Lesson 52

Anticipation of Modern Science – 23:9-15

Chapters 22-25 of the book of Deuteronomy deal with various rights and it has pertinence today because a lot of people think that the government gives people rights, the so-called civil rights movement, etc. is actually a fallacy; the government has never given anyone any rights and the government can never take away any rights. If your rights are given to you by government, you know what, government can take it right back. So the only basis for true freedom is to assert that God has given certain rights to you and only God can take them back. The government does not happen to be God, although it thinks it is oftentimes. Therefore this section of the Word of God is very important because it gives you the basis of rights. We’ve gone through several sections of Moses’ sermon and we’ve covered the inherent rights in Deut. 22:1-12 and there we discussed the inherent rights, rights that come about, simple property rights, etc.

Deut. 22:13 to the end of the chapter we discovered sexual rights that come about by God’s design of marriage. This was an important section; we spent 4-5 weeks covering this and explaining it. If you would see that rights, sexual rights, are there by God’s plan and not by mans. Man can’t take them away and although man would love to break down the divine institution of marriage through the doctrine of free love, etc. nevertheless those rights still stand and any time people are promiscuous, anytime people cross those boundaries they are infringing on, not only their own rights, but they are infringing upon their partner’s rights. And whether their partner likes it or not, might like it, but still he has no authority to bargain away those rights given to him by God in verses 13-30.

Last time we began chapter 23:1-18 which is a section that deals with community rights. The principle is this, that you have a group of individuals living inside of a community, the wholesomeness of the team depends on each individual person’s behavior. You can go to athletics and see how this works out, you can see it on the football team, how if one man stays out of training and it’s a crucial play and he doesn’t block the right player or is a little off on his passing and some player intercepts, the whole team suffers because one man wasn’t doing his job. So the emphasis in verses 1-18 is that everybody on the team does their job. And to insure that everybody on the team is going to do their job, verses 1-8 is a series of exclusions against membership on the team. This is the immigration laws of Israel. Immigration laws—and Israel was an exclusivist nation, she didn’t let anybody come in like the United States has very stupidly done throughout history, letting every Tom, Dick and Harry come to this country. When this country was founded by the Puritans it was founded by people who were strong in the Word of God and yet throughout our history we have persistently let in people from other cultures that have essentially had zero background in the Reformation, Christianity, etc. with the result that we have destroyed our country. We have destroyed it from the inside because our people no longer accept the Word of God, they are negative toward it but we have also hurt our country from the outside by letting various people into our country that have brought foreign ideologies, etc.

Therefore verses 1-8 are a series of restrictions that Israel had made, not because she was saying these people couldn’t be saved. We showed you that was not the case; the case was that Israel had a job to do before God and could not allow certain people to be on her team, and was not going to allow certain people to be on the team. This is where Christian organizations, I have discovered, are very much behind Scripture, because certain Christian organizations have sort of a sentimentality about them that they’ll allow anybody that comes along so long as they’re sincere, and they mention the word Jesus every other syllable or something and this qualifies them for being a missionary in some organization, or being pastor, or being a seminary professor somewhere because they’re sincere. And because we have allowed anybody in because on the basis of their sincerity, we have hurt ourselves. We have allowed people to come in who are liable to the tongues movement; we have allowed legalists to come in; we have allowed people that have come in and destroyed the fundamentals of Christianity because of our sentimentalism. You can never be a leader and you can never have a going organization if you are going to kick back to sentimentalism and allow it to control the situation. It’s principle or sentimentalism, one or the other.

The last part of this section, verses 9-18 deal with barriers not to people but to ideas. So here we have a hedge, an ideological hedge around the nation Israel. The first section deals with the exclusion of people and we said the people that were excluded were people that had become so saturated, either because of their persistent negative volition or because of their place under the Genesis curse, Gen. 12:3, they have engaged in some act of anti-Semitism, with the result that they have fallen under the curse of Gen. 12:3, they are excluded from the nation. But now we come to ideas and practices, practices of the Gentiles round about, which were prohibited on the part of Israel. We’re going to see an amazing thing, something that repeats what we have seen again and again throughout this book, and that is that these exclusive laws of God, though meaningless when you first hear them perhaps, when science has begun to investigate it turns out they have a solid scientific basis. So now we come to the first one, verse 9, which sets off the context and gives us the framework for the rest of these laws.

Verse 9 describes the situation in which they are engaged. “When the host goes forth against thine enemies, then keep thee from every wicked thing.” What’s the point? “When the host goes forth” is in a time of war; this is a time when the military camp is moving out and the tendency would be to forego certain practices, sanitary practices and so on that were practiced in the city. So these troops are out in the field and God says listen, when you get out there I want you to follow certain rules and certain principles. And he gives these rules and principles by two examples, verses 10-12 and verses 12-14. Verses 10-11 deal with one category and 12-14 another.

Now what are these two categories and why is only one example given? For the reason that this is a sermon. Moses is not being comprehensive, if you want the comprehensive listings go to the book of Leviticus, but this is a sermon and Moses is just illustrating. So he’ll take a principle from this category, a principle from this category, a principle from that category, just to give you an idea of that category. For example, let’s take a student and have him tell about how he received Christ. Well, I might take a grad student, but that isn’t typical of all students, there are freshman, sophomores, juniors, seniors and graduate students, and I only pick one graduate student, that doesn’t mean that represents all students but it’s one of a category. So I illustrated the category by taking one person out of it. That’s what Moses is doing here.

