Lesson 33
Completion of Calendar and history
The book of Deuteronomy can be looked upon as a constitution, for
archeology has discovered that the structure of this book is similar in
structure to a treaty made between what they call a suzerain and a vassal
king. A suzerain a king such as the king
of the Hittite Empire and he would be king over a large area. He would make treaties with vassal kings,
such as in history the suzerain of the Hittite Empire made treaties with Tyre,
he made treaties with the King of Sidon, etc.
And he’d make the small mutual aid pacts with all these treaties. The treaty would bind the vassals to him and
him to the vassals in a legal relationship, so that if he obeyed the suzerain
then certain blessings would accrue to him, such as defense, etc. But it spelled out love, and of course today
we think romantically of the word “love” and yet it’s almost ironic to find the
word “love” used in an international treaty in the Ancient Near East. The reason is that the word “love” here has a
different connotation. In the Ancient
East the word “love” in this context meant simply that you obey. So that so and so loved Pharaoh, or so and so
loved this, it would mean that he obeyed him, he submitted to him. This is the word “love” as used in the
international realm.
Now we find that Deuteronomy is written the same way, replacing the
suzerain with Yahweh or Jehovah, he rules over twelve vassals, the twelve
tribes. And this treaty structure ties
Him, binds Him legally to the tribes and the tribes to Him. We said the book develops love too; it
develops in loving God with your heart and then it says with your soul. These two words mean two entirely different
things. The word “heart” refers to such
things as volition, conscience, it would refer to your personal relationships
or your personal affections. It would
refer to rationality and memory, such things as this; these are what are
involved in loving God with your heart, this is an inner thing, it starts on
the inside. This is why chapters 5-12
dealt with loving God with your heart because all true worship begins on the
inside.
Deuteronomy goes on to add something that the New Testament does not add
and there’s a reason for this. Chapters
13-26, and this is loving God with all your soul. If you want to invent synonyms, the [can’t
understand word/s] to the synonym for soul would be life. That’s the best thing that I can think of in
our language that communicates nephesh and
how it’s used in the Hebrew, just life, and by this we would mean certain
details of life. A better way to
summarize these details than we have been doing is just simply think of two
things, social and physical. You have
your fellowship with other believers, you have your friends, you have your
family, you have your relationship with government and your community. These are all social details of life. And then you have physical details of life
such as work, possessions, including money, food, sex, health. These are physical things and these are
always encompassed in the details of life or the social and physical needs and
experiences of man and this is what it means the area of the “soul” in the Old
Testament.
Now it is important to realize that the Old Testament adds this whereas
the New Testament tends to be shy on this point, and the reason is that we’re
talking about a kingdom here. We’re
talking about a
We passed through some of these details but the thing that seems to bind
up the first section of Deuteronomy, from chapters 12-16 is the fact that it
emphasizes the unity of the nation. This
is the great theme. What unifies the nation?
Next week we’ll be discussing law and order and national righteousness,
an entirely new thing. We’ll deal with
the police department, with the court system, etc. in
It shows us about the mechanics of history, that a national entity
cannot sustain itself until there is something that ties the people
together. If you lose the glue you lose
the society and you lose the nation. This
is the point and this is why, for example, communism tries so hard to indoctrinate
people in atheism because it realizes that to unify the nation it has to have
some defined religion and atheism is a religion. So therefore we find the need of unity. And today we completed Deut.
Those four items in the calendar formed a unity; they were all
celebrated in the springtime. The 14th
of Nisan here, the Feast of Unleavened Bread from the 15th to the 21st,
Firstfruits on the Sabbath that occurred in that interval, the seven days, and
Pentecost, taking this Sabbath, going out seven Sabbaths plus one, getting it
on a Sunday, and that would be Pentecost.
So this was how the spring calendar was fixed. We have gone through and shown how each one
of these corresponds to an element in
Then Unleavened Bread; what did Unleavened Bread point to? Unleavened bread was simply… the women would
not take any leaven from the past to use in the cooking during this week. Why? Because leaven was a symbol of
continuity so therefore the Unleavened Bread spoke of a separation between the
past experience of
Then we have Firstfruits; what are the Firstfruits? This was a time when harvest was ready and
God so worked in the climate so there was always a Sabbath in that interval
every single year when the harvest would be ready. So God manipulated through climate and
through weather to produce a harvest just at this time and Firstfruits was the
time in which you’d go out and harvest the first grain, and apparently some
farmer near Jerusalem was selected for this, and he’d go out into his field and
harvest the grain and bring a sheaf of this to the high priest and this would
be presented before the Lord in thanksgiving that the harvest had begun. Now it took them seven weeks to harvest and
when they finished the harvesting you had Pentecost. Firstfruits was fulfilled historically in the
resurrection of Jesus Christ. Why?
Because when Jesus Christ rose from the dead it was the final culmination
of what God had planted. In fact Paul
uses that very term in 1 Corinthians, remember he said the natural body is
planted in a natural body but it dies and is raised a spiritual body, and he’s
talking about the resurrection here. So
Jesus Christ was the first person who was resurrected…the first person who was
resurrected!
Now on Pentecost something else happened. Pentecost is the end of the season, the
harvest is all in and what does this say?
This means that the grain that they had cared for, had nurtured, etc. is
now ready to be used. So during
Pentecost they would take, not the grain, but they would take the grain in a
loaf of bread. In other words, the grain
is now being used; the grain has reached the point of its final destiny, to be
eaten. Therefore Pentecost represents
the end of something, it represents the fact that at this point in time
something is complete, ready to be used.
