Lesson 45

Basis of Freedom: God-given rights – 22:1-12

 

We come to a new section of this book.  We have been working through this book and as we come to a new section it’s well to remind ourselves of the forest before we lose it for the trees.  The theme of Deuteronomy is love but it’s a different kind of love than 20th century love.  The love that is expounded in the book of Deuteronomy is the love a believer has for God, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy might,” expounded by the Lord Jesus Christ as the first and great commandment.  Deuteronomy gives you the content of that.  And Deuteronomy divides itself into two parts; chapters 5-11 and chapters 12-26.  Chapters 5-11 deal with loving the Lord in your heart of mental attitude.  Therefore in these chapters you have the emphasis on how people think, their inner most attitudes because it is from your inner mental attitude that all worship proceeds.  You can go to church and you can involve yourself in a lot of religious activity, you can give, you can come to prayer meeting, you can do all sorts of things but if there’s nothing on the inside, if there’s not a positive mental attitude the rest of it is a waste of time.  God is not interested in externals.  So mental attitude comes first in Deuteronomy.

 

Chapters 12-26 deal with loving the Lord thy God with all thy soul, which we would translate as with all your life.  Explained in a little more detail it means all the details of life.  Here’s your life; inside you have a mental attitude but on the outside every one of us is involved in certain activities.  We have our relationship with our family, with friends, we have relationships with society, we have relationships with government, etc. we have our own personal life, we have emphasis on our job, our possessions, whatever they be or the lack of them, we have emphasis on our personal relationships in our family, we have health, we have sex, we have all sorts of these details of life.  Now it is in the realm of these details of life that chapters 12-26 deal.  We have broken chapters 12-26 down into certain sections. 

 

Chapters 12-16 dealt with the section of the unity of the nation Israel.  In other words in this section we took all the details of life and arranged them under a topic; the topic was that no nation can have any true unity unless that unity is religious.  So we have the religious unity of the nation Israel expressed and this deals with, of course, the details of a person’s relationship to government and so on, but in the overall framework of developing something that glues a nation together and that is a religious unity.   No nation on earth ever has unity unless it is spiritual unity.  You found this is the civil war between the states; you find this as you go back through history that the thing that makes a nation hang together is a basic agreement on certain values.  This is why in the ancient world each nation had their own individual god. They weren’t dumbbells; they recognized that a nation had to have this kind of unity.  It is because we are using this unity in the United States that we are in hot water today.

 

Chapters 16-21 deal with national righteousness.  This is national righteousness, and that’s the slogan, that’s the central topic that is covered in these chapters.  This has important repercussions for us as believers.  As I summarized when we finished chapters 12-16, in chapter 16 we come to the point where we have carefully defined the fact that a nation’s unity exists because of its religion, or lack of it, that is its certain spiritual values.  Obviously we don’t have national religion in the United States, but Israel did and it was this that gave her the unity.

We, at the end of chapter 16 gave certain principles that we can carry over as Christians into the 20th century.  We spoke of these and defined them as such.  We said that we have basically two things that are in the fore view with regards to the principles of chapters 12-16 today as citizens in the United States.  One is the rise of humanism which was triggered by evolution, it was based on evolution and was triggered by the post World War II developments, the increased global consciousness of the world, etc. and the tendency now among thinkers is to posit that we are going to have one world religion.  And that one world religion many are trying to make humanism, the idea that we worship Man with a capital “M”.  God is dropped out of the picture and everything is done for man.  We are all one brother under the sun and the universal fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man and we don’t even mention the universal fatherhood of God, it’s only the brotherhood of man.  For those of you who think that’s true I’m sorry to inform you there is no brotherhood of man in the Bible because the brotherhood of man that God recognizes is based on personal regeneration, there’s only one brotherhood of man, those who have personally accepted the Lord Jesus Christ. 

 

So humanism is cutting across Biblical Christianity today and humanism is one of the foremost competitors to have as a world religion and tie the world together.  We as Christians fight this.  How do we fight it? The first way we fight it is we insist there is no brotherhood except those who have personally received the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior, period. We will not recognize any other brotherhood, cannot recognize any other brotherhood and never will recognize any other brother­hood that is based on anything other than personal regeneration.

 

The second way we can oppose the trends of our time to try to glue everything together in a non-Christian basis is to insist upon Bible doctrine, to make Bible doctrine the big issue, not because it’s just one doctrine among many but because it’s the truth. Therefore, for example when we go into various learning situations where we are taught English history, we are taught European history and American history and it is not taught from a Biblical perspective we take what we can and dump the framework.  We take the particulars and just sidetrack the whole framework. When we are taught evolution we take the facts of it, the biological and geological facts of the case and drop the framework. Everywhere we come across anything in our intellectual live that crosses the Word of God we drop it.  This is the discipline that I am training our young people to be involved in.  People don’t like to hear that but this is the only way to survive in the 20th century if you’re going to think Biblically.

 

The third thing that Christians can do is to get involved in their own areas of responsibility as citizens on the job and putting some Biblical principles into practice that we have enumerated.

