Lesson 42
The Doctrine of War III – Conclusion
Deuteronomy 20, we are in the section of Deuteronomy that has to do with
the righteousness of the policies of
“The officers shall speak unto the people, saying, what man is there who
hath built a new house, and has not dedicated it,” or as we said when we went
through this before, accustomed it, meaning that he had lived in it for one
year. “Let him go and return to his
house, lest he die in the battle, and another man dedicate it.” In other words,
the person who would come in the army has had the opportunity and privilege of
living in the
Verse 6, “And what man is he who hath planted a vineyard, and hath not
yet eaten of it?” and we said this is a five year process to fulfill verse
6. Once again showing that the men had
the right to eat of the fruit of the land first and then they were to fight for
it. Verse 7, “What man is there who hath
betrothed a wife, and hath not taken her? Let him go and return unto his
house,” and so on, “that another man may take her.” Here again to enjoy the divine institution of
marriage.
Verse 8, “And the officers shall speak further unto the people, and they
shall say, What man is there who is fearful and fainthearted? Let him go and
return unto his house, lest his brethren’s heart faint as well as his
heart.” Here you have men who are
committed and who are to be in the Lord’s army at this time in history. So this is one of the elements that we have involved
always in holy war, in the Bible, it is always involving people with positive
volition. Now this is in strong contrast
to another principle that you find in the New Testament. Maybe you never caught the connection but
let’s to back to Luke 9:57. The Lord
Jesus Christ reverses the policy of Deut. 20 when you recruit for His army and
there’s a reason for this. “And it came
to pass that, as they went on the way, a certain man said unto him, Lord, I
will follow You wherever You go. [58] And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have
holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man has no where to lay
His head.” That verse gives you the
principle why the Lord Jesus Christ reversed the policy of Deuteronomy.
In this chapter the principle was no person is to fight in the Lord’s
army that had not first enjoyed the fruits of the
So therefore He says, verse 59, “And He said unto another, Follow
me. But he said, Lord, allow me first to
go and bury my father. [60] Jesus said unto him, Let the dead bury their dead;
but go thou and preach the
You see, when the Kingdom of God was removed from history, 586 BC there
was no other national entity on earth, never has been and never will be until
the second return of Christ, where you have a society which itself is
identified with the Kingdom of God. So
therefore since this is so what kingdom is left? It’s the kingdom of Satan and so therefore it
becomes a satanic issue with us as to whether we’re going to hold on to the
things of the kingdom of Satan, say Lord I have to take care of this, this,
this, this detail and all those details are wrapped up in a unit called the
kingdom of Satan. Christ says forget it,
if you’re going to be on My side just forget it. You are going to go all out for Me or forget
it, just don’t bother with it. So this
is why the policy is reversed in the New Testament.
However, there is one thing that he did not reverse. If you look at Luke 10 you’ll see where He
commissioned the seventy disciples.
Verse 5, “And into whatsoever house ye enter, first say, Peace be to
this house. [6] And if the son of peace be there, your peace shall rest upon
it; if not, it shall turn to you again. [7] And in the same house remain,
eating and drinking such things as they give; for the laborer is worthy of his
hire. Go not from house to house.” And by the way, verse 7, you hear every once
in a while some cult or some person say oh we don’t have paid ministers, we
follow the New Testament. Now if you
look at that verse closely you will see that paid “clergy” (quote, unquote) is
authorized in the New Testament. So we
follow the New Testament tradition also, we pay our preachers.
Verse 8, “And into whatever city ye enter, and they receive you, eat
such things as are set before you. [9] And heal the sick that are there, and
say unto them, The
Now go back to Deut. 20, this is the same policy that
Verse 12, “And if it will make no peace with you, but will make war
against thee, then you shalt besiege it.
Then in verses 16-18 you have the policy of utter annihilation upon
those people, outlined in verse 17, who as we have said last time were people
that went on negative volition. We have
“the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and
the Jebusites,” these were all civilizations in the ancient world that went on
negative volition toward God. As a result, as always happens, negative volition
always produces religion. Religion is
always what is produced when you have people going on negative volition. People who reject God always wind up on some
sort of system of works; I’m so good that I can commend myself to God on the
basis of my good works, I live by the golden rule, I give money to the church,
I do this, I do that and therefore God has to accept me. This is religion by works and it’s utterly
anti-Biblical. The Bible says that you
are saved by grace and your works do not count for salvation.
So, here we have religion produced by negative volition and this is one
of the problems that these people had in verse 17. In fact they developed the most intense forms
of religion that history has ever seen and God expresses His judgment against
religion by utterly destroying these people.
Now often you will hear it said that the God of the Old Testament was a
God that was an old meany, a sore-head, etc. and all He did was go around
annihilating people. God never
annihilated anyone except those outlined in verse 17. And this chapter, if you read it carefully,
shows you that it was not the policy of God to annihilate people, except those
people who had lived in the land and who therefore had lived out their negative
volition and therefore God said My grace is terminated at this point; I’ve let
you people go on, I’ve let you reject, reject, reject, reject, reject and
reject and I’ve had it, done, over with, and I’m going to remove you from
history. So here is the judgment of God.
Now people find this very difficult to reconcile with the God of love;
the reason is of course is that they do not understand righteousness.
