Lesson 66
Lordship of the Nations – 28:27-48
Deut. 28 is an explanation of the mechanics of history and it concerns
the Old Testament saints as they were organized in a nation. I had a question asked: would you please
explain how and Old Testament person is a Christian; is he one in the same
sense as a New Testament believer? I’d
like to begin by answering this question because it’s directly pertinent to
Deut. 28. To answer this question you
can think of a simple graph. Think of
the Old Testament, the New Testament as two columns on the graph or chart. The basis of faith or the basis of salvation
in the Old Testament, or the means by which it was made effective was the work
of Jesus Christ future in history, the cross; the basis of salvation in the New
Testament, the work of Christ on the cross retroactive. So one is prospective and one is retroactive;
one looks forward to what Christ would do in history, one looks backward to
what Christ has done in history. But if
Jesus Christ had never gotten to the cross every person in the Old Testament
who believed would not have been saved.
Everything hinged on Jesus Christ going to the cross and finishing the
work. If He didn’t make it they would
have lost the promised salvation. Their salvation was promised and the basis
was the real work of Christ in history.
The means for appropriating the salvation for the Old Testament saint
was by faith; by the way, a verse on the first one is Rom. 3:24-25. The means for salvation in the New Testament
is by faith, the first reference, Rom. 4.
The objective or the object of their faith in the Old Testament as well
as the object of faith in the New Testament is the same, the Son of God. The Son of God in the Old Testament was
revealed through the typology of the tabernacle. The Son of God was revealed through the
Messianic prophecies. The Son of God was
revealed in numerous and varied ways in the Old Testament. In the New Testament He is revealed in His
person, He revealed Himself. So the
object of the faith is the same. The
only thing that differs, that makes the Old Testament seem different from the
New Testament saint as far as salvation is concerned is the amount of
information. The Old Testament saint did
not have access to the amount of information that we have. The Old Testament saint did not know the
exact conditions under which Jesus Christ would go to the cross, so we have
less knowledge here, more knowledge here.
That’s how the Old Testament saint was saved.
The second thing to remember about the Old Testament saint is depending
on his racial makeup he had a different position after he was saved. We draw the plan of God this way: phase one,
the time we receive Christ; phase two, from that time until we die, and phase
three, eternity. Phase two in the Old
Testament was slightly different from us.
When we accept Christ as Savior Jesus Christ sets up a position for us;
the Holy Spirit puts us in union with that position and we call that “in
Christ.” We have a circle, the bottom
circle that denotes our sphere of experience and the New Testament believer, if
he’s in here he’s filled with the Holy Spirit; if he’s out he’s controlled by
the flesh. Those are the mechanics.
The Old Testament saint differed however, in depending on certain
things, his top circle was different, depending whether he was a Gentile then
he had one position, the position was a position of blessing through the
Abrahamic Covenant, Gen. 12:3, “in thee shall all the families of the earth be
blessed.” He has a position under the
Adamic covenant where God promised to Adam and Eve that Eve would be the mother
of all living and that she would bring forth, the woman would bring forth Messiah.
So the Gentile’s position is a function of that.
Now let’s come to Israel; you take all of the Old Testament saints
together and then you have a nation and there are certain divine mechanics that
have to do with that nation, so we draw circles again; this time it’s not the
individual in the circle, this time it’s the nation. The nation itself is controlled by the
Abrahamic Covenant and it is controlled down here by the Mosaic Covenant. The Mosaic Covenant is conditional, if you stay in fellowship with God, then
you will have blessing, if you do not
stay in fellowship with God, then you will have cursing. And in Deut. 28 we have the blessing which
signifies the nation is in national fellowship, and we have cursing which
signifies the nation is in national out of fellowship status. So
Again we want to review the chiastic structure of this chapter so that
you’ll be clear as to what the procedure is.
Think of the chapter as made of three concentric circles. At the center you have the Lordship, who is
going to be the Lord of the nation; whom does that nation serve as a
nation. The second circle is the
domestic situation, and the third circle is the international situation. Chiastic structure means that Moses builds up
to the center; he starts at the periphery, moves in, moves into the center,
moves back out again, and it’s his way of emphasizing the center, so therefore
in verse 7 of the blessing he talks about international condition. In verse 12b-13 deal with the international
blessing; he deals with it in verse 7, then he goes back to it in verses 12b-13. In verse 8 he moves in to the inner circle,
to the condition of the nation, and then we have verses 11-12a, this is the
domestic condition. Then we have the lordship, verses 9-10. That’s the first section of Deut. 28, that’s
the blessing section.
