Lesson 57
Protection for All – 25:1-10
As we come close to the end of this section of Deuteronomy we probably
2-3 more times before we finish the end of chapter 26, at which point this book
shifts in its character and is concerned with a review of the history of the
nation and the dynamics of history, the angelic conflict and the counsel of
God, the angels, etc. it’s quite a change of pace. But as we come down to the end of this we
constantly have to keep before us the objective of this book, and the objective
of this book is to delineate obedience to God through the area of the details
of life. In particular, I think you’ve
noticed by now that man’s physical state is to be in some correspondence with
his spiritual state so that if a person is redeemed spiritually it means as far
as the
During this time there was a kingdom of God on this earth and the
kingdom was immediate, the kingdom was manifested in the sense that God judged
the nation directly in history, there was a direct cause/effect relationship
and of course the kingdom was removed in 586 BC in the book of Ezekiel when the
Shekinah glory left the Temple. This is
the
The only way in which you can
manifest the
Now after we finished the book
of Deuteronomy we’re going to study the angelic conflict and we’re going to use
an analogy worked out between the book of Ephesians and the book of Joshua, and
you will see that the believer’s call is not one to just sit around but his
call is to an active aggressive campaign of bringing his environment under the
Word of God. In
Can you imagine, for example,
some of these communists or radicals coming into Puritan New England? In the first place they’d probably just get
off the boat and they would have been shoved in the water and if they managed
to survive that they probably would have been hung and that would have solved
the problem very rapidly. And they would
never have been able to get too many people to follow them because the society
in which they tried to infiltrate was saturated with Bible doctrine. It just naturally insulated the people and
when they came along and said “the greatest good for the greatest number” the
believers of that day would have realized that’s a lot of nonsense, it’s always
been good according to your ability, period, the capitalist system over against
the socialist system, because they would have understood Bible doctrine.
This is the problem today and
the book of Deuteronomy has pertinence because in every one of these
illustrations that we’re going through, don’t think of these as just dry
illustrations. They are there to show you that these people, in this day,
didn’t keep Bible doctrine just upstairs; they moved it out into the sphere of
life and began to change their environment by bringing it under obedience to
the Word of God. Maybe they didn’t do it
all at once but they did it in their own spheres of responsibility.
In verses 1-4 we begin to have
one of these spheres of responsibility and this refers to the government
officials. We are back to the trial system of
So this is why the rights of
man can only be hinged on the character and essence of God, and any other base
for rights and freedom is absolutely wrong, and this is why, although the
people and the liberal clergy today will tell you they are all for freedom,
they are all for civil rights, they are all for the rights of man, etc., don’t
you believe it. What they are for is for
a system that they have invented but they are not for the rights of individuals
as God has given them those rights. These people could care less about God’s
rights. What they care about is that they want to make one big socialist
kingdom and they want to be the rulers of it.
That’s what they are after and they are manipulating and taking
advantage of your sensitivity to certain words.
If you are a Christian you are sensitive to words like “freedom,” you
are sensitive to words like “God-given rights” and when someone comes along and
uses these words in your presence there is an emotional response, even though that
person isn’t using them the way you hear them and the way you understand them,
nevertheless they are able to evoke an emotional response out of you by
manipulating you through the use of this vocabulary. So this is why you have to have your
mentality schooled in the Word of God to be able to spot the phonies around
today that are misusing Bible doctrine and Bible Words.
In verse 1 we have an
illustration, we start off in a courtroom situation. This is important for
several reasons but most of all verses 1-3 give you a fair, simple system of
administering justice. Verse 1, “If
there be a controversy between men, and they come unto judgment, that the
judges may judge them, then they shall justify the righteous and condemn the
wicked.” And here we have the idea that first a fair system of justice is based
on a law that was previously known. It’s
not based on the rights of man. Parents
can apply this raising children, it’s the same thing; where discipline is
needed you have to adhere to a set of standards that were previously known
otherwise you have no right to discipline somebody for disobeying a law that
wasn’t known before. So the concept of a
known law is the first element of a fair judicial system, that you have a code
that’s set up and a code not just based on your personal whim but a code that
is based on God’s will, divine viewpoint, and when it’s based on that what have
you done? Then you set up a code,
whether it’s in your family, you have a family code, whether it’s in your home,
whether it’s in some group that you’re with or something else, nevertheless you
have this code, but the advantage of having the code tied to divine viewpoint
is that nobody can overthrow the code because it’s God’s, it’s not yours, they
can’t say well that’s just your standards.
No, no, it’s not just your standards, it’s God’s standards. That’s why it’s necessary to tie the law to
God’s character and His will.
The second thing to do is in
verse 2, “And it shall be, if the wicked man be worthy to be beaten, that the
judge shall cause him to lie down, and to be beaten before his face, according
to his fault, by a certain number.” So
where you have chastisement that chastisement is proportional to the crime. And it’s not arbitrary and it’s carefully
administered, not in anger but on supervised conditions, not somebody flying
off the handle and belting somebody but it’s under strict supervision and
that’s the reason for the judge, as we’ll see in a moment.
That’s the second principle of
a judicial system that really works, you have a law that’s based on God’s
standards, you have it carefully administered, not out of the anger of a moment
but out of the fact that someone has specifically violated this particular
point of the law and therefore they have this specific punishment for that
specific violation.
The third thing, in verse 3,
“Forty stripes he may be give him, and not exceed; lest, if he should exceed,
and beat him above these with many stripes, then thy brother should seem vile
unto thee.” There is to be a limitation on the type of punishment and it’s not
to be to the extent where it begins to damage the person. Punishment up to a certain point is
corrective, beyond the point of correction it becomes destructive, and the
Bible recognizes this. There is not liberty
of unlimited punishment in Scripture, it’s always carefully limited. And Paul saw this in Eph. 6:4 when he said
“fathers, provoke not your children to wrath,” and what he meant was don’t
carry the discipline beyond the point where it ceases to be useful. If you go beyond that point X then you begin
to tear down and destroy and build antagonisms and resentments, etc. rather
than correct. So the Word of God has an
interesting provision in verse 3 where punishments were limited.
