Lesson 51
Community Rights – 23:1-8
Turn to Deut. 23. We have just finished a series on the sexual rights
that God’s Word gives to humanity. And
this is in the section of Deuteronomy that is dealing with the details of
life. These details of life extend from
chapters 12-26 and there’s a reason why these details of life all follow the
emphasis on the heart, “thou shalt love the Lord they God with all thy heart,”
chapters 5-11 deals with the inner mental attitude. Mental attitude always precedes exterior
action and so therefore the details of life are covered after the inner mental
attitudes are handled.
Now we have come and we have dealt with various sections of the details
of life and we are on the section that has to do with freedom, that denotes the
basis of freedom in all areas of life and the great thing that we’ve discovered
in chapter 22 was that freedom precedes from God-given rights. No government gives these rights, no
government takes away these rights; these rights are intrinsic by virtue of the
design of God. And therefore since this
is true it means that any government, any society that recognizes these rights
will tend to be a free society. Any
society that tends to cover up these rights, tends to distort these rights,
will be a totalitarian society.
In our country today are coming into a position where more and more the
divine institutions are coming under attack.
We have four divine institutions in the Bible. The first divine institution is volition;
volition is that institution given to all the human race and it is commonly
known as free will. It means that God
holds you responsible for your decisions, God doesn’t twist your arm, God
doesn’t shove the gospel down your throat and make you believe. It’s strictly up to you and therefore since
volition is given in God’s Word it means something else, it means that here you
have the basis of all true human freedom.
Here is the basis for prosecution of criminals under the law, you hold
them judicially responsible because they were free to do or not to do and if
volition was not there then they would be robots and robots cannot be
disciplined. So volition is very important
and it is the fundamental divine institution.
The second divine institution is marriage, and it’s here where certain
sexual rights are given and outlined in Deut. 22:13-30 and we covered these in
great detail, working through and showing why there are certain performance,
certain rules given to those who are outside this institution of marriage and
those who are inside the institution of marriage, based upon sexual rights that
every person has. And then we have
family, the divine institution of family, and then we have the divine institution
of nation.
All of these are common to the entire human race and you can study
history by noting where these divine institutions come under attack. Every
place these divine institutions come under attack you will find the human race
weakened, such as in our country. In our
country nationalism is being replaced by internationalism, the emphasis upon
world government to solve world problems and of course we know from the Bible
there will be world government but on the terms that Jesus Christ Himself lays
down. Then we have family and the family
institution is coming under attack today largely through the school system,
where the school has essentially come into the family, taken the children out,
giving them secular education but all the while undermining the parent’s
authority, making the parents out to be the biggest set of goofs that ever
walked the face of the earth, etc. And
this again is a calculated, deliberate and in some cases communist inspired
assault against the family structure.
It’s very easy to trace in certain areas that we can see even here. Then we find marriage coming under attack
because the doctrine of free love, etc. permeating our society, emphasis upon
sex outside of the boundaries, etc. sex with no boundaries and we have seen
that sex without boundaries destroys sex, always has, always will and will
continue to do so as long as man lives.
Finally a more subtle form which we are going to deal with tonight, the
area of volition because the divine institution of volition is very difficult
to protect. It can only be protected by
giving people options. In other words,
if you’re not given the freedom of choice, whether you have volition or not,
it’s immaterial. If, for example, we ran
our country the way the communist party ran
We can go to the right, to anarchy and that’s the other extreme, where
you allow everything to happen. You say
well, we’ve got volition why not let it loose and let anything happen that will
happen. And of course in the end this
destroys volition because volition requires a framework in which to operate and
be protected from other people’s volition.
That’s why we have policemen, we have to have law in society because you
as an individual exercise your volition but I don’t want my volition curtailed
because you are interfering with my life by your volition. So we have to establish boundaries and
limits.
The tendency in a society is to swing one way or the other, to go to
totalitarianism or anarchy but the result is always the same, the destruction
of a person’s right of choice. This is
why, for example, forms of socialism that are coming into this country are
absolutely wrong and are geared to destroy humanity. All schemes of socialism basically operate on
one theory, the theory of the least common denominator. We have people that are
intelligent and people that are stupid and we always have and we have people
that are educated and people that have no education, and by the way, that does
not necessarily correlate with their intelligence. We are graduating the largest
group of ignorant people in the history or our country. Just because someone has gone four years in
college doesn’t mean a thing. I have met
people who have been self-educated, have never gone out of grammar school that
know more and are more perceptive thinkers than the college graduate.
