Lesson 26

Submission to doctrine – 13:6-18

To reintroduce the topic of Deut. 13 turn in the New Testament to Gal. 1. Deut. 13 is part of that section of Deuteronomy in which we are instructed on the details of life and how to love the Lord amidst these details. The Word of God gives us the fact that love of Him proceeds first out of a proper mental attitude. That’s love the Lord with all thy heart. And then this outflows into a love of the Lord in the details of life. This is loving the Lord with all your soul. The word “soul” in Hebrew can be roughly equivalent to what we would call life, the details of life. Deut. 13 is part of a series in this section of Deuteronomy, chapter 12 dealing with unity; unity of worship, i.e. all true worship in Israel was to be done at a center, the authorized center wherever this may be. It was sometimes at Shiloh, at times it was in various other sites in the Holy Land and finally it wound up in Jerusalem. Why is this? What’s the principle behind chapter 12?

The principle in chapter 12 is that worship of God can only occur in the presence of God. Now all of us are aware that God is omnipresent but there is a difference between the omnipresence of God and the presence of God. The omnipresence of God simply says that God is completely at every point in space but the presence of God is where you come that you maybe heard. Throughout the Bible in the Old Testament, it’s hard for us who live in the Church Age to think this way, and in studying the Word of God, to present the Old Testament accurately I myself have to constantly switch and shift my thinking to feel how these people in the Old Testament must have thought. But in the Old Testament they conceived of worshiping God in His presence that was located at a point in space. It wasn’t all over the place; it’s true they could pray, but when they really wanted to come to where God really was, they had to come to a point location, and that point location is given in Deut. 12.

This, by the way, is why dispensationalists say the Holy Spirit is removed from the world at the rapture of the Church. People say oh, how can an omnipresent Holy Spirit be removed, doesn’t the Holy Spirit operate during the Tribulation? Yes He does; He does very definitely, as He did before Pentecost. But Pentecost and the rapture represent the termini in which the Holy Spirit makes His presence available in the human heart. That is not true during the Tribulation. The Holy Spirit is removed. It doesn’t mean that people can’t pray, people can’t have a personal relationship; they did in the Old Testament. But what it does mean is that the Holy Spirit does not indwell permanently, completely, all of the saints of the Tribulation. Therefore, this is important to understand this point about the rapture.

But in Deut. 12 you have the image that God is only available to be worshiped totally at one point and that is where the nation is to unify. The theme of all these chapters is unity. The second thing is the unity of doctrine and in Deut. 13 Moses is saying the way to unify believers is by a unified doctrine. Then chapters 14-15 deal with unity in religious practices. There are some amazing things in chapters 14-15 concerning funerals, concerning diet, concerning welfare, concerning economic systems, and all of this is found in Deut. 14-15. Then in Deut. 16 we have the celebration, the national celebrations and in these the nation is authorized to have holy days. You’ve heard of holidays, this is where it came from. There are supposed to be certain holidays established for the nation in which the entire nation would participate. Every male would have to come before the presence of the Lord at least three times a year and these three great feasts are explained in Deut. 16 and by way of application, these three feasts, oddly enough, when you lay them out on a piece of paper one after another set up the prophecy of history. History is going to follow the exact pattern of the feasts of the Old Testament.

So all of this is very important but to return to our subject tonight, the doctrine of Deut. 13, we want to understand something about this, that throughout the Scriptures, when God reveals Himself this is usually what happens. You have first God revealing Himself through a prophet, since Moses. The prophet writes it down; at first he orally communicates it to his generation but eventually the prophets die and the people of the ages recognize that they must have it in writing. This is why the early church did not at first write the New Testament down. For example, why weren’t the Gospels written right after Jesus died? Why is it that it took so long for the early Christians to write the Gospels? Because if you had the choice of reading the Gospels and listening to an eyewitness of the account, which would you rather do? You’d much rather listen to an eyewitness; you’d much rather listen to a man who was there and said I saw Jesus Christ. Well, what did He say? I’ll tell you what He said, I was there when He said this, that and the other thing. That would be a lot more exciting and thrilling to you than reading about it.

