Lesson 67

Challenge to Volition – 29:1-9

We covered one of the basics of the plan of God, both in phase one, phase two and phase three. We know the plan of God consists of these three parts, phase one, the time you receive Christ; phase two, from the time you receive Christ until the time you die, and phase three, eternity. Basic to every phase of the plan of God is the principle of faith. The plan of God is a gracious plan; it works on the basis of grace, it flows on the basis of grace and the only way you can contact grace is by faith. Therefore in Deut. 29:1-9 we have the topic emphasized by Moses, the basis of faith. We have come a long way in Deuteronomy, beginning in chapter 27 and running through chapter 30 is the covenant ratification procedures; the entire book has been a revamp of the Law, it has been going through the various phases of the Law, and has dealt with the amendments to the first covenant given at Horeb.

Now Moses comes down to the time of decision, but before he gets to the time of decision he spells out the issue to the nation. And in chapter 27 he gives you the ceremony; he outlines the ceremony which we will later see in the book of Joshua. Then in chapter 28 he deals with the blessings and the cursings, adequately warning the people that as a national entity they are at one moment going to be in the will of God or they are going to be out of the will of God; blessing for obedience, cursing for disobedience. And we have prophesied in this 28^th chapter some of the most gruesome forms of discipline in history. We have gone down to the fifth cycle of discipline, the nation Israel was to be disciplined in five steps. The first step, God would apply the heat and if that didn’t work then He would turn it up a little more, they’d get the second degree. And if that didn’t work God would heat it up a little bit more and they’d get the third degree, the fourth degree and the fifth degree. At the fifth degree of discipline the nation Israel would go into captivity. If the fifth degree was reached you would have such things occur in the city of Jerusalem such as young women eating their babies. We saw that as we have seen it repeated three times in history; it was in 721 BC, 586 BC and 70 AD. And all three times when the nation Israel went down this same incident of women literally so hungry that they would chop up their own children and eat them. This was what happened during these sieges; these were the gruesome things as God began to turn the screws on the Israelite nation to bring pressure to bear to bring them around to Himself.

Moses had clearly stated the blessings and the cursings and now in Deut. 29-30 he winds up with a challenge to volition in which he is going to, in these two chapters, give an invitation to the nation to enter into a covenant. As we go through these two chapters just remember, this is the true form of invitation in the Bible; invitation, and he doesn’t ask the nation to come down the aisle; he asks the nation to consider certain things and put their name on the dotted line, and that’s not signing the card either, this is a by faith decision that is made in the recesses of the human heart. And this challenge is a call for this type of decision.

This section, from chapter 29-30 is made up of many parts; tonight we are going to take the first of these parts which is a review of the preamble and historical prologue. Why do I use those terms? The preamble and the historical prologue. The reason is that these two words tell you that the Old Testament Law was built on the legal format of the day and in that day, when suzerainty vassal treaties were made, a treaty would be made between a great king and these lesser vassal kings. And these lower vassal kings would be locked into a covenant structure with a suzerain. All of these treaties had a certain format. For example, you make a will out in the state of Texas; you have to include certain things or that will is not valid. If you’re writing a contract on a house you have to include certain things and if you don’t you’re asking for trouble. So when you write up a legal doctrine it must include certain things. Generally there’s a precedent of sequence in that legal doctrine and so it was in the second millennium.

The first thing was always a preamble, second was a historical prologue; the preamble identifies the great king, the historical prologue reviewed the previous manifestations of that king. The first thing that we find, the major portion, was the stipulations of a suzerainty vassal treaty, what the great king wanted the vassal kings to do, etc. Also part of this was a listing of the witnesses to the treaty; there would be witnesses standing by and we’re going to see when we get into Deut. 32 that the angelic council, so described therein, would be witnesses to this treaty. Then we have the cursing and the blessings; in the Bible notice they are reversed, blessings and cursings because the Bible puts grace before judgment. In the secular treaties of the day it was judgment before grace. And then they had various miscellaneous procedures for ratification, etc. But notice, every treaty in the second millennium had this form; every treaty in particular had a historical prologue.

Treaties in the first millennium, just so you know what I’m talking about, here’s the cross of Christ, here’s 0 BC, working backwards in time, here’s 1000 BC, here’s 2000 BC, we call this the second millennium and this the first millennium. The Bible says Moses wrote the Law right there; the liberals say no, it was written here, and yet when we analyze the structure of this book of Deuteronomy we find that it is written in the format of the second, not the first millennium. Second millennium treaties had an historical prologue section; the first millennium treaties were minus an historical prologue section. Deuteronomy has a historical prologue, therefore it was not written in the first millennium, it was written in the second millennium; the liberals are wrong as always and the fundamentalists are right.

So now we come to the structure of this thing and we want to look at the historical prologue because here is where we are going to find analysis of the Word of God through the devices that archeology gives us, points and focuses evidence upon certain things in the text which we might have ignored. And lo and behold, when we come to this historical prologue, as we do in verses 1-9, we have emphasized the most remarkable principle. And the principle is this, that before the stipulations in these treaties you would preface it by a historical prologue. They would always go into this. What did a historical prologue do in a treaty? The historical prologue revealed the character of the great suzerain. It would be a tabulation of certain historical manifestations of the suzerain.

