Lesson 24
The National Shrine of
We will again get into the area of Deuteronomy that has to do with the
heart, how to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, or how to love the Lord
thy God with all thy soul. “Heart” we’ve
covered in chapters 5-11 dealing with the inner mental attitude. This is a cliché, unfortunately, among many
Christians, “Love the Lord, thy God, with all thy heart, and with all thy
soul,” it’s some little phrase you pick up in Sunday school and that’s the last
you hear of it. But this is actually a
key to what spirituality was seen in the Old Testament to be. To the Old Testament saint when you loved the
Lord thy God with all your heart, you love the Lord thy God with your volition,
your conscience, your reason or you rationality, and your satisfaction of a
need or a desire for personal relationship was satisfied ultimately in God and
in your personal relationship with Him.
This is loving the Lord thy God with all thy heart, but as we are going
to see again and again in the book of Deuteronomy, the Old Testament saint
never made a disjunction between a doctrine and experience. This is a disjunction that came into the
world of thought through the Greeks and most of us here tonight come out of
Gentile homes. Therefore we don’t have
the kind of thinking that an Old Testament saint had and therefore can’t really
appreciate what this phrase means. But
to the Jewish mind you had this, “loving the Lord thy God with all your heart”
always linked with soul, love the Lord thy God with all your soul. We have said
to make it a little clearer that loving the Lord thy God with all thy soul
simply means, if we translate it, loving the Lord with all your life, all the
details of your life. So here’s your
life, you have fellowship with other believers, you have loved ones in your
family, you have sex, money, jobs, relaxation, health, and you have your
relationship to government and your relationship to friends. All of these are details of life; all of
these are activities that every person faces.
And when we love the Lord thy God with all our soul it means that we
know God’s will in every one of these areas and follow it out. That takes knowledge of the Word of God and
this is why Moses, beginning in chapter 12, is going to devote a considerable
portion of his instructions to these details of life.
In chapters 12-16 we deal first with the topic of unity for the
nation. In these chapters Moses is going
to stress a common recurrent theme, he’s going to deal with many of these
details of life but the theme is going to be unity, from chapters 12-16. The reason for this is that you cannot have a
nation without some commonality to it.
You cannot have any group without something common. We can’t have a congregation without something
in common and this is why we have a doctrinal statement and why we have certain
requirements for membership, so we’ll have something in common.
From chapters 16-23 Moses stresses righteousness in society, or
righteousness in government. Chapters 24-25
deal with the problem of freedom, a much discussed topic today and you will see
in those chapters what true freedom means.
Finally, in chapter 26 he deals with the allegiance of a citizen to the
nation. All of these are going to be
dealt with, but under each topic, each section will include many details of
life.
For example, let’s go to this portion where we deal with unity and under
this section which deals with unity we’re going to have many details of life
covered. First, we’re going to have the
detail of life concerning your relationship with the government. In this case the relationship of these
believers with the national government.
In chapter 12 we’re going to deal with the central sanctuary. In chapter 13 the emphasis is on doctrine; chapters
14-15 on religious practices, and in chapter 16 the emphasis is on national
celebrations. All of these involve the
relationship of the believer, first with government; it involves the
relationship of the believer with fellowship with other believers, and it also
involves money, the equivalent of it.
That will be involved today too.
These details will be incorporated into the discussion into the overall
topic the unity in
Here is the breakdown of chapter 12.
From chapter 12:1-3 we have the elimination of all other rival
centers. In other words, the idea of
this chapter is to set up one center of worship for the nation. Before you do that you have to eliminate all
the other competing centers. Therefore the first three verses deal with
destruction. Verses 4-14 deals with the
detail that must be central; these are all the details that have to do with
that centralization, that center temple or that center tabernacle of that
center of worship. Verses 15-28 deal with things that don’t have to be central,
so we’ll say that’s decentralized. These
are the things that they are allowed to do outside of the sanctuary. First the things they are supposed to do in
the sanctuary, second, those things they are supposed to do outside the
sanctuary, and then verse 29-32 will deal with a warning, a closing warning and
this repeats the chapter because it really repeats the first three verses. Moses wants to get across a point so he
repeats.
Let’s look carefully at verse 1-3 and begin to see the program of loving
the Lord thy God with all thy soul. You
may think when you read these first three verses that’s a heck of way to love
the Lord thy God with all your soul, to go around and destroy things. There’s a
principle behind it. When we said how
thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, you remember chapter 7;
chapter 7 was the fact that spirituality will automatically set you in conflict
with the culture in which you live.
Automatically! You can’t help it,
if you are following the will of God… this is not an excuse to be discourteous
to other people, this is not an excuse to be like a lot of the early
fundamentalists, just be obnoxious, and then claim that because people didn’t
like you you were being persecuted for the Lord’s sake. You weren’t being persecuted for the Lord’s
sake; many of these people were just being persecuted because they were such
idiots nobody would tolerate them.
Being persecuted for the Lord’s sake is simply the fact that people
don’t like you, not because of your personality but they don’t like you because
of what you stand for. And if you are
persecuted because of the principles for which you stand, praise the Lord for
it, that’s good, because evidently you’ve created enough impression to get a
response.
The first three verses implement the conflict of spirituality in very
practical terms; practically how is the conflict expressed? The first three verses tell us how. “These are the statutes and judgments which
ye shall observe to do in the land,” and by way of review, “statutes” appeal to
conscience. They are not enforceable by
government edict. “Statutes” simply come
from the Hebrew word choq, and choq is the word to isolate something
and it simply means of all of the known options you have available in your
life, you can go 360 degrees, God says you can only go this much, say only a 40
degree ark of the spheres of all possible ways you can move. God says I only want you to move north, or
northeast, or east, I only want you to move in a certain area. So from that we get the idea that you limit
off things, and choq is the word used
for this; it expresses the will of God for a believer. But choq
was a matter of the individual’s conscience.
I always thought when I read the Old Testament that there was a
policeman on every block that was ready to prosecute you if you didn’t adhere
to every letter of the Law. And I’m
finding much to my surprise that first of all
Then we have the other word, “judgments.” Now “judgments” are something else and
judgments are law, this is the law of the land.