Therefore this looks forward to the time when the Holy Spirit would come
to
So we come to one of the strangest of all feasts, a feast that was
fulfilled and yet it wasn’t fulfilled. It
was fulfilled in one sense, the Holy Spirit came on schedule, on the very day
of Pentecost the Holy Spirit was poured out.
Now this is something to remember and why you have to be careful about
people that go around emphasizing the Holy Spirit and they say what you have to
do, brother, to receive the Spirit is to tarry and to pray and agonize and do
all these things, and yet isn’t it interesting when you examine the Scriptures,
why did the Holy Spirit come on Pentecost?
Because the disciples were agonizing in the room? Oh no, the Holy Spirit came on Pentecost
because that was the schedule that God had worked out for history. He did not come in response to the prayers
and to the unification of the saints, the only reason why the Lord said wait
here in Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit is come is because He wanted them in
one place when this event happened.
Because you know at Pentecost they could have been scattered throughout
the whole city; He wanted them in one room at one point, then He would pour out
His Holy Spirit. And that is the reason
for them gathering together.
Now, something happened on Pentecost. We know the nation wasn’t ready;
it wasn’t like the grain that is ready at the end of the harvest to be used in
bread. It wasn’t ready because they had
rejected Messiah, and so when we come to the day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit
is ready, God’s ready, but the nation isn’t, and this is the result that has
left us in history with World War after World War; this has left us with a
world in crisis and turmoil because Israel is not ready. And wars and rumors of wars will continue in
history until
You remember the illustration we used of this. We said it could be looked on as some Monday
morning after a final exam in a college campus and the professor comes in to
pass out the exam for the semester is finished, the exams have been taken and
Monday morning he is scheduled to pass out the exams because the kids need
these exams to graduate. But then the professor
comes in Monday morning on schedule but instead of giving the kids the exams he
slams them down and says the class average was 10, you all flunked, therefore
we will now have a cram course, you cannot graduate so we’re going to have a
cram course. This is what has happened
in history, God has said to Israel you cannot graduate, you were not ready when
the Holy Spirit came, therefore I am going to call out a new body called the
Church and the Church is going to exist for an interval of history, from
Pentecost on to the rapture, then the Church will be removed from history. But the Church for some finite time in
history is going to exist and it exists because Israel was not ready on the day
of Pentecost.
Now we come to the fall sequence of feasts. We’ve gone through these spring feasts:
Passover, Unleavened Bread, Firstfruits, and Pentecost, all occur between March
and May; they are the spring cycle of events.
Now the end of the calendar is in September/October and here we have
three events on the calendar of Israel.
We have one called Trumpets, we have another event called the Day of
Atonement, and we have the one which we’ll develop tonight, the Feast of
Tabernacles.
Something to notice about these feasts, and this is where we, as
premillennialists have a consistent interpretation of Scripture. Were the first four of the seven feasts
fulfilled literally, exactly on the day in which they were celebrated? Yes.
They corresponded to an event in the past and God fulfilled them
literally in the future. Test question:
if God behaved this way with the first four feasts will He behave that way with
the last three holidays, the last three elements in the calendar? Yes. A
person who is not a premillennialist, who doesn’t believe that God has a continuing
purpose for the nation Israel is at a loss to explain what you do with the rest
of the calendar. What do you do with the
rest of the calendar, here you’re right smack in the middle of Israel’s
calendar and you drop it. Has God
dropped Israel from history? Has God
given Israel up? He couldn’t because He
dropped off half His calendar. There is
no known event in history that corresponds to any one of these three elements
of Israel’s calendar. These three
elements of Israel’s calendar remain to this day unfulfilled, therefore by
deduction there must be a prophetic event in the future that God will fulfill,
just like He did the first four He’s going to fulfill the last three.
What are these events? Let’s look
at the first two briefly and develop Tabernacles. The first one, Trumpets; what was this
looking back to or what did it involve.
Trumpets was when the trumpets were blown throughout the land of Israel
in the autumn, and it essentially was this, it announced to the people of the
nation that the end of the year was about to happen. It was an announcement saying that the climax
of the calendar is about to occur and it tipped off all the people. In every town they’d blow the trumpets and
the trumpets would signal on the first of Tishri which would correspond to our
September/October, the first of Tishri these trumpets were blown, it’s the
breaking of the long silence of summer.
The last time the people have gotten together was the Feast of Pentecost
and so now the people haven’t gotten together for a while and it’s been
quiet. All summer they’ve worked and now
the harvest is in, the fall harvest is in, they blow the trumpets announcing
that the feasts of the climax to the calendar are about to begin. That is what trumpets looks back to or what
it involved, a blowing of the trumpets.
What will this look forward to?
By the way, the modern Jews celebrate this as the new year; the Jews
actually have two new years, one in the spring and one in the fall, and this is
the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, actually it’s not the new year. You see, the year begins at Pentecost and
it’s going to end shortly, so it’s actually wrong to interpret this as the
first of the year. But the Feast of
Trumpets, what does it look forward to?
We don’t know exactly what it looks forward to but it looks forward to
some event that will happen one autumn when God does something to break His
silence. Some event is going to happen
to Israel and it will signal to Israel that God, Yahweh is going to take them
back into His hand and He is going to run with them again in history. We don’t know the nature of the event but
something will happen toward the end of the Tribulation, toward the end of the
seven years, when God makes it clear to the nation that they are now coming back
into full scale usage in history.