This is why the New Testament was not written until these first generation believers died away, then it was put into writing and cast into a form. Once this happens it is zealously guarded. No one is allowed to change the enscripturated Word. We find warnings against this throughout the Bible. We find it in Deuteronomy, God says don’t touch this Word, don’t tamper with it, don’t add to it, don’t take subtract from it. In the book of Revelation, the last verses, he who adds to this I will add the plagues of this book and he who subtracts from these things I will subtract the blessings of this book, a horrible curse upon he who would distort the Word of God.

Here in Gal. 1 we find the principle again; it has to be reiterated time and time again in our day, that the Word of God cannot be tampered with. Verse 6 by way of context, Paul says, “I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel. [7] Which is not another; but there are some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ.” Now look at verse 8, look at what is said in verse 8, a fantastic statement. “Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.” Isn’t this interesting. This is an infallible apostle saying that if I come back tomorrow to this congregation and preach something different from what I have taught you, let me be accursed. The apostle even condemns himself, he says even if I turn around tomorrow and come to you and say I was wrong yesterday, I gave you the wrong information, listen to me now, then I should be accursed. And though “an angel from heaven” comes and you would have a genuine spiritual experience with an entity from the spiritual world and he tell you something, let him be accursed. No one has the authority to tamper with the Word of God.

With that in mind let’s turn back to Deut. 13 and I think you can appreciate the spirit in which Deut. 13 was written, to zealously protect the prophetic Word of God. The prophetic Word of God is here grounded on Moses. Chapter 13 is divided into three sections. Verses 1-5 deal with the prophet and the prophet is not to tamper with the Word of God. The second section runs from verse 6-11, and here it deals with the home and the loved ones in the home, and they are not to tamper with the Word of God. And from verse 12-18 cities, or the national subdivisions of the nations are not to tamper with the Word of God. So we have this rule applied to all levels of society regardless of who it is, everyone must submit to the dogma of Moses.

This, unfortunately, has a nasty connotation in our time for we live in a day when dogma, or doctrine, is downplayed and it’s always ironic to me, you usually get this on the college campus and people say oh, you fundamentalists, you’re always talking about doctrine, and to you the world would die and you’d still have your doctrine. And I’d say “Amen.” But the point is that there’s a tremendous assault being made upon doctrine on the part mostly of the whole culture of our time. This is amusing because if you would stop and think for two minutes you would recognize that it is a contradiction because in order to attack doctrine you have to have doctrine. For example, if someone says the Word of God is not true, that’s as dogmatic statement as when I get up and say the Word of God is true. So it’s false to say that the fundamentalist is the only one who has the doctrine. Oh no, every position has doctrine. The point is, which doctrine, and this is always to confront a person with. When they attack you for standing up for doctrine, say where do you stand, and the moment the person describes where he stands you say well, that’s doctrine, that’s the doctrine of your position. So you are just as ardent believer in doctrine as I am in mine.

Nevertheless, the doctrine here is the Mosaic doctrine and by way of review, in verses 1-5 we have it applied to the prophet or dreamer of dreams. We have the situation in verse 2 where the dreamer or the prophet has said look, listen to me, I want the nation to go in such and such a way. Now what he says if false, what he says is antithetical to the Word of God. But he says you follow me and the proof that I am from God is that I am going to predict something and that something is going to come true. So in verse 2 the sign of wonder does come to pass, there has been a bona fide miraculous occurrence, “whereof he spoke unto thee,” but when he said it, of course, he denied the Word. What are we to do?

Verse 3 is the attitude of response, “You shall never hearken to the words of that prophet,” even though the prophet is able to show you miraculous works, if his message does not line up with the Word, he is to be rejected. That’s the absolute negation in the Hebrew, never, never, never listen to him, don’t pay him a second thought, don’t pay any attention whatever. If his message doesn’t line up with doctrine, discard him, don’t pay attention to him. This is the rule that is to apply to all prophets. I also said there was a second rule which we will come to in Deut. 18, so we have generally two rules. The first one, Deut. 13 says that doctrine is THE criteria, not miracles. Therefore you have the Word over experience.

