Lesson 40
Doctrine of War I – 20:1-9
Turn to the next to the last chapter in this particular section of the
book and it’s good that we pause for a few minutes to see just where we’ve been
going since we started through the book of Deuteronomy, and to go back and once
again look at the forest so we don’t lose it for the trees and the
details. The book of Deuteronomy was
determined; it was a book that was put together by the sermons that Moses gave
before he died. Moses gave this sermon,
and by the people like sermonettes for Christianettes will not be pleased to
recall the fact that Deuteronomy took hours to deliver. We only have part, we think, of what this
sermon was like. But the book of
Deuteronomy is patterned, scholars now believe, after a treaty form found in
the ancient near east. And the very
format of this sermon, therefore, tells us something, how Moses was thinking
and how the nation received this sermon because the format that Moses used to
preach his last sermon was the format of an ancient treaty called a suzerainty
vassal treaty.
It looks something like this: you have what was known as a great
king. And the great king in the ancient
world would be any king or suzerain of a great power, such as
Now, when you study the book of Deuteronomy carefully, you notice that
Moses is using the same format. And it
tells us something very important. What
this tells us is that they conceived of God, or Yahweh, as He is known in the
Hebrew of the Old Testament, Jehovah in some of the English Bibles, or Lord in
the King James Bible; Yahweh made a treaty with twelve vassals, the
tribes. Here they are, the twelve tribes
out here, and Yahweh set Himself up in a legal binding treaty with these
tribes. And therefore the Pentateuch is
looked upon as a legal document, as a constitutional document, one that seals
up, defines the law that bound God to this nation. Since this is so it’s important that the
theme of the whole book which is “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy
heart and with all thy mind and with all thy soul” that this particular theme,
the great commandment, actually is an exposition of love in the
political sense, not in the sentimental sense in the 20th
century. Love used in the 14th
millennium before Christ, in the second millennium before Christ was used of a
suzerain toward his vassal king and of the vassal king toward the
suzerain. It was a political term.
For example, we have letters, the Tel-Amarna letters of kings in the
Now we said man, according to the Bible according to the Bible also has
a set of characteristics that enables him to have communication with this
God. In place of sovereignty which he
does not have as a creature he has something called volition which can go
positive or negative toward God; in place of righteousness and justice he has
conscience; in place of love he has what we would call personal affections or
an interest in attaining happiness in personal relationships. Then in place of God’s omniscience, he has
what we call rationality and memory.
That depicts what is meant by the Hebrew word “heart.” The Hebrew word “heart” does not indicate
only emotion; it includes rational thinking.
So here’s the heart in the Hebrew.
Now when the Bible says thou shalt love thy God with all thy heart, it
means first you have positive volition toward God, you want to know Him. You
are interested in His things, you are interested in learning more about
Him. You are interested in a personal
relationship with Him. There’s
volition.
When it says love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, it also speaks of
conscience, which means on your conscience you have the need for
standards. So therefore if you love the
Lord thy God with all thy heart, and by “heart” we include conscience, it means
you fill up your conscience with the standard from the Word of God. See, consciences can have all sorts of
standards; just because you violate your conscience doesn’t necessarily mean
you’ve even sinned according to the Bible because conscience can be loaded up
by the time any person is 30 years old he has learned to short out his
conscience, that is, anybody that has a little intelligence. And you are able to talk your way through
certain things and rationalize, etc. and fill your conscience up with all sorts
of standards. Therefore the problem that
we have as believers is to purge our consciences and restore it to God’s
standards.
Then the third thing involved with loving the Lord thy God with all thy
heart is the need for a personal relationship with God. And this is the difference, of course,
between Bible Christianity and all other forms of religion in that all other
forms of religion are basically moral codes, thou shalt do this, thou shalt not
do this, you will do this, will do this, on Tuesday you will do that, next
month you will do this, the month after that you won’t do this. Therefore it becomes a set of codes. That is not so in the Bible. The Bible gives us more than that, it gives
us a personal relationship with God, a real thing that begins now, not in
eternity. And this is what, of course,
is so exciting about historic Christianity.