 

Now we come to the end of chapters 16-21 and it’s time for another summary as to how we can apply these principles as citizens in the United States today.  First let’s look at some of the principles that we’ve learned in chapter 16-21 and then summarize these and apply them to our situation.  The first thing that we have learned in this section of Scripture is that standards are grounded… see first you have your religious unity and that means the nation agrees on certain values and from these we get our standards, our moral standards.  That’s what our problem is today; the United States has no moral standards basically because there’s not an agreement on the source of standards.  In the Bible the source of standards for law and morality is the Word of God.  And that’s the way it was when the Puritans were here and everybody knocks the Puritans.  We have all sorts of people trying to smear the Puritans and actually the Puritans were probably one of the greatest peoples who ever lived; they were the toughest people that ever lived.  They came to this country and carved out of a hopeless situation a tremendous nation.  No other people have ever done this.  The Africans never have, the Europeans never have and the Asians never have.  It has been the Puritans and the Puritans alone that did this.  So don’t buy the line that says the Puritans are old fogies and they didn’t like this and they were a bunch of stuck up people.  That is completely a distortion of history.  The Puritans were a wonderful great people. 

 

The second principle we have learned, not only is the source of law found in the Word of God but we also find that the best arrangement, the absolutely best arrangement for government and freedom is when you have a maximum of citizen involvement and a minimum, an absolute minimum of governmental interference.  This is the most optimum situation.  You find it in Israel; in Israel they never even had a police force yet the law was enforced.  Do you know why?  Because citizens got involved.  The citizens enforced the law, they didn’t wait for you to call the police department and have someone else come down and do it, they did it.  So you had maximum citizen participation. 

 

The third thing, the government will operate on the basis of principle, not vengeance or maudlin sentimentalism.  We found that in the doctrine of capital punishment, that capital punishment in Scripture is on the basis of principles, not on the basis of vengeance.  People say oh, you’re for capital punishment, you’re trying to get back at somebody.  We’re not trying to get back at anything, that’s a total misreading of the Biblical doctrine of capital punishment.  The Biblical doctrine of capital punishment is based on you take a life you lose your own; it’s simple.  And that’s the principle, and it’s regardless of your emotions, whoever is involved the principle is still there.  Therefore we find that judgment and governmental operations should be on the basis of principle not on the basis of one extreme, community vengeance; the other extreme, maudlin sentimentalism where we feel sorry for someone who hijacks an airliner from California to go to Italy and the Italians say we’re not going to return him because you Americans have such tough justice.  Well if our justice in the 20th century in America is tough, I’d hate to see what Italy’s justice is like.  Anybody that endangers a pilot’s life and a crew’s life ought to be executed.  In fact they ought to carry guns in the plane, the next time someone tries it, shoot them; that will solve the problem.  It would only have to happen once or twice and they would get the idea.

 

The principle in this section of Scripture is that the government operates on the basis of principle.  We found four guarantees, provisions that were given to Israel by God to make sure this went on in practice.  The first principle was a quick trial, not a delayed trial, not one of this business about you commit a crime this year and your case might get in court in 3 years, might get in.  Israel always had quick justice and that was one of the keys as to why their judicial system operated and operated very well over the few centuries that it was operating at maximum efficiency.

 

The second principle that was provided in the Word of God was a thorough investigation of the evidence.  If there was not thorough evidence available they dumped the case.  Remember, a person could not be sentenced to death unless there was an eyewitness to the crime, two eye­witnesses.  You had to have strong evidence to convict someone.  The third thing that they had to have was governmental reparations for unsolved crimes.  If you went down the main street of Jerusalem and somebody bumped you on the head with a chain and you have to have 32 stitches in your cranium and you went to the hospital, the government would pay your hospital bill because in Israel any unsolved crime was the responsibility of the community and the community paid for it.  The fourth principle we found was that there was public punishment that consisted of three categories: capital punishment, physical punishment, such as whipping and fines.  There was no jail, they did not believe in caging people up like animals. 

 

The other principle that we learned was that governmental policies will strengthen the family unit, not tear it apart.  This is the other principle that we learned in chapter 16-21, that the government had the responsibility of seeing to it that the family unit was strengthened, not torn apart.  So whatever the responsibility, whether it was in welfare, whether it was over some other area, the design of the government program was such as to increase the authority and strengthen and preserve the family unit.

 

Finally, the fifth principle that we learned in this section was that governmental policies would stress the following things.  This is when government is involved in war, which is a legitimate function of government; these five things must be included.  First, there must be judicial principles involved and not personal vengeance.  So if a nation goes to war it goes to war on the basis of a declared war; it goes to war because it is the consensus of the citizens that some right has been destroyed, that they are threatened or some other legal base.  And there’s a formal declaration of war.  

 

Secondly, the second principle that goes along with this that we found was that judgment during the war, such as bombing today, etc. would be against those who really have openly violated the law and it was not a license to massacre, such as Hitler tried to do to England.  The principle recognized in the Word of God is that you have war, yes you do, but make sure that you direct your attack against those who are responsible.

 

Three, you were to have humane care of the captives. We saw that in chapters 19-20 where you had POW’s who were women and during the ancient times the women were the victims of every war.  And yet Israel, and apparently only Israel had the real strong protection for women POW’s.  And these women were protected by the law of Israel and so on that God had given them.

 

The fourth thing that controlled war was a minimum destruction of natural resources and we found that in chapter 20, that when they went in they were not to chop down all the trees and the vineyards, etc. because after the war is over obviously somebody has to eat so you try and preserve natural resources during the war.

 

Five, verses 1-9 of chapter 20 taught us another principle, that men are not… the economy is not to be set up so that people make their living off of an active warfare situation.  In other words, the men if they had a vineyard, they were to tend to their vineyard.  They were to have an economic base so that when they went in the army there wouldn’t be the tendency, let’s keep the war going because this is the way I earn money; the tendency would be to get back to civilian life as fast as possible.

