Lesson 58

Conclusion to Civil Rights – 25:11-19

Tonight we finish with this long section that we’ve been working through on the various stipulations of the Law. We have divided the book of Deuteronomy, chapters 12-26, into basically four parts: the first part, chapters 12-16, chapters 16-22, and 23-25 and then 26. These are the four sections of this great section of the Law. The first section deals with the cement that holds a nation together and that is a commonly agreed upon religion. In Israel there was no freedom of religion although there were many other freedoms, because basically there cannot be freedom of religion and unity in a nation; never can be, never will be. In our United States Constitution, when the founders wrote into it freedom of religion their conception of it in that era was freedom of different sects that were primarily theistic, i.e. that they had a common belief in God, although we might disagree with them on various points. However the Supreme Court of the United States has taken this point out to a very invalid conclusion and has made it apply to anyone with the result that this insistence upon freedom for anything, from atheism down to Christianity, will never work and will eventually destroy this country. You cannot hold a nation together that has a diverse background; the only thing that will hold a nation together is a common heritage and a commonly agreed upon background and this was the national religion of Israel explained in chapters 12-16.

Then in chapters 16-22 we found that the national standards of righteousness that came out of this national religion, here you have religion and then you have national righteousness from this religion, national moral standards. And this is something that a lot of modern day people who are fighting for a return to law and order in the United States and who are fighting for a moral and ethical part in our culture fail to fountainhead and that is that you can’t fight for standards if you don’t have any base on which to put the standards. Therefore Moses did not start with chapter 16, he had four chapters of preparation to show you that moral standards must have a theological base. That theological base is the character and essence of God. If you don’t have that base, no one is going to listen to your moral standards because they are just your opinion versus someone else’s opinion.

Then we had in chapters 23-25 the concept of freedom and this is being illustrated in case after case of the fact that God has certain individual rights for people and that true freedom comes when men, collectively and individually, recognize what God has given to the individual. We’ve gone through this thing, we’ve shown you various rights of the individual, the community rights, sexual rights, etc. and showed you that basically no government ever gave these rights; no government will ever revoke these rights. These rights are yours by virtue of the fact that God has made you in His image. These rights pertain to both believer and unbeliever except certain rights in this section which we’re working with. Then chapter 26 deals with patriotism. And when we finish with this we will be through with this section of the Law and from this point on we’ll study various aspects of how the nation phased the Law in to it’s national life and culture and get a little bit into five stages of God’s discipline on the nation Israel, the setting up of the angelic counsel in Deut. 32, etc. So there will be a change of pace, particularly we’ll notice it next week because we begin chapter 26 and although it’s still part of this major section we’re in it’s the end of the Law, you don’t have stipulation after stipulation.

Verses 11-12, this is number sixteen in our list of illustrations of certain freedoms in the nation. And this was an illustration that paralleled verses 1-4. Verses 1-4 dealt with the freedom from humiliation. You remember in verses 1-3 where criminal law was applied and where punishment was applied to the convicted person; that criminal application was limited and tempered by mercy, and the absolute standard is in verse 3 where it says the man could not be beaten more than 40 times. So you have an upper bound on the punishment that can be administered, and any punishment that needed more than that was capital punishment under this economy.

Now in verses 11-12 we have another illustration. [“When men strive together with one another, and the wife of the one draws near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him who smites him, and puts forth her hand, and takes him by the secrets, [12] Then thou shalt cut off her hand; thine eye shall not pity her.”] Verses 1-3 dealt with a criminal; verses 11-12 deal with a man in a similar way as the woman is dealt with in Exodus 21:22. Verses 11-12 depict a mode that was used by the women in the ancient world for self-defense. You can find it in the Assyrian law code, those of you who are students, it’s in Pritchard’s Near Eastern text, page 181, and there you will have translated the Assyrian law code and it was evidently a common system of self-defense that the women used in the ancient world. However, when this was used, according to verse 11 the reason why her hand was cut off, verse 12, the mutilation, which by the way, is the only mutilation authorized in Scripture except one other one and that’s circumcision.

The reason is that they’re both tied together. In verse 12 the administration of this punishment has to do with the fact that this woman in this case has violated the sign of the covenant, for in so doing what she has done in exercising her self-defense under that condition she has violated the sign of the covenant which was circumcision and therefore she must pay by her hand being cut off, which is also a type of circumcision. In other words, God is going to say because she has violated this covenant, because she has desecrated and shown her disrespect, as Moses wife did, remember we went through Zipporah, and she got to the point where she had to circumcise her sons and she didn’t like it and she took the rock that she was using and threw at Moses feet and said there you are you bloody servant. And Moses said okay honey, bye-bye, we’ll see you around. And he dismissed his wife and never saw Zipporah again except one other time. And that’s because she wouldn’t go along with the sign of the covenant. This was of fundamental importance and any person that violated the sign of the covenant was immediately judged according to the Law.

Now the women had other protections and if you turn to Exodus 21:22 you’ll see that the woman herself had freedom to and her rights for bodily integrity were respected. These are just samples, these are not all the details of the Law, we don’t have the details of the Law. Remember this is a sermon and what Moses is doing here in this sermon is picking out one or two details. In Exodus 21:22 we have a woman who is pregnant, “If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follows; he shall surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.” That may sound like a little innocent phrase but out of that phrase we can prove something; we can prove that the fetus, the unborn child inside a woman is not a living soul in God’s sight, because every other place in the Old Testament where you take a life, a life must be paid. You never have a [not sure of word] applied in any part of God’s Word, when a life is lost, when you have nephesh, the Hebrew word for soul, when you have a soul killed in the Old Testament another soul must take its place because this was God’s way of teaching, capital punishment was authorized as a teaching device to teach people that you cannot… suppose we said look, you killed somebody, I’ll fine you $30,000. What you have done is said that person is worth $30,000 and God says that person is not worth $30,000, that person is worth an infinite amount of cost, so therefore you could only pay for a life with a life. That was the rule.

Now here in verse 22 we have obviously the unborn baby is destroyed because this man has assaulted this woman, etc. and as a result she loses the fetus, the unborn child, the embryo, depending on what stage of pregnancy she’s in. And because she loses this thing he does not have to give his life, and it’s only a fine according to the woman’s husband, therefore the deduction of verse 22 that the baby is not considered living until it takes it first breath as far as God’s Word is concerned. What does this mean? It means that you cannot say that abortion is murder. Now God’s Word has various other things to say on the question but you cannot say abortion is murder on the basis of this text. Verse 22 says that the person isn’t living, if a person isn’t living you can’t kill them, so therefore therapeutic abortion is not murder and can’t be defended against on that basis.