The cursing section is outlined in a different way but still on the same
basis. Verses 20-26 and then he returns
to the international position in verses 58-68.
We covered that last time. Tonight we’re going to finish Deut. 28 and
we’re going to start in verse 27 and work through 37, then we’re going to start
verse 49 and work through verse 57. This
is the condition of the nation. Packed
in and as a sandwich between these verses are verses 38-48 that outline the question
of lordship. So you see how Moses moves;
first in verse 20-26 he’s in the outer circle; verses 27-37 he’s in the inner
circle; in verses 38-48 he’s in the lordship in the center. Then he moves back out, in verses 49-57, back
out in the outer circle, and then 58-68 he’s out on the rim again. Why did he do it this way? To emphasize; it’s all done for emphasis,
emphasis on the central position.
Let’s look at the first set of these conditions of the nation
internally, verses 27-37. When we come
to this section, those of you who are real sharp will notice that this is also chiastic. Verses 27-35 deals with one subject, disease;
verse 38 and verse 34 deal with the second subject which is mental illness;
verses 29-33 is oppression, and verses 30-32 deal with the problem of
frustration, national frustration.
Again, learning what we have from the chiastic structure, why does Moses
present the material in this form? He’s
presenting the material in this form to emphasize frustration; that’s one of
the key hallmarks of the judgment of God upon a national entity.
In verse 27 we read, “The LORD shall smite thee with the boil of
Verse 28, “The LORD shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and
astonishment of heart.” Verse 34, “So
that thou shalt be mad for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see.” You have here again the emphasis on the
madness, this means in the Hebrew a confused form of thinking, it doesn’t mean
to act insane, it means to just be utterly and terribly confused, so much so
that you can’t think rationally in the middle of a situation. Man of the Christians that have dealt with
kids on dope, at times they’re so incoherent that you can’t even reason with
them about the gospel of Jesus Christ because their minds have been warped by
the dope and it’s just like they were under a demon spell, you can’t break
through because they’ve lost the power of rationality. The dope has destroyed their brain. This is one of the fiendish results of this
sort of activity that goes on in our day, but other things can destroy your
power to think and it’s shock, often times the shock due to national
adversity.
We have seen in our own country in recent years two instances where we approached
what is spoken of here in the text; one instance was the assassination of John
F. Kennedy where it was a national shock and you had men getting up from high
places making absolutely ludicrous and stupid statements about how we were all
to blame because a foreigner came to the city of Dallas and shot President
Kennedy, as though Dallas to blame, everybody in Dallas was automatically
implicated in the guilt, just because you lived in Dallas. You had people in high places under shock, a
tremendous national shock and they lost their rationality, their power to
reason and they made these stupid statements on TV, the radio, and the news
media amplified it so that you had one person making a stupid statement and the
first thing you know everybody is making stupid statements. That was a graphic illustration how a nation
can mentally become deranged under extreme pressure because the people do not
have the criteria of the Word of God to think through.
We have seen the same thing with Martin Luther King, every white man was
to blame because Martin Luther King was assassinated; another piece of malarkey
and yet again you have the situation where people under extreme adversity are
caused to make irrational statements.
Go to Isaiah 13:8 and you’ll see historically where the same thing hit
the nation
You see the same report in Isaiah 29:9-10, here we find the national leadership
can no longer make rational decisions because of the shocking pressure, “Stay
yourselves, and wonder; cry out, and cry;” literally it says in the Hebrew
scream, go out in the middle of the street and yell as loud as you can, and
“they are drunk, but not with wine; they stagger, but not with strong drink.
[10] For the LORD has poured out upon you the spirit of deep sleep, and hath
closed your eyes;” and notice this last clause, “the prophets and your rulers,
the seers hath he covenant covered.” By
this Isaiah means that the national leaders are completely at a loss to know
what to do and under the extreme pressure the leaders fall apart. Any group, when the leadership goes the group
goes. The group can’t take it once you
smash the leadership. And when the shock is so great and the pressure is so
fantastic that under the shocking conditions the leadership collapses mentally,
they don’t have to collapse physically, they can collapse above the eyebrows
and lose their mental stability and when that happens the whole group goes
right down the drain. That’s what Isaiah
is saying.
That’s what was prophesied in Deut. 28, the mental shock nationally due
to adversity affecting everybody, not just the peon in the street but it
affects the king himself, it affects all levels of leadership in the nation,
they fall apart, they don’t know what to do, they hit the panic button and they
begin to jump at all sorts of ridiculous things that are held out to them.
