Lesson 30

Poverty and Slavery – 15:12-23

We are going through the section of Deuteronomy that has to do with loving the Lord with all your soul. The word “soul” here can be translated “life” or equivalent to our terminology, details of life. Every believer has the inner mental attitude, that was described in the early chapters of Deuteronomy, “love the Lord with all your heart and with all your soul.” From chapters 5-11 we dealt with loving the Lord with all our heart, dealing with the inner mental attitudes. Now we come to the details of life such as fellowship with other believers, such as your relationship with loved ones, such as sex, food, money, job, relaxation, health, such as relationship with law and government and friends. And all of these things we all have, these are all details of life and the Old Testament is very interesting because the Old Testament spells out in black and white what it means to love the Lord in all these areas. So we’re not left without any guidelines, there are definite rules and regulations, definite outlines and controls to this word “love” in the Old Testament.

Last time we concluded with verse 11, let’s look back at chapter 15 and pick up some high points so as we finish chapter 15 in this section we get the big view. This particular section, chapters 14-15 of Deuteronomy has to do with what we would call the good life. Paul says meditate on those things which are good. This has to do with a believer who in various areas of his life, if he is living to the Lord, loving the Lord in all these areas, that he’s going to produce a behavior pattern and this behavior pattern is going to be characterized by certain things. In 14:1-2 we found out this behavior pattern has to do with your attitude toward death. This is why a lot of believers are out of it because when they get to a funeral they act like any pagan and weep, moan and groan and carry on as though some person had left them forever which is nonsense. If a person has died and that person is a believer it is a temporary separation, for to be absent from the body is to be face to face with the Lord and that means that if a loved one of mine who is a believer dies then He is going to be in the presence of the Lord like I am and we’ll see one another after death. So whereas Christian death has sorrow, sorrow at the departure of a loved one, it does not have that deep inner grief of a pagan. But so many Christians are so ill instructed that they don’t know the difference.

Verses 3-21 has to do with diet and we went into that in great detail. Verses 22 to the end of the chapter dealt with tithing, giving and taxation. The last two verses of Deut. 14, verses 28-29 set apart a function for some of the taxes. The taxes in the nation were voluntary; the tithe was voluntary on the part of the citizens to pay their tithe. The welfare provision of Deut. 14:28-29 was to set apart in all these cities, they had various cities around the land and each city was to take every third year, to take all their taxes, which would be in the form of produce, and set them inside the city in storehouses and these storehouses would be used to feed the poor people, as defined by verse 29, the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, the widow, etc. There’s one missing there and that’s the men; the head of the families are missing in verse 29 and there’s a reason for it because if a man was going into poverty he did something that we’re going to get into tonight. But up to this point in verse 29 you have people who are on welfare because they have no means of economic freedom and stability. Therefore the freedom is provided by welfare and the people, the Levites had no right to hold property, widows had no right to hold property, therefore they had the provision of levirate marriage in the Old Testament, and orphans had no right to hold property, and the ger, or the foreigner, this was a person who was a Gentile who lived within the boundaries of Israel as a citizen, but could not hold title to property. So these people were subject to economic losses, etc. and had to attain their livelihood by some means and welfare was one of the ways these people were supplied.

Here is the legitimate form of welfare in the Bible. Here is what God means when He says I want you to love me with all your heart, in all the details of life and this includes loving the Lord in the details of your social relationships. These are bona fide poor people who are poor, not because they don’t want to work, not because they can’t work or something, they are poor simply because of their situation in life and therefore in the Bible these people are provided for by welfare. But notice something else about this provision of welfare. It is provided by the tithe. We’re going to get into something about this, this is 10% on all people, this is not progressive taxation, this is equal percent of all people. Every citizen of Israel kicked into the pot 10%. This was used for the poor. So therefore God did provide for the poor in this society and the provision of the poor was considered part of loving the Lord with all your soul.

In chapter 15 we get into another section and this is the problem of the release. This is a problem to get out of debt. Every seven years, this is the way it would be laid out, you have the first year, second year, third year, fourth year, fifth year, sixth year and seventh year. On that seventh year if you had been poor and someone gave you some money, say $1,000 and you were paying that back at the rate of $100 a year. So you’d pay back, say a person gave it to you the second year of this cycle; the second year you get a loan of $1,000 because you have run out of money and you can’t buy toothpaste or something critical, therefore you are the recipient of some philanthropic loan. The third year you pay off $100, so you now owe $900. The fourth year you pay off $100, you owe $800; the fifth year you pay off $100, the sixth year you pay $100 and you owe $600. What happens in the seventh year? The $600 is erased and the debt is completely reduced to zero. Why? Because this prevented something, the debt cycle. This kept the debt cycle from occurring in the nation Israel, and God had it worked out this way so that these people would attain a fresh start every seventh year.