Back to Deut. 25; these commands which may seem trivial actually are very important because they tell us many things about God’s attitude in certain things and as I showed you from Exodus 21 many of these are crucial in some of the discussions that are going on today. Now the seventeenth illustration of the freedom is given in verses 13-16 and this is illustration of freedom from being short-changed in business deals. God was concerned with this because remember this whole section of the book of Deuteronomy is written to a people who are redeemed and because the word redemption means freedom, it means that if you are a free person you are to live like you were free, and you ought not to be in bondage to people, things, circumstances or anything else. And all this is a plea for is that if you have been freed by God then you should live as a free person.

The application today to many Christians is that if you are a born again believer in Jesus Christ this means you are free from legalism. What do I mean by legalism? I mean other Christians that take standards that may be right for them, but they can’t be backed up by the Word of God, and they apply them to you, and they’ll beat you over the head with some set of standards, why around here we don’t do blank, and that’s legalism. When that can’t be justified from the Word of God and yet Christians come to you and say you have to do it, and they can’t point to a chapter and verse in the Word, that’s legalism and they are nosing into your business. And if you live like a grace oriented believer you will just do a 180 and exit from the vicinity of those kind of people. They are miserable people, they are usually the kind that walk around and never crack a smile; if you tell a joke they’ll probably lay flat on the floor; these people are so tense that these people can never relax. And because they’re tense and all up and nervous, etc. they have to make everybody else nervous. So their famous trick is to go around and pin a set of taboos on some other Christian and make you feel miserable because you walk in and you’re all smiles, you’re relaxed and you enjoy yourself and they just can’t stand it that you are sitting there relaxed. They can’t stand to see you there enjoying yourself. The worst thing that can happen to one of these type of legalists is to watch somebody enjoying themselves; this is absolutely satanic from their point of view and therefore they’re going to get you in line. Particularly if you are a new Christian you will be liable to this, where somebody comes up and says ooh, we don’t do that here. If someone ever does this to you in Lubbock Bible Church you report them to me because I’m not going to have that around here. We operate on the Word of God and where the Word of God tells you certain standards fine, but when someone comes up to you and tells you that you have to do this and it just cannot be backed up from the Word, they have no business and I will deal with them if you tell me who they are because we don’t want any legalism. That’s the fastest thing to destroy Biblical Christianity.

Verse 13-14 deal with these weight and ephahs and here is another illustration of this freedom that God wanted His people to enjoy themselves. See, this is the whole point, God wants believers to relax, and the Christian life is a time when you can enjoy yourself. Now there’s a struggle involved, we’ll get into that in verses 17-19 but there’s a time and a place for relaxation and even when you’re struggling there’s a time for relaxation. If you’ve ever studied how the really top-notch athletes perform you’ll see that they get nervous and tense before their athletic event but you always notice something, they never get totally tense because if they do they never can perform. There’s a certain balance between the fact that they get their adrenalin glands going but their muscles are loose and ready to go, and if they don’t and they get tense they’ll pull a muscle or something will happen and just ruin the whole thing. That’s the way the Christian life is; in the Christian life you have to be alert, you have to be alert, you can’t be lying flat on your back and hoping that God is going to pour manna in your mouth or something, you have to have a balanced attitude on this business of passivity and activity; you have to have the attitude that God is going to bless you with His grace but you have to exercise discernment and the mentality of your soul has to be in operation; you have to have your volition in operation seeking out His will for you.

Verses 13-14 deal with standards and it’s from this that we get a tremendous lesson applicable to the New Testament. “Thou shalt not have in thy bag various weights, a great one and a small one. [15] But thou shalt have a perfect and just weight; a perfect and just measure shalt thou have, that thy days may be lengthened in the land which the LORD thy God gives thee.” Now these weights and stones you can see in any book on archeology, they have a balance, a hand balance and they have a number of stones that they would put in one of these balances that would act as a certain weight and then you’d weigh out whatever you were selling. And of course the gyp artists of the day had a nice game going. What they would do when they’d sell you something they’d have heavy stones to make this thing look heavy on a balance, so therefore if they have heavy stones they can charge you by the weight and make a lot of money. But when you go to sell them something then all of a sudden they say ah yes, I’ve got a different set of weights and they’ll put the new weights on and all of a sudden it’ll be low weight. And you can’t get your price because if the price is based on weight they’ve got you coming and going; every time they well to you they charge you higher than the price and every time they buy from you they want a lower price. So that’s the way the gyp artists worked in the nation Israel and God had ways of handling them.

Now verse 14, “Thou shalt not have in thine house different ephahs,” the word “measure” is an ephah and to see how large one of these things is, turn to Zech. 5:6 and I’ll show you how big one of these ephahs were. This is a vision of Zechariah and in this vision he saw many interesting things. He describes beginning in verse 6 a vision that the angels had given him. “And I said, What is this thing? And he said, This is an ephah that goes forth. He said, moreover, This is their resemblance through all the earth. [7] And, behold, there was lifted up a pound [talent] of lead; and this is a woman that sits in the midst of the ephah.” Now you get an idea there without going into the details of Zechariah’s vision that this ephah was a pot, that’s really what it looked like, a very wide-brimmed kind of a pot, and it was so big that a woman could sit in the middle of it. So you get the idea that this was a large measure and it was always used for measuring grain, etc. it was a dry measure used in Israel.

Back to Deuteronomy, now we understand what this was that they kept in the house. And again what they would do is they’d have the small one and a big one, and maybe a very clever fellow would have an artificial bottom in his and he’d fill the grain up but it wouldn’t be a full ephah, and he’d sell people this thing out of a fix-up standard. So these were the things that were going on in the business world as they are today and God had to lay down laws against it. But the interesting thing as far as we are concerned as the believers is the vocabulary that is used to restrict this.

Verse 15, “But thou shalt have a perfect and just weight,” now about the last 50,000 times I have drawn a diagram here depicting the character of God, sovereignty, righteousness, justice, love, omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence and immutability, and this absolute righteousness or +R I have always said to you was a standard. Where did I get that? This word from the Hebrew is zedek. And zedek is used here in verse 15 for “just.” In other words, this word carries an inherent connotation of a standard and this you must see, that God’s righteousness is not just some ethereal idealistic symbolic value of something. When God speaks of His righteousness in the Word of God, He has in mind a concrete set of standards, that a person is either obeying those at one point in history or disobeying those but they are real standards. These aren’t idealistic standards floating around in the Bible. This word, “zedek” means a standard, a value, and it’s a real value, it’s not some shadowy symbolic value like the modern theologians would have you believe. This is a concrete standard of operation that God has.

This is like in Deut. 25:1 where I said that the word “may judge them…and justify the righteous and condemn the wicked,” tells you immediately what happened to you at the point of salvation, for at the time you were saved, God has His sovereignty and He has His righteousness. You are down here and you are in status –R, also you have sin, personal sins and a sin nature, and therefore lack a positive righteousness. That’s what –R means. By the way, Adam had this because Adam had not yet, even in innocence obeyed; there wasn’t any act of obedience. So you have this person sitting down here and you’re behind a barrier and God’s standard, absolute righteousness, looks down. What does absolute righteousness call for? Perfect obedience to His revealed will. That’s what absolute righteousness means. That’s what it calls for. And any discrepancy in this brings in a third attribute, justice. When justice looks down and sees absolute righteousness being violated it decrees death. “The wages of sin is death” so therefore very person in the human race is behind the barrier. So when the Lord Jesus Christ comes to die on the cross He does an interesting thing.