In verse 10-11 he amplifies in Leviticus, this is simply a form of secretion from the human body, verses 12-14 any form of excretion. And all of these are tied in with sanitary procedures that God had given the nation. The most interesting thing about these sanitary procedures is the history of Europe and the failure of the church of Jesus Christ to take this passage seriously. Had Christians throughout history, watched carefully what was said in these passages, thousands upon thousands of people would be alive throughout history. And yet because the believers in their day, particularly in the Middle Ages failed to heed these simple elementary laws of sanitation, many millions of people died through the Black Plague and other things throughout Europe, a horrible thing.

I’m going to illustrate this by going back to a man by the name of Dr. Semmelweis, the first doctor to perfect a technique, at least the first area of sanitation inside the hospitals. It may seem strange to you but before Semmelweis no one ever thought of washing their hands. So Semmelweis in 1840, this was as late as 1840, after all the Middle Ages, after all the Black Plagues, after all these great plagues had raged through Europe and killed millions and millions of people. By the way, those of you guys who date girls, do you know why you walk on the outside? Because in Europe they used to have houses like this, if you’ve been to Europe you’ve seen these houses over the street, the man used to walk on the outside with his lady on the inside because they used to dump all their garbage and what have you out the window and it was just simply that you were protecting your lady from getting dumped on. So the fellow would be the one that would walk on the outside and when they dumped their garbage he had to have an umbrella or just take it. That’s how the custom of the fellow walking on the outside arose; it was very practical. But it was true that throughout the Middle Ages these people dumped everything, waste, garbage, etc. right out into the streets. You can imagine how things must have been. It wasn’t the nice scenic Europe that you read in your history books; it was a very foul smelling dirty filthy area.

In 1840 Dr. Semmelweis was operating in a hospital in Vienna, it was a teaching hospital, one of the greatest in its day. It was a hospital where interns would come to train, a hospital where they trained nurses. And in particular Dr. Semmelweis was working in the maternity ward. In his maternity ward one out of every six women that entered that hospital never came out, they died. When the woman died they were wheeled into the autopsy room and of course, if you’ve seen a hospital they just put this dead body, wrap it up, sometimes they don’t but usually they wrap it up in a big bag and they put it on a wagon and take it down to a room and if it’s an autopsy situation they go in and try to see why the person died. This was in the days of experimental medicine, this was a teaching hospital so these women that died in the maternity ward, they’d lay them out on a stretcher, bring them into the autopsy room, and the first item of business of the day would be for the doctors, the older men, to bring their medical students in and they would examine these dead bodies. That was fine, they were trying to learn how these women died.

Of course, what they failed to do was wash their hands after they finished and they’d go on up to the next floor and examine the women that were going to have their children with the same dirty filthy hands that they had just handled these dead women with. No cleanliness, no washing of the hands or anything else. And Semmelweis saw this go on and he got in charge of one of these wards and when he was in charge of this ward that 57 people died in his ward; that was just too much for Semmelweis, so he decided that he was going to start the procedure of washing his hands. Therefore when the men would come up, these people would walk up from the autopsy room and he said before you come in my ward you’re going to wash your hands. So these interns would grumble, give Semmelweis a lot of static but they finally washed their hands. And as a result, instead of 57 women dying, that was in April when he started, by June only one out of every 42 women died; before that one out of ever six, just by washing the hands, by July he had gotten it down to one out of 84 women had died because he instituted this procedure of washing the hands. Later on it turned out that he had 11 women in one ward; one woman was sick and he noticed something. This woman who was sick was examined by these men after they’d wash their hands, and then there was number 10, 9, 8, 7, so on down through the ward, and the doctors never washed their hands once they were in the ward. So they examined this lady and she finally died but all 10 of these other women died. And Semmelweis said ah, that shows you that you have to wash your hands after every person is examined.

Therefore he instituted a new procedure, and this got to really annoy these doctors and they said of all the idiotic stupid things, we are not going to put up with this business of having to wash our hands every time we have to examine someone. So they refused and Semmelweis was fired from this hospital, and later he went to Budapest and tried to do the same thing there and because of the prejudice in the medical personnel he was again fired. And Semmelweis goes down as one of the great [can’t understand word] of history, medical history, because he failed to convince the people of his day as to the validity of cleaning the hands. Now why is it all there? Because not until after Semmelweis did two men come along, one by the name of Pasteur, another by the name of Koch [sp?] and another by the name of Litzer [sp?] and these three doctors [can’t understand word] what was then called the germ theory of disease, namely that disease is carried by germs and bacteria and that when the microscope was perfected these were seen.

Now what’s the point for us as Bible-believing Christians? Why go through all this medical history? Because what you have in front of you in this passage running from verses 10-14 is a sample of Biblical commands that were given people who did not know anything about the germ theory. In other words, they did not have the scientific background to appreciate why God told them to do what He told them to do. And yet God said nevertheless, I want you to be hygienic. Some of these hygienic rules for example, if you’ll notice it in verse 11, “he shall wash himself with water and” in Leviticus it fills it in, “he will be unclean until “the sun has gone down.” That’s a strange thing but actually what they did was they took their dirty garments and they laid them out in the sand and during the 24 hours out in the wilderness the sun would beat down on these garments and what’s that? You have water, that’s washing, and what’s happening to the garments when they’re out in the sun? They’re being sterilized. So you have two elementary procedures of sanitation, you have washing and sterilization.

