Lesson 68
Moment of Decision – 29:10-20
In Deut. 29 we have worked with the section of the Law where Moses is
presenting an invitation. This is
important to look at this whole chapter carefully because it teaches you a bona fide invitation. We have a lot of things that pass today for
invitations; and once in a while I get feed back that somebody gets mad because
I don’t give an invitation up here. If
that makes you mad, let me make you a little madder; I never intend to give an
invitation up here, never! And the
reason is for one thing, the Word of God doesn’t authorize it. It doesn’t authorize me to mind your
business. When you believe in the Lord
Jesus Christ that is a matter strictly between you and the Lord and no one
else. You can’t find any passage in
Scripture that will say anything else.
This business about Jesus calling the people out in the Gospels, He
wasn’t calling them to salvation, He was calling people who were already Old
Testament saints to discipleship. And when He walked by and said Peter, come
and I will make you fishers of men, etc. He was addressing Himself to people
who had already been baptized by John the Baptist and had already confessed
their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as Messiah and therefore it was just a
situation of calling them into service.
But that was not an invitation of salvation.
Furthermore, before 1830 there never was an invitation down any
aisle. We have the great revivals of
John Wesley, we have the great revivals of George Whitfield, and these men
never used any of these gimmicks. That’s
all it amounts to is an emotional gimmick because if I get so many people to
come down the aisle then I can report to my board I had so many this morning,
etc. It doesn’t impress me in the
least.
An invitation in Deut. 29, according to the Word of God is given
privately and it is given on the basis of information. In verses 1-9 Moses, before he invites the
nation to make a decision, and by the way, he’s inviting every citizen in the
nation at this point, several million people, you can’t get any aisle that’s big
enough to take several million. So here’s
Moses in chapter 29:1-9 and before he gives an invitation he gives
information. You have no right to make a
decision on the basis of emotion; your decisions must be based on doctrinal
content. So in verses 1-9 Moses reviews
what God has done for this nation
Now what’s he saying? That God
gave the miracles and these miracles were acts in history, they are facts,
pardon the expression, not emotions, facts, and they are historical instances
of God’s Word revealing Himself, the “Word” being the second personality of the
Trinity. So you have the second
personality of the Trinity being revealed in the Old Testament. He reveals Himself through words and through
works. Now let’s look at this a moment
from the standpoint of personality. The
decision to which you are called upon at the point of salvation and the
decision which you are called up on moment by moment to make as a Christian is
to trust in the Lord. The Lord is a
person, so it means you trust in a person.
Let’s transfer this down into the human realm because the Trinity of the
Bible gives you personality. By the way,
every once in a while you’ll meet some idiot that says well, the Bible doesn’t
really teach that Jesus was God, or I don’t believe the Trinity. If you don’t
accept the Trinity you don’t have a personal God; it’s as simple as that, you
can’t have personality, solitary personality.
If God is absolutely one and alone then you have a solitary personality
and that is an abnormality. In God’s
Word “it is not good for a personality to be alone.” You always have to have one personality in
company socially with another one to have a normal balanced personality. Therefore the doctrine of the Trinity is what
gives Christian the whole base for saying personality is important. Dump the Trinity and then I’ll show you that
you can also dump personality; personality doesn’t mean a thing without the
Trinity, not a thing, it’s not worth a dime.
The Trinity gives us the concept of personality; it makes personality a
very important thing. It makes
personality as important as the concept of right and wrong, absolute
righteousness. So in verses 1-9 when we
trust in a person, we have to first, before you can trust in a person you have
to know their character; their character has to be trustworthy. So this is the equation that you have to make
first, trustworthy, a person’s character has to be trustworthy. Now when you meet someone, a member of the
opposite sex or a member of the same sex and you’re having a personal relationship,
how do you know when you can trust the person.
It’s as simple as this, we don’t have to go on a big metaphysical
explanation of faith in the Word of God, the analogy is right there. How do you trust anyone?
How are you going to trust somebody?
You’re going to trust somebody by listening to what they say, the words,
and watching what they do, works. You
can’t trust someone on the basis of one of these being missing; you have to
have both of them. You can’t have
someone who does works but never clues you in to why he does them or what he’s
thinking about. This is not a base for
trustworthiness, there’s no communication of the personality. Personality is communicated by words and by
works. It’s the same thing with the
Lord; the Lord is communicating to us by words and by works. So Moses says here in verses 1-9, he is
saying that God has done these things in history, they are the works of God,
they are not what I thought God did, they are not what we dreamed up and Moses
had a secret meeting in one of the big tents one day and said let’s dream up
something to make these people inspired so they’ll go into the land. That’s not this. Biblical Christianity is grounded on words
and works; God literally speaking in history and God literally working in
history. If God literally does not speak
as the Bible says He does, if this does not represent the ways of God, not the
Word but the words of God, if this book doesn’t represent that or if this book
is not the words of God as we have no works of God in history, then you can
forget it all. You can’t hold on to
Christianity without this.