For example, if we had the King of the Hittites and he would make a treaty with the King of Tyre, he said now listen King of Tyre, I want you to do certain things, but before I tell you what I want you to do, I want you to remember certain things about myself. I want you to remember that I did this for you, I did that for you, I helped your father out of a jam when the treasury at Tyre was defeated I sent a big loan of gold bouillon down to help you out, when you were being attacked by the Philistines I sent a detachment of soldiers to help you out and I did all these things, so therefore I love you and you are to respond to my love. And love in the Old Testament is defined politically; it is not an individual concept, love in the Old Testament was used in political documents and it meant that this man loved this nation in the sense that he was concerned over it. He might or he might not have liked them personally, but he loved. Love in the Old Testament has this greater connotation. This is why the Lord Jesus Christ said “if you love Me, you will keep My commandments.” This is what this suzerain said, he said listen, I love you and now if you love me then you’re going to do certain things.

So here we have the suzerain and here we have the vassal king, and the suzerain said I love you because of these things; I am trustworthy, now what I want you to do is love me. It is a commanded love. And the content of the love is defined in the stipulation section. Now the stipulation section of Deuteronomy is chapters 5-26, all those details that we went into, were to define the content of love I history. This is not a formless sentimentalism; this is an actual thing which can be measured. Love can be measured in Scripture, and therefore the stipulations define the content of this.

The historical prologue is necessary because it is a revelation of the character of God. In verse 1 we have the phrase “These are the words of the covenant, which the LORD commanded Moses to make with the children of Israel in the land of Moab,” now please notice the word “words.” These are literal words and sentences that God spoke to these people. This is something that you have to go back to. This evening when we go through verses 1-9 we are going to go back to the elementary sections of the Christian faith and it’s always good to review these things.

The first thing we want to review is God’s character. We know that God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love, God is omnipotent, God is omniscient, God is omnipresent and God is immutable. God is all these things; this is the character of God. You ought to know the character of God; you can’t go one inch in the Christian life without knowing the character of God because this is the objective of your faith. So this is the character of God as far as His essence is concerned, and this is shared by creatures in part. All the attributes on the left side of this box are shared by personal creatures in creation; all the ones on the right are not shared. Sovereignty, righteousness, justice, love and omniscience are shared in a degree by other people. What do I mean by other people? I mean angels and men; animals do not and plants do not, and machines do not. But angels and men share personality with God. In place of sovereignty man has volition. In place of righteousness and justice man has conscience. In place of love man has personal affections. In the place of omniscience he has mentality.

So God has made us in His image, which means we can communicate, there can be a personal relationship back and forth here between these attributes and this is what the Bible means by a personal relationship. This is what sets you off from the animals; animals do not have this. Of course the evolutionist has a hard time explaining why there’s a discontinuity between man and animals. So here we have then the difference between animals and man and this is why in verse 1 it says “These are the words” of God. God is communicating words to us as people; God can communicate to us as though I sat in front of you and spoke to you. That’s the kind of God we have and that’s the kind of God that is the basis of our salvation.

It’s interesting when we come to this verse, “These are the words of the covenant,” the covenant can mean contract. It’s very interesting that Professor Albright wrote in a recent book, Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan, page 108, that “contracts and treaties were common everywhere in the Ancient Near East,” that was a common thing, “but” and here’s the big but, “but only the Hebrews, so far as we know, made covenants or contracts with their God.” Now that’s an amazing statement; that’s an absolutely amazing thing. What this means is that every other religion of history has never dared to make the claim that their god has verbally revealed himself to man. No other religion makes that claim, that their god has entered into a legal word by word contract. Other religions will give you prophets; other religions will give you teachers, but none of them come out with the audacity to say that God has made a contract with me and furthermore God has signed His name on the line and I’ve signed my name on the line. This is a claim that can only be made by the nation Israel in the Old Testament and part of the New Testament. This is a contract; it is a unique thing in history.

This is the second contract made; it says that “These are the words of the contract, which God had commanded Moses to make with the children of Israel in the land of Moab, beside the covenant which He made with them in Horeb.” There are two covenants involved here; the first one was made in Horeb, the Ten Commandments. That one was broken immediately and we might say there was a second one which was a duplication of this one. Remember while Moses was up on the mountain they were having a party down below and while Moses was up there getting the words of God inscribed on this thing, they were down having a blast and making up some golden… all the ladies donated their jewelry and Aaron, being the fool he was, he was a weak man and he allowed his congregation to lead him. And he was impressed by his congregation; his congregation said Aaron, we’re taking over. And Aaron said oh, you are, fine, fine, I’ll go right along with you. Moses had left him in charge and Aaron refused to exert his authority as leader over the congregation and so therefore he was rushed into this operation and Moses comes back and says hey Aaron, what’s the deal with this golden calf. And Aaron said well you know Moses, I don’t know what happened but you know we put that gold in the fire and it just popped out. And that was Aaron’s very sad excuse for this golden bull, actually, it just happened Moses, I can’t explain it, you know, you just drop gold in the fire and these things happen sometimes. So that was his numbskull excuse for covering up his lack of authority.

So when we get down to this thing, the second covenant, Moses went back up and he got permission from God to review. Actually God had the basis right then to judge that nation but God is a God of grace and so the second form really corresponds to the first, so technically this is the third covenant made, though in one sense it’s the second, and this was made at the end of Moses life when you transition from Moses to Joshua. A new covenant has to be made to show continuity of leadership. See there was no king to carry continuity, no set of judges. And at this point in history the continuity had to be carried by a second document.