Then in verse 29, here the emphasis is shifting to the oppression, “And
thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind grope in darkness, and thou shalt not
prosper in thy ways; and thou shalt be only oppressed and spoiled evermore, and
no man shall save thee.” In the Hebrew
the force is much stronger than in the King James, for in the Hebrew it reads
in verse 29, “You will be a groper,” and it’s the Hebrew participle and it
means you’re groping around all the time, constantly, 24 hours a day, for in
the Hebrew the participle is the motion picture tense of action that continues
and continues and continues and continues and never stops. These people are going to be groping at
noonday, at the height of the sun, in the maximum light and they’re going to be
groping as in darkness. And no matter
what human gimmick they try to get out of their problem nationally Moses says
you are never going to prosper, you’re never going to prosper Israel because
you’ve dropped out of the circle, you’re
out of fellowship, status quo carnality and when you’re a carnal Christian or
you’re a carnal nation, no matter what human gimmick you devise to solve a
problem you will never solve it because God isn’t going to allow it, He is
spanking you, He is spanking the nation Moses says, and He isn’t going to stop
spanking until you straighten up. One of
the signs of God’s judgment isn’t just national disaster; one of the signs of
God’s judgment is the prelude to national collapse in which the whole nation
loses itself.
In verse 29 they are groping around and it says “and thou shalt be only
oppressed and spoiled evermore,” it doesn’t mean forever, it means continually,
and the verbs here, “oppressed” and “spoiled” are the participles and it means
they are going to be continually oppressed, continually spoiled, and the last
sentence is powerful and it says there is going to be no man who is your
savior, “and no man shall save thee.” There’s
going to be no national leader on the scene that’s going to have the solution;
everybody is going to be panicked. One man is going to say if we could it this
way and another man try it this way, and another man try it this way and they
try it this way and it doesn’t work, they try it this way and it doesn’t work,
they try it this way and it doesn’t work; that’s what it means, you’re not
going to have a savior, you’re not going to have a national leader that’s going
to get you out of a jam because God has deliberately engineered the pressure
and He’s not going to let up until you straighten out. That’s what he’s telling
this nation in verse 29.
Now verse 33, the pair that goes with verse 29, “The fruit of thy land,
and all thy labors, shall a nation whom you do not know will eat up, and thou
shalt be only oppressed and crushed always,” continual participles again. These foreigners are going to come in and
they’re going to eat you up, they’re going to go through your fields and take
it. Today in an analogous way we would
say they would come in and they’d take over the businesses, they would come in
and they’d take over the stock market, the banking, and don’t you think there
aren’t elements that are trying. And they’d
come in and do all this and Isaiah says do you know why they’re doing it? Because you are out to lunch and you’re out
of the bottom circle and as long as you are out of the bottom circle there’s
not anything you can do until you straighten up and God says I’ll take care of
it if you will take care of your problem and your responsibility.
Now we come to the end of this chiastic structure in verses 30-32 where
the absolute emphasis is upon frustration.
“Thou shalt betroth a wife, and another man shall seize her” literally,
not just “lie with her,” it says seize her and grab her, “thou shalt build an
house, and thou shalt not dwell therein; thou shalt plant a vineyard, and shalt
not gather the grapes thereof. [31] Thine ox shall be slain,” it’s the status
of being slain, it’s a participle, “before thine eyes, and you shalt not eat
thereof; your ass shall be violently taken away from before your face, and
shall not be restored to thee; your sheep will be given unto your enemies,” and
again the refrain, although it’s translated differently in the King James it’s
exactly the same as the last of verse 29,
and there’s not a savior, “and thou shalt have none to rescue
them.” There’s not a man that’s going to
come about on the scene that’s going to solve the problem. Not one, your hope is cut off.
Verse 32, “Thy sons and thy daughters shall be given unto another
people, and thine eye shall look,” and one of the most pathetic parts of this
whole section is the participle here, your eyes are going to be looking,
constantly, constantly looking for your children and you’re not going to find
them because the enemy has taken them away, “and fail with longing for them all
they day long; and there shall be no might in thine hand,” meaning you have no
means of solving this problem.
Now turn to the second section in which this problem is dealt with. The second section begins in verse 49 again
emphasizing domestic disaster of a nation.
“The LORD shall bring a nation against thee from far, from the end of
the earth, as swift as the eagle flies; a nation whose tongue thou shalt not
understand.” This is the prophecy of
tongues. The tongue that you will not
understand is the Gentile tongue that the Jewish people would not understand,
and so they said it would be in a tongue that they don’t understand. And I want you to remember this; in your King
James the word “tongue” means “language.”
Look at how it is used here, “in a language you will not
understand.” He’s talking about that,
speaking in tongues is speaking in languages.