Either you take the Bible as the authority or you chuck it, and it’s
dishonest to do what a lot of people are doing and saying well, I like certain
things about Christianity, it gives me kind of a nice feeling and it gives me a
feeling I’m loved, it accommodates my human weaknesses in certain areas of
life, it gives me a system of right and wrong, I like all these things so I’m
going to keep on believing in right and wrong and all these great things even
though I really don’t accept the basis of Christianity. That’s absolutely ludicrous; I could come
along to you and say why do you believe that, just because you want to. I could sit down and say let’s blow up the
human race and this might give me comfort, it’d be kind of a thrill to build
the biggest H-bomb you possibly could and watch it go off; you can’t say that’s
wrong, what right do you have to say that’s wrong? You have absolutely no right to say that’s
wrong if the words of God are not here.
That’s what Moses is doing in verses 1-9, he’s giving the past history
of
Remember
Moses had problems because every time one of these three or four million
people wanted to find out what was wrong they trotted over to Moses,
fortunately Moses didn’t have a telephone, this is one of the things that saved
Moses, if Moses had a telephone out there he probably would have gone insane
the first year. But he was able to hack
it for a while because at least it took them time to walk to his tent. So he had a steady line outside his tent of
people that had problems: Moses, what do I do in this situation; Moses, what do
I do in that situation; Moses, what are we going to do here; and Moses,
somebody stepped on my toe yesterday; Moses, somebody put sand in my coffee and
all the rest of it, all the rest of the tremendous theological difficulties
that these people would have. So Moses
has the lines outside his tent and finally his father-in-law says why don’t you
get smart, why don’t get a board together and why don’t you divide up some
responsibilities, so Jethro had some sense.
Now Moses wife, his first wife, Zipporah, didn’t have any sense, but
Moses got along pretty well with his father-in-law evidently because his
father-in-law couldn’t stand Zipporah either.
So you had Jehovah and you had the Law, then you had Moses, and then you
had these people called the sarim, and
these were the military officers and he divided them up into marching units,
all the tribes. You had the twelve
tribes and within each tribe he broke that down and had these sarim, and the sarim were the men who would take charge of minor difficulties, if
somebody had grease in the Coca Cola or something they’d take it to the sarim, that’s their problem, and he’d
solve the problem, and the real bad problems then they’d say okay, let Moses
take care of those. That way it relieved
the pressure on Moses. Well, this worked
fine for a while until later on where Moses go to the point where he needed
some spiritual help, this was just a sheer mechanical operation here, but Moses
needed some spiritual help so then he decided, he didn’t decide the Lord told
him, He said Moses, I want to set up this board and so Yahweh said here’s My
Law, here you are Moses, now I’m going to add to you seventy men. You’re going to have a board of seventy men
and they are going to be endued spiritually as I have endured you and they are
going to share the leadership and the guidance and the direction for this
nation. These people are called in
Scripture the shoterim. Now it’s the word “shoterim” that is given in verse 10, “your elders and your shoterim. These shoterim
are these officers on the board, they’re not the law officers, they are the
highest officers, so “elders” represent the leaders down at the family and
tribe level, and “shoterim”
represents the man up at the board. So
these are the two classes of leaders that come before the Lord in verse 10.
Then in verse 11 he tells “Your little ones, your wives, and thy
sojourner who is in thy camp, from the hewer of thy wood unto the drawer of thy
water,” in other words, everybody will be represented here. Now obviously a million people aren’t
literally going to be in front of Moses’ tent when this thing is going on but
they all enter into the covenant, they are all there represented. So every person in the nation, he says, is
going to enter into this, this is an invitation to the nation, this is a
national invitation. And it will go to
every citizen in the nation.
So here we have now the national invitation, and in verse 12 we have the
purpose. They are standing, in verse 10
means standing at attention, it’s the military expression which means they are
standing in the place, their assigned position.
Verse 12, purpose, “That thou” the nation “should enter into covenant
with the LORD thy God, and into His oath,” now there’s an important reason why
the word “oath” is here in the text because this covenant is what we call a
two-party covenant. It is the only one
in Scripture, and this explains, if you master the concepts of the covenant you
will never have a problem with eternal security. The two-party covenant is the Mosaic
Covenant; the Mosaic Covenant was given on a two-party base, which means that
there were two people that signed on the dotted line. God signed saying that I will bless you
Now that’s very different from a one-party covenant and the one-party
covenant is the Abrahamic Covenant. That
is given in Gen. 12; Gen. 15; Gen. 17; Gen. 22 and the Abrahamic Covenant says
that God is going to bless the nation unconditionally, that God is going to
bless sovereignly, it is His purpose in history to bless this nation. So therefore what is God going to do, He says
three things in the Abrahamic Covenant.