Now you say what about a
recalcitrant, what do they do about someone who just wouldn’t toe the
line? The Word of God had a way of
eliminating these people, it was by capital punishment. You say well isn’t that unlimited
discipline? No it isn’t, it’s suffering
over very fast and it means that if this person wouldn’t stick with it they
either left the nation, exile or they were killed, and if they couldn’t play
the ballgame then they had no business being in the ballgame and that’s the way
the feeling in the Word of God and that’s the way a logical judicial system
works.
Now let’s go back through
verses 1-3 for details. That’s the
outline of a very useful practical system of administering discipline in any
group, whether it’s in the family or the nation. “If there be a controversy” and the word
“controversy” is a rib, it’s the
Hebrew word for lawsuit, “if there be a lawsuit between men and they come unto
judgment, then the judges may judge them, then they shall justify the
righteous, and condemn the wicked,” and I think if you read this you wondered,
what does it mean “justify the righteous and condemn the wicked.” This is
particularly puzzling because if you look at the original language the word
“justify” here is the word “righteous,” to be righteous. There’s the verb “be righteous,” now Hebrew
verbs had different stems and this particular stem was in the hiphiel, a
hiphiel stem in the Hebrew meant to cause to be righteous.
Now you say wait a minute,
what’s going on here, this person is already righteous and the judge causes him
to be righteous, what does this mean?
This means de jure
righteousness, in other word’s it’s the righteousness that pertains to the law,
the person was defacto
righteous. In other words, he had obeyed
the law, that’s defacto
righteousness, he had in effect obeyed the law but he would be formally
declared before the bar of justice as having perfectly obeyed the law and that
made it de jure. So that’s the difference now, one is defacto righteousness, which the person
had before he came to the trial. One is de jure righteousness which he has by
the declaration of the legal authority of the land.
Now what’s so important about
this for you as a believer? Turn to Rom.
3 because it pertains to your salvation.
This verse that we’re going through in Deuteronomy is the basis for
understanding the doctrine of justification in the New Testament. If you will understand this principle you
will never, never, never have any trouble with eternal security. Those of you who have difficulty swallowing
eternal security just understand carefully what justification means. Justification means a judge attributes de jure righteousness to one who has defacto righteousness already before he
went to the courtroom. Now look, you
have the bar of justice, here’s the judge up here and here are the two people,
the plaintiff and the defendant, etc.
Now this person has righteousness, he has obeyed the law; this is case
number one on the docket; number two docket, this person has sin, he has
disobeyed the law. Here’s person A, he’s
number one on the docket; he comes up and the issue did he or did he not break
the law.
Let’s make this a simple
illustration, suppose it’s driving a car, you’re going down the street and
someone accuses you of going 35 mph in a 20 mph zone, you went by the school or
something supposedly when the light was flashing. That’s the law, 20 mph, and you’re accused of
going by at 35 mph. Now if you are defacto righteousness it means that you
actively obeyed the law and went 20 mph.
So that’s defacto
righteousness, you obeyed the law so you went through the system at 20 mph
obeying the law. You actively obeyed the
law, that is your righteousness, +R. Now
here’s person B, number two on the docket and he’s been accused of going 35 mph
in a 20 mph zone and it turns out yes, he did, so therefore he actively
disobeyed the law and we call that an act of personal sin or the Bible calls it
transgression violating God’s Law, so you see, that’s personal sin. So you’ve got the concept of active
righteousness and concept of sin, violation.
Now there’s a third concept
that you want to understand and that is minus R that is not equal to sin. What’s minus R? Minus R simply means lack of positive
obedience and in this analogy case three on the docket was he wasn’t driving
his car. Now do you see the point? He’s not credited with obeying the law or
disobeying the law because he wasn’t in his car. So in this case it would be like Adam before
he went one way or the other way. So minus R is in the sense that you lack
positive obedience, and a person like this can’t say well I’m so great, I
didn’t break the law. All we can say is bless your poor little head, you didn’t
have the opportunity to break the law.
Now this is important because this is how you’re going to understand the
righteousness that’s given to your account.
Now let’s take this example
over, these three examples over to the New Testament and look at Romans 3:19,
“Now we know that whatever things the law says, it says to them who are under
the law, that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty
before God. [20] Therefore, by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be
justified in his sight; for by the law is the knowledge of sin.” Now what’s that pointing out? Let’s go back to this illustration. What it’s saying is that everybody has driven
through the speed limit, and so everybody has sin. In other words, the laws of God are a unit
and somewhere along the line if you study it you know you have actively
violated His standards. That’s personal
sin; you’ve actively violated His standards.
So that’s what Paul means by the fact that there shall be by the deeds
of the law no flesh be justified because no person has perfectly obeyed the
law.
Now verse 21, “But now the
righteousness from God,” literally, “the righteousness from God outside of the
law is manifested, being witnessed through the law and the prophets, [22] Even
the righteousness of God,” righteousness from God, “which is by faith of Jesus
Christ unto all and upon all them that believe; for there is no
difference.” And then he goes on to say
“For all have sinned,” see that’s a violation of the law, “and come short of
the glory of God,” but, verse 24, “Being justified freely by his grace through
the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, [25] Whom God has set forth to be a
propitiation through faith,” and so on.
Now what’s the point? The point
is that you’re over here, you’re like case number two on the docket; every
person in this congregation is this way, you have actively violated God’s
standard. You can’t go back and do what
a lot of people say, well God forgive me my sins. If God forgave you your sins, what it would
mean is that He would wipe out the sin all right, but you’d revert back to this
condition, you’d go back to the status of Adam before he had a chance to go one
way or the other. If God just forgave
your sins it’s be like a businessman who is in debt; here he is, he needs
$2,000 to make it and he’s $2,000 in debt. Forgiving your sins would be wiping
out the debt but still leaving you with zero. That’s what forgiveness of sins
means.
