Lesson 37

Righteous Priests and Prophets – 18:1-14

 

The section in Deuteronomy that deals with righteousness in government runs in chapter 16 on through chapter 21.  It’s basically built upon the assumption, and this is always the assumption, of any righteous government that there’s a willing consensus of its citizens to adhere to this righteous standard.  If there isn’t, the Word of God says you’re just wasting your time.  This is why it’s useless to cry for law and order when most of the citizens do now want law and order for them­selves personally.  So the Word of God is very realistic.  I’m always amused by people who say that the Word of God is idealistic, the Word of God can’t be done in our day, etc.  It’s actually the most realistic position that you could possibly have.  Religion in our time is the most unrealistic thing. The Word of God is perfect realistic, it fits every situation.  In fact, I think this is why mean really don’t like it, it’s too realistic, it tells them how they really are.

 

So the Word of God in this area tells us that basically as we see from chapters 12-15 and part of 16 that the nation has to have some sort of unity and this unity has to be of a spiritual type.  In other words, this lays the basis for the standards that the government is to follow.  And Israel as a theocracy had its unity grounded in its legal relationship with God.  Now chapters 16-21 pick up that and build on it.  Now that the unity has been established, now that the nation is locked in a legal relationship with God, with a God who is immutable, God is absolute righteousness, He’s absolute justice, a God of this character, now we can start talking about law and order but you can’t do it before that.  [Small blank spot]

 

So here are four sources of law.  The first source of law would be by direct revelation and only one nation on earth has this as a source of law.  The second way is build a consensus upon the Word of God and this would be Reformation Law, Northern Europe, England and America.  You will notice, those countries are the ones that have had the great democracies; no other place on earth has had democracy except first where you have had Bible Christianity.  So when you read in school about some guy called Woodrow Wilson saying we will make the world safe for democracy, and we will go and try to establish democracy with the hotten-tots, etc. and we’re going to spread democracy all over the earth, just remember, you can’t have democracy unless you first have an influx and a tremendous impact by Bible Christianity.  And if you don’t, the only type of government that will work is a monarchy or a dictatorship.  That’s just the way it is.  You cannot have a democracy if you do not have a broad base of Bible Christianity and that is why this country is not going to have a democracy in the next generation.  This country cannot go on with a complete negative, negative, negative attitude toward God’s Word, destroying the spiritual base of democracy in this country and expect to go on the way it has been. This is divine viewpoint consensus or ideally what it is is a maximum number of a citizens of a nation adhere to most of the divine viewpoint moral criteria.  That’s all; it doesn’t mean that everybody’s a Christian.

 

The third source of law is some human viewpoint consensus.  Human viewpoint consensus on the other hand is something different; here you may have exactly the same percent of believers.  In stage two you could have, oh say 10% of the United States are actually born again believers in Jesus Christ, say in the 19th century.  In this century, just suppose we still had 10% of the United States born again people in the 20th century.  The difference, and moving from step two to step three is that although the number of believes proportionally has not [some words missing] in other words, they aren’t the ones that are influencing the rules any more.  In this country right now the only thing that is basically saving us is that we have a strong remnant of believers that are still faithful, that are rising up all over this country pulling out of apostate churches, setting up their independent churches and adhering to Bible teaching.  Not because they want to fight, not because they’re schismatic, not because they’re malcontents with their own [some words missing].  The split isn’t because the people have left the church; the split is because the church has left the Bible and the people are still there with the Bible.  This is the nature of the split you see in our day.  Thus we have the shift from two to three and human viewpoint consensus where now the influential people, the big names, the people that write the laws, the people that are influencing the legislation of the nation are no longer influencing it from a divine viewpoint consensus, but a human viewpoint consensus.  And they usually hunt around for things and we gave as one of the famous illustrations the 1954 Supreme Court decision, a beautiful decision to illustrate this point. 

 

We’re not debating whether the decision in the end was right or wrong, that’s not the point here.  That’s superficial, that’s beside the point.  It’s not whether the Supreme Court was right in saying that schools must be desegregated.  I believe it was right but that is irrelevant.  The point is that the Supreme Court reached the conclusion by the wrong line of reasoning.  Instead of building the conclusion, as it could have, on the basis of traditional American law, it relied upon sociologists, one by the name of Günter Murdall who when he came to this country said the United States constitution was one of the most out-moded pieces of literature in the world, this is the man who wrote the book the Supreme Court used to make its decision.  Now when you have a court all of a sudden turning around, throwing out jurisprudence, throwing out the tradition that normally a court adheres to, and instead running because someone wrote a book and now we all feel sorry and we’re going to make the law after the book.  Forget the principle, just because you feel sentimental over this book, and that’s what happened.

 

And finally the fourth stage comes along and this is why you can’t have a democracy.  Up to this point you could say well, still in 1975 and 1980 it would be possible for the United States to have a democracy with human viewpoint consensus, wouldn’t it?  Yes, it’s the next step where all this happens but the next step inevitably happens and that’s the one of anarchy.  And here is where the student radical comes along and says why do I have to adhere to your law; give me one good reason.  And all of a sudden the previous generation that threw out the roots that cut the tree down and took the tree and the fruit and left the roots, this generation finds itself unable to answer the next generation when they come to them and say why should I obey your law.  Who told you to run my life, what base do you have to tell me what to do and what not to do.  And they’re right, what base do you have if you’ve gotten away from the Biblical base. What base do you have?  You don’t have anything. 