Remember these are not business loans; these are philanthropic loans, aid to families, etc. What God would do was every seventh year He’d do something very interesting. He would erase loan; now He wouldn’t give them more money, that would be up to them, but He would erase their debt so that beginning the new cycle, which would be equivalent of the first year, the person could start out with a clean slate. This was another feature of the welfare program of Israel, it gave people a chance to get back on their feet with a fresh start, but it didn’t keep them as wards of the state.

Now we come to the problem of poverty. We reviewed some of the causes of poverty and I want to review these because I left out a point. The Biblical doctrine of welfare and poverty is a most misunderstood area of our time.

The first thing to remember about poverty in the Bible is that poverty is a spiritual problem. If you have a background in sociology are immediately going to rise up in deep suspicion and label me as some sort of an unfeeling fundamentalist who’s attacking the poor. If you have a background in sociology you have my sympathies, actually, because most sociology is anti-Christian. But if you have had that background, let me enlighten you at one point. The Scriptures say in Deut. 15:4 that there should be no poor among you, it says in your King James, “Save [except] when there shall be no poor among you,” in the Hebrew it says, “However, there would be no poor among you,” if verse 5 were followed, “If thou carefully hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God,” so what this is saying is that in the society of Israel there would be no poor if the nation walked with God as an entire culture. Poverty therefore is a result of national cultural disobedience to the Word of God and no other reason. There are other reasons, yes, secondary, but these aren’t the real ultimate reasons; the ultimate reason for poverty is because of the social rejection on the part of a nation to the revealed Word of God.

And God predicts this in verse 11, which is not a contradiction of verse 4, “For the poor shall never cease out of the land,” and this is the kind of a statement that we’ve seen so often in Deuteronomy where God will say this is your blessing Israel if you will do this but I know you’re going to do this. This is the style of this book. Therefore at this point we can make one tremendous deduction about poverty and poverty is this: that it is a result, a sign and symptom of the social rejection of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We see this in our country. In our country we see things going wrong and people get concerned about this but if you are a Christian you understand something from Rom. 1. When people have the Word of God and turn away as a culture they incur the wrath of God. I often hear Christians say if we go on we’re going to get judged by God, but if you think Biblically you’d never make a statement like that.

The very fact that the disorders are happening is proof that God’s wrath is already being poured out, for in Rom. 1 it says that those have had the truth and have turned away from it, God releases His common grace. You see God protects society, He protects society from the plotters, He protects society from the evil people until a point is reached when that society, as a culture, rejects Him, they don’t want His Word and they just totally throw the whole system out so God says okay, I’m releasing My hand, I’m going to let the wheels of history take over from here. In Rom. 1 you read God released them over to their own mind. They liked to think these things and God says okay, I’m tired of restraining your sin, I’m going to let your sin natures have full run of the mill. So therefore the wheels of history grind on and cultures are destroyed. The very fact that our culture today is experiencing the things that it is is a sign that God’s wrath is already upon it.

And this is why the Biblical Christian differs from a lot of people in this country. The Biblical Christian realizes that our problem is a spiritual one, that poverty and all the rest of it basically is a spiritual problem. And tomorrow you could have all the proper officials elected and the next day you’d have the same problem. Why? Because basically it’s like this. Suppose we have $1,000, that’s your asset. Let’s have a little game; the game is to invest $1,000 so you get the most profit back on it. We divide the congregation in half, those on the right and those on the left. Those on the left take after the liberals and say here’s our national asset, let’s spend it this way and so you work some program. Those on the right hand side of the aisle are the conservative and you say let’s take the $1,000 and work it out this way. But both of you are not thinking truly Biblically because the Biblical Christian looks at it and says wait a minute, who says we’re limited to $1,000? The Christian says now wait a minute, our national assets are in direct proportion to our spirituality, therefore the big issue is to present the gospel to our society and the more people you have regenerated and the more believers you have trained in the Word of God and following the Word of God, filled with the Spirit, you increase the national assets in a material way, this is a material illustration, you might increase the national assets to $3,000. So the Christian is apart in one sense that he’s generating more assets by the impact of the Word of God, whereas the politicians are scrambling around trying to sort out the pieces. We’re interested in bringing new pieces into existence. We are the truly creative ones because we are the ones that are dealing with the raw material here. So therefore the Christian’s objective in society is to change the whole society; it’s not to restructure the elements that are already there, it’s to add to them.