What is the Day of Atonement? The
Day of Atonement was when the high priest went into the Tabernacle; it was the
day of cleansing, it was the day of confession, it was the day of restoration. The Day of Atonement has no known fulfillment
in history, therefore what are we to say that this looks forward to. If you have Jewish friends you’ve probably
heard of this, Yom Kippur, Yom is the Hebrew word for day, Kippur is the Hebrew
word for cover or atonement. So this is why
they call it Yom Kippur, the Day of Covering, the day when her sins would be
covered. When will the sins be
covered? Let’s look in some prophetic
passages of the Word of God to see what this day is going to be like.
Turn to Zech. 12:10, we’re about to see a prophetic picture of an event
that will happen in history that will fulfill this very important Day of
Atonement. This is speaking of the
Second Advent of Christ. “And I will
pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Spirit
of grace and of supplications; and they shall look upon Me whom they have
pierced,” and you tell me the crucifixion is not prophesied, what pray tell is
that verse talking about, “they shall look upon Me whom they have pierced, and
they shall mourn for Him, as one that mourns for his only son, and shall be in
bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his first-born.” Why is the nation Israel going to act this
way on the Day of Atonement in the future?
Because all of a sudden on a nationwide scale the nation wakes up to
realize that Jesus of Nazareth, one of them, one of their own, is their
Messiah, the one that they laughed at, the one that they rejected, this is the
One who really was the Messiah after all.
And it’s going to be more or less a horrible national awakening to one
of the greatest mistakes a nation has ever made in history, failing to
recognize God’s gift to them.
Therefore in verse 10 it’s going to denote a day of confession of sin,
and a nation nationally speaking is going to confess their sin on the Day of
Atonement. This, therefore, is the
prophetic fulfillment of the Day of Atonement and we can add details to those
of you who like to draw charts of the Tribulation, you now know the day and the
month this is going to occur. How do we
know this? It’s simple, God always fulfills the feast on the exact day of the
calendar so whenever this event occurs in the Tribulation it must occur in
autumn and it must occur on the 10th day of the month of Tishri,
according to the lunar calendar.
Now the Tabernacle, the Feast of Tabernacles. Turn back to Deuteronomy for this, Deut.
16:13, “Thou shalt observe the feast of tabernacles seven days, after thou hast
gathered in thy grain and thy wine.” Now
it’s important to notice that in one sense this corresponds to the Feast of
Pentecost. The Feast of Pentecost was
the end of the spring harvest; this is the end of the autumn harvest and
included not only grain but it included wine.
By the way, this is one of the secondary overtones to why John in his
Gospel starts the Lord Jesus Christ out in a bridegroom feast and what does
Jesus make? He makes wine for wine is
the symbol that the King has come and He is about to enjoy a Kingdom, and the
word “wine” always denotes enjoyment, and that is why John begins his Gospel to
prove that Jesus is the Messiah, that He is the King, that He has come to His
Kingdom and we are to enjoy it. And thus
in John 2 we have the bridegroom, the bride wine incident.
So grain and wine, the complete harvest is now in, not just the spring
harvest but both spring and autumn. Therefore the end of the whole agricultural
year is at hand. Everyone has their
check, here’s the end of everything now, blessing is at hand, they are now to
enjoy themselves. So this Feast of
Tabernacles is the end of the agricultural year. Verse 14, “And thou shalt rejoice in thy
feast, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant, and thy
maidservant, and the Levite, the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow
who are within thy gates.” There again
you notice this thing which we have noticed again and again, what does man do
in the Old Testament when he comes into the presence of the Lord? He rejoices.
You don’t have to be a deep student of the Word of God to realize that
they had a ball; they came to Jerusalem and had a party. Now let’s be secular enough to say it. That’s what they were doing, they came to
Jerusalem and enjoyed themselves and had themselves a wonderful time. So the God of the Old Testament that everyone
thinks is an old meany… isn’t it interesting, everywhere you find men coming
into His presence they come and are commanded to rejoice and have a good time.
That’s the joy of the Lord, the fruit of the Spirit in our age. “Thou shalt observe the feast of tabernacles”
and this is part of it.
Verse 15, “Seven days shalt thou keep a solemn feast unto the LORD thy
God in the place which the LORD shall choose; because the LORD thy God shall
bless thee in all thine increase, and in all the works of thine hands;
therefore thou shalt rejoice.” You can
easily see this is referring to the end of the farming year. Now what is this going to correspond to in
the future? It is going to correspond to
the end of history and the beginning of the millennial reign of the Lord Jesus
Christ, for here the Lord Jesus Christ is prophesied to reign on earth, to set
up a world government for 1,000 years after which we will experience the
eternal state. But He is going to
establish a point in time, 1,000 years of world government with disarmament,
and it is going to be done God’s way, not man’s way. And here you have the answer to the great
problems of our time, people recognizing that instruments of war have become so
great that we cannot go on too much further without something happening and
there’s a cry for disarmament, there’s a cry for all of these things and yet
it’s in God’s Word, God says yes, I recognize the problem but you let Me solve
the problem, don’t you try to do it.
