Lesson 56
Biblical “Concern for People” – 24:17-21
We’re on Deuteronomy 24; Deuteronomy 25 will conclude this section of
the Law. After that there are a series of chapters that deal with the phasing
in of the Law and other matters so the subject matter shifts and I think it
will be a welcome shift, we’ve been in this quite some time. We finished verses 8-9 and the doctrine of
sickness and how God heals, and the true doctrine of healing and the false
doctrine of healing. We said that the
body is not to be deprecated in Bible Christianity but that God is interested
in using your body. I’m always amused
the way some people like to apply Bible doctrine. It interests me to find out what ideas go
through people’s heads when you teach the Word and you wonder how people take
it. After I gave the message last week I
called on one of our people and there was a set of bar bells on the floor. People take these things to various
conclusions. So I’m looking to see
what’s going to happen in verses 10 thru the end; it looks like a harmless
passage but we’ll see what happens.
Verse 10, beginning here we encounter a series of continued
illustrations. These illustrations all
have as their objective to show that it is not God’s will for people to be
oppressed. Oppression, that’s the topic here
and freedom from oppression, in particular economic oppression but this
economic oppression is but a type of the spiritual oppression that all men face
and we’re going to see this quite forcibly tonight. The point is that when God
liberates His people He wants us to live a pattern of freedom and not become in
bondage to things. This is why, when He
had His physical redeemed people, redemption in the Old Testament means more
than just the idea of redemption, it really means freedom; it means political freedom.
There’s only one group of people that I know of that’s come close to
Israel and that was the Puritans, as far as having a good system, based on the
Word of God, that was really… it’s looked upon today as bigoted because they
did not allow freedom of religion.
Verses 10-13 give us the first illustration, an illustration from
economic oppression; it concerns the pledge.
This is not pledging money to the church or tithing or anything else
like the unbiblical gimmicks that are being used today, but verse 10 has to do
with a financial loan given to another person in the nation of
Verse 10 says “When you do lend thy brother anything, thou shalt not go
into his house to fetch his pledge.” You
say what does this have to do with oppression?
Verse 11 explains it, “Thou shall stand outside the house, and the man
to whom you are lending shall bring out the pledge outside to you.” Here’s the point, you have a person out here
and he has the money. You have a person
here and he’s minus money, he needs some.
So he goes into his little tent over here, whatever they had, and looks
for some collateral, something that he can use to hold that loan. The idea here was the person out here with
the money could take advantage of this person in his weakness and say look, I
see this nice leather chair in your living room and I can lean back in that
nice leather chair after I’ve been out picking grapes, I think I’ll use that as
collateral, and inconveniently work it out so the man never can pay his debt
and then of course he has himself a nice reclining leather chair. That is the kind of thing that the Word of
God condemns. It says that this man has
to stay outside this house; this man has to go in and pick out something that
will be worthwhile value wise, but is not something that he’s very fond of or
something that involves the necessities of life.
It’s very similar to the command that we studied in verse 6, “No man
shall take the nether or the upper millstone to pledge; for he that takes this
takes a man’s life,” and here you see there’s this, what I would call, a
minimum circle drawn around every person in the nation
What you see here in example after example is God defining the fact that
the individual cannot come under the total crushing weight of an economic
system that’s against him. He has his
rights. In other words, people count
more than the system. So the Word of God
authorizes certain minimum restraints put upon the economic process when it
threatens to destroy the individual life and the Word of God is quite clear on
this. So in the technical sense it is
not strict laissez-faire in the Old
Testament, however it is strict capitalism and this is where our little friends
on the left side of the spectrum theologically are all wet, they would advocate
that the early Christians were communists, etc. The early Christians were not
communists; they shared things in common under a disaster type situation where
the early church was threatened and they didn’t know how long they were going
to live and they pooled their resources.
You’ve been in family situations and you pooled your resources, you
don’t call yourself communist because you do this, nor was the early church; the
early church was not communist. You can
read the book of Acts and you can see this very clearly.
The reason why capitalism is the backbone economically of the Word of
God is that it’s only in capitalism, basically, where the individual has
maximum individual personal and individual responsibility for his
possessions. You see the Bible exalts
volition and it trains volition, it says life is a series of decisions in which
the individual person must exercise his volition and exercise it, exercise it,
exercise it, exercise it and volition can only be exercised when you have
choice, when you own property and you are responsible how you use the
property. You can’t give to God if the
property isn’t yours. You can to go
See, underlying one of the most crucial points of worship is the fact
that you’ve got property that’s yours personally, it’s your private property
and you have a right to do with it as you please. And that’s something that offends people
today but nevertheless that’s just the way it is in Scripture. Socialism is not authorized in the Word of
God. It has come in and it’s always
paralleled apostate theologians. You can
follow it right down into the 20th century when one of the greatest
socialists in America was Rauschenbusch and Rauschenbusch was a Baptist liberal
from Rochester Theological Seminary who wrote the book, The Social Gospel, and he was the promulgator of it and he said
that that socialism basically is the gospel of the Kingdom and he preached this
all over American between 1910 and 1920 and you can see how closely it’s identified
with liberal theology; make no mistake about it, socialism is not Biblical.