Now verses 19-20 give another principle of the warfare. “When thou shalt besiege a city a long time,
in making war against it to take it, you shalt not destroy the trees thereof by
forcing an axe against them; for thou mayest eat of them, and thou shalt not
cut them down (for the tree of the field is man’s life) to employ them in the
siege.” The principle here is that warfare,
even holy war is not to permanently annihilate the human race. And therefore you don’t want to do something
that is going to endanger succeeding generations. And therefore in this situation you are to
conserve the resources that are needed to maintain and sustain life, human
life. And so one of the conservative
principles about the warfare policy outlined in Deut. 20 is that natural
resources are to be preserved as much as possible. In other words, you don’t go spreading all
sorts of things around destroying all the food because when you take over the
land you’re going to need those resources.
So it’s silly to do this. Even,
by the way, in the Tribulation, the Lord Himself at the Second Advent does not
destroy all living things.
So these then are some of the principles in Deut. 20 that outline holy
war in the Old Testament. If you would
like further study, I refer you to Deut. 7, there you have the emphasis on holy
war from the standpoint of the mental attitude.
In chapter 20 you have holy war from the standpoint of the details of
life, and the things that you are to do and not to do. Now let’s look at warfare in general.
We first want to develop the concept of war and its place in history and
the Bible’s position on warfare, because often times you hear it said that the
only valid Christian position is pacifism.
That’s, of course, false. But
there is a place for war in the Bible and I will give you some of the
principles involving warfare. Now this
is not holy war, remember the difference in concept here. Holy war is a technical term which refers to
the wars waged by
The first thing: What are the background issues of war? Why have war in the first place? Why does war exist in history? Why is it authorized by the Word of God under
certain conditions? First, the country
that is doing the war, this is the first principle, is executing judgment. Whose judgment? God’s judgment. To see this turn to Gen. 9, here’s where you
have the foundation of government in history, and in history when this
government institution was to be formed it was formed on one and one basis
alone and that is that it was to perform God’s judgments in history.
Gen. 9 occurs after the flood; after the flood there are certain things
that are going to happen. The first
thing that is going to happen is that you will no longer have a universal
judgment by God on mankind. God says I’m
not going to send the waters again, I am not going to execute a global judgment
and He gives a strange reason for it, Gen. 8:21, “And the LORD smelled a sweet
savor; and the LORD said in His heart, I will not again curse the ground any
more for man’s sake;” you stop there and say isn’t that a pleasant thought, and
then you continue and you say well how does this follow, “for the imagination
of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more
every thing living, as I have done.” So
you say how does that follow from the first half of the verse. It follows this way: God is saying that
mankind has an old sin nature; every man has a sin nature and you multiply this
by a million people and so you have one million sin natures existing on the
earth, and you only need two sin natures to have a problem. And you multiply that by a million and you
can see what happens. So God says
listen, if you’ve got a million sin natures sitting around on this globe, then
we’re going to have trouble and we’re going to have trouble in every
generation. And so therefore in order to
stop this kind of thing from going on I’ve got to execute global judgment, it
means every generation is going to have to suffer a global catastrophe.
Now obviously that would be kind of stupid to run history with God
judging every generation with global catastrophe. Therefore what God says, all right, I’m going
to hold off my global judgment but I’ve got to substitute something else in
place of My direct global judgment, and what God substitutes is the divine
institution of government. And here is
where arises; it does not arise as a product of man’s social organization in
the evolutionary process. It arises
because in a point in time in history God authorized man to execute God’s
judgment. Since God is not going to
execute universal judgment on every generation, something’s got to happen;
something’s got to check the old sin nature of man, so therefore what is going
to be the check or the breaks on this thing is the institution of government
whereby man has the job and the role of executing God’s judgment.
You’ll see this in Gen. 9:6, “Whoso sheds man’s blood, by man shall his
blood be shed;” and the key phrase in that verse is “by man” and the word for
“man” here does not mean individuals, this is not an authorization for revenge
tactics. This is an authorization for
man equals human race, and so here in Gen. 9 you’ve got the principle that now
the human race has been given the authority to execute judgment upon itself.
And so here in history is why you have the rise of government. Government in
the Bible does not mean social organization, you had that before the flood, you
had cities, you surely had councils in the cities, you certainly had a
differentiation of jobs, you certainly had different skills manifest, etc. and
you certainly had a type of social organization. That is not government. Government in the Bible means executing the
judgments of God during history when God isn’t doing it; man is doing it in place
of God. So therefore, “by man,” that
means that now the human race has been authorized to carry out God’s
judgment. So this is the function of
government and this is what government is from the Bible’s viewpoint.
Now where else do we pick this concept up? We find it in Romans 13 in
the New Testament. Turn there, just to
show you this is not something that went out with Jesus Christ. Verse 1, “Let every soul be subject unto the
higher powers. For there is no power but
of God; the powers that be are ordained of God. [2] Whosoever, therefore,
resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God; and they that resist shall
receive to themselves damnation [judgment].”
All right, now look at verse 1, “no power except of God, the powers that
exist,” who are the powers that exist?
The powers that exist are civil authorities. Now these powers that exist, the civil
authorities, exist by the design of God.
God has personally designed it.
Verse 2, “Whosoever, therefore, resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance
of God;” that is, whoever resists government, the concept of government, now
this is talking about anarchists, the principle here, the “ordinance of God”
equals divine institution number four, that is government. So what it is saying here in verse 2,
“Ordinance of God” is divine institution number four “and they that resist
shall receive to themselves damnation” or punishment.