 

Inevitably what happens, modern society can’t live in anarchy so you go back, you bounce back and forth between three and four, three and four, and out of this you have a production of dictatorship because a dictatorship, after a while people are saying look, we’ve got sophisticated transportation, garbage collection systems, sewer systems, utilities, power and lights and all of this in a modern city and we can’t afford to have this disrupted by these radicals in the streets so therefore and ultimately I am willing to vote away my freedom to install a police state to keep these things under control and protect us.  The radicals are the ones that are forcing the country to this position.  That ultimately is where it winds up.  The radicals will never win, they never do, they’re crushed, just like the radicals were the ones who in 1917 backed Lenin and said we want a new thing, we want to throw out this rotten Russian society, we want a free society.  So Lenin said fine, follow me and I’ll give you the free society and they said great, and so they followed Lenin and he got in and guess whose heads he cut off first?  The radicals.  Lenin knew the only way to keep law and order was a dictatorship.

 

This is the way things are going and these chapters, 16-21, we deal first with the officials.  From 16-18 we’re going to deal with the government officials and 19-21 government policies.  First the officials because basically it’s who it is that carries these policies out.  Once you’ve got your basic principles, then the next important thing is who are you going to have staff the positions of your government.  Finally, what are the specific policies that these men follow? 

 

Chapter 18, which we’ll cover tonight, deals with the last group of these officials. We’ve dealt in chapters 16-17, first with the judges.  They performed two functions in government, they performed executive plus judicial.  No legislature in Israel, God wrote the laws, therefore no legislative function.  The judges were the executive and judicial officials.  You also had a king but that was God’s permissive will, it wasn’t His direct will.  The next officials are the priests, and this is what we’re going to deal with tonight, and prophets, and that rounds out your officials.  These are the three kinds of officials that you have in the nation.  The priests are religious and the prophets are both religious and political.  The reason why they are both is because the prophets extend the law which applies to both areas.

 

From verses 1-8 you have the priests.  Verse 1, “The Levitical priests, that is all the tribe of Levi, shall have no part nor inheritance with Israeli; they shall eat the offerings of the LORD made by fire, and His inheritance.”  Some of you probably have a New Scofield Bible but I just noticed something when I prepared this, the priests and the Levites, and I think the New Scofield Bible reading “the priests, the Levites, all the tribe of Levi” as though it’s all in apposition.  And I’m shocked to see the New Scofield do this; I don’t understand what happened here because this is one of the most controversial verses in this book because the liberals have used this verse to try to prove their theory that Deuteronomy was written late.  See the liberals believe that religion evolved like everything else, and so they say that well, first in Israel you have polytheism and you have Abraham running around setting up a statue everywhere he went, etc. and then in the days of the prophets you had monotheism really develop and some group of men got together, and we call this the D school and they wrote Deuteronomy.  So Deuteronomy is not the writings of Moses, it’s something late.  This is what you’re going to get in any religious course in college.  Christian tax payers are paying to have your faith destroyed in a school of so-called higher education.  Actually it’s lower education.  But nevertheless, D is supposed to be the big deal and he’s the guy that writes this thing and puts it all together.  D stands for “Dumbbell” as far as I’m concerned, in the liberal position because there is absolutely no basis for it. 

 

This verse, they say, the priests, the Levites, all the tribe of Levi.  If you went to the RSV this is the way it would read, equating Levites with priests.  Now the Bible says elsewhere that this is the case; you have many Levites, big circle; only some of the Levites are priests, but the liberals argue this verse, verse 1 proves that the author of D didn’t hold that position.  He came along later and held that all priests were Levites so you have priests identical to Levites.  In other words, he was equating this verse, so they translate this verse, the priests, the Levites, all the tribe of Levi, every one of them does this, or has done it in the past.  And this is why I can’t believe why the Scofield Bible did this at this point.  But this rotates on a principle of Hebrew grammar that looks like this.  If you have a sentence and you have two parts to the sentence, part A and part B, part B can either be in apposition, so that you would have A = B, that would be one way of translating it, the priests, the Levites, A = B.  That is a legitimate translation from Hebrew grammar. But there’s another option, you can have A and then B amplifying A so that you can have A amplified by B.  So you first have A, this is one way, A = B.  Then you can translate it another way and say verse A and then A is amplified by B and to show you that this actually happens you just have to go back one chapter to 17:1 and it’s right there, and everybody [can’t understand words] the liberal translates it this way here, because here it doesn’t involve proving their hypothesis. 

 

Deut. 1:1, “Thou shalt not sacrifice unto the LORD thy God any bullock, or sheep, wherein is blemish, or any evil favouredness;” the word “blemish” is A, any blemish, or evil favouredness, that’s just the King James way of saying “blemish” is A, there’s your specific thing, and then the author says this specific blemish or any other thing and that’s B.  So you first have A and then A is amplified by B.  Any specific blemish or any other thing that’s on it.  Now anybody translates in 17:1 that way, but when they come to 18:1 where you have exactly the same thing then all of a sudden they start fudging the translation to try to prove their theory.  And the way it should be translated is the way the King James originally translates it and it goes like this:  “The Levitical priests, the Levites,” see all the priests were Levites, that’s true, but not all Levites are priests, “and all the tribe of Levi,” or “even all the tribe of Levi.” 