To see this turn to Deut. 1:5, remember all this book of Deuteronomy is a sermon. You think I teach long, Moses preached this entire sermon, apparently at one sitting. And he reviewed all the details and everybody stood at attention while he was going through this thing. I’ve never tried that, it’d be kind of interesting to have everybody stand up and see how long you could stand up, just go on preaching, have an endurance contest, see how long you could survive. But Moses evidently preached and these people didn’t sit down unless they sat in the sand, Moses was preaching in an open field and he preached to the leaders, probably, not literally to the whole group but they all got the word eventually.

And in 1:5 it tells us how he started. He started “On this side of the Jordan, in the land of Moab, began Moses to declare this law, saying,” and the word “began” means to pick up the job and the word “declare” means to exegete. It means that what he did here so far, up to the point we’re at, he didn’t even mention this third covenant, he was talking about the first one and he said now look, this is what God has done for you and let me explain it to you, which is interesting. Moses sat with these people forty years and he had the greatest generation of idiots, probably since the disciples that Christ had. We’re going to see a reason, I think I’ve discovered why it is that when God moves in history he always moves through a group of nitwits to start the ball rolling. There’s a good reason for this and this passage, Deut. 29 is going to show you why. But God picked out the most ignorant generation He could and saddled Moses with these people for 40 years. And Moses taught the Word and taught the Word and taught the Word and I want you to notice as he dies, what is he doing in verse 5? He’s teaching it once again… teaching it once again. And this is his last time, after he goes through this sermon he drops dead. You say well I would too if I taught this long. Moses goes through this thing and this is his last point.

Now in 5:2 you see again that he’s talking about the first and second versions but not the third. In 5:2-3, “The LORD our God made a covenant with us in Horeb. [3] The LORD made not this covenant with our fathers, but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day.” In other words he’s still talking about that first covenant. He’s explaining it, reviewing it and going over and over and over. Now you come to our passage in Deut. 29 and for the first time in verse 1 he announces that there is going to be a New Covenant made, which will be beside the old one. So here we begin the formalizing of this treaty and here we get down to the nitty-gritty of the national decision, the challenge to the nation’s volition at this point. Moses says we are now going to set up a second covenant, beside the covenant which God made with you at Horeb.

Verse 2, “And Moses called unto all Israel, and said unto them, Ye have seen all that the LORD did before your eyes in the land of Egypt unto Pharaoh, and unto all His servants, and unto all his land.” I want you to get this as we move through these 9 verses because Moses at the end is going to make an invitation for them to believe, but as he moves toward his invitation, what is he doing? He’s appealing to evidence. And in verse 2 he begins, he says I want you to remember that all the Lord did before your eyes in the land of Pharaoh, personal relationships are in back of the treaty; this is not just a treaty, it’s like the suzerainty vassal. That was more than a treaty, it was a binding agreement between two people and personal relationship depends upon the trustworthiness of the personal character that stands behind that treaty.

So just as the secular king had to assure the vassal king that he was trustworthy… how do you assure someone you’re trustworthy? There’s only two things you can basically do, by words and action. So what Moses is doing here as he preaches, he’s saying look, Yahweh, or Jehovah is up here and you are down here. Here’s Israel and he says Israel, you’re going to have to trust in Jehovah, your nation, and now you’re going to have to go down and make a national decision to trust in Him. Now before you can trust in Him you have to be convinced that He’s trustable, that He’s trustworthy in His character and in His essence. And so to show that He’s trustworthy in His character and in His essence, He is going to review the historical facts that underlie the faith, and this is why he refers to the plagues in Egypt. These were things that took place before their eyes.

Now I recently heard a marvelous illustration showing how when we accept Christ it’s a parallel to this. Here you have Jehovah in Israel and it’s the same thing when you have Christ, and you have either an unbeliever accepting at the point of gospel hearing, or you have Christ and you have the believer and it’s a problem in your life and you have to rely on one of the promises of God and you have to trust in Him. Before you can trust in Christ, you have to first be convinced that He’s trustable. This is why some people say they can’t believe; it’s because they haven’t considered the evidence of the trustworthiness of the person of Jesus Christ. Just as in this case Moses wanted to insure the fact that the nation Israel first had a revelation of the trustworthiness, that the character was trustworthy and they could safely rest in Him. So He is going to review evidences and proofs for this.

As I say, I recently came across this parable, one of Dr. Frances Schaeffer’s people that uses this and I think it’s tremendous because it brings this out in a way which I’ve never quite heard as far as personal trust in somebody. It’s called The Parable of the Resistance Fighter, and this is a situation, supposedly taking place, say in France during the time of 1941-44, and put yourself in the place of a French resistance fighter. Here you are, we’ll let this man be F, the Fighter, and you have your little rifle and you’re sitting there and all of a sudden a stranger comes along to meet you; we’ll label him S, he’s a stranger. You being to strike u a conversation with each other and it turns out that the stranger is the C.O. of the whole resistance movement; he’s the Commanding Officer. Now on the basis of your personal relationship, this goes on for a day or two, you eat together, you sleep together, you have conversation together, until you as a resistance fighter are confident of this man’s character; you ask him questions, you have the right to ask him questions, there’s a personal dialogue that goes on, there’s communication between you and you ask him certain things, etc. And to a certain degree he’s open to you. And you begin to read his character on the basis of your personal conversation with him.