So education and natural intelligence are not necessarily
correlated. So what happens, the
socialist comes along and says well you people up here are giving those people
down there an inferiority complex and you have no right to be smart; you
businessmen who make profits, you’ve got no right to make profits because
you’re taking money away from other people and all the rest of it, so what
we’re going to do is find out the least common denominator because we can’t
pull people up so what is it? The least
common denominator equals moron and that’s exactly what socialism always tries
to do, reduces everybody to the moron level.
So now instead of recognizing merit on the basis of merit alone, we are
afraid we might insult somebody so we won’t educate our people, we’ll keep them
stupid. The business man that has a
natural ability to make money, he has no right to make money because in so
doing he might take some money away from somebody that could be on the welfare
roles.
And you see our country is being destroyed and our county is being
destroyed by a very simple principle; look at the population age-wise, look at
the population under 20, they do not sustain themselves, they’re not earning
the money, and they are all being supported by someone else. Look at the population over 60, increasing
percent; they aren’t supporting themselves, they’re being supported by
you. Now you figure it out, how long can
you take a reducing percent of the population and use them to support everybody
else? Sooner or later it’s all going to
come crashing down, when the middle class, one of the most maligned groups in
our society, is being systematically milked of all of its money.
In this passage you are going to see a principle
Now it’s the same thing when it comes to a large community. When we join
together in a community we have the right to expect the other members of that
community to stay with it. So beginning
in verse 1 we have the restrictions that
So here in verses 1-8 we have the immigration laws of
Here we have three cases in these first 8 verses of restrictions against
people who were disqualified from membership in the nation. It is not saying these people were not saved;
I will prove to you later that it has nothing to do with salvation. This has to do with protecting the team and
keeping the quality up. It has nothing
to do with salvation!
Verse 1 refers to eunuchs, and these people were used throughout the
ancient world for a very important purpose.
Actually the word “eunuch” comes from an Arabic word which means
bed-keeper. He was in charge of the
harem of the king and obviously there is implication as to why he is a
eunuch. That’s why he was trustworthy,
he could be trusted around the king’s harem and later on the word “eunuch” did
not mean a physical eunuch and this is the explanation people have read this
and say oh, I see thousands of eunuchs in the Scriptures. Yeah, but you can’t tell from the word
“eunuch” whether they are a physical eunuch or whether they are simply, it
means one who is trustworthy who has an intimate officer. That’s the second
meaning of the word “eunuch” and it’s impossible to tell from the context which
is meant.
So verse 1 restricts the entrance of these kinds of people and refers to
a common practice in the ancient east.
You would have a king and he would surround himself, his body guard
would be made up of eunuchs. For
example, if you go to the library and pull out a book called Pritchard’s
Ancient Near East in Pictures you can go thumbing through hundreds of pages of
archeology and you will see there eunuchs, and what they looked like and you’ll
always see them around the king’s throne.
And they were always there because these were the trustworthy men. The king figured it he could trust them with
his women he could trust them with anything.
And therefore since he could trust these men they were usually men of
tremendous influence and tremendous impact.
Now why is it that these people were excluded? Because first of all, mutilation is never
condoned in the Word of God with one exception which we’re coming on in chapter
25. Mutilation is always wrong. Turn to 14:1 and you’ll see it again. There are various reasons why mutilation is
never condoned. Mutilation was a
religious practice done by the pagan religions of the Ancient Near East. Now, mutilation has several things against it
as far as God is concerned. For one
thing it means suffering and it means suffering because of religion, and God in
the Bible is always against religion because religion always causes suffering;
religion always has and always will cause suffering. That is why Christianity
is not a religion; Christianity is a personal relationship with Jesus
Christ. It has nothing to do with
religion. Religion is man seeking the
approbation of God by his own good works. Christianity is man serving God
through regeneration and the empowering of the Holy Spirit, absolutely two
different things. But religion has
always caused suffering in the world and always will cause suffering in the
world. If you are presenting the gospel
to someone and they say oh, well, you Christians have always caused suffering,
the religious wars and all the rest, you can quickly excuse that very simple-minded
objection to the gospel because basically it’s grounded on a misinterpretation
of history. True Christianity has never
caused suffering, it is always a distortion of Christianity and that point is
very important!
You can criticize Christians all you want to and you still haven’t negated
the gospel because you haven’t attacked the gospel until you can show the
system is wrong, not the people. And
until you’ve done that you haven’t touched Christianity so I don’t care if
you’ve had bad experiences with Christians, it doesn’t impress me in the
least. I have bad experiences all the
time with Christians, it’s my business.