 

So what’s he saying?  He’s saying this, he says look, the priests who are Levites, and all the rest of the tribe of Levi. That’s the thrust of this verse, so it is not true, the liberal position, it’s grammatically ambiguous and the liberals are just forcing the translation to prove their theory.  Even one of their own scholars has said this, for in 1954 Dr. George Ernest Wright, one of the outstanding Old Testament scholars said this: A careful study of Deuteronomy’s use of the phrase, the priests, the Levites, and of other contexts where the word “Levite” appears along has led me to the conclusion that the King James is correct after all in its interpretation of Deut. 19:1.  So here’s a case where you King James is better even than the New Scofield edition at this point. 

 

“The priests, the Levites, even all the tribe of Levi shall have no part nor inheritance,” and this is the idea that they were to be a national clergy that was to be financed by the tithe.  Now the tithe in Israel was national income tax, 10%, it wasn’t graduated either, it was 10% no matter how much you made.  Everybody paid an equal portion because this went to finance the national clergy.  It went to finance the clergy two out of three years; on the third year it went to welfare; not welfare as we know it but assistance, food, etc. for the poor who couldn’t work for themselves. 

 

But I want you to notice a very interesting thing, that 66 and 2/3rds percent of the national income went to Bible teaching.  You can imagine how much Bible teaching you could have if you had the people with a national budget of the United States government. And the rest of it, 33 and 1/3rd percent went to aid, to the poor, etc.  No defense in the budget because every man had arms; every man in the nation Israel was armed and could have arms in his home, without registering.  You didn’t have to have a license for your spear.  You didn’t have to go down and fill out a registration blank every time you wanted to add six arrows to your quiver.  You didn’t have to get permission from the government to buy a bow.  Where I came from in New York State you can’t even use a weapon to defend yourself.  They have a law in that state that if you are assaulted and you’ve a gun and your attacker hasn’t got anything, he’s got a stick and he’s hitting you over the head with a chain or something, you have to run; you cannot use your gun to defend yourself against the person that is hitting you that is unarmed.  He could be killing you beating you over the head with a chain and your only defense was to run.  There was a case where they had a person who was an invalid, a cripple, and this bully boy used to come and beat him up all the time so one time this person, he had two doors in his house, an outer screen door and an inner door, and this bully boy was running after him and was a little inebriated so the person ran in through these two doors, he turned around and got his shotgun, had it right there and came back and sat because he realized this man was going to kill him, this man was under the influence of alcohol and he loved to pick on crippled people, and he blasted him one right through the eyes and he was five to six months proving that he didn’t murder the person.  They tried to arrest him for murder because he shot to defend himself.  That’s where it’s coming from.  You cannot defend yourself.

 

That is not the way it was in Israel; every man had a spear, every man had arms, every citizen had the right to bear arms as it should be in this country.  Any time you see gun legislation you are seeing a deliberate move to destroy freedom.  Any person who backs firearms removal and this kind of activity is a person who is against what America has stood for and is one who is deliber­ately trying to deprive you of your freedom to defend yourself.  And you will hear clergymen from the pulpit saying this, loudmouthed clergymen from the National Council of Churches and other apostate organizations, and they spread all this around saying this is the position of Protestant Christianity.  It isn’t the position of Protestant Christianity, it’s the position of a group of nincompoops, that’s what it is, it has nothing to do with Protestant Christianity, and if you are on the ball do you know what you’re going to do.  Just go home and have a set of postcards and every time you see the National Council come out with a statement, just write to your Congressman on that postcard and say: “The National Council of Churches does not represent me, period.”  Don’t forget the Congressman is more interested in votes more than he’s interested in the National Council.  If you can show you’ve got the vote and the National Council doesn’t, he’ll listen to you.  It’s as simple as that, that’s the way you play the game. 

 

Here we have verse 1, the Levites, and these are the priests who are going to teach the Word of God and they’re going to be supported by the tithes given to the nation.

 

Verse 2, “Therefore shall they have no inheritance among their brethren; the LORD is their inheritance, as he hath said unto them.”  God has set them apart.  Verse 3, “And this shall be the priest’s due from the people, from them who offer a sacrifice, whether it be ox or sheep; and they shall give unto the priest the shoulder, and the two cheeks, and the stomach.” and these cuts of meat, the shoulder and the two cheeks, etc. these are the choice cuts.  See, when a person gave a sacrifice it was always tempting to keep the choice cut for yourself, so this was put in there to make sure that the choice cut went to the priests; that’s all.  Now we come to verse 4, “The first fruit also of thy grain, of thy wine, and of thine oil, and the first of the fleece of thy sheep, shalt thou give him,” here are your crops being given. 

 

Verse 5, “For the LORD thy God hath chosen him out of all thy tribes, to stand to minister in the name of the LORD, him and his sons forever.”  Now with this we are introduced to the principles of the office of a priest.  What are the principles? We’ve gone over the principles of a judge; here we come to the principles of a priest.  The first principle: this office is based upon heredity, not upon individual choice, in the sense that they were specially called of God.  Remember we said the king was especially chosen of God, but not the priests.  The priest had access to his calling simply by the right of physical birth.  He could or could not choose to become a priest, but if he’s a Levite, any Levite could become a priest if he wanted to; it’s as simple as that.  He had the right by birth, if he wanted to exercise the right.  So the Levite then, by the way, if you have some Jewish friends and their last name is Levi, they’re Levites.  They actually are descendants from the original Levites, at least the name carries down through and it’s pretty conservative.