Now that is not all that God
does; He does do that, when you at the point of salvation, He does do that, but
that’s not all He does. In addition to doing
that He gives you positive assets. That
would be like taking a businessman $2,000 in debt, he not only cancels his debt
but on top of the cancellation he gives him operating assets. That’s what justification is; it’s a
crediting that we have perfectly obeyed the law. Some of you have never seen that about
salvation, this is why you’re all fouled up. And this is why some of you today
swallow hard and kind of grind the teeth every time I mention eternal security. The reason is that you do not understand
salvation. And I don’t understand how
you could ever worship the Lord in thanksgiving if you don’t understand
salvation. If you don’t understand
salvation it’s about time you got straightened out. The easiest way to get straightened out is to
just simply look at the text of the Word of God and what it’s saying is that
the word “justify” means that you are credited, not just with the removal of
your sins, as in case two, but in this analogy that I’ve given it would like
you drove through a 20 mph going 35 mph, you violated the law, God wipes the
violation out and furthermore credits you with the fact as though you had
driven through at 20 mph.
So there are two things that
are going on here; one is the removal of sin through the forgiveness of sin, the
other is the crediting of obedience to your record. So that’s what justification means. That’s why you can’t lose your
salvation. It’s very simple once you see
it, you can’t lose your salvation because a person that’s credited with perfect
obedience can’t lose it; it’s a result that God has credited to you. How can you lose something…here’s your life,
from the time that you were born until the time you die, and God looked at your
life and says +R! (exclamation point) as a result of the Father’s declaration,
and He’s credited you with perfect righteousness. Now ill you please tell me how any act of
disobedience out here can lose your salvation.
It’s absolutely stupid. If God
has already credited me with practical obedience then no act that I do that’s
disobedient can knock that declaration out.
All you have to do is
understand the legal concepts that are involved here. Justification is a once and for all act by
which God the Father declares us to have the obedience of Jesus Christ. See, that’s where that +R comes from, you say
wait a minute, I haven’t been perfectly obedient to God’s will, I’ve gone
through life and I can tell you 2,000 times in the last six days that I’ve
dropped the ball spiritually and I just don’t have perfect obedience. How come God has the gall, you might say, or
the nerve to credit me with perfect righteousness? Do you know why He does? Because His Son
perfectly obeyed and it’s that perfect obedience that’s credited to your
account. Now do you see what [can’t
understand word] in the presence of God?
It’s the obedience of Jesus Christ that does it, not yours.
Your obedience in your life is
something else; there is a factor of personal obedience and that has to do
whether you’re in the bottom circle or out of the bottom circle, it goes back
to this point; here’s the point you’re saved, from that point on you stay in
the top circle, that’s the legal circle.
In experience, however, bottom circle, you can be in or out. Now if you’re out here we say you’re out of
fellowship; you get in by 1 John 1:9; if
you’re in fellowship we say you’re filled with the Spirit, walking by the
Spirit, etc. if you’re out we say you’re out of fellowship, you’re sowing to
the flesh or some other expression that either Paul or John uses. That’s a simply way to understand the
Christian life. It’s very simple once
you grab the point. You’re in the top
circle always but you can get out of the bottom circle; you go in or out, in or
out. That’s eternal security; eternally
secure in the top circle, but in the bottom circle it’s up to your volition,
you can get with it or you can just forget about it and goof off, in which case
God has a little factor out here called discipline in which he makes sure you
don’t goof off too long, because if you’re out there goofing off, he has a
system of very painful discipline that will even take you to the point of
physical death, the sin unto death, and that’s the way He deals with
recalcitrant members of His family. People
that won’t stay with it, the habitual goof-offs spiritually always get it in
the end, always! And God will see to
it. So that’s the other side of eternal
security. You are once in God’s family
always in God’s family. You have
children, you know what happens, they go out and make an ass out of you and
your name and you say good night, I wish I didn’t have him for a son or her for
a daughter, let’s draw the blinds and change our name. You may wish you could do that every once in
a while I’m sure, but the point is that you can’t and wherever that kid of
yours goes making a goof-off of himself and embarrassing you before the school teachers or the
authorities somewhere around town,
you’ve got name attached, sorry, it’s your baby. So everywhere he goes he embarrasses you,
well that’s a tough role, he’s still in your family, you can’t get rid of that
child.
So why do you suppose God has
picked up that analogy and used it to stamp our salvation? Why do you suppose He did that? If you could lose your salvation why use the
illustration of the family; that’s kind of stupid. There are plenty of other illustrations; God
could have used an illustration of the covenant relationship; He could have
used the illustration of a business relationship in the ancient world, there
are thousands of illustrations available in Koine Greek that God could have
picked up and used had He intended to teach conditional security. But the reason why He didn’t use them and the
reason why He picked up the family illustration is to teach eternal
security. Once you are born in a family
you’re in that family forever, period.
Now that’s the point. He will
discipline, that’s the other side of the coin of eternal security. If you are a parent and you’re doing your
job, you know what the story is. A kid
may go around and embarrass you in the daytime but when big dad comes home in
the evening it’s another story; then there’s a little court session held and
discipline is administered. That’s the
difference.
Eternal security means you’re
always in the family of God but it also means that God always has a paddle and
He’s ready to use it on you; that’s what eternal security means. So if you
grasp the concept of justification I don’t think you will ever have a problem
with eternal security. You have to
present eternal security carefully or someone will say that’s an excuse to go
out and raise Cain and so on. It’s not
an excuse to go out and raise Cain, as I’ve just explained; you try it and see
what happens.