First of all, He takes your sin and puts them upon Himself. This is what happened and why it got dark at Golgotha and the Lord Jesus Christ screamed out according to Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me,” when He was acting for and giving and communicating to us His separation from the Father. He’d never known a moment in His life when He was separate from the Father and yet at that time, because He had you personally in mind He bore your sins for you on the cross. Now at the same time the Lord Jesus Christ bore your sins He did something else. We are very fond of producing human good, things that look good on the outside and yet proceed out of a wrong mental attitude, giving money to a church, joining the church, etc. all human good actions unless it’s motivated by God the Holy Spirit, and this human good the Lord Jesus Christ rejected, for if human good could save any individual Jesus would never have died on the cross. So since human good is rejected, sins have been paid for, the only other thing left to solve the problem is this problem of lack of righteousness. Now what happens?

The Bible says that in a point in time when you receive Christ God credits to your account Jesus Christ’s perfect obedience. That is what we mean by imputed righteousness, imputed +R. Where did the +R come from? It came from the Lord Jesus Christ in His perfect obedience. That righteousness is what is credited on your account. The moment this is credited, verse 1, using the same analogy from the Old Testament, the judge “shall justify the righteous.” Now you notice the person is already righteous, the judge hasn’t changed the defacto status at all but he has changed the de jure status, he has changed his legal status although he hasn’t changed his real status. The person’s real status is that he has, in this case, imputed righteousness. All right, so a split second, I receive Jesus Christ as my Savior, what happens? God the Father credits Christ’s righteousness to me; at that point He turns around and says now you are justified.

What does that mean? That means that I have credited to my account perfect obedience. This solves the problem of eternal security and why no Christian can ever lose his salvation, for if God has justified you, this means that you already have credited on your account perfect obedience. This is not a license to raise hell because it’s always balanced by the doctrine of believer’s discipline. We will see that tonight. But there is this balance, you must keep it, you must understand what justification means.

So back in verse 15 when we are talking about these standards remember that this is a beautiful illustration if you ever want to communicate the concept of righteousness and what it means Biblically, chapter 25 is absolutely crucial. Verse 1, it’s crucial to communicate the idea by a very simple illustration, what does it mean to say I am justified. Verse 1 tells you what it means. What does it mean by the fact that God is righteousness? Verse 15 gives you a beautiful illustration. You don’t have to go anywhere else to find this, you can get it right out of the Bible, and verse 15 gives you a beautiful picture of what it means by righteousness, a bona fide legitimate standard.

Verse 16, we come to the conclusion of the matter, “For all who do such things,” habitually doing such things, Hebrew participle, “all who do unrighteously, are an abomination unto the LORD thy God.” Now this word “abomination” is a key word in the book of Deuteronomy. What does this mean? Certain sins are very… there’s kind of a degree of sins in the Word of God and one of them is the lowest on the totem pole is the abominable sins. These things are an abomination to God. Turn back to chapter 14, I want to take you through the use of this word “abomination” so you can see something that keeps recurring every time this word occurs; it has a connotation behind it and all you have to do is look up the word “abomination” and watch how it’s used.

In Deut. 14:3 you have the word used of pure and impure food and what is the impure food? It doesn’t mean the food is poisonous, it simply means that this impure or unclean food is either by mutation, biological mutation or its biological, biochemical form, pictures the curse of Genesis 3 so therefore it’s cursed food. And God’s people in the Old Testament were to be physical types of spiritual truth and so they just didn’t eat unclean food. Now it turns out also that some of this unclean food is poisonous but it doesn’t mean that all of it is necessarily poisonous, that’ not the point. The point in verse 3 is that the abominable food, the “abominable thing” is something where you have the loss of categories between the pure and the impure. You have this tremendous contrast wiped out; the Gentiles and their diet, for example. You see God has put a category, one side of the fence is pure food, the other side is impure food. And he who crosses that category, it means that you’re eating an abominable thing. So you see what the word “abomination” here in this context means, you cut across a sharp category that God has set up in history.

In Deut. 17:4 you see the same thing, here is the next time the word “abomination” is used in the book and it says, “and it be told thee,” it’s talking about a person who sacrifices to the stars, verse 3, “and hath gone and served other gods, and worshiped them, either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven, which I have not commanded, [4] And it be told thee, [and thou hast heard of it, and inquired diligently, and behold, it is true, and the thing certain,] that such an abomination is being wrought in Israel,” and here what’s the category? You have the category between the Creator and the creature and that category is dissolved and therefore when you dissolve and cross that category God says it’s an abomination. When you cut across categories that God has set into history, this is an abomination.

Deut. 18:12 you see the same thing, here we deal with the spiritist, verses 10-11 define the various kinds of divination and spiritualism that were going on in the nation. Incidentally this is one reason why God ordered the complete extermination of the Canaanite civilization. The Canaanite civilization was a civilization that had become spiritualist, like our civilization is becoming in America, in the last five years we have had such a fantastic increase in spiritualism across this country, it is one of the worst things, you think the National Council or the communists are bad, as far as God is concerned one of the worst things to develop in America in this time is the increase of spiritualism. You have an increase in Ouija Boards, horoscopes, séances and all the rest and don’t think these are just fake, they aren’t just fake, there is a bona fide spiritual force in back of them. Believers that fiddle with them are asking for demonic problems. You are never as a believer to mess with this stuff, it will only bring ruin upon your spiritual life. I have in my office a book recording 125 pastoral cases where Christians have fooled around with this kind of thing and wound up either killing themselves in suicide, destroying other people, taking poison and trying to kill themselves or winding up in tremendous depressive states. And it’s all because they went along with what they thought was a big joke, ha-ha-ha, I’ll have some fun over here and God says don’t you ever fool with this kind of stuff, ever! It is straight from the pit of hell and is motivated by Satan and his demons. Don’t ever fool with this kind of thing; that’s the fastest way to get bombed out in the Christian life.

Verse 12, an abomination, spiritualism, an abomination; why? Because here you have the boundary of all boundaries broken down between God and Satan and when you break that boundary down God says that is an abomination. That’s the worst of all possible abominations. You see, we as a civilization in America today are very prone to make this mistake; we have lived through 30-40 years of intense materialism where people have put values on material things, where we listen to the voice of technology, etc. and we’ve said that that is all there is to reality, the material. So the tendency now is to say well now there’s something lacking and so what we are going to do is experiment with the spiritual, the immaterial, and investigate ESP and ESI etc. Now the danger is that people begin to think this way; they say any supernatural manifestation must be of God and you are absolutely wrong. Absolutely wrong! Any supernatural manifestation can come from one of two sources; it can come from God or it can come from Satan. Therefore Christians are very naïve to go along with a lot of the racket that’s going on in certain areas where they have big ecstatic experiences and they say God gave me a wonderful sense of peace. How do you know it’s God that gave you a wonderful sense of peace? You can’t tell anything about supernatural phenomena unless you submit it to the Word of God.