What’s the punishment? Verse 3,
“For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou, then, not be afraid of the
power? Do that which is good, and thou
shalt have the praise of the same, [4] For his is the minister of God to thee
for good. But if thou so that which is
evil, be afraid; for he bears not the sword in vain,” showing once again that
government’s base is rooted in the authority they have to take human life. The sword…“the sword is not in vain.” What do
we make of this? Obviously Paul is not
an idealist; he knows there are going to be corrupt rulers in history. Give Paul credit for at least a few points of
IQ. And Paul knew the Roman authorities
like you and I will never know them. So
just because you’ve had a little history and you can say well now, Paul really didn’t
understand the Roman government, etc. I would suggest that Paul knew more of
Roman history than anyone in this congregation at the moment.
Now Paul was a realist but he said this is a basic operating principle
and that is that the rulers, the government institution itself has been given
by God and we respect God’s design and we don’t have to respect the people in
it. We may very violently disagree with
people that are in it, but nevertheless we respect government, not because who
sits on the top seat; we respect government because who designed it in the
first place, God did. So therefore any anti-government type thing is anarchy,
and particularly I’m thinking of course is anti-Biblical.
Now, this is the first principle behind war. Government has the right to take life in
judgment. They had the right to execute
judgment in history because no one else is going to do it if they don’t,
therefore war is a legitimate operation of government. This is what legitimizes the concept of war
because war is one part of government just performing its job as unto the
Lord. And good solid godly government
can engage in war with absolutely no problems of conscience, absolutely
none! So we have then war legitimatised
in the Bible, BUT, and there’s a but to it, and this always comes in as a
problem of the individual versus his country in a particular situation.
And so we come to the second principle, the principle of opposition to
war or opposition to policy you might say, specific policy. In other words, you as a Christian may be
convinced that war is a legitimate aim, legitimate duty but you may not be
convinced of the legitimacy of a specific war. What options do you have? I suggest that you have only one option, or
actually two options and these are the only two legitimate options I would say I
would have as a Christian who would oppose the policies of my country. For example, I could conceive of a situation
where out country would go into a situation of oh, say going in and knocking
off the government of
The second policy, this is the one that you find in the book of Acts and that is you say I’m not going to
do it but you submit to the punishment.
That this is what the apostles did, you find this again and again in the
book of Acts. The apostles said no, we
are not going to stop preaching the Word of God. The government authority said you will stop
preaching. Paul said we will not stop
preaching. Peter said we will not stop
preaching, we listen to the Word of God and not the word of men. So you have a specific case in the New
Testament where the apostles disagreed and were in opposition to specific
policies of the government. But what did
they do? Did they parade around
So we have this kind of situation, individuals can legitimately protest
specific policies of the government but if you’re going to stay around, you
just be prepared to take your knocks.
And that’s the Christian policy of civil disobedience. You can find details in the book of Acts if
you look carefully. I want to make that
clear, so that you have no confusion in your mind about the problems of civil
disobedience, they are outlined in the book of Acts in complete detail.
That was the first principle; war is a legitimate function of
government. The second principle was
that opposition to this specific policy is either leave the country, or say no,
give a Biblical reason and then take your knocks. Now the third principle of war, and that is
that a soldier, this goes along with principle number one but it’s a little
more specific, for those of you who are in the service right now or if you will
be in the service, a soldier, when he kills or when he executes a military
maneuver acts in this case as an agent of God.
When he is following out his country’s dictates he’s no more out of line
than a policeman is arresting a criminal.
A soldier is acting as an agent of God; he, if he participates in the
army obviously agrees with the policy of the war and so on, therefore he
believes this to be a legitimate extension of government power, a legitimate
punishment upon the enemy, etc.
Now I’ll tell you what’s running through some of your minds right now,
you say well isn’t the
Then the third thing is that a soldier acts as an agent of God. Now, this says something about the mental
attitude of a soldier in combat. This
says that when a soldier goes, and for example, is involved in a killing
situation where he has to kill a person on the other side, he is not killing
out of personal revenge that enemy soldier.
He is executing that soldier as a, for example, a person would in the
gas chamber. It’s not that the person
that dropped the pill in the gas chamber or pulled the switch in an electric
chair, he doesn’t have a personal grudge against the person that’s strapped in
the electric chair, he’s doing his job as unto the state. So therefore a soldier who kills is doing his
job as a Christian involved in carrying out a policy of government.
In connection with this I’d like to read you a short quotation from
Major Hutchins book, Beyond Combat. It’s a very good book for some of you who are
in the military and some of you would like clarification on this, this is
written by a Major, a graduate of Dallas Seminary, who went in and was one of
the top chaplains in Vietnam. And he
makes this comment about a soldier being an agent of God instead of carrying
out his personal vengeance. He says: “A
soldier engaging the enemy with hate and malice commits murder in his
heart. My observations convince me that
the soldier motivated by hate is not an effective fighting man. His judgments are fogged; there is only a
recklessness about him that places not only himself but all those with him in
jeopardy. The best fighting man is the
one motivated by a sense of duty and responsibility and subjection to his
government. The commandment, ‘thou shalt
not kill,’ should prevent a Christian soldier from murder but should also
motivate him to be willing to serve in the armed forces so as to help prevent
others from such sin.”
