other words the equivalent today would be confessing your sin, but in the Old Testament he used this verb to circumcise because it looked forward to what ultimately would happen.  In Deut. 30 the word is turned around and it says in the Millennium God will circumcise you.  This means that God will do this, which is the regeneration of the New Covenant. 

 

In the New Testament, Col. 2:15, we have this but the point to remember in this discussion with Moses is that he’s not talking to you, he’s not talking to me, he’s talking to saints that lived before the Church Age.  These saints did not have a new heart.   Proof: in Psalm 51 after David sinned David asked give me a new heart, “create in me a new heart.”  Therefore you might say that fellowship in the Old Testament was looked upon as getting a new heart, in other words they get out of fellowship, they get back in fellowship and they’d get a new heart.  This is not like we have; we have a permanent abiding new nature.  It’s just whether we let the sin nature control it or not that’s the issue.  So there’s a difference between the New Testament saint and the Old Testament saint and you have to keep this in mind.

 

Basically, as far as the life is concerned the only difference in experience is that you know things that they never did. This is why Jesus tells us you are My friends, and then He defines the word “friends” and He says a servant doesn’t know every­thing but a friend is one in whom you can confide and He says I told you everything that God has for you, so therefore you I call My friends, but I previously called you My servants.  The Old Testament saint was known as a servant; New Testament saints are known as friends, John 15.  The difference is in difference in scope of revelation. 

 

Now let’s look at this word “circumcise” a moment.  It is obviously taken from a physical act of circumcision.  What is the physical act of circumcision and it’s purpose; it was given first under the Abrahamic Covenant to all the seed of Abraham.  Abraham plus all his seed, it was anticipating Moses.  Moses did not bring about circumcision, Abraham did.  Why?  Because of the following factors.  First, it was a sign or purification. Second, it was a judging of the flesh.  It was the only mutilation of the body tolerated in the Old Testament, any other mutilation of the body meant that you were excluded from national fellowship.  If a person was deformed in any way they could not partake of the Temple rituals because they did not permit any defamation of the body, any mutilation which the Canaanites did all the time.  Therefore we conclude from this that it was a judgment upon the flesh.  It looked forward to judgment of the flesh and it’s interesting that this is the only mutilation tolerated in the Old Testament.

 

Third, it involved the organ of procreation because the only bona fide production that you can get is out of a pure heart.  The emphasis here is on production.  So it’s no accident that God utilized this in the organ of procreation because He was emphasizing production.  They cannot have production without a pure heart.  This goes in the Christian life, all the good works that a Christian can do and all the rest of it are just junk in God’s sight unless it comes out of the right mental attitude.  You can give money to the church, you can do this, you can do that and all the rest of it but all of it is a waste of time if you don’t do it with a pure heart. 

 

Finally, the fourth thing, it was to mark off the Israelite from the Canaanite population.  It was a sign of separation.  You couldn’t have any intermarriage without it becoming obvious that you had a difference in the population. The Canaanites had to be distinguished from the Israelites.  And of course marriage, an adulterous marriage is always the sign of violation of faith and covenant.  Therefore, again it is no accident that this is involved in the marriage relationship of separation.  It’s a sign of separation.

 

The fifth thing, it was always accomplished on the 8th day and that’s no accident either.  An infant could not be circumcised until the 8th day and could not be circumcised after the 8th day. If he was circumcised he had to be circumcised on the 8th day.  Why?  Because throughout the Old Testament you have a very strange thing and you see this in Exodus 22:29, the significance of the 8th day.  “Thou shalt not delay to offer the first of thy ripe fruits, and of thy liquors; the first-born of thy sons shall thou give unto me.”  Isn’t that an interesting word for the King James translation?  Imagine this, in the Victorian era, translating the word for “drinks” by “liquors.”  I wonder how this ever got by the prohibitionists.  It’s obviously not referring to alcoholic beverages; it’s talking about the wines, grape juice, etc of the ancient world. 