But then we have in Deut. 18 another test that is frequently misinterpreted so as to make it conflict with Deut. 13. In Deut. 18 the test is this: if the man says something is going to come to pass and it doesn’t, then he’s also false. But notice what I said, I did not say if the thing comes to pass and it does he’s true, for if that was what Deut. 18 said then it would conflict with Deut. 13. But Deut. 18 is not a positive test, it’s a negative test; if it fails, then the man has not spoken in the name of the Lord. Why is this? Because a bona fide miracle in Scripture, a bona fide prophecy in Scripture is always in ALL details 100% accurate. It is not a statistical high accuracy. It is always perfect. Why? Because the God of history is able to manipulate all the factors inside history to bring about His perfect will. This is a sign that you have been spoken to by the God of the master of history, the Lord of history. Therefore there is demanded in Deut. 18 perfect prophecy.

This is why the statement of Ruth Montgomery’s book, where she is describing Jean Dixon, and this is her personal biography of Jean Dixon, and in the front on page 10 she makes this statement about Jean Dixon. “Gradually as I studied her I became sufficiently impressed with the phenomenal accuracy of her predictions to be believed when on occasion she had missed. Had she always been right some of her forebodings would have seemed too horrific for comfortable contemplation.” Do you see what happens here? Jean Dixon is able to have a high accuracy of prediction, that violates the Word of God. The question in the Word of God is not a high accuracy of prediction, the question in the Word of God is either you are 100% or zero, there is no in between. Therefore Jean Dixon is a hoax, therefore Jean Dixon does not have the gift of prophecy, therefore Jean Dixon is an imposter and a witch and she should be condemned publicly for it and I think she is the largest phony that ever came to this country and the more she could be so labeled and maligned on a national scale we would have ended a lot of this bologna going around about gifts of prophecy and all the rest of the malarkey.

We are in the midst of one of the greatest satanic revivals of witchcraft and demonism that this country has ever seen. I got a message from a group of people in the peninsula south of Palo Alto, south of San Francisco and they are having universities training college students in the acts of the occult, demonism, Satan worship and all the rest. They have classes that you can go to and learn all this; this is one of the greatest satanic revivals our country has ever seen. But fortunately where Satan is active God always is. And in this same peninsula, in this same neighborhood where this free university is there are more Bible classes being established in the last four years than any other place in the middle part of Calif. So it’s going into a spiritual conflict. God is readying the forces of light to do battle with the forces of darkness in our day and it’s going to be a battle; don’t kid yourself, we have pussy-footed long enough. We have said people like Jean Dixon who is a great philanthropist, a great humanitarian, a wonderful person, a person who if she walked in her everyone would say that is a wonderful educated respectable person and yet the Bible would condemn her and sentence her to death according to Deut. 13, she is a witch and an imposter. And it must be said, regardless of personality; we have to make our stand not on the basis of whether we like the person or dislike the person, we have to make our stand on the basis of what does the Word of God have to say, the basis of principle, not the basis of personality.

Now we come to an area that is even harder to deal with than the area of the prophet, and that is verses 6-11; these are the loved ones of the home, and here are we to love the Lord with all our soul? Are we to love the Lord in the middle of the details of life? Remember the details of life include many things; it starts out with our fellowship with God and other believers, it starts out with our loved ones, it starts out with the home life, it starts out with sex, with money, with jobs, with relaxation, it includes my relation with the government, it includes my health, my relationship with my friends, etc. all of these, the details of life. And if we are to love the Lord our God in all these details it includes the area of loved ones.