You can spot “judgments” if you’re reading your Old Testament and you
want to know is this a statute or is this a judgment, how do you tell? If you read the text and you read something
like this: you will do this, you will do this, you will do that, you will do
this, that’s a statute. If you read your
Old Testament and you see it this way: if such and such happens then you will
do such and such, if such and such happens then you will do such and such. That
is a judgment. That is how you roughly
tell a statue from a judgment, the way it is written in your Bible.
In chapter 12 we have no judgments, they are all statutes. So what does that tell you immediately about
the content of this chapter? The whole
idea of a central worship center is purely a matter of volition on the part of
the believers of this time in history.
No one forced them to come here.
They had a little motivation because if they fooled around God would
discipline them. But they had no one
beating them over the head to come to the temple. If they were spiritually discerning they did. Some people in their families have some
person who was kind of out of it spiritually and they clobber them; some wife
would clobber her husband and pester him and pester him until he finally comes
to church and visa versa, husbands do the same thing to their wives. As a minister it’s interesting because you
can tell the people that were pestered because they sit there and glare at you
and they have it all over their face, I was dragged in here, I hate this place,
I can’t wait till you shut your big mouth and I can walk out that door. Nevertheless, this is what happens. Of course this is wrong and God never
condones this; God always allows these people to operate on their
volition.
So these are the statutes and statutes are what are contained in chapter
12. In chapter 13 we’ll deal with judgments, it’s a totally different kind of
chapter, but this chapter deals with statutes.
“These are the statutes and ordinances which ye shall observe to do in
the land, which the LORD God of thy fathers is giving you to possess, all the
days that you live upon the earth. [2] You will utterly destroy all the places,”
again we’ve got to make a distinguishing mark because the King James
translators did not know some of the fine points of Hebrew grammar in their
day. Since that time it’s been
discovered what this kind of a verb construction means. You take the Hebrew verb and you add an
infinitive. Here you have the verb “to
destroy,” “you will destroy” and they added, before the word actually, they
added the word “to destroy.” So when you
read it in the Hebrew it reads “to destroy you will destroy.” And when you see that kind of construction
with the infinitive plus the verb it always amplifies the mood of the verb.
Now, let’s look at this because I know in school today they are too busy
teaching sex to teach English grammar so we have to go to some of the basics of
English grammar. A verb has a tense; a
tense in the English is past, present or future. In the Hebrew it is not so; in the Hebrew
there was no such thing as past, present or future. The only Hebrew tense there was incomplete
action or complete action. Those are the
only two tenses you have in the Hebrew.
The time you have to figure out yourself as you read it. It’s obvious, it’s not obvious all the time
but usually your future verbs are incomplete action, the action hasn’t
finished, it’s future, it hasn’t finished.
So normally you would have the imperfect tense in the Hebrew used for
the future. But here’s something
amazing; when you have a promise from the Word of God that God is going to do
something, the Hebrew uses the perfect tense, meaning that although that
promise is yet future it is so certain that God puts it in the perfect tense as
though it was completely passed and finished.
You see the power of the Hebrew in the Old Testament. These people wrote in the perfect, when they
were so sure that God was going to answer them they just it past tense, he
already has. We may not see the results
right now but it’s as good as answered perfectly.
Therefore that’s tense; tense comes over into our language as past,
present and future. Mood is something
else; you have an imperative mood and sometimes in the English you don’t have
any way of expressing this in the written language, the only way you have of
expressing it is the way you inflect your voice. For example, a parent says to a child, “you
will come in at 7:00 tonight,” now that is an imperative mood; that is an order
and the way you inflected the verb when you said it shows you what kind of a
mood it is. Or you may just have a
declarative kind of thing, you may just have a normal kind of indicative mood
in which you just say you will come in, or he came in or something like
that. That would be an indicative
mood. If we had an interrogative mood,
will you come in? If it’s conditional it
would be if you come in tonight, then something will happen. That will be a conditional mood on that verb.
What’s the mood here? You can get
it from the context, “you shall utterly destroy all the places,” that’s an
imperative mood. Therefore it’s an order
from God to the nation and if it’s an imperative mood and you add an infinitive
onto it, it strengthens the mood.
Therefore what strengthen is, you’d better destroy all these, and I
don’t mean half way, I mean all the way!
That’s the connotation here when you strengthen the mood. Why you do not want to follow the King James
is because the King James has misunderstood this and said “utterly
destroy.” I want you to get the idea of
this in the Hebrew so you’ll understand some of the remarks we make. “Destroy,” let’s use a different verb for
illustration. Let’s use the word to
kill. The Hebrew has one way of writing
the verb to kill. Suppose I said I want
to kill him, I’m just going to tear his body apart, I’m just going to
annihilate him. There I want to not emphasize the mood, I want to emphasize the
intensity of the action, and so there if I would write this in the Hebrew I’d
double the middle letters in the verb and when those letters are doubled it
doesn’t mean amplify the mood, it means amplify the intensity of the action.
Another verb where this shows up real well is break; when it’s in the
qal stem in the Hebrew that’s a simple stem, straightforward, it just means to
break. When I double up the words in
here, then it means to shatter and that is the piel stem in the Hebrew. So you see he has all sorts of ways of
expressing himself and you lose this in the English. That is why a person who
teaches the Word of God must know the original languages if he is to really
deal with all the nuances here.
In verse 2, “you shall utterly,” it sounds like you’re intensifying the
action, in other words you’re going to destroy everything around here and
that’s the way the King James took it but it’s wrong. That’s not the emphasis; the emphasis here is
“you must destroy” or “you certainly will destroy,” the emphasis is on the
imperative mood, not the intensity of the destruction. “Ye shall utterly destroy all the places
wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods,” and where are
these places. They’re listed here, “upon
the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree.”
These are three places in which people worshiped in the ancient
world. Why did they worship on a
mountain? For example, many of you have
had mythology in school; remember
They had hills; what are hills?
Hills are known in the Hebrew as tells, for example if you study
archeology there are certain things, a tell, it’s an artificial mound of dirt
and these people would elevate this and on top of this dirt they’d have their
altars, again, where they couldn’t find a mountain they made one, that’s the
point.