Notice again, however, and this is a point we want to remember as Christians, God didn’t tell them why it worked, He just told them to do it. Never mind why it worked, later on in history you’ll find out why it works but you just go ahead and do it and later on you’ll get the information and appreciate why I told you what I did. Now that’s a principle, the way God operates. And this is the principle that we want to take again and again from the book of Deuteronomy. This is why, when I went through, particularly for the benefit of our young people, this problem of sex and the concept of one flesh and although we don’t know in the 1960’s what that means, that doesn’t mean medical science and psychiatric research isn’t going to find out what that means ten years from now. And someday modern science is going to catch up with the fact that when the Bible was talking about this “one flesh” concept the Bible meant what it said and there was a good sound scientific basis behind it. And people can pooh-pooh this and say the Bible is just sticking rules up in mid-air and so on, and that’s exactly what the medical profession did with verses 10-14. For years they said men who paid attention to this like Dr. Semmelweis are a group of idiots, are a group of superstitious pagans, nitwits. These are all the nice sweet names that Semmelweis was called because he insisted on following through on some of the Mosaic rules of hygiene. But it goes back to the fact that Moses could not have known to do this. This was not practiced by the Gentiles. How did Moses know to do this?

This is a proof for the inspiration of Scripture. Just like, for example, we have circumcision and as I have said again and again, why in the Bible is circumcision on the seventh day? Nobody knew that until the 20^th century, until they started studying Vitamin K and prothrombin in the blood and it turns out when an infant is born the prothrombin levels in the blood start out high because he inherits the prothrombin and Vitamin K from his mother but immediately upon birth the prothrombin levels go way down and they don’t peak until the seventh day and the seventh day that baby is up to his prothrombin and Vitamin K level. Now did Moses run a blood analysis to find that out? Absolutely not. God said you circumcise on the seventh day and never mind why, I told you to do it. So later on it turns out medical science finds out why.

But my point is that when God tells you to do something He means for you to do it and if you don’t understand why, you may never learn why, if he tells you to do it, do it. And that’s just the way it is, and sooner or later medical science will probably catch up and find out what these things mean. But don’t think that you have to have a complete understanding of what the Bible is talking about in order to obey, before you can obey. Just take it on faith that there’s enough information elsewhere that this is tried and tested and you’ll be all right.

Now, verses 15-16, here we have another example of excluding foreign ideas. Verses 9-14 deal with the hygienic practices of the Gentiles were forbidden for the Jews. Israel was not permitted to treat themselves the same way that the Gentiles treated themselves. Verses 15-16 is another one, you don’t catch it unless you study it in the original and you find out what the master and servant mean here. “Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant who is escaped from his master unto thee,” now this is not an Israelite slave. The escapees within the nation are treated elsewhere in the Word of God. This is talking about a Gentile. Again let’s look at the map, here’s the eastern end of the Mediterranean, here’s the Sea of Galilee, the Dead Sea, and you have Israel here, and you have slaves running away from the Gentile nation and they come, they’ve escaped, and they come to this nation and so verse 15 says you “will not deliver unto his master the servant who is escaped from his master.” You say what has that got to do with ideas? It has to do with the fact of what we know now in history as extradition treaties. This is when, for example, we had an Italian hijack an airliner he goes to Italy, now Italy won’t give him back to us because they claim for some reason American justice is too tough.

The point is that Israel was not to engage in extradition treaties. When a person was to flee to Israel, that was Israel’s business, and if the Gentiles lost him it was their tough luck. You say why, why is this here? Because God didn’t want this nation to enter into treaties with Gentile nations. Israel was to stick alone and her faith and trust was to be in the Lord Jesus Christ known under the old covenant and not in Gentile nations. It’s an issue of trust. Now we have the same principle operating in our nation today in that we reverse the principle, we try and make as many treaties as we can, get as involved with every nation under earth as we can, and we fail to think back to what George Washington warned us, in the famous farewell address, George Washington told many things, that address ought to be required reading and memorized by every person who is eligible to vote. In this address in the middle of it Washington said something tremendous and it goes right along with the same principle of nations minding their own business. Quote, “the great rule of conduct for us as the Thirteen Colonies in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith, but here let us stop. It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.” Had we done that we’d be in a lot better, stronger position.

And Israel recognized that. God said to Israel listen, don’t mess with these Gentile nations, you trust Me, I’ll take care of it, and I don’t need you fiddling around with treaties. And of course Isaiah warned them, every time Israel you make a treaty with a foreign nation it’s going to turn back on you. So what happened, Israel like a lot of people, heard Isaiah and went in reverse, and they went down to Egypt and they said we need armaments and we need all sorts of weapons from Pharaoh, etc. and so they made this big long treaty with Pharaoh and what happened? They got burned, because do you know what happened. Pharaoh brought his armies right up there and took them over. It always happens. So verses 15-16 are a block, it’s another one of these blocks to keep Israel free, to keep them from engaging in foreign influences and absorbing foreign ideologies. Why? To preserve the unity of the nation.