Therefore, the first problem of poverty is that poverty basically, like all problems, is a spiritual problem. It is not, therefore, a result of our economic laws, etc. Last time I showed you several illustrations of this. The Cosa Nostra in 1968 took in twenty billion dollars out of the United States economy. Talk about the cost of running the war, do you realize if we had twenty billion dollars we could run the United States Air Force for one year. All these people griping about the cost of the Vietnam War, nonsense, people say oh, the Cosa Nostra, those baddies there, organized crime, let’s do away with it. Do you know how organized crime goes on in this country, playing off on the liquor, the prostitution, drugs, and everything else. Organized crime couldn’t last two minutes in this country if they didn’t have a means of catering to the sins and lusts of the flesh. I’m not excusing Cosa Nostra, all I’m saying is that these people build on the lusts of the flesh and if you had a Christian society they couldn’t exist. The reason these things exist is because society is weak, it’s flabby. Alcoholism causes a loss of twenty billion dollars annually. Another thing, we have power lust on the part of politicians and this is what has gone on in our country. We have a senator that has done more to destroy this country than any people in public office. Do you know what keeps getting this man elected? Conservative business men; oh, you say, no, not conservative business men. Oh yes they do, and the reason they do is because guess who has seniority in the Senate. And if we don’t have a Senator from out state with seniority we’re not going to have any of the plush plums that come our way. Do you blame it on the Senator? No, you blame it on the lust of the people that voted him into office.

The first point in the doctrine of poverty is that poverty is spiritually caused. Then we have the second thing on the doctrine of poverty, and that is that Christians see poverty as a problem that can be resolved only by national back to the Bible, back to the Holy Spirit movement. In other words it has to be back to the Word of God, emphasis on teaching the Word of God and application in the life. And that is the only thing that is going to solve this nation’s problem. Instead of going back to the Word of God, a lot of people say this is too slow, you Christians have been pushing this gospel for 150 years and what have you done to American society? Nothing! Do you know the reason we’ve done nothing? Because society by and largely has rejected it. I’m not going to go running around town with all sorts of secondary solutions or to Washington DC to help out in the war on poverty and all the rest when it’s all due to the fact that people reject the gospel. I’m not going go cover up for their mistakes. We as believers exhaust our responsibility when we live as unto the Lord and teach and preach and live His Word, and that is all the Lord calls us to do. Yet you have liberal after liberal, let’s organize these churches, let’s get busy with social action. The point is that we’re playing with symptoms and that’s the whole point. This is why the fundamentalist doesn’t get socially involved; he is socially involved. The moment you live for Jesus Christ and dare to present the spiritual truth of the gospel to an unbeliever you are, by definition, socially involved. You don’t have to get involved; you are involved at that point. Therefore playing around with all these secondary symptoms…. May be in a local situation we’re called upon to do something. For example doctors often have to give aspirin to reduce fever and then they get to the main thing, but you don’t want a doctor that all he did was solve your fever problem, you want a doctor that got to the heart of the problem.

The third thing in the doctrine of poverty; we reject the two false notions of millennialism. There are two false notions and one true one; let’s look at the true one, the Biblical one, premillennial. Premillennial means that Jesus Christ comes again in history and sets up 1000 years of perfect environment. That is your perfect social order, and this is the image, this future golden age is the image that historically gave rise to communism, etc. during the Middle Ages, as Norman Cohen has proven in his book, that this was the vision, because no one else in the history of the world has ever had a vision of a future golden age. Read mythology; all the golden ages are past, not future. Only in the Bible do you have a future golden age that lies ahead of man. Therefore during the Middle Ages you had people that went around Europe starting revolutions to bring in that future golden age and from that movement we get two forms of millennialism in our day. We have the gradualistic millennialism which we call socialism, and then we have the sudden or the catastrophic millennialism and this is communism. Those are the two main forms that we face today that are actually Christian heresies.

What is a socialist? A socialist gradually, through a sneaky process of legislation works to produce this golden age. What is the golden age he wants to produce? It’s something, though he’s not conscious of it, it’s something that he really has borrowed from the Bible. Now, we come to the communist; what does he want to do? He wants to do the thing by revolution, he says the socialist is wrong, the socialist wants to build it from law, he wants to gradually transform it, we’re not going to bother with that, we want sudden revolution, sudden destruction of the whole social order and then we will get our golden age. As a Christian would you agree or disagree that a transformation is needed to bring in the perfect environment? You’d have to agree, we don’t disagree, we agree with the communists and socialists that a transformation is necessary. We radically disagree on who it’s going to happen. We say that it’s going to be due to the Second return of our Lord, when He comes into history and sets it up, that’s how society is going to be transformed. So in one sense we agree with the socialists and the communists, yes, society has to be totally restructured, but it’s going to be restructured by Jesus Christ coming and breaking into history in a moment of time. That’s our premillennialism. However, it is due to God’s grace, so you have our program that is grace, God does the work, man does the receiving. You have communist and socialists which are works, man does the work, and God, if He exists, does the receiving. So you’re back to your religious problem of grace and works again. Socialism and communism are basically the age old heresy of man trying to do a work that only God can do. And this is why we say to the communists and socialists, you can have your revolution, you can have all the legislative reform you want to and in the end you will have hell on earth, because you will now have not only the sin nature of man, you haven’t got rid of that, you haven’t got rid of the sin nature in government officials, but worse than that, now you’ve set up a power structure, totalitarianism, so now you’ve not only got the sin nature, but you’ve got a machine that that sin nature can control so you’ve got something at the end that’s worse than when you began.