 

So the priesthood office is an office based upon heredity and not a special calling of God; it’s strictly heredity based upon the right given at physical birth.

 

The second point: the Levites were to teach the Word of God.  Turn to Deut. 33:10 and you’ll see their ministry.  “They shall teach Jacob thine judgments, and Israel thy law; they shall put incense before thee, and the whole burnt sacrifice upon thine altar,” etc.  This is talking about Levi, verse 8, talking about the application of Levi and you see, they shall teach Jacob, that’s the nation, thy judgments and Israel thy Law.  So here the ministry of the Levite is a Bible teaching ministry.  Now do you see something about this?  You have one twelfth of a population of the nation supported by the entire national… 66% of the national budget going to Bible teaching.  You don’t understand till you pull these facts out, you don’t realize what this theocracy was all about, and the impetus on the Word of God.  One twelfth of the nation engaged in Bible teaching; one out of every twelve people was engaged in Bible teaching.   Say we have a 144 people, so we have 12 people engaged in Bible teaching, so for every congregation of 144 people if this ratio held, which it doesn’t necessarily have to, there would be 12 people who would have the ability if they exercised their volition and were mature enough to teach God’s Word.  Do you see this, this is fantastic; this is on a nationwide scale and they would be supported by 2/3rds of the national budget.  So you get an idea here of just what this nation was all about.

 

The third principle of the office of the priest.  The main ministry they had was to present the sacrifices before the Lord; they were mainly there to present the sacrifices of the people before the Lord, act as mediators in the sense that they went from the people to God; they represented man before God.  That’s the old cliché, the prophet represents God before man; the priest represents man before God.  That’s the way to distinguish between those two offices.

 

The fourth principle and this is found in Deut. 21:5, and this is that the priests were to act as God’s personal envoy in every court of the land, because it says “And the priests, the sons of Levi, shall come near; for them the LORD thy God has chosen to minister unto him, and to bless in the name of the LORD; and by their word,” the priest’s word, “shall every controversy and every stroke be tried.”  That doesn’t mean that they take over the function of the judge of the court; it simply means that the priest as a Bible teacher was there to present the Law.  He was God’s personal representative.  If the judge would say hey, what’s the Law on this, come on over here, I want to find out what the Law says, the priest would be there in the court to present and he would say the Law says this, and then the judge would say okay, what are the facts in this case; the judge would make the decision but he would make it on the basis of the revelation from God given to him by the priest.  The priest therefore would stand as God’s personal representative.  When we get into that section I’ll show you that this was common in the other portions of the ancient world.        You have this Hittite Empire and the Hittite Empire had various towns around it and when they had a jurisdictional problem or they had some problem in the judiciary that had to be decided there would be a man who would be, say the mayor and the city council.  They would be the ones in that day that exercised both the executive and the judicial functions and they’d try the case but they would always try the case in the presence of a military commander.  They’d have a military commander there and the military commander would represent the King of the Hittites; he would be the Kings’ personal representative and although he himself would not actually participate in the court decision, he would be there saying and representing to the court this is the law of the land, I represent the law.  So you’d have, therefore this person representing the law just like the priest in the courts of Israel would represent the Law of Israel, the Law of Jehovah to the nation. 

 

Therefore the priest’s job was basically a representative one.  Now do you see the pathetic picture that is presented in the Gospels, when the Lord Jesus Christ, God Himself, stands in the court and it is the priests that are attacking Him?  And not only are the priests the ones that are attacking Him, the high priest is the one who is attacking Him, who himself is supposed to be a type of the man that he’s attacking.  This is the utter irony of the gospel and you see more and more of this as you see the Old Testament.  You say how could confused could these people possibly get.  How dumb can you get?  And the Gospels are one of the most ironic pieces of literature in the ancient world, just from the standpoint of literature.  It is almost hilarious if it wasn’t so pathetic to see the mistakes that are made in the Gospels.  And the mistakes increase all down the line, particularly when you see the Old Testament.

 

Verses 6-8 depict the choice of a Levite. “And if a Levite come from any of thy gates out of all Israel, where he sojourned, and come with all the desire of his mind unto the place which the LORD shall choose, [7] Then he shall minister in the name of the LORD his God, as all his brethren the Levites do, who stand there before the LORD.”  Now what this says is going back to our previous chart, i.e. that the Levites represented by the large circle are not all priests, small circle, but all priests are Levites.  So here you have a Levite who is not a priest; he’s not serving the central sanctuary but he wants to.  He decides look, I’ve had Bible teaching in this town, that town, etc. I’d like a crack at serving in the Temple.  So verses 6-8 say that he has the right at any time to move from a Bible teaching in the rural areas to come to the big city and to serve in the Temple.  The reason behind the provision of verses 6-8 is to prevent a little click from forming in Jerusalem, to prevent these priests from getting the idea, well, they’re super Levites, they are so great that all the rest of those clods that are members of our tribe that are out in the countryside are just a bunch of hicks, etc. they don’t know anything, but we here in the big city, we know everything and we’re the cocks of the walk, etc.  So this provision is put in there to regulate this problem to cut it off, nip it in the bud. 