Here, in verses 6-11 is the tremendous decision that believers have to face again and again and again. “If thy brother, the son of thy mother,” and notice there, there’s an apposition in the Hebrew, “thy brother,” comma “the son of thy mother.” Why do you suppose Moses as the preacher, when he preaches this, adds this apposition to brother? To make it close, so that you realize the tension. This isn’t just a person out there called a brother, but this is the son of your mother; this brings it in more close communion, increases the tension, “or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend who is as thine own soul,” that last appositional statement tacked on to “friend” means the closest friend you have, think of the closest friend you have. So all of these now, area of loved ones, if these “entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers,” here is the solicitation now to follow false doctrine. Please remember that verse 6, the last half of it, doesn’t mean they literally come up and say let’s go and serve another God. I showed you from Jeremiah that it doesn’t mean what it says. What he is saying here is this is the content of what they say; they don’t have to literally quote this.

For example, Jeremiah takes this up and applies it against a prophet of his day who prophesied wrongly in the name of the Lord. Hananiah didn’t get up before the congregation of Israel and say hey, wanna follow another god folks, it wasn’t that obvious. It wasn’t that open, he said you follow me, I’ve got the word from God, just follow me. And Jeremiah takes this up and throws it into Hananiah’s face and he says you have asked us to follow another god. Why does Jeremiah do that? Because Hananiah, in getting up and declaring what is not the Word of God as though it was the Word of God is moving away the children from their fathers, the spiritual children from their heavenly Father, they are tearing believers away from the Lord.

Verse 7, this defines it, “Namely, the gods of the people who are round about you, near unto thee, or far off from thee,” any one of these gods. Hananiah was evidently linked with some of these in Jeremiah’s day. “…from one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth, [8] Thou shalt not consent unto him,” now all of these verbs in verse 8 are in the Hebrew absolute negation. Hebrew has two ways of negating a verb, it has a relative negation which means don’t do it but it has an absolute negation and the absolute negation is never do it, don’t do it once. All of these are negated in an absolute sense in verse 8. “Thou shalt not consent unto him,” that’s the first verb. Watch how the verbs increase in intensity. First it says you won’t consent, you won’t listen and you won’t and you won’t have your eye pity him, “nor hearken unto him, neither shall thine eye pity him,” this is very difficult because who is this speaking of. This is speaking of loved ones in the family, this is a man looking at his wife, a man looking at his son, a man looking at his own friend and he says if they solicit you from following the Word of God, don’t let your eye pity them.

You see, the Bible always deals in terms of principle, not personality. “Thou shalt not consent unto him,” and Moses knew as a human being, as any human leader knows, the hardest people to lead are those who are the closest to you. That’s why a good leader never has many friends deliberately, because the more friends a good leader has the harder it is to be believed. Always keep people at a distance. There’s a reason for that. It’s very, very difficult to lead people with whom you are emotionally involved. So in verse 8 it says don’t let “your eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him. [9] But thou shalt surely kill him,” now the King James finally translated a verb in the absolute sense right. In verse it says “thou shalt surely kill him” and the word “kill” here is that phenomena of Hebrew construction that we’ve gone through again and again. You have a verb and you add an infinitive to the verb and you increase the intensity of the mood. So what is he saying? “You will kill him,” all right, I add an infinitive on here and it increases the verb, you must kill him.

[The tape becomes difficult to hear so accuracy may be affected.]

“… thine hand shall be first upon him” now at this point I want to go through a principle of Hebrew jurisprudence that you may understand what this phrase means, “thy hand shall be first upon him.” Turn to Deut. 17:7 where we have the principle of witnessing, and in the courtroom of the ancient nation when the verdict was made, guess who executed the sentence. The witnesses. Do you know why God had that? Because it does something to your testimony if you know you, you are going to be the one that throws the rocks. You are going to be careful how you testify about a person, when you are looking them straight in the eye and you accuse the person of doing something, knowing that full well that when the trial is over you are going to be the one to throw the rocks; it does something to preserve the testimony of the court.