So this is why we criticize and are diametrically opposed to communism. And by the way, don’t ever apologize for premillennialism. I did a paper at seminary on premillennialism and I found out that some of the early socialists in this country recognized that the one thing that opposed socialism in the 1920’s in America was the Scofield Bible with its premillennialism. And one of these socialists admitted that this is the worst enemy we face, the Scofield Bible. Why? Because the Scofield Bible orients the people who read it and the Scofield Bible has some good notes in it and if you read those notes you will be trained gradually into premillennialism and you will understand God’s program for history and you will understand the futility of humanly designed programs.

Now we come to the fourth point in the doctrine of poverty and this involves solutions, present day solutions. What are our solutions? If our solution is not radical reformation of society then what is our solution. I suggest three things. First, all solutions advanced by Biblical conservatives toward social problems of any kind will recognize that we are not trying to restructure society. Jesus is going to do that, if we try it we’re getting in His way. Therefore our solution will have no hidden purposes like progressive taxation. Let me give you an example. In the 1930’s we had people going around this country with bleeding hearts talking about the poor and saying we need social security and we need to give all the aged people social security, etc. And they cried and cried on everyone’s shoulder. That sounded like a good argument and in some cases it was legitimate except when they went to design the program, watch how they do it. When they designed the program they make it wholly government, so you can’t choose. It’s not like passing a law for compulsory automobile insurance where you’re compelled to buy auto insurance but you’re not compelled, you can choose various companies. So they form a government monopoly and that immediately is suspicious.

The second thing they do is that it’s progressive, although social security is a flat rate, it largely blends in with the whole idea of progressive taxation, etc. and you get back what you don’t put in and all the rest of it. And its basic motive is not to help the poor, don’t be naïve. The basic program of social security is to restructure society, to take money from those who have it and give to those who haven’t. And I don’t mean in a sense of giving to the poor, I mean to take advantage of people who have made a lot of money and take it out of them. Don’t you ever be jealous of a person who’s made a lot of money; if they’ve made a lot of money they earned it. Don’t sit around and say he’s got a million dollars; that’s his business and you have no right to sit around with mental attitude lust and say I’d like to have that and vote for socialist programs so you can force him to give it to you. That’s basically the motive behind social security and that’s why I’ve pointed out if you look carefully in Deut. 14 what do you find out about the tithe? It was a flat 10% rate on everyone and the objective behind this program wasn’t to take from those who have and give it to those who have not; it was everybody putting the same amount in the pot, not progressive income tax. As one man said that designed social security, if we really told the American public what we really had in mind when we designed social security they never would have voted for it. I’m not knocking the idea of giving to the poor and the aged. I’m just saying that when you design the program watch out the motives. The motives here are not to give; the motives are to restructure society which is an anti-Christian goal.

Secondly, our solutions toward the poor should be mainly structured to get them back into society as fast as possible. And to date no welfare program has ever done this. What happens? The poor get poorer and the family, after the third and fourth generation are still in the welfare lines. You never found this in Israel. This program given to us in Deut. 15 had giving these poor people a break and then bang, they’re right back as producing members of the society. They didn’t drag on and on and on and on, year after year after year on this thing.

The third thing and this is very sensitive in our society as a democracy, but if you go to deal with the poor, deal with the poor. Don’t deal with the poor farmer, or the poor colored person, or the poor somebody else, if you’re really interested in the poor, deal with the poor, but what happens in our society. We kowtow to certain groups, minority groups etc, and we’re not interested in the poor, what we’re interested in doing is bribing minority groups to vote. That’s what’s happening, so instead of treating the poor as the poor we’re just buying votes and that’s what it amounts to. We’ll give you the right to vote, you may not know how to write your name but we’ll give you the right to vote so you can vote for us, after all, we got you this program. This is what goes on.