Back to Deut. 25:2, this is
the second provision of this courtroom, “And it shall be, if the wicked man be
worthy to be beaten, that the judge shall cause him to lie down, and to be
beaten before his face,” now why did they do that? Because at times in the
ancient world the men who were using these sticks, and they used sticks, not
whips in the ancient world, you can see this in [can’t understand word] you can
see it in the Egyptian archeology, they took two men and they got this
character down on the ground, one fellow grabbed his feet and the other guy
grabbed his hands. And the third man
just hit him over the back with a stick and that’s how they handled their discipline
problem. Now it was done in the presence
of the judge who passed the sentence to make sure that they didn’t misapply and
there wasn’t additional punishment that was not authorized. Do you see the control? This is controlled
discipline; it’s not giving vent or wrath to something. Say he had committed a crime that warranted
seventeen strokes; all right, the judge would be there, one, two, three, four,
and when it was seventeen, that’s all, period.
So the judge there was control the administration of discipline in verse
2, it was not just out of pure anger.
Then we have verse 3 that
gives us the limitation on the punishment, “Forty stripes he may give him, and
not exceed,” forty was the maximum number because 40 in the Bible is the number
of testing. Has it ever occurred to you,
notice the usage of the word 40 in the Word of God: It starts back in Noah’s flood; it rained 40
days and 40 nights. Israel spent 40 years in the wilderness. Moses spent 40 years training to take the
Jews out into the wilderness. Jesus
Christ spent 40 days in the wilderness, and it was 40 years after Christ’s
ministry until the Temple fell in 70 AD.
Always in the Bible 40, whether it’s days or years, refers to a time of
testing, a time of pressure that God brings to judgment or discipline upon His
people. And it’s not just an expression,
as the liberals would say, that this is kind of a synonym for judgment; it is a
literal measure of time of discipline: 40.
Now this cannot be exceeded and beat him because if it is, if there are
more than 40 stripes, this is what’s going to happen it says, “then thy brother
should seem vile unto thee,” and the word here means to be humbled. You have beaten him to the point where he’s
no longer a man, not physically destroyed him, but as far as the dignity of a
man made in the image of God, you’ve destroyed him; you’ve destroyed his status
and his dignity.
So therefore administration of
discipline is limited and if you’re going to have to discipline someone to the
point where you’re going to have to go beyond the 40 stripes in the Old
Testament, you had to kill him. You
couldn’t get this business of almost killing him by slow torture. They were either beaten 40 times and if that
wasn’t enough they were eliminated by capital punishment but you had no right
to lower a person made in the image of God before his fellow men. That was something that was just verboten
there.
Now verse 4, the last part of
the thing and verse 4 sounds like a little odd footnote and you wonder how the
oxen got in here; what about the oxen in verse 4, “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox
when he treads out the grain.” The only
way you can explain this is that this is a proverb, obviously it refers to a
literal thing of muzzling these oxen when they used to stamp out the grain but
it also has come to be, by this time in history, a proverb for don’t withhold
from one his due rights, or his wage. To
prove this, turn in the New Testament to 1 Cor. 9:7 this is always an amusing
passage to go to because of verse 5, I get a bang out of verse 5 every time I
read it. Paul had a little problem with
the Corinthians, they got this hyper spiritual attitude all of a sudden; it’s
always carnal Christians that get these hyper spiritual attitudes and they had
this hyper spiritual attitude. You know
some of these groups that come knocking on your door are so proud of
themselves, you know we don’t pay our clergy, we have a volunteer lay clergy
and we don’t pay our minister and all the rest of it and it looks like a big
deal and the Corinthians were pulling the same thing on Paul.
So in verse 6 he said, “Or I
only, and Barnabas, have we no right to forbear working?” In other words,
haven’t I got the right to stop providing for myself and let you people support
me? Of course I do. Verse 7, “Who goes to war at any time at his
own expense? Who plants a vineyard, and
eats not of its fruit? Or who feeds a flock, and eats not of the milk of the
flock? [8] Say I these things as a man? Or saith not the law the same also? [9]
For it is written in the Law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the
ox that treads out the grain. Doth God take care for oxen? [10] Or saith he it
altogether for our sakes? For our sakes,” Paul takes that passage from the Old
Testament as a proverb that applies to this principle, “no doubt this is
written for our sakes, that he that plows shall plow in hope, and he that
threshes shall thresh in hope and be a partaker of it. [11] If we have sown
unto you spiritual things, is it a great thing if we shall reap your carnal
things?”
Now his point is that he has
the right to be paid as an apostle of Jesus Christ, from people who benefit
spiritually because he takes time to study and that means he takes time that he
could be using to support his family, or himself in this case, so therefore
since he has taken this time and can’t support himself or his family then he
should be paid by those who give it.
That’s his point. So next time
you meet one of these jokers that come knocking on the door with one of these
wacky religious outfits is well it doesn’t impress me in the least because I
know the principle from Deut. 25. Just
feel free to quote the proverb, that’s what it means. You needn’t feel embarrassed to belong to a
church that pays their minister very well.
All right, now that I’ve defended my salary let’s go back to verse 4.
Verses 1-4 defend the concept
that a person is not to be humiliated in punishment or his work, verse 4 is
humiliation in work. Now we come to a
very enigmatic passage, verses 5-10 that deals with Levirate marriage, and
because there are a number of misinterpretations we want to spend the rest of
our time this evening in verses 5-10. “If brethren dwell together, and one of
them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead shall not marry outside the
family unto a stranger: her husband’s brother shall go in unto her, and take
her to him as his wife, and perform the duty of an husband’s brother unto
her.” This brother-in-law has to marry
this woman and you say what kind of a custom is that, I’d never marry my
brother-in-law. Well you didn’t have to
in this situation but it was a provision and the reason for this provision is
because of a very interesting concept that applies to us as Christians.