Verses 17-18, the last example of this: “There shall be no priestess [whore] of the daughters of Israel, nor a priest [sodomite] of the sons of Israel.” You’ll have to understand that the King James translates this as “whore” and “sodomite” because of the functions of the priests but the word itself in the Hebrew means holy. You say that’s a fine way to translate the word “holy.” The word “holy” here is a word which is generally used of priests or priestess, masculine/feminine and it was used for the priest and priestesses of the Gentile religious cults, and part of the Gentile religious cult was the fornication that went on in the name of religion. You see, religion always has two things in history. They have it tailored for anybody’s desires. On one hand they have licentious rites in certain types of religions and in other cases they have legalism so that satisfies everybody. If you’re a legalist you pick your religion that legalistic. If you’re the kind that likes to go out on the town and raise Cain, you’ll find a religion; there’s one designed just for you. And so the Gentiles had this kind of religion and the priest and priestesses here are the ones who engaged in the fornication. And what they would do would be raise money for their gods.

You see, they had a little racket going. They had this temple, Wed. night we’re going through the temple of Diana and Diana had this operation, here in the eastern portion of the city of Ephesus was the temple of Diana and there were a lot of gods and goddesses in there and they had these priests and priestesses, nothing more than hired prostitutes. And people would go in there and pay and out of that money would go to finance the temple. In other words, one of the greatest fund-raising campaigns in history. And religions always have their fund-raising campaigns. Don’t laugh at the Gentiles because we have just as stupid idiotic fund-raising campaigns in so-called fundamental churches, where you have somebody sign a card, brother, will you pledge do much to God, etc. That’s blasphemy, you don’t pledge… do you know what I’d tell someone, sure, I’d pledge to God but I’m not going to tell you what I pledge. I’ll pledge to God but it’s none of your business what I pledge to God. What I pledge to God is between me and Him and not between me and thee, and that’s the way it is. But what do we have? We have the religion crowd and they want you to sign pledge cards and they want you to tithe, that’s another little racket. That’s the income tax for Israel, has no place in the church dispensation. And we have all the other fund-raising rackets and it’s because religion that has failed to teach the Word of God is always trying to raise money, twist arms, impress people and all the rest of it. So if you belong to any organization that has pledging of any type, if you belong to some organization that knocks on your door you can just put it down in your little book that it is an apostate organization because any organization that has to rely on all the gimmicks is an organization that has failed to trust in the Word of God. You make your needs known and that’s it, let the Lord take it from there.

What does it say in verse 18, “Thou shalt not bring the hire of an whore, or the price of a dog, into the house of the LORD thy God for any vow; for even both of these are an abomination unto the LORD thy God.” That’s God’s answer to all fund-raising campaigns. It’s blasphemy, it’s an abomination to bring that kind of money before Him. The only kind of money He wants is money from people that have freely given without coercion and embarrassment, people who have seen the issue and want to give and that’s the only kind of money that’s valid in God’s sight. So next time you are around the arm-twisters just forget it, it’s a religious con game. If we have to raise money like everybody else, what testimony is that? You’ve shot the testimony. Any time a Christian organization has to resort to gimmicks to raise money it’s short on spirituality and tragic because right there they have denied the faith that they have fought for. The tragedy is that fundamentalist church after fundamentalist church is doing this. Sometime I’m going to lay out here one weeks mail so that you can see all the religious gimmicks and programs that come my way. Some man wrote and said if you’ll give me three hours in your church three times a week you can have all the money you want, and we can increase your Sunday School attendance 120% and he showed statistics, graphs, etc. I put the thing right in the garbage can and that’s where it belongs.

Anytime people try to bring these gimmicks on you it is because they have failed to trust the Word of God and they have failed in practice to adhere to the doctrines they taught. Now wouldn’t it be funny, you take the same people, the very same people and if a liberal got into the pulpit and denied the faith, the guy wouldn’t have a chance to finish his sentence before he’d be thrown out the door, but the same people turn right around and attack the doctrine they’ve fought for. That’s the tragedy of it and that’s what went on here.

In verse 18 it says don’t you do this, and evidently there was a problem because evidently this religion called Yahwehism in history, that’s just a scholarly term for the Mosaic religion, Yahwehism had as one tenant, “thou shalt not mix with Baalism” and yet evidently throughout the history was the tendency to say well, we need a few million dollars for the Temple and these Gentiles have it so why don’t we just bring it over. So they would announce solicitating money from the unbeliever, just like a lot of Christian organizations, going around and knocking on businessman’s doors and not making the issue of salvation clear, they just want the man’s money. That’s blasphemy, it falls under the same thing here, “an abomination to the LORD thy God.”

All these practices that we’ve studied so far in this chapter have to do with community rights. They are rights that have been given to the community to protect the unity. Anytime you have Israel importing either people with alien ideologies, human viewpoint, or you bring various ideas and practices, which is human viewpoint again, into this nation you are breaking the unity down. That’s why these restrictions and hedges are put here.