You think you have problems with Christians, I see more problems in a
week than you’ll see in a month, or a year; that’s my job. So you’re not telling me anything new to tell
me why I had my big toe stepped on one day by some Christian and because of
this I refuse to accept the gospel, it doesn’t interest me, etc. That’s wrong because it has nothing to do
with Christianity, it’s because of some clod that happens to come along and
identify himself as a Christian and he fouls up and so on, but that doesn’t
discredit Christianity. So don’t ever
retreat because some unbeliever comes to you… I knew some Christian and you
should see the way he lives and I’m so fed up with the way this Christian
lives… just like water off a duck’s back, it doesn’t impress me in the least
and should never impress you.
Deut. 14:1, “You are the children of the LORD your God: ye shall not cut
yourselves, nor make any baldness between your eyes for the dead,” now that
doesn’t mean you get a shave on the bridge of your nose, this means that you
get kind of the army haircut, this is what the Canaanites used to have. One of the amusing things to me when I went
in the service was when they lined everybody up and some of these boys with
their long hair, I just loved to watch this because they sit in the barber
chair and these army barbers just take one swoop with that little clipper right
down the middle and in two minutes the guy has a nice little reverse Mohegan
hair cut, then the kid had to have the rest of his hair taken off too, and that
was the whole point. But that’s the kind
of shaving that’s going on here.
“Between your eyes” means between your eyes on a line over your head, it
doesn’t mean right here on the nose.
This baldness was a religious symbol and it was a mutilation symbol, so
therefore God is against this. For one
thing, He is against suffering, there’s enough suffering in life and religion
you will find will always add to suffering, always adds to suffering. People try to earn their points with God by
coming to church and they hate church.
People come in here and it looks like somebody has twisted their arm or
they’ve come to impress somebody in their family and they’re miserable and I
feel sorry for them. Sometimes I feel
like stopping the service and say we’ll all stand up and you can sneak out the
back door, that would relieve a lot of suffering. But this is what people go through to impress
other people and it’s just a waste of time. So God never condones
suffering.
The second reason why this is wrong is that it is a sign of apostate
religion. Apostate religion always has
this mutilation device and they had it throughout the Ancient Near East. The third reason why this is wrong is because
it makes man less than what God intended him to be. You see, you never mutilate somebody to make
him better than what he was. After
you’ve mutilated him you’ve ruined him, you’ve distorted the form that God has
given to that man. That’s why mutilation
is never condoned with one judicial exception in the whole Bible, because you
make man something less than he was, something less than he was when he left
the hand of God. Therefore that is never
condoned.
Now back to Deut. 23 and we have the eunuch problem, and for these three
reasons this is wrong, this is a false mutilation and it is not condoned in the
Word of God. And now we come to a fourth
reason why mutilation is not condoned and to take this we have to go to Isaiah
56:5. This is speaking about the
But in Isaiah 56:4, “For thus saith the LORD unto the eunuchs that keep
my Sabbaths,” these are men who have either forcibly been mutilated as so many
scholars think Daniel was, because of the captivity and so on, or they have
mutilated themselves while unbelieving Gentiles. But nevertheless at some point they’ve
trusted the Lord and now their pattern of obedience is seen because they
“habitually keep my Sabbaths, and they choose habitually the things that please
Me, and they take hold of My covenant.”
These now are believers. Verse 5,
“Even unto them will I give in Mine house,” and this is “will,” future, not
present, future, future referring to the Millennial Kingdom and eternal state,
“even unto them will I give in Mine house and within My walls a place and a
name better than that of sons and of daughters,” now here you are introduced to
the fourth reason why the eunuchs were prohibited from the nation Israel.
Principle: A eunuch can’t have children and therefore a eunuch cannot
hold that which is owned according to the judicial and cultural systems of the
day. So God says in verse 5, even though
the sons and daughters, even though they can’t have a family, even though this
is all true, I will give them something better, I will give them an everlasting
name. God will pick up the slack and
he’ll supply that they physically cannot generate. So this is the fourth reason against the
eunuchs that they could not hold property and hold onto it in the nation
Verse 2, we have the second restriction.
They would not allow another kind of person and this is not an
illegitimate child. Verse 2 is
translated in the King James as though it is an illegitimate child. If that word disturbs you, I’m sorry, but
that is a legitimate word, you will find it in Webster’s Dictionary,
bastard. That is a legitimate word and
is not a curse word so don’t accuse me of dropping curse words in the
pulpit. “A bastard shall not enter into
the congregation of the LORD; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter
the congregation of the LORD forever.”
This word actually was not known in the time the King James was
translated. It’s manzer, and manzer is not
known, nobody knew what this word was until later on somebody began to dig
around some Arabic and it turns out that the word means to spoil. That’s the verb form, spoil.