Biblically, if you’re interested in the poor, then pay for the poor. For example, in our country we talk about the colored person being disadvantaged. What about the American Indian? Have you talked to some Christian missionaries on the Indian mission field in Arizona and New Mexico? They are some of the most downtrodden people in this country and they haven’t got a fair break. If people were really interested in the poor their motive would show. The real thing that shows you the motivation is, and we see this pseudo-thinking that goes on, we find people coming in from the federal government telling parents that your kid is going to go to such and such a school because we want to integrate the school system. Ask yourself the question, where do these official’s children go to school? Take Washington DC. All these people that are voting in all these programs to force integration, did you ever notice where their children are going to school? In the white suburbs of Virginia; they have an integrated school system in Washington DC but you don’t find the children of the Senators and Congressmen going to those schools. Do you know why? Because they’re not interested in integration for them, they’re interested in integration for you because it buys votes from minority groups. So this is the motivation behind a lot of this and I wanted to expose this so that you wouldn’t be impressed by these arguments; they are just phony all the way. Don’t ever confuse what’s going on in our country with this kind of thing that’s going on in the Bible. This is true charity in the Bible, where there was a real concern over people that had problems and they really helped them with them.

Let’s finish chapter 15, beginning at verse 12, the problem of slavery. “And if thy brother, an Hebrew man, or an Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years,” there are two ways in which a person could be sold. This chapter deals only with one. Here are the two ways you could be sold and this answers the question I asked before, why do you suppose there’s not a man allowed to go into those food stores in the city. Who was privileged? Levites, women, orphans, foreigners. So where were the Jewish men? They couldn’t get in there. Where were the heads of families? They weren’t allowed into that welfare pot. Why? Because this was the way in which they solved their poverty program if they were the head of a family. If a man was the head of a family he had two choices. Before he got in debt, he realized he was getting poorer and poorer and he thought he might go into debt, he could do something in Lev. 25:39, he could sell himself into the servitude of a rich man. In other words, he could come in, not as a slave, this wasn’t looked upon as slavery, but he could sell himself and become a… a permanent job, you might say he had permanent job security with another man. Therefore you had job security. Notice, it was job security, not welfare security. So here we have job security of Leviticus 25:39; that’s one way a Jewish man who was head of his family who realized he wasn’t making it, realized he had to support his family, he would sell himself to another rich Jewish male.

The other problem came up here and this was if a man couldn’t pay his debts, then he had to work it off. And this is the kind of slavery that is listed here. This is how slavery got started. Slavery was due to the fact that a man who was in debt and couldn’t pay off sold himself into slavery to pay this off. But as so often in Scripture there are safeguards for this man so he wouldn’t become a permanent slave. That’s given in verse 12, “And if thy brother, and Hebrew man, or an Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years, then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee.” So if he sold himself as a slave he wouldn’t be a slave forever. There would be that seventh year of release coming up. That is not exactly the seventh year of the previous verses because this is just six years from the time he went into slavery.

Verse 13, “And when you send him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty.” I want you to see verse 13 and study it carefully because in Exodus 21 which is the legal format for this we have this law written up as a judgment. What is the difference between a judgment and a statute? I said a statute is a statement in the Scripture that appeals to your conscience, Big Brother isn’t over you with a stick and going to beat you over the head if you don’t obey. It’s strictly up to you and when the Bible wants to give that it gives it in the form of a statute. You do thus and such, that is up to you and if you don’t do it you have the Lord to face, but you don’t have government. Judgment is when government says, and that’s usually phrased in your Bible, if such and such then such and such. It’s an “if” clause and “if” clauses are judgments and have court precedents.

Now in verse 13 this is something that Moses added. Verse 12 is a judgment. You see that “if” there, “if thy brother, an Hebrew man, or an Hebrew woman,” “then” you will do this. Verse 12 was enforceable by government edict. A man would get in trouble if he didn’t do this. But now verse 13 is a statute. Verse 13 did not have to be done by the man. For example, suppose we have Snoopy, and Snoopy sells himself to Charlie Brown to get out of debt. The point is that Charlie Brown under the law was obligated at the end of six years to release Snoopy. So he releases Snoopy, but under the Mosaic Law in verse 13, if he has grace, if he really loves a person as a man he would not let him go empty away. What does that mean? He would provide for him so that he wouldn’t come into slavery again. If a person was a slave and had lost all his possessions, what good would it do to free him? The Law said you had to free him, but Moses went beyond the Law and said listen, when you free this person, remember this person is not a machine that you’re discarding, this person is a human being, he’s a member of the human race and if you really love him, then you will give him supplies to get him started in life, verse 13.

Verse 14, “Thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock,” give him food to eat, “and out of thy floor,” that is grain, “and out of thy winepress,” wine, “wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him.” Here are some reasons why. First reason, and this goes back to our attitude toward poverty. The first reason given in Scripture for this attitude is number one, that our possessions are actually possessions of grace. The wealth you may have you may say is due to your work. The Bible says it’s due to God’s grace, and He has seen to it that you’re healthy enough so that you could work to get the money. Some men don’t realize that, they think their job is their God and they work as unto the men and not unto the Lord. The proper attitude in the Bible is I work as unto the Lord and not unto men; God is the one that gives me my job, God is the one that promotes me on the job. And if I do my job as unto the Lord, then He’s going to take care of me and that’s all God asks, and not to lick the feet and boots of everybody on the job. You do your job as unto the Lord, period. So this is the possession of grace in verse 14. God has blessed them and this is material possessions. Give of those things “wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee.”