Now we’re going to go into another section beginning in verse 19 and this is the final section of this whole section that goes from chapters 22-25. Beginning at verse 19 we take up a whole new category and this new category has to do with independent and individual rights. We dealt with community rights and now we’re going to have a series of miscellaneous examples of individual rights, divorce and so on are included in these. We’re going to study each one carefully. Again, please remember this is not a complete list, Moses is just giving you samples of various types of rights and we’re going to study three of these illustrations tonight.

Verses 19-20 are the first illustration and this is an illustration of the freedom from economic oppression. And this is the only true answer to poverty as long as this world is sinful; the Biblical answer to poverty, verses 19-20. “Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of anything that is lent upon usury. [20] Unto a stranger you may lend upon usury, but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury, that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all that thou settest thine hand to do in the land to which you are going, to possess it.” Here is the point that is made here again and again. There was zero interest on the loans. Some of you business men kind of doubt that, but this was not business loans; these were philanthropic loans that were made to poor people and they were made at zero percent interest.

I want to notice a few things about this and then we’ll go into the doctrine of poverty. In verse 20 you see the phrase, “unto a stranger thou mayest lend usury,” let’s look at that word “stranger” because you seem to have an exception. Don’t use usury but then use usury. Who is the stranger? The stranger is the nekar, this is a traveling businessman, he’s the kind of a fellow that is not a resident Gentile, he would be called a ger in the original language, but this is a traveling businessman and he is one who is there for business reasons, he’s not living in Israel, he’s just come to the nation to sell stuff and engage in trade, etc. so therefore they said you can loan to him, if he gets in a bind and comes to you for money you have the right to demand interest but from the fellow Israelite, zero percent interest. Now let’s look at poverty for a moment.

Turn back to Deut. 15 and review a few of those principles, why we have poverty in the world. The first thing about poverty is that it was solved inside the nation Israel by zero percent interest loans and these loans were emergency funds that were given to people who were having trouble making ends meet.

The second point about this was that these are philanthropic loans, not business loans. Business loans were not known at this time. Proof: Exodus 22:25, this proves that this was a philanthropic loan and not a business loan. “If you lend money to any of my people who is poor among you, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, neither shall thou lay upon him usury.” Now you see the “if” clause, that is a philanthropic loan and not a business loan. So some of you men that have heard some preacher say that if any man wants a loan you just go ahead and loan him anything he wants, etc. that preacher is out of his mind. It’s not talking about business loans; it’s talking about philanthropic loans. And of course this is what the Lord Jesus Christ meant in Matt. 5:42 when he said “if any man ask you money, let him have it.” That was the context of that.

What’s the third thing about this problem of poverty? The third thing to remember is from Deut. 15 is that every seven years there was a release of the debt. Verse 1, “At the end of every seven years you shall make a release. [2] And this is the manner of the release: every creditor who lends anything unto his neighbor, shall release it; he shall not exact it of his neighbor, or of his brother, because it is called the LORD’s release.” Now the point here is that every seven years that loan was cancelled. And you say good night, I’d hate to be the guy that loaned in the sixth year, and that’s very right because he says later on in this passage, he points out that there’s going to be that tendency and don’t you say in your mind, oh, it’s in the sixth year and I’ve only got a couple more months on this loan and here the guy borrowed $1,000 and he can only pay it back till there’s about $850 still remaining on the principle, and bank it comes the year of the release and I lose $850, now what kind of a deal is this.

The answer is given in the Word of God again and if you look in verses 3, 4 and 5 it’s explained. “Of a foreigner,” this is a person, the traveling businessman, “you may exact it again; but that which is thine with thy brother, thine hand shall release, [4] Except when there shall be no more poor among you; for the LORD shall greatly bless thee in the land which the LORD thy God gives thee for an inheritance to possess it, [5] Only if you carefully hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe to do all these commandments which I command thee this day. [6] For the LORD thy God blesseth thee, as he promised thee. And thou shalt lend unto many nations, but thou shalt not borrow; and thou shalt reign over many nations, but they shall not reign over thee.”

And the promise is that God is going to take the man in this particular business situation and he has loaned $850 and he has lost that loan, at the year of release God says look, I’m going to work through the economic structure of the society of Israel so that you will get that $850 back and this is a promise that God gave those people in that day, and so the issue with the man at this point was the issue of faith, do I trust the Lord to supply my need or not. You see it goes right back to faith all the time. God gave a problem to these men, here they are, a man comes up and says say, I need $1,000. And this man says all right, I got $1,000 but I know this is the sixth year, next year is the year of release and I’m going to lose everything. All right, but yourself in that position, can you feel the tension, between your $850 and the promise of God? That was the point and these were the many little things that God had inside the structure of this nation to keep testing, testing, testing, testing, just like He’s testing many of you. Except with you it’s probably not the same kind of situation, but it’s the situation, any situation of life that involves failure to claim some of the promises, I Peter 5:7, Rom. 8:28, He continually tests us as believers and the issue in your life is are you going to respond or are you going to panic. Are you going to fall apart every time a trial testing comes or are you going to relax and be like the great saints of the Old Testament, you’re just going to say God is going to supply my need and I don’t have to go around and ring doorbells, I can relax because God is going to supply my need. But no, what happens? 95% of the Christians fall apart, a little pressure and boom, everything goes, worry, worry, worry, and that’s what happens. Why? Failure to claim the Word of God.