Well, they wondered what this is and it turns out that what this is is a
person who is born under the conditions of Deut. 22:30. Remember I said last time we said that there
were certain times when marriage is illegitimate in the Old Testament. There
are certain times when marriage is eliminated for two reasons. Remember in Leviticus I said there were two
categories of eliminated marriages. One
category was when the male and the female were closely genetically related;
that was obvious, we have that today, don’t marry sisters, brothers, etc. So when the male and the female are closely
related physically and genetically that marriage was illegitimate in God’s
sight and prohibited under the Mosaic Law.
Then we had that second category that Moses used as an illustration to
the whole category in verse 30, and remember I said we don’t know why this
happened but also the Bible prohibits marriage where, say the male is related
physically to another male who has been married to this female. This man dies, he cannot marry this
woman. Why this is so I don’t know.
There is one exception, Levirate marriage in the Bible. But nevertheless apart from that one
exception this is prohibited. Why this is so perhaps someday we will find out,
as I will point out to you things in this chapter that for years were
enigmas. Why did God say no? Why did God say no, and science suddenly
discovers why, there was a hidden factor that they didn’t know about
before. So evidently there is a physical
factor related to this kind of a situation and God has just prohibited it in
His Bible. The children of such unions
are called by this term, nemzer, they
are called spoiled children and children evidently that have some genetic
defect, some problem with them. I’ll
show later on how this works out in a real historical situation. Again why they eliminate this it’s hard to
see, unless it is because these children, by the very background in which they
were raised and because of their physical genetic structure are susceptible in
a way we know not of to heresy and false religion. It sounds like it is because of certain
examples which I’ll show you in the Old Testament.
Now the third thing, verses 3-8, and this is a restriction against
certain national entities. Verse 3, “An
Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD.” Now there’s a tremendous history behind this
and to pick up the reason for this because we covered this when we started the
book of Deuteronomy and I’m sure that your memories have faded so let’s turn
back to Deut. 2 and find out why the Ammonites and the Moabites have been
eliminated from the nation. There are
several reasons why they are eliminated, all of them very good reasons. Deut. 2:9-11. What is the geographical
situation? Here’s the eastern
Mediterranean, here’s the Sea of Galilee, here’s the Dead Sea, here’s the Gulf
of Aqaba, the Jewish people are coming up in a tremendous force, and they come
up here and for forty years wander around just south of a point called
Kadesh-barnea. At the time of the
discipline ends and that discipline ends the year that the last person died of
that generation, which was Aaron, when that last person died then the discipline
is removed and now they begin to move into the land. But they have a problem, because they have
two national entities that are in the way.
One national entity is called Moab and the other called Ammon. Both of these national entities were in a
blocking position so that the Jews couldn’t come up through this way and then
come into the land. They had to bypass
this. But when they bypassed it they
made request to the nation to find out whether the nation at least would
sustain them physically, would they sell them things even, because remember you
had a mass of approximately two to three million people moving up here and the
problems of logistics were quite formidable, so they had to have supplies from
some place.
And so they asked in verse 9, it turns out in the background they asked
Moab. Well the Lord told them look, when
you move north I want you to leave Moab alone, “neither contend with them in
battle; for I will not give thee of their land for a possession, because I have
given Ar unto the children of Lot for a possession. [10] The Emim dwelt there
in times past, a people great and many, and tall as the Anakim, [11] Who were
also accounted giants, as the Anakim; but the Moabites call them Emim.” Now what’s the purpose of that notice in the Bible? Again there is never a wasted word in
Scripture. All these words are put in there to fill you in on certain events of
history that determine why things happen as they do. These people were going up here and they were
to bypass the nation, not cut through it.
Reason: because Moab and Ammon were both from Abraham’s family. I’ll get into the genealogy in a moment but
they’re related. And God had done
something because of this relation. He
gave them the land, notice verse 9, Moab has been given a certain land. So down in the south section you have Moab
given the land of the Emims.
Who are these people? The Emims
nobody knows about except we have certain archeological hints as to who these
people were. There was a giant race that
dwelt in this area of the world at the time Abraham moved into the land.
They’re called the Rephaim in Scripture.
We don’t know much about these strange people but they evidently were
tremendous, they were giants. Archeology
reports the bedstead of one of these men was 20 feet long and so these people
were strong powerful and feared people.
Abraham came in and had a lot of activities with these people; that is
hidden in that little short paragraph back in Genesis about Melchizedek and if
you study that through they have… Abraham had a large amount to do with the
ultimate annihilation of this race.