 

Now we come, verses 9-22, the role of the prophet.  And the role of the prophet stems directly from the problem of the priest.  Why?  Because the priests basically had one source of divine revelation.  It was the Law, the five books that you have in your Bible; that was basically his content.  That’s what he had, that’s his Bible.  So now what would happen?  Later on as God worked with the nation in the history of the progress of revelation and it would come a time in history when the nation needed additional revelation.  Could the priests give the nation additional revelation?  No, the priest was not the channel of revelation.  This is interesting, the priest as a Bible teacher, much like… exactly like Bible teaching today, is not the channel of new revelation, he was simply going back to the revelation that God had given in the past and was teaching it to his generation. That was the role of the priest.  He couldn’t add or subtract from that Law and he could only teach the Law.  But obviously some people are going to say well look, we’ve got ourselves in this jam, we need a special word from God, where do we get it from.  Now we come to the role of the prophet.  First there’s the false problem of verses 9-14, here’s the problem the priests… the tendency in the day to bypass God’s prophets and take a shortcut to spiritism and mysticism, such as is happening in our society even here in Lubbock.  Verses 15-22 depict God’s solution to the problem, His divine provision, the prophet. 

 

Let’s look at verses 9-14, this is the problem of where the priest might run to if he panics.  Here comes the problem, the pressure is on and here you’ve got divine guidance. What is the priest going to do?  He’s going to go back to the Law. What if it isn’t covered in the Law, what if the Law has to be brought up to date?  Can the priest do anything about it?  No he can’t, so the tendency is under pressure to avoid going to the Law and visit spiritism or to go to a witch or some sort of medium.  And here is where you have the rise of divination and spiritism. 

 

Verse 9, “When thou art come into the land which the LORD thy God gives you, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations.”  What are “the abominations of those nations?”  Here they are listed for you in verse 10, “There shall not be found among you,” and I’m going to list these out and study them by categories, there are several here and they fall into categories and the best way of studying them is categorize them into four points. There are four basic types of spiritism that you run across.  And you’re going to run across these, every time you walk into a newsstand you’ll see this; it’s coming out all over. Pornographic literature is trivial when you compare it to some of the spirits literature that’s coming out of the newsstands. 

 

In the first category you have divinations by child burning; now this is an ancient feature and obviously hasn’t started yet, but this is divination by child burning.  The idea simply is this, you take a young child, build a fire and let the kid run through the fire and if he gets burned God’s will is one thing; if he doesn’t get burned God’s will is something else.  So the divination that the ancients would use is to send a small child and make him run through the fire.  If the child came out with second and third degree burns and was all black and his skin was charred that was God’s will one way. And if the child went through the fire and didn’t do this that was God’s will another way.  Now it’s a gruesome way, but that shows you how stupid man can be, because of his desire to know God’s will or his desire to know future things or his desire to know something that he does not know, he will resort to all of these things.  That is indicated by “makes his son or his daughter to pass through the fire.” 

 

The second type of divination is used is found in the next one, and this is divination by chance, that’s very common.  Flipping coins is one obvious way, Weegie boards, another one, pendulum swinging is another one, etc.  Now to see this we have to do a study on the word that’s found in the middle of verse 10, “who useth divination,” and the word here is quasam in the Hebrew, and that’s the word which is used for divination and that word gives us a hint as to how they did it in the ancient world.  Apparently, if this word is true and its background is true, they would take a quiver and they would take the heads off the arrows that they had in the quiver, and they would mark the arrows; each arrow would have a mark on it for some options.  Suppose they had ten different possibilities here.  They were in a jam and they had ten different possibilities, they’d take ten arrows, take the heads off the arrows and mark each arrow.  Then they’d put the arrows in the quiver, shake the quiver and throw them out.  And the arrow that came out first was the will of God.  Now you can obviously draw analogies today but I want you to see the Word of God and how it says don’t you dare use that, that is an abomination.  I’ll give you some Christian equivalents; these people that wake up in the morning and say oh, I just the take the Bible wherever it opens, I just study like a blind man, I wave my hand and it falls on a verse and I read the verse and that’s God’s blessing for the day or that’s what God wants me to do.  I would like to see what would happen if they opened to one of the Gospels and their finger just happened on the verse where Judas Iscariot hung himself. 

 

But here you have divination by chance.  To see how this actually worked out in one place turn to Ezekiel 21:21 and you’ll see how this was used quite often in the ancient world. Now to understand this you have to see this as the battle of the end and the collapse of the southern kingdom; you had Nebuchadnezzar using westward from Babylon, he’s invading the land.  He has two options, whether to go to a place called Rabbath or to go to Jerusalem.  And he’s got to hit one place or the other place, but he doesn’t know what is the will of the gods, so in Ezek. 21:21 this is what he does: “For the king of Babylon,” that’s Nebuchadnezzar, “stood at the parting of the way,” that’s the road he was following, one road went to Jerusalem, one road turned south and went to Rabbath, “at the head of the two ways, to use divination;” there’s the same word, “he made his arrows bright, he consulted with images, he looked in the liver. [22] At his right hand was the divination for Jerusalem, to appoint captains, to open the mouth…” etc. and evidently what happened he prepared his arrows, he threw the arrows out, he had two arrows in the quiver, and the one that indicated go to Jerusalem came out first and so he held it in his right hand and that’s how Nebuchadnezzar made the decision to move to Jerusalem; he made it on the basis of divination prohibited here in Deut. 18.  So that’s the second category of divination.