The point here is that a soldier can kill but he’d better make sure
that’s all he’s doing, that he’s killing as an agent of the government and in
his mind he is not killing that man because he personally hates the man. Some of you who have not followed the Word of
God in your personal life find this hard to believe it’s possible. But those of you who have claimed the
promises of God, who have sought out God’s will in specific areas of your life,
will find obviously no problem with this.
Now the fourth problem of warfare and that is found, as we have said in
Deut. 20, it’s found in several other passages and that is that you try to
avoid injuring those who are innocently involved. In other words, you try as much as possible
to avoid killing the innocent. This is
found in Deut. 20 and we’ll briefly refer to it. Verse 14-15, here is the soldier being a discriminating
killer. There are all sorts of problems
putting these principles and applications to specific situations. I will speak to that problem in a moment but
let’s get the general outline. Verse 13,
“And when the LORD thy God has delivered the city into your hands, you will
smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword, [14] But the women, and
the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, all the spoil
thereof, shall you take unto yourself, and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine
enemies, which the LORD thy God has given thee.”
As I said, the word “male” in verse 13 refers to any male over 20;
compare with Numbers 1 if you want the reasons for it from the Bible. So
therefore they are to kill every man who is 20 or above. Why?
Because every man who is 20 or above in this particular society had the
right to choose and he could choose to participate in that cities policy or not
to participate. Therefore if he was in
the city, he was participating in it and he shares responsibility for it and so
when the soldiers go in they kill him because he shares responsibility for the
policy of that city. Now, the women in
that society at that time, and the children of both sexes under 20, the word
“child” here means anybody under 20, which is generally a good description. So you have a woman or any person under 20 years
old of either sex, these people in this society did not have the responsibility
of choice, were not looked upon as participating in the decision, and therefore
in verse 14 God excused them. And in His
holy war He made a distinction between the innocent and those that participate.
That’s the principle; in practice in modern situations such as we have
in Vietnam it is very, very difficult to apply this situation. A soldier asked me about this situation in
Vietnam where you have a patrol go in and you don’t know the enemy from a hole
in the ground and there you are, you don’t know whether you’re killing
civilians or somebody else and he says in that kind of a situation what is a
Christian supposed to do. And in that
kind of a situation all you have to do is trust the sovereignty of God. And that is the thing that you have to rely
upon and you have to say I’m following out the policies of this situation, I’ll
have to trust the Lord that these policies were designed with some intelligent
people, usually they are, it’s usually the politicians that are always fouling
it up, but generally your military men who design infiltration policies are
very conservative and recognize this.
Actually your military people are much, much lest bloodthirsty than the
civilians. The civilians are always the ones that are blood thirsty.
A beautiful example of this if you doubt it is Adolf Hitler. In World War II Hitler’s general had a plan
for the conquest of Britain and had they been allowed to do it we’d still be
fighting World War II because Hitler’s generals were going to go into Britain
and they were going to fly over the channel and bomb out the RAF airfields and
had they done that you would have had no battle of Britain in 11941 of the RAF,
but Hitler said no, I want to terrorize the Englishmen, I want to make them
people squirm, and so I want to bring all my bombers in over London. So here’s the city of London and night and
day the German’s came in and dropped bomb after bomb on London. Now, stupid thing was that Hitler lost all
his bombers this way because he didn’t bomb the airfields. Now if they had listened to the military men
they would have won the war and they would have had a minimum of casualties on
both sides, as is always the case. If
you listen to your military strategists you will generally have less casualties
than civilians who are amateurs who are always sticking their fingers in the
mess. This is what happens, Hitler was
an amateur and he stuck his finger in and the result was a horrible number of
casualties on both sides, he lost his air force in the process and nothing was
accomplished.
This is why in Vietnam it’s tragic that we have the situation, oh, we
killed so many men, enemies today, we killed a thousand VC this week and only
300 Americans died, and we kind of like a box score here, how many people
died. Now no military man in his right
man fights a war on the basis of that.
Military men fight wars on the basis of have we won or not. The object of how many people you kill isn’t
usually, I’ve never seen it in any way I’ve studied, isn’t a basic military
objective, not at all. So don’t buy this
line that you’re fed that anybody that wears a uniform is a boogie man. You can just forget that, that’s a completely
false image.
Now we have another principle, not only does the Bible say protect the
innocent in war, it has this last principle of Deut. 20 and that is to protect
natural resources as much as possible.
That was found in Deut. 20:19-20.
This leads us to a concluding point on the Biblical doctrine of war that
has to involve nuclear war. Is nuclear
war justifiable? This is the real issue
on nuclear war. Should a government,
given a clear mandate to use its sword against evil, use that sword when it
might destroy the entire human race?
That’s the real issue. In other
words, if man has got to the point where the sword that a government is holding
in its hand is such a powerful sword that with one sweep of this sword the
human race will be annihilated. Does the
government then have the right to use this sword and we claim yes it does,
because the primary reason for government is to execute judgment upon
evil. If there is a just cause for war,
then even nuclear war is justified.