Now the next step is that he disappears. He goes off into the night and you never see him again, but you know that he’s the Commanding Officer of the resistance and you know that the time, this man, your fellow resistance fighter, say that in Paris some place you see the Nazi’s being bombed out, maybe somebody puts explosives on one of their tanks or something on the streets of Paris and blows it up and some of your reporters come in and say we saw your stranger friend involved in this bombing group. And you say oh, he’s doing his job. Then one night some of your friends come to you and they are very disturbed because some of your own men have been captured by the Nazi’s and who was wearing the Nazi uniform and arresting them? Your stranger friend. Now you don’t know what to think. The stranger has appeared on both sides; one time he’s appearing as a Nazi, and the next time he appears as a French resistance fighter, and you get reports again and again throughout the year, first he appears doing one role, then he appears doing the next role but you trust in him and you keep on trusting and say well, he must have a purpose for this. There must be a bigger purpose behind this so I’m going to trust that he knows what he’s doing, I’m going to trust that there’s a plan here, even though I can’t communicate with him right now about it. So this goes on and finally the other people in the ranks say why do you keep trusting this man; one day he’s on our side and the next day he’s on their side; one day he’s seen bombing the Nazi’s, and the next day he’s seen helping them out. How can you continue to trust in him?

There are two answers to this parable; one is the wrong answer and one is the right one. If you were asked as a resistance fighter, why did you keep on trusting him, if you were a liberal, and I want to draw this because I’m trying to get into the difference between liberal faith or the faith most people think of when they think of the word faith, and true Biblical faith. So we’ll put liberal up here and Christian down here, and we’ll put faith under each one. Liberal faith, what they mean by the word faith and what we mean by the word faith. Everybody should know this and I know some of you don’t know it because I’ve noticed the way you use the word faith. The liberal would say that you go on trusting, not because you’ve had a personal dialogue with this person but because you had an experience, kind of an undefined experience with this person, you didn’t really read his character but he just impressed you, you felt impressed when you were around him. So your trust and your faith is proportional to your subjective experience. And when that experience wears low, then your faith fades out.

The Christian, however, says no, the reason why I continue to trust in this man who apparently claims to be the C.O. of the resistance movement and though he’s seen doing things for the Nazi’s at times is because in my personal communication that I had with him, when I talked with him, I became aware that he had a plan and I became aware that it was necessary at certain times in history for him to assume different roles to be perfectly persuasive to the other side and so therefore on the basis of the dialogue and the character reading I’ve coupled the words of him, the words that he spoke with his actions and I find that they are consistent. I find that he gave me enough basis to believe and to trust in him, because as we talk together his character was revealed now I can trust in him.

Now that’s the difference between a liberal and a Christian when we use the word faith. And that’s the difference here, what Moses says in verse 2, that “You have seen all that the LORD did,” this is Biblical faith, this means that you trust and are called to trust in Jehovah God because of what He’s done for you. There are two things that Moses says you must know, you must know the words of God and you must know the actions of God. This is why in this book of Deuteronomy we have two tests for truth, and you can’t really believe, truly, until you pass and filter things through these two tests. Here are the two truth tests given in the Bible. You should know these because these would apply to a cult, these would apply to anything that comes to you. There are always two tests by which you can ascertain if something is true or something is false. These two tests apply not only in the Bible; these two tests apply even in the area of science. They apply in history; they apply in every pursuit that man has ever engaged in. Every man has to use these two tests to find out whether something is true or false. No man who has ever made a statement that this is the truth who was honest with himself has ever avoided making these two tests.

The first test is given in Deut. 13; we call this the logical test. I want you to see that when you trust, because we are going to get into the practical thing of the Christian life and I think if you’ll examine your own heart and you find it tough to believe oftentimes in the middle of adversity, you find it tough to go on living the Christian life, ask yourself, is it really because you aren’t convinced of the trustworthiness of Jesus Christ. And if you are not convinced that He is trustworthy it’s obvious that you have not made these two tests.

The first test in Deut. 13:1-4, “If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and gives thee a sign or a wonder, [2] And the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spoke unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them. [3] Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams; for the LORD your God tests you, to know whether ye love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul. [4] Ye shall walk after the LORD your God, and fear Him, and keep His commandments, and obey His voice, and ye shall serve Him, and cleave unto Him.” What’s the point? Here is what we call the rational test or the logical test. Does it fit with the Word of God? Here you have a man who makes miracles, he’s impressive, he does all of these things and half the Christians say it’s a sign of God’s working, he speaks in tongues or he does miracles or he heals people, amazing, let’s all clap, that’s proof. It is not proof! The proof here is is he consistent with Bible doctrine? Here you could have a miracle validate and it would be rejected by the people because verbally he does not agree with the Word.

So this is the logical test and it means words; this refers to the words of a person between one person and another do the words check; are the words consistent, does this person tell me one thing one moment and another thing the next. This is the logical test. And as God reveals Himself in one age and another is He telling something about Himself over here and then is He telling us something different over here? Are God’s words consistent, that’s the first test, and no cult can every pass this test, for every cult and every false religion has a conflict between their teaching and the teachings of the Word of God, therefore you can easily show a cult is non-scriptural.