 

Now these are the principles, how do we apply them as believers today?  First of all what do we notice today.  Let’s look at our situation, and then let’s look at how we can apply the principles.   First the situation, what do we find ourselves in in the last half of the 10th century as Bible-believing Christians. We find several characteristics of our society that have to do with chapters 16-21.  The first characteristic of our society is that we are increasingly a government of men, not law.  Therefore it’s the personality and not the legal principle that’s the basis of law.  For example, look around the world and ask yourself one very simple question: how much power have the legislative arms of government got?  The legislative branches of government over the last 10-20 years since World War II have progressively decreased in their power.  The power of Congress has decreased, etc. in practice; now theoretically it probably hasn’t, but in practice it has, showing that what we have, the first characteristic is that we have government by men, not law.  So men are the big issue.  So we have personalities instead of principles; we have men instead of laws.  This is an increasing danger in our day.  The reason of course is that we’ve lost our standards so the only thing to fill the gap is men. 

 

The second thing which is a corollary to the first is that now we have a rise of the elite, govern­ment by the elite.  This is not a new thing, Plato recognized it; Plato had these philosopher kings that were going to rule the government because these were the wisest people in the land, etc.   Recognize that this is happening today, you are getting an increasing academic scientific establishment that’s taking over. These are the experts, they make the decisions, you poor slobs don’t know anything, all you do is vote them into office.  This is the attitude they have.  And the average American citizen doesn’t know enough to come in out of the rain so therefore we’re going to govern for him.  We have snobbery and so on and we have this rise of the elite where you tend to concentrate power in the hands of a few (quote) “experts” (end quote).  And of course every time this happens we are in trouble.  Read John Kenneth Galbraith, he’s one of the outspoken men for this trend in government. 

 

Thirdly along with this we have another trend in our day and it’s the tendency toward world government, the tendency to erase national boundaries in favor of one world government.  For example, in Switzerland in 1968, last year, between August 27 and September 12, they had a constitutional convention and they worked out a constitution for the next world government.  So people are thinking about it and the tendency is strong to decrease allegiance to national entities and put them over to a strong government.  Of course we have seen the fallacy of this from the premillennial point of view.  The only world government that we could possibly tolerate is one with a perfect being as its head and the only perfect being is the Lord Jesus Christ.  Therefore perfect government must wait until the return of the Lord Jesus Christ.

 

Then we have finally a fourth principle of our day and that is the increasing tendency to use war as vengeance instead of execution of judgment.  For example, we have it based on sentimentalism; some of our society would say it’s wrong to fight the Vietcong but it’s all right to go over and invade Rhodesia.  Some of the very non-charitable so to speak, the Ford Foundation and a few others, have actually drawn up plans to try and invade Rhodesia and South Africa and the reason is they think they’re violating someone’s rights and they may, but the point is it’s very interesting that we’re all against war when it comes to Vietnam but we’re ready to start one any day over Rhodesia and South Africa.  So it’s a matter of whose coat tail is in the door and it’s not a matter of principle. 

 

So these are some of the characteristics that we face as Christians.  What are we going to do with them, what is our response?  I suggest we have four counter responses.  The first one is that we must insist that government is a divine institution and we will challenge people who will say otherwise.  Government has been instituted by God in Genesis 9 and the job of government is not to carry out somebody’s personal dream.  The job of government is to execute divine morality in society, period!  And any time you lose the God-given basis of government you are setting in motion a machine that is going to crush you eventually.  And we should be fighting for the statement that God is behind the institution of government; it exits before Him and is responsible to Him, not to man. 

 

The second point that we should be making in our society today is an opposition to the increasing power of centralization in the hands of the experts.  Vote against programs that are designed to concentrate power.  This is one of the Biblical responses in this kind of a situation.

 

A third thing that we can do is to oppose any anti-Christian pseudo neutrality that exists in the realm of society, such as we are going to teach your children sex education, and not adding the rest of the sentence, in a humanistic framework.  We don’t mind sex education, in fact you come next week you’re going to get some sex education right from the pulpit, Deut. 22.  So we’re not against sex education; what we are against is sex education inside an anti-Christian framework.  And that is what we fight and will continue to fight and can do nothing but fight.  Even if it causes upheaval in the public school system then let it cause upheaval.  We have got to adhere to the fact that we must teach within a Biblical framework.  And we have many other principles which we don’t have time to go over, we’ll discuss these later on.

 

Let’s turn to Deut. 22 for the third section of this book.  Now we come to the third section of Deuteronomy that has to do with freedom, national freedom by God-given rights.  We have an important concept here, something that is totally missing today.  The base of freedom is the rights that God has given to us, and God has given these rights and whether we recognize these rights or not, that’s something else.  Whether we recognize these rights or not is entirely irrelevant, they’re still there, God has given them.  Tonight we begin a new section, from chapter 22 through the end of chapter 25 and let me break this down. 

 

We have four subdivisions in this section.  Deut. 22:1-12 we have the principle stated that rights come by divine design; the principle is stated that rights come because of God’s design, not because somebody makes a law and puts them there.  Rights are inherent, they come about because of God’s original design of creation.  From 22:13 through the end of chapter 22, verse 30, we have sexual rights by the divine institution of marriage.  And we are going to examine sexual rights and we are going to treat them inside the divine institution of marriage.  I am going to teach the Word of God verse by verse and what’s good enough for the Holy Spirit is good enough for me, He wrote it, not me. 