Turn to Isaiah 28, do you see where Isaiah got a lot of his material;
Isaiah didn’t originate most of his material, he copied from Moses. Isaiah’s genius was not in originating
material; Isaiah’s genius was in adapting Moses law to his generation; that was
Isaiah’s strong point. Isaiah 28:11 he
predicts this tongue thing and he says, “For with stammering lips and another
tongue,” another language, “will he speak to this people,” and again he
emphasizes that there’s going to come a time in history when God will speak to
Israel through Gentile languages. And
what happened in Acts 2? What languages do you read in Acts 2 by which the
gospel was transmitted to whom? Who came
to Jerusalem on that day of Pentecost?
Jews, the nation Israel. But what
languages were used to communicate Christ to them? You’ve got a list in Acts 2, the first few
verses and it tells you, and every one of them are Gentile languages. And Paul says in 1 Cor. 14 it’s fulfilled,
this prophecy of Isaiah. So you see,
this is the speaking in tongues, it is the sign of the beginning of the end for
the nation Israel.
Back to Deut. 28:50, “A nation of fierce countenance, who shall not
regard the person of the old, nor show favor to the young.” The word “fierce” in this expression, “fierce
countenance” is the Hebrew word which means unyielding, it means dogged
determinism, it means the country that God is going to select be the
disciplining nation over Israel is going to come and nothing is going to stop
them. No matter what Israel tries to do,
later on we will see how they tried foreign policy and it didn’t work, they
tried military policy and it didn’t work.
No matter what they tried it didn’t work. So what Moses is saying is this nation is not
going to be stopped, there’s nothing you can do. Once the thing is set in motion just forget
it, just head for the hills because nothing is going to stop them. “A fierce countenance, who shall not regard,”
they don’t care about anybody and they are going to come in and historically
they did. [51, “And he shall eat the fruit of thy cattle, and the fruit of thy
land, until thou be destroyed; who also shall not leave thee neither grain,
wine, or oil, or the increase of thy cows, or flocks of sheep, until he have
destroyed thee.”]
Verse 52, “And he shall besiege thee in all thy gates, until thy high
and fortified walls come down, wherein thou trust,” notice that phrase, he’s
going to besiege you until your high and fenced walls come down in which you
trusted. What’s the point that he’s
making there? He’s saying that a person
who is out of fellowship, who’s out of the bottom circle and he’s wandering
around, you and I know as believers what happens, we are always trusting in
something other than the Word of God at that point in our life. God has given us about 7,000 promises in the
Word, like Rom. 8:28. When we’re out of
fellowship we always trust in something.
Israel nationally trusted in a wall. We as Christians, instead of
trusting these promises, we’ll trust in something else. We’ll trust in our own strength, we’ll trust
in our own ingenuity, our own intelligence, something, but we will not be
trusting in the Word of God. And that’s,
by the way, a test to tell whether you’re in fellowship or not. What is the object of your trust? Are you trusting the promises of God directed
toward you or are you trusting your own ability and this is the issue that’s
always present and was present nationally. We are responsible to build a strong
military machine but we can’t put our trust in the machine. We put our trust in the Lord. This is what it means, those walls wherein
you trusted they are going to come down, throughout all thy land.
And he, this enemy, verse 52, “shall besiege thee in all thy gates,”
that’s all the cities, the word “gates” means cities, “… throughout all the
land which the Lord thy God has given thee,” and this is going to go on and on
and on. Then finally in verse 53 we have
that horrible thing come up again, “And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own
body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters whom the LORD thy God has
given thee, in the siege, and in the distress, wherewith thine enemies shall
distress thee.” I read you Josephus and
I showed you how that verified in history literally in 70 AD and when you see
this happen again and again in Scripture you don’t come up with these idiotic
statements like some people did to me when were talking about Christ, about
interpreting the Bible spiritually. You
interpret the Bible the way the Bible interprets itself and the Bible interprets
itself physically and literally. So
we’re going to see how this came true within the Bible. Last time I did it with Josephus in 70
AD. Let me show you some passages in the
Bible where this happened.
This is what happened in the nation.
We’re looking at 400 BC here at this point. Along about 930 BC the nation had a civil
war, and it split, northern kingdom and southern kingdom. The northern kingdom was known as Israel; the
southern kingdom was known as Judah. The
northern kingdom collapsed in 721 BC; the southern kingdom collapses in 586
BC. They were out of fellowship for 70
years, came back in 516 BC, went down to the time of Jesus Christ and finally
down to 70 AD. At 70 AD God put them
back in the fifth stage of discipline once again and it was then that I read
about the happening in Josephus.