Verse 11 is where this person has a minimum [can’t understand word] for
economic protection around him, this is not socialism but it does involve
certain economic controls that God authorizes to protect the individual and his
humanity.
Verses 12-13 deal with an extreme case of a very poor person, “And if
the man be poor, thou shalt not sleep with his pledge.” You wonder what does this mean. It meant that that man was so poor that the
most valuable possession he had was his simlah
or his outer covering and he would give that as collateral for the loan which
meant the fact that he had nothing to sleep in, the simlah was also used not only as an overcoat but it was used to
sleep in. How often they washed this
thing or they had a Monday morning wash or something but they wore it all day
and they slept in it all night, so whether they had two or three of these
things I don’t know but obviously the poor person did not.
So in verse 13 the procedure was “In any case, thou shalt deliver him
the pledge,” here we have one of Moses’ imperative moods where he takes the
imperative mood of the verb, actually it’s in the imperfect form but imperative
mood, and he adds an infinitive to it and everywhere in the Hebrew where this
happens, when you have an infinitive added next to the main verb, it
intensifies the mood of that verb. Now
that was not understood when the King James translation was made and so the
translators try to make stabs at this every once in a while, sometimes they hit
it, sometimes they don’t. But in the
King James, in verse 13, it sounds like this is kind of loose. “In any case, thou shalt deliver him the
pledge,” what it should read is “You must deliver the pledge,” in other words,
this is a command and by adding an infinitive on to it Moses emphasizes this
and he says you have to do this.
Now here we are introduced to an important principle, one I want you to see and
probably is the backbone of the rest of this chapter. Watch the reason given for this. “In any case, thou shalt deliver him the
pledge again when the sun goes down, that he may sleep in his own raiment, and
bless thee; and it shall be righteousness unto thee before the LORD thy
God.”
Notice it does not say it shall be righteousness unto thee before thy
debtor. In other words, the point here
is that morality in the Old Testament was not a code of ethics just tacked up
in thin air; it was a set of instructions to operate by in the presence of God. That was why these things worked. And you can go to a man like Arnold Toynbee
and he can look down his long English nose at the people of the Old Testament
and he can say look, all these people in the Old Testament had this belief, and
Arnold Toynbee refers to this as the Judeo-Christian belief but then later on
Toynbee also says, and yet it’s strange that it’s this belief that has produced
all freedom in the western world, basically.
The paradox is that here Toynbee is saying this just a belief, just a
subjective belief of the Israelites. In
other words you have, say the Israelites over here and the Greeks over here and
the Greeks had their own set of morals and Israel had their own set of morals
and we have Egypt and the Egyptians had their own set of morals and isn’t it
interesting how Israel’s won out. And he
has no explanation for it.
The explanation obviously is that the Israelites didn’t just consider
themselves to having a set of morals. They didn’t look upon this just as a
moral code; they looked upon this as the direct words from their God and that’s
why it was so powerful in their life.
You can’t hold a set of morals up to a people, this is what’s happened
to young people, people say be good and follow this and do this and don’t do
that and all the rest of it. Why should
I? If I’m a young person and you tell me
to do something why should I do it? I
won’t bother with it unless you give me a reason, a base in back of that, and
that base has to be something bigger than you.
Children can respect their parents and so on but this is not a base for
creating moral rights and wrongs, the base for getting right and wrong through
is God Himself, that’s why we obey, and that’s the point in verse 13.
And by the way, if you look at verse 13 carefully it’s going to become
obvious to you; you just have to read it once or twice, that the government
couldn’t enforce this. We see this again and again in the book of Deuteronomy,
that’s why it’s called the book of love because what Moses is doing, he’s taking
the Law and he’s saying this is what the Law really is. Turn to Deut. 1:5, when we started this we
said what Deuteronomy was all about, “On this side of the Jordan, in the land
of Moab, began Moses to declare this law, saying,” now the word “declare” means
to etch, it was a word used in the ancient world for taking a chisel, a
chisel-like [can’t understand word] taking a hammer and cutting into the stone
big enough so people could read it, and what Moses is saying is I’m not just
declaring the law folks, I’m taking this chisel and I’m banging it to you,
that’s the point. In other words, he was
going to explain this Law, explain the whole content and spirit of the Law, and
this is why the characteristic of love in the book of Deuteronomy, and grace, is
there, because Moses gives you the mental attitude that accompanies the law,
it’s not just the cold law of Leviticus and Numbers, it is the spirit behind
the Law.
So now you come over to Deut. 24 and you see this little thing that
you’re supposed to do. Now project
yourself back into that situation for a moment.