 

By the way, I remind you again that Christians can use this as a substitute for divine guidance.  This is why divine guidance is not some little detail we have been covering in the morning.  If you don’t use it you’re going to wind up using one of these categories and God calls them an abomination.  [Blank spot]   And any Christian that uses it shares in this condemnation.  So here’s the first category: child burning.  The second category: chance.

 

The third category is by trance, chance and trance.  And here you have divination by trance, and some modern counterparts would be Jean Dixon, Edgar Case and a few of the other seers of our time.  These people are using divination by trance.  In verse 10, where it says “an observer of the times,” this is what we mean.  It doesn’t mean “observer of the times,” it’s a Hebrew word which means to go into a trance and utter odd noises.  Incidentally, it is used for the gift of tongues given to some of the mediums, that they had the ability to speak in other languages.  Pardon the word “tongue” but you notice it does have a sinister connotation in certain portions of the Word of God.  So these men would go into this trance and utter these odd noises.  They’d speak in various tongues, they’d have their crystal balls, they’d have oracles, etc.  The Oracle of Delphi was one of the famous occurrences of this in the ancient world and you had other similar oracles that if you studied ancient history you will come across them.  So that is what the King James means by that word, the “observer of the times,” it means to divine by trance, going into a trance and saying these things. 

 

“Or an enchanter,” the last part of verse 10, an enchanter.  The enchanter is the Hebrew word which means to look into arrangements of things.  For example, palm reading would be this, where the person looks at your palm and he sees certain lines in your palm, he sees a line that runs across from one side of your hand to the next, he sees the line that runs down from your thumb and the way that these lines are oriented, the arrangement of these lines is supposed to spell out your destiny or the capabilities of your life.  Tea leaf reading is another one where you put tea leaves in the cup and then pour the water out and the arrangement of the tea leaves is supposed to give this information.  Astrology is another one where the arrangement of the stars is supposed to set of a particular type of destiny in an individual person.  All of these are included by this word which means looking into the arrangement of words, planets, events, etc. and discerning God’s will by means of these. 

 

Now if you don’t think, and this word, an enchanter, would be divination by signs, so here we have four categories: child-burning which hasn’t reoccurred in our country yet to my knowledge; divination by chance; divination by trance and divination by signs. These are the four major categories given here and if you don’t think these are modern… on a plane a guy three or four seats down was reading astrology, introduction, astrology for beginners.  People are hungry for this kind of thing and looking around; a lot of it is sheer garbage, and if you don’t think the things are sinister I just happened to pick this up in a bookstore within half a mile of church, it’s called A Pocket Guide to the Supernatural.  On the back it says: in simple everyday language you can learn how to (1) communicate with the departed through the Weegie board; (2) foretell the future with cards; (3) travel throughout the world via astro projection; (4) control the destiny of others through ceremonial magic; (5) learn the secrets of the past through automatic writing, plus basic instruction in astrology, hypnosis, numerology, palmistry and psychometry and other arts and sciences never before detailed in one book. 

 

This is coming by the truckloads and you have to ask yourself, it’s more than a joke as far as the non-Christian is concerned.  To us it’s junk, absolute junk, absolute worthless, but why are men seeking this. Ask yourself that?  Why is it? Because they have lost the authoritative Word of God, that’s why.  A man wrote a book not so long ago, Kurt Tock [sp?] in Germany in which he showed that every time you lose the basic Christian roots of a society you will immediately have a rise of demonism and spiritism.  Do you know one of the great examples of this?  The Very Reverend Bishop Pike.  Here is a man who denied the cardinal doctrines in the Christian faith out of his hatred for the supernatural.  He says you have to throw these out because 20th century men will no longer believe in the supernatural world given in the Bible and yet Pike loses his son and where does he run?  He runs to the seer so he can have a séance on Canadian TV and everybody watch and here this man is supposedly talking to his son.  He marries a woman 20 or 30 years younger than himself simply because this woman has a physic ability and he enjoys being with this woman because his wife is a witch like he is. 

 

Now why does a man of Pike’s mentality, of his education, a man who is so thoroughly ingrained in materialism that he denies the supernatural of the Bible and yet sooner or later under the pressure of life he’s forced to go back to spiritism.  It’s like the parable Jesus said, you throw out one demon and seven worse ones come into the house.  And that’s what happens, you throw out the supernatural, we won’t make the analogy between the demons, but if you throw out the supernatural of the Bible, the supernatural world of the Bible and the promises and the faith that God has given, do you know what you’re going to end up with?  You’re going to wind up with something seven times worse from your own viewpoint.  So we have this coming into our society by the truckloads, simply because of man’s rejection of the Word of God.

 

Now the next two categories, by the way the word “witch” here [verse 10] should be in the last category that I’m going to work with, not in verse 10, it should be in verse 11 if you divided the verse by categories.   These are four means of divination or finding out the will of God, or the gods or something.  The next two are what we call black magic; known in history as black magic and these are a little bit more serious.  “The witch, [11] or a charmer,” and here is where we have people that are actually cursing other people and actually have the ability to bring curse on some one.  If you don’t believe this, talk to a missionary.  When someone came back from Jamaica I was asking him about things down there and he was showing how in Haiti and on the island of the Dominican Republic, etc. you have these people able to curse someone and kill them by black magic, and they are able to cause tremendous suffering, to cast their spell on another person.  You don’t think it happens?  Well it does, you ask a missionary that’s been out there. 