Then in verse 15 is the second reason why you should provide, in this case, of the slave going to his freedom. “And thou shalt remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee; therefore, I command thee this thing today.” Here’s the second reason; the second reason is that God hates bondage of any sort. God hates bondage. He can’t stand bondage to the sin nature, He can’t stand bondage to anything, and God doesn’t want you to be in bondage, not to people, to men or anything except Himself. This what God hates, He hates any kind of bondage except bondage to Himself. How much more has He cried to the Israelites as He cried to the Christian, don’t be in bondage to human viewpoint, don’t be in bondage to all the gimmicks and all the rest of the stuff that you get in the Christian literature of how to do this and how to have a wonderful Sunday school program, and all the rest of it, it has nothing to do with God’s word. These are just human viewpoint things that you could get out of any unbelieving book on motivation psychology. God doesn’t want us to be in bondage to the things of this world.

There’s a tremendous freedom to being a Christian. You don’t have to be in bondage to any person or any thing. What greater freedom can you have than that? Don’t ever forget that the concept of political freedom came from that concept of freedom. [Blank spot] …concept of freedom right here in the human heart, the concept that I am free and I don’t care whether you put chains on my legs and hands, and if you throw me in jail, I have freedom on the inside and you can’t take that away from me. Never! You can cut my head off, you can kill me, you can torture me but you will never remove that freedom I have on the inside. That is what gave birth to political freedom. God wants His creatures to be free.

In verse 16 it says, “And it shall be, if he say unto thee, I will not go away from thee, because he loves thee and thine house, because he is well with thee, [17] Then thou shalt take an awl and thrust it through his ear unto the door, and he shall be thy servant forever. And also unto thy maidservant thou shalt do likewise.” this point becomes, in verse 16-17 it gets a little bloody here with the awl and thrusting it through his ear. I don’t know, did they have pierced ears in those days, here it was, so your girls with your pierced earrings, you’re just following the slave that in the Bible loves his master so much he had his ears pierced. I don’t know if there’s any symbology in that and that’s why all the women like to have their ears pierced or not. Nevertheless, this is the first pierced ears that people had in the ancient world and it was due to the fact that the slave voluntarily said I love my master, I want to be in bondage to him, and then at that point he became a permanent slave. But notice, he was protected, it was his own volition; volition was never violated. No man was coerced into slavery. He voluntarily chose it.

Verse 18, “It shall not seem hard unto thee, when thou sendest him away free from thee; for he hath been worth a double hired servant to thee, in serving thee six years; and the LORD thy God shall bless thee in all that thou doest.” What does this mean, he is “worth a double hired servant?” From this we can gather how much in American dollars that a slave was worth. A slave was bought in the ancient world for 30 shekels. The average wage of a working laborer in that day was 10 shekels a year so six years gives you 60 shekels. The slave worked for six years, so therefore you would have for the price of a slave which would be 30, you’d have to buy two laborers to work six years, to do the work that slave did. Therefore God is saying look, and this is the most amazing thing when I came across this in the background, in Hammurabi’s Code and these other non-Biblical codes they get out of slavery at the end of three years. They are only in slavery three years and they are released on the fourth, and I said to myself, isn’t there something wrong here? Isn’t there something wrong, the Bible is more gracious than the ancient world. How come in the Bible slaves had to work six and they are released on the seventh? Why is this? Because of this provision here in verse 18, God had the slave work long enough so that he would double to the person that owned the slave production, so that when his freedom came there wouldn’t be that inner temptation on the part of the man who owned him to keep him, because the slave had worked for six years so that he had produced two times what the man would have gotten from laborers. Therefore the employer or the owner of the slave would have been motivated to let him go and release him with a lot of funds. We have evidence in history that this system worked a lot better than the other system because if a person only worked three years, then the owner really hadn’t made anything, so therefore the tendency was to find all sorts of legal ways that he could keep the man in slavery. So there was a very wise design behind this law. Verse 18 ends slavery, and we see here that this is part of the good law of the Old Testament, this is the good life.

We’ll just conclude, verses 19-23, the last section of this whole area and this concerns blemished offerings. We’ve had poverty, now we’re going to deal with blemished offerings. To get the prophetic picture from this, let’s look at verse 21, “And if there be any blemish therein, as if it be lame, or blind, or have any ill blemish, thou shalt not sacrifice it unto the LORD thy God.” In other words, when the sacrifice was made it was to be a perfect sacrifice. Why do you suppose there was this provision? Is this just an accident? No, for in the New Testament, turn to 1 Peter 1 and you’ll see the great design behind history. The Bible is not just a collection of stories; it’s one story, from its first page to the last page one continuous story of God’s work in history.