Tonight I want to show you what happened in 721 and 586. Let’s turn first to what happened in 721 BC
in 1 Kings 6:24, this is the siege of Samaria, Samaria was the capital of the
northern kingdom; Samaria was the capital city and it was the last one to fall
before the enemy. “And it came to pass
after this, that Ben-hadad, king of Syria, gathered all his host, and went up,
and besieged Samaria. [25] And there was a great famine in Samaria; and, behold,
they besieged it, until an ass’s head was sold for fourscore pieces of silver,
and the fourth part of a kab of dove’s dung [leavings] for five pieces of
silver. [26] And as the king of Israel was passing by upon the wall, there
cried a woman unto him, saying, Help, my lord, O king. [27] And he said, If the
LORD do not help thee, how shall I help thee-out of the barn floor, or out of
the winepress?” He’s sarcastic, he says
what do you want me to do, I haven’t got anything left, what do you want me to
give you? In verse 28, “And the king
said unto her, What ails thee? And she answered, This woman said unto me, Give
thy son, that we may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow. [29] So we
boiled my son, and ate him. And I said
unto her on the next day, Give thy son, that we may eat him. And she has hidden her son.”
It literally happened. So how do
you take Bible prophecy? Spiritually or
literally? You take it literally. That’s how the Bible means for itself to be
interpreted.
Turn to Lamentations 2, this is talking about 586 BC. Lamentations is a book of sorrow, it’s a book
of weeping; Jeremiah is called the weeping prophet because he lived to watch
his own nation go down the drain right in front of him. The book of Jeremiah is tremendous,
particularly for our day in our nation because Jeremiah is a man who stands
here and watches it go right down in front of him. He can remember as a child growing up in
peace, in law and order, and now he’s looking in front of him and nothing,
everything has fallen apart; his nation has collapsed during his own
lifetime. The book of Lamentations is
written as he stands there and he watches the people go by. What had happened in 586, Nebuchadnezzar
decided he was either going to go to Jerusalem or go south to Egypt; he threw
some straws in the wind, actually arrows with marks on them which was the means
of spirit’s guidance in that day for Gentile pagans, and so then he decided to
come along the road to Jerusalem. He
came to Jerusalem, knocked off all the cities around it and began to put
pressure on Jerusalem. Finally he broke
it down and there was a place north of Jerusalem called Ramah, and Ramah in
Hebrew means weeping and wailing and in weeping and wailing it was named
because the people of Jerusalem were carted out by the truckload, if you want
to use the expression, to this place and rounded up and organized for the chain
gang to be marched across the dessert back to the Babylonian Empire. They were
a slave people and this was the end of the nation in 586 BC. And the people were lined up in these camps
around Ramah, and they were organized and sorted; the old people were killed
and the young people were killed, and it left the teenagers and the young adults
and they were the ones that were left, and they were all chained together, men
and women together in this chain gang and carted across the dessert.
The book of Lamentations records Jeremiah sitting there watching this
happen in front of his eyes. And he begins to record what happened and the
pressures that hit these people. And in
chapter 4 he gives us some of the gruesome things that happened. Verse 4, “The tongue of the nursing child
clings to the roof of his mouth for thirst; the young children ask bread, and
no man breaks it unto them. [5] They that did feed delicately are desolate in
the streets; they that were brought up in scarlet embrace dunghills. [6] For
the punishment of the iniquity of the daughter of my people is greater than the
punishment of the sin of Sodom, that was overthrown as in a moment, with no
hands laid on her. [7] Her Nazarites [nobles] were purer than snow; they were
whiter than milk, they were more ruddy in body than rubies; their polishing was
of sapphire,” but now “Their visage is blacker than a coal; they are not known
in the streets; their skin clings to their bones; it is withered, it is become
like a stick. [9] They who are slain
with the sword are better than they who are slain with hunger; for these pine
away, stricken through for want of the fruits of the field. [10] The hands of
the tender-hearted women have boiled their own children; they were their food
in the destruction of the daughter of my people.” He’s saying the women used to eat their own
children.
How do you take prophecy? Allegorically and spiritually, or do you take
it literally and physically? You take it
literally and physically, that’s the way the Word of God intends for it to be
taken.
Turn back to Deut. 28. Three times in history this law has worked its
way out, in 721 BC the city of Samaria; in 586 BC the city of Jerusalem; in 70
AD the city of Jerusalem, and it has yet one more time in history to be acted
out again, and that’s during the Tribulation just before Jesus Christ comes;
Jesus says it’s going to be so bad in Jerusalem at the final end that He wants
His people to flee out, get out of this, when you see the sign of the
desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel, get out of here, don’t stay in the
city because they’re going to come and it’s going to be horrible in the city. So this is the tremendous law of history that
God is faithful and just as He is faithful to His promises He is faithful to
His cursings. And just as He has
promised us blessing if we trust His promises He has also promised us cursing
and discipline if we fail.