Then the fourth thing is rationality and memory, thou shalt love the
Lord thy God with all thy mind, and this means that you begin to think God’s
thoughts after Him; you begin to look at life from the divine viewpoint instead
of the human viewpoint, you begin to look at the catastrophes of life not from
the standpoint of chaos but from the standpoint of a well ordered plan, Rom.
8:28. So this is what it means to love
the Lord thy God with all thy heart.
The book of Deuteronomy covers this material from chapters 5 through
chapter 11. And this whole section is
basically devoted to mental attitude. The Bible is very insistent that we love
starting with the inside, the mental attitude and the external works, well,
they’ll come. But that’s not where the
Bible puts the emphasis. The Bible puts
the emphasis on the inner heart, on the inner mental attitude. This is why religion is always antithetical
to the Bible because religion always puts the emphasis on the outside.
Now in chapters 12-26 we do have the outside and this is spelled out in
loving the Lord thy God with all thy soul.
Soul in the Hebrew looks like this, nephesh,
and that is the Hebrew word for soul, and we would loosely translate it today
in the English as “life.” So we say that
our life includes the details of life such as our social life, our relationship
with out family, relationship with friends, relationship with government and
society around us, we have our job, we have possessions, we have health, we
have sex, we have all the details of life.
Now these include details of life but that’s not where life really
is. Life is really on the inside and
that’s why the first chapter, chapters 5-11 talk about what’s inside. Now chapters 12-26 start looking at the
outside and they begin to instruct the nation about certain external practices
which are wise and they are the divine viewpoint of these details of life.
We have gone through certain sections of this. We are now in the section that has to do with
righteousness. Chapters 12-26 actually
deal, first with the unity of the nation.
And this teaches a vital lesson about history, namely that no nation can
be unified unless it has a spiritual unity.
And the Bible says therefore that
The second phase of Deuteronomy deals with righteousness and it spells
out righteousness for the nation. It
talks about righteousness in law; it talks about righteousness in certain
policies; it talks about righteousness in government offices, etc. So here you have righteousness, and then we
going to move into freedom and we are going to define civil rights and you are
going to see what the true freedoms that the Word of God gives.
Right now we are working with righteousness, national righteousness and
we dealt first with officers, the various officials and we found out a strange
thing about the government of
Remember there are two things that bother human beings when they come to
a decision. First of all there are
revenge tactics, that’s one extreme.
This is when people are always out to get somebody, malign somebody, and
if you are involved in any judicial thing, if you’re involved in personal
relationship you’ll always have the people out to get you, the people that just
can’t put their old sin natures down one minute, they are always out to get you
in some way, shape or form. So these are
the people with the big fat revenge tactics.
We also have the other problem in human decision and that is maudlin
sentimentalism or emotion. Here is where
we have people that are sloppy in principle, people who feel sorry for so and
so, and they make their decisions on the basis of their emotions, on the basis
of their feelings, not on the basis of principle and here’s where we get in
trouble. By the way, here’s where most
Christians get in trouble because they go through the Christian life, divine
guidance, by maudlin sentimentalism, divine guidance by how I feel. I wake up in the morning and feel like a
louse so therefore God doesn’t want me to do something; I wake up in the
morning and I feel tremendous, therefore God wants me to do all sorts of
things. And it may not be God wants you
to do anything. But you have to decide
what you’re going to run your life on, on the basis of principle or on the
basis of emotion.