So this is the third great boundary that’s crossed; we have the pure and the impure, the Creator /creature, God and Satan and we have some more categories that are crossed in this book. Deut. 22:5, this sounds like a minor one but again you see this category being broken down in our day. “The woman shall not wear that which pertains unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.” Now when I exegeted this I told you ladies to relax, this is not knocking slacks. What it’s saying is that the people who are doing this in that day, in that culture, were deliberately impersonating the other sex through religious ritual and so on, and here we have the boundary broken down between male and female and that boundary in the Word of God is always to be respected. The Word of God says certain things about the man; it says certain things about the woman. Of course if more believers were to study the Bible they’d understand a little bit more about the opposite sex; the Bible has gobs to say about this distinction and we have flaunted the distinction and God says every time you do, it’s an abomination.

And then finally we have Deut. 24:4, here you have the divorce problem and God says in this particular situation, this is an abomination, the reason why is a breakdown of divine institution number two. There’s legitimate divorce in the Bible, we’re not saying there isn’t reason for divorce. However, in this case it was being misused and misapplied and so therefore God says it’s an abomination. And it’s because, of course, of the breakdown of divine institution number two which is marriage.

Back to Deut. 25:16 and let’s look at this abomination. The abomination here is a breakdown of standards of measure, standards in the natural world or economic standards. And you can see now this word “abomination” as it is used in this book has a distinct connotation that what irritates God is for Christians to get into this mentality that oh, it’s not black or white, it’s coming out gray. There is no gray areas with God, it is either white or it is black, period. Therefore we are to be alert and sharp in understanding the standards of God in the Word of God.

Verses 17-19, the last illustration, the seventeenth illustration in this series on freedom. In verses 17-19 we have an illustration of freedom from the source of bondage. What is mentioned here? We have these strange people called “Amalek.” We are going to make use of a principle here and I will explain this so that you won’t be confused because I want you to see how this applies to you living under the New Testament era. First let’s look at the word “Amalek.” The Hebrew word looks like this; there are three letters there, those are consonants in Hebrew. There’s a verb that looks like this; and this verb means tall or labor. It’s not proven that Amalek or amal are related but it looks very like they are, and if you look at what Amalek means later on in Scripture it looks very plausible that the word amal, means laborious toil, toil that just gets to you, and these people are going to be pictures of this in the Christian life.

What we want to examine is the principle of typology. For some of you this is new because you have come out of backgrounds where you have not been exposed to exegetical teaching in the Word of God. The principle of typology means that God has so designed history, say back here at 1400 BC, God has so designed certain events back here in history to prefigure things He’s going to reveal down here, say around 0-30 AD. In other words, later on in history God is going to reveal certain truths but back here in history He has actually physically designed certain things to mirror those truths.

For example, you can preach the entire gospel of the New Testament out of the tabernacle. The tabernacle was a building that was used in the Old Testament for worship. It looked something like this, you had a Holy of Holies here, you had a holy place, you had a curtain across this and back here you had an ark, it looked something like a coffin and on top of this thing was a gold plate. Inside the ark were the Ten Commandments and on top of the ark you had two angels; we don’t know what they looked like, perhaps something like the sphinx, and these were called cherubim. On top of this thing, the high priest would go in there once a year, taking blood and he’d walk up to this thing and spatter it down on top of this gold plate, and the Shekinah glory of God dwelt in the cloud above this thing.

What was the purpose of all this? It was to show that God’s righteousness and His justice, looking down can only be satisfied by nephesh for nephesh, life for life, and the sign that life had been paid was blood. Therefore the nation’s sin was confessed by the use of sacrifices. Now the nation could not go behind this wall; this partition was solid. On the night in which the Lord Jesus Christ died, the Gospel says that this curtain in Herod’s temple, which is not the tabernacle but was patterned after it, this great tremendous curtain, historians tell us it was 2-3” thick, about 20 feet tall, so you can imagine, it probably weighed hundreds and hundreds of pounds. This thing was miraculously rent from top to bottom. Why did that happen? Because it was a symbol that since the cross man has access directly to God. Why? Because in the Old Testament you couldn’t go back here, except the high priest once a year, and the only way he could get back there was to carry blood of a shed lamb. Now in the New Testament the Gospels say in Herod’s temple, they were in there one time and all of a sudden the whole thing ripped, tore, and it tore from top to bottom, not from bottom to top. It was a miraculous tearing, it was a great miracle and that showed the people of that day that the way into the Holy of Holies is now opened because Jesus Christ, the perfect Lamb, died on the cross. So now we have access.

Now what am I saying? I’m saying that back in 1400 BC when God told Moses how to design this tabernacle He had that day the crucifixion in mind, and so He had this whole thing set up, for example we have the showbread, we have the lights, we have all sorts of things; all these things mean something and later on Israel would look back and they’d use these for illustrations. What does this tell you? It tells you God is sovereign in history and He so set history up that it is going to illustrate what He wants to teach us.

Now we have the same thing here with Amalek. Amalek comes over to us as our old sin nature. Amalek was a historic tribe, actually loved in history, and yet the function that Amalek performed in the plan of salvation was analogous to your struggle with your sin nature. You see, if you’re a believer tonight, in case you don’t think you have a sin nature, just ask the person next to you and they’ll give you a candid answer. Here’s your soul, it has volition, personal affections, mentality, bodily affection. When you are controlled by your sin nature, it means that your volition goes negative; it means that your personal affections are all messed up, you have approbation lust, materialism lust, and you have a lot of approbation lust in Christian circles. Christians are always doing some thing and expect 3,000 people to say oh, golly, you did such a great job, wonderful, wonderful, and the glad hand committee gets out and all the brownie points get distributed, etc. Why do people serve in that motivation? Because it’s energy of the flesh, approbation lust, they just want to have the approbation of the group. So they figure what’s the best way and fastest way of getting the approbation of the group? If I do something for them. So because I want the approbation of the group I do something for the group. Nonsense! You do something because the Lord wants you to and if He doesn’t want you to then just don’t say yes, say no. That’s the flesh operating and that’s what it does to the person.

It’s this flesh that Amalek depicts. Let’s go through the history of Amalek in the Old Testament so you’ll understand what’s meant here in verse 17-18. Moses says “Remember what Amalek did not thee by the way, when ye were come forth out of Egypt.” In the Hebrew it says “while you were coming out of Egypt. Verse 18, “How he met you by the way and smote” all these people. [“…and smote those behind thee, even all that were feeble behind thee, when thou wast faint and weary; and he feared not God. [19] Therefore it shall be, when the LORD thy God hath given thee rest from all thine enemies round about, in the land which the LORD thy God gives thee for an inheritance, to possess it, that thou shalt blot out from the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget it.”]