Just pretend we are in a time machine and we go back centuries, all the
way back to this time in history. Now,
can you imagine the government enforcing verses 10-13; obviously the government
is not going to enforce it, first of all they had no policemen. And you imagine
that, they had such fantastic law and order they didn’t need policemen, an
amazing society, an absolutely amazing society.
So this was a regulation that was enforced by who? If there were no policemen to enforce it, who
enforced it? No one, it was up to the
individual citizens to obey it, and it shows you then why two-thirds of the
national budget was devoted to Bible teaching… yes, Bible teaching! The Levites were supported by two-thirds of
the budget, one-third went to welfare and two-thirds of the budget went to
Bible teaching, supporting the Levite priests who went from town to town
teaching the Word of God. Do you see the
connection why it was necessary to do that?
How could you have the people obey verses 10-13, this was the glue that
kept the society together; these people always knew right and wrong and they
had a personal commitment to God, and out of this personal commitment to God
and His will they were a law-abiding citizenry and they didn’t have to have a
policeman on every block to see that if you didn’t lock your door somebody was
going to come in on you. Later on in the
kingdom that was the rule, maybe, Solomon had soldiers stationed around various
points in the country because the law and order broke down. The reason why it
broke down was because of the lack of reception of the Word of God.
So you had these people going around and teaching and in verses 10-13
it’s very obvious that it depends totally upon you. For example if this was the will of God for
the United States now it would mean that you as an individual citizen, nobody
is going to watch you, you don’t have to write a report and tell how many times
you did this and didn’t do it, Big Brother isn’t going to look over your
shoulder, it’s strictly up to you. Do you see the level of maturity, fantastic
maturity these people had. God said it’s
all up to you, I’m not going to run around knocking on your door, I’m not going
to check up on you, it’s strictly up to you; it’s between you and Me, that’s
it. So this is why all this nonsense we
have today about going around and checking up on somebody and see if they’re
doing it and all the rest is unbiblical.
If they’re not going to do it as unto the Lord and you come around and
they feel pressure, for example to give, some churches with their building
funds have to come around and call on you, do you know why the people give;
it’s very simple, get the person out of the living room. That’s not a motivation to give, it’s just a
gimmick, that’s all it is, I want to get this guy off my back and I can’t
figure out any other way so I’ll write out a check for $1.00 and do something
to get rid of him. This is obviously
human motivation and the Bible never condones this and you see it here; it all
has to come from the individual as unto the Lord.
Now this goes back to the idea that there are only four sources of law
in history. One source of law is by direct
revelation and only one nation can qualify for this, Israel. They were the only nation that got their law
directly, at least within recent history.
Two, the other source of law is by consensus based upon a direct
revelation: illustration, Puritans. Here
you had a group of people that generally agreed on certain principles and they
stuck with it. The third source of law is where we’re going in this country,
social contract, this is where you get together and it’s like one big football
game, you say now let’s see, how many downs do we have to have to make a first
down, is it going to be four or five, how many points will we get if we kick a
field goal, and you set up a series of rules to run the ballgame with and this
is a social contract. Usually what it
amounts to is the least common denominator; everybody agrees on this, they
can’t agree on something so we’ll all agree on this and so this becomes the
rule of the ballgame. Unfortunately this
is not really morality, this is just rules of the ballgame and it has no real
demand on my conscience.
And incidentally under this theory of social contract of law how do you
justify the condemnation of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. See, the Nuremberg trials were really a farce
as far as law and order outside the Christian framework. If God is not in existence and there’s no
such thing as an absolute standard of righteousness, what right did the western
powers have to go in and execute the Nazi war criminals. Figure it out, because under the German law
they were doing fine, they did what they thought best for Germany and so as far
as the Germans were concerned it’s all right, as far as we’re concerned it was
wrong but that doesn’t mean that our standard applies to them. Do you see what
a mess you wind up in under this theory?
That’s what I’d argue, I’d defend them on the basis of the fact you had
no business condemning the Nazi war criminals because you had no absolutes that
applied to them. What right have you got
to project your standard on to them?
Unless God exists, and then there is a certain absolute standard that
applies to everybody, but not unless that’s true. So we have this.
And we have the fourth, the anarchists. These people are pretty smart,
the radical students today are not dummies, they just recognize the
insufficiency of the base of the social contract idea of law. And so they say listen, my parents tell me
I’m going to do this and the country gets together, the establishment, and sets
up certain rules and regulations and why should I obey them, give me a good
reason. Nobody has given them any reason
so they say the heck with that, if you want to make rules I can make just as
good rules as you can and I’ll go ahead and make them. We call that an anarchist, he just lives by
himself, makes up his own rules as he goes.
You can see it’s a perfectly logical position if you don’t have any base
for the law, and the only base you have for any kind of law goes back to the
essence of God. Here God is, sovereign,
righteous, just, love, omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence and immutability,
that’s God. And particularly it’s His
righteousness that gives you the base for law, and that’s where it comes from.