Now, elementary principle: you can’t claim what you do not know and I suspect this is why we have so many people running around in panic palace because they have not studied the Bible well enough to know the promises of God. Now it’s very simple, it sounds very simple, but you ought to stand up here and look at the expressions I have to look on at every service Sunday morning, and particularly some of the men. The tragedy is that we know from the doctrine of marriage the man is supposed to be responsible in the family. So who comes to most of the services? The wife, that’s real sharp and then we wonder where the Christian church is; it’s very simple, the men aren’t assuming the leadership, that’s it in a nutshell. Because they have failed to get with the Word of God women have taken over, much to the detriment of the church. There’s nothing wrong with women but in their place and that’s the problem, we’ve got women leading the church of Jesus Christ and it’s tragic. Why do we have three times as many women on the mission field as we have men? The women out there are facing natives and savagery, etc. and going through dangers. Where are the men? All of a sudden they disappeared. That’s the story of Christian in the 20^th century.

So now we come back to Deut. 15 and we look at poverty and we see it’s much the same thing because the test is being applied to these businessmen, these men that are going to be loaning money. Now we come to the fourth thing and the conclusion of the doctrine of poverty and it’s built from a contrast in two verses. Watch the two verses because if you don’t see the contrast, it looks like there’s a contradiction here. Verse 4 says (quote) “there shall be no poor among you,” so you read that and you say that’s great. But then you go down to verse 11 and what do you read, it says “the poor shall never cease out of the land.” Oh-oh, one of those contradictions again; just relax and take it in context, as we have covered in detail when we went through this chapter we showed verse 4 is a promise because in verse 5 what does it say, there’s a hitch attached to it, a big fat “IF,” always be aware of documents that have something with an “if” in it. This is a promise; this is going to be true if verse 5 is true.

Now let’s look at verse 5, “If you will carefully hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe to do all these” things, and this is a promise that poverty would be absolutely and totally alleviated in the nation Israel if that nation stuck with the Word of God. If you had people trusting the Word of God there wouldn’t be any poverty. It’s my observation that a lot of poverty in America is due to the same thing, spiritual ignoramuses. This is not a knock on a person just because they happen to be poor, but I know many, many people and you can read this in books and sociology of the poor, where they are poor simply because they make about as much money as anybody here, it’s just they don’t know how to spend it, it goes out as fast as they make it and they’re poor. Why is this? Because they don’t have any discipline, they don’t have any character and what’s the Word of God going to do? The Word of God gives character. So here again you see on a small scale at least what was on a larger scale in the nation Israel.

But verse 11 is an announcement of what would certainly be the case. The Lord, in His omniscience saw ahead this nation is never going to make it, and I know that they are never going to get in the ideal position that I promised them in verse 4 so the poor are never going to cease out of the land, you’ll always have them with you. So if that’s true with Israel it’s going to obviously be true with the United States. That’s the poor and God has provided for the poor but He provided for them in such a way that they would not become wards of the state.

Turn back to our passage, Deut. 23. This is a beautiful provision for the poor of the nation but it’s designed with all the omniscience of God so that after everything is said and done these people don’t wind up as wards of the state. That’s the beauty of the welfare system of Israel, a beautiful system, absolutely beautiful. No one starved and yet no one became a dole on the welfare roll all the time. It’s an amazing system; it had a self-correcting system built into it.

Verses 21-23 deals with another freedom, the freedom from religion, beautiful freedom, one of the greatest freedoms ever given, freedom from religion. Verse 21, “When thou shalt vow a vow unto the LORD thy God, thou shalt not be slack to pay it; for the LORD thy God will surely require it of thee, and it would be a sin in thee. [22] But if thou shalt forbear to vow, it shall be no sin in thee. [23] That which is gone out of thy lips thou shalt keep and perform, even a freewill offering, according as thou hast vowed unto the LORD thy God, which thou hast promised with thy mouth.” Now what’s the point here? The point is this, that God is not impressed with human good and a lot of people would say oh, I’m going to vow great things for God and go through all the motions and if they had a revival in that day they’d have 3,000 people walk down the aisle for nothing because they went down the aisle to impress somebody else, they went down the aisle because their friend, girlfriend, husband or somebody was there and they wanted to impress them what a spiritual giant they were and so they went down and made this big vow. And what God is saying is I’m not impressed and if you’re going to vow you vow to Me and you perform it to Me.

So in verse 21 is the seriousness of the vow, “you will not be slack to pay it,” if you have gone ahead as a Christian with positive volition toward God, what this is saying, and you’ve told Him you’re going to do something then you’d better do it. I’ve seen that happen in one of my closest friends in MIT; he was called to the ministry and he failed to respond to the call of God. I don’t know what the story was but I know that he was called, he told me so. And he resisted the call and went into engineering today and today he’s in the funny farm. Why? God disciplines. People who are called and He’s wanted to do something and they’ve kicked against it, oftentimes He lowers the boom and He lowers it good. It’s because God doesn’t play games. If someone has promised Him something then He intends that that person follow through. Example: do you remember Acts 5, Ananias and Sapphira had a little real estate business going on. And Barnabas, it turns out, which was one of the greatest believers of the grace principle in the history of the church, came up and said look, I’m going to give all my possessions to the church. And Ananias and Sapphira said oh boy, look at Brother Barnabas down there, he’s getting a lot of attention and people think Brother Barnabas, such a great believer, Brother Barnabas has given everything… [blank spot.] So we have very serious illustrations in the Bible about people who have vowed to God to do certain things and have never followed through on them.