The second test is given in Deut. 18 and this is what we call the empirical test, this is the test of experience; the first is a logical test, do the things fit together logically and the second thing is does all of this fit with all of my experience. So in verses 20-22 we come to the second great test of truth. “But the prophet, who shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or who shall speak in the name of other gods, even that prophet shall die. [21] And if you say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the LORD hath not spoken?” and here’s the sign, watch it or you’ll be confused. In verse 22 it says, “When a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD has not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously; thou shalt not be afraid of him.” In other words, this is a negative test, it’s not positive.

Remember a positive test doesn’t prove. If a man says I predict so and so and it comes to pass, that is not proof. What is a proof is if he predicts so and so and it doesn’t come to pass; that is a definite proof. It’s a negative form, and that’s the way the empirical test works. This is why we can invalidate people like Jeanne Dixon; Ms. Dixon is often right; immediately by this test she’s disqualified, for a prophet of God is not often right, a prophet of God must be 100.000000% correct, not 99.999999% it has to be 100.00%, that’s how correct a prophet must be. And that is the empirical test, the test of experience, does it fit together, does it match in history? Those two tests are the only tests that you can apply to anything. And you must apply them, you can apply them in your personal relationships, you can apply them in science, you can apply them in history, various modifications of them but basically you have to use these same two tests. So Moses is going to use these two tests.

So when we come over the Deut. 29 what is he going to do? He’s going to take both of these tests and apply them because he wants to convince his hearers that God is trustworthy. The object in which they’re going to have to trust is trustworthy. It’s like marriage, in a personal relationship you have two people. Before they commit themselves one to another they must be assured of the trustworthiness of the other person. Do you see that; they have to be before they commit. Now watch two things about this. The first thing is they never have total knowledge. They can’t have total knowledge, they have to go on what knowledge they have. If a man were to say I am not going to marry this woman until I have total knowledge about her, he’s already made a decision to be a bachelor. You have to at some point… the volition has to swing into action on what basis it has. This is a crucial test because next time somebody comes up to you with this hyper supercilious pseudo intellectual garb and say well I don’t accept anything until it’s proven to me, you can go back unto that person and show them, probably in that same day, they have made agreements in people on the basis of trusting the character in a personal thing. In other words, do they have a family, they must come from a family, what’s their relationship within their family. Certainly they trust people within their family; why do they trust people within their family? Because they’ve had to and they’ve had to on what basis they have. Christianity is a personal relationship and you have to trust in the person of Jesus Christ or in the Old Testament you had to trust in the person of Jehovah, as He had revealed Himself.

When we come down to the invitation what Moses is going to do in these verses is he is going to give us words and actions of God and he’s going to let those words and those actions reveal God’s trustworthiness, then he will say believe, but he doesn’t say believe first; he waits until after presenting the evidence that God is indeed worthy of your trust, then he says will you believe. That is Biblical faith. This is why we insist on a literal Bible. This is why I have said if evolution were proved true tomorrow I would jump my faith, and I still say it. So if you want to get irritated, go ahead. And if you can’t say that then you don’t believe in the Biblical sense of the word because the Bible gives us certain facts and I have to have these as a basis for my trust in God and if they’re not reliable then I have no basis for my trust in God. It’s either the Bible or nothing; you can’t be assured of evidences out in [can’t understand word]. You’ve got to take His Word and His revelation of Himself and if this revelation says that I did certain things in history and it turns out He didn’t do certain things in history, then somebody is all fouled up and you’ve destroyed the revelation of the character of God.

This is why, for example, in one major denomination, this man has a big fight with somebody in this denomination and he said if Jonah was not three literal days and three literal nights in the whale then Jesus Christ is a liar. And he says you have no right to be a Christian if you don’t accept the miracle of Jonah. And a man in that convention got very mad and walked out and said I can’t believe this ridiculousness, I start with Jesus Christ; and it sounds very pious, until I would come along ask the man, and what right do you have to trust in Jesus if He was wrong with Jonah? You can trust in Jesus Christ but is it the Jesus Christ of your imagination or is it Jesus Christ as He has revealed Himself in the Word of God. Are you talking about the God that you’re trying to invent in your own mind or are you talking about the God as He is revealed in the Bible. That’s what the issue is. And this is why it all hangs together and you can’t compromise one word in the text or the whole thing falls apart. You’ve got to see this and this is why the fundamentalists fight for these things; it’s not that we’re trying to be nitpickers, it’s simply the fact that logic forces us into this position, that if Jesus was wrong on one thing only, then He does not pass the test of Deut. 18; if He was wrong only one time that’s enough to disqualify Him.

You can chalk it up to compromise with the tradition of His day but if Jesus was wrong in one place, there’s no guarantee He wasn’t wrong in another. It’s fashionable among evangelicals and you’ll read this in your Christian magazines, oh well, Jesus compromised with the day on the idea of creation; He didn’t share the worldview that we share today. All right then, let’s look at that closely. If Jesus did not share the worldview that we have today then how are we to presume that He understood what He was talking about when He described personal salvation? Maybe, as geology supposedly has undermined the first parts of Genesis, perhaps psychology tomorrow will finally explain the conversion experience and then we’ll say well, you see Jesus compromised with the psychological understanding of His time and described this conversion thing as miraculous when it really wasn’t, it’s just that in that day they hadn’t evolved in their understanding of psychological principles. Do you see what a devastating thing? You’ve let the Trojan horse in and now the whole city is conquered. And that’s what happens; when you let one word go in the Scripture you are sentencing the whole Bible to the trash can. You can’t compromise an inch in any of this, it all hangs together.