 

And this is how you see the native witch doctors are able to keep their discipline in the tribe; you don’t obey me your next baby will be deformed, try it and see.  What would you do if you didn’t have the Lord?  If you don’t follow me you’re going to come down with a horrible disease and die a slow pitiful death just like so and so did last week. What would you do, what would be your reaction? Do you see the horror that you find yourself in if you don’t have an authoritative Bible to come back to and say you can curse me all you want to but my position is in Jesus Christ and you’re not going to touch me apart from His will.  His will is absolute for me and you can’t touch me without His absolute permission, so therefore you’re not afraid of any person.  But could you say that if you were a non-Christian?  No you couldn’t, and you’d become a bondslave to this kind of thing. 

 

So here we have the witch; the witch is characterized by using herbs and drugs to produce magic effects.  This means one who will use drugs.  Today we have the drug called LSD and other things.  “Charmers,” this word is another person that uses black magic much like the witch; the witch and the charmer are very close except the witch uses herbs and drugs, the charmer uses voodooism.  This is the thing that’s used on these islands where you take a doll or some object that represents the person and you identify the person and then they stick pins in it or they curse this doll and if this doll is you and they stick a pin in the leg that’s supposed to cause an accident where you break a leg or something.  This is a means of black magic and it apparently works in these cultures, namely because of the influence of demonism, etc. 

 

Now still part of the same category we have charmers and witches, that’s one set of people; now we have the next group of people, the “consulter of familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necro­mancer.”  These people are [can’t understand word].  These people are actually communicating with a demon or demons and are producing effects that to you would look like they’re speaking to the dead.  For example, there’s not a shadow of doubt in my mind that when Bishop Pike was on Canadian TV and had the séance that he was truly speaking to another being on that stage.  I have no doubt about it, I have no doubt that there were three persons on that TV program, although the viewers only saw two, Pike and the medium.  But I believe there were three people there and the third one was an unseen demon that Pike was speaking to.  He was not speaking to his son. 

The “consulter of spirits” literally is one who asks spirits; one who ask spirits, the consulter of familiar spirits or a wizard.  That phrase, if you run a parenthesis from “consulter of familiar spirits, or a wizard,” it’s all one phrase, and if you translate it literally it would go this way.  “One who asks various spirits or his own private spirit.”  In other words, one man can be a medium through whom many spirits can speak, a whole group of them get on this guy, or a man can be a spirit who has his contact spirit.  I believe, if I remember correctly when Bishop Pike had his séance the particular seer, I forgot the name of the contact spirit but I believe he was one of those who went through one contact spirit, he had a spirit to himself.  And so he would be classified in this context as a “wizard.”

 

Now to show that this is phony and to show that these people are not truly speaking to the dead but instead are speaking to spirits that are impersonating the dead, turn to 1 Sam. 28.  Here is King Saul getting himself in a jam and like so many believers instead of adhering to the Word of God, instead of living in the Word, you take in the Word, you digest the Word, you use the Word in your mind to attack human viewpoint, divine viewpoint over human viewpoint, you believe the promises of God so that when you get in a jam you remember 1 Pet. 5:7, “casting all your care upon Him for He cares for you,” you remember Rom. 8:28, “All things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are called according to His purpose.”  You don’t get into a panic and fall apart and go running around like some ignoramus unbeliever and pick up all these weird things.  But Saul does this.  The Christian of the 20th century, oh, where are we going to go, I’m all upset, I’m going to go to a psychiatrist.  Saul didn’t have a psychiatrist in that day so he took the nearest substitute which happened to be the witch of Endor. 

 

Here’s the context, verse 10, “And Saul swore to her by the LORD, saying, As the LORD liveth, there shall no punishment happen thee for this thing.”  See, the witch is afraid to practice her profession because of the law that we just studied.  Verse 11, “Then said the woman, Whom shall I bring up unto thee? And he said, Bring me up Samuel.”  So the witch is asking Saul to bring up someone from the dead.  In other words, this is her business, she’s a necromancer, she’s one who talks with the dead, she says.  So Saul goes to her and he says to her look, would you bring me up Samuel.  Verse 12, “And when the woman saw Samuel, she cried,” she screamed literally, “with a loud voice.  And the woman spoke to Saul, saying, Why hast thou deceived me? For thou art Saul.  [13] And the king said unto her, Be not afraid; for what sawest thou?  And the woman said unto Saul, I saw gods” literally elohims “ascending out of the earth. [14] And he said unto her, What form is he of? And she said, An old man cometh up, and he is covered with a mantle.  And Saul perceived that it was Samuel.”  Now here is Samuel coming forth in his intermediate body from Sheol and he actually comes forth. 

 

Now what is the importance of this text?  It shows you that these people are phonies because when the real thing happens the witch was surprised.  Why would she have been surprised if all along she had been calling people up from the dead?  The only explanation for why this witch screamed is because now she really gets someone up from the dead and it shakes her up so that she screams, she looses all rationality at that point and screams.  And it proves that she was a phony.  She may not have realized, I’m not saying that these people are deliberate phonies, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying they’re deliberate phonies; I’m saying that they have convinced themselves oftentimes that they are speaking with the dead.  I have no doubts about the integrity of the medium to which Bishop Pike went on TV, I have no doubts that the man thought he was speaking to Bishop Pike’s son.  But my point is that he’s still phony because the person to whom he was speaking was not Pike’s son.  The person that he was speaking with was a demon, just like this.  Here the person, this witch, had not been talking to the dead; she’d been talking to demons. 