Therefore, our deduction from this is as Christian citizens we are to
prepare ourselves for war; we are not to disarm because Jesus Christ said that
you will have a perfect environment after I come, not until, for until I come
there will be wars and rumors of wars and therefore it is the wise Christian
who will always vote for a strong military machine. That doesn’t mean a military government, it
means a strong defense, and don’t ever let some liberal make you feel guilty
for voting for armament and a military might.
You are voting Biblically. In the
United States we have weak-kneed clergymen who have gone creeping around this
country, parading around for disarmament, and we have practically destroyed our
own forces simply because people are trying to bring in this Millennium
themselves.
Let’s learn a lesson; how is an individual saved? By grace, not by works. How is the world society going to be
saved? The same way, by grace, not by
works. And therefore every system of
socialism and communism is basically a legalism; it is basically man trying to
bring about in the energy of the flesh something God is going to bring about,
and that is why communism and socialism and disarmament are just as sinful as
legalism on an individual basis. There
is not any Christian who knows anything about the Word of God who will say I am
going to get to heaven on the basis of my good works. How do you become a Christian? That’s the first thing you recognize, that
you can’t get to heaven on your good works, you have got to receive divine
grace and it is only by divine grace that you can be saved.
What’s the application then to the world problem? The world problem of war, disarmament,
over-population, polluted environment and all the rest are going to be solved by
grace and the tragedy in our day is the same as individual tragedy. How often does God have to work on an
individual life to make him realize that you can’t be saved by your own works? Some people have to be knocked around pretty
hard, some people have to go through misery, suffering, because they are
determined they are going to save themselves.
They are determined they’re going to buy their way to heaven, they are
going to do good works. I have talked to
men who have spent all their time running from church meeting to church
meeting, doing this, that and the other thing, thinking that all the time
they’re building merit with God and they have never recognized the fact that
they must receive divine grace and receive Christ’s finished work.
You have the same parallel in the international sphere. Men are running around country to country
doing this, doing that, trying to bring about world peace when it is going to
be impossible and the tragedy is that the very effort that are being used to
bring about world peace always bring about war.
Every time you try to solve the problem you are going to mess it up and
people are going to get hurt, people are going to suffer; works always leads to
suffering, always, whether it’s on an individual basis or the world basis.
This is why we are premillennialists, because premillennialism says to
the world we recognize the problem, we recognize that the problem that we have
in our world and we also recognize that God’s plan is not complete unless it
solves that problem, so therefore God’s plan of salvation includes this one
thousand years to solve man’s problems and guess what? At the end of the one thousand years the
Bible prophesies that nations are going to revolt again. After a thousand years of perfect environment,
no war, perfect prosperity, again man revolts showing once again the problem is
man, not God. By the way, showing once
again that the problem is not your environment, it is you; you can’t blame this
on somebody else, this is you, your good old garbage can heart, and that’s
exactly what the problem is. And that is
a problem that God is going to show in the nation and national history, is that
after a thousand years of perfect environment they can’t say oh, we didn’t have
a chicken in every pot or we didn’t have enough Cadillac in our garage and we
feel poverty, etc. There will be no
excuses at the end of one thousand years of perfect environment and yet you
still have revolt. What is this
saying? It’s saying the problem is on
the inside, not on the outside and it’s a waste of time to deal with these
things without dealing with the human heart.
So what does the Feast of Tabernacles look forward to? It looks forward to the institution of the
Millennial Kingdom. They dwelt in
tabernacles, this is a memorial to the fact that God provides the home, and the
environment, and the dwelling for the person.
And God is going to provide in the future a dwelling, He is going to
provide one thousand years of a tabernacle, a tabernacle that will have perfect
environment, a tabernacle that will have perfect peace. Therefore, this is what the Feast of
Tabernacles looks forward to. What do we
know about this, by deduction? We know
that since this feast always occurred on the 15th or the 21st
the Millennium will begin I the autumn of some year in the Tribulation; it has
got to, just as Jesus was crucified in the spring to fulfill that first feast,
so the Millennium must be in the autumn.
Now I want to back up a minute and go back to the Trumpets. I said it is on the first of Tishri which we
could take to be the first of October. I
have heard Christians say that the signing of the agreement in 1948 with Israel
setting Israel up as a nation was a fulfillment of this Trumpets, for it was
the first thing that God had done to the nation to call it into existence and
this corresponds to the day of Trumpets.
Is this true? When was the
agreement signed? Israel was set up as a
nation May 14, 1948. That is in the
springtime and cannot, therefore, fulfill the Trumpets. The Trumpets is going to be an event that has
to occur in the autumn and it occurs at the end of the Tribulation. Therefore, the Feast of Trumpets, the Day of
Atonement, the Feast of Tabernacles have not been fulfilled in our day. The first four feasts were fulfilled,
therefore by deduction the last three must be fulfilled literally; they haven’t
been fulfilled, therefore they must be fulfilled literally in the future with
the nation Israel. Therefore God has a continuing
purpose for Israel.
Now a few closing notes in this section.
Verse 16-17, “Three times in a year shall all thy males appear before
the LORD thy God,” this is directed to the head of the homes, and to the males;
the males were looked upon in Israel as the leaders and therefore they were the
ones who were responsible. Israel was not run by a petticoat government, Israel
was run by men and the reason it was is simply the same principle of the New
Testament, it is not degrading women.
You will see a most fantastic thing in this next section when we get on
righteousness. There is one complete
section that we’re coming onto, the dignity of a lady, and the dignity of a
lady has never been established in the Ancient East until Moses wrote this. You are going to see where women attain their
dignity historically and it’s a passage coming up.