 

Chapter 23:1-18 we have community rights by the calling of God. Each one of these sets of rights is caused by something God does.  In the first section God creates, that gives rights.  In the second section God ordains the institution of marriage, and that sets up certain rights.  23:1-18 God calls a community to a certain destiny and that sets up rights.  23:19 on through the end of the section, 25:19 we have individual rights because of the deliverance of God.  God has gone about to redeem man and therefore this gives man certain rights.  I hope when we get through this section you’re going to see the root and the basis for saying there’s a civil right here, there’s a civil right over there, there’s a base for it but watch where the basis is.

 

Let’s look at this principle more closely, let’s start in verse 1. We are now looking at this first section; the principle stated that rights come about by God’s design in creation.  And you may be wearing a set of dark glasses and not be able to see God’s design in creation but the design is still there.  “Thou shalt not see thy brother’s ox or his sheep go astray, and withhold thy help from them; thou shalt in any case bring them again unto thy brother.”  “Thou shalt not see thy brother’s ox or his sheep go astray,” the word “go astray” here is a Hebrew participle and it tells us something important about this whole situation; miss this you miss the whole point.  This is a Hebrew participle; a Hebrew participle denotes action or continues it, it’s a motion picture tense and any time they also wanted to depict an action continuing he used the participle meaning that I see, I look out, and I see this action going on before me.  Therefore he uses the participle and he says look, you’re walking down a road sometime and you see this happening in front of you.  That’s when you go and swing into action. 

 

So this says automatic involvement.  Why? “Thou shalt not see thy brother’s ox or his ass going astray in front of you,” you’re there and it starts to go astray, “and hide thyself from them.”  Let’s look first at the word “thy brother.”  “Thy brother” means that this person has the right of private property… private property, with all due apologies to our communist friends the doctrine of private property is inherent in Scripture.  Reason: you can’t give back to God what you do not own, therefore the whole function of the Bible is grounded on capitalism and private property.  “Thy brother” has a right to private property and this is given to him by God’s design.  Now notice something, Moses is not laying this down as a law, this isn’t a law that you’re looking at in verse 1, this is an attitude. 

 

In other words, the point is that you’re walking along this country road in Israel and you see this thing going on, there’s no law that says you have to do a thing, absolutely no law whatever.  But what Moses is saying is whether there’s a law or not, the person who owns that property has a right to the property, whether the government recognizes it or not is not the point.  The point is that he has an inherent right to this property, it’s his.  The government’s laws may reflect it or they may not reflect it but that is not your concern.  If you’re thinking biblically you look upon a person and that person has a right of ownership.  And it’s there because of God’s design and creation, not because the government gave it.  The government can’t take these things away.  They can on paper but it’s just paper; these things are inherent. 

 

All right, now this is the basis of citizen involvement in the law. What Moses is saying in verse 1, he says look, I don’t care, you don’t have to worry about a Levite priest might be, oh gee, I saw brother so and so walking down the street and brother so and so might not even see the Levite priest, the Levite might not see him, it doesn’t matter who is watching, you don’t do this as unto men, you do it as unto the Lord because this is His design and so therefore if it’s… it’s “thy brother’s,” possessive, it’s a piece of your brother’s property, you respect his right of ownership.  And you don’t worry about whether the policemen are watching, whether there’s a reward out for it or something else, you respect his right because it’s inherent, it’s not there because the government put it there.

All right, let’s look at the word “hide thyself,” here’s a person coming down, he’s seeing his brother’s ox going astray and he hides himself.  Now this word is kind of humorous, it’s ‘alam in the Hebrew and the word actually means to conceal but it’s used in what is known as the hithpael stem, and the hithpael stem is reflexive, which means, if you’ve had a little grammar, you have a subject, a verb and an object.  When you have a reflexive verb the reflexive verb takes the action and takes the object and identifies it with the subject.  So this is what you have, “you don’t conceal yourself,” in other words if I used the Hebrew verb to kill, and I used it in the reflexive, what would it mean?  Commit suicide!  The subject is the receiver of the action.  So when you have a reflexive verb it takes the action and puts it right back towards the subject, and that’s the hithpael stem in the Hebrew.  Now what this means is, let’s give it a contemporary flavor, “make yourself scarce” would be about the best way of translating this verb.  When you see this happening, don’t make yourself scarce.  Don’t conceal yourself and pretend, oh gee, look at the clouds over there, it’s really great and go the other way pretending you don’t see it, making yourself scarce. That’s what Moses is getting at; it’s an inner attitude here and to remember that you do this as unto the Lord, not unto men. 

 

Verse 2, “And if thy brother be not near unto thee, or if you know him not,” what do you do?  Finders keepers, losers weepers?  No.  You keep it, “you shalt bring it unto thine own house, and it shall be with thee until thy brother seek after it, and thou shalt restore it to him again.”  Again the principle of respect of inherent rights when the government is not necessarily looking at you.  Now you can understand something, why this nation had the potential of being the greatest nation in the world because a nation whose citizens have this attitude is fantastic.  If 50% of the American population had this attitude crime would practically disappear, but nobody respects property any more.  The trick is it’s right if you get away with it; it’s wrong if you’re caught. 

 

I never cease to be amazed at the adults in the city of Lubbock.  Some lady was complaining about a policeman hiding, there’s a nice tree there, he can park his police car under it and nobody sees it and sooner or later some idiot comes tearing through the stop sign, the little red light goes on and they get caught; then they write to the editor and complain, that cop was a nasty because he hid and I didn’t see him.  And not only that, but the editor of the paper agrees with it.  You can see where we’re going; it’s wrong for the policeman to hide.  Now if I was a policeman I’d love it, I think would be the greatest game imaginable.  If you obey the law you don’t have to worry about whether the policeman is looking; what are you worried about cops hiding, so what?  What do you care?  Do you have personal interest in this? Sure you do because you’re breaking the law, that’s why you’re interested.  They’re complaining about the police hiding but they’re really saying is I want to break the law and get away with it.  That’s exactly what they’re saying. 