Look at God’s sacrifice in 1 Peter 1:18, “Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, like silver and gold, from your vain manner of life,” that’s behavior pattern, an empty behavior pattern, worthless behavior pattern, “received by tradition from your fathers,” in other words, what he was saying to these Jews in his day, listen, the reason why you’re accepted with God is not because you’re such a good Jew, not because you live (quote) “a good life,” not because you go to church and do all these things, that’s not the reason for your salvation, for this is but “vain behavior pattern received by tradition from your fathers,” like a lot of Americans in this country think I’m a Christian, I was born in the United States. Well bully for you, what does that make you? Another American slob, it doesn’t make you a Christian. You are a Christian because you are spiritually born again, that is what makes you a Christian, not because you got citizenship of the United States. This is your “vain behavior pattern received by tradition from your fathers.” People always put emphasis on this, you find it today. Why do you go to this church? Oh, I don’t know, my mother went their, and so did grandfather, so I’m going. What’s that got to do with spirituality? Nothing, it’s just tradition. We have people living by tradition from their fathers.

But verse 19 tells you the basis of redemption, you are redeemed “with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lam without blemish and without spot,” and that refers back to Deut. 15. Now do you see what Peter’s getting at. He’s saying look, do you Jews remember when you had to pick out, you had to go in that slop and you had to pick out a sheep or you had to pick out an ox, what would you do. What would be the tendency if you were one, let’s just be honest and you had this flock out here you were ready to sell, which one of the oxen or which one of the sheep would you tend to give to the priest? You’d give the one that you wouldn’t get the price for in the market, right? That would be the one that was with blemish and with spot. Therefore what does blemish and spot really mean economically? It means value. So if you picked out this sheep and it was on three legs, etc. and you say well, we can’t get anything for that, let’s give it to the priest, it’ll be my tithe for the afternoon or something. That wasn’t a big sacrifice on your part; you realized you couldn’t get any money for it on the open market so give it to the church. So that’s what happened. So “without spot and without blemish” simply means you pick out the junk and give it to the priest, and God says I don’t want the junk, I’m not satisfied with your junk, you don’t have rummage sales for Me and give Me all your junk. I’m not in the junk business. This is what God’s saying here, if you give something to Me, I want the best.

And that goes for your life, by the way, as a believer. Don’t give God second place. People said when the missionaries were martyred in Ecuador, I remember reading it in Life Magazine, these five men were martyred down there in Ecuador and one of them happened to have a Master’s degree in English literature, he was a brilliant scholar in English literature and they said what a shame, what a waste of life, here’s this man, he’s got a Masters degree in English literature, he could have had a career in writing in the United States and he goes down and gets martyred by the Indians. Of course Life Magazine with its usual perceptivity didn’t realize the fact that this man recognized the principle that when you give something to God, give Him the best or don’t give it period.

This goes for the plan of salvation in verse 19, “with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot” means a precious lamb, a perfect lamb, one that would command the highest place in the marketplace. And this goes back to the gospel once again, God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love, God is eternality, omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, and immutability. And therefore God with His character looks down and has to design for you down here, a sinner, a plan of salvation that’s going to satisfy righteousness and justice. Righteousness and justice looks down and says (quote) “death,” that’s all I see when I look at you is death because you’re a sinner, and I don’t’ care how many… and God says this in His Word, I don’t care how wealthy you are, what your education is, what your background is you’re still a sinner.

We have to be careful as Christians, when I work with people I have to be careful when I say this to them because oftentimes you may be dealing with a person who has one particular hang up. For example, you may be dealing with a drug addict, you may be dealing with a homosexual and this particular thing may be a big issue with them. And when you call them a sinner just be careful that you are not saying to them you are a worse sinner than someone else… be careful. When you call someone a sinner, and we do this in Scripture, when we call someone a sinner scripturally we mean every person is a sinner in the same sense. I may have my area of weakness over here, you have an area of weakness over here, but the location of the area of weakness has nothing to do with it. We’re all sinners. And don’t you look down your nose at someone that may be an alcoholic, or some person that’s a homosexual, or some person that’s having problems with drugs and pick him out and say oh, naughty, naughty, and look at him as though he’s somehow divorced himself from the human race because of his sin. We are NEVER saying that. And you as a witnessing Christian have no right to condemn a person and say you’re a worse sinner than someone else. We’re all in the same boat, ALL of us, so therefore God designed a perfect plan in Jesus Christ. His righteousness and justice look down on Christ, Christ picks up sin on the cross, Christ bears our sins for us, and therefore since Christ bore our sins, righteousness and justice are satisfied, love can now come down through sovereignty and bless us because of the cross of Christ. That is the plan of salvation.