But these people were all inhabiting the area and then when the Jews
came back they found them all missing except for a pocket of these giants that
was up here called Og, King of Bashan and Moses eliminated him. But about two-thirds of the population was
wiped out. Why? Because in the meantime, while the Jews were
down in Egypt, God sent Moab in here and he eliminated the Emims, these are
these giants, and gave Moab the victory over them. So you have a preview of what Israel is going
to do to Canaan. On a small scale what
God does, He takes the small nation of Moab and says look, you’re not going to
be half as blessed as the nation Israel, you don’t have the covenant relationship
but I’m going to bless you anyway and so He say now you’re going to move into
this land and I’m going to give you this land from the hands of the
giants. And then He did the same thing
with the Ammonites and that is found in verses 19-23, “And when you come near
over against the children of Ammon, distress them not, nor meddle with them;
for I will not give thee of the land of the children of Ammon any possession,
because I have given it unto the children of Lot for a possession. [20] (That
was also accounted a land of giants; giants dwelt therein in old time, and the
Ammonites call them the Zamzummim, [21] A people great and many, and tall as
the Anakim, but the LORD destroyed them before them; and they succeeded them,”
etc. and the Lord destroyed them. So
here you have the second section of this super race destroyed.
Now what’s the point? God, in His
grace, has allowed these people to move in and conquer. It was an act of grace related not because
God loved Ammon, not because God loved Moab but because God loved Abraham’s
family and people who are associated with that family received the
blessing.
Now let’s go back to Genesis 19 and find out the basis for this conquest
that we’ve just noticed. Gen. 19:30,
here is how Ammon and Moab came to be, they are children who are called manzer, and Ammon and Moab are some of
these children and you’ll notice a strange thing about them. These children
were born out of an illegitimate union and they turned out to be apostate in
history. Verse 30, “Lot went up out of
Zoar,” now who is Lot? Let’s get this
straight, here’s the family tree. You
have a man by the name of Terah, he is a Gentile. Terah has three sons, Nahor,
Abraham, and Haran, and these three sons of Terah come into the Land. Nahor means snorer, this guy had sleep
problems of something, and he was just called a snorer. Abraham wasn’t called
Abraham; he was called Abram, father of high places, Avram, and then
Haran. Now Abram had a son by the name
of Isaac; Isaac had two sons, Esau and Jacob.
And out of Esau comes Edom. Now
Haran also had some sons and his son was Lot and now you’re about to see how
Lot has his sons, Ammon and Moab.
“And Lot went up out of Zoar, and dwelt in the mountain; and his two
daughters with him; for he feared to dwell in Zoar: and he dwelt in a cave, he
and his two daughters. [31] And the first-born said unto the younger, Our
father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the
manner of all the earth. [32] Come, let us make our father drunk with wine, and
we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father,” and so on. So these were children born out of an
incestuous union and these people turn out in history to be people to whom God
gives His grace and yet they go negative.
God gives them a great opportunity of coming in and displacing these
people and having just as much a promised land as Israel would have just across
the other side of the Dead Sea and yet these people go negative and we find out
in history, not covered in Deut. 2, that they rejected, and when Israel came
through here they did everything they could to stop it.
So therefore God lowers the boom according to Gen. 12. Let’s look at Gen. 12 and you’ll see a curse
that operates throughout and is the explanation of the exclusion of certain peoples
from Israel. Gen. 12:3, this is one of
the universal basic laws of history; it will always operate, always has
operated, you see it operating now in 1969 and 1970. “I will bless them that bless thee, but I
must curse him that curses thee.” What
is that saying? Notice the shift, “I
will bless them,” plural, “who bless you, but the one” singular, “who curses
you I will curse him.” What does that mean?
This means that God has so designed history that when people lay their
hands on the Jews they are going to get disciplined. Every act of anti-Semitism
will always be paid back and doubled by God, and every nation that has gone
anti-Semitic has never existed. They’ll
exist for a while but they’ll always destroy themselves. Anti-Semitism will destroy a national entity
and the United States will go down the day it turns anti-Semitic; always will
because of Genesis 12:3, “I bless them that bless thee, and curse him that
curses thee.” This is not favored
treatment to the Jewish person, this is simply saying that the Jewish person
has a mission to perform in history and that when people, the Gentiles,
interfere with that role, then the Gentiles receive God’s discipline. God will
preserve the Jews regardless of whether the Gentiles like it or not.
Back to Deut. 23, now we’ve had some background on Ammon and Moab and
let’s see if now we can understand why these people are excluded from
Israel. Verse 3, again, Ammon and Moab
excluded by the laws of immigration.