So this is why Moses emphasizes again and again what God has done. I want to take you on a tour of Deuteronomy starting in 1:30 and I want you to see that again and again when he asks the people to move in faith it was on the basis of something that God had already done in the past history. He never asked the people to believe into nothing. In 1:30 he’s addressing the armies of Israel and he’s saying you’re going to have to go out and you’re going to have to fight and the fight is going to be a fight of faith, and in order to fight in faith you’re going to have to trust the Lord and the basis and the evidence I give you is in verse 30, “The LORD your God, who goes before you constantly,” it’s a Hebrew participle, “He shall fight for you,” that’s the promise, but the basis of the promise is the next clause, “according to all that He did for you in Egypt before your eyes.” God did something in Egypt in history and because He did that one time we can trust Him to do it again. And if what He did in Egypt was wrong, and if the people who wrote Exodus were fouled up and were just giving a nice line, then you see what it does to the whole promise? The promise doesn’t stand there alone, apart from the historical works of God. If God did not literally do what Exodus says He did, then those Jews in that day could have said Moses, you’re talking through your hat, you know that this is just a tradition that you invented to teach sweet things about God, but He literally didn’t do that down in Egypt, that’s a nice story that you manufactured to make us feel nice. And now we’re in the middle of a jam and you expect us to trust in the promise and the promise has no base. NO! Moses always gave a base for his promises. God will fight for you as He did in Egypt.

Citing another example in history, Deut. 3:21, it’s the same kind of thing. He’s giving confidence to Joshua and Joshua faces a jam in his day and He gives a promise to Joshua, He says Joshua, listen carefully, I’m not asking you to trust in nothing. “And I commanded Joshua at that time, saying, Thine eyes have seen all that the LORD your God has done unto these two kings; so shall the LORD do unto all the kingdoms where you’re going to pass.” Here you have a situation where God has destroyed Og and Bashan, that’s chapter 2, it’s the whole point of chapter 3, it’s a preview of coming attractions and Joshua is physically there and physically led the armies in and he saw God work. God literally worked here, we had a military victory, and now I [not sure of word] had another military victory and so Moses turns around after the battles are over and he says Joshua, let this be a lesson to you, you have a base for your promises, God did it twice, God is going to do it again. So the promise is not hanging in midair, it’s hanging with historical evidence behind it.

The same thing in Deut. 4:3, a promise given for victory in the life of the nation, “Your eyes have seen what the LORD did because of Baal-peor; for all the men who followed Baal-peor, the LORD thy God has destroyed them from among you.” These are what I call the negative promises of the Word of God; these are the promises that God will certainly discipline the disobedient believer. A lot of believers fail to remember there are two categories to the promises of God in the Bible. One category promises to bless you, the other category promises to discipline you. Both are equally true and both are equally sure. So again the promise of discipline in verse 3, Moses is saying I want you to remember this, you remember what happened literally in history, and therefore you can be assured it’s going to happen again.

Deut. 4:34, he’s trying to encourage them and create in them a sense of trust and so he says, “Or hath God ventured to go and take him a nation from the midst of another nation, by temptations, by signs, and by wonders, and by war, and by a mighty hand, and by an outstretched arm, and by great terrors, according to all that the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes?” Before your eyes you saw this, eyewitnesses; Exodus again [blank spot] … remember what God did in history, so therefore you can have your promise because your promise is grounded on the trustworthiness of God. God is trustworthy because He did this for us in the past, He’s trustworthy enough so we know He will do it for us in the future.

Deut. 5:26 and he does the same thing here, he says here, speaking of the Ten Commandments, “For who is there of all flesh, who has heard the voice of the living God speaking out of the midst of the fir, as we have, and lived?” And he cites back to the historical miracle, and I say to you again, if the liberals are right, throw your Bible in the basket, right tonight, because if God didn’t literally speak words to so those people could sit there with their tape recorders if they had had them, to record those words in Hebrew, if God did not speak that way the whole cause is hopeless. Why? Because this is the ground of our promises; I can’t be sure that God is trustworthy if the historical manifestations of his trustworthiness are false. I have no evidence in which to place my trust in God if this record is wrong.

Deut. 7:18, we find the same thing there. He’s again saying that when you’re discouraged and the pressure has come upon you, in verse 17, “If you shalt say in your heart, These nations are more than I; how can I [possibly] dispossess them?” and they’re discouraged, they face adversity, they face pressure. And in verse 18 he says, “Thou shalt not be afraid of them, but shall well remember what the LORD thy God did unto Pharaoh, and unto all Egypt,” a historical miracle of deliverance. God did this in history, and the tendency for a lot of people is this, they make two little compartments in their mind and up here they put the Bible and all the Bible truth and down here they put history and they say God did this, these things happened down here and there are a lot of words up here some place. That’s not the way the Bible says, it says God worked down here in accordance with His promises and if He did it once then He can do it here.

If I can’t be sure that God delivered the way He said He did in the Old Testament I can’t be sure He’s going to deliver me in the Christian life. I can’t even be sure that in eternity I’m going to have fellowship with Him through Jesus Christ. How can I be sure? How can I be sure if the previous things are wrong? You cannot tamper with the Scriptures; you tear away the trustworthiness of God.