They had another thing, they had air conditioning, and that’s the
trees. It was hot there so they wanted
to worship under the trees and that literally is why they had the trees. If you want to check this out, turn to Hosea
4 and you’ll see centuries later what the saints were doing under these trees,
all sorts of things were happening. In
Hosea 4 you had all this activity going on, in verse 12 you have Hosea
condemning these practices. “My people
ask for counsel of their idols, and their staff declares unto them; for the
spirit of whoredoms has caused them to err, and they have gone a whoring,
departing from under their God. [13] They sacrifice upon the tops of the
mountains, and burn incense upon the hills, and under oaks and poplars and
elms, because the shadow of them is good; therefore your daughters shall commit
whoredom, and your spouses shall commit adultery. [14] I will not punish your
daughters when they commit whoredom, nor your spouses when they commit
adultery; for they themselves are separated with whores,” etc. The reason for this
language and the strong language is the theme of the book of Hosea. But the point is that he’s condemning the
Baalism worship that’s going on and the reason why these people were practical,
it’s hot out there, they want to get cool, they didn’t have air conditioning in
that day so they planted trees. So up on
these tells they had their trees and they went to work underneath the
trees. This is why God is condemning the
trees in Deut. 12:2; you will destroy “the high mountains,” etc.
Verse 3 is what they are to do when they hit these sites. “And ye shall overthrow their altars, and
break their pillars, and burn their idols with fire; and ye shall hew down the
carved images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that
place.” We will see at the end of this
chapter, when they get to the warning, there’s a vital principle here,
something I find is lacking in my background, in fact it’s lacking in the whole
western civilization and that is the idea that you can have doctrine and
experience united in one. There is no
separation here and you see this, because to eliminate Baalism they don’t just
eliminate the idea, how do they eliminate the idea? By destroying the sanctuary, physically
literally destroying the manifestation of the idea. They make no distinction between the idea,
trying to discredit the idea and its manifestation. For example, applied today, if somebody
wanted to discredit Christianity they’d kill the Christians instead of fighting
the Christian ideas. This is the
connotation of the Old Testament. If you
want to destroy an idea you destroyed the people and you destroyed their
civilization; that’s how you destroyed an idea.
You didn’t separate the idea from the people and that’s a characteristic
of the Old Testament.
In verses 4-14 we have the positive.
We’ve had the negative, you’re going to go out and I want every one of
these things destroyed God says, every one.
Now in its place I am going to authorize special places of worship. Verse 4, “Ye shall not do so unto the LORD
your God. [5] But unto the place which the LORD your God shall choose out of
all y our tribes to put His name there, even unto His habitation shall ye seek,
and there thou shalt come.” What is the
place that God chooses? Immediately many
of you are going to say Jerusalem and of course you’re wrong because there were
many places that God chose to put His name. For example, in Joshua 4 He put His
name at Gilgal; this is where he met the captain, the Lord of Hosts. In Joshua 8 Shechem was the place. In Judges 20 it was at Bethel. In 1 Samuel 3 it was Shiloh, where Samuel had
his seminary. And finally, only in 2
Samuel 6, or about 1000 AD, some four centuries after what you are looking at
was written, it finally came to Jerusalem, but not until. So this does not necessarily mean Jerusalem.
What it’s saying is that if you come to a worship place be doggone sure that
I’ve authorized worship there. That’s
what it’s saying, worship only in authorized worship places.
What does this tell you about something?
It tells you something about the Millennium. Here’s where your knowledge of the Old
Testament helps you in prophecy because all of these things that are looking
forward in the Old Testament have to come to fruition in the Millennium. Where is God going to authorize worship in
the Millennium? He’s going to have a
real, literal temple; people have all this trouble, why is there a temple in
the Millennium; there’s got to be to follow the mode of worship here. You always have a place where people can
worship, with one exception and you’re living in the exception, and that’s the
Church Age. The norm is that you must
have an authorized place by God for your worship. This is given in Israel and in the
Millennium; in Zech. 14 Jerusalem is declared to be the world capital.
In verses 6-7, what they are to do, they are to bring everything
there. “And there ye shall bring your
burnt offerings, and your sacrifices, and your tithes, and heave offerings of
your hand, and your vows, and your freewill offerings, and the firstlings of
your herds and of your flocks,” all of this, all of the religious ritual of the
day is to be done only on authorized grounds.
Verse 7 you see something else; many times I hear, oh, the people of the
Old Testament, they worship a God that was horrible, a God that was just
bloody, a God who hated everybody, but look at verse 7, “And there ye shall eat
before the LORD your God, and ye shall rejoice,” relax, come to this worship
service with whatever you have and have a ball and that’s what he’s
saying. Believe me, they brought stuff
that you could have a ball with. They
had strong wine and everything else, this was given in the Old Testament.
Strong wine was a part of the temple worship service and this is ways in which
they rejoiced. We, in our day condemn
alcohol and rightly so because the Bible condemns it when it becomes an
interference in the way a person thinks.
The difference is that in the ancient world, there strong wine was not
of the alcoholic content our wines are; that is the difference. By comparison we almost drink pure alcohol;
they did not and in Proverbs you have the doctrine of alcohol, where alcohol is
authorized in Scripture for only two uses.
One, for physical suffering, for example, amputations, it was used as an
anesthetic in the ancient world and a person would be forced to drink wine
until he got drunk so that he wouldn’t feel the pain when they chopped your leg
off or something like that, the crude forms of operating that they had. So it was used as an anesthetic.
And the other one, it was used as a sedative for mental illness, also
given in verses such as Prov. 31. Those
are the two authorized times when a person is told to be drunk in the Bible,
for a sedative for mental illness and for an anesthetic for physical sickness
and suffering. By the way, the reason
alcohol is condemned in Scripture is the same reason why drugs and everything
else are condemned, namely, it destroys something in your soul called
rationality. You cannot think when you
are under the control of drugs and alcohol; this is why God’s Word condemns it,
not because it wants to be prudish, not because the Word of God wants to be
tabooish or anything else, the reason is for your benefit. If you drink this way, if you fool around
with drugs and everything else, you are going to destroy reason and you cannot
live the Christian life when your reason goes; you’ve had it because you can’t
apply the promises, you can’t think, you’ve just had it. This is why the Scriptures condemn
alcoholism.