And when it says in verse 19 “with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot,” it means Jesus Christ was qualified to go to the cross. Do you know what it means to be qualified to go to the cross? It means that He had to be perfect; Jesus Christ had to be perfect humanity. Why humanity? Because deity can’t die. The doctrine of the hypostatic union says that Jesus Christ is undiminished deity and true humanity united in one person without confusion forever. That is the classic definition of the doctrine of the hypostatic union. This means that Jesus Christ as God can’t die. Why? Because God is eternality, God can’t die on the cross; if God died on the cross He wouldn’t be God, so how is God going to die on the cross. He can only die by taking upon Himself humanity, man, and He becomes God-man and then He goes to the cross and what dies? The humanity dies, and it’s this humanity that pays for our sins. It is a perfect sacrifice, the death of Christ, the blood here, “the precious blood of Christ,” is reference to the fact that Christ poured out His life for you on the cross. This means, by the way, that it’s a plan of grace. This means that God has done it all, you don’t add to it. The tendency always is this: we’ve got to add to something God has already done. We’ve got to add coming down the aisle, we’ve got to add all these things. Sometimes these things may be legitimate things, but what I’m saying is don’t ever confuse them. If you try to add to God’s plan you come out with zero. God has a perfect plan and He doesn’t want you messing with it. He has designed it perfectly and this means that you keep your nose out of it and I will keep mine out of it. The only connection we have with this plan of salvation is the point of faith and that means the empty hand reaching up to receive God’s grace. That’s the only thing we do, we don’t touch the plan of salvation, it is done, finished!

Therefore, as we conclude this section of Deuteronomy, just remember this good life that was pictured to the nation looked forward in many ways prophetically to what Christ would do in history. It gives you the detail of living (quote) “the good life,” it shows you attitudes you should have toward the poor, so that you won’t be deceived by the pseudo liberal and his pseudo concern for the poor. The person who is really concerned for the poor will understand that the greatest thing you can do for America today is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. The greatest thing you can do as an American citizen is to live effectively for Jesus Christ. Do you know why? God has His ways of reversing the wheels of history almost instantaneously if His people but respond.

I have given you many the illustration of England and how the great Wesleyan Revival reversed the trends of England in that day. I will give you three tragic illustrations where this never happened. One is North Africa, and today you can count the number of Christians on one hand that are still living in North Africa. When you trust the Lord in North Africa you have about five minutes to live and then the nearest Moslem comes up to you and slash, that’s the end of your Christian testimony. That’s how they handle Christians in North Africa. But do you realize at one point in Church history the strongest church for Jesus Christ was located in North Africa. Where did Augustine come from? North Africa, and you had some of the greatest evangelical action on the African continent that you have ever had in history. What happened? That culture turned its back on the gospel, it became weak, Christians became flabby, they began to despise doctrine, and they began to drift around and God brought judgment in on them and that culture has never recovered.

I can cite the example of India, today where we talk about the poor and yet there’s enough beef and ham in India to feed that nation to the year 2000, and yet the people starve in India. Why? Because of religion; religion says don’t eat the cow, the sacred cow, don’t eat it. That’s nonsense. If they would adhere to the Scripture there would be no poverty in India today. People don’t have to die of hunger in India, they die because it’s their own foolishness and the United States finances it. It’s due to false religion.

Do you realize that in Jesus’ time, after Jesus Christ rose from the dead one apostle by the name of Thomas, remember doubting Thomas, he went to India and established a great church in India and all over that Indian peninsula you had Bible-believing churches, the Thomastic Apostolic Church was founded, and in practically every province of India you had a Bible witness and what happened? That culture turned its back on doctrine; the Christians got weak and what happened? India went down, Hinduism came in and today that continent is in bondage, suffering miserably, thousands and thousands of babies die before they are one year old because they drink the filth of the Ganges River and all the rest of it, and the parents don’t have any meat to give them because of religious bondage.

You can go to China; do you realize that in 700 AD the Nestorian Church practically had a Bible-believing witness in every province of China and what happened. That culture turned its back on doctrine and God brought judgment, and today China is closed. It wasn’t until the 19^th century that China was finally opened up again to missionary activity.

But isn’t it interesting, culture after culture, after culture we have had this. Now apply it to yourself as an American citizen. What country in the history of the world has had the opportunity for a Bible testimony that America has had. You can’t name one, not since the early church has there ever been one country with so many people that have had such a great opportunity to receive God’s Word. What do you think God’s attitude is going to be? Do you think God is an old man with long hair up there rocking back in His chair, bless you, bless you, bless you? Do you think that’s the way God is? Do you think He’s going to tolerate this attitude? Flippancy toward His word, hatred of doctrine, etc. He’s not going to tolerate this and this country is going to go down and is going down before our eyes. This is why our young people, if there’s one generation that needs doctrine it’s our young people.