 

That’s the whole point that Moses is bringing out, you don’t live your life as a citizen whether someone is watching you or not, you live it as unto the Lord.  And you know, it’s very relaxing.  Just stop and think of it, you live your life as unto the Lord and you can relax, you don’t have to worry who’s watching you, whether Big Brother is looking over your shoulder, you don’t care because Big Daddy is looking over your shoulder, if you want to use the term that way.  You live your life as unto the Lord and forget who is looking at you and it’s very relaxing.  Twenty-four hours a day you can live your life in the most relaxed manner possible and if someone looks at you great, if someone doesn’t, great, because the Lord is looking at you, you live your life as unto the Lord.  Actually if people would just recognize this it’d lead to a lot less nervous breakdowns and everything else because you don’t care what people think, you live your life as unto the Lord.

 

Verse 3, “In like manner shall thou do with his ass; and so shalt thou do with his raiment; and with every lost thing,” actually any lost thing, and the principle is that you do this as unto the Lord.  [“… of thy brother’s, which he hath lost and thou hast found, shalt thou do likewise: thou mayest not withhold thy help.”]  To see this developed in the New Testament turn to Col. 3:17, “And whatsoever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by Him. [18] Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord. [19] Husbands, love your wives, and be not bitter against them. [20] Children, obey your parents in all things; for this is well-leasing unto the Lord. [21] Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged.”   So in verses 18-21 you have all family relationships included, and what’s the principle?  Whether the father is looking, whether the husband is looking, whether the wife is looking you live your life as unto the Lord.  They may be around to appreciate it and they may not be around to appreciate it but you don’t care because you do these things as unto the Lord because He tells you to do these things. 

 

Verse 22, “Servants,” here’s your employment relationship, between employer and employee, “Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh; not with eyeservice, as men-pleasers, but in singleness of hear, fearing God.” That’s the attitude of the employee, he does his job as unto the Lord and not just because the boss happens to be peeking over the cash register to see if he’s got his finger in it.  That’s not the point.  The point is that the man has been given a job and he does the job as unto the Lord, forgetting whether somebody is looking at him or not.  And then you have the other tendency, a lot of people find they can get promoted faster when the big man is around they put on the show and then when he disappears then you can relax; this is what a lot of people have figured out as a way to get ahead in the business world.  Actually if you are a Christian and think this way you have my sympathy because by the time you are 45-50 you are going to wind up in an ulcer.  If you want a promotion He’ll give it to you when He sees fit and you don’t worry about it and wonder when so and so is going to look at you.  The Lord is looking at you and He’s far more interested in your job than you are.

 

Let’s see what he says about the employer, Col. 4:1, “Masters, give unto your servants,” analogous to 20th century America employers, “Employers, give unto your employees that which is just and equal, knowing that you have an employer [Master] in heaven.”  So here’s the attitude of the employer who hires his men, don’t think you’re the top dog because you’re not.  There’s a person higher than you and He’s employed you in a job so don’t get an uppity attitude just because you happen to be in a position where you’re boss.  This doesn’t mean be a weak man, that’s not the command in Scripture.  Don’t be a weak man, but it’s being a perceptive man who knows principles and can apply them.

 

Verse 2, “Continue in prayer, and watch in the same with thanksgiving, [3] Praying also for us, that God would open unto us a door,” here is prayer, you do your whether praying whether people are there to watch or not.  That’s why I never make Wed. night an issue, I’ve never said people come on out Wed. night, we’ll give apples to everybody that comes, we’ll give out rewards because if you come Wed. night this shows that you’re a spiritual Christian and that you’ve made a lot of points with God, etc.  You haven’t made points with God.  People can come to Wed. prayer meeting just because they want to be seen there, oh, the pastor will see me there and he’ll think I’m such a spiritual believer and if I don’t come to prayer meeting he’ll think I’m carnal.  Frankly, I can’t tell whether you’re praying in fellowship or not even if you’re there.  Only the Lord can tell whether you’re praying in fellowship.  If you regard iniquity in your heart the Lord is not going to hear you, you can be at prayer meeting all the time and never get heard.  So I never make Wed. night an issue.  Now Wed. night has a tremendous application, we have people that pray here and we’ve noticed answers to prayer, we’re recording in writing our answers to prayer and it’s exciting to watch how God answers specific prayers.  But we never make an issue out of it because some of you may not be able to get to Wed. night prayer meeting but you do your praying any way.  The point is that you do your praying as unto the Lord, not unto me, not unto the Board, not unto the church, as unto the Lord.  That’s the principle in Col. 3-4.

 

Let’s go back to Deuteronomy and pick up some more of these rights.  Verse 4, “Thou shalt not see thy brother’s ass or his ox fall down by the way,” now here’s a different situation, analogous principle however, this time there’s an injury, he’s fallen into a mud hole or something, “don’t hide yourself,” same verb “from them; thou shalt surely help him to lift them up again.”  Again the situation is you’re walking down the road, this happens in front of you and you recognize the man’s right to help, the help of a neighbor so therefore you help him.  And the word for help, “lift up” is the Hebrew verb plus the infinitive and whenever you have the verb plus the infinitive in the Hebrew language it emphasizes the mood of the verb.  That is something that in the English course they probably do not teach but mood of a verb means the following things.  You can have an imperative mood, you can have a declarative mood, it’s what the verb does in the sentence, the tone of the verb.  He kills someone, and then if I say imperative I say “Kill him,” and that’s the imperative mood. So you see, that is the mood which the verb says and this is what is meant here and here’s the imperative mood.  That imperative mood is doubled when you add the infinitive on to the verb.  So therefore Moses is emphasizing something here in verse 4, you’d better help him lift him up again.