Nationally we cannot make a one to one analogy between Israel and the
United States. I’ve said that again and
again. Israel was a special nation in
God’s sight, but it is rough, approximate, to make some analogies. And if the United States as a Gentile nations
functions under the principle of Acts 17:26 which says basically that God has
set up boundaries in space in time with the purpose of creating positive
volition toward the Word of God, and when the nation as a whole goes on
negative volition toward God then we can expect similar things to these things
in Deuteronomy 28. And certainly as we
have gone through here you can make your own application to our own
society. But these are signs that God
not will judge, future, but God already is judging.
Deut. 28:54, we have a tremendous principle here as far as the Christian
life is concerned. “So that the man who
is tender among you, and very delicate, his eye shall be evil toward his
brother, and toward the wife of his bosom, and toward the remnant of his
children whom he shall leave.” The word
“tender” and “very delicate” denotes a naturally sweet personality. Here’s something startling from the Word of
God, but it says that every person has an old sin nature. Out of its area of strength comes personal
sin and out of the area of weakness comes human good. Some people have naturally sweet
personalities; that’s what the words mean, the man that is tender and very
delicate, a man who has a naturally warm personality, naturally has a warm personality, this man is going to be doing
these things in verse 54-55; his natural personality is going to go right down
the drain and so here you have somebody that’s sweet and people say oh, what a
marvelous Christian and what you’re looking at is simply human good. You’re looking at a person that has a
naturally sweet personality and you’re snowed by that sweet personality and yet
that personality comes out of the energy of the flesh and is all human good and
the proof that it comes out of the old sin nature is that when the adversity
gets on, watch the sweetness and light disappear.
My first experience with the clergy was this way, a few chaplains where
I went to college were the sweetest things going, until you went up to a
position of standing for the Word of God and I found myself in criminal court,
and I suddenly discovered that the naturally sweet personality just suddenly
dissolved. Sweet personality isn’t going
to carry you; sweet personality isn’t going to carry anybody and you’d better
learn right now that if you respond to people on the basis of their natural
personality you are out of it Scripturally.
The only thing that makes a person pleasant from an inner point of view
is inner beauty, something that comes from the work of the Holy Spirit on the
inside, and that is what the Word of God places emphasis on. These people fall apart. In verse 54 these were the people that
everyone said oh, what a marvelous person, sweet personality and look what
happens to the sweet personality when the pressure gets a little heavy. Verses
54 & 55, that’s what happens. [55, “So that he will not give to any of them
of the flesh of his children whom he shall eat, because he has nothing left him
in the siege, and in the distress, wherewith thine enemies shall distress thee
in all thy gates.”]
Verse 56, “The tender and delicate woman among you, who would not
venture to set the sole of her foot upon the ground for delicateness and
tenderness,” see the picture that’s being drawn here, a naturally very gentle
type of person suddenly is transformed into a monster by adversity and
pressure. The reason they are so
transformed is because the sweetness came from the sin nature to begin with;
that’s why. A person filled with the
Holy Spirit will be the same under pressure as they are any other time. The Holy Spirit makes up the difference; the
Holy Spirit gives the resources to keep on going on when the going gets
rough. [Blank spot]
In Deut. 28 we see the principle that the natural personality doesn’t
have it and you never, never want to judge a person on the basis of their
natural personality. What transforms the
individual is the filling of the Holy Spirit and that’s all. If you’re relying on someone else because
they are a naturally sweet person, you’re going to be sadly disappointed
because someday they’re going to be out of fellowship and someday the pressure
is going to be on and you’re going to have a monster on your hands and you’re
going to wonder why. This is the last
part of the domestic policy.
Verses 38-48 and this is the center and last section to this chapter,
the question of the lordship of the nation, beginning in verse 38 and running
through verse 48. Going back to the
circle again, we have the lordship of the nation, we have domestic policy, we
have international policy. We’ve covered
the outer circle, we’ve moved into the inner circle and now we’re at the center
of the passage. These ten verses are
what Moses intended to emphasize so let’s look at them.