We found in the last part of chapter 19 that this court system, one of
the features of this court system was that they were to base it on the Word of
God. This goes back to Deut. 18 where we found that the Word of God was the
criteria of guidance. The book of
Deuteronomy sets up the prophetic order for Israel and therefore since the Word
of God must be given to the nation through prophets, the problem that the
nation had was a natural one and it’s found in 18:9, “When you are come into
the land which the LORD thy God gives you, then you will not learn to do after
the abominations of those nations. [10] There shall not be found among you
anyone who makes his son or his daughter to pass through fire or who uses
divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch,” or any of
these things. Here we have a list of
“thou shalt nots.” The reason for this
is that God was going to provide the nation guidance. The guidance would be verbal prophecy from
Himself mediated to the nation through prophets.
Now, he therefore wanted, and this is a lesson we as believers have to
remind ourselves again because we’re always prone to this, putting something
else in place of the Word of God for guidance in our lives. This nation was prone to it so therefore we
found in verse 10 that He didn’t want (1) anyone that makes their son or
daughter to pass through fire, this was something in the ancient near east for
discerning certain things. For example,
if you wanted to find out whether you had God’s blessing, you’d take some poor
child, set up a fire and make him run through it, and if the kid got burned to
death that indicated one thing, and if he got out alive it indicated something
else. And that is actually the cruel
means by which many of the ancients discerned the issues that they needed to
have discerned.
Then we found the second word used there was “he that uses divination”
and divination is actually a word that would correspond in our time to one who
would divine by chance, such as polishing coins etc. It actually comes from a Hebrew word which
means to take a quiver of arrows, take the heads off the arrows, paint the
arrow, shake them up and throw them down on the ground; each arrow would mean
something. If you wanted to go right or
left you’d have two arrows and you’d throw these things down and the first
arrow to hit the ground, if it was the right one you’d turn right. We gave examples of this. That would correspond to people that toss
coins over their shoulder, divination by chance.
Then we have one who would be an “observer of the times” and the Hebrew
word “observer of the times” simply means one who divines by going into a
trance; this would correspond in our day to the pseudo tongue movement, to the
crystal ball gazers, etc. people who claim to discern and in fact do discern,
as we showed, but God said I don’t want you as believers to mess with it. I have given you an absolutely superior
perfect system of guidance in the Word of God and you should not go to these
people, etc. the enchanters and the witches and various other categories.
The lesson to learn is that the Word of God is supreme. So tonight when we come to chapter 20 and
begin to deal with the policy of war, we once again, not to our surprise, find
that the Word of God is the absolute criteria, for in chapter 20 we have the
introduction to the policy of war. We’ll
be spending tonight and next week on this topic of war. Chapter 20 deals with a particular kind of
war called holy war. That is not any
kind of war that we fight today. The world has never seen a holy war; the last
holy war that was conducted was probably done I the last part of the kings or
about 1000 BC. Today the Arabs have
something called Jihad, and if you’ve been reading the papers you’ll see that
word come up. The Egyptians are
beginning to use it, they want to get come some of their land back from Israel
and the Islamic priests are shouting Jihad, Jihad, Jihad, we want Jihad which
means that we want the Islamic holy war.
The Islamic holy war means we conquer for Allah and we will kill
everybody else, etc.
There is such a thing a bona fide
holy war and in this chapter you have it gone through in detail so if you may
be troubled why the Bible has war, etc. we hope to answer those questions as we
go through the text. Verse 1, “When you
go out to battle against thine enemies, and see horses, and chariots, and a
people more than thou, be not afraid of them; for the LORD thy God is with
thee, who brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.” There are a lot of things in this verse but
we want to notice two things. First,
“when you go out to battle,” this means that holy war was conducted
selectively; it was not a constant feature of the nation and the best we can
tell, if you look at a map of Israel, you have the Gulf of Aqaba, the Dead Sea,
the Sea of Galilee, and this land, the land known then as the land of Canaan;
inside those boundaries they were to annihilate everything. We’ll see that in this chapter. Outside of those boundaries they were to
simply come up to a city and say to the city, will you submit to our God
Jehovah; if you do not, we’ll conquer you, if you do you can join our kingdom
and in that way they were to march northeastward to the Tigris-Euphrates Valley
out here where the line of demarcation was set up in Genesis 15. So this was a massive piece of real estate
that the Israelites are supposed to conquer.