 

Verse 30, “Likewise shalt thou do with thine oxen, and with thy sheep; seven days it be with his dam; on the eighty day thou shalt give it to me.”  You can find it in other passages, Lev. 22:27, etc. where animals could not be separated from their parents until the 8th day.  They had to go through a week of life and it’s significant because a week is seven days and it’s a complete cycle.  They had to spend a complete cycle with their parents before they could be separated.  They could not be separated from their parents, and animal or a man, until after that 7th day.  The exact significance I’m not sure of except that it’s an interesting parallel to creation.  I rather suspect that the 8th day is looked upon in the Old Testament as the beginning of independent life.  Even though the young animal or the young human being is separated from the mother, nevertheless, for seven days it is not living an independent life. 

 

I think I can show this from recent medical research.  The 8th day, by the 8th day that infant or that young animal has adjusted to life and evidently it takes seven days for a baby and for an animal to adjust to its outside environment.  This is why God would not permit circumcision before this time.  This has been brought out very inters tingly by S. I. McMillan who wrote a pocket book which I recommend, None of These Diseases, and in this he points out a very interesting thing.  When medical science went to investigate the blood of the human being they discovered some­thing called Vitamin K and Vitamin K is needed for a blood clot.  Also they discovered an element called prothrombin, and Vitamin K and prothrombin are very much necessary for the blood to clot. If you take the curve or prothrombin in the human infant after birth it develops.

 

Let’s take Vitamin K first; you have Vitamin K.  When that baby is born it gets all it’s Vitamin K from the mother and all the Vitamin K that it’s got is from the mother.  Whatever the details are, the bacteria in the intestines, etc. that makes this, by the 8th day it comes up to 100%.  So God protected those infants from bleeding to death by saying look, you operate on the 8th day, and by that day… He didn’t tell them but it’s interesting, He of course as Creator knew that infants were so built that they could have bled to death before this point.  The other element, prothrombin is another interesting term because it starts out at 100% and goes down to 30% on the third day and then comes back up to the 100% level again on the 8th day.  So you have these two chemicals, both of which peak exactly on the 8th day.  It’s very interesting, Moses didn’t know all this.  Liberals say it just got to be a custom; do you suppose Abraham had a group of experiments of 3,000 infants and he circumcised all different days to find out which was the most effective day.  That’s nonsense.  The reason he knew this was because the Creator of Vitamin K and the Creator of prothrombin personally told him I want you to circumcise infants on the 8th day. 

 

So it’s the most amazing sign of the inspiration of Scripture that when these details, the details of Scripture are pressed for all their worth they always come out shining.  Never be afraid of an intellectual challenge to the Word of God.  I have never, never been disappointed by accepting any challenge any man could throw my way.  Eventually, it may take me time before I can give an answer but eventually, keep pressing forward and the Word of God will reward you.  You never have to apologize or feel embarrassed by the Word of God.  It can withstand any assault.   These are just some of the interesting little details of the Word. 

 

We come to the spiritual significance of circumcision.  In the place of the purification, the physical act of course was an act of purification, what is the spiritual equivalent? Regeneration!  The erection of a new heart and this is why in Col. 2:11 it says you, believers, “have been circumcised with the circumcision in Christ,” and this refers to regeneration. 

 

Secondly, the physical act was a judgment on the flesh and in the New Testament it shows up as judgment against the old sin nature.  The old sin nature is judged at the cross and therefore God the Holy Spirit can indwell you.  If your sin nature had not been judged by Christ on the cross then the Holy Spirit could never come into you because the minute the Holy Spirit hit you you’d die, because God decrees that sin shall cause death.  The only reason we can be alive tonight and indwelt by the Holy Spirit is because our sin natures have been died for.  The penalty has been paid.

 

Thirdly, spiritual circumcision and physical circumcision involved the organ of physical procreation, so in the spiritual sense this involves the organ of spiritual production.  What is the spiritual production?  It comes out of a human heart that’s regenerated and this is the only way you can have production. 