So therefore in verse 7 it says “The hands of the witnesses shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterward the hands of all the people.” What’s the point? The point is that the witnesses were to be the first one, they executed people the slow way then, they didn’t have gas chambers, they didn’t have electric chairs, they had stones, and they would get these people off in a ravine somewhere and just throw stones at them and you can figure out the pain involved as these stones come down. If you are fortunate someone will hit you on the head and knock you out so you’ll become unconscious. You can imagine it wasn’t a very pleasant thing to look down there and see this bloody hulk still groping around while you threw stones at him. But this was the way, in all the gruesome details, people were executed in Israel. So therefore the hands of the witnesses were the first ones upon them.

Now let’s apply this to the New Testament, and see if by understanding this principle we can enlighten ourselves to one of the strangest passages in the Gospels, John 8 and the woman caught in adultery. This section in John 8 is a source of great debate. In verses 1-11 Jesus has an encounter with a woman who has been caught in adultery. For years and years scholars have debated whether this passage really should be there in John 8, or whether it should be at the end of the Gospel of Luke where it is found in some of the Greek texts. The problem is that there is a problem as to how it fits into the testimony of the time.

For example, chapter 7 dealt with the Feast of Tabernacles, and Jesus has just got up in the middle of the feast and said, “If any man thirst, let him come unto Me,” and those of you who aren’t aware of what was going on when he said that can’t appreciate the strident claims that this man made, for at the exact moment that Jesus cried out to the congregation, “If any man thirst, let him come unto Me,” at that very time the high priests were pouring water out of great pitchers and chanting the words of Isaiah, “Ho, the waters of salvation to the Lord,” and in the middle of this great ceremony Jesus got up and interrupted and said “If any man thirst, let him come unto Me,” don’t go to the priests. And that is the force of Jesus’ statement. You can imagine, how could a man who said these kind of things be merely a good man. He’d be a lunatic and that’s one of the greatest apologetic claims of the gospel of Christ, the things Jesus did showed the fact that either He had to be who He claimed to be or He was insane.

And then later on after this woman caught in adultery in verse 12 it says “Then spoke Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world,” and you cannot understand this either until you understand what happened at this point for in this ceremony the priest were going around and lighting the candles to illuminate the whole temple area and when they had done this, Jesus got up and said “I am the light of the world.” Imagine the audacious claim for a man to stand up in the middle of a religious ceremony lighting candles and He gets up and says “I am the light of the world.” You see now the force of Jesus’ claims and why they hit the people so hard in their time when you understand the Old Testament background for these things that went on in gospel times.

Now why is it that Jesus, in verse 1, is in the Mount of Olives all of a sudden? In the middle of all of this temple worship, how come He’s off in the Mount of Olives, and how come this woman is caught in adultery in the early morning when the scene in chapter 7 is in the afternoon and the scene in chapter 8 is in the evening? It seems out of place. But fortunately, as always, if Christians would just be patient long enough for the archeologists to gather the material, we find the Word of God is inerrant after all, for now we find through unknown, actually an unconscious effort of the Jewish scholar, that one of the parts of this feast was to have the ceremony one day, the light ceremony the next, and in between here the people had to stay in the temple overnight to protect the women. The women had to go and stay in these areas around the court; they had rooms for the women to sleep in during the night to protect them from the men in the religious celebration. So the women would retire there for the night. And this incident in John 8 occurs the morning after something happened during that religious ceremony and it fits in exactly the way John has said it would. Exactly! This does not have to be wrenched from its context, this literally occurred between these two days of the festival.

But to get to our point and to see and apply the Old Testament principle that we’ve learned about the hand of the witness being first against him, this is how to explain what Jesus said to this woman. “Jesus went unto the Mount of Olives. [2] And early in the morning He came again into the temple, and all the people came unto Him;” He’d created quite a stir the other day. They said oh, here comes that guy that said come unto him those that thirst. Let’s see what He’s got to say. So they all come to Him, “and He sat down, and taught them. [3] And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, [4] They say unto Him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act.” That’s important, “the very act.” These are claiming to be witnesses to that act and therefore they are the [can’t understand word] to cast the first stone according to Deut. 17. They are the witnesses.