Nevertheless, they were to have a good time here in verse 7, “…and ye
shall rejoice in all that ye put your hand unto,” means rejoice from your
produce. In other words, these people
are to come here and in particular the Feast of Tabernacles and they were
coming from the farm, and they had just harvested their crops and they had
their income for the year and they are to rejoice in the produce, what they had
put their hand to is the production. And
this is a picture of what you’re going to do in heaven. It’s the same picture. We rejoice in phase 3, we trust the Lord, we
live our life, we die, we go to be with the LORD, and do you ever say what’s
going to happen in phase three? Several
things are going to happen. First of all
we’re going to continue to learn more and more about the Lord. We don’t’ have omniscience, we will remain
creatures in heaven; you do not gain omniscience just because you go to heaven,
you still learn and learn and learn and learn.
We worship. Another thing we do
is rejoice in the production that we have had in phase two. This is why it’s so important to get down how
to be filled with the Spirit, how to handle your personal sins, so that you
will not have human good, so that when you get into heaven although you’ll be
there, you’ll have something to rejoice in, you’ll have bona fide production, production which is done in the filling of
the Holy Spirit. So the worship services
of ancient Israel are in some sense a fore view of the ultimate universal
worship of the new creation. “And there
… ye shall rejoice in the production,” not only you, “and your households,
wherein the LORD thy God hath blessed thee.”
You can see it was a time of joy, not a time of sorrow. This is another characteristic; if you look
at religion and you look at morality and you look at people trying to do things
in the energy of the flesh, you always find people that are so serious that if
they smiled I think they’d split, they get so tense. It’s difficult to communicate to people that
are tense, that can’t relax, can’t think through, etc. So this is the point, and by the way, if He’s
authorized worship service, what do they have?
Why were they to be relaxed, because there who was going to teach
them? The priests would teaching the
Word of God, every seven years every citizen of the nation Israel had to come
to these authorized centers to learn and hear the entire Law read to them;
every seven years. An analogy today
would be every citizen of the United States every seven years must hear and
review and study the United States Constitution. Of course people in the 4th and 5th
grade say what’s that?
Verse 8, “Ye shall not do after all the things that we do here this day,
every man whatsoever is right in his own eyes.”
“Whatsoever is right in his own eyes” is a reference to the fact that
these people were not worshiping according to the Law throughout the 38 years
of wandering in the wilderness. Where do
we get this from? You get it from Amos
5:25 where it declares that these people all during these 38 years, not only
were they under discipline, they were not adhering to the Law, they were just
out of it all the time. So Moses says
look, you people are a fallen apart generation, but for heavens sake, when you
go to the land straighten up, and when God tells you that He wants you to
worship here, don’t do like you’re doing now, go out for a weiner roast on top
of mount so and so and call it worship. That’s basically what was happening for
the 38 years, but when they get in the land they are to go only to authorized
centers of worship.
Verse 9 is an interesting key to the Law of the Old Testament and if you
look at it carefully you will have solved for you one of the greatest problems
of Biblical scholarship. “For ye are not as yet come to the rest and to the
inheritance which the LORD your God giveth you. [10] But when ye go over the
Jordan,” then God is going to authorize these standards. What’s the point? The point is that in normal Old Testament
studies, in college courses, etc. they make a big point out of the fact that
the Law of Moses does not show up until the time of the captivity around 586
BC. And they say Moses must have not
written this law, in fact if you look in a concordance sometime you’ll be
shocked. The Law of Moses is not
referred to in the book of Judges, it’s not referred to in the book of Samuel
and Kings, as such, the Law is mentioned once in a while, but the heavy
emphasis comes down here. Why? Because this Law, I have come to believe it
was to be phased in gradually. This is
not the kind of thing that the moment they marched across the Jordan River,
there it is, boom, they were under the Law.
This Law was to be phased in gradually as they possessed more and more
land and began to get more and more settled.
Now you know as well as I do, they never got that way, and they really
never even approximated God’s ideal until the time of David, about 1000 BC when
God says that you know I give you rest from your enemies. It’s only that point, way over in 2 Samuel,
that you begin to pick up this concept that the nation finally has
arrived. Here oddly enough is where you
start having the notice of the Law.
So my impression of the Word of God is that this Law was to be phased in
and they were to obey as much as possible given the circumstances, and as they
conquered more land and as God settled the nation, more and more the Law was
supposed to go into effect, until ultimately you had the whole thing in effect,
and their eschatology, if you would ask them what’s the program of God for you,
they would have drawn a chart like this: here’s Moses, here’s our redemption
from Egypt and we’re going to go on down in time and gradually we conquer more
and more land until down here Messiah is going to come. Messiah comes and it’s going to be perfect
environment. That’s the general
impression that they had of prophecy. Of
course there are many missing elements that God adds by way of progressive
revelation that we know are going to happen.
For example, Jesus Christ died, the Church Age comes and then you have
the Tribulation; all that has been put in there. And by the way, there’s no guarantee that God
can’t do something between the end of the rapture and the beginning of the
Tribulation either. History is open; God
can surprise His saints by injecting these parentheses, so to speak. But this was their picture of coming
events.
Now verse 10, here is where God is going to authorize their
worship. “But when ye go over the Jordan
and dwell in the land which the LORD your God giveth you to inherit, and when
He giveth you rest from all your enemies round about, so that ye dwell in
safety.” The rest was not given, repeat,
not given until 2 Samuel 7:1. That’s
when at least the preliminary phases of this rest were true in history. After this they are to come and they are to
give all these things [verse 11 “Then there shall be a place which the LORD
your God shall choose to cause His name to dwell there; there shall ye bring
all that I command you; your burnt offerings, and your sacrifices, your tithes,
and the heave offering of your hand, and all your choice vows which ye vow unto
the LORD.”]
And in verse 12 this what he repeats in detail. “And ye shall rejoice before the LORD your
God,” this is a mental attitude that accompanies true worship, rejoice, relax,
have a good time, it’s not something solemn and you dress up and sit there
stiff, etc. you just relax and have a good time and this is rejoicing. And you rejoice before the Lord, you don’t
have to be a Bible student to catch the picture here. It’s a national party is what it is and they
come to this temple and they have their sacrifices, and some of it is gory, for
example a priest would get up there and he’d cut open these cattle and they’d
bleed to death and the blood would spurt out all over the place, etc. but after
this was over you went into the feast, you rejoiced. This is how they rejoiced and notice somebody
is added here in verse 12, the Levites.