 

The fourth thing, it’s a sign of separation.  No unbeliever has a regenerate heart.  Here’s where there are boundaries to draw.  You want to be careful of this.  The either/or and the boundary line to draw is between a believer and a non-believer.  That’s where God draws the boundaries, believer and non-believer.   I can have fellowship with any believer as long as he’s in the will of God.  We are told not to fellowship with certain believers that are trouble-makers, that’s some­thing else, but as a general principle  fellowship extends in the circle who are born again. 

 

The fifth thing, it is accomplished, whereas in the physical case this was accomplished on the 8th day in the physical case, in the spiritual case it is accomplished at the moment of regeneration.   This is accomplished at the point of regeneration or phase one. 

 

Verse 16 says circumcise your heart means, Old Testament saint, get in fellowship, and show forth the fruits of spirituality under the Old Testament economy.  Now verse 17, this is another verse that’s interesting for people who say that Jesus Christ never claimed to be God, the New Testa­ment never says He is, etc.  Look at this verse, “For the LORD your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God. A mighty, and an awesome, who regardeth not persons, nor takes rewards.”  Look at those titles.  Do you recognize those titles from somewhere else?  Those titles are appropriated by the Lord Jesus Christ in the book of Revelation.  When you get to that fantastic thing in the book of Revelation and John looks up and he sees this man on the white horse riding down and on his side was written “The King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.”  That title applied to Christ proves His deity.  That is a title that can only be applied to Jehovah and that tells you something.  Jehovah of the Old Testament is Jesus Christ. 

 

The Jehovah’s Witnesses use this verse in Isaiah 9 it comes out, “He shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father,” and they use the word “Mighty God” and say that it means that Jesus was just a Mighty God, and not the Almighty God.  They utilize this verse, out of context of course, to refer to a less than divine being, and this is their Jesus Christ.  Their Jesus Christ is nothing more than an archangel.  They challenge believers on this Isaiah 9:6 passage; of course they don’t read the passage very carefully because the next verse says “Father of Eternity,” it doesn’t say “Everlasting Father,” it says He is the “Father of Eternity” and therefore He must be God.  But just suppose they’re right, just suppose we say okay, a Mighty God means less than God.  What do you do with this verse then?  “The Lord your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty” God.  Now who is it talking about?  It’s talking about God and it calls Him a Mighty God and so it proves this title can be used of the divine being, the one and only Creator.  So again it shows you these people take things out of context, etc.

Verse 18, “He doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment.”  The thing that is going to come up again so I won’t go into it in detail but you’ll notice three classes of people in verse 18. There’s a reason for this: the fatherless and the widow and the stranger.  The reason for this was the man was the head of the family in Israel, and owned the property.  A woman could not take title to property in Israel.  It had to be a man.  This is why you have that strange custom in the Old Testament that some people claim is immoral, called levirate marriage where a woman could call upon the brother of her husband to get her pregnant so that she could have a son and that son could carry title to the property.  Now it turns out in the context the man who does this is always an unmarried man and it’s a marriage, it’s not just one act, it’s a marriage.  The man holds title to the property.  If a woman loses her husband she has no base of freedom because freedom in the Israelite economy is dependent upon owning private property.  Freedom is always equated with owning private property. 

 