Let’s to back and remember some geography. Here’s the eastern end of the Mediterranean; here’s the Nile delta, you have the Red Sea, apparently in this day the Red Sea extended far north of where it now is, you have the nation of Palestine here, the Gulf of Aqaba here, and the Sinai Peninsula. What happened was that Egypt had Israel in bondage. All right, at the crossing of the Red Sea what happened? God miraculously some way separated the water. Now it isn’t what the liberals tell you, they didn’t get galoshes on and wade across some marshy part some place, this was a phenomenal supernatural manifestation of God’s omnipotence in which He just separated the water; Israel went through and Egypt got kind of zapped in the process. Now they no sooner got across… now that’s a picture of our salvation. I always take communion back to that point in history. Why? Because the Passover, the freeing of Israel from Egypt, is a picture of your salvation, that’s what it is. In other words, Egypt stands for the world, you make an analogy now, Egypt stands for the world, Israel stands for the person who is being saved. What happens?

How is Israel saved? First of all they were saved because they had doors and they applied blood on the top, on the left and on the right, making the sign of the cross. So the angel of death passed over the homes with the blood and the homes that didn’t have the blood he went in. If you saw Cecil DeMille’s production can remember that, I think he did a very good job in depicting that. I imagine that people were really scared that night and you can imagine the person saying look, I wonder if that blood on the door is enough, how are we going to get by this thing. It turned out that no matter what the Egyptians put on the door he’d just go in the house and kill and the doors that had the blood on he wouldn’t. What was he trying to show people? Salvation is by His grace through blood; the blood of the cross, later on in history blood of the Lamb at that point. So there’s number one, they come out of Egypt. Now what happens?

Turn to Exodus 17 to see the first encounter with Amalek. This is typological interpretation, where we’re real, literal, historical events, now this is not allegorical interpretation, please don’t confuse the two. Some believers allegorize; this is not what we’re doing tonight. Allegory is when you just take some passage out of the Old Testament, whether it’s history or not, you don’t care, and you manipulate it and ram it and jam and cram it until you get something that you like. That’s allegorical interpretation. Typological interpretation is under the strict control of the Word of God where there are certain things that are consistently used over and over again in the Bible for New Testament truth.

In Exodus 17 they have just gotten out, and of course you can put yourself in this position, you’ve gone through this situation, you have your husband, your wife and kids there, and everybody is running around and you begin to get a little upset. So the first seven verses they had some problems. In verse 1 they were led out to this particular point in the wilderness of Sin. And verse 2, “Wherefore the people did strive with Moses, and said, Give us water that we may drink. And Moses said unto them, Why strive ye with me? Wherefore do you tempt the Lord?” Do you know why he uses the word “tempt” the Lord? Because this generation of believers went on negative volition so much they were tempting the Lord to kill them, the sin unto death. And they finally did, they tempted the Lord all the way and He just let them have it. But in verses 1-7 we have the situation develop where they’re just getting out there and they can’t do anything else but complain, complain, complain, oh, I don’t like it out here, the scenery isn’t as good as it was in Egypt and the sand is hot on my feet, and we don’t have enough food, the Good Humor man isn’t out in the dunes some place, we don’t have any ice cream and all the rest of it. And this complaining was going on and notice what happens.

Verse 8, “Then came Amalek,” now this is their first encounter with Amalek, “and fought with Israel in Rephidim.” This is the place that’s mentioned back in Deuteronomy and evidently Amalek jumped them. We study extra-Biblical sources and these say to us that there were up to 400,000 soldiers that descended on Israel at this point in history, a massive attack. These people were known in history as one of the most cruel people that ever lived. The book of Deuteronomy testifies to the fact that they were absolutely fearless; every other nation in history at that point, do you remember the problem with Rahab, what does she tell you about every other nation in the world. She says we have been waiting for you for 40 years, where have you been, because we have feared and we have known that the God of Israel is truly God of the world and He has put the fear of Himself in our hearts. But there is one people that God never put the fear of Himself in and that was Amalek, and these great people, by the way descendants of Esau, measuring 400,000 that came, like Genghis Khan’s hordes, he broke out of central Asia many times in history, so these great hordes broke out of this Peninsula down here, the Arabian Peninsula, this great horde stayed down there, one of the early Arab tribes, and at a certain point in history they broke out and came up almost to the sea, almost to the southeastern corner of the Mediterranean and began a blocking position. They took up a blocking position. Here we have Palestine up here, the Promised Land, and you have Amalek holding this whole territory up here in a block.

So now what’s going to happen is that he descends and he hears about Israel coming across the Red Sea and these people have such determination they don’t care whether God of heaven or god of any place else is going to stop them, they move in and they just utterly try to destroy this nation.

[Blank spot] We know from extra Biblical sources that one of their techniques was to prey on the rear guard, you’d have a group of men moving out here and you’d have the stragglers behind and they were the ones that were hanging back and these were the ones that Amalek picked off; he’d come right in back and start picking these people off, anybody wounded would start to torture and they’d come up to the wounded people, oh, you’re wounded, fine, I’ll give you another wound. This was their method of first-aid, first-aid to kill them. Then they had another system, they’d gouge the eyes out of people that they found along and then laugh at them. This was some of the atrocities. Amalek was a tremendously, tremendously fierce people. They came out of nowhere and in history they disappeared and to this day we [can’t understand word] have an archeological trace except notice is given to us in Scripture; a very, very fierce people. They loved to pick on children and they’d pick on the children and they’d draw and quarter them, they’d take horses and various mules, etc. and tie the baby’s hands to one and the feet to the other and pull, and that was their favorite trick. So you can see that they had all sorts of techniques worked out to torture people.

So this is the first encounter and God delivers them but notice how God delivers them. Verse 11, “And it came to pass, when Moses held up his hand, that Israel prevailed; and when he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed. [12] But Moses’ hands were heavy; and they took a stone, and put it under him, and he sat thereon; and Aaron and Hur held up hands, the one on the one side, and the other on the other side; and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun. [13] And Joshua discomforted Amalek and his people with the edge of the sword,” actually it means he destroyed Amalek. So one of the first forces from the Amalek block came out and was annihilated at this point in the Sinai Desert by Joshua. But the way it was done was that Moses had to hold his hands up, showing that while the soldiers were out there fighting it was basically God’s power that was doing it. And the victory over Amalek came as they claimed God’s power. Now that’s the first time they hit Amalek.