Verse 38, “Thou shalt carry much seed out into the field, and shalt
gather but little in; for the locust shall consume it.” What’s he talking
about? He’s giving you a principle found
again and again in the word, if we order all creation on a hierarchy we have
man, animal, plant, machine and by machine I mean the biological and physical
universe. Here we have man and man, it
says in Gen. 1, was given to have dominion over all the world; man was given to
rule over the animals, he was given to rule over the plants, over all his
environment, man was given to rule.
That’s what Gen. 1:28ff says, man was made as the lord of creation,
little “l”, lord of creation. But a
strange principle happens; when man forsakes the will of God he is reversed, so
that man becomes crushed by his environment, whereas man could have been lord
over the animals, insects, as in verse 38, now he finds that the insects are
lord over him. Most of this came about
at the fall; this is what the curse is all about. Some of you still insist on interpreting the
curse as spiritual; you can’t get spiritual things out of the curse, the curse
is physical and it means that the whole physical creation fell and it
introduced discourse into the physical creation and I am well aware of the
biological problems of morphological changes in the plant and animal kingdom; I
am well aware of the denture problems of vegetarian type animals now becoming
carnivorous, I’m well aware of those.
I’m just reporting to you what the text says and the text says that there
were physical changes in the universe.
But God says He’s going to amplify those changes.
So here in verse 38 those animals, and insects are part of the animals,
that man could have been lord over and in lieu of his being lord over at least
God and His good angels would have blessed Israel, protected the crops from the
locusts. He says I’m not going to
protect them any more and so man here you could have been on positive volition
as lord and ruler over your physical environment, now you’re going to be
crushed by the weight of it. So he’s
going to have the locusts tear up his field.
Verse 39, “Thou shalt plant vineyards, and dress them, but shall neither
drink of the wine,” because the worms are going to eat them. In verse 40 they plant olive trees and the
trees cast forth their olives, and here we have diseases, wilt and other
things, so now he’s crushed by the decay of the plant kingdom. Verse 41, “Thou shalt began sons and
daughters, but you shalt not enjoy them; for they shall go into captivity,” the
enemy is going to come and take them away.
In verse 42 again the locusts destroying the means of production. And finally in verse 43, “The stranger who is
within thee,” that’s living inside Israel, “shall get up above thee very high,
and thou shalt come down very low.” This
means foreign influences are going to take over; the insects are going to rule
over you, the plants are going to rule over you, foreigners are going to rule
over you.
Verse 46, “And they shall be upon thee for a sign and for a wonder, and
upon thy seed forever.” “Forever” here
means a long time. What is this as sign of?
It’s a sign of God’s character.
It goes back to the essence box, God is sovereign, God is righteousness,
God is just, God is love, God is omniscient, God is omnipotent, God is
omnipresent and God is immutable. God’s righteousness and justice, when God
says I have a standard He means I have a standard and I don’t intend to change
it. The standard is there and it’s going
to be there as long as I am here, and since I am eternal and I am immutable,
it’s always going to be there. That’s
what it means, it’s a sign that Go has laid forth certain standards and He
isn’t going to compromise those standards.
One of the most idiotic ideas we have in our generation is relativism,
everything is relative and everybody is picking this up. I just through talking to someone who said
all truth is relative, it’s how you see it and all the rest. And here you are saying all truth is
relative; the statement “all truth is relative” is an absolute statement, it
means that you’ve surveyed the whole domain of knowledge and you’ve concluded
that every piece of truth is definitely relative; that’s an absolute statement,
but it’s what we call a statement that contradicts itself. But it’s ridiculous, all truth is relative,
what a stupid statement. He probably
learned it from some high school teacher somewhere. This is “a sign and a wonder, and upon thy
seed forever.” So here we have the signs
that God is going to give to the nation of His own character and His own
essence.
Verses 47-48, “Because thou served not the LORD thy God with joyfulness,
and with gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things,” watch verse 48,
“Therefore, shalt thou serve thine enemies whom the LORD shall send against
thee, [in hunger, and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in lack of all things;
and he shall put a yoke of iron upon thy neck, until he have destroyed
thee.]” Do you see the either/or. God said look, you’re going to serve Me or
you’re going to serve your enemies but you can never serve yourself. This is the law that God provides for His
children, He provided it for His nation and He said you get out of line and
you’re going to be the servant of the people that you hate. And as Christians we do not have three
options, we have only two: either the Holy Spirit controls our life or the sin
nature controls our life.