The nation’s leaders were male and therefore they were the ones that
were to direct the worship, they were the ones to come into the presence of the
Lord three times a year, “in the Feast of Unleavened Bread,” that’s one feast,
that included Passover, it included Firstfruits, “in the Feast of Weeks” which
was Pentecost, “and in the Feast of Tabernacles,” they did not have to come on
the Day of Trumpets, they did not have to come on the Day of Atonement which
may suggest that Israel in the future will not be gathered totally at that
point. “…and they shall not appear before the LORD empty.” Isn’t this amazing. When we as believers die and go into the
presence of the Lord, what do we take with us?
Every believer when he dies in this age is going to be judged by the
Lord. This does not concern your
salvation, it concerns your works, whether you will receive rewards or
not. Passages pertinent to this are 1
Cor. 3; 2 Cor. 5, and this deals with the believer’s judgment. The one thing that we will bring before the
Lord is our pile of works and then something is going to happen. God is going to expose those works to His
fire and the works which survive are going to be those works done in the power
of the Spirit and the works that are burned up and eliminated are those that
are done in the energy of the flesh, which we have called human good.
What is human good type of works?
Human good type of works would be works done when you are trying to
impress someone else. When you give
money and you really aren’t giving it to the Lord, you’re just giving it
because someone next to you gave and you’ll look stupid if you don’t give, and
why do you go to Bible class or prayer meeting or something like this? Unless it’s proper motivation it’s human good
and God says I don’t recognize it because it’s not a product of the working of
the Holy Spirit. So really you might
draw one conclusion from this, if you’re going to be carnal why not raise Cain
and be carnal all the way because it’s not going to do any good to be a
phony. If you’re going to be out of
fellowship you might as well be out of fellowship but stop trying to impress
everyone else that you’re in fellowship when you’re not because it just doesn’t
pay off; it’s going to be burned up.
This then is what we’re going to appear, so every believer will at least
have some divine good.
Verse 17, “Every man shall give as he is able, according to the blessing
of the LORD thy God which He hath given thee.”
So some of us will have more works than others and it doesn’t depend on
whether you’re a pastor or not.
Individual believers—some have a lot of good works, some have little but
every man will give according as he is able.
Now one important deduction from verse 17 and that concerns Christian
giving and tithing. I have often made
the statement that tithing is an Old Testament institution. I know the literature that comes around
because people have sent it to me trying to straighten me out. Someone tried to straighten me out on tithing
once and said oh but Pastor Clough, don’t you recognize that tithing was
institued before the Mosaic Law, didn’t Abraham give tithes to Melchizedek, so
therefore tithing is an inherent feature and has nothing to do with the fact
that it’s of Israel. That’s absolutely
wrong; tithing was a symbol in the Ancient Near East for taxes. It’s another word for taxes; notice at the
feasts, there’s no tithing at the feasts.
They give as they are able.
What is happening? You have two
elements here, they are in the presence of the Lord and they give as they are
able. Does that suggest something to the
New Testament saint? Are we in the
presence of the Lord? Of course, where’s
the Holy Spirit? In our hearts? Where’s the temple of the Lord? The Church is the temple, every person who
has believed in Jesus Christ has the indwelling Holy Spirit so therefore we are
automatically by position in the presence of the Lord and when the Old
Testament saint was in the presence of the Lord he didn’t pay taxes, he gave as
he was able, and therefore Christian giving is as you are able, the same
principle of 2 Cor. 8 and 9, and tithing has nothing to do with it.
Tithing was a system of taxation to support the nation and it was a
political institution. The religious
giving of Israel was according to the principle of verse 17, showing by the
way, that grace giving is the same in both Old Testament and New Testament; it
is not a New Testament institution. The
Old Testament saint tithed because it was his obligation to his nation. And then after he tithed he gave as the Lord
enabled him and that was a free will offering. That’s the difference; we do not
operate as a nation. When you pay your
taxes April 15th you have tithed, you’ve probably done three times
the tithing, but nevertheless you have tithed according to the Old
Testament. So if some dear saint comes
walking up to you and says oh, brother I want to put your name down because the
church needs money and we’ve got to get all the tithes into the storehouse. You can tell them oh really, I just put my
tithing into the store house April 15th, I sent my check into the
IRS, the storehouse in Washington. It’d
be a beautiful comeback and you’re operating on Biblical grounds. Nevertheless, tithing is taxes; it has
nothing to do with giving. Giving is
separate, it’s a grace principle.
Now let’s tie this whole unit together.
We’ve worked from chapters 12-16; next week we begin with verse 18 which
starts an entirely new subject. Why the
King James translators ever made a chapter division where they did I do not
know because chapter 17 should really begin with verse 18 for here we
shift. Here we are going to move now,
not from the religious unity of the nation but we’re going to deal with law and
order. We are going to deal with the
court system; we are going to deal with federalization of government in the
form of a King. We are going to deal with many issues that affect our political
thinking of our say from the next section.
We move now from religion to the government and before we do this we
want to review and apply what we’ve learned from chapters 12-16.