That’s the tragedy in our country today, people laugh at the Bible-believer and
all the rest of it. Actually it’s the
Bible-believer that’s the glue that holds this country together, because if you
start throwing out this concept of a God who has an absolute standard, you just
shot the base for law, just forget it.
You can’t just set up a set of laws.
This is what is happening in this country, we have the idea, oh, we’ve
got a social problem, all we have to do is pass a law, change the rules of the
ballgame and everybody is going to play.
No, everybody doesn’t play that way.
It’s very obvious why they don’t play, no base for it.
You see in verses 10-13 Moses appealed directly to the character of God
in verse 13, he said look, I don’t want you to do this to brown-nose some other
person, I don’t want you to do this because this is going to get you in favor
with the authorities and you’re going to get the whole set of Sunday School
pins every time you do this, I don’t want you to do this because your parents
will be happy, I want you to do this because it’s righteousness before the Lord
thy God, that’s why I want you to do it.
Do you see the standard that he appealed to? And that’s where the morals and everything
should hang. If you have a set of morals
and you’re trying to teach them to somebody, you have to hang them on something
solid and the place to hang them is on the character of God. That’s the place where they belong and
nowhere else. You hang them in thin air,
someone is going to come in and knock them down, and that’s what the anarchists
are doing today.
Verses 14-15 give us a second example of illustration from economic
oppression. “Thou shalt not oppress an
hired servant who is poor and needy, whether he be of thy brethren, or of thy
strangers that are in the land within thy gates. [15] And his day thou shalt
give him his hire, neither shall the sun go down upon it; for he is poor, and
sets his heart upon it” now here’s an expression that’s important for those of
you working on the soul the heart and the spirit, etc. This verse in verse 15
where he sets his heart means he sets his soul, the Hebrew there is nephesh, and it is not heart, it is nephesh and this is one of the texts to
prove that volition is in the soul. It’s
an act of volition that’s described here, he is setting his heart, that’s a
function of volition but it’s said to be “soul,” nephesh, and this proves that volition is in the soul. “… lest he cry unto the Lord and it be sin
unto thee.” Do you notice something
strange about that “sin unto thee?” If
you don’t, turn to Psalm 51, this is a technicality but it’s an important
one. In Psalm 51 David is confessing his
sin and in verse 4 he makes a very interesting statement. David is one of the most miserable people
that ever existed right at this point.
Why his Son Solomon had to do the same thing and wind up in the mess he
was in, I do not know, God alone knows.
He saw his father go through this, Solomon as a son must have watched
his dad suffer, he must have watched his father go through the results,
although obviously he wasn’t around when this exact thing happened. He saw his father suffer, he saw his father,
one of the greatest leaders of the nation, fall down in sin and get in trouble
and he saw it happen again and again and again, and he also saw God bless his
father, and yet Solomon evidently really didn’t believe what was going on. So he went down into this carnal spiral.
In verse 4 David, when he turns around to confess his sin, doesn’t he
make an interesting statement? Think of
what he’s confessing. First of all he
got out of fellowship, not because he saw Bathsheba taking a shower but because
it was the time in the spring when kings were to go forth to battle; that’s why
the Bible puts that notice in there. And
it says that David’s job as unto the Lord was to move out in holy war, and he
was to move out and annihilate the Canaanites.
That was his job that he had been given by God to do and we find at the
beginning of this passage over in Samuel that David’s sacked out, and this
immediately this should alert you, something is wrong with David, because in
the Psalms remember what you read? He
says Lord, I rise up early to praise you.
David evidently got up early and went to bed early, and yet the whole
pattern of his life shifted at this point.
An here he’s sacked out in the afternoon and he gets up about 3:00 p.m.
and walks out on the porch and he has the highest house in Jerusalem and he
looks down there and he sees this girl taking a shower. The problem is, she doesn’t have any clothes
on, so he gets interested and that’s how he gets involved with Bathsheba. So he commits adultery with her and he
doesn’t know enough to confess his sin and leave it, but then he does what a
lot of us do, we get out of fellowship and we say I’m going to stay out of
fellowship, I like it out here.
So what David is going to do now, he’s going to insulate himself from
God’s grace and he’s going to say well now I can get out of a jam, I got in
trouble with this girl but I can get out of the jam because what I’ll do is
kill her husband; so he arranges… he had a wonderful soldier, Uriah, a
tremendous fellow, and David just flat murders him, he gives the senior office
an order and says listen, when the battle wages in this area I want you to take
a few men with a patrol and I want you to take him out there and let him get exposed
to enemy fire. And Uriah goes down, he’s
murdered. First of all he got out of
fellowship by not following God’s will, this is why, incidentally when he saw
Bathsheba he actually fell for her. If he had been walking in fellowship David
would have had no problem, he’d just done a quick about face and drawn his
blinds, that’s all, no problem. But
David couldn’t do that because David had already been out of fellowship before
he got into that situation.
That’s why Christians fall, it’s through some little innocent sin that
knocks you out of fellowship and then you wonder, good night, how come I don’t
have any victory over this thing. The problem is back here somewhere you got
out of fellowship, so you don’t have any victory, you’re trying to fight it in
the flesh; flesh can’t fight flesh. So
then the third thing he does is murder.