The second time is after they’d gone… here’s Israel now, they’ve come near to the Mount Horeb area, Mount Sinai, and here they get the Ten Commandments; then they come traipsing back up and they’re going to try to break through the block and come up into the… the first plan of attack is to move into the Holy Land from the south, it’s open plain area, very little geographical obstruction compared to the other way and very little problem with the other Arab tribes and so they’re going to try to ram through the center of this block. Now when they get here, Num. 13:26, you’ll see what happens. This is the incident at Kadesh-barnea. Kadesh-barnea was an outpost of the southern section of the Promised Land. It was one of the Canaanite lookout posts. The Canaanites had to guard their southern flank so they set up a lookout post at a place called Kadesh-barnea. So the Israelis coming up from the south had to pick off this southern lookout point, Kadesh-barnea and that was the plan of attack.

Moses sends some spies in, verse 26, and they report back to him and they come back and they say oh Moses, this is horrible, we’ve gone up there and we find the giants of Anak there and we find the Amalekites there, and we find all these people there, we can’t do it Moses. Except two men that come back with divine viewpoint, Caleb and Joshua. Caleb and Joshua come back and say Moses, we can do it; do you know why we can do it? Because who got us across the Red Sea; who defeated Amalek the last time? You see it was Joshua that was leading the troops the last time they faced Amalek, he knew how to fight them and he had the confidence that God would be with him. So he didn’t have any trouble, Moses, come on, let’s go. And we have these other nitwits on the spy team that came back and said no, we can’t do it, it’s too big and all the rest of it. And they came back and griped and groaned and so finally God answers them and this is found in Num. 14:1, “And the congregation lifted up their voice, and cried; and the people wept that night.” All crybabies, here you have your typical Christian believers, the least little pressure they fall apart and start crying. And of course Moses must have got 3,000 telephone calls, Moses, can you come over here and do some counseling and all the rest of it, and of course Moses was willing, like all pastors, to do counseling. The only thing that gripes you about counseling is oftentimes it’s very hard to get the people that need the counseling to come and the ones that don’t need the counseling are always coming. I’m not knocking counseling but I can see some problems that Moses might have had.

So then verse 4, mutiny, much mutiny against Moses, “And they said one to another, Let us make a captain, and let us return into Egypt.” And Joshua takes over and he gives the straight scoop in verses 8-9 and says look, you just trust the Lord and we’ll go on in. But verse 11, God has all He can take and here’s where they tested God until God’s patience was at an end. “And the LORD said unto Moses, How long will this people provoke me? And how long will it be before they believe Me, for all the signs which I have shown among them?” I have showed this people one sign after another and they still won’t believe Me. Look at verse 12, “I will smite them with the pestilence, and disinherit them,” and Moses of course makes his intercession as he always does, every time these people get in trouble, and in verse 19 we have the conclusion to the matter where God pronounces the sin unto death on these believers.

He says “Your carcasses shall fall in this wilderness; and all who were numbered of you, according to your whole number, from twenty years old and upward, who have murmured against me.” Do you know why God only disciplined those that were over 20? And He only disciplined the men, not the women, not the children. Why? Because the women were good? No, not necessarily, it was that all males over age 20 had a vote in the decision, and God always holds you responsible for your decisions, not something you can’t do, He holds you responsible for what you do do and what you can do and didn’t. So this shows you the principle operating in Scripture, I hold all responsible “from twenty years old and upward” for this thing and you’re just going to drop dead out here in the wilderness. And furthermore I have designed a tour of the desert and you’re going to see all the scenic tours of this desert, for 40 years you’re going to traipse around here and you’re going to know every grain of sand on every dune. And that’s what happened, all these people dropped dead finally out in the desert because they disobeyed; it did not mean they lost their lost their salvation but it does mean that God disciplined them and removed them from this life because they were an obstruction to His program. So this is the second time that Israel meets this block and the fade out and drop back. See, they made a first victory here, went down to Sinai, tried to come up, ram through the center, and then they flaked out and dropped by the wayside.

Now we have another encounter and this in verse the same chapter, verse 41. After God pronounces the fact that they’re not going to be able to run the blockade, they’re not going to be able to ram through Amalek they say oh, we all of a sudden changed our minds Lord, now we’re going to do it. So in verse 41, “and Moses said, Why [wherefore] now do you transgress the commandment of the LORD? But it shall not prosper. [42] Go not up, for the LORD is not among you’ that ye be not smitten before your enemies.” See, Moses recognized that God had given them a chance and that was it, so he says look, just take it as from the Lord, abide with your discipline and don’t try to do this. And of course they’re going to do it now. And then verse 45 is the result, [“Then the Amalekites came down, and the Canaanites who dwelt in that hill, and smote them, and go them, even unto Hormah.”] so that’s the second time, Amalek just chases them all over the Sinai Desert like they did the Egyptians not so long ago and that’s what happens. Amalek just clobbered Israel, just clobbered them. They had Jews running all throughout the sand dunes. Why? Because it wasn’t their business to go in in violation of the Word of God.

Now we have another little crack made and this is found in Deuteronomy, in fact, let’s go back to the passage in our study, chapter 25. Here we have a curse pronounced upon this people. This is one of the serious items of the Word of God that periodically in history God curses a people. You may interpret this to mean that God is a meany, and He doesn’t like somebody so He curses them. That’s not true; when God curses a people it is because that people have had an opportunity to believe, they have had years and years of presentation of the Word and they’ve rejected and rejected and rejected, so God says all right, I’ve had it and you are going to be eliminated from history. And this is what He says now in verse 19, “And it shall be, when the LORD thy God has given thee rest from all thine enemies round about, in the land which the LORD thy God gives thee for an inheritance, to possess it, that you shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget it.” Blotting out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven is equivalent in the Old Testament to annihilation. These people will be cursed and will be totally destroyed, that’s what God says, and you’re going to do it.

Now one of the great tragedies of Israel is that they have not yet done this; they goofed it, and of course the Lord Jesus Christ… whoever Amalek has become genetically now we don’t know, will take care of it at the Second Advent, but they never did what God told them. The next time they hit Amalek is Judges 5:14 you see what’s happened, this is what’s happened, they’ve come on into the land now, here’s the Mediterranean, here’s the Dead Sea, the Sea of Galilee, after the 40 years they tried an eastern strategy; instead of moving their armies in from the south under Joshua they came around to the east and moved into the center section. There was a three-pronged campaign, they secured a beachhead right around Jericho and then they moved south in a very series of fast campaigns Joshua eliminated one stronghold after another and then moved north and eliminated the strongholds to the north. By the way, that strategy is the same that Mosha Diane was using during the Six Day War to defend the frontiers of Israel. The Jewish people today in their military structure are excellent students of the tactics of Joshua. The book of Joshua, I understand, is one of the required books to be studied by every Israeli Army Commander because he is to know these tactics cold, he is operating in the same terrain and basically as an infantry force there are certain limited tactics you can apply in that terrain and evidently many of them are covered in God’s Word.