Chapters 12-16, the major theme is unity of the nation. We found in chapter 12 what was the key to
unity? They had worship in the presence
of the Lord. That was the one thing that
united this nation. God was there and they had a central shrine, a national
shrine and that is where they conducted their national worship. In chapter 13 what was the thing that unified
the nation? It was Bible doctrine and therefore in chapter 13 the point was
that any person that is going to violate and twist and turn doctrine, kill
them. Why? Because this was a treasonous act against the
nation. And then in chapters 14-15 we
have the good life, or the national way of life amplified in the book of
Proverbs and this is the unity that stressed joy, freedom and purity for the
people. The cry for a good life is
another thing that united the nation.
Chapter 16, the calendar or as we have shown, actually the national destiny,
the nation was to have a fantastic destiny in history. Every person in that nation was to
participate and so the thing that united the nation in chapter 16 was a
national destiny.
Now how can we apply this today?
Let’s take a look at where we are as Christians today in the 10th
century and see if we can take some of these principles that applied to the
nation Israel and carefully bring them over to our day. This has to be done carefully because we have
to remember that the United States is not Israel; we are not locked into a
legal relationship as a nation to God. We are part of the Gentile nations. In fact in the books of prophecy the United
States is never mentioned or hinted at, suggesting in fact that by the time
that Christ comes the United States will have declined to a second rate
power. [Blank spot] But nevertheless we
have the fact of this unity. Can we take
some of these principles and apply to our problems today.
I would suggest three basic applications to the problem of unity in our
day. First, national unity must precede
all questions of law and order. As pressing as juvenile delinquency and crime
and riot is in our country we have to go deeper than that. You cannot produce law and order unless you
first have a commonly agreed upon set of standards. How do you write your laws if half the nation
isn’t going to obey them? The laws
aren’t any good, there is no power in law, the power lies in the people’s ability
and willingness to obey the law. And if
you don’t have that you can write all the laws you want to and you’re not going
to have a healthy nation. So the first
thing we can learn about it is that we have to establish some sort of national
unity. Why did JFK push the New
Frontier? Because he had some advisors
from Harvard who knew enough to realize that this principle has to operate.
They said to get the nation behind the President there must be something that
unites the nation and this was tossed out to try to stimulate a common response
across the nation to a commitment to the New Frontier. Then in the 1920’s we had a professor who
wrote a book called The Great Society. This was taken over by LJB and used again;
again the thinking was that you have to get the nation united and going in some
direction before you can actually have law and order. This is the problem that we face as a nation.
We are not going in one direction. Until
that is solved it is useless to talk about law and order.
You have to have some sort of national consensus before you can produce
law and order. This is why when you stop
to think, how do you ever solve that problem?
It’s easy to solve the law and order problem but how do you ever produce
a national consensus? Once that
consensus is shattered, once it’s broken, how do you ever replace it? It takes a fantastic amount of work to
replace it if it is ever replaceable. So
the key problem that we face is not law and order, the key problem that we face
is a national consensus. [Blank spot] …comes in, now once it’s been in the
culture it will tend to unify. It
reverses its role. For example, in the
United States Christianity was the thing that held the United States together
because basically it promoted this morality which influenced even the
non-Christian. So after a while
Christianity would tend to unify.
However in our day we find ourselves in a problem. In our day we find the nation has lost its
unity and is hunting around for a new one and I will have to say that if the
United States is going to survive it is going to find another religious unity
and it’s at this point where Christianity’s role shifts. Before Bible Christianity was looked upon
favorably by the authorities in this country because it generally promoted
peace and harmony. But I fear that in
our generation as we move into the 1970’s Bible Christianity is going to be
looked upon by the authorities as derisive if we are doing our job as unto the
Lord, for we are going to have to be the people that are going to say we are
going this way and we don’t care where you are going. We’re going this way, period, no
compromise. Therefore since society has
rejected the Christian unity they’re going to look for a secular type of unity
and when this goes through, for example you can see it in the school system,
you can see the idea of producing a secular base where we’re neutral in
everything except one thing, i.e. Man with a capital “M,” we worship him, not
“men,” individuals, but “Man.” Therefore
we have the rise of what I call humanism.
This is where we have to watch it as Bible Christians.
We have to study humanism, understand where it’s going and its
development in our time. The first thing
about humanism is that it is based upon evolution. It is based on an evolutionary view of man,
the idea that man is nothing more than a sophisticated ape.
Secondly, it is has been triggered by post World War II development such
as the atomic bomb, such as the population explosion, such as the pollution of
the environment, such as space travel. What’s the role the moon shot and
everything else is playing in history?
It’s very simple, the moon shot and the rest of the program is building
a global consensus. In other words what
is happening that you’re tending to get men to think in terms of we’re on one
planet together and you tend to produce the idea of one brotherhood of
man. Watch out for that term, that is
the slogan of humanism, the universal fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of
man; we’re all in the same boat together.
Doesn’t that sound cozy? And that
is just the slogan of it all. Do you see
what that puts you in? No longer can you
play along with the crowd and be comfortable but the time is coming when
everybody in this congregation, if they’re going to stand up for Jesus Christ
is going to be faced with the uncomfortable position of saying I reject the
universal fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man; all men are not
brothers and God is not the father of all men, period. He is the Father only of those that believe
in Christ and I will accept only in brotherhood those who believe in Jesus
Christ. Do you see where that’s going to
put us? It’s going to put us in a
divisive role and no longer will be looked upon as favored; we are going to be
looked upon as the rebels. So while
you’re condemning the radical college student just be thinking in your mind the
time is very short when you will be in their position and the police will be
called in to quell Christianity.