This is why the Bible is totally anti-socialistic.  All of the socialists say that we’re going to have one great happy family and everybody is going to own nothing, except we, that’s what it amounts to.  The socialists philosophy is reduce everyone.  Here you have people; some people are brilliant, some are dumb, some are well-educated and some aren’t, some are poor and some are rich, and you have society structured that way.  It’s not a personal insult.  You’re a member of the human race, Jesus Christ died for you equally, but there are obvious indifferences and you can never level up these things.  You never will, but the socialist comes along and says we’re going to reduce everybody down to the lowest common denominator so the lowest common denominator is idiot, so we’ll make everybody an idiot and we’ll be up here.  They always leave a few people out and it’s always themselves, they’re going to be the top dogs in this thing.  The rest of us, we poor slobs, are going to be down here underneath the idiot level but they’re going to rule.  This is the story of socialism and it’s all founded on the idea of property is evil.  Yet isn’t it interesting in Scripture, you can’t have freedom in Scripture without owning property.  And here’s the proof because in these three verses God has to look out for these three classes of people because these are the only three classes of people in the nation that can’t own property.  This is why they are always victimized in Scripture.  This is the poor, the person who doesn’t have property doesn’t have freedom and God has to take care of them.  So the man who has died here, the widow who is left alone without her husband, is victim; she can be used and many of the widows in Israel at times during the apostasy had to take up prostitution to earn their food and it was a horrible situation that women had to go through because their husbands died.  Many of them died in battle, just like a lot of women today have lost their husbands fighting for war. 

 

In the Old Testament you have the man holding property and the widow is a woman who’s lost title, therefore she has no base for freedom.  And the fatherless are children left without parents and they can’t hold title; a minor could not hold title in the Old Testament so therefore they didn’t have property and you had young children, orphans, who had to be cared for and they could be victimized.  Many of them went begging through the streets of Jerusalem and you read in Isaiah and the prophets how the Pharisees would take their chariots and roll right over them.  These were the self-righteous religious people that condemned Jesus Christ, not the Pharisees in Isaiah’s time but the predecessors of the Pharisees would march through the town and just run over these kids in the street with their chariots and Isaiah says God is going to come into this city and He’s going to ride right over you.  This is the basis for a lot of the prophets of the Old Testament.  Always remember these three classes. 

The third class is the stranger.  Who is the stranger?  The stranger is ger in the Hebrew with a long “e”, and ger was a person who came into the land voluntarily, he was a foreigner but he was a citizen.  He had citizenship in the nation but he was not of natural blood; he was not physically related to the nation and therefore could not hold title.  You see the land, it goes back to the idea of land; this land is God’s land and He has title to it and He gives title to the tribes.  He gives title to these tribes and then if you’re a member of the tribe you have title.  This is why now you can never have a Messiah because in order to have a Messiah come today He has to be a member of a tribe to get title, and the Jews lost all their records in 70 AD when Titus went in and finished up what his father started, he ruined all the records.  This is why we have very few records of the nation Israel.  But these citizens couldn’t take title to this because the title had already been given to physical members of the tribe.  And these people, many of these people, it shows you the impact, never underestimate the impact of Israel in world history.  Never!  In the Old Testament every trade route from China, Europe and Africa went through Israel.  Isn’t it interesting, the one crucial piece of real estate in the world centered on the world trade routes God set His little nation right there. 

 

You had people move down from Ethiopia, for example, in Acts Philip talked to the Ethiopian.  Do you know who that Ethiopian was?  He was a person who was connected with the treasury dept. of Ethiopia.  He went down and won people to Christ, and as a result of this tradition says that the Ethiopian Church was started by that man in Acts 8.  So it was a tremendous thing and evangelization occurred all over the world because these merchants would go through.  A merchant would pass through Israel and say I like this land, this land has freedom, this land has standards, this land has absolute social justice, this land is the nearest thing to a perfect society on earth, I like it, I’m going to stay here.  So these people would settle down and you had thousands and thousands of Gentiles settle in the nation Israel.  Why? Because they recognized something; in this nation we have freedom.  We have freedom here.  So these people settled but they could not hold title, and later on under the apostate kings these people were victimized. So the three classes of people you have in verse 18 tell you a lot of information. They tell you exactly the structure of the social system and we’ll deal with the details of this later on. 