Now that’s the sins this man is confessing. First of all he sinned against the nation,
you’d think because after all, he didn’t lead their armies the way he should
have; he sinned against Bathsheba, and the third thing is that he sinned
against Uriah, her husband. But look what he says in verse 4, “Against thee,
thee only, have I sinned,” now you say oh no David, you’ve got to confess it
before people. David never did, do you know this, because sin is a technical
word which means I have broken whose standards?
Did David break Bathsheba’s standards?
No, she didn’t have any standards, maybe she adhered to God’s standards
but the standards weren’t hers and the standards weren’t Uriah’s; he didn’t
cross Uriah standards, what he crossed was God’s standards. And therefore sin being an infraction against
a rule, whose rule is it? It’s not the
legislature of Israel; Israel didn’t have any legislature in their
government. They had judicial and
executive but no legislative. Do you
know who the legislative was in Israel? God, He made the law. So therefore sin
was against God.
So therefore he says in verse 4, that’s why I have sinned against God
only, I’ve injured these people, I’ve hurt these people, I’ve murdered these
people, I’ve committed adultery with these people, I’ve ruined my nation, but I
have sinned against God. Now an
illustration that was used at Dallas Seminary by my Hebrew professor I think
gets this across very well, the fact that you’re a father and you tell your son don’t go down and don’t
play baseball down the street because if you do so that ball can go into so and
so’s window. So being a natural kid he goes down and plays ball right in front
of the window. Bang, right through the
glass. And so the kid comes home. Now who has he sinned against? The man who had the window or you? Well, he sinned against you because you were
the one that gave him the command and it’s your command that he broke, and
incidentally he broke the window along with it, but the real basis is that he
broke your command.
That’s the concept of sin in Scripture.
I can injure people, I can hurt people, but what I have done as far as
my sin is concerned is I have sinned against God’s standard and it’s to Him
that you confess. Now the Bible also
authorizes reparations, etc. in the sense if I have injured somebody, stolen
something from them, and so on I’m supposed to restore it; but nowhere in the
Bible do you get this jazz that’s prevalent in certain missionary circles where
everybody gets up and confesses and you have a whole circle of people, they get
around, they all confess their sin to everybody, and so and so feels guilty
tonight so he confesses some sin he did 20 years ago and then Joe Blow and he
wants to feel more humble so he figures something he did 25 years ago and it’s
a real whopper and he lets that out in the group and oh, my goodness, look at
Brother So and So, and this goes on. Do
you know what it is? It’s just dumping
dirty linen in the middle of the floor and what it amounts to is you get
Christians, oh, I wonder, what kind of dirty linen do you have and that’s what
it amounts to. Now that’s not spiritual,
that’s very satanic and it’s uncalled for in the Word of God. The rule to use if you’ve injured somebody
you go to that person but you don’t blab it all over the place and you don’t
have any public confession of sin.
So in verse 4 David is truly following the Bible under conditions where
you’d think there would be a tremendous tendency for him to let go and go
crying around, if Uriah had a father and mother to go to them and say I’m
sorry, etc. but what he does is confess his sin before God. See the concept, if you take care of the
vertical relationship between you and God the horizontal all fits
together. You just have to guard with
holy jealousy your personal relationship with God. The rest of it will take care of itself.
Now Deut. 24 again, this man in verse 15 is going to “cry against thee
unto the LORD, and it will be sin for you,” or with respect to you. The sin becomes, and here’s the series now,
what’s going to happen and this has to be understood in the context of the
suzerainty vassal treaty, we now know that there were such things as suzerain
vassal treaties, and when I started this series I recommended the commentary,
Meredith Kline, Treaty of the Great King,
in which this is all explained, and he points out that you have a suzerain,
great kings, say the king of the Hittites or something, and he makes treaties
with these lesser kings, say the king of Edom or the king of Tyre or the King
of Sidon, etc. he makes this treaty, it’s called a suzerainty vassal
treaty. Now it just turns out that the
law of the Old Testament follows this exactly.
It is a legal format and this is beautiful for the fundamentalists
because we’ve been saying for years that Moses wrote Deuteronomy and now we can
prove it because here’s this format that went out of circulation in 1000
BC. Absolutely this kind of format, as
far as we know, went out of circulation in 1000 BC and now we find Deuteronomy
written in something dating between 2000 and 1000 BC, the liberals had always
dated Deuteronomy about 500-600 BC and they’re all wet because the book is
written in a type of format that existed in the second millennia before Christ
and not in the first millennia.
Well, in these suzerainty vassal treaties there were always provision
that if one vassal, say here’s the king of Edom, had a fight with the king of
Tyre, they would cry out, the king of Edom would come and send a messenger to
the suzerain, up to eastern Turkey where the Hittites had their center
apparently, and he’d send his messengers up to the Hittite place and say now
look, I’m a suzerain unto you, I’ve willed my country to you, you are my great
king, now take care of this guy. And he
had that legal right.