Throughout the rest of the book of Deuteronomy the Levites are important
because these people are the custodians for the Word of God for the
nation. It is the Levites who are going
to teach; they have the Bible teaching ministry in this nation. They have two groups. You might say the Levites are divided into
two divisions; one division stays at the central sanctuary, that’s the central
division, and then you have the country division that is dispersed throughout
all the nation, city here, city here, city here, etc. and these Levites
disperse. So you had two groups of
Levites. The group mentioned in verse 12
is the Levites that were in the city.
These Levites had no way of providing for themselves, they were a clergy
that was subsidized by federal taxes.
The federal taxes were the tithes and these people are to enjoy all
these tithes and everything else because they have no way of sustaining
themselves for they were to give themselves over completely to the ministry of
the Word of God. Therefore these Levites
depended upon these gifts. So Moses adds
in verse 12, be sure that “the Levite who is within your gates,” the word
“gate” in the Old Testament is a synonym for the word “city.” It refers specifically to the city council. This is why in Handel’s Messiah, it says open
the gates and King of glory shall come in, and open the gates sounds like it
means open these big city gates, but that’s not the point; the point is as
Messiah comes every town should respond to Him.
That’s what that verse means, open wide your gates means that these
people that are responding accept Jesus as the Messiah.
Here the gates refer to the cities, and the Levites, group two, the
country divisions are to come to the central sanctuary. These people were to journey from town B over
to the central sanctuary in great caravans and they were to take the Levites
into the city with them and let these Levites enjoy the benefits of the fruit
of the land, etc.
Verses 13-14, this is simply a reminder to show them that they are to go
only to the place which the Lord shall choose.
“Take heed to thyself that thou offer not thy burnt offerings in every
place that you see, [14] But in the place that the LORD shall choose in one of
thy tribes, there thou shalt offer thy burnt offerings, and there thou shalt do
all that I command thee,” the point here is that they are to offer these things
only in authorized areas, not in unauthorized areas.
There was a tragic example of a man who thought he could violate the
Law, verse 14. His name was
Jeroboam. There came a time, about 930
BC in the history of the nation when a man who was the son of Solomon, called
Rehoboam, this guy was the biggest nut who ever sat on the throne of Israel
with the exception of Manasseh and he was the son of the most brilliant father. It’s a tragedy but some of the best fathers
in the nation Israel had some of the most nitwit sons that you’d ever want to
see. Solomon wrote Proverbs, by and
large, to teach Rehoboam; that’s the wisdom of Proverbs. Solomon was so brilliant that people came
from all over the world to listen to his wisdom, and yet out of his affairs
with all his women came a group of young men, one of whom, Rehoboam, became the
new king. And when Rehoboam got there he had his teenager gang for
counselors. He wouldn’t listen to the
counselors of his father, you know, people over 35 or 40 don’t know anything
and therefore Rehoboam wasn’t going to pay any attention to the old crowd. He got things moving, he separated the nation
and caused a civil war because he got these young hoods to come in and tell him
what to do and they told him what to do, get rid of all the old people, so
Rehoboam said that was a good idea, and so he decided to chuck all his father’s
advice, so he dismissed them, he got rid of them.
Then we have a man in the north by the name of Jeroboam. And Jeroboam was a man who started out
find. The Lord said, Jeroboam, I want
you to form a political kingdom to the north called Northern Israel. Here’s Jerusalem and to the north you were to
have Jeroboam. In this case, pardon to
you southerners, the north was the good guys at this point. They weren’t for long, however. The north was authorized to break away from
the south, and they broke away on the basis that they would remain united at
one temple. Where did they get this
from? Verse 14. Verse 14 could not be rewritten, so even
though Jeroboam politically could separate, he could not and had no
authorization from God to start a new religion in the north. But Jeroboam did, he had two sanctuaries that
he set up, one down here. He was very
smart; one of these sanctuaries was at Bethel, only 12 miles down the road from
Jerusalem. What he wanted to do with
this sanctuary at Bethel was to get some of the southern saints to come, hey,
look at our worship and use it as more or less a propaganda device to get
people to move north. Then he set up
another worship center at Dan. So you
have these two worship centers, Bethel and Dan, and he set up statues of a
golden bull, the Bible says calf but it’s not, it’s a golden bull. This bull he worshiped as Elohim. In other words, this was outright
idolatry. And throughout the entire
history of the prophets they condemned, you can read 1 and 2 Kings and it gets
so tiring, you read so and so did this but he persisted in the sins of
Jeroboam. So and so did this but he
persisted in the sin of Jeroboam. You’re
never told what the sin of Jeroboam is until you get to 2 Kings 12 and there
the sin of Jeroboam is told in that not only did he politically divide from the
nation but he established his own religion in violation of verse 14. And God judged the north. The north was to
suffer and they suffered tremendously; they suffered sickness, they suffered,
insects came in, at one time the locusts came in and Amos wrote his prophecy
and many of the others in the form of these locust plagues and God hammered
away at the north trying to get them to repent and they never did. Finally God brought the north down to its
knees in 721 BC when Samaria fell.
So here is the tragedy of a simple verse like verse 14, it led to
centuries of suffering. Thousands and
thousands of people died miserably.
Thousands and even millions of people suffered throughout history
because of the violation of verse 14. So God means what He says when He says I
only want you to do this in an authorized place.
Now God was realistic and from verses 15-28 God says obvious you can’t
do everything at a central sanctuary, there has to be some things you can do in
the home. One of those things that you
can do in the home, verse 15, “Notwithstanding, thou mayest kill and eat flesh
in all thy gates, whatsoever thy soul desireth, according to the blessing of
the LORD thy God which he hath given thee: the unclean and the clean may eat
thereof, as of the gazelle, and as of the hart.” Let’s explain this verse; we can do a lot to
explain the whole section by just understanding verse 15.
[Blank spot] This is an exception to a rule that you have to
understand. In Lev. 17 you have the
original form of this legislation. This
represents a change. This itself shows
you something about the will of God. Do
you know the will of God for you today can be different from the will of God
for you tomorrow? It goes back to this
circle that I’ve been drawing, consisting of two circles, the inner circle is
the universal will of God that is the same yesterday, today and forever, and is
the same for every believer always. But
there’s another circle of the specific will of God, things that God wants you
to do specifically, not me, not Joe Blow, but you, and He wants you and you
alone can do it. This is God’s plan for
your life. He may want you to do one
thing today and another thing tomorrow and this will changes. Here you see an example of it in
Scripture. Lev. 17 tells them one thing,
Deut. 12 tells them another and the reason is clear.