In this particular situation we find something else, verse 22, “But if you shalt forbear to vow, it shall be no sin” to you. That’s where the freedom is in this verse, it means don’t be conned into making some vow in which you have no willingness, desire, nor intent of fulfilling. That’s why we’re never going to have a dedication service in this church as long as I’m pastor, never going to have young people come down and dedicate their lives to the Lord, it’s blasphemy. You look at these dedication services and about 9 out of 10 don’t do a thing after they’ve dedicated, they just go down because all the young people are together and they feel like clods sitting back there. So the minister plays “Just as I Am” 40 times and gets all the emotions jacked up and now they come down the aisle, and one or two are sitting back there and everybody starts looking around and gee, they haven’t yielded their lives, look at those carnal teenagers back there, etc. So finally they’re pressured, they come down the aisle too. They don’t come down the aisle because they dedicate their lives to the Lord, they come down to impress people, get with the crowd, etc. It’s never going to happen here, if you dedicate your life to the Lord it’s going to be between you and the Lord, not between you and me and the congregation and the Lord. Privacy! And you have that right and this verse gives you that right and don’t let some clergyman con you into destroying your privacy. You have the right to come in here and breathe our oxygen and do what you want to and it’s strictly between you and the Lord. That’s privacy and the Bible teaches that privacy.

This is why sitting in a group, in a congregation, is one of the greatest privileges you have, it means that nobody can pry into your business. You can sit there and dream about your wardrobe, you can think about the new car that you are making the payments on and all the rest of it, you can sit and daydream, it’s up to you, privacy. But God says in verse 22, “if you forbear” and you don’t want to make a vow, don’t make it, nobody is asking you to and He isn’t. A lot of religious people ask you to, a lot of religious people say hey brother, have you dedicated your life and all the rest of it. It’s none of their business, absolutely none of their business, and you ought to tell them that, that’s the fastest way to get these people off your back. Look them straight in the eye and say that is none of your business, period, and you usually won’t be bothered again.

Verses 24-25, another great freedom, this is freedom from hunger and thievery, one of the most interesting systems in the whole economy because here we have provisions for the poor that need food and yet at the same time we have the provision to protect property rights. Now here’s how it works. We’re going to first look at the theory in verses 24-25 and then we’re going to conclude with a little incident that happened in the Gospels with the Lord Jesus Christ when He tried it.

Verse 24, “When you come into your neighbor’s vineyard, then thou mayest eat grapes to thy fill at thine own pleasure; but thou shalt not put any in thy vessel. [25] When you come into the standing grain of thy neighbor, then thou mayest pluck the ears with thine hand; but thou shalt not move a sickle unto thy neighbor’s standing grain.” What’s the point? The point is that you have many poor people. If you want to see how this works in practice you can sometime study on your own the book of Luke. [small unintelligible spot] So they had excess in their production. So here’s the country’s production and they had a surplus of production, that was the blessing of God. Out of that surplus was given to the poor, these poor people could come into the field and pick as much as they could eat at that time. And that was a service to the poor. Every person who had a farm, every person who had this kind of a crop had to do this to allow the poor to have this food. But they couldn’t come in and take away and harvest it, they could only come and eat it. So you have this fine balance that God had worked.

How did it work out? Verse 24 says you can your fill, except the Hebrew says you can eat according to your soul and that’s a Hebrew expression that teaches us something about the soul. I have drawn this diagram, after going through volition, conscience, personal affections and mentality, I’ve added something, bodily affections, because the soul in the Bible includes physical drives and desires, and here is one proof of it right here. This is a physical need for food and it is a desire spoken of in the Hebrew as a desire of your soul

Let’s look in Matt. 12:1-8 to see what religion did to this freedom. Everywhere you have religion you will generally have the destruction of freedom. Bible Christianity is not a religion; it is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Here’s what religion did to this wonderful balanced system of freedom. “At that time Jesus went on the sabbath day through the grainfields; and his disciples were hungry,” notice He made a boo-boo, He went through “on the sabbath day.” “He went through the grain and His disciples were hungry and bean to pluck the ears of the grain, and to eat. [2] But when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto him, Behold, hypostatic union disciples do that which is not lawful upon the sabbath day.” Now to understand the Pharisees you have to go back to the concept of legalism.

What is legalism? We take the sin nature of a person, it has one of two tendencies, the tendency toward licentiousness or a tendency toward legalism. If you have the tendency toward legalism what you are in essence doing, you are taking the righteousness of God and making it your unrighteousness, in other words, you are decreasing the demands that God’s righteousness is placing upon you. So therefore you replace God’s righteous demands with your own little code over here. We call that the taboos. So you really have replaced the holy righteousness demands of God that demand attitudes of the heart and you’ve tried to externalize these and trivialize them down to some little set of we don’t go swimming where the girls go etc. We don’t chew bubble gum on Saturdays, etc. an equally irrelevant taboo. This goes on and it’s called legalism.