General Harrison, a Christian soldier who has written much on this
problem, says this, and I couldn’t put it in better words. (Quote) “Where the sword is the Lord’s and
the vengeance is His, where He seeks that vengeance by the hand of those to
whom He has delegated His authority, then even that sword is justifiable, whose
use leaves God’s standing alone on the scene of the holocaust.” Now that’s serious business and this is not
advocating a flippancy about war. This
is simply building the solid moral principles given in the Word of God, that
the government has a mandate to execute judgment and if I have to say if a
bandit comes in here and I have to, for example, this would be equivalent, you
have one nation and one nation here and this is an aggressive nation, going
around bumping everybody off and the only way you can stop this thing is drop
the bomb, drop it, and you let God take the responsibility. You don’t share the responsibility, God has
told you when evil arises you judge it.
And if you blow up the world in following out God’s will then you blow
up the world, it’s His problem, not yours.
This sounds like it’s a loss of conscience; it is not. If God tells you to do something and you have
all sorts of side effects resulting from your obedience to the will of God that
is His problem, not yours. Reference:
Matt. 10. The principle that if God
tells you to do something you do it and everything starts falling apart the
problem is on the Lord’s shoulders, not yours.
Matt. 10, this is in a context in which Jesus Christ is briefing His
disciples about the problems of persecution and in verse 28 he says, “And fear
not them who kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear
him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. [29] Are not two
sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of
them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. [30] But the very hairs
on your head are all numbered.” Now
isn’t’ that interesting? How many hairs
do you get on your head every twenty-four hours? Some of you have a shortage, but other people…
so the very hairs of you head are all numbered.
Now what this means is that every day God must have a new number because
every day you’re getting new hairs on your head. So this number changes from day to day and
God says His omniscience is so fantastic He keeps a record of every hair on
your head. Verse 31, “Fear ye not,
therefore; ye are of more value than many sparrows. [32] Whosoever, therefore,
shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before My Father, who is
in heaven. [33] But whosoever shall deny Me before men, him will I also deny
before My Father, who is in heaven.”
Now verse 34 is the principle, as you go forth Christians and you run
across adverse situations and as a result of standing for the Word of God and standing for Jesus Christ, you encounter
problems even in your own family, and you are the source of trouble and
disruption, that is the Lord’s problem, think nothing of it. Verse 34, “Think not that I am come to send
peace on earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword. [35] For I am come to
set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother,
and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. [36] And a man’s foes shall
be they of his own household. [37] He that loveth father or mother more than
Me, is not worthy of Me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than Me, is
not worthy of Me. [38] And he that takes not his cross and followeth after Me,
is not worthy of Me,” etc. Now this
means that if in this situation, you have this Jewish home and you have the man
over here who is the head of the house, and you have this person accept Jesus
Christ as Savior, it would cause a tremendous amount of friction. Those of you who were here last week heard it
from one who actually lived in this situation.
So this causes a family disruption and people are going to say couldn’t
you keep your big mouth shut, look at what you’ve done, you’ve caused
disturbance in this family, you’ve blown the lid off this situation, everybody
is upset because of you and your religion.
And people love to give you the guilt feeling, they love to pawn this
off on you, it’s all your fault and your religion. Of course, I could care less if someone says
that to me, fine, you can think what you want to.
The Lord says look, if this happens to you don’t let it bother you, you
just go right on doing the Lord’s will and if people don’t like it they can
lump it, and that’s the believer’s attitude.
And if it’s going to cause family upheaval then let it cause family
upheaval, you just do the Lord’s will.
Now this is not a mandate to be careless and not a mandate to be sloppy
and not a mandate to be disobedient but it is a mandate to place the blame
where it belongs, it’s on the Lord’s shoulders, not yours if this situation
arises, that’s the principle.
The principle simply is that you follow the will of God no matter where
it leads you and if it leads you into all sorts of problems you just keep on
following the will of God, period, and don’t let anyone ever talk you out of
it. That’s something I’ve found that
some believers don’t understand, they are so afraid of rocking the boat that
they’re not going to say anything because they might upset somebody. Well so what if you upset somebody; who you
care who you upset, the Lord or some other person? You should have a little more insight as to
what upsets the Lord. It upsets the Lord
more for you to sit around and be afraid to open your mouth in some situation
because you’re afraid you might disturb someone. The loud-mouth unbeliever isn’t afraid of
disturbing someone; it’s always the Christians that are afraid of disturbing
someone. Go ahead and disturb someone,
if they are disturbed by the Word of God they need to be disturbed, that’s the
best thing for them. When you think of
the great men of the past, John Knox who walked up to the Queen of Scotland,
right in the middle of a royal court and said you are a whore, and said this
right in front of the court and they didn’t like that, that was impolite.
Of course you know what John Knox was saying, he wasn’t meaning the
literal, of course that might have been there too but what he was talking about
was the whore of Babylon in Revelation and he had good cause for it because in
this case this particular queen that was involved had formed an alliance with
the nobles of Scotland and they had gotten together to crush the early
Presbyterians who went up into Scotland, they were going to destroy this
Protestantism once and for all. And Knox
said you’re not going to destroy me, I’ll outlive you all. And he went on and he taught the Word of God
and he upset people. And he upset the
Queen and that really upset the Queen, but do you know something, she couldn’t
do a thing. She had all her nobles there
and she had a whole battalion of royal guard standing right in that court and
she didn’t dare touch John Knox [blank spot] because she knew that once her
soldiers touched John Knox she’d have a massive riot in the community because
John Knox was so popular.