Deut. 17:3-4, “Whatsoever man there is of the house of Israel, who kills
an ox, or lamb, or goat, in the camp, or that kills it out of the camp, [4] And
brings it not unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, to offer an
offering unto the LORD before the tabernacle of the LORD, blood shall be
imputed unto that man; he hath shed blood; and that man shall be cut off from
among his people.” Those animals listed
in verse 4 are known as sacrificial animals to the nation. They are sacrificial
animals, namely animals qualified to be used in the sacrifices. Suppose you have a nice fat animal out there
and say ooh, boy, I can just see a nice juicy steak and I’d love to have that,
so you go out and you kill this thing. According to Leviticus 17 when they were
out in the wilderness and the whole nation was around the Tabernacle when a man
killed one of these sacrificial animals he had to bring it to the Tabernacle,
and had to leave the blood there. Why?
Because he was killing and God said I want to remind you every time you take a
life, I don’t care whether it’s an animal or a person, you have taken a
life. And to dramatize the effect of
this you must leave the blood at the Tabernacle.
Now, on the other hand, if he was out here and he just saw a deer
running around and shot the deer, which was not a sacrificial animal, he did
something else with it. Lev. 17:13, “And whatsoever man there is of the
children of Israel, or of the strangers who sojourn among you, who hunts and
catches any beast or fowl that may be eaten, he shall even pour out the blood
thereof, and cover it with dust.” And
that was the authorization, so you have two categories of the will of God. First if it’s a sacrificial animal take the
blood to the temple; if it’s just a simple animal of prey, then all you have to
do is spill the blood out on the ground. Why spill the blood out on the
ground? Because there were two problems.
First, if the blood was kept it could be used in heathen worship, and secondly
it was to teach people that the blood stands for the value of life. They were not to eat the blood; the blood
alone was God’s. So these are the two
things.
Now you come back to Deuteronomy and obviously God has to modify
this. He doesn’t have to modify number
two, if you’re a hunter and you kill a bird or an animal of prey and you pour
out the blood, that’s fine. But He has
to modify the first one because every time you want a steak you can’t go
trotting down to Jerusalem to present the blood to the temple. It’s too far, so therefore you have to work
out some way you can do this around your home.
So that is the purpose behind verse 15, “you may kill and eat flesh in
your gates … as the roebuck and the hart.”
Why is the roebuck and the hart, this is simply two Hebrew words which
mean deer, the roebuck is more like our antelope, it’s an animal that’s become
extinct in this part of the world but in the Bible times they had this animal
life running all over, particularly out to the east of the land and these are
the antelopes, etc. the animals that you’d go out and hunt for. So therefore, “as of the antelope, and as of
the hart,” the “hart” actually is a ram, you can go out and you can kill these
animals, sacrificial animals and just kill them like any hunting animal, the
only thing I want you to do is verse 16, pour the blood out upon the earth,
don’t eat the blood. The reason again is
because the blood speaks of the value of a human life.
Briefly the reason for that is this: that in the non-resurrected body,
in the immortal body, in the mortal body we have now you have blood. What does
blood do? Check it out in a manual on physiology, blood transmits oxygen to the
cells; it takes CO2 away from the cells. Blood transmits nutrition to the cells
and removes waste material from the cells.
What is blood doing? Blood is a
sign that your body is dependent upon your environment. This is why blood in the Old Testament is
used as a symbol for life. Now in the
resurrection body we are told in Luke 24 there are bones and flesh in the
resurrection body, a different kind of flesh but there are bones and flesh, you
will have a skeleton and you’ll have feeling. For example, when Jesus Christ in
His resurrection body went along the Emmaus road He obviously didn’t look
different from a normal person, they just walked along and were talking with
this guy, He looked absolutely normal, they invited Him to dinner and He ate,
so the resurrection body looks very much like our present body with one
exception—no blood. What does that tell
you? The resurrection body is not dependent upon environment; the resurrection
body is a totally self-sustaining entity.
This is why blood, to make a long story short, was used as a symbol of
life in the Old Testament.
There’s one other phrase in verse 15 that indicates a special adaptation
of the old law, “the unclean and the clean may eat thereof,” what’s that
saying. This is not talking about the animal; it’s talking about the
people. If you’ve washed your hands of
haven’t washed your hand, you can eat.
What’s the point is under the old Law you had to be ceremonially clean
before you could eat of the meat. Now
you don’t have to. Why? Because you’re out here in all these villages and you
haven’t got time to run to Jerusalem every time you wanted a steak, so if you
want a steak you just slaughter the animal there and eat. You don’t have to worry about all the
religious details.
So this verse represents a clear case of the specific will of God changing
for the believer under different circumstances.
Verse 17-18 is just a repetition of what we’ve had, you’re not supposed
to eat the things that you’re supposed to take to the temple but the things
that you don’t have to take, go ahead and eat them and enjoy yourself.
Verse 19, “Take heed to thyself that thou forsake not the Levite as long
as thou live upon the earth,” again reminding the people that they had an
obligation to the Levites. These men
could have died from starvation unless they were supported by the gifts of the
people. Oftentimes you hear people say
tithes and freewill gifts. There’s a
sense in which these are true, distinguished in the Old Testament. It’s very interesting, throughout this
chapter have you seen one case of a judgmental statement, if a person does not
bring the tithe then such and such will happen.
You haven’t seen it because it’s not there and it’s not any place in the
Old Testament. Tithing was a voluntary
operation under the Old Testament economy.
Let’s look at verse 24, and we will finish this section up on what they
are allowed to do in their homes. The
reason given is in verse 21, “If the place which the LORD thy God hath chosen
to put His name there be too far from you, then thou shalt kill of thy herd and
of thy flock,” etc. See that’s clearly
the reasoning behind this adaptation of the will of God. [Verse 23, “Only be sure that thou eat not
the blood; for the blood is the life, and thou mayest not eat the life with the
flesh.”]