Verse 5, “Now Moses, in the law, commanded us that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou? [6] This they said, testing Him, that they might have to accuse Him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though none had heard Him. [7] So when they continued asking Him,” and the Greek says they asked Him and asked Him and asked Him and asked Him, and it must have been five or ten minutes that Jesus is questioned and He sat there as though He wouldn’t even listen to them. And the men kept asking Him, are you going to kill her, are you going to kill her, are you going to let us stone her, and Jesus refused to answer, and He kept writing in the sand. No one knows what He wrote in that sand, it’s a source of a lot of speculation, possibly parts of the Mosaic Law, but nevertheless, in verse 7, “He lifted Himself up, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”

Some people have interpreted this passage to mean that you should never accuse a person of wrongdoing. That is NOT the interpretation of this passage. What Jesus said was the application of Deut. 17:7, He said let those of you who have not sinned, and the word “sin” here refers back to adultery, He said let those of you who are without adultery, those of you who haven’t done this very same thing last night, let you cast the first stone. That’s why they dropped their rocks and left. He wasn’t saying that you have to be sinless before you condemn a person for wrongdoing. I have heard this verse misused in congregations where a minister who got himself in trouble and a lot of other people in the church, nobody wanted to fire him because they said “let him who is without sin cast the first stone” and all the rest of it. A misapplication of this by a bunch of spiritual idiots; that has nothing to do with the verse. The point here is that these men were engaged in the same kind of activity; how do you think they caught her in the act? What were they doing inside the temple; they weren’t supposed to be there. So Jesus knew it and He just simply applied Deut. 17, okay guys, you haven’t done it, let’s see the ones who haven’t been engaged in the same practice last night. That’s why they slunk off. It was a great source of embarrassment. I can just see the people clapping because don’t you think the common people of the day didn’t know what was going on in those rooms, and don’t think that those common people didn’t know what the Scribes and Pharisees were doing in the temple; they knew very well, they financed it through their taxation, they financed that temple of apostasy and they loved to hear the Lord ream them out. So this is the background of John 8 and you can understand that when you understand the Old Testament custom. Jesus simply challenged them on the basis of their own Law.

Turn back to Deut. 13 and while we’re turning there, remember something else Jesus said. Remember John said “If any man love not his father or his mother more than Me he is not worthy of Me,” [blank spot] so and so his son, more than me He’s not worthy of me, what was the point Jesus was making? Simply the same thing of Deut. 13. Jesus hadn’t said anything new in Matt. 10; Jesus was just reiterating the teachings of Moses from Deut. 13, “he who loves his family more than Me is not worthy of Me.” Why did Jesus say that statement? Simple, the same reason Moses said it in Deut. 13, for he who places his allegiance to the Lord underneath his allegiance to his family is in trouble, deep trouble, and here is where this happens. Deut. 13:6, “If thy brother, the son of they mother … entice thee,” don’t sympathize, take him out and accuse him.

In verse 10, “And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die, because he hath sought to thrust thee away” or force thee away “from the LORD thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage. [11] And all Israel shall hear, and fear, and shall do no more any such wickedness as this is among you. This is one of the great fringe benefits of a strong judicial system, the deterrence of immediate justice. You see after this happened a couple of times it would straighten up a lot of the problem, and this is one of the features of justice in the Old Testament. No extended trials, no [can’t understand word] appeals from the n^th court all the way up to the top where it takes ten years to get a conviction. Oh no, conviction was immediate and sure and just in Israel. Therefore, since they had a validly operating judicial system, they didn’t have the gripes about it, justice was respected, or it could have been had they operated according to the system for any length of time.

Therefore an immediate justice, a firm justice, and the result would be verse 11, Israel would hear about it and they would do wickedness no more. There is one of the justifications for a firm sound administration of divine discipline, for a firm sound working of judicial and civil law in a nation, in a society.