And it’s the same thing in verse 15, except instead of the suzerain you
have God and in place of these vassal kings you have the 12 tribes or
individuals in the 12 tribes. So now
these individuals have the right because of the law to cry to their Lord
against someone else that’s in the same covenant relationship. And when they do this immediately it becomes
sin, verse 15, it becomes sin for that person.
Now verse 16 illustrates another principle, it goes along with this same
idea, and this is the illustration of freedom from injustice. “The fathers shall not be put to death for
the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers; every
man shall be put to death for his own sin.”
Now this emphasizes a principle often neglected in this book of
Deuteronomy. People have drawn the
conclusion this illustrates the social group, but yet you see in verse 16 it’s
very obviously strongly individual and you have to keep these two things in
balance. Moses never lost the balance
between the group and the individual and in verse 16 we have the individual
responsibility. If you are a believer or
if you’re an unbeliever God has given you a volition and He holds you
responsible for that. Now God in many
ways is a gentleman. Now I know some
people that are frustrated because God is a gentleman; do you know why? Because what they want to happen is for God
to come booming into their life and turn them into a robot and make them live
the Christian life. But you know, it’s a
strange thing, God never makes you do anything; He presents the issue and it’s
up to you to choose, a wonderful system really, a tremendous system. It’s up to
you, strictly up to you.
Now this is what the trouble is in our day, there’s resentment against
this. This is why I think a lot of
Christians are going off into the tongues movement, etc. because they don’t
like to be responsible for their own life, they want to yield themselves up to
something, turn themselves into robots, automatons for God, etc. This is wrong; it’s just picking up the
spirit of the age in which we live. You
are responsible personally before God for your life. I have to stand before the throne as a believer;
I have to stand before the judgment seat of Christ, that’s 2 Cor. 5:10. If you are an unbeliever, if you have not
accepted Jesus Christ, then you’re going to stand before the Great White
Throne. Now both of us are going to have to give account, and He holds both of
us responsible. It turns out believers
do not lose their salvation at this judgment seat of Christ; it’s an evaluation
for reward, but still God holds you responsible, not me, not someone else, not
your wife, your husband, your girlfriend, He holds you responsible. That’s the
concept of the Word of God, individual responsibility.
Now you say wait a minute, I find in the law where it says God is going
to visit the iniquity to the third and fourth generation. All right, turn to Deut. 5:9, this is the
second commandment of the Ten Commandments, so-called, you remember God has
just got through, don’t make a graven image, etc., thou shalt not bow down to
them, and then He says in verse 9, [Thou shalt not bow thyself unto them, nor
serve them;] for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of
the fathers upon the children of them who hate me, [10] And showing mercy unto
the thousands of them who love me and keep My commandments.” I want you to notice something because a lot
of people make this flippant statement, oh, the God of the Old Testament is a
meany, and the God of the New Testament is a God of love. This is a false presentation of the Word,
it’s absolutely nauseating because it shows the fact that the person hasn’t studied
in the Old Testament. The God of the Old
Testament is a God of love, it’s just that He hasn’t manifested the love as
much as He has in the New Testament, but don’t you ever think the Lord Jesus
Christ is a sweet little thing that you see in Sunday school holding a lamb up;
it makes a nice Sunday school picture.
Did you ever read what Jesus Christ looks like at His Second Advent in
the book of Revelation? He’s on His
horse and the blood is flowing as high as the horse’s flank. Now is that the kind of picture you see of
Jesus Christ in the Sunday School literature?
God is a God of love and He is a God of justice.
In verses 9-10 you have this contrast made, I will show iniquity to
those who hate Me but those who love Me, I’m going to bless them. These are the two sides of God, and here’s a
little personal application you can make, judging yourself and your surrounding
environment, whenever you hear people talking about love that are this
mealy-mouthed sentimental mush kind of stuff, that you can chalk it up as not
love. Do you know why? Because a person
who loves also hates, the two always go together. For example, a man and a wife; a man says he
loves his wife, oh yeah but he has three or four other women out in the
backyard some place. Now, that’s not
love, if he loves his wife it’s going to be the relationship of Israel, Jehovah
to Israel, he is going to love her and he’s going to hate other women. It doesn’t mean he hates them literally but
it means that he’s made a choice here.
Love always does that, it’s going in one direction or the other, there’s
a positive and a negative to it and so someone who loves some principle will
always hate its opposite, it’s got to be that way. So don’t buy this kind of floating around
jazz that passes for love today. We have
hated and love then.
The second thing about this passage in Deut. 5 is that the children have
to participate in the things of their fathers to receive the discipline of
their fathers. Notice what it says
carefully, “I will visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children until
the third and fourth generation of them that hate me,” … “of them that hate me”
goes with the children, not with the fathers.