Verse 24, “Thou shalt not eat it; thou shalt pour it upon the earth as
water.” Verse 27, “And thou shalt offer
thy burnt offerings, the flesh and the blood,” this is these sacrificial
animals, you will still offer them “upon the altar of the LORD thy God,” so
they could offer a sacrificial lamb on the altar in accordance with religious
ceremony, they could eat him at home not in accordance with religious ceremony
if they so desired.
Verses 29-32 conclude this chapter and have a very important warning.
“When the LORD thy God shall cut off the nations from before thee, where thou
goest to possess them,” etc. Verse 30, “Take heed to thyself that thou be not
snared by following them,” now it’s a very interesting statement here, “that
you not be snared by following after them after they are destroyed from before
thee, and that thou inquire not after their gods, saying,” and here’s an
interesting statement, “How did these nations serve their gods? Even so will I
do likewise.” What does that mean? What this means is these people would walk
into the land and in the ancient world people believed that each territory of
land had its own god, for example, Lubbock, there’d be a god of Lubbock,
there’d be a god of Brownfield, and if you were a farmer and you farmed within
the Lubbock area to get a comfortable crop you’d have to make friends with the
god of Lubbock. If you were to farm
ground in Brownfield you’d have to make friends with the god of
Brownfield. This is the whole psychology
of the Ancient Near East.
That’s the point in verse 30. When they walk into the land, the natural
tendency of Ancient Near Eastern people was going to be who’s the god around
here that we have to kowtow to? Who’s
the genie that we have to rub his belly, etc. to get prosperity in our
business. This is the whole psychology
behind it. If you want a more detailed
study look in 2 Kings 17 and there you have a case history of how this actually
happened.
Verse 31, “Thou shalt not do so unto the LORD thy God; for every
abomination to the LORD, which He hates, have they done unto their gods. For even their sons and their daughters they
have burned in the fire to their gods.”
This is one of the most cruel forms of worship ever known in the ancient
world. They had a god called Molech, and
Molech demanded child sacrifices.
Therefore they’d take some of these babies and they would hold the baby
alive over this fire while the baby literally burned to death and the baby
would scream, etc. and this baby would die a horrible death of burning. That is the kind of religion that was
normative in the ancient world. So next
time you hear this jazz about the Bible being against man and horrible, you
just remember if it wasn’t for passage like this we’d still be doing it. It was because Israel moved in and said God
is a God who is Creator and loves the people that He has created, and you
cannot do this, this is an abomination, verse 31, and it is that sanctifying
influence that the Bible has had on society.
And it always burns me, particularly when I see some of these
loud-mouthed women running around with a few degrees after their name that
think they are the ones that are going to run society, the NEA and a few
others, always trying to tell everybody how they’re supposed to educate people
and they’re always implying that Christianity and all the rest make women
subservient. When we go through Deuteronomy you’re going to see what the Bible
has done for women, because before the Bible came along, and Moses came along,
women were about equal to a cow in price in the ancient world, and you could
buy them off, trade them, etc., they were just considered property. And that’s all they were until Moses came and
straightened them out. And that is
another tremendous social influence the Bible has had. So don’t ever buy this
line that the Bible is anti-social or the Bible is anti-humanitarian. If it was not for the Bible, then let’s
trade, if you don’t like the Bible then go back to the burning of children, how
would like that; go back to where women were just nothing but slaves. Some of these loud-mouths that are going
around have the freedom that they enjoy due to the Word of God.
Application of this whole point: the central sanctuary. Where in the New Testament do you think Jesus
deals with the problem? He deals it with
in John 4, so turn to John 4 and see how this applies to us. John 4:19, this is one of those famous
episodes when Jesus Christ is witnessing to a woman. Some people never can read the Bible
clearly. I was reading a theological journal
that some liberal came out with the theory that Jesus came to the well to make
love to this woman. How you ever get
that out of John 4 I will never know, but this it he way people read into it
what they want to see. Verse 19, “The
woman said unto Him, ‘Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet.’” Jesus is in the middle of witnessing to this
woman. All of a sudden this woman has
one problem that a lot of people have to whom you share Christ, and that is
self-sufficiency. Never bother to tell
the gospel to a self-sufficient person, you have to disarm their
self-sufficiency before you can cast your pearls before swine. I consider it a waste of time to share the
gospel with some person who thinks they’re so proud and so self-sufficient they
don’t need grace. And you have to disarm
them first and get rid of that self-sufficiency.
So Jesus had this problem, this woman is so cock-sure of everything, so
He says in verse 16, come and bring your husband over here, I don’t like to
talk to women alone, bring your husband over here. Of course she about dropped her teeth because
she said I have no husband. And Jesus
said you’re right, you have no husband, you’ve had five husbands and he whom
you’re now living with isn’t your husband, you say that truly. You can see Jesus all of a sudden got under
her skin, very rapidly and she decided whoops, maybe I’d better pay attention
to what this guy is saying.
So in verse 19 she begins to respond, “Sir, I perceive that you are a
prophet.” Of course that sounds kind of
humorous in the King James but she was just simply responding to the fact that
this man knew her life and was able to tell her things, so she decided that
this man could answer some questions. So
the first question she asked, verse 20, “Our father worshiped in this mountain;
and You say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.” This was a schism that started around 200 BC,
between a group called the Samaritans, that’s why the parable of the Good Samaritan
is such a good parable. The Samaritan
was considered a slum dweller, something like just a social outcast of the time
because the Samaritans started worship in the Northern Kingdom. They were imports; these people were
half-breed Jews. The conquerors, the
Assyrian conquerors who came in and conquered the land had a policy. They were
worried about revolts so what they would do is take the population out and just
leave a skeleton force to farm the land and then they would import other people
into the land and they would intermarry and break down boundaries of
nationalism, etc. Therefore these
Samaritans were hated people to the Jews because they were half-breeds; they
were half Jew and half Gentile. And they
said you had to worship on Mount Gerizim, that was the place they said God authorized. It comes directly out of Deuteronomy 12. You only can worship in a place God
authorized. Here’s the problem? Where did He authorize it? The Samaritans said Mount Gerizim and the
Jews said Mount Zion or Jerusalem.