Beginning at verse 12 we come to the third section of submission to doctrine and here it’s not the prophet or the family, but here it’s an entire city. Here is where the problem arises of even civil war. They are to risk civil war, if necessary, to submit a disobedient city. If that city says we are strong, we are going to fight you, then the nation is to engage in civil war if that is necessary to subdue that apostate city.

Verse 12, “If you shalt hear a report in one of thy cities, which the LORD thy God hath given thee to dwell there, saying, [13] Certain men, the children of Belial [worthless fellows],” now this means the sons of, in the Hebrew it looks look like this, the sons of [not sure of word, sounds like “B”], this is just the way the Hebrews would have of describing something with an adjective. Instead of writing “rich men” they would write men of wealth, or sons of wealth. So this word means “worthlessness,” the word itself means “worthlessness.” So “sons of worthlessness” just simply means “worthless fellows” and if you check this out in a concordance and you see how it is used, it means the hoods, it’s used of the street gang, the thugs that used to walk around the city of Jerusalem. They didn’t have any police so they had a lot of these hoods running around the streets, etc. they didn’t have motorcycles, they had chariots so these people would be running around, running into things, running over people and everything else. They had their problems. Isaiah speaks of them, until they had a few generals come in and these generals weren’t nice police officers. They came in and they just took their armies and went right through the streets and killed them right in them right in the middle of the street. That was justice in those days and it solved the problem. They never had any more hoods running around the streets for a few years after that because they’d just simply kill them where they found them and that’s the way the military authorities dealt with the problem in the Old Testament.

Verse 13, these are “worthless fellows, gone out from among you, and have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which ye have not known. [14] Then shalt thou inquire, and make search, and ask diligently; and, behold, if it be truth, and the thing certain, that such abomination is wrought among you,” verse 14 is there that they conduct a judicial investigation, they are not, just because they hear a rumor, to go down there and clean out a city. They are to carefully investigate the situation, is this true? And after investigating it, verse 15, “Thou shalt surely smite” and there again you have that infinitive construction in the Hebrew, “You must surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly,” now “destroying it utterly” is that phrase that we’ve come to again and again in this series, charem, and charem is the principle in Hebrew of absolute destruction of holy war. When God decrees that He condemns something, all of that is to be destroyed.

When, for example, in the early days of Israel the armies moved into the holy land there were occasions, for example, with Achan, you remember what happened, they went into a city and he withheld some of the material, he withheld some of the spoil, and to you it would sound like an act of mercy, but it wasn’t with God because God had condemned the city, therefore any person who would go into the city and steal the wealth was stealing from God. This also prevented something else, a psychological guard and protection for the nation Israel. If God had said I want you to go into the city and destroy it, and keep the wealth, then what would have happened to the justice? Figure it out for yourself, there would have been all sorts of charges against a city that was wealthy and then the city was wealthy, they’d say we want the wealth so let’s trump up the charge that they’ve departed from doctrine, go in and steal all the wealth. But God protected, in all His wisdom, He protected them from doing that. Why? Because in verse 15 He said I want you to destroy it wholly, which meant that it would not be advantageous for them to go out and say there’s a rich city, let’s get all the wealth out of it. They couldn’t because they were commanded of God that when they went in to destroy it they were to destroy all of it, including the wealth. So it was of no material benefit to them to destroy a city. The only reason why they would destroy the city would be to follow out a command of the Lord, you destroy it entirely, all that is there, even the cattle. You ask why include the cattle, at the end of verse 15? [“Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword.”] Because this is a rural economy, the people have problems with their cattle, they want more cattle, there’s a city over there that’s got a lot of cattle associated with it, so let’s invent a charge and steal all the cattle. But to prevent this God says when you destroy that city destroy the cattle too, and then there wouldn’t be any natural materialism lust to go get involved and foul up the principle of justice.