So “when you go out to battle” means basically when you go out to any
one of these engagements, these principles are to hold. When you “see horses, and chariots, and a
people more than thou,” Israel would be outnumbered in these wars, she would
have the problem that she would be facing what to her would be super
weapons. “Horses and chariots” were the
ultimate weapon in the ancient world.
These would be weapon systems for which there was no known defense. And therefore God said something: when that
happens to you and you go out and you see these enemies and they are more than
you and they have weapon systems that are better than yours, I want you,
Israel, to remember something. I want
you to remember that I am the Lord who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.
Turn to Exodus 15 and you will see the song of victory, the triumph song
that was sung by the Jews when the attained victory over Pharaoh as a result of
divine grace. Remember the situation;
it’s going to come up again and again throughout chapter 20. They were being pushed to the wall. Here’s the Nile Delta, and it comes down like
this, and somewhere along here which we’ve never been able to pinpoint,
somewhere along this Nile and out here the Red Sea and whether the Red Sea
looked exactly like it does now we don’t know, but somewhere along one of these
barriers Pharaoh’s chariot forces came in.
The Jews had their backs to the water; they couldn’t go any way because
Pharaoh had them surrounded plus the terrain.
So therefore from the human point of view it was utterly hopeless. There was no human solution to the
problem. Pharaoh’s chariot forces were
the invincible military machine of his era and there was no known defense against
it. You know what God did, God blocked
off Pharaoh, he caused a wind blow, pull a channel across the Red Sea and they
exited. Therefore in Exodus 15 this is
their hymn. This is a doctrinal
hymn. This is what the words were like
and I want you to see that their hymns taught doctrine, so they didn’t have
someone teaching the Word of God and then get up and sing some Mickey Mouse
sentimental hymn about joy, joy, joy and don’t know why and all the rest of
it. That just dissipates everything you
try to build when you teach the Word of God.
Exodus 15:2, “The Lord is my strength and my song, and he is become my
salvation; he is my God, I will prepare Him an habitation; my father’s God, and
I will exalt him. [3] The LORD is a man
of war; the LORD is His name. [4] Pharaoh’s chariots and his hose has he cast
into the sea; his chosen captains also are drowned in the Red Sea.” Now if you read that at first glance it
sounds like it’s revenge tactics; it sounds like they’re gloating over the
suffering and misery that God caused Pharaoh. That is not true. What they are
gloating over is that God was a God of war and He did it; they knew they
couldn’t do it and what the praise is, it isn’t about the suffering, the praise
is thank God that He did something, He actually came in history to my aid and
accomplished this task.
So this is why, going back to Deut. 20, he brings up that phrase in the
last part of verse 1, “for the LORD thy God is with thee, who brought thee up
out of the land of Egypt.” That verse is
deliberately calculated to recall to their minds God’s grace, how God solved
their problem. God fought their battle
for them when they were totally helpless.
Verse 2, “And it shall be, when ye are come near unto the battle, that
the priest shall approach and speak unto the people.” Now the priests as we have seen throughout the
book of Deuteronomy is a representative of God.
When the priest walks, wherever he goes, whether he’s in the court
system, whether he goes into the state department of their time, whatever it is
he represents God Himself.
In verse 3, “And ye shall say unto them, Hear, O Israel, ye approach
this day unto battle against your enemies,” now your enemies, of course, would
be God’s enemies because they’re identical in the Old Testament. “…let not your hearts faint, fear not, and do
not tremble, neither be ye terrified because of them.” You can get a lot out of the Word of God if
you just slow down and pick out a few words and begin to look at them
carefully. This is why I say it’s fine
to read your Bibles but my general rule is don’t read more than you can
understand in the time that you’ve got available. If you only have minutes, just read five
minutes worth of material that you can understand and think about. Let’s look at some of these words. “Let nor your heart faint,” and this
particular Hebrew verb for fain, rakak,
means a lack of determination. It’s
usually used of a person who isn’t convinced about the righteousness of the
cause and this lack of conviction causes him to be kind of weak in his mental
attitude. So we have the first word
which would be rakak and rakak would mean lack of determination;
this means that they have not thought through the issues and they do not have,
for example, like a lot of people in this country, strong convictions on why we
should be in Vietnam doing what we’re doing.