So she said to Jesus look, here’s my problem, the Bible tells me I’m
supposed to worship only in the place God tells me, my fathers tell me I’m
supposed to worship on this mountain, you guys tell me I’m supposed to worship
on this mountain. I can’t worship at two
places at the same time so please tell me something. So verse 21, “Jesus said to her, Woman,
believe Me, the hour is coming, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet
at Jerusalem worship the Father. [22] Ye
worship ye know not what. We know what we worship; for salvation is of the
Jews.” At this point in verse 22 Jesus
Christ sustains the argument that Mount Zion is the proper place. Jesus is not yielding to her, He is not
compromising His testimony of the Old Testament, He is siding with the Jews
over and against the Samaritans at this point in the argument. But He says,
there is something going to change; there is an hour coming when neither in
this mount or in Jerusalem you will worship the Father. Verse 23, “But the hour cometh, and now is,
when the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth; for
the Father seeks such to worship Him. [24] God is a Spirit; and they that
worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.”
And here we have the modification for the Church Age to the rule of
Deuteronomy. Where now is worship
done? It’s done in the spirit. Where is
the spirit? First, the human spirit is
included in this word and the human spirit is our heart, which includes our
volition, it includes our conscience, it includes our personal relationship
with God and it includes our reason or rationality. That’s the heart, that his the location of
worship in the Church Age. And it is
done in spirit, of course, it includes the filling of the Holy Spirit. It’s not done in a carnal way. Make the opposite if you want to get the
contrast. Suppose Jesus said you will
worship the Father in flesh and in lies, there you get the contrast: in spirit
and truth—in flesh and in lies. His
point to the woman is that now the time is coming when worship will be done in
the human heart irrespective of a physical location and this is the norm for
the Church Age. Why is it the norm for the Church Age? Two reasons; number one you can’t have an
authorized center of worship during this time of the Gentiles because obviously
the Gentiles don’t have a system of worship so it would be impractical to have
Deut. 12 operate throughout the Church Age.
And the second reason it that it has to be by a renewed heart or
regeneration.
Now you ask, does this modify therefore the Millennium? Does this invalidate the prophecy that in
Jerusalem the people will worship in the Millennium? It does not. Why? What is at Jerusalem? Who is the Church? The Church is the temple of God. See, the
temple was a building in the Old Testament but the Church, you, me, everyone
who has accepted Christ, are part of the entity known as the Church. And in the new creation, as well as in some
ways in the Millennium, we are the temple, and in the New Jerusalem, who
inhabits the New Jerusalem? The Church.
That is the place. We’ve emphasized the Church is a heavenly people and Israel
an earthly people too much in some sense.
They combine ultimately, but the difference is that the Church is the
temple of God; no longer will God be worshiped in a building, He will be
worshiped with a group of people, and the group of people are the saints of the
Church.
This means something important for us in phase two. This means in phase two, of all the saints
who have ever lived, from Adam down to the last man who was saved, guess who
for all eternity is going to be in a close position to the Lord Jesus
Christ? The Church Age believers. That
is the high privilege of being born again in the Church Age because for all eternity
you will be as though you were a temple and that close to the Lord Jesus
Christ. That’s the point of the Church
Age.
What He is saying here is that you will worship the Father in spirit and
truth, and in spirit and truth means that you will worship the Father in the
filling of the Holy Spirit. You have the
sin nature of man and the area of strength produces human good; the area of
weakness produces personal sins.
Therefore if you are a believer you don’t want to be producing sin so
the tendency is to cover up your sin with the area of strength and produce
human good. But you don’t want human
good either, it’s all human good and worthless in God’s sight. When you worship
God you want it to come from the filling of the Holy Spirit. That is why, and don’t
misapply what I say, it is better to stay home if you’re going to be carnal if
you come if you don’t intend to get spiritual by using 1 John 1:9. If you
insist on being carnal coming to church has absolutely no benefit for you with
one exception and that is you might get enough of the Word so the Holy Spirit
can later use that. But if you have no
intention of becoming spiritual going to church of any religious activity, is a
waste of time. This is why, for example,
this building is not a temple, you are the temple, your body is the temple. And this is the great doctrine of the Church
Age which Jesus modifies in John 4. This
is a modification of Deut. 12 introduced for the benefit of the Church Age.
Now the application by way of the nation, what’s happening if we look
out on this principle? We have a central
sanctuary today in the United States and the central sanctuary is Washington DC
and it’s a central sanctuary that is taking on more and more religious
implications. The more the government does the more people tend to look to the
government as God and the more in practice the government slowly but surely
usurps the place of God in the every day experience of people. This is why the welfare state, why socialism,
is anti-Biblical, because it results in practice of putting the state in place
of God. There is such a thing as bona fide welfare but socialism and
welfarism tends to replace God with the government and this is what we run the
danger of. We’re fighting something here
as Christians, you are the sanctuary, I am the sanctuary, this is where the
worship is done. So the tendency is to
fight between your own worship in your own heart and the government, looking to
the government for all things. A group of
English Christians summarized this application to Deut. very well when they paraphrased
Psalm 23, “The government is my shepherd, therefore I need not work; it allows
me to lie down in a good job. It leads
me beside still factories, it destroys my initiative; it leads me in the path
of a parasite for politics’ sake. Yeah,
though I walk through the valley of laziness and deficit spending, I will fear
no evil, for the government is with me.
It’s a parent and utopia for me by appropriating the earnings of my own
grandchildren. It fills my head with
false security, my inefficiency runneth over.
Surely the government shall care for me all the days of my life and I
shall live forever in a fool’s paradise.
I think that well represents the philosophy of welfarism and it’s
humorous but the more you think about it the more serious it becomes because
that’s exactly what’s happening.
So as we conclude Deut. 12 we want to remember the central thing is a
central sanctuary or shrine and the reason behind this is that you must have an
authorized center for worship to unite the nation. Today we have no central sanctuary; today the
unity that exists between believers is a unity of your hearts, a unity that is
a result of being born again in Jesus Christ.
What is the unity? You hear this
stuff about ecumenicalism or humanism and the Church is all going to get
together in one good organization.
Ridiculous! Where is the
unity? The unity is in individual born
again people. I can have fellowship with
another born again person and I don’t care what church he’s a member of; if
he’s a member of the Lord Jesus Christ that’s good enough for me and I’ll have
fellowship with him any time I please.
And I don’t need some organization to have unity with him because I
already, by position, have unity. That
is the answer to the ecumenical movement; you don’t need an organization
because we have it by position.