Turn to Gal. 5:16 for the same principle. “For this I say, then, Walk in the spirit,
and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. [17] For the flesh lusts
against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary
the one to the other, so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.” Same principle, it goes back to the two
circles. When I receive Christ God the
Holy Spirit puts me in union with Him, top circle. Bottom circle I can be out or in at any time;
outside I am a carnal Christian, inside Holy Spirit filling. That doesn’t mean you have a giddy feeling,
the Holy Spirit filling simply means He does a complete work in your soul and it means all the faculties of
your soul are go, they’re all operating truly as they should. It goes back to the essence of the soul which
we’ve gone through but I want to show you why it’s an either/or situation. Here is the soul and the human spirit of the
believer; these are functions of the soul: volition, personal affections,
mentality, bodily affections. When we are controlled by the flesh certain
things happen and all we produce out of this is human good and personal sin.
That’s the only thing we produce here.
The filling of the Holy Spirit can’t move from the human spirit over to
the human soul because He’s blocked by your carnality. So in our personal affections we become
unstable; mentality begins to worry, begins to be confused, begins to be
occupied with human viewpoint. We have bodily affections, uncontrolled, they
are dominate and you become a slave to these things.
Now that’s exactly analogous to the nation Israel. The nation Israel would either serve the Lord
or they would serve those who were her enemies.
And as a believer and a child of God the flesh is your enemy, and you
are so designed that at any given moment in history, in your personal
experience, you are serving one or you are serving the other but you are never
free. Don’t ever kid yourself that you
are absolutely free. You’re not free;
you’re free in only two ways, to move to allow the sin nature to take over your
life and to play out the sin principle or you’re free to let the Holy Spirit do
it. So you can be victims of this and
you know when you’re out of fellowship the bodily affections, you can’t meet
temptation. This is what happened to
David. David was out of fellowship and off came the problem with
Bathsheba. He’d seen women without clothes
before, that wasn’t the problem with David. The reason why he fell for
Bathsheba was because at that point he was out of fellowship. He was out of fellowship and susceptible to
temptation. A Christian, and I can make
this statement dogmatically and absolutely, no Christian filled with the Holy
Spirit can ever be forced by a temptation, it’s impossible, absolutely
impossible. When Christians yield to
temptation it’s because they have gone on negative volition toward God and have
chosen to allow the flesh to take over.
This means freedom from your environment, it means that you never have
to be a victim of your environment, never.
And this means that the principle of Christian, we’re going to ship
Christians of to hothouse environments where they’ll be safe… where are you
going to get an environment where they’re going to be safe from the flesh? Tell me, you’re not going to find one because
the flesh is always with them. So no
matter where you put your Christian, no matter what the environment, look what
they’ve got inside. What do you do with this?
You can’t put a Christian in a hothouse environment and say this is a
good place and he’s safe there.
Nonsense, he’s not safe there; these kids still have the nature on the
inside. The reason you say he’s safe is because in your own mind you’d rather
have a moral unbeliever or a moral carnal Christian than you would a spiritual
Christian, because some of you think it’s worse for a Christian to fall out of
fellowship once in a while versus being in a nice atmosphere where you can be
out of fellowship all the time as long as you’re moral and ethical. I don’t know where you get that but you don’t
get that from the Bible. The flesh is
always there!
Now what happens? If you’re
filled with the Holy Spirit the Holy Spirit is free to move over from the human
spirit and begin to work with the various functions in this way. That’s the only choice. This may sound narrow minded but that’s the
way the Scripture says it, that’s what this verse says, verse 17, the flesh is
against the Spirit, the Spirit is against the flesh and they are contrary the
one to the other, so that you cannot do the things that you would. It’s one or the other. The problem with us as believer is to simply
use our volition. Do we want God’s will,
that’s the question? That was the question to the nation Israel; very
simple. As you read all of these
gruesome, horrible examples of what God was going to do to the nation out of
fellowship, don’t think it’s God’s fault. Why is He going to do it? Because they were out of fellowship, and they
could have stopped this thing instantaneously in history. In fact, do you realize that at one given
future moment in history all of the cursings and the disciplines upon Israel
are going to stop instantaneously? Do
you know what that moment is? It’s
prophesied in Zechariah, they’re going to look upon Him whom they’ve pierced,
and they’re suddenly going to realize that this is Jesus Christ and some fall
day in October, fulfilling the Feast of the Day of Atonement, suddenly Israel
is going to repent and change their mind, and that time Jesus Christ Himself is
going to come and they’re going to change these things.
It’s the same thing in your Christian life, one or the other it’s up to
you; you’re free either to serve God or the flesh, but not both, or not some
little neutral thing in here; it’s either one or the other, God or the
flesh. Israel was free to serve Jehovah
or her enemies, one or the other, and that’s the only option that we have as
believers.
This concludes Deut. 28, it concludes the exposition of the blessings
and the cursings and next week we’ll be on the final section of Deuteronomy,
chapter 29.