This is the problem, we do not have conviction, we do not have
determination, and rakak is the verb
to indicate this. They faint from lack
of conviction.
The next word, “fear not,” this is the same word in the commandment,
“thou shalt fear the Lord” etc. and when used of an enemy it means that you
over-estimate him. It means that you
look up to this thing and you have undue respect for him; you go too far the
other way, you over estimate his strength and you’re afraid of him because your
intelligence sources have come back and said you over-estimated his strength or
something and this word is yare’ and it means simply to over-estimate the enemies strength. This is what we can do. Each one of these
applies to your mental attitude as a believer because we are doing the same
thing; every time we fail to trust the promises of God it’s either lack of
determination, we don’t understand what the issue is or we over-estimate the
enemy, we say I don’t have any resources to fight this catastrophe that’s come into
my life, this thing just dropped in all of a sudden and I’ve got no resources
on which to lean and yet God says in 1 Cor. 10:13, there has been no testing
taken your or has come into your life except that which is common to all men,
and God will not allow you to be tested beyond your ability, but will with the
testing make a way of escape that ye may be able to bear it. And that’s one of the greatest promises in
the Word of God, that no suffering can come into the life of the believer for
which God has not provided in advance His promises and His grace sufficient to
meet the situation. So therefore this is
a sinful mental attitude, it is failure to see God’s gracious provision to meet
the catastrophes of life.
The third word, “do not tremble” is the word chaphaz, a German “c” and chaphaz
would be a word which means to be rushed prematurely, it means the fact that
you’re not ready to do something yet the situation is you feel like somebody is
behind you, just kind of forcing you into it.
This is a person who hasn’t thought through things and he just feels
pressure to do something and he doesn’t feel like he’s ready to do it. I often wonder how many people at the altar
have chaphaz.
The fourth term is “terrified” and the word “terrified” means to shake,
it’s a Hebrew verb to shake and this means a physical manifestation of your
fear.
So these four things the priest briefs the army on, he says look, these
things are all signs of a lousy mental attitude and we don’t want our soldiers
to have this kind of attitude, so therefore we are going to adopt a little
system, and this is one of the most clever systems ever devised for selecting
soldiers for an army. They filtered out
all the crybabies and all the weak-kneed people, and all these guys. CBS or some news media will go over to
Vietnam and pick some guy that’s feeling sorry for himself, hasn’t got mail in
the last two weeks, etc. and he’s down on Uncle Sam and CBS comes back and
tells you a big hairy report about lack of morale in the troops, etc. They always pick on some weak person like
this. This is going to be stopped in the
armies of Israel by verse 3, it says I don’t want any of this lack of
conviction in my army, the LORD your God, He is it that goes with you and He’s
going to fight for you against your enemies.
If you want to see where this is repeated, two places in the Word of
God. And it’s one of the greatest
promises you can claim as a believer. If
you’re confident that you are operating in the will of God, you have available
in the Bible, besides this text, two other great promises. One is found in Exodus 14:13. This is a wonderful promise because it tells
you something very interesting about the Christian life; the principle holds
even though it’s been almost three millennia since this promise actually
occurred in history. “And Moses said
unto the people, Fear not,” and notice what he tells them, what does he tell
them, press the panic button, go see your psychiatrist, go get three bottles of
aspirin, and some Alka Seltzer in case it hits you in the stomach. Don’t do that, he says “stand sill, and see
the salvation of the LORD,” Isn’t that a wonderful promise, “Fear not” and
“stand still,” don’t do anything because you can’t do anything.