Verse 16, “And thou shalt gather all the spoil of it into the midst of the street thereof,” this is the market place, the town square, “and shalt burn with fire the city, and the spoil thereof every whit, for the LORD thy God, and it shall be an heap forever; it shall not be built again.” The word “heap” is the Hebrew word tell, and those of you who are interested in archeology, Michner’s book, he shows you how the excavate through a tell, a tell is an ancient mound on which a city has been built, then destroyed, another city has been built on top, destroyed, another city built on top, destroyed, somehow these people never gave up, and they built a city there, the thing would get destroyed, they’d build it right on top. And what God says, I want you to stop the process right here. When that city goes apostate I don’t ever want you to build on that tell again, you just leave it there and that tell is going to be a monument to apostasy.

Verse 17, “And there shall cling nothing of the cursed thing to thine hand; that the LORD may turn from the fierceness of his anger,” and not “show thee mercy” but the Hebrew says “give thee mercies,” plural, it’s different, that He may give, that’s grace, “mercies,” plural, mercies are the blessings of God and the blessings of God bestowed upon this nation depended upon their obedience to His Word. They had to obey His word, then they would receive the mercies. What are the mercies? Let’s enumerate the mercies; according to the Mosaic Law the mercies were occupation of the land, they would occupy the land forever as long as they were obedient. They were to have military victory, that was the second mercy that God was to give them; every enemy they would engage they would defeat, not because of their military prowess but because of one thing; they had their faith and God was on their side, and another thing, subjective, their armies were disciplined.

Some of you are reading in the newspaper about the United States Army and Air Force and the problems the services are having with disobedience with these jackass GI’s that get on television and say we’re not going to fight, we don’t like the drill sergeant, he’s nasty and all the rest of it. They are always nasty, that’s their job, they’re paid for it. They can’t run over the sergeant like they ran over their father. It’s like the Commandant of the Marines said, you show me an army that doesn’t have discipline and I will show you an army that is going to go down to disaster. One of the most graphic portrayals of how this operated in history is the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire expanded as an army never did, and they were not superior militarily to the Greeks, they were not superior militarily to the Persians, the reason the Romans were superior was because the Roman generals maintained discipline. These men were disciplined and the reason the Romans won wasn’t because they had the great generals of the ancient world, it was because when those men got together they operated as a team. And if one man was hurt the rest of them moved on and kept moving on, and they never broke rank, never retreated. To this day the Roman Army has gone down as a model of discipline in history. And what finally broke the Roman Empire militarily was when they began to hire slaves in the army and these slaves were sucked into the army on the basis that we have, we’re going to have a voluntary army and all the rest of it. The Roman Empire is one of the great historical proofs that you cannot have existence and blessing in history apart from law and order and discipline. There’s the proof in history.

This is what Moses is trying to get across here, he is trying to show these people that they’ve got to be disciplined, and discipline begins with a stubborn adherence to the Word of God. When you decide in your own heart, I am going to believe the Word of God and stand for the Word of God and I don’t care if the world is against me, I don’t care if 15,000,000 are out there and they say ha-ha and they laugh and all the rest of it, I’m going to ha-ha right back at them and I’m going stick and if I go down to my grave I’m going to go down trusting in the Word of God. That’s the kind of stubborn faith that the Word of God exalts.

So here they are to destroy this city, and in verse 17, they are not to let any materialism lust break forth, grab some of these things, etc. for their own, and God is going to show them mercies. Mercies again, occupation of the land, victory, they’re going to have a worldwide testimony and they are going to have economic prosperity, all of these God will give them if they will follow out His commands. [“And there shall cling nothing of the cursed thing to thine hand; that the LORD may turn form the fierceness of His anger, and shoe thee mercies, and have compassion upon thee, and multiply thee, as He hath sworn unto thy fathers.”]

Verse 18, “When thou shalt hearken to the voice of the LORD thy God, to keep all His commandments which I command thee this day, to do that which is right in the eyes of the LORD thy God.” This is the concluding challenge of chapter 13. Next week we’ll start with chapters 14-154 and deal with the unity shown in the religious practices of the nation.