Then we say the summum bonum
of this type of activity, the highest good is the fulfillment of Man with a
capital “M.” What do we mean by the
fulfillment of Man. They don’t know what they mean by the fulfillment of Man
but basically it’s the idea of getting a chicken in every pot so we all won’t
starve to death, getting a Small pox vaccination and all the rest of it, and
getting man elevated, this and that, and that’s the great slogan.
The fourth thing to remember about it is has its own prophecy. You see this is basically a counterfeit
Christianity and it has what I have called a gradualistic millennialism. In other words, the idea is they are going to
bring in the Millennium by human works.
That is the future of humanism; that in a nutshell is what you are going
to face; that in a nutshell is what your children are going to be taught; that
in a nutshell are going to be witnesses for Christ in, humanism. And this is developing all over the world;
this isn’t just a phenomenon in the United States. I talked to a missionary from Iran who
recently worked with the Islam culture and you know how rabid these people
are. If you become a Christian in some
of these Islamic cultures you can count your life by minutes because the
chances are some fellow brother in Islam is going to come up and … and that’s
the end of you. That’s the way Islam
is. But what’s happening to the younger
generation in these Islamic cultures?
They’re breaking away and they’re saying mom and dad are strong on Islam
but I don’t dig it too much. Then we get
a report from Formosa, the great Buddhist culture, and here where everybody
worships idols, what is the younger generation doing? They have their idols but
they don’t care particularly for it. So
all over the world, whether you go east, west, north or south, the younger generation
is moving to this area. All these are
going to dissolve and become one big fat anti-Christian religion, a worldwide
humanism.
Therefore we do not rejoice in the diplomacy and the peace efforts that
are gradually building a world society; we fear these efforts and when possible
we oppose these efforts because they are building a pseudo brotherhood of man
and a pseudo fatherhood of God.
What can we, therefore, as Christians do? Let’s go through Deuteronomy and pick out the
principles again. What can we do based on Deut. 12? What was the issue in Deut. 12, worship in
the presence of God? How can you apply
that to the situation I just outlined?
You can apply it this way: where is all true worship of God going to be
in this age? In born again individuals
and therefore the Christian today will assert that there is no worship of God
until you have been born again. And this is the message which must be
emphasized in our time, I don’t care what church you belong to, I don’t care
what your race, your background, if you are not born again you do not worship
God, you worship your own imagination, period!
I’m not talking about being baptized or joining a church, I’m talking
about spiritual regeneration, and if we ever had a time when we ought to
emphasize it’s today because in Deut. 12 what was the thing that unified the
nation Israel and God insisted upon?
Worship in the presence of God.
Where is the presence of God today in the Church Age? The human heart; therefore worship in the
human heart is going to occur only in those who are born again. So I see from Deuteronomy the one doctrine
that I must repeat to my generation over and over is that if you want to
worship God and have a true brotherhood and fatherhood of man you must be born
again.
The second thing that I would emphasize based on Deut. 13 is the
emphasis on Bible doctrine. Here we must
say that we will emphasize doctrine and doctrine and doctrine and doctrine and
this is the one thing that is going to hold us as Christians. What was the thing
that unified Israel? Mosaic doctrine and
anybody that didn’t toe the line was identified and that means today we will
point out apostasy and if we have to call a man an apostate we call him an
apostate. This doesn’t mean to be
snotty, and this doesn’t mean to be grotesque about this thing but it does mean
that we have an obligation to point out error and not only is it positive that
we feed on the Word of God and Bible doctrine but when we see error we call it
by its name, and this is going to produce an issue. Do you begin to see, being a Christian isn’t
too comfortable.
Then we get down to Deut. 14-15, what can we learn from these two
chapters? What was in these two chapters?
The good life. What can we apply
to our own day? It started out with
funerals, the doctrine of death, so what is the great doctrine we are to
emphasize today at the point of a funeral and the point of connection with
death is the doctrine of the resurrection, over and against this mystical thing
that you see, the occult, the mystical, and all the rest of it, it’s coming in
like a flood. The great of doctrine of
these people is reincarnation, if you’re a bad person when you die God’s going
to take your spirit and put you in the form of a toad and someone is going to
come along and squish you. Or if you’re
a good person then God is going to put you in some rich man’s body, etc. It’s a lot of junk. The Bible doctrine of resurrection has to be
emphasized today.
What is another doctrine that we must emphasize today in this good life
technique? That is environment. We as Christian citizens can improve our
environment in one sense, like Israel did, and that is insisting on purity,
whether this is moral, whether it is spiritual, whether it is physical,
Christian citizens have a role. The
Christian, in a physical way, just like in a spiritual way, can object to his
environment. It’s not that we totally
transform our environment; we’re aware that you’re not going to bring in the
Millennium but we certainly can point to dangerous things in our environment.
And then we get to the problem of bona
fide welfare, and the government’s care for the true poor. What are some of
the things that we can learn from Deuteronomy in welfare, our attitude toward
it? First of all, we can learn that all true welfare in the Bible is directed
toward the poor, not vote groups.
Therefore people are identified as poor, not poor so and so, not poor
farmer, poor colored person, poor somebody else. When the poor are dealt with in Scripture
they are dealt with as the poor, not because they have power. Poor are bona
fide interest of government. Don’t
apologize for this and don’t be confused, welfare is a legitimate form of
government, but watch how it is. First,
it is directed to the real poor. For
example, in this country, and I am not knocking one particular race at this
point, but I want you to notice something; we have had it complained all over
this country from one side of the land to the other that the colored person is
the disadvantaged person in our society.