Now watch what happens, the Pharisees always tried to externalize the commandments of God and do you know why? Because a legalist is basically pride motivated and a person who has pride thinks that they don’t need God’s grace, therefore all they have to do is keep these commandments and they are righteous and they’ve done it in the energy of the flesh and everything is good. So here are the Pharisees and what they have done is claim that Deut. 23 doesn’t include this because they claim that Deut. 23 is only valid six days out of the week. They claim that when you walk through the field to pluck the grain you’re doing work and the Sabbath says you don’t do work, so therefore the Lord Jesus Christ and His disciples are wrong.

Now I want you to see the very clever answer that Jesus gave back to them. “But He said unto them, Have you not read what David did, when he was hungry, and they that were with him, [4] How he entered into the house of God, and did eat the showbread, which was not lawful for him to eat, neither for them who were with him but only for the priests?” Now look at this, this is a most amazing quote out of the Old Testament. Here you have the showbread, in the Temple, it’s not even talking about the field on a Sabbath, He’s talking about the Temple, only the priests were to go into the Temple. But what did David do? He got hungry and went in for a sandwich. Now what’s the deal? How could David get away with walking into the Temple and making a peanut butter and jelly or something? How did he work this out? The principle is this: David was in whose service, David’s or the Lord’s, when he did it? He was in the Lord’s service. When David walked into that Temple he was hungry not because of his failure to provide for his [small unintelligible spot] therefore he had the right to eat of the showbread because it was not work, it was not work done for David, it was work done for God. The Sabbath did not exclude work if it was done for the Lord. That’s the Lord’s argument.

Verse 5, “Or have ye not read in the law, how that on the sabbath days the priests in the temple profane the sabbath, and are blameless?” What’ he’s talking about there? Now what the Lord does is He says ah, you guys like the Temple so much, well, do the priest or do not the priests work on Sabbath? Of course they work, everybody would have to admit the priests worked on the Sabbath, that’s his big day; preachers are on Sunday. It’s a Sabbath working, so the Lord says if the priests work on a Sabbath, how come, when you tell me that the work can’t be done on a Sabbath. Obviously what was the Lord doing? He was redefining the word “work” as it should have been defined, work done for your own benefit or work done for the Lord. Work done for the Lord does not come under the Sabbath exclusion. That’s the Lord’s point, and now look at the astounding claim He makes in verse 6, “But I say unto you that in this place is one greater than the Temple.” That is a claim that is blasphemous if Jesus wasn’t who He claimed to be. Think of what that would have meant to a group of people that thought this building was the Holy of Holies and Jesus comes and says do you know Me, I’m greater than the Temple. How would you take it? People claim Jesus never claimed to be God, but what do you do when the Lord Jesus Christ makes this kind of remark, and He does it all through the Gospels, He just doesn’t let you off making it one or two times. What do you do with a man that says that? Either He’s a nut or He is who He claimed to be, there is no choice. So that’s what He’s saying here in verse 6, He says look, if those priests can work for the Temple on the Sabbath day My disciples and I am going to work on the Sabbath day and if you legalists don’t like it lump it. That’s His answer to the legalists and He completely smashed legalism in this day. And it was this legalistic, righteous, self-righteous crowd that ultimately led to Christ’s crucifixion.

What do we learn from this, verse 7, “But if ye had know what this means, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the guiltless.” Who are the guiltless? The guiltless are the Lord Jesus Christ and His disciples. And the Lord says look, I want you to know two words, you should know these, mercy and sacrifice. He says what is mercy? “Mercy” is a Greek word here that is a translation of the Old Testament word chesed which means loyal love. And He says this loyal love is a sign of positive volition toward God and He says this is what God is after, positive volition, it starts from the inside and he who has this has it. And this sacrifice business is the externals and this is what the Pharisees are concentrating on, legalists concentrate on it, Christians who say all you have to do is go to the 11:00 o’clock service and see if you can bear through an hour of it every week that makes you number one Christian. That’s externals. But the Word of God always puts the emphasis on the inside, the inner mental attitude.

As we go through these freedoms from one example to the other this is going to come out. It’s going to come out when we get into divorce, it’s going to come out when we get into engagement, it’s going to come out when we go through every area of life that is coming up in the next couple of chapters, freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom. And yet isn’t it ironic, everywhere you have religion religion says no, no, no, no, no. You will see this contrast again and again, you will see it rub off on you, you will see it in areas where you have been, where the legalists always try to destroy the freedom that God in His grace gives people. They try to make divorced people feel like they’ve committed the unpardonable sin. They try to exclude divorced men from boards of deacons and they have no business doing it, divorced men can be on any board of deacons. People think that for some reason divorced people have made some unpardonable sin. That’s nonsense, you can’t find it in the Word of God. They pick on all sorts of other things that go on. People say you can’t do this, this disqualifies you and all the rest. It doesn’t come from the Word of God it’s a lot of legalistic garbage that people pile on to make people feel sorry for their sin, to try and beat people over the head and destroy freedom and you will always have this; this is legalism to the core. And this is why it is so hard to witness, oftentimes, to people with the gospel of Jesus Christ because we have had religious fundamentalists with their legalism who have told people you can’t join the club because of something, you don’t have the right pair of glasses on or you look cross-eyed or something. And yet God has one standard, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.