Verse 4, “Because” here’s the explanation, “they met you not with bread
and with water in the way.” Now look
what God has done with Ammon; He gave Ammon and Moab the land, the resources
and He gave them the victory. Now they
are to share that victory, the bread and the water are the fruit and the produce
of the land. They are to take this and to share it with the Jews that are
coming into the land. “But because they
met you not with bread and with water in the way, when ye came forth out of
Egypt; and because they hired against thee Balaam, the son of Beor, of Pethor
of Mesopotamia, to curse thee. [5] Nevertheless the LORD thy God would not
hearken unto” this because “… the LORD thy God loved thee,” they were in a
covenant relationship.
Now one of the most horrible curses ever pronounced in history, verse 6,
“Thou shalt never seek their peace nor you shall never seek their prosperity
all their days forever.” And this is one
of those rare times in history when God has said don’t preach the Word. Israel, you are a missionary nation, you are
to preach the Word all over the world but I want you never to go into this
area, you just keep the Word from them.
Don’t you ever seek their peace, don’t you ever seek their prosperity;
they sentenced themselves to doom by their actions. Now there is only one other race in history
that received this sentence and that was the Canaanites, and you remember what
happened to the Canaanites. The
Canaanites were destroyed physically.
Why then didn’t God destroy the Ammonites and the Moabites? Why didn’t He destroy them physically? Because they are related back through Terah
to Abraham and his family and evidently God isn’t going to touch any member of
that family.
So although these people have gone on negative volition, they’ve had the
grace of God extended to them, they’re rejected, rejected, rejected, God says
all right, that’s it, I’m not giving you another chance. Boom, you’re out, you just struck out, that
was the third strike right there. The Canaanites struck out and then God
removed them physically but not this case.
So here, “thou shalt not seek their peace nor their prosperity all thy
days forever,” is one very horrifying judgment.
God is withholding the gospel from these people. They had the chance to hear and they
rejected, rejected, rejected, so God says fine, I’ll take My gospel and go
elsewhere, you’re not interested in it so we’ll move on to better places. And of course this is a legitimate tool of
missionary activity, if a missionary is in the area and people have heard the
gospel and don’t respond, missionaries have all the right in the world to just
pick up his sack and move elsewhere, go to somebody who appreciates the Word of
God, don’t waste your time talking to people that have rejected, they’ve had
their opportunity.
Verse 7, now here’s a warning, in spite of all these things, God holds
them back on certain points. “Thou shalt
not abhor an Edomite; for he is thy brother.”
You see, Edom comes from the other side of the family, it goes back to
this family tree, Edom comes from Esau, so therefore he’s closely related and
although he rejected the covenant with the birthright, etc. nevertheless Esau
and his descendants are treated respectably in the Bible. “Thou shalt not abhor an Edomite; for he is
thy brother. Thou shalt not abhor an
Egyptian; because thou wast a sojourner in his land.” the Egyptians, strange as
it may seem, are always looked upon in a sense favorably. Although Egypt itself is a symbol of Satan,
the individual Egyptians are never so treated in Scripture. God says those people, when the time came in
history that I had to discipline you, because you remember why the Jews went
down into Egypt, there’s a reason behind it.
You have Abraham. What happened
to Abraham? He was a liar, he was taking
a vacation one summer down in Egypt and Pharaoh got eyes on his wife [blank
spot].
And so Abraham was worried about what would happen and he tried to pass
his wife off as his sister and of course when he did this then God began to
discipline the Empire of Egypt, and so Abraham was a liar, and then he had a
son, Isaac. And Isaac tried to do the
same thing with his wife, Rebekah, and he was a worse liar, and finally you get
to Jacob and the name means he’s a liar.
So you see, he’s gotten worse and worse, and this is what has happened in
the third generation. In the third
generation this sin is amplified and multiplied and multiplied, fathers pass it
on to sons, sons has amplified it and passed it on to his son and so by this
time God says you people need a little heat to learn, a little pressure, so He
sent them down to a pressure cooker called Egypt. And for 400 years they were slaves in Egypt,
until God was ready to pull them out again.
But the reason why God takes Egypt, and not Babylon, for example, was
that Egypt had a policy of segregation, and it was a place where Egypt,
segregating themselves, they could not stand Semitic peoples and so they
wouldn’t even eat with them. That’s why
when you read about Joseph it says that Pharaoh wouldn’t eat with him, just
wouldn’t sit down at the same table. And
the reason God picked that nation out was because the Jews had the tendency at
this day to suck in religion, human viewpoint, religion, all the time, and God
knew that if they stayed in the land they’d become totally infiltrated and so
He says all right, I’m going to take you down to Egypt and you’re not going to
have a chance to get anything because I’m going to take you into a society that
they just hate your guts, so you’re not going to get a chance to communicate or
anything else and you’re just not going to pick up any religion from
Egypt.