Deut. 11:2-3, the same thing, “And know ye this day (for I speak not with your children who have not known, and who have not seen the chastisement of the LORD your God) His greatness, His mighty hand, and His outstretched arm, [3] And His miracles, and His acts, which He did in the midst of Egypt unto Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, and unto all his land.” I’m not talking to people, he said, who aren’t eyewitnesses, I’m talking to you people, you people are eyewitnesses of this thing and you’re going to trust because you’ve had this, you’ve seen this, you’ve seen God is faithful and you’ve seen His trustworthiness.

Now some of you say well that’s nice, that’s the way the Old Testament believed. Come to the New Testament and I’ll show you the principle is the same. Luke 1, Luke is a medical doctor, he’s writing to a man who had questions about the Christian faith, so Luke says in verses 1-4 I’m going to do a little research, and I’m going to present data to this man that will cause him to trust more in Jesus Christ. So in v. 1-4 it says, “Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those thing which are most surely believed among us, [2] Even as they delivered them unto us, who from the beginning were eyewitnesses,” eyewitnesses! Of what? Eyewitnesses of the miracles of God and His revelation. So you see then, that God’s character depends, depends on these eyewitness reports and if they’re not true you have no basis for believing anything. In verse 3 he says, “It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, [4] That you might know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed.” Now is this faith in thin air or not? Theophilus has undertaken a whole research project; that research project yielded two books in your Bible, the result of Luke’s investigation: the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts.

Turn to Acts for another astounding claim that he has made. Acts 1:1, he’s writing volume two of his work to Theophilus and he’s presenting information to them and he says, “The former treatise,” that’s the Gospel, “have I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach, [2] Until the day in which he was taken up, after He, through the Holy Spirit, had given commandments unto the apostles whom He had chosen,” now watch this, “unto the apostles,” now watch what Jesus did to the apostles, “To whom also He showed Himself alive after His passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.” Don’t you see, the New Testament says don’t believe into nothing, don’t hang your faith in midair, hang it on the historical data. All you have to be afraid of is bearing history; if you uncover history the Bible will always validate itself. It’s the liberals who want to destroy history, always, turn it into myths, distort it, misrepresent it, do anything you can. One of Satan’s deceptions is to distort history; distort the historical record so that we don’t know and can’t confirm the Word of God.

Now we come back to Deut. 29, we’re going to find out a solution to why it always seems that God picks the biggest idiots in any generation and shows Himself first to them and then He shows it to the rest of us, not that we’re not idiots. But it is interesting, He has an invert IQ qualification, the lower the spiritual IQ the better off they are qualified to be in on the first story and it happened here. Verse 4, “Yet the LORD,” after all these things which you have seen, “Yet the LORD has not given you an heart to perceive, and eyes to see, and ears to hear, unto this day. [5] And I have led you forty years in the wilderness,” he goes on, all these things, “your clothes have not become old upon you, and thy shoe has not become old upon thy foot.” He evidently overcame the second law of thermodynamics in which the universe is decaying; this law evidently was reversed in a small local way during these forty years. Verse 6, “Ye have not eaten bread, neither have ye drunk wine or strong drink; that ye might know that I am the LORD your God.” Strong drink, by the way is an alcoholic drink and in verse 6 he’s saying you ate manna, you didn’t eat regular food, this is a miraculous occurrence. In verse 7-7, these are other things that happened to you, [“And when ye came unto this place, Sihon, the king of Heshbon, and Og, the king of Bashan, came out against us unto battle, and we smote them. [8] And we took their land, and gave it for an inheritance unto the Reubenites, and to the Gadites, and to the half tribe of Manasseh.”]

But in spite of all this, verse 4 says you haven’t had a heart to perceive. This generation was an ignorant generation, a dumb generation, a generation that demanded evidence after evidence after evidence after evidence. Why? I think the answer is this, that you have a generation which God is going to do a mighty work, He makes sure that He does is, in a generation that is stupid; He makes sure that He gets a group of people that are slow, that are on negative volition to a large respect because if you can present enough evidence for this generation, then you can provide enough evidence to convince any generation. This is why you have a generation of ignoramuses at the time of the Exodus. The first generation, only two out of millions of men made it because they did not trust, they were slow and stubborn, and would not believe the evidence. So God, in order to convince them, piled evidence upon top of evidence upon top of evidence to convince this stupid generation, and having convinced that stupid generation he says now I’ve revealed Myself enough so that anybody in the future can believe.

Turn to the New Testament and you’ll see the same principle happen. Luke 24, the disciples were very slow, very stubborn men to believe. This always has to be kept in mind; you take Bible as literature courses or you listen to some program on television, don’t you ever buy this little saying about oh, these disciples were so naïve they’d believe anything, and after while they just believed these things and presto, out dropped Christianity. These people would be the last people to believe anything, they were slow, stubborn people. This generation couldn’t have made [not sure of word] by their own human works, it was impossible, that’s one sin they couldn’t possibly have done, believe something wrong, they couldn’t even believe period. So if there’s one ludicrous explanation for Christianity, it’s this explanation that oh, these people, they were so superstitious and they would just believe anything anybody would tell them. That is not true. This generation was deliberately selected by God to be the most skeptical generation, probably in the Church Age.