This is a promise to apply in those crisis times when you can’t do
anything physically and usually when you try to do something you goof it up
anyway, so what this says, just relax, just sit and relax and let the Lord take
care of it. “Fear not, stand still, and
see the salvation of the LORD which He will show to you this day,” now that is
a tremendous promise and that promise was given in history when a group of
believers faced impossible situations.
From the human level, from the human perspective there was nothing those
people could do and at that point the Word of God comes in with some very rare
advice you never hear in the 10th century. He doesn’t say fear not and stand and
self-hypnotize yourself into thinking the situation is good, the situation is
good, etc. That’s self-hypnosis but
that’s now the Bible. The Bible says you
look at the situation, you say it’s bad, but then you turn your eyes from the
situation onto the Lord’s grace and you say “fear not, stand still, and see the
salvation of the LORD which He is will show you today. Verse 14, “The LORD shall fight for you, and
ye shall hold your peace.” That is a
tremendous promise.
The second time this promise is repeated in the Bible, 1 Sam. 17:47,
this is a promise claimed by one of the most famous teenagers in the Word of God,
David. And he’s famous for this reason,
he had an interesting background as a teenager.
David was kind of the black sheep of the family, nobody like him, he was
junior. And all of his big brothers kind
of ha-ha, look at little boy David, and so on. They laughed at him and David was just junior
all the way in his family. Everybody
else had a big deal, when there was a party all his older brothers were there
except poor little junior, he was in the back room. David was always in the back room, but David
learned something. He learned that while
he was in the backroom he wasn’t going to pity himself and go into operation
self-pity. He wasn’t going to have any
self-pity in his life, he wasn’t going to cry about it, etc. He was going to make time while he was there
so while he was in the back room he began to cultivate a habit of trusting the
Lord, when he was out in the fields with the flocks he began to cultivate the
habit of caring for sheep; he began to trust the Lord to supply his needs. He began to face the enemies, at that time in
Palestine they had lions, they had bears, they had all sorts of animals that
have since become extinct. By the way,
one of the evidences that this book was not written late, as the liberals say
it is.
So David had all these experiences in his life and every time those
experiences would come in, nobody saw him, this wasn’t a glamour boy up in
front of everybody, in the spotlight every time he claimed a promise he could
get up and say oh what a glorious day it is and give a big testimony. He had none of that, it was all behind the
scenes where nobody saw it except him and the Lord. And out of that experience as a teenager he
got stronger in faith and stronger and then the crisis day came, depicted in 1
Sam. 17:47, here it is where David comes up to Goliath. By the way, Goliath is only one of six, do
you think Goliath was the only giant in the Bible. He had brothers, so this
wasn’t the only big boy around, this was just one of them. He was out there with the Philistines, we
don’t know, these apparently were genetic freaks that came from Hebron down and
intermarried with the Philistine population.
So that he had a combination of Greek and Amorite genes, and what other
things he had I don’t know, but he was a genetic freak and he was characterized
by a tremendous height. Goliath was
literally a giant. He marched out there
and says show me; here’s the bully boy at work.
So David says fine, I’ll show you, and all the rest of his brothers, the
loud mouths that used to laugh at David junior, all them were kind of shaking
in their boots at this time and they were looking on. And here comes little pip-squeak brother out
and he says what’s the matter with you ox’s, can’t you go out there and kill
this guy, I thought you were my big brothers.
David says never mind, I have a God who can do it and in verse 47 this
is what he says. “And all this assembly
shall know that the LORD saves not with sword and spear;” he tells his brother
look, just drop your spears, just forget it, God isn’t going to use your
spears, so he says “God saves not with sword and spear,” with human means, “for
the battle is the LORD’s and He will give you into our hands.” And he has the gall, this little pip-squeak,
to walk up to Goliath and tell it to him.