 

Verse 5, “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for all that do so are an abomination unto the LORD thy God.”  This has two applications, one basic one and one in this context.  Let me go first to the historical application and we find it out by looking carefully at the word “all that do.”  Let’s look at this; the verb “to do” is a participle.  If you’ve been paying attention what does this tell you?  Is this a once for all action or is it habitual?  It’s an habitual action and so what this is talking about is people that habitually do this are an abomination unto the Lord.  It’s not a signal for all you ladies to throw out your slacks; it has nothing to do with slacks.  It has to do with something that occurred in the ancient world and when we develop it you’ll see what the point is.  [Blank spot]

 

“All that do” are people that habitually do this and in that day, in that culture, the people meant here are the Canaanitish and the Baalistic worshipers where you had religion and you had male and female impersonation.  This was the impersonation practices of the Canaanites.  And it had to do with their religion, and what it was doing was the men would dress up as women and the women would dress up as men, and what this is is an insult to the built in sexual difference between male and female that God has built into the human race.  He says look, I’ve got two categories, male and female, and I want those categories respected and I don’t want them mixed around.  They didn’t have unisex clothing styles in Israel.  I want these differences pronounced and I want them respected.  So the Canaanite religion in that day, in that culture, was not respecting the male/female difference.  And God said I have built people this way and I expect people to acknowledge this.  That is why in verse 5 it talks about “the woman shall not wear anything that pertains unto a man,” and the man to woman, because it is talking about those that habitually do this, that are deliberately doing it to blur the male/female difference.

 

Turn to Romans 1:21ff and you will see the spiritual reasons for this, the mechanics involved.  The blurring of the difference between a man and a woman, between the male and the female is always the result of negative volition toward God.  In history it always happens that where you have a rejection of Bible doctrine, where you have a rejection of the Word of God, you have this distinction becomes very, very weak.  In Rom. 1:21 we find this, “Because, when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful.”  Now drop down to verse 26-27, “For this cause God gave them up unto vile affection’s; for even their women did change the natural use for that which is against nature; [27] And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another, men with men,” etc.  It’s an obvious reference to the blurring of these distinctions, and this was the heart of the Canaanite religion that Moses was talking about.  Basically it said it was a trend toward homosexuality in the Canaanite cult and that’s the point; it’s an abomination to the Lord.

 

Now this is not to say that people that are in our society who are of increasing tendency to get involved in this problem but it is not to say that they are a worse sinner than anyone else; that’s not what we’re saying.  What we are saying, however, is that it is a problem and that God, as far as He is concerned, when it becomes prevalent in society, is condemning and judging that society.  It is a sign of God’s judgment upon a society when it gets to the point when this is no longer controlled and it’s breaking out all over the place.  So a word to the wise.

 

Back to Deut. 22, please remember this is not a signal for all you ladies to throw out your slacks; that’s not the point.  The point is that it goes back to the motivation that lies behind why these people habitually did that, to impersonate people of the other sex.

 

Verse 6, “If a bird’s nest chance to be before thee in the way in any tree, or on the ground, whether they are young ones, or eggs, and the dam sitting upon the young, or upon the eggs, thou shalt not take the dam with the young [7] But thou shalt surely let the dam go, and take the young to thee, that it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest prolong thy days.”  Now what does this have to do with it? This is a lesson that we’ve seen again and again in Deuteronomy and it’s humanity to animals.  Here’s your humane society of the Old Testament.  Why?  There is a principle; animals in the original design of creation were not given for food.  The entire civilization before the flood was designated as a vegetarian civilization.  And man was given the right to kill animals for food after the flood but it was an abnormal addition to creation.  And even then when God gave men the right to take life, animal life, He said but when you eat I want you to drain the blood out. We went through that, the reason why the blood is drained from the meat is to be a reminder of the fact that a life was shed at that point… a reminder that life was shed and life in God’s sight, even animal life, is precious and He does not want it promiscuously destroyed.  He’s saying it’s fine to hunt, it’s fine to take animal’s lives because I’ve told you to do it, but when you do it realize what you’re doing, realize that you are taking live, even though I have told you to do it. 

And here you find the same thing as we have found before, if you’ll turn back to Deut. 14:21 you’ll see where we ran into this once before in this book.  The last part of verse 21, “Thou shalt not seethe,” or boil “a kid in its mother’s milk.”  What this is saying is there’s something horrible about taking the milk which was to be used for the nourishment of that young animal and boiling him in it; there’s just something crude about this that the Mosaic Law says this is a callousness toward life. 

 

It’s the same thing here and if you turn past our text to 25:4 you’ll see somewhat the same thing. Remember as we do this, the content of all these little nitpicking regulations, the content basically is one thing, Moses is telling us how to love the Lord with all our soul or in all the details of life.  Now do some of you realize that it takes thinking to live the Christian life?  And Moses presumed that his hearers could think.  I don’t know what he would do today if he preached to the television generation; but nevertheless in this day he presumed the basic understanding on the part of his congregation.  He realized that the people would think it through, etc.  Verse 4, “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treads out the corn,” and Paul explains this principle in the New Testament.  The point is there’s a labor, the ox here has the right to eat while he is producing.  It’s cruel to make this animal work and the very food that he needs to work you’re depriving from him. That’s the point and Paul ties this to the Christian laborer in the New Testament and clarifies what is meant. 