And verse 10 gives you the opposite, “showing mercy unto the thousands
of them that love me.” All right, you
can see this; you’d have a conflict between the two verses if this wasn’t
true. Look at verse 9 again, just
suppose you interpret that to say look, here’s the wrath of God, here’s a
father and he as son 1, son 1 has a grandson and then you have a great great
grandson. So now you have these four
generations; this man sins and if you are going to interpret verse 9 to mean
that God is going to punish all three of these generations for the father’s
sin, what do you do about verse 10?
Suppose down here you have a great grandson and he accepts Christ as
Savior known under the Old Testament economy.
Now he’s a loving God so therefore the promise of verse 10 goes into
action and you negate your interpretation of verse 9. In order to harmonize the two verses you’ve
got to see this.
To make a long story short, the law of culpability in the Old Testament
simply means that when generation number two does the same thing that the first
generation does it’s going to be disciplined the same way the father was. I don’t know whether you’ve studied families
or not but you can take, I don’t know whether this is authorized or not but
it’s strange that in history you can take a family, say like the Herods, Herod
the Great, Herod Antipas, etc. and you can run though that family and watch
this; the father commits a sin and he’s judged, and his son and the son’s son
and the son’s son’s son engage in the same pattern of behavior and they have
the same kind of judgment fall upon them.
Whether this is a legitimate application I don’t know but it’s very
interesting to notice how this thing works.
The continuity of discipline is what is meant. To see this turn to Isaiah 65:7, Isaiah is
addressing his generation and he says “your iniquities and the iniquities of
your fathers together, saith the Lord, which have burned incense upon the
mountains and blasphemed Me upon the hills, therefore will I measure their
former work into their bosom,” and what he’s apparently doing here is that
there’s a continuity of sin, if you’d like to study this further you find the
same thing in Jer. 16:11-13, you find the same thing in Dan. 9:16 and in Lev.
26:39 so it’s repeated many times in the Word of God. Why is this so? How can we conclude and explain this? I think there are only two explanations that
seem to fit. I don’t know which one is
true, they might both be true.
One is suggested by Dr. Joe Temple in Abilene, a very remarkable
deduction based on the life of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. If you take Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, you
notice a progression of the area of weakness.
Abraham had an area of weakness, here’s the sin nature, out of his area
of weakness comes personal sin, and the personal sin that Abraham tended to do was
to lie. All right, now Isaac comes along,
what does he do? He does exactly the
same thing. And Jacob comes along and
his name means chiseler, it gets worse and worse as this family goes on in
history; it develops. Why this occurs we
don’t know, it could be a heredity factor in that the sin nature transmitted
from the parents to the children, actually you are transmitting your areas of
weakness. So parents may have an area of
weakness where it’s easy for you to sin in certain areas and this is transmitted
to your children. It doesn’t mean your
children have to sin this way, but it means they are going to have an inborn
natural tendency to sin this way.
Therefore the Jewish people, knowing this principle, always used to
discipline their children this way. You
had your parents and they knew their own sin natures, and they knew basically
where each other got out of fellowship the easiest, and so guess what, they’d
have some children and they’d look at those children and they’d notice hmm,
wonder where they learned that from and then they’d look at each other and say
hmm, guess he got it from you. So they’d
look at the kid and they’d find out, good night, this kid has the same area of
weakness we have, how about that. So
evidently the sin nature is in hereditary form, these areas are liable where
you kind of lose your balance, etc. spiritually. So this is a real notice for parents because
you can spot this in your own children.
Now this is what makes it difficult when you adopt a child. When you
adopt a child you don’t know his parents or her parents areas of weakness and
you have to watch and observe very carefully to see this and to watch it, and
that’s why in that sense they’re harder to bring up than a child of your own.
The second explanation for the third and fourth generation is by Dr.
Meredith Kline and this is a sociological one and it simply is that the third
and fourth generations were the limits of the ancient near eastern household,
so that you had a patriarch, a grand old man that ruled over the family and
under him would be three or four generations gathered together in one great big
family, so therefore since he was the head of the family he’d tend to run it
along certain lines. Now whether it’s
sociological or heredity we don’t know, it could be a mix of both, but
evidently God has so in His mercy worked that this only does last to the third
and fourth generation, whether it’s dissipated genetically as people intermarry
with other people from other families or whether it’s because the home
ultimately breaks up or something happens, but God says this extends to the
third or fourth generation.
But notice, he also said but it extends to thousands of generations to
them that love me. Now how can you get the God of the Old Testament is a God of
hate and the God of the New Testament is a God of love when He just made a
statement like that. He’s going to visit
the iniquity to the third and fourth generation but to those that love Him He’s
going to create grace and pour out grace to the thousands of generations. Do you see the contrast? Fantastic contrast! The God of the Old Testament is a God of love
just as much as the God of the New Testament.