The concept is that in the Old
Testament they placed emphasis on continuity of existence. In other words, if your
great-great-grandfather was down here and you went down succeeding generations to
your generation, there had to be a continuity in history of your name, of your
family, a concrete continuity and so what we have here in verses 5-10 is an
illustration of the freedom from historical oblivion. One of the worst things that could have happened
to a person in the ancient world is to die and have his name disappear from
history. This is why later on when we
study Amalek at the end of this chapter we’re going to see the great curse, God
says I am going to blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven
forever. And there was no greater curse
could come upon an ancient person in the Ancient Near East than to say that his
name would be blotted from heaven forever for it meant that this continuity was
broken. You see this in Abraham; you see
it back in Gen. 3 when God said to the woman it’s your seed, your seed is the one who is going to
judge Satan. So it was something that
was physically and genetically related to that woman.
And now you come over to Abraham’s
time and what’s the big deal with Abraham?
Abraham is here and God says listen Abraham, your seed as it descends
down through history is going to expand and through your seed the world will be
blessed and down here, in the Millennial Kingdom, your seed will enter it. In other words the concept of continuity down
to the point of blessing in history was there.
Now if you’ll turn to Lev. 25 you’ll see how this applied to the real
estate of the time. First it applied to
the name of the family, it had to be perpetuated, and now in Lev. 25 we have
the concept that the possessions of the family had to be continuous down
through history, the possessions of the people.
Lev. 25:23, “The land shall
not be sold forever,” now what is God saying there. When Israel went into the
land, as we’ll see in the book of Joshua and Ephesians concept, they took
parcels of that land that were there; here they are, these are the different
parcels given to the tribes. Each tribe had
a parcel of land that they were to keep and to hold so that that would be true
all the way down into the Millennium, that they would be on that land, it was
their inheritance, and that very piece of real estate was going to be their
inheritance in the Millennial Kingdom.
Therefore the emphasis was we must keep hold of this possession. And
verse 23 says you’re never going to sell it; never will this land be sold. And the power of this prediction is shown
back in 1917 when the British under General Allenbee moved into Palestine
driving the Turks out and the Jewish people under [can’t understand word] tried
to buy the land for England and England wouldn’t sell it. They finally got it by a treaty agreement,
but they never sold the land. And it’s
very interesting, down to this day that land has not been sold and that land
never will be sold because God is pronouncing His Word, verse 23, that’s My
land and I’m not selling it. It goes to
the people to whom I gave title to that land and I am going to see in history
they get their land. So verse 23
guarantees the land to the people, regardless of what happens in history.
Verse 13, this is another
provision that God had to keep the possessions under the family name. “In the year of this jubilee you shall return
every man unto his possession,” possession is a synonym for land, every 50
years they had a jubilee, and that meant that the land revoked back to the
people who held it at the beginning of that cycle. So if you held title to this property then
and somehow in the course of time you needed money and had to sell it to
somebody else to get the money, etc. so somehow you weren’t really occupying
the land, it meant that in the year of jubilee it reverted back to you, it
reverted back to your name so that you would have this property, your family
name.
So you see the emphasis in the
Old Testament on this continuity, both of name and property. Why? Because they had the idea, a true one, that
if you are here, this is generation number one, generation number three, generation
number n, all the way down here, you
have all these generations, down here finally at some generation, say
generation n, then you would enter
the Millennial Kingdom. And they
considered it to be a great honor that their family name, their family’s
possessions would be there when the Lord returned to set up His kingdom. There had to be continuity; there had to be
this for security.
So this continuity, if you
want to summarize it and apply it to Christians means security and we’re back
to the doctrine of eternal security.
Turn to the New Testament and you’ll see how this comes out with the
concept of inheritance. Eph. 1:14, this is your inheritance, you are a believer
in Jesus Christ and you don’t have real estate.
This is going to seem far out unless you tie it to your own state in
this dispensation. What does it mean for
you? In verse 14 it tells you what it
means for you, in that your inheritance, your possession as a born again child
of God is secure. You were sealed, verse
13, with the Holy Spirit of promise, verse 14, “Who is the earnest of our
inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, unto the praise
of His glory.” This means there is a
time when you receive Jesus Christ as your Savior, into your human spirit comes
to dwell the Holy Spirit. And that Holy
Spirit indwelling and His work in your life, Paul says, is an earnest, it’s
like a down payment, God has said to you look, I’m going to give you an
inheritance, a fantastic inheritance. Every person who is a believer in Jesus
Christ has got this inheritance and you can say well now, that’s kind of wrong
because I don’t deserve this, or Joe Snodgrass, he accepted Christ and he’s a
clod; do you mean to tell me God’s going to give him an inheritance and me too,
I deserve more than that. Sorry pal, it
operates on the grace principle and if God chooses to bless Snodgrass as a clod
believer then that’s His business.
God the Holy Spirit comes to
indwell and this indwelling is the evidence that He’s going to finish the job
He started. In other words, you can’t
see your possession now. If we saw our
possession now we’d probably give up and say good, take me home Lord, I want to
enjoy it. But He doesn’t allow us to see
the possession, He gives us a hint as to what the possession is and He gives us
security to tell us that it’s coming.
And the security that He has given to us is the indwelling Holy
Spirit.
Turn to 1 Peter 1:4 and you
get the same concept. Peter has just gotten through in verse saying, “Blessed
be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who, according to His abundant
mercy, hath begotten us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus
Christ from the dead.” That means that the historical resurrection of Christ is
proof that God’s program is coming off, so don’t buy this line that’s handed
out by the liberals today, we can talk about the cross and we can talk about
the resurrection, but whether it literally happened or not is irrelevant.