So this is why they were down here and although Egypt, in one sense
disciplined, in another sense they are always looked upon as performing a
service for Israel. “Thou shalt never
abhor an Egyptian.”
Verse 8, “Those [the] children that are begotten of them shall enter
into the congregation of the LORD in their third generation.” Now let’s apply this and summarize what we’ve
learned in verses 1-8. We found several
things that we can apply to history. The
first thing that we find is that there is a cultural, racial, linguistic
continuity throughout history for various national entities and groups. And although historians today love to take
the animistic approach where there’s just a few people here and they say the
United States is made up of a bunch of people from here and elsewhere, etc. God
doesn’t look upon history that way. God
looks upon history as a set of groups of people and these sets exist down
through history and have a continuity to them.
And the generations that follow always inherit the mess of generations
beforehand and you can see this, you can see it in European history, you can
see it in the history of Britain, you can begin to see it in the history of the
United States, you can see it in the history of India, you can see it in the
history of North Africa, you can see many, many sections of the world that have
been exposed to this kind of history. So
therefore you have God’s very concern about Israel, when He takes one of these
national entities and He protects it.
Israel is a culture, Israel is a language and God is going to set a
little barrier around Israel and He says look, I don’t want any ideas coming in
and I don’t want people infiltrating this nation. So God sets up immigration barriers against
them. It is not saying Israel is any
better. I’ve shown you that this has
nothing to do with salvation; it is to protect the quality of the nation so
they can do the job that God wants them to do.
The second principle we learn from verses 1-8 is that Israel has to
have… the walls that were made actually were two types, they restricted against
people and restricted against ideas.
We’ll get to the ideas next time or the practices may be a better word
than ideas, the practices. But certain
people that stood for things that were apostate, certain people had been so
thoroughly enmeshed in the Gentile world were just eliminated.
We have a third factor; this did not affect the salvation of the
individual. I gave Isaiah 56:1-7, I will
now show you one further section, Ruth 1:16.
Why is this book in the Canon of Scripture? To prove a point, Ruth was a Moabitess, and
by the way, it’s interesting, she is in the line of the Lord Jesus Christ, and
this book is written to prove a certain point and that was that when the person
is born again, when the person is a believer, they are allowed into the nation
in spite of their background. Verse 16,
often used at marriage ceremonies, “And Ruth said, Entreat me not to leave
thee, or to turn away from following after thee; for where you go, I will go;
and where you lodge, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God,
my God.” The principle is that Ruth at
this point did not come under this restriction because she had faith. At this point she trusted the Lord Jesus
Christ as He was known in the Old Testament economy and was born again and she
came into the nation and was allowed to move in. In this book that’s the whole argument, that
when the Moabites and these people do trust the Lord then it’s all right.
To confirm this, turn to Nehemiah 13:23-27, “In those days also saw I
Jews who had married women of Ashdod, of Ammon, and of Moab; [24] And their
children spoke half in the speech of Ashdod, and could not speak the Jews’ language,
but according to the language of each people.”
That immediately tells you what’s on the author’s mind; it’s not a
racial prejudice that’s going on here.
That’s not the point; the point is that the racial entity has a tendency
to perform in a certain way, there’s a certain cultural factor that comes into
operation and that’s the point. The
point isn’t that the women are Moabites and Ammonites, the point is that the
women are unregenerate and they are unbelievers and they’re teaching their
children these forms of Gentile religions and they’re doing it, of course,
through the language.
The fastest way to break down a national entity is to exchange the
language. And one of the greatest men
that proved that point was Alexander the Great.
Alexander the Great conquered a tremendous amount of real estate in his
day but Alexander was a smart fellow, he knew one thing, there is only one way
to hold people together and that is give them a common language. So Alexander called all his linguists in and
said look, I am not going to learn all these cotton-picking languages, when I
go in and conquer Persia I am not going to learn Persian. When I go into Israel I am not going to learn
Hebrew. When I go down to Egypt I am not going to learn Egyptian. They are
going to learn my language. But
Alexander had a problem because Alexander had four kinds of Greek and he
couldn’t decide which Greek it was, so he had his men together and they did
manufacture the only, the first and last artificial language ever made in the
history of the human race called the Koine Greek. The Koine Greek was manufactured by Alexander
and his linguists so that he could give orders to his army, soldiers, etc. all
in one language; he didn’t bother with anybody else’s language. And everywhere Alexander went, Alexander said
I’m not learning your language and I’m not learning your customs, you’re
learning mine. And that’s how Alexander held the empire together as long as he
did. Of course later on it broke up with
the Seleucid kings and so on, but Alexander was a brilliant man in this area,
he realized if you can change a person’s language you can change the person,
you can change the whole society.