 

Going back to our text, here you take the young but you don’t take the mother at the same time.  The mother could be taken later, but again Moses is saying be conservative.  I think that basically there was a conservation motive behind this, though there are people who are experts, ornithologists tell me that it’s very difficult to understand what’s so conservative about verses 6-7, there is a problem here in understanding the conservation principles behind this.  But the whole point is that Moses was sensitive to categories, even inside the animal kingdom. 

 

Verse 8, “When built a new house, then you shall make a battlement [parapet] for thy roof, that thou bring not blood upon thine house, if any man fall from there.”  Here is sensitivity toward human life and here you are not to do anything that is going to deliberately endanger human life.  You’re to be sensitive about this.   You see, every one of these commands has as its implication that people are going to become callous, people are going to say oh the heck with this, what does this matter, it doesn’t matter, just go on.  And Moses says don’t think that way, that’s not loving the Lord in the details of life.  You have to be sensitive to what you’re doing at all times and this is another illustration, a building code in the Old Testament. 

 

Incidentally, some of you who are troubled perhaps by liberal doctrine of the Old Testament, if you’ll look at verses 6-7 and ask yourself a question, I think you can quickly see the ridiculousness of the liberal position.  The liberals say this book was written in a monarchy, the time of the monarchy, around the 7th or 8th century, or even later than that, and they say it was written to produce a political reform, that’s the motivation for this book.  Would you please tell me what bird’s nest have to do with a political reform?  You see, it’s absolutely stupid to say this book came along centuries after Moses for political reform.  What in heavens name does a bird’s nest have to do with politicians?  It’s absolutely stupid when you get down to the details.

 

Verse 9, “Thou shalt not sow thy vineyard with various seeds, lest the fruit of thy seed which thou hast sown, and the fruit of thy vineyard, be defiled,” but it’s not the word defiled, it is “become holy.”  Now you say well isn’t that an interesting problem, and it is an interesting problem. What does it mean?  Here’s the situation, some farmer has his orchard here, he’s all his trees.  Then he comes along and he plants seeds in the same orchard. What he’s trying to do is get double production from his land; that’s what “various seeds” means, the obvious point is the last, “which thou hast sown, and the fruit,” see, there’s two, there’s a compound object there at the end of that sentence, a compound subjective clause, subordinate clause.  You see, “lest the fruit of thy seed which thou hast sown,” that’s it right here, the fruit of this seed, “and the fruit of thy vineyard,” which is the result of these trees, lest both of them become holy.  Now what does “become holy” mean?  To see this expression we have to turn back to Lev. 27.

 

Lev. 27:9, here is where this term is explained, “And if it be a beast,” it’s talking about sacrificing animals, “and if it be a beast whereof men bring an offering unto the LORD, all that any man gives of such unto the LORD shall be holy.”  That means, being holy becomes the property of God.  Verse 10, watch what happens, here’s where dear brother so and so gets faked out.  “He shall not alter it, nor change it, a good for a bad, or a bad for a good; and if he shall at all change beast for beast, then it and the exchange thereof shall be holy.”  Now “be holy” is an idiom for meaning it becomes the property of God. God confiscates the property when it is misused and so here you have someone saying oh, I’m going to give something.  It would be analogous in our day to taking a five dollar bill and saying I want to impress the person next to me, he keeps dropping a five dollar bill in the collection so therefore I’m going to impress him and I’ll make up my own five dollar bill and drop it in the collection plate, counterfeit. 

 

And it’s the same thing here in verse 10, you have this guy that wants to impress, here you have brother Samuel over here and brother Moses next door, brother Moses gives this nice sacrifice and brother Samuel doesn’t have one, he has some out here but he doesn’t want to use them, so brother Samuel picks out some animal that’s got hoof and mouth disease or something like that, and then he brings that as a sacrifice, he wants to get rid of the thing anyway, so might as well give it to the Lord. The Lord says great, do you know what’s going to happen; I’m not only going to take the thing that you’ve offered Me but I’m going to take your good one too, how do you like that for business. That’s what God is saying, don’t you tamper around what you give to God because He’ll take both things.  That’s what happened in verse 10.

 

Verse 21 is a similar thing, here is where land has not been claimed by people and therefore God confiscates it, “But the field, when it goes out in the jubilee,” the fiftieth year, “shall be holy unto the LORD, as a field devoted; the possession thereof shall be the priest’s.”  And there’s your explanation what it means to be holy.  It means that God confiscates the property, it becomes the property of the priesthood, it becomes the property of the Temple.

 

Back to 22:9, what God is saying, I think is two fold, it has a conservationist overtone in the sense that the land is overworked at this point, but it also has another point and I think greater than the conservation viewpoint because mixed crops have a beneficial effect too, but the point here that I think God is saying is look, I’ve given you resources, I’ve given you certain categories to work with, trust Me to give you the produce, don’t try to engineer  your own little schemes to get more goods because in the end you know who’s going to get it, I’m going to get it all. So everything goes and becomes His property.

 

Verse 10, “Thou shalt not plow with an ox and an ass together,” and here we have, probably another humane provision in that the ox and the ass would pull differently and so on, and pull against one another, but the real heart and thrust here is that God has designed these two animals that are different, and putting them together like this essentially means you do not recognize God’s created categories.  You’re oblivious to them, you’re callous to them.  And Moses keeps pointing out that, watch the categories that God has put into creation. 