 

Now another verse that proves the falsity of these things is found in Isaiah 29:4, and this tells you how the demons simulate a dead person and why they are able to convince their mediums that these people are real. Why is it important for you as a believer to understand this?  Isn’t this a little far out?  No it isn’t, because let me tell you something, that your unbelieving friend is going to find himself in a very embarrassing position because the unbeliever scoffs at this and says ho-ho, this is something leftover from the times of the Bible, nobody believes this stuff any more, we live in the 20th century, don’t you know that, and in his condescending tone, spoof, has any idea of the supernatural and so he says this stuff is a phony thing.  But then all of a sudden some day in his life he receives evidence.  He’s like Pike. 

 

Let’s take Pike again as the example.  Here Pike scoffs at the supernatural; now he is in a crisis, he goes to the medium and all of a sudden he gets experimental evidence that this medium is truly talking to someone, so when Pike, as he said, when this man spoke to me he told me things about my son that only my son and I knew.  This medium couldn’t have known this in his own human ingenuity.  I spoke about intimate things that only a father shares with his son, and only my son could have found these things out.  How is it that this medium knew these things?  And Pike is presented with the evidence and Pike quickly draws the conclusion that that’s my son.  Because of his previous denial of the Bible he has cut himself off from the true explanation and the true explanation in this case is here you have Pike, and we have the medium and Pike turns to the medium and he is getting this message; the medium in turn is getting… say he sees this person over here which is this demon. 

 

Now the demon, because he is a demon has access to the information of Pike’s son, but Pike, since he doesn’t believe in demons narrows the possibility down when he thinks this thing through and says well, obviously the only other person that could have known these intimate things is my own son and so he says this must be my own son that I’m talking to.  But it’s not his son because the demons have access to these facts; they know these things, they watch us all the time.  So the demon could very well impersonate someone that you love very dearly could be impersonated and you would believe it if you didn’t know this doctrine from the Bible.  We could have a medium in here and he could talk to your father or your mother that may have died and tell him things that only you and your parents know and I will bet you if you didn’t study the Scripture carefully you’d say that must be, I must be talking to this person because only this person would know these things, when in matter of fact if you believe the Bible, the Bible is telling  you yes, this is a true phenomenon but you’ve interpreted it the wrong way.  The true interpretation of the phenomenon is that these are demons.

 

In Isaiah 29:4 is one of the explanations of how these demons are able to impersonate.  God says to Israel, “And thou shalt be brought down, and shalt speak out of the ground, and thy speech shall be low out of the dust, and thy voice shall be, like of one that has a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and they speech shall whisper out of the dust.”  This is why these people who have these contacts believe they are speaking with the dead because the demon impersonates those who have died, those who are of the dust, those who are of the ground.  And the demon projects his voice as though he is speaking from the realm of the dead.  So the medium himself is deceived into thinking that truly he has contact with people that are dead. 

 

Now I want to emphasize this to you again.  In Luke 16 do you remember the story, absolutely crucial to underscore this whole point we’ve been making.  There is no communication with the dead and I say that emphatically and dogmatically, underscored ten times with colored pencil.  There is no communication with the dead and anybody who tells you there is is a downright liar.  There is not and there cannot be, absolutely not, for in Luke 16 Jesus Christ Himself teaches this, because He says look, here I have one man in Paradise, here I have another one in Sheol and this one in Sheol has a brother on earth, and he wants someone to go witness to him, and so instead of people praying to the dead he asked Abraham, Abraham, can’t you send someone to my brother; now if there was communication from the dead he could have spoken directly to his brother.  But there is no communication with the dead and so he has to ask permission and permission is absolutely categorically denied in Luke 16.  So anytime you see this junk, don’t buy it, it’s phony. But it’s not phony in the sense that the person who tells you this thinks its phony.  It’s not as though this person who tells you this is trying to pull the wool over your eyes. That’s not what we’re saying. We’re saying that he’s had the wool pulled over his eyes too by this demon activity. 

 

And this is why again we warn you, don’t, whatever you do, you talk about immorality, do you know what’s worse than immorality?  Getting mixed up in this demon activity; don’t mix with it, don’t play with it, don’t get involved with it, separate yourself from it and you won’t get in trouble.  If you want to bring misery on yourself just go ahead and play with it, go ahead and dabble with it and you will wind up a miserable believer.

 

Verse 12, we’ll finish this section, verses 12-14, “For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD; and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee. [13] Thou shalt be perfect with the LORD thy God.”  Now the word “perfect” here means complete; what it means is “thou shalt be mature,” you’re going to be in fellowship with Him a maximum amount of time and therefore derive maturity.  Verse 14, “For these nations, whom thou shalt possess, hearkened unto observers of times,” there you have people who are engaged in spiritism, “observers of the times” means by trance, divination by trance, “and unto diviners;” these are people, divination by chance, the Weegie board boys, etc. “but as for thee, the LORD thy God hath not permitted thee so to do.”  And that verse applies to you as believers today in the Church Age. God has not permitted us to mix with this kind of activity, absolutely forbidden.  The reason we will find next week, because of the doctrine of God’s prophets.