How often have you heard anyone complain about the Indian? I know some missionaries to the Indians out
in Arizona and they will tell you that they are the most maligned, the most
segregated people. Do you know why the
politicians aren’t interested in the American Indians? Because there are no votes there. Let’s put it bluntly, that’s exactly the
reason and a lot of this welfare business today is a lot of phony political
vote-getting. That distinguishes true
Bible Christianity. Bible Christianity
is interested in the poor because they’re poor and because of God’s interest I
them, not because of how many votes they’re going to get.
The second thing about welfare is that the Bible ratio between giving to
the spiritual versus the physical is two to one. Remember the passage where it said bring your
tithes to the priest, but then when was it that you let the tithes go to the
poor? Once every three years. Do you see what’s happening? The budget toward Bible teaching was twice
that of welfare. So therefore if we have
a welfare program in this country that’s five billion dollars, if we were to
operate like Israel we should have a budget outlay for missions and Bible
teaching of ten billion dollars a year.
Wouldn’t that be fantastic; you can see the priority and the priorities in
the Scripture are first you take your welfare payment, multiply by two and
those are the provisions that should be devoted to Bible doctrine, in that
order. Welfare receives one half the
amount that is devoted to Bible teaching in Israel.
The third thing about welfare in the Bible and that is that it is never
intended to bring people into bondage to a welfare system. The welfare system in Israel was not intended
to make slaves of the destitute. The
welfare system in Israel was to give a person a hand when they needed it and
shoot them back into the labor force as fast as possible; never to allow them
to become the parasites of society, as our welfare program is so designed. But welfare in the Scripture, God graciously
worked it out so if a person had a legitimate problem, he had a bankruptcy, he
was poor, he couldn’t feed himself, no family would go hungry in Israel, but
these families would ultimately
be thrust back into the work force and you had legitimate welfare.
The fourth point is the dreamers of our society with their
millenniums. We are going to have to
call it what it is and say that we are waiting for the thousand year millennial
reign of Jesus Christ. That is our
answer to socialism and that is our answer to communism and by this final point
we deduce a very important principle.
The difference between a Christian who is (quote) “interested in social
matters” and a non-Christian—a Christian will never try to change capitalism he
will never try to buck the system, he will always work with the system, never
against the system. For example, the liberals often quote the prophets of the
Old Testament. I majored in Old
Testament in seminary, I deliberately did this because I had heard this all my
life, the liberals quoting Isaiah, quoting Jeremiah and using this as an appeal
for social action. I deliberately
majored in Old Testament to find out, is this really true? And one of the greatest scholars of prophetic
works said this, page 99 of Claus Westermann’s book, Forms of Prophetic Speech, “in all of the sharp criticism of the
Kingdom as well as of the priesthood, cult, prophecy and temples, no prophetic
speeches have been passed down to us that demanded a total change in the
political and cultic areas. Prophecy in
the Old Testament does not have a revolutionary character.” What is he saying? He’s saying that God has established a system
of capitalism and that is the basic framework in which you are to solve your
problems. And the tendency in our day is
no, we can see the limitations of capitalism, let’s throw it out and bring in
something else to bring in this Millennium, and the Bible says you leave it the
way it is; you work within it, you’ll never get total success but just work
within it because eventually God will bring in a new social order, the one
thousand year Millennial reign of Christ.
You wait for that before you change what you’ve got because if you tear
down what you’ve got you’re going to find you’re going to suffer and suffer.
The tragedy is that most of our liberal seers of today don’t realize the
goose that laid the golden egg, and by the way, some of us don’t. But do you know who the goose that laid the
golden egg in this country is? You, the
middle class, the ones who pay their taxes, the ones who have financed this
thing. And sooner or later the golden
goose is going to be killed and it’s not going to lay any more golden eggs and
then who’s going to pay. This never
dawns on them. I know this because the
other week I saw a little clipping out of the paper and it’s amusing because it
was a notice about what some preachers were going to do that people didn’t give
money to the church, so this group of people got together, this is a unique
idea, but the point was that these people gave money and the budget was getting
less and less and less, as it is in all the liberal churches all over the land,
so some of these people got together in a panic session down in Houston and
formulated the following proposal; we are going to have it work out so that you
can pay in the offering by credit card and therefore all you have to do is
submit your credit card and we’ll automatically take it out of your account and
this will solve the decrease in the budget.
This is what goes on. You see,
all of it is phony gimmicks. They don’t
realize that people give because they’re fed; they don’t give and they’re not
going to finance a revolution and some of the dumb stupid fat cats in the
American middle class are finally waking up to the fact that they have been the
ones that have been stupid enough to pay for all this nonsense. My advice to you is don’t give your money;
don’t complain about it if it’s your dollars that are financing it. That’s what’s happening, liberalism in this
country has been financed by stupid fundamentalists. We teach the Word of God here; if I wanted to
be a member of a denomination I could but I don’t want to be and it’s simply
because of this thing. Do don’t bother
with it, if you want to get your feet in the mud go ahead but I’m telling you
that God wants you to give your money, your effort and your time if you’re one
of His children to the propagation of His Word.
And if you’re caught up in some machine that doesn’t allow you to teach
the Word of God, my advice to you based on the Word of God is get out. I’m not saying come to Lubbock Bible Church,
I’m saying just get out, and you can go where the Lord leads you.