Of course Goliath didn’t like it very well but Goliath didn’t have too
long to think it over because Goliath was executed shortly after this. So here’s a verse that depicts the tremendous
mental attitude of a believer, who looks upon his life, because he’s operating
in the will of God he relaxes, and he says the battle is the Lord’s and I’m
going to let him take care of it. So he
places it in the Lord’s hands. And don’t
think this slingshot thing is just something added. It’s not something added, he was literally
trusting the Lord. He only had one shot
and that was it and if that missed, giant steps are a lot bigger than his. So he was trusting the Lord even though he used
this small weapon.
Back to Deut. 20 and you can begin to understand the doctrine of holy
war and in Deut. 20:4 it says “For the LORD your God is He that goes with you,
to fight for you against your enemies, to save you.” It was a command to this kind of faith. I wouldn’t be surprised if David read Deut.
20 in his life and this is where he got the promise from.
Now here’s a little system that the army of Israel had to filter out the
weak-kneed people, to get rid of all the crybabies and this is how they did
it. Verse 5, this is the first thing
they did. “And the officers shall speak
unto the people, saying, What man is there who has built a new house, and has
not dedicated it? Let him to and return unto his house, lest he die in the
battle, and another man dedicate it.”
We’re going to summarize these principles but just first look at what’s
happening and then when we finish looking at what’s happening we’ll summarize
why it’s happening. Verse 5, the word
“has built a new house and has not dedicated it,” it is not the word “dedicate,”
it doesn’t mean you kind of break a bottle of champagne over the front door or
something like that. That’s not what it’s talking about. “Dedicate” here is a Hebrew word which means
accustomize, it means that you go and live in the house. Josephus tells us that it took a year to do
this; it took a year to do this. So what
a thing if you built a new house, here’s your new house, here’s this guy he
build his new house, he was to accustomize it by spending one year residence in
that house, and after he had lived in the house one year, that house was
dedicated. Why is this? Because this is
the kingdom, the kingdom is present in history at this point and what God is
saying, if you haven’t enjoyed the fruits of this kingdom I don’t want you
fighting for it. I want you never to go
out and say I fought for this thing but I never enjoyed the blessings. So God is saying I want you to enjoy the
blessings first and then you go fight for it. Therefore the blessing is
material prosperity, he built this house, God says I want you to enjoy it, so
you take a year off and you sit in that house and you live there and you enjoy
it.
Verse 6, “And what man is he who has planted a vineyard, and has not yet
eaten of it? Let him also go and return unto his house, lest he die in the
battle, and another man eat of it.” This
is a phenomenal thing here. To get the
background on this turn back to Lev. 19:23.
You might say God is being very fair here. He’s never asking someone to fight for
something that they haven’t enjoyed. So
He says fine, if you haven’t enjoyed it, I want you to enjoy it, I want you to
appreciate My blessing.
Lev. 19:23, “And when ye shall come into the land,” now watch the
sequence, this tells you how long a time period this is, “and when ye shall
come into the land and shall have planted all manner of trees for food, then ye
shall count the fruit thereof as uncircumcised;” it means that this plant that
is in the land is considered not worthy of the community yet, “three years,” so
that starts it off, this was one year, now watch this, you’ve got three years
after you’ve planted your pear tree or something, and for three years you never
can eat the fruit, this is after it’s fruiting, after the thing is bearing
fruit, still you wait for three years, “it shall be as uncircumcised unto you;
it shall not be eaten.” Verse 24, “But
in the fourth year all the fruit thereof shall be holy with which to praise the
LORD.” This means you went out and
picked all the pears off the tree in the fourth year and took them to the
Temple and gave them to the Lord. Verse
25, “And in the fifth year shall ye eat of the fruit thereof,” now going back
to Deuteronomy what’s that saying.
That’s saying the guy is to wait five years. If you’ve planted an orchard you are to wait
five years until such time that you have actually eaten and enjoyed the fruit
of that orchard, then I ask you to fight for Me. Now people say the God of the Old Testament
is a boogey man or something; this God is full of love and grace, look at this. He doesn’t even ask these people to fight for
anything until they have first enjoyed His blessings.