And in Luke 24:25, the Lord Jesus Christ is going down the Emmaus Road, as He walks down the road He’s walking with men who walked with Him for years, whom He taught. Imagine this now, people who think that these people were naïve believers, they weren’t naïve believers, they walked with the Lord Jesus Christ and now He’s walking with them again in resurrection and they don’t believe it. And so in verse 25, “Then He said unto them, O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! [26] Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory? [27] And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, He expounded unto them, in all the Scriptures, the things concerning Himself.” Look at verse 38 and you see the same thing. He’s coming into a room and all of a sudden He appears and they are scared, “And He said unto them, Why are you troubled? And why do [these] thoughts arise in your hearts? [39] Behold My hands and My feet, and see, for a spirit has not flesh and bones, as ye see Me have.” He had to prove Himself to these men. These men saw, they lived with Jesus Christ, and He still had to prove Himself to them.

So this is why, as we come to the final reference, go to John 17:9 when the Lord Jesus Christ prays for you and for me. “I pray for them; I pray not for the world, but for them whom Thou hast given Me; for they are Thine. [10] And all Mine are Thine, and Thine are Mine; and I am glorified in them.” And He speaks here of the fact that these people for whom He prayed includes both you and me, and He prays, verse 20, “Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also who shall believe on Me through their word,” don’t you see how God works in history. You take an ignorant generation, a skeptical generation, prove yourself to that generation, let that generation be the one that goes out and says yes, God did these things, and then the other generations are going to believe. God had to pile evidence on top of evidence upon top of evidence to convince the generation in which He began.

This is what faith means in the Word of God, and this is why it means that when we have these promises as Christians, such as Rom. 8:28. How can you test your faith; how can you increase your faith? Apply the two tests again and say now wait a minute, let’s just say I don’t believe that promise because that’s what we do half the time anyway so let’s just do it formally. You don’t believe the promise, so let’s trot it out and examine it, and let’s test it by the two tests. Let’s see if the Bible is consistent with itself, if that promise checks out with the rest of the Scripture.

So we’ve applied the rational test, the logical test, it fits with the rest of Scripture. Now does it fit with experience in history; go back, the book of Acts, did all things work out together for good to the men in the book of Acts? Yes. Did all things work out together for good to the men in the Gospels? Yes. Did all things work out together for good to the men in the Old Testament? Yes. That’s why they were written, that’s why those books were written. Are they living I the same kind of history you and I are living in? Yes, the universe hasn’t changed. Therefore, is this promise valid or isn’t it? If God did it for them, why can’t He do it for us?

And that’s the way to think through and that’s the way to build up your faith; your faith can’t be built up by saying I’m going to believe, I’m going to believe, I’m going to believe, I’m going to believe and hypnotize yourself into this. Your faith is built up as you critically examine the promises of the Word of God and you investigate the base on which they stand. As you critically examine as a believer the evidence, the physical evidence, that Jesus Christ has ascended into heaven and sat at the Father’s right hand, what evidence do you have? Read the book of Acts, chapter 1, read Acts 7 when Stephen is being stoned and all of a sudden the heavens open up and he sees Jesus, not only at the Father’s right hand but Jesus is standing at the Father’s right hand and the picture you get there in the Greek is that Jesus had been sitting down at the Father’s right, hand, He sees one of His brethren ready to die, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, and the Lord gets up off the throne and stands there waiting to receive Stephen.

That’s what Stephen saw and important to that vision is the fact that nobody ever saw Jesus Christ stand before, all the other visions are of Him sitting down. And all of a sudden you notice Stephen has had a real vision because there’s something different, Jesus is standing up there. It’s real, and all of a sudden we know that Jesus is at the Father’s right hand, at the seat of power and above all principalities. So that is the basis for your faith.

This is why when we see these promises, like 1 Pet. 5:7 you can trust in that promise because you know who is at the Father’s right hand to administer, to make sure it works. So don’t you see, if you have trouble with faith, don’t run away, don’t try to hypnotize yourself, investigate the evidence behind it because I’ll lay 9 to 1 in odds, (that’s gambling from the pulpit) that the problem is that you don’t really trust in the character of God, there’s a doubt in your mind that He stands behind His Word. And if there’s a doubt in your mind that He stands behind His Word it’s time you did some investigation. You can only stick with it in the Christian life if every day you interact with the Word of God, and that doesn’t just mean making the 11:00 show on Sunday Morning; it means interacting and it means sometimes getting out on the firing line and getting your head blown off so that you know that you don’t have the faith so that you go back and revamp. That’s one of the great advantages of getting out there. A soldier in basic training could say well Sarge, I’ve learned to fire this gun, I know everything, I’ve repeated and repeated this procedure, I know all about it. But the Sergeant is wise and he says okay, you go on out on the front line and we’ll see how you do. So the first time it happens, gee whiz, which end of this gun does the bullet come out of, etc. He gets out there and falls apart. What’s the advantage? It’s shown him that he has deluded himself and he goes back and redoes it again.

Don’t be afraid of falling flat on your face because the benefits to you are measurable, it means that you know where your weak spots are so you got back and build up your armor, so then you go out again. And I’ve done it myself, again and again, constantly testing to improve your armor so the next time you go out you don’t make the same mistake; you learn and you build up, but you’re never going to learn until you put it in action because some things of faith have to be tested by application. You can hypnotize yourself into thinking you believe but the test, the acid test is what happens when it comes upon your situation where you have to believe, then what happens.