Bologna it’s irrelevant, it’s the proof that the rest of the program is coming
off. That’s what Peter’s point is here in verse 3. You have to believe in a historic physical
literal resurrection or the whole thing slides down the drain. That historical
physical literal resurrection is the proof that what God has started God will
finish. Verse 4 is you, “To an
inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in
heaven for you.” Now that’s the analogy
spiritually with what you’re seeing in the Old Testament.
You as a believer have an
inheritance that’s absolutely secure. When you go, here you are, you’ve trusted
in Jesus Christ, and you’re going to die or be raptured, one or the other, and
when you are, you enter into your inheritance.
And all of you who put your time and effort into things, who haven’t
thought once about studying the Word of God or sharing the gospel with somebody
else and you’ve tried to build up for yourself a nice fat inheritance, you’re
going to get up here and say wasn’t I stupid, God had all these wonderful
things for me and I fiddled around with the wood, hay and stubble while I was
on earth. That was a nice way how not to
run your life. That’s the attitude a lot
of Christians are going to have because God has something fantastic for you and
you’re fiddling around with all sorts of secondary things that aren’t
worthwhile two minutes when compared to what God has for you. So these are the analogies in the New
Testament.
Now turn back to the Old
Testament and finish this section of Deuteronomy. We’re back with the brethren that are
dwelling together. Verse 5, “if brethren
dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead
shall not marry outside the family unto a stranger,” outside to a stranger
means she’s going to have to marry within the family. Now there’s a limitation on this, she doesn’t
have to and this limits Levirate marriage; Levirate marriage in the ancient
world was very common and it was very bad in many respects for the women of
that time, but nevertheless, because the women basically were only a tool to
get property, you married the woman simply because of her property. And that’s why Solomon, incidentally, why he
had 700 wives, a lot of it was sheer politics, no love, no romance or anything
involved, he married Pharaoh’s daughter because he wanted to get some points
with Pharaoh, and probably Pharaoh had one of his ugliest that he gave Solomon
just for spite and a big laugh and Solomon said ha-ha, I’ll put her down in
court number 32 and never look at her for the rest of her life, but
nevertheless I married Pharaoh’s ugly daughter and as a result I’ve got a lot
of property so ha-ha to Pharaoh. So they played this little game back and
forth, this is the way it worked.
In verse 5 we have Moses
sanctifying this whole thing and bringing in some divine viewpoint
control. First it would only apply, in
this case, “if the brethren dwelt together,” that means they’d have joining
parcels of land and so you might have joint ownership; it’d maybe make more
sense than contemporary culture, they had joint ownership of a business. What’s going to happen? One partner, joint
ownership now what happens to the other half.
Well, they wanted to keep it as close as possible in the family, so they
used this procedure. The wife who was
left alone, who was a widow, could not marry a stranger outside of the family.
All right, what does this
mean? Well first it would be that this woman could have a child. Here’s the
woman, suppose she had some sons, the sons would inherit that share of the
business; joint ownership, point a, point b, so b goes to the sons. Then over
here you have the daughters. Now suppose
the woman lived and her sons dies, no sons but she has some daughters. Turn to Numbers 27 and you will see what
happens in that case. This is the normal
system of inheritance, beginning at verse 8, if there were daughters, God said
in verse 8, “And thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel, saying, If a man
die, and have no son, then ye shall cause his inheritance to pass unto his
daughter.” Now the daughter had to marry
someone in the same tribe. Suppose this
family had no children except one girl and this one girl was left and the
property fell to her. She was required by
the Law of Moses to pick out her boyfriend from one tribe and that was all. She
had to limit her dates to one tribe and one tribe only because the man she was
to marry was to be from that tribe to hold the title and not get it mixed up
between the various tribes. They had to
keep these things distinct. So she got her dating life a little curtailed but
that was the way it was because the property fell on her shoulders.
Verse 9, “And if he have no
daughter, then ye shall give his inheritance unto his brethren. [10] And if he has no brothers…” etc. So you see there was controls already
established but when you got back to Deut. 25 the woman, the wife here, had
another option. If she had no sons, see
if she had sons it would be wrong, but if she had daughters she could say well
I know the property will go my daughter but on the other hand, say this girl
marries outside of the immediately family, this is family F and this is F2,
still the property is with the daughter and she marries over here, it still
goes outside the immediate household. But she could exercise an option if she was
a widow, she had an option to exercise here and that would be to get her
brother-in-law to marry her and raise up children, the first child raised,
verse 6, “And it shall be, that the first-born whom she bear shall succeed in
the name of his brother who is dead, that his name be not put out of
Israel.”
So she could arrange a
marriage, obviously if her brother-in-law was married then she couldn’t do it
but if the brother-in-law were single then she could marry him, raise up a
family and the first-born would keep the name and that way it would keep it
under this immediate family. So that
widow could exercise an option, providing verse 7 that the man agreed to
it. So this is what happened, they had a
nice treatment for the man who wouldn’t agree to it. See, it wasn’t compulsory, the [can’t
understand word] are very sweet about this, it wasn’t compulsory, it wasn’t
breaking his arm, it’s just he had a rather embarrassing and very humiliating
operation to workout.
So in verse 7, “And if the man
desire not to take his brother’s wife, then let his brother’s wife to up to the
gate unto the elders,” then they made a case out of it, they brought it to the
elders, the elders are the judges of the town, “and say, My husband’s brother
refuses to raise up unto his brother a name in Israel; he will not perform the
duty of my husband’s brother,” she entered a complaint. [8, “Then the elders of his city shall call
him, and speak unto him; and if he stand to it, and say, I desire not to take
her,”] then verse 9, she took care of him.