So this then is the principle that the Word of God gives you that you
follow the will of God wherever it leads you.
And this principle we would apply in nuclear war in the case of the
government follows the Lord’s mandates to execute judgment upon evil and you
get into all sorts of secondary or unnecessary results, things that you can’t
avoid, etc. and that’s His problem, He’s the One that told you to do it.
Now let’s apply all this to the Christian life. Let’s take the concept of holy war; go back
to holy war concept and apply it to the three enemies that we fight as
believers. Let’s review this for a
moment: the flesh, Satan and the world.
These are the three great enemies that have to do with the conflict I the
Christian life. Let’s look at those
three enemies that every one of you who is a believer face. First, the battle that you face with your
flesh, we call the flesh in the Bible is the world for old sin nature. Why is the word “flesh” used for the old sin
nature? Because the old sin nature has
its base in your physical body. That’s
why it’s removed at death and there’s evidently some way in which the soul is
united with the body, the old sin nature is tired to the physical corruption of
the body and you have this little thing: old sin nature with an area of
weakness and an area of strength. It has
two tendencies; any person has these two tendencies, going to the left or the
right. You may be going to the left in
the sense of licentiousness, here’s where you rebel against your creature hood
and so you’re trying to deny the fact that you are a creature. This is a rebellion against your creature
hood and you say I want to run the universe my way, I want to run my life my
way, I make my own standards, period.
That’s licentiousness.
Then we have the opposite extreme of legalism. Here is a person who usually is of a
religious background and he’s not denying the fact that he’s creature, but he’s
denying the fact, yea, I know God exists and I know I’m his creature, but you
know, I’m okay, I don’t need His grace.
And so here we have a denial of grace; that’s why religion is always
against God’s grace. And here the person
says I am so righteous that God just will clap with joy when I come up before
the pearly gates, look at this, number one has just arrived. This is the concept of a legalist. He is acceptable to God on the basis of what
he does and he’s usually so proud that he does this and does that and doesn’t
do this doesn’t do this and doesn’t do that, etc. So here’s your legalist. Now every one of you is located on this
scale; you have tendencies going to the left or to the right. And right now if we could read you you’d read
somewhere on that scale of legalism or licentiousness, going in one direction
or the other.
Then to make life more interesting it seems that all of us have areas of
weakness and areas of strength. Areas of
strength mean that you are able to put on the poker face and here is where you
can sin privately and you can do all the sinning you want to and put on a big
front for everybody else and they look on and don’t see anything wrong, and of
course everything is wrong because you are carnal and you can wear a nice poker
face and impress everyone and you’re out of fellowship with the Lord. That’s your area of strength. Some of you have covered your areas of
strength and you can cover about 99% of all possibilities. You can look so spiritual, and oh my, look at
this spiritual giant. You look so
impressive and on the inside it’s just carnality, carnality, carnality, human
viewpoint, human viewpoint, human viewpoint but on the outside you’re able to
impress the average church person; superficial Christian, they’re impressed by
people and they call this spirituality because all it is actually is people
operating in their area of strength and looking as though on the outside they
are okay and this is spirituality. It’s
not, it has nothing to do with spirituality.
Now area of weakness, this is where you just let it out, let the hair
down and everything. When you get out of fellowship everybody under the sun
knows about it, it just comes out all over the place, so that’s your area of
weakness. Now this is what you have to
continually review in your mind and your relationship with other people. You can have this other person, it may be
your husband or wife, it may be someone else in the congregation, it may be in
some Christian group that you’re with.
Here you are and here’s X over here, and X has an area of strength and
an area of weakness and you have an area of strength and an area of weakness
and your area of strength might correspond to his areas of weakness and the
tendency is for you to look down your pious nose at person X and say well, when
he gets as mature as I am then we can discuss business, etc. And this is a tendency, and usually in
fundamentalist circles you have this problem, you have some person who comes
into the Christian life who’s fought the problem of alcoholism, for example, or
sex or has some other hang-up and you bring this kind of a person in the
average fundamentalist congregation and they can’t stand it if this person
drops the ball once in a while in these areas and they get all shook up, oh, do
you think so and so could be a Christian; I don’t think so, do you ever hear of
a Christian doing this; oh, no I never heard of a Christian doing this. All you have to do is read the Bible;
Christians do it all the time in case you haven’t noticed.
So here’s some person who has an area of weakness and they show it and
they go out and… we’re not condoning this but what we’re saying is that you in
your pride have no right to look down your nose at the other person, absolutely
no right. You can help them and pray for
them but you don’t have to look down your nose and think you’re so great because
while you’re looking down your nose, guess what, you’re out of fellowship too
because you’re sitting there saying how proud you are that you’re Mr.
Somebody.
This is the problem of the flesh and the battle that we face. How do we fight the flesh? The principles are given to us in Rom. 6:6,
it says, “knowing this, that our old man has been crucified” past tense, “with
Him that the body of sin might be neutralized.”
Now let’s look at that phrase, “might be neutralized.” Let’s pick this sentence apart, “the body of
sin,” what does the body of sin refer to?
The body, obviously the physical body, and it’s called the body of sin
because the old sin nature is grounded in the physical body. So it’s saying that this body of sin might be
neutralized. Now look at that verb for a
minute, is that passive or active? It’s
passive. The subject receives the
action. So the body of sin doesn’t neutralize
itself. The body of sin must be
neutralized by something outside of itself and this is why living the Christian
life is impossible. You can’t live the
Christian life without the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is the one from the outside that neutralizes it; you
can’t neutralize your old sin nature.