So, in Judges 5 we have the situation, verse 14, “Out of Ephraim was there a root of them against Amalek; after thee, Benjamin, among thy people,” now what’s this? Ephraim is a tribe that’s gone in to settle this land and you have some of these tribes of Amalek and they begin to give him trouble. Now they are in their own land. What was God’s plan? God’s plan was for them to deal with this thing down here and eliminate it, when they were outside of the land, but they didn’t do that. They bypassed it and came into the land and so what happens? This mean that every year, year in and year out, they’d have to fight Amalek, they’d have to fight these tribesmen, and they’d be a constant thorn in their side because they weren’t gotten rid of when God told them to get rid of them. So in Judges 5:14 we have trouble; in Judges 6:3-6 the same thing, “And so it was, when Israel had sown, that the Midianites came up, and the Amalekites, and the children of the east, even they came up against them,” these Amalekites evidently still had some reservoir over in here and they’d break out and move westward every once in a while and start annoying Israel. And they could have had peace for years, but no, they wouldn’t eliminate Amalek, so therefore they had this constant trouble.

Turn to 1 Sam. 15:7, Saul decided he was going to do something about it. Saul is going to go in and he probably did more than any other commander in the nation Israel to wipe out the Amalekite threat. “And Saul smote the Amalekites from Havilah until thou comest to Shur, that is over against Egypt.” Now most scholars can’t believe this because they don’t accept Biblical tradition. I told you that these people numbered 400,000. The geographical points of verse 7 range from the Euphrates River all the way southwestward to the border of Egypt. That shows you the tremendous expanse of Saul’s campaign. This wasn’t just some little battle in the afternoon somewhere. This campaign of verse 7 was a fantastic campaign. Saul led the armies of Israel out on a search and destroy operation is what it was, and they took everything from the Tigris valley all the way down to the Nile valley and everywhere they had the Amalekites they searched them out and destroyed them. It was a tremendous search and destroy mission but he made one big mistake, verse 8, “And he took Agag,” remember that name because that’s going to come up again, “he took Agag, the king of the Amalekites, alive, and utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword.” You say isn’t that inhumane? No it wasn’t, God told him to do it.

Verse 9, “But Saul and the people spread Agag, and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs,” and this shows you one reason why God ordered a total annihilation; He did not want looting among His troops and in holy war there was never to be looting. The booty had to be burned, the possessions had to be burned, the people had to be destroyed. The soldiers were not allowed to go in and ravish the women, they were to go in and kill the women but they couldn’t touch them as far as ravishing them, etc. And this was holy war and Saul was to go in and utterly annihilate these people. Now he didn’t, he disobeyed and the rest of this passage, many of you have read the Old Testament and know what happens, Samuel got him up and said Saul, you say you killed everybody, what’s this I hear out in the background, a lot of static over there in the field some place, and Saul says well, I guess there are a few oxen over there. And Samuel said oh, that’s interesting, by the way, who is that over there? Oh, that’s the king, and Samuel said what did God tell you to do Saul. And he said well, God kind of told me to kill everybody, and I can imagine with kind of a sick smile on his face, and Samuel said well why didn’t you kill him. And so Samuel took the sword and went over and chopped his head off. So that solved the Amalekite problem for a while, but it doesn’t solve Israel’s problem.

Turn to 1 Chron. 4:41, again this is down in Hezekiah’s time. Now to catch this Saul lived about 1050 BC; now we’re going down in history to about 700 BC in the time of Hezekiah. The northern kingdom has been destroyed in 721 BC by the Assyrians and all that is left is the southern kingdom or Judah, the two tribes, Judah and Benjamin. And here in 1 Chron. 4:41 we have another incident with these Amalekites. You see, they were supposed to be eliminated. “And these written by name came in the days of Hezekiah, king of Judah, and smote their tents, and the habitations that were found there, and destroyed them utterly unto this day, and dwelt in their stead, because there was pasture there for their flocks. [42] And some of them, even of the sons of Simeon, five hundred men, went to Mount Seir, having for their captains” all these people, etc. [43] “And they smote the rest of the Amalekites who had escaped, and have dwelt there unto this day.” See, they had to send another search and destroy operation to pick off this other pocket of the Amalekites but still, they hadn’t eliminated all, and so for the tragedy that resulted from the failure of Israel to handle this problem turn to the last of the historical books, after Chronicles, the book of Esther, a very interesting book. Esther tells you about the history of those Jews who stayed outside of the land and did not return. Esther is probably one of the most alert, brilliant young Israelite ladies who ever lived and she did a tremendous job for her people because there weren’t any men that had the guts to stand up when they should have stood up, and so as always in the Word of God, God has a wonderful way of humiliating the men and that is to let the women do it. And so He let Esther do it when the men should have taken care of it and nobody was found so Esther did it.

In Esther 3:10 we have a very strange remark but it must be tied back to the Amalekites, “And the king took his ring from his hand, and gave it unto Haman, the son of Hammedatha, the Agagite, the Jews enemy,” and here we come down to about 400 BC, the Jews are all dispersed. Here again orientation, here’s the end of the Mediterranean, here’s Israel, and this is occurring over in here, the Persian Empire. You have Esther up here, she’s the queen and she hates this guy, she can’t stand this man, but she’s allowed herself to be married to this man so that she can save her people. She sacrificed her married life for the sake of her country and she’s gone ahead and gritted her teeth and bore it while this man made love to her, etc. but through this operation this woman saved her country, a tremendous story of patriotism. And in 3:10 there’s a man by the name of Haman, and Haman is a guy that started anti-Semitism in the Persian Empire, he went around and had a personal campaign to kill every Jew he could find in the kingdom of Persia and how he started it and why he started it is related back to Amalek; he was Agagite, he was related to Agag, that king that was killed, and do you know why he started anti-Semitism? Because he knew that a couple of generations ago his grandfather had been killed by the Jews and now he had the Jews in his grasp and he was going to kill them.

Now, this anti-Semitism actually came about in history because the Jews themselves failed to annihilate the Amalekites; had they done in the first place what God told them to do there wouldn’t be any of these people around, but Haman was one of the greatest anti-Semites probably next to Adolf Hitler that ever walked the face of this earth. And he is related to these Amalekites.

Now how do we tie this all together as Christians? I hope you’ve seen as we’ve studied the history of the Amalekite problem some principles, I hope you’ve seen the principle that Israel was saved, in the analogy she came out of the land. What did she first have to deal with? Amalek. What did she fail to deal with? Amalek. What, therefore did she have to deal with the rest of her life? Amalek. Now, in conclusion of the matter turn to Romans 6 so you as a believer in Jesus Christ will not make the same mistake Israel made.