So verse 25, Nehemiah is shook up about this change in language that’s
going on. So he said, “I contended with
them, and cursed them, and smote certain of them, and plucked off their hair,”
you get the impression this guy wasn’t too diplomatic, “and made them swear by
God, saying, Ye shall not give your daughters unto their sons, nor take their daughters
unto your sons, or for yourselves.” And
verse 26 tells you why, “Did not Solomon, king of Israel, sin by these
things? Yet among many nations was there
no king like him, who was beloved of his God, and God made him king over all
Israel; nevertheless, even him did outlandish [foreign] women cause to sin.”
Now “outlandish women,” if you ever hear that expression here’s an explanation
for outlandish women; that’s not just a slang term, it’s literally they are out
of the land, that’s what it means here, it’s almost a literal translation into
the English of the Hebrew word. It means
these women have come into the family relationship with a culture and with a
language that is utterly foreign to that nation and they are tearing it apart
and Nehemiah said I am not having anything to do with that.
Now can’t you just see Nehemiah today, he’d say oh my, we have to go to
the United Nations and obviously all these people, we have human rights and we
believe in everyone’s the same, etc. and we’re just going to open our gates to
any Tom, Dick and Harry that shows up and of course you ruin the nation. Now application to the United States: what
have we done in our history? We started out as a nation represented by northern
Europe basically, northern Europe and a Reformation culture. And this basically is the background for the
United States and this is the background that gave you the law, that is the law
that we used to enjoy before the Supreme Court started writing its own;
Reformation law, law that was based on the Word of God. There’s a tremendous
painting in the Supreme Court Building in Switzerland and this painting has the
statue of justice with a sword and the sword is pointing down to a book and on
the book is “The Law of God.” And the man who painted that painting understood
that the source of law are the absolutes given in the Word of God. You get away from that and you have the
obvious problem.
Why is it the Supreme Court can’t stop pornography through the
mail? Can you imagine the Puritans
having pornographic material through the mail; they’d stop it good and
quick. But the Supreme Court is helpless
because the Supreme Court has gone over to a system of law of Oliver Wendell Holmes
and others who have come into this country who said I don’t believe in such a
thing as an absolute any more. Well,
once you’ve dumped the absolutes no wonder you can’t… nothing becomes bad then,
everything is a wash, and that’s what’s happened in our country. How did it happen? Infiltration from other cultures, it’s as
simple as that. Our immigration pattern
in this country brought in a lot of it.
This is not being prejudice against certain people, this is simply
saying that when you incorporate people into a nation you’ve got to understand
that they are going to bring into your nation concepts alien to the nation for
which it was founded. It’s always going
to happen.
That is why, turning back to Deut. 23 there was provision in verse 8 for
these kind of people. Notice the wise
provision, verse 8, “The children that are begotten of them shall enter into
nation [congregation] but only after the third generation.” Do you see what God did? Here you have a national entity. Pretend this is the USA; you have people that
come to the United States of America, say around 1900, out of a culture of
Reformation northern European culture.
Now what, if you apply verse 8 you wouldn’t exclude them, you’d let them
come into the country but you do not allow them to participate in the civil and
social functions until the third generation, after they have assimilated the
culture. In that way you preserve your
culture. But no, we’re too busy shipping
out our culture, we’re too busy apologizing for it. America is the world’s biggest door mat and
everything we do is wrong. You see the weakening of America’s moral fiber; it’s
not only just due to a breakdown inside our nation, it is due from 1800 on down
to about 1930 with the infiltration of all sorts of groups of non-northern
European culture. And that is what has
broken our culture down and has contributed to it, and of course lack of Bible
teaching is the number one factor, and we are right on down because we will not
take a stand; we will not say look, we have a culture here called American and
that culture is going to stand and we’re not about to apologize for any nation
under the sun. It’s our culture, we have
a right to it and that’s it.
You can see the Jewish people back in the Old Testament, they didn’t
apologize for it. God had given them this culture, it was their heritage and
they kept it and they weren’t about to apologize to anybody or any person for
it. But we have lost the concepts of the
value of culture and heritage in history, and patriotism, and it’s all
basically due to a religious problem, America has gotten away from the
absolutes that we had. When the men came
to this country, the Puritans, they formed one of the greatest systems of
government the human race has ever known and don’t buy this stuff that your
children are getting in the schools that knock the Puritans, and they say these
old fuddy-duds, etc. All right, they had a few idiosyncrasies but don’t ever
forget if it hadn’t been for them you wouldn’t be sitting where you are because
it was the Puritans that gave us the freedom that we enjoy and they got it from
the Word of God.