And yet you read all this devotional literature about so and so yielding
to the Lord, I yielded this, I yielded that, I yielded this, the sin nature
doesn’t yield the sin nature, how can that work? It’s impossible.
So therefore a person cannot neutralize because this verb is in the
passive voice, not active. It is neutralized
by something outside of itself; the something outside of itself is the Holy
Spirit. The Holy Spirit neutralizes the
sin nature. And this is why you cannot
live the Christian life without the filling of the Holy Spirit. So the answer to the problem of the flesh is
to be filled with the Holy Spirit; just let the Holy Spirit control. Some outside side aids that you can employ if
you are a wise Christian in this battle of the flesh, we always include these,
and this is to not rely on the Holy Spirit but these things that if you’re
smart you’ll do. First of all, you will
not deliberately go into situations that are going to entice you, places where
you know you are going to be enticed. If
you know you’re going to get burned somewhere don’t stick your hand in
there. You find this principle in Gen.
39:12 where Joseph is in this situation and this woman is after him and so he
just takes off, he doesn’t even excuse himself.
This woman is there and the first translation I ever made in the Hebrew,
this woman grabs Joseph all of a sudden, takes hold of his garments and Joseph
takes off so fast he got out of that room so fast that the garment in the
Hebrew is pictured as though it still has him in it. And she’s sitting there holding the garment,
where’d he go. That’s how Joseph exited, very quickly.
Then we have the second principle in the Word of God and that is take
care of your body, 1 Tim. 4:8, “bodily exercise profits little, and godliness
profits a lot,” it is not knocking physical exercise, it’s simply saying take
care of your body if you don’t want trouble.
And if you want trouble spiritually, go right ahead, run your body into
the ground, eat poorly, stay up all hours, don’t get enough sleep and you’ll find
yourself a nice spiritual problem. That’s
the fastest way of getting it. So that’s the battle with the flesh.
Now we have a second category we battle as Christians. Now we move to Satan. How do we battle with Satan? Well, Satan has two main attacks; he has
first an attack that is designed to confuse.
How does Satan confuse you? He
confuses you by presenting you with false religion. This is Satan main means of confusing people
in the world today is through a false religious attack. Here he will promote false doctrine, such as
the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God. That is a satanic doctrine, there is not any
brotherhood of man in the Bible; you can’t find it in the Bible. He promotes religion that’s grounded on human
works. He promotes religion that’s
grounded on making somebody other than the Word of God your authority, such as
so and so’s key to the Scripture, or somebody’s outlines, making this the Word
of God instead of the Word of God. He
has all sorts of ways and this confuses people by introducing false information. By the way, the first time this happened was
when he talked to Eve in the Garden, and he said “has God said that you
shouldn’t touch this,” insinuating that God hadn’t said it; insinuating there’s
something wrong with God, teaching and slipping into Eve’s mind false religious
doctrine.
All right, the second thing how Satan will attack you and that is
through pressure. He’s going to put the
pressure on you with one little scheme in mind and if you master the scheme
that he has in mind, much of the satanic pressure will dissolve. The scheme that lies behind Satan’s strategy
here that puts you in the nutcracker and really squeezes you is to drive you
away from God’s promises. He wants to
put a split between you and God. The
pressure is designed to erect a barrier there, he wants to break off your
fellowship with God, get your eyes on people, anything, get your eyes on some
person you don’t like, get your eyes on some situation, get your eyes on
something, get your eyes on anything but God.
That’s what he wants, and so he’s going to put pressure on your life and
as long as he’s successful at he’s got you, until you master a little judo
technique about this thing and that is you take the same thing that he wants
you to do and you reverse it, so every time the pressure comes in instead of
driving you away from God it drives you closer to God.
And so here Satan comes up against you, here you are sitting here all
innocent and Satan brings in some pressure situation, wants to split you off
from God. So your reaction now, you’re going to go to the promises and you’re
going to claim the promises, I’m going to go to 1 Peter 5:7, you’re going to
have the same attitude Job had, even if God slays me I am still going to trust
in Him. That’s the stubborn tenacity of
a believer. I don’t care if this world
falls apart I am still going to go on trusting the Lord. So if you were Satan what would you do? Every time you bomb this guy he turns around
and it drives him closer to the Lord. I
know what I would do, I wouldn’t put any pressure on him any more. And this is what James means when it says
“resist Satan and he will flee from you,” and if you look up one verse it’s got
the key, “he who humbles himself before the Lord, the Lord will give him
grace,” and then it says he who resists the devil, the devil will flee from
him. That’s what it means, the devil
will just take off when he realizes his strategy of testing doesn’t work out
because you’re taking his strategy and you’re turning it right around. The strategy was intended to drive you away
from the Lord but every time you get pressure it drives you closer to the Lord,
well he’s going to give up. Satan’s not
a nitwit, in fact he’s one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived. So here we have Satan; now Satan has a lot of
helpers, he has people in the world known as demons. When you begin to see the dimensions of the
spiritual conflict you won’t have this flippant attitude a lot of believers
have. We’re in a warfare in case you
haven’t learned that yet.