Verse 7, “And what man is there who hath betrothed a wife, and hath not
taken her? Let him to and return unto his house, lest he die I the battle, and
another man take her.” The word “betroth” here is a very well debated term,
it’s exactly what it means, literally it means pay the price. There were some money transactions in
marriages in the ancient… of course there still is except it usually doesn’t go
from partner to partner. In fact, my
advice to a lot of couples would simply be to take the money and just go out
and get married somewhere and save it because you can use it after you’re
married and don’t waste it on a big fat wedding. A wedding ceremony doesn’t cement a marriage,
it’s the mental attitude of the people that cement the marriage. So I wouldn’t waste a lot of money, just go
get married some place and save your money, use it later. So the word “betroth” here is pay money, and
it means… the best way to translate it is a sort of engagement plus getting
your marriage license, would correspond in our society to it. You’ve got your blood test, your marriage
license, etc. everything is all legally clarified but the wedding has not yet
taken place. That’s what mentioned here.
This is, I think, what’s going on in the New Testament with Mary. You have a bunch of ignorant liberals who say
Jesus was literally born of Mary and some German soldier or something like
that, some way to desecrate Jesus’ deity and Mary’s virginity. But Mary was not actually married to Joseph,
she was engaged to him and she had come to this step, she was engaged, she had
her marriage license and she had her blood test if you want to bring it into
the 20th century, but she was not yet married to him. This is why we adhere to the doctrine of the
virgin birth of Jesus Christ. “And what
man is there who has betrothed a wife, and has not taken her? Let him go and
return unto his house, lest he die in the battle,” in other words, get married,
enjoy the woman for a little while and then go off. This was part of the standard procedure in
the Old Testament.
Now verse 8 and 9 summarizing this section, “And the officers shall
speak further unto the people, and they shall say, What man is there who is
fearful and fainthearted?” The word “fearful” is simply the word which means
fear because of lack of determination; faint-hearted is the word once again to
over-estimate the enemy. So we have
these two words repeated again and there’s an interesting word, “Let him go and
return unto his house, lest his brethren’s heart faint as well as his
heart.” The word “faint” this time is
the Hebrew word which means to melt.
Have you ever had that feeling some times, all of a sudden you get faced
with something that’s really scary and it literally feels like you’re melting
inside? That’s what this Hebrew is, it expresses this emotion of fear where you
just, all of a sudden something hits you like that, so you have this melting
and it’s the Hebrew verb which means to fear.
Of course, the brethren, “his brethren’s heart” means that fear is
contagious and it is better, if you’re going to have a team have seven men that
won’t panic, that have seven plus one and this one guy panics.
I have a goo illustration of that when I was rowing in college, we have
the crew, we used to have eight, and we were going down the Charles River in
Boston one time, and we were all rowing, and you have to row exactly in
sequence and if you don’t, everybody is sliding up and down this hull and if
you don’t slide it’s too bad because the guy in front of you will be in your
lap and if you go back too far you’re going to get the end of his oar right in
the small of your back. So you’d better
move and make sure you’re moving in sympathy with the rest of the crew. If you’re going to have a winning race you
have to have your oar pulled out of the water exactly, there can’t be a second
delay, is one man leaves it in just a split second, then he starts building up
friction and friction slows the boat down and you can’t afford to dissipate any
energy by friction. In this kind of a
situation if one man panics, that’s the end.
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It’s the same principle in military service and here the Bible
recognizes this in verse 8, if you are going to have someone that panics on the
team, get them off the team. It’s better
to have an under-manned team with people who won’t panic than a fat staff with
someone on there who’s going to cause trouble.
Verse 9, “And it shall be, when the officers have finished speaking unto
the people, that they shall make captains of the armies to lead the
people? That was the conclusion of their
briefing and next time we’ll deal with the details of how they went into war
and some of the policies they followed under military operations.