Now to catch the significance
of this you have to understand what the shoe was used for. Verse 9, “Then shall his brother’s wife come
unto him in the presence of the elders,” this is a civil function now, “and
loose his shoe from off his foot,” now you say isn’t that a peculiar thing to
do. Well, what she was doing, it wasn’t
that she was selling shoes or something but she took his sandal off because the
sandals were used, if you look at the book of Joshua, in the book of Joshua it
says everywhere your foot trods I have given you. Well, they would mark out property by walking
around it and so you see the sandal was there basically to fix property; it was
the means by which property was claimed in the ancient world. So when she took the sandal off it meant that
the man was losing part of his right, and so they had it worked out that the
woman would reach over and she’d undo the latch on his sandal which would mean
that that man had voluntarily given up the right to claim property. And the humiliating thing for a Hebrew man
was that it was a woman that was doing it.
That was humiliation number one, that he had let this woman come along
and take property away from him. See,
it’s deliberately designed to embarrass him.
And the second thing she would
do wasn’t very nice, she’d spit in his face, yes that’s what the Hebrew says,
spit, s-p-i-t, and that’s exactly what she did. And she didn’t spit at his
feet, she spit in his face and then she proceeded to make the announcement. [“… and spit in his face, and shall answer
and say, So shall it be done unto that man who will not build up his brother’s
house.”
Verse 10, “And his name shall
be called in Israel,” in other words, that’s the legal title that he was known
by then, “The house of him who hath his shoe loosed,” meaning that wherever
this man went now they’d say oh, look what happened to you brother and he’d
just have a bad reputation for being the kind of guy that wouldn’t take care of
his brother and so on. So it wasn’t
compulsory but Moses had it worked out so that it usually functioned in most
cases.
Now I want to summarize by
taking you to two other passages in the Word of God where something similar to
this happens but not quite. First, Gen.
38, I’m taking you to two passages for two different reasons. I’m taking you to Genesis 38 because of the
misapplication that modern Roman Catholicism has placed on this passage by
misinterpreting it in the light of Deut. 25, the sin of Onan. Verse 2, “And Judah saw there a daughter of a
certain Canaanite,” Judah is out of fellowship and the first thing he dates is
a Canaanite girlfriend, “whose name was Shua: and he took her, and went in unto
her.” And he married her, [3] “And she conceived, and bore a son; and he called
his name Er,” it should have been error.
Verse 4, “And she conceived again, and bore another son; and she called
his name Onan. [5] And she yet again conceived, and bore a son; and called his
name Shellah,” so he had three sons.
Verse 6, “And Judah took a wife for Er, his first-born, whose name was
Tamar. [7] And Er, Judah’s first-born, was wicked in the sight of the LORD; and
the LORD slew him. [8] And Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brother’s wife,
and marry her, and raise up seed to they brother.”
Now, this is the early form of
Levirate marriage which was not condoned in the Word of God, this is what is
not condoned, he did not have to do this under the law, this was a compulsory
act and he was forced into it at this point.
But nevertheless, verse 9, “And Onan knew that the seed should not be
his;” now this means that he had ulterior motives for going into this thing
because he knew if I went into that marriage and I married that girl, all my
children are going to have my brother’s name, well bologna on that, I want the
property, and I want my children to have the property, so the rest of the verse
and the story describes how he got out of the thing. [“… and it came to pass, when he went in unto
his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground, let that he should give
seed to his brother. [10] And the thing which he did displeased the LORD:
wherefore he slew him also.”] Now, in
Roman Catholicism they have interpreted this passage as violating the concept of
a married couple to have contraception and I want to go on record this passage
in no way has anything to do in arguing against contraception, never has, never
will; it is a complete misreading of the text because the sin mentioned here,
and the reason why in verse 10 God slays Onan is not because of contraception,
the reason why He slays Onan is because Onan has entered into the marriage
under deceit and he is utilizing the woman for his own pleasure without raising
a seed up under the Levirate system. So
it has absolutely nothing to do with contraception. But you always see this passage pulled out
and used that contraception is a sin and this is why today Roman Catholicism
goes into flurries every time the word is mentioned. It has nothing to do with it if you
understand Levirate marriage.
The other passage of Scripture
is in the book of Ruth; this book of Ruth is not the same kind of direct
Levirate marriage mentioned in Deut. 25.
It starts of in verse 2, “And the name of the man was Elimelech, and the
name of his wife, Naomi, and the name of his two sons, Mahlon and Chilion,” and
these were the sons that were born to him.
Obviously the problem was that this man was out of fellowship. See everybody gets into trouble when they get
out of fellowship, get out of the land, start fooling around, etc. So he went over there and his son started
dating some Moabite girls and so Elimelech died, “Naomi’s husband,” verse 3,
and she was left, and her two sons. [4] And they took themselves wives of the
women of Moab,” so they violated the Word of God right there, they weren’t
supposed to date over in Moab, they had plenty of girls in Israel, but the
grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. “… the name of the one was Orpha, and the
name of the other, Ruth; and they dwelt there about ten years.”
Verse 5, “And Mahlon and
Chilion died also, both of them; and the woman was bereft of her two sons and
her husband.” So now you’ve got a
problem, now you’ve got a widow and then her daughters-in-law, they’re both widows. So you’ve got a whole club, and that’s the
problem. Now this can’t be Levirate
marriage under Deut. 25; a lot of people confuse this, this woman has no
brother-in-law, the brothers are dead, her sons are dead, so it can’t be
Levirate marriage. What happens in the book of Ruth is that one of these girls
evidently is an unbeliever, negative volition; one’s on positive volition, Ruth
is positive volition. Naomi is a
believer, kind of out of it but she’s a believer and Ruth follows her mother-in-law. Ruth is a girl who has trusted in the God of
Israel and she says what’s often said in the marriage ceremony, “where you go I
will go and your God will be my God,” and that’s a declaration of her faith in
Jesus Christ. So Ruth then goes with her
mother-in-law, Naomi, back into the land and meets up with a man by the name of
Boaz.