Then the third area of responsibility is the world system. Now the world system, this is a battle that
involves the intellect and involves your social life, it involves the two. It involves basically the way you think and
this is why I am trying to get people here to cultivate the habit of seizing
upon the Word of God and comparing what the Word of God says with what various
people say, with what you hear on TV, what you get in the papers, and all of
this because this is where the battle is going on. It’s not going on in the taboos; well the
boys and girls can’t go swimming together and all the rest of the
nonsense. Frankly with what the girls
are wearing you don’t have to see them in a bathing suit any more. So here’s the world system, and here’s the
intellect. And this is a problem, people
never realize, dumb Christians go on legalistic tangents, we don’t let the
girls go swimming with the boys and we don’t chew gum and we don’t have bubble
gum in our church, etc. and never realize that above the eyebrows, that’s where
the battles are lost. And yet the
average church doesn’t give the Christian enough doctrine to think more than
two minutes on something that’s spiritually relevant.
Now that’s where the battle is and you’re going to lose young people,
old people, all people unless you give them doctrine, unless you give them
something to think about and respond to, you can take all your legalism and
you’ll never [can’t understand words] you’ll just drive them away, that’s
all. But that’s where the issue is located
and don’t you ever forget it. The battle
today is above the eyebrows in the mind, where you think. And you see this over and over again. You see it in the college student, they sit
around like a bunch of inert rocks and you tell them something about the Word
of God and oh yeah… This is a problem,
inert zombies walking around and then we wonder why no impact is made for Jesus
Christ. 1 John 2 is the key verse on
this, verses 15-17, “love not the world, neither the things that are in the
world. If any man love the world, the
love of the Father is not in him. [16] For all that is in the world, the lust
of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life, is not of the father but
is of the world. [17] And the world is passing away and the lust thereof, but
he that does the will of God abides forever.”
That verse, verse 17 is going to be the theme song for what’s coming up
in the morning service which is going to be the book of Ecclesiastes. The book of Ecclesiastes has a tremendous
battle; it concentrates on what you think.
This is the theme song, the things that count in this world are things
that persist for eternity and things that don’t count, the things of the world
that Satan would love to get your eyes on are things that are temporary, things
that are passing, things that are going to be gone tomorrow and that’s it.
So John counsels us, “love not the world, neither the things that are in
the world.” Why? Because the last of verse 16, after you see
the word “is,” verse 16 and the word “is,” “is not of the Father,” does not
come from the Father, “but is from the world,” the world in the Bible is the
word cosmos which means an ordered
system. And cosmos as an ordered system is an ordered system under Satan
whereby he is able to take good things and mold them into a team that is
satanic. Now it doesn’t mean all
amusements are wrong, what it means is that Satan has monopolized them. So what do we have, for example, let’s take
the social aspect of this. We dealt with
the intellect, let’s look at the social life.
In the social life we have category amusements and Christians yell and
scream about worldly amusements. Who was
it that started writing books? The
greatest book ever written is the Word of God.
Who wrote it? Believers wrote it;
there’s an amusement, reading. You take
a cultural form such as music, art, those things aren’t satanic, it is the way
they are used that makes them satanic. And so we have Christians say oh, we
don’t use music. Why don’t you use
music, it’s an excellent medium for reaching people for Christ. Instead of conquering ground that’s lost,
they retreat from it. Now isn’t that
stupid. If the enemy is using a tool and
I like the tool I’ll just go in and use it myself. You see this is not worldly techniques. There’s a difference between worldliness in
the mind, mental attitude, human viewpoint and you might say techniques that
the world uses, such as art, such as music, such as reading, and all these
things. These help Christians, they can
be used for Christian or anti-Christian purposes. But what determines how they are used is your
mental attitude, that’s what determines it, not the medium itself. The medium itself is innocent, absolutely
innocent, nothing wrong with movies at all, the thing that’s wrong with movies
is who uses them. But that doesn’t mean
we can’t use them.
So this is why Christians never understand and the result is that we put
on a tragic witness for Christ, we are not reaching our generation as we should
be, we are retreating in the wrong direction because we have not encouraged
people with gifts in these areas to go in there and conquer for Jesus Christ,
go in and take over the media, go in if you have artistic ability and you paint
as unto the Lord and you witness for Christ through your paintings. Go if you have music talent, create, compose,
take over these areas, like Bach and many of the men who wrote these things as
a testimony. Go ahead, don’t feel embarrassed
because God has given you talent, use it.
Instead of doing this we patter away at our little nitpicking taboos and
wonder why no one is being reached for Christ.
That’s why.
Therefore these are the battles that we face as a Christian. Once again to summarize we face the
flesh. How do you fight the flesh? The principle is basically flee, flee to the
Holy Spirit, do not try to fight the flesh with the flesh, with your own
energy. Satan, what’s the answer
there? Go to the promises of God; every
time he puts pressure on claim the promises, or you might say grace. And then we have the world system and the
only way you can fight the world system is to live in the Word of God, living
in the Word means you take in the Word, you digest the Word, you think about
it, you use the word to criticize, you use the Word in the promises, etc. I
would summarize our fight against the world with one word; criticize in the
good sense of that word. Flee, trust and
criticize; those are the tactics that the Christian believer should use today
in his holy war.
Next week we will deal with some of the concluding ordinances in the
book of Deuteronomy.