 

Now I want to show you an amazing thing.  This is the verse that Paul quotes in 2 Cor. 6 that everybody quotes; you’ve heard this again and again.  If you often wonder where Paul got a lot of his quotation, he was a student of the Old Testament.  The Old Testament gave Paul tremendous illustrations.  2 Cor. 6:14, “Be not unequally yoked together with unbelievers; for what fellowship has righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion has light with darkness? [7] And what concord has Christ with Belial?  Or what part has he that believes with an infidel?”  You see God has categories of light and darkness, truth and falsehood, the beautiful and the ugly, these are categories in creation and you can’t be insensitive to these. So what he’s saying here, “be not unequally yoked” means you have this kind of a situation that all too frequently occurs in local churches, here’s a saint, he’s a believer, here’s a person that’s not a believer and you have these people linked together in a religious organization and that is the first step toward suffering nationally and socially.  Whenever you link up people who have trusted the Lord Jesus Christ for their salvation and religious unbelievers you are asking for trouble.  The Ecumenical Movement is headed for destruction of our society because of this. We have linked believers and unbelievers together and they don’t pull in the same direction.  You’re trying to mix something that cannot be mixed; it’s like taking oil and water and trying to mix it sometime, it’ll never mix, one is oil, one is water and they cannot mix.  It’s the same point here, you take a believer and an unbeliever, you cannot link the two; you’ve got to have all believers or all unbeliever. 

 

Principle: in marriage ceremony I am authorized to marry two kinds of couples; I can marry two rank unbelievers, they may not be rank personally, they may be wonderful people, or I can marry two believers but under God’s authority I have no base to marry a believer with an unbeliever and I am very careful about that.  The more I’m in the ministry the more I’m becoming aware that this is a very sensitive issue. 

 

Deut. 22:11, “Thou shalt not wear a garment of various sorts, as of woolen and linen together,” again this is an illustration of Israel to watch for the divine categories in creation.  It does not apply to us so if you look at your look label and find out it’s 40% cotton and 20% nylon or something, just relax, it has nothing to do that.  It’s teaching Israel to observe categories.

 

Finally verse 12, “Thou shalt make thee fringes upon the four quarters of thy vesture, wherewith thou coverest thyself.”  You say what has this got to do with categories, category idiot maybe but what has this got to do with the idea of being separate.  Turn to Num. 15:37, here is where this idea of fringes on the garment came from.  There are four corners to these garments.  I have never figured out how they took a four-cornered garment and wrapped it around themselves and kept the hem even with the ground.  I’ve often speculated on how they did this but somehow they had a four-cornered garment and they wrapped it around themselves so that it came out even, without corners dragging in the dirt.  I don’t know how they did it but anyway there were four corners apparently on this thing, and on each corner they had to put a tassel and on the tassel is the color blue.  I have some pictures of this; they were to have a tassel on the end of this garment.  Here is why they were to have the tassel.  “And the LORD spoke unto Moses, saying, [38] Speak unto the children of Israel, and big them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments throughout their generations, and that they may put upon the fringe of the borders a ribbon [cord] of blue. [39] And it shall be upon you for a fringe, that ye may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the LORD and do them, and that ye seek not after your own heart and your own eyes, after which ye used to go a whoring, [40] That ye may remember, and do all My commandments, and be holy unto your God.” 

 

And the point here again is categories.  The category is Israel versus the Gentiles, and they always are to set themselves out, even by the way they dress, again showing that there’s a category here, a boundary that God has set into creation and they are not to transgress that boundary.  If you look up a few verses before verse 37 you see the history of why they were told to put these things on their garments.  Verse 32, “And while the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man who gathered sticks upon the sabbath day. [33] And they who found him gathering sticks brought him unto Moses and Aaron, and unto all the congregation. [34] And they put him in ward [prison], because it was not declared what should be done to him.”  Now it was a temporary jail.

 

Verse 35, “And the LORD said unto Moses, The man shall be surely put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp.”  And they kill him, verse 36.  The point was that this man had forgotten the fact that Israel had been given the Sabbath ordinance, and he was behaving like a Gentile, and God says look, I’m going to put fringes on your garments so that every time you get up in the morning you’re going to be reminded that you are different, and when you stoop down to do your work you’re going to see these fringes.  You’re going to remember that you are different than these people.  So this is an aid that God has built in to this whole mold of the community to remember that there’s a category here too. 

 

Let’s summarize: verses 1-12 what have we learned?  God, by His design and history and creation has set into creation categories, differences, and we are to respect those differences. We are to be sensitive to them, we are to be sensitive to truth and error, right and wrong, Paul takes this verse and applies it.  You can see how Paul is using this when he says “be not unequally yoked,” that’s his New Testament application of the principle.  So let’s take a hint from Paul, the application of what we have learned tonight.  Not only is it a social one, not only is the fact that people have rights because God has given them to them, not only that, in other words the government has not given them to them, they have inherent rights, not only is that true but we also have the fact that we as Bible-believing Christians are inherently different from the world because God has caused us to be born again and  you, if you have received Jesus Christ as you’re Savior, I don’t care what you’re wearing by way of clothes, I don’t care what your background is, your race is, your education is, the point is still this: that you are different by virtue of your spiritual birth and no matter what you do to cover this up, you are still different. God is going to treat you differently than He does the unbeliever, He is going to work with you differently in eternity than He does the unbelievers, and it goes down through life and no matter how you wish to get out of it, you cannot destroy the categories that God has made. So live like a believer and respect the categories.