 

Verse 19, “Love ye, therefore, the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”  Now verses 20-21 deal with God and in the Hebrew it’s emphasized, and the only way to indicate this in the English would be to underline it.  “Thou shalt fear the LORD thy God; his shalt thou serve, and to Him shall thou cleave,” it’s emphasis on Him, when this is used the author is saying serve the Lord, not someone else; this is the implied either/or.  “Thou shalt fear the LORD thy God,” not someone else, thou shalt fear Him, not someone else, “and to Him shalt thou cleave,” not someone else, “and you shall swear by His name.”  By the way, that shows you the commandment “thou shalt not swear” does not refer to the taking of an oath because here is a command to take an oath in the name of the Lord, “swear by His name, [21] He is thy praise,” emphasized in the Hebrew “He,” not someone else, “He is thy God,” not someone else, “who has done for thee these great and great and terrible things [awe-inspiring things],” that’s wondrous things, miracles, salvation.  You would get up tonight and say that Jesus Christ has died for your sins, that’s the great and terrible thing that He’s done for you.  “…which thine eyes have seen,” our eyes have not seen, Jesus says therefore we’re blessed, “Blessed are those who believe and have not seen the things that you have seen,” He told the apostles.  

 

Now verses 22 and we want to conclude in verse 22 by pointing out a solution to one problem.  “Thy fathers went down into Egypt with threescore and ten persons, and now the LORD thy God hath made thee as the stars of heaven for multitude.”  First you want to understand the fulfillment of prophecy in this verse.  A prophecy was made in 2000 BC, in Gen. 15 and 17.  That prophecy is now fulfilled in 1400 BC, six centuries later, in the time of Moses day.  Already the nation has attained to the limits foreseen in the Old Testament.  In other words, Abraham’s children have so multiplied that now this prophecy is fulfilled.  The only two other prophecies of the Abrahamic Covenant is that they will hold title to the land, an eternal title to the land and they will never disappear.  Those two prophecies continue today, the second one is not exactly fulfilled, never has been, even under Solomon and David. This must be fulfilled and this is why you must be a pre-tribulationalist, a premillennialist if you believe in Scripture because you’ve got to have a Millennium in order to satisfy provision number two of the Abrahamic Covenant which has never yet been fulfilled.

 

“Threescore and ten persons,” those are seventy.  Now let me just warn you in case some guy challenges you on this or something, it says seventy here.  In Acts 7:14 it says seventy-five, when Stephen says there were seventy-five people in Egypt. [“Then sent Joseph, and called his father, Jacob to him, and all his kindred, threescore and fifteen souls.”]  Here it says they came down with seventy.  You say oh-oh, and I’ve seen it on the college campus, someone says oh, Acts 7:14 says seventy-five and in Deut. 10:22 it says seventy, there’s a conflict in the Bible.  The Bible can’t be inspired because we’ve got an error.  Is that true?  No it isn’t. Stephen quotes from the Septuagint, which is known as the LXX, or the Septuagint, and the Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Old Testament and the translators when they got to the passages involving this put seventy-five instead of seventy.  Why?  Because seventy-five refers to Jacob, plus his sons, plus their wives, plus their children, seventy refers to this, and includes Joseph and he has two sons, and all that adds up to seventy.  But when the Septuagint translators reflected this they did something else, they added in Joseph’s two great-grandsons and three grandsons.  So they added more of Joseph’s family and got seventy-five, and that’s what Stephen is talking about. 

 

In other words both figures are true, it’s just that one is talking about a longer lineage for Joseph than the other one; one is including Joseph’s progeny and the other is not including Joseph’s progeny. Both are true, it depends how you want to look at it. Stephen preferred to look at it from the standpoint of a complete progeny including Joseph.  Here Moses prefers to look at it with an incomplete progeny.

 

This passage, Deut. 10:12-22, you can easily see reflects on the character of God.  This is God who has chosen these things in verse 15, it is God that requires that you circumcise the heart in verse 16, it is God that executes judgment, it is God that is the praise in verses 20-21, and next time we will conclude this section on the heart by showing the reviews of the plan of God and also the parting challenge of Moses.