This is one of the great love
stories of the Bible and she kinds of work around with Boaz and gets herself
married to them. Now the problem with
this is that Boaz did not marry Ruth because of the Levirate principle. Boaz married according to the goel principle, the goel, and that is the kinsman redeemer concept in Scripture. A kinsman redeemer was a member of a family
who had basically four rights; this man, for example if you come from a large
family, it could be your uncle, it could be your grandfather, it could be your
brother, somebody, some man in your family would be designated as the family goel, and his job would be
four-fold. First, he could buy back
family property. If he was a man of means, say if your uncle was a man of means
you’d appoint him as the goel, sort
of like an executor of an estate or something, but he’d be the goel, he would have the right to buy
property back so that if you had to sell under adverse circumstances to make
money or something, he could come back, buy the property so it’d revert back to
the family. That was one job he could
do, that’s described in Lev. 25.
The second thing he could do
is if you had to sell yourself into slavery, he could buy you back out, and
that’s described in Lev. 25, so that if you got in trouble and had to sell
property he could buy it for you, if you had to sell yourself, you didn’t sell
the shirt off your back you just sold yourself in that day if it got really
bad, and he could buy you back.
The third thing he did, it was
kind of a nasty thing, he’d act as a family executor, Deut. 19; if a man had
killed somebody in your family, one of these goons had hit him over the head
with a chain or something and this person was accused of murder, he had to be
legally accused, the goel could chase
him all over the nation Israel until he found him and killed him. And that was a blood redeemer, the kinsman
blood redeemer. Now he had that right if
a trial had been held first; this is not the family feud or blood vengeance,
this means that the executor of the trial would be the goel so that if a member of your family was assaulted and killed or
something, and somebody else had to be killed, he would do it. I have often suggested we ought to go back to
this principle in America because it would take care of a lot of this sloppy
court system where so and so gets off because he got dropped on his head when
he was a baby or something and the poor guy couldn’t do anything except beat
your father over the head with a chain; he just happened to see something when
your father walked out the door and hit him on the head and killed him but the
poor guy, he got dropped on his head when he was just a baby and he was just
projecting or something. What would
happen in Israel, you’d have a member of the family and he wouldn’t give up,
and he wouldn’t be like the court system, he’d go after that person until he
got them, and that’s it. That’s the way they solved the problem. I would dare say while the system worked they
had very little crime because most of the idiots were done away with, and
that’s how they did it, with the family goel.
Now the fourth thing is a
little more romantic than that; the fourth thing was the he could marry women,
such as Ruth, and get them out of trouble.
If she was in a situation where she had to borrow money, she was loaned,
she had the inheritance name, he could come and buy her but this is not
strictly Levirate marriage. You see this
in chapter 4:3, if another kinsman, here’s Boaz, and here’s Ruth, and here’s a
kinsman, we don’t know who this man’s name is, but he’s there and he had the
right to marry Ruth first but he didn’t want to. And his reason is given in verse 3, “And he
said unto the kinsman, Naomi, who is come again out of the country of Moab,
selleth a parcel of land which was our brother Elimelech’s,” so he goes first
to the nearest kinsman, and by the way, this book is a wonderful book for
teenagers because this shows the patience of a girl who loved a man very deeply
but she was willing to trust the Lord to work out the details, and the story
only takes four chapters to do it, but it takes you through how this girl
didn’t take the initiative, she trusted in the Lord and let the Lord work out
the details and she was greatly blessed.
And you should see some of the details, you think you’ve got
complications, you should have seen what she had, and yet she said Lord, if
it’s your will, then you’re going to work the details out and He did.
These are one of the details
here in verse 3-4, the kinsman could have married Ruth. Now wouldn’t have that blown it. Here Ruth loved Boaz and really wants to get
married to Boaz but then she invokes the principle and this guy comes along and
he marries her, that really would have fixed things up. But it turned out that because she trusted
the Lord, and relaxed, and let Him handle the details, verse 4 happens, Boaz
talks to this man, he has to get this man’s permission first, “And I thought to
advertise thee, saying, But it before the inhabitants, and before the elders of
my people.” See this is the goel now,
buying back the land, “If thou wilt redeem it, redeem it; but if thou wilt not
redeem it, then tell me, that I may know; for there is none to redeem it beside
thee, and I am after thee. And he said,
I will redeem it.” Verse 5, “Then said
Boaz,” and you can just imagine the tension building up because he’s just
agreed to redeem property, that’s Ruth.
So he agrees, but then in verse 5, “What day thou buyest the field of
the hand of Naomi, thou must by it also of Ruth, the Moabitess, the wife of the
dead, to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance.” See Boaz didn’t clue him in to the other
clause in the contract, and then the guy swallows in verse 6 and says oops, and
he says “I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I mar mine own inheritance.” The
reason there is that either he was married at this point or he was worried that
he would have more than one son. See, if he only had one son by Ruth it meant
that everything, his property and Ruth’s went to that son. And so at this point he probably chickened
out and said you can take it, [“Redeem thou, my right for thyself; for I cannot
redeem it.”]
So verse 7 explains the fact
that Boaz finally got to marry Ruth.
It’s a rather interesting love story and one that is based on Biblical
concepts. But this involved something
other than a Levirate principle that we’ve been studying and I didn’t want you
to confuse the two. This is a goel
situation and has nothing to do with the Levirate system.
Let’s conclude by turning to
Matt. 6:20 once again. This is the
conclusion of the matter of Deut. 25, the principle, our inheritance is laid up
for ourselves in heaven “where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where
thieves do not break through and steal [21] For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also.” Your treasure,
Christian, is in heaven and it’s absolutely secure and you don’t have to go
through Levirate marriage and other things and other gimmicks to hold on to
your inheritance. It’s absolute yours,
yours because you have believed in Jesus Christ and yours forever because you
have believed in Jesus Christ. So if you’re a Christian you can give thanks to
the Father for this, and no one, no thief, no national catastrophe, nothing can
remove this inheritance from you name.