Keep in mind the analogy; here you are at a point in time. I don’t know when that point in time was, in fact I don’t know how many of you are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ but we’ll presume you are, so there you are at a point in time when you received Christ. All right, at that time God entered you into union with His Son. This is your legal position in the New Testament described as “in Christ.” Now this means that you share certain things of Jesus Christ; you share His perfect righteousness, that’s credited to your account. You may be the worst louse in the world, you may have a lousy personality, people can’t stand you but God loves you and He has this tremendous plan worked out for you and He has credited to your account absolute righteousness. So regardless of how many friends you have or don’t have, if you have received Christ God loves you with an infinite amount of love. The next thing are these two elements called DR, one death and the other resurrection. In Romans 6 we deal with death; you say I’m not dead yet, the point here is spiritual death. Why do you have to die spiritually, why is it necessary. Romans 6:6, “Knowing this that our old man has been,” that’s past tense, “has been crucified with him, that the body of sin,” that is your physical body which acts as a base of operations for the flesh, the sin nature, “the body of sin might be destroyed” or neutralized, or put out of operation, “that henceforth you should not be serving sin.” Now that’s yours as a believer. You do not have to be a slave to your flesh. Some Christians struggle with this all the time. Do you know why? Because you did the same thing that Israel did. What did God tell you in verse 6? He tells you that Jesus Christ has died, not only for your sins but He has died to sin; if I am in union with Him, Jesus Christ is a new creation, if I am in union with Him I have to die before I can get into that new creation, and I die legally and spiritually at the point I receive Christ and he therefore, with His death, I share His death on the cross; this means that potentially you as a believer have the ability to have victory over your flesh and there’s no need for any Christian sitting here in this congregation ever to have extended problems in your sin nature.

If you do, there is one of two things wrong: either you have not dealt with yourself according to Romans 6 or you are under demonic attack, but there is no reason for habitual defeat at the hands of your sin nature any more than there was reason for Israel to be under the habitual defeat of Amalek. What was Israel to do with Amalek? Destroy it. All right, what are you to do with your flesh? You can’t destroy it without killing yourself, obviously, but God has provided a system in verse 6 of rendering your sin nature totally inoperative. That’s what the Greek means there in verse 6. God has provided a wonderful provision for you and you don’t get this because you join a church, you get it because you are in union with Jesus Christ, it is all grace. God has provided en toto for your sin nature problem. And you may think that you have the worst sin nature any Christian ever had and your wife or husband would say yes, Amen. Your best friend might say so, but I don’t care how bad you are when you are out of fellowship, still God has provided a tremendous plan for you. He has provided for total annihilation of that sin nature as far as day to day operation.

There is only one problem. What did Israel have to do to attain victory over Amalek? Did she just sit around and say well, good, God gives victory over Amalek, we’ll just sit here now. No, she had to actively walk by faith through that block; she could have penetrated that southern block, when God put that block across there she could have walked right through and nothing would have stopped her. Joshua could have led the armies right through there and nothing would have stopped him. But they had to march. Now you as a believer, verse 6 tells you something, that God has given you victory over your sin nature because He has provided for its becoming inoperative. Here your soul is, volition, personal affections, mentality, bodily affections and here’s your flesh, your old sin nature operating out of your flesh wants to come in here and botch up your soul, wants to bring your soul into bondage. You are born with this, I have it, everybody has it, so don’t use that as an excuse. The Bible says every one of us has a sin nature. You young people that are dating, just remember the person you’re dating, I don’t care how sweet they seem, you can be snowed for a couple of dates but you watch carefully and look underneath the armor and you’ll see some cracks and don’t get shocked when you begin to see the fact that the person you care for very much has a sin nature. Bully for you, you just woke up to a vital Biblical truth. And the problem you have is finding someone compatible. And by the way, no one this side of the fall is totally compatible because you both have sin natures, and you both have times when you get together and the sparks will fly simply because you have a sin nature.

Now what the answer is to the Christians is found in verse 11, this is how you take the truth of verse 6 and apply it to your life, “Likewise, reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ, our Lord.” Notice, it takes an act of the volition. So here you are, out of fellowship. What do you do? You use 1 John 1:9, “if we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” That puts you back in fellowship; now you are walking in fellowship with the Lord and all of a sudden bang, some temptation comes in. Maybe some person has said one of these cutting remarks with a smile on their face and you’d like just give them a knuckle sandwich or something. Or maybe someone else has done something to you and you’re disappointed, and maybe you’re in the doldrums and you get into a self-pity spiral and you just can’t pull out, you feel so sorry for yourself, nobody cares for me any more and all the rest of it; self-pity, that’s what’s happening, the sin nature is appealing to your volition. So at that point when you begin to have temptations hit, you don’t confess temptations, that’s where some Christians have lost the battle already, you don’t confess temptations, you confess the sin that results from the temptation. So don’t think you have to confess and use 1 John 1:9 every two minutes because you have some temptation enter your mind. Jesus was tempted but He never sinned and therefore it would be blasphemy to say He did.

What happens when these temptations come, you claim this promise; this is a promise for you to claim, verse 6, and verse 11 tells you how to claim verse 6, it’s says “count” and the Greek word here means to reckon, it was used for a businessman in the ancient world when he’d tally up his business records and he’d count on this, he had so much profit, so much loss, he reckoned this. So in verse 11 when these things hit you, what do you do? Whine, cry, fall apart? No, you say wait a minute, this is just like Amalek tried to do to Israel; every time Israel got defeated Amalek tried to attack. What should Israel have done? Go out and blast them, search and destroy mission. Who’s blasted your sin nature? Jesus Christ on the cross has already blasted it, so all you have to do in verse 11 is say no, I claim the cross work of Christ, I claim verse 6, I know that my old man has been crucified with Him and I sit right here and I’m going to claim it, period. And you just make up your mind by positive volition that you are going to claim verse 6, and you’ll have a struggle at times because you’re not used to this kind of operation, you’ve got this effeminate image of Christianity and that’s not the image of Christianity. Christianity is a very masculine thing and it involves fighting; it involves struggle and this is what you are going to see again and again, struggle, struggle, struggle, struggle. And it sounds terrible and yet you realize that out of this struggle comes a wonderful peace and a wonderful joy that nothing can replace. And once you’ve experienced this you’ll never want anything else.

Verse 13, “Neither present your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin, but yield yourselves unto God,” the word is “present yourselves unto God as those that are alive from the dead,” now you ought to read that, those of you who have problems in this area, and some of you, your life may look like this, you may have a circle here and you may have various details of life, your social life, your sex life, your family life, you may have school life, academics, or something and fine, you might be walking through all these circles and you don’t have any problem until you hit some other area over here, maybe it’s the group you run around with, some of you young people are running around with some very questionable people I’ve noticed, so you come around this group and every time you get in this group you have problems. Now what’s the problem? God wants you to mature in that area, so you may not have a problem here, here, and here, but over here, that’s just one area of your life you’re going to have to deal with and you know it, I don’t. So you just take verse 6 home and you study it and memorize it and apply it and you’ll soon find there are areas in your life where you’re going to have some problem. Find out where those are and work on them. God wants you to mature as a believer. Now by working on them I don’t mean grit your teeth and have some power of positive thinking or some thing like that, that’s not the Christian life. It means that you believe and you claim verse 6 again and again and again and again until you do what Israel never did with Amalek, you wipe the remembrance of him from under heaven.