Back to Deut. 24 to finish the chapter; in verse 17-18 we have an
illustration of the freedom [can’t understand words, “Thou shalt not pervert
the judgment due the stranger, nor the fatherless, nor take a widow’s raiment
to pledge.” Verse 18, “But thou shalt
remember that thou wast a slave in Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee
from there; therefore I command thee to do this thing. [19] When thou cutest down thine harvest in
thy field, and hast forgotten a sheaf in the field, thou shalt not go again to
fetch it; it shall be for the sojourner, for the fatherless, and for the widow,
that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hands.] Remember
we went through [blank spot] …the same thing in verse 21. Why pick out those three classes? Because those three classes represent the
helpless classes of society, the orphans, a child who’s lost his parents,
absolutely hopeless under the Old Testament economy. He has no one to fall back on and he’s at the
mercy of society. You take the widow, in
that state the widows were treated very poorly in that world, [long blank spot]
… there’s a little bit of this in the New Testament when the Lord Jesus says
when you do your alms, remember this, there’s a parallel here in Matthew 6,
let’s go over to the New Testament to see this parallel and then we’ll finish
the chapter.
When Jesus discussed Alms giving He made the same point. This is the same point, or very similar to
what Solomon is going to discover in his experiment on pleasure. But in Matt. 6:1-4 is the doctrine of minding
your own business. “Take heed that ye do
not your alms before men, to be seen of them; otherwise ye have no reward of
your Father, who is in heaven.” Isn’t that interesting; what is the reward, a
big fat zero, that’s what you get and it’s explained in verse 2. “Therefore, when you do your alms,” this is
good works, “do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the
synagogues and in the streets, that they may have the glory from men. Verily I
say unto you, They have their reward.”
Now what does he mean by that when he just got through saying there is no
reward? Because the reward in verse 1 is
a spiritual reward from God the Father. Verse 2, the reward they get there is
just the reward for men. In other words,
they walk down the street and have a little orchestra in front of them, look
what I’m doing, they have the jazz band, etc. and everybody claps, three big
points. So they enjoy themselves, but
what happens after they do their work?
Nothing, no reward with God. So
therefore verse 2, simply the Lord Jesus is saying just mind your business,
conduct your life as unto the Lord, you do things because of the Lord, not
because of men and you’ll get your reward from God.
That’s the same principle in the Old Testament, Jesus is just amplifying
the same law that if you’re a farmer in this case and you’re going through the
field there’s a natural thing, you don’t feel deprived because you’re doing it,
but you’ve gone through and you’ve harvested and you’ve got some left, just
leave it there and don’t feel it’s going to be some big loss because God is
going to make it come back to you. 2
Cor. 9:8, same thing in the Christian life, God is able to supply, etc. make up
your sufficiency in all things.
Verse 20, When you beat your olive tree,” same thing, “don’t go over the
boughs again; it shall be for” these people, [“it shall be for the sojourner,
for the fatherless, and for the widow.”]
Verse 21, “When you gather the grapes of thy vineyard, thou shalt not
glean it afterward; it shall be for” these people again, [“the stranger, for
the fatherless, and for the widow.”]
Verse 22, “And thou shalt remember that thou wast a slave in the land of
Egypt; therefore I command thee to do this thing.” These people are believers who have been
freed from bondage and they are to live this freedom out.
Now we can apply this as far as we are concerned as Christians because
as Christians we have been freed from the bondage of sin. God also calls us to be freedom lovers,
lovers of freedom. Christians should be
the most alert people to the deprivation of freedom anywhere in society. When you see people bullied, something on the
inside should rise up in wrath because the person who is bullied was made in
the image of God and God gave that person a volition and God doesn’t want
people to be in bondage, any kind of bondage, economic, spiritual or any other
way. If your conscience is operating as
a mature Christian, something should get you mad when you see people in
bondage, regardless of what their status is, something should irritate you and
if it doesn’t you have some examining to do.
Why, in conclusion, is God so interested in this point? He’s made illustration after illustration
after illustration; what’s the whole thing here? Freedom from oppression; what in ever case
are these people doing. What is the farmer doing in verses 19-20, what’s
motivating him to get out there and harvest every cotton-picking little thing
he can get in his field? It’s covetousness, and do you remember your Ten
Commandments, go from one to ten, do you know the tenth one comes right back in
the first one. The first one says “Thou
shalt have none other gods before me,” that’s the first commandment. What’s the tenth one? “Thou shalt not covet anything,” they’re
saying the same thing, absolutely the same thing. If I say I want something else in my life
other than God it’s going to be some thing, I’ve got to covet something, and
coveting, of course, is the absolute other side of the coin for denying the
Lordship of Christ.
So this is the reason why we have these series of illustrations; they
are to show that as believers we are to live out the freedom that we have. We
are to attach our morals and our laws not to something in thin air but to the
righteousness and justice of God. We are to attach our concept of freedom, not
to some philosopher or something, we’re to attach the concept of freedom to the
love of God that operated in history to the cross of Christ. That’s the base of freedom; give up that base
and you’ve lost everything.
Next week we’ll deal with chapter 25 and finish this section of the Law.