First He says I am going to give you eternal title to real estate and
that real estate is the land of Israel, plus all the way out to the Tigris-Euphrates
Valley. Don’t tell the Arabs, they
haven’t discovered that one yet. Then we
have the second thing of the Abrahamic Covenant and that is that they are going
to survive in history. No matter what
happens in history, no matter how horrible it becomes, the Jewish people will
go on surviving. They will be one the
unique…practically the unique race. No
race so small and going through so much has ever survived as this nation has. When we studied this I read you Nicolas
Guirdneff’s [sp?] comments as he was a Marxist and as he began to study history
and apply the laws of economic determinism to history he found out that it
didn’t work in one case; he applied it to every nation in history but one, and
when he went to apply the laws of economic determinism to history he couldn’t
explain Israel’s behavior and that led to… it was one of the reasons why
Guirdneff left the Marxist camp. So you
have this and then you have the fact that there will be a worldwide
testimony.
Now from these two-party covenants and the one-party covenant, we can
set up a diagram for the nation
But there is the area of experience and this shifts and changes with
time, that’s the bottom circle. That,
nationally, would be the Mosaic Covenant.
The Mosaic Covenant promises “b”, inside the circle, and “c” outside the
circle, “b” is blessing, “c” is cursing.
And the Mosaic Covenant says if this nation remains in fellowship with
Me, then I will bless it; if this nation does not, then I will curse it. But the Mosaic Covenant does not replace or
abrogate the Abrahamic Covenant. The
Mosaic Covenant is simply there as a specification of the will of God in time
for the nation Israel.
Now having said that let’s go back to verse 12, “That you should enter
into the covenant” that’s the two-party covenant, “with the LORD thy God, and
into His oath,” now what’s the oath?
Because this was a conditional covenant and because God wanted them to
see His absolute righteousness, God so set up the covenant and engineered the
thing so that the people would have to come face to face with absolute
perfection. Turn back chapter 27 we
discussed the curse there, or the oath that they took, in verse 14 to the end
of chapter 27. When we went through
this, we had this cursing. This is called malediction in the Ancient Near
Eastern literature. When you went before
the suzerain, malediction meant that you would call down the judgment of the
gods upon you if you did not adhere to what you had promised. So we would liken it in our vernacular, and
this is not just vernacular, this is literally, to hell with me if I don’t do
this. That’s basically what they’re
saying, literally what they’re saying because that’s what the judgment means.
They are calling into question their entire judgment, “to hell me if I do not
do this thing,” and you go down through these various items until you get to
27:26 and then you have everything cursed.
“Cursed be he who confirms not all the words of this law to do
them.” There is the oath; it is an oath
to absolute perfection.
And this is what God wanted to reveal in history. See, He had to teach these people certain
things; He had to destroy its self-righteousness, every once in a while, in
fact quite frequently you will meet people who think they can save themselves
by being good enough to meet God’s standards.
These people are self-righteousness proud individuals. And God said listen, if you want to save
yourself, look at this Law, because anything that comes one-thousandth of an
inch short of the standard of this Law is as bad as something coming three
miles short. It doesn’t make any
difference. And this is why you
frequently see me using these symbols, +R and –R; +R draws attention to the
fact that if you’re up here it doesn’t make any difference positive number you
are, you’re in the class of positive numbers.
And –R means you have a righteousness, it’s down here, it doesn’t matter
what negative number it is, it’s still in the class of negative numbers. And the distinction isn’t in the numbers; the
distinction is in the sign before the numbers.
And so this is what we mean, +R is God’s absolute righteousness; –R is
human good, –R represents all those things that people do that fall short of
God’s absolute standard. Some of them
are very good things, we’re not knocking that, we’re simply saying that you
can’t use them to gain approbation with God.
Therefore the Mosaic Covenant says look, you are entering into a cursed
relationship, if you do not obey Me, then this discipline will happen, God is
saying. That’s the seriousness of it.
Back to Deut. 29, when Moses called them to enter into the covenant and
the oath, he clarifies the issue. This is something that is not being done
today in the area of evangelism.
Somebody comes up and gives you a few sob stories that they gather from
these preacher manuals; they go through and pick out something that will turn
your emotions on, get a few tears flowing, then they get you all worked up and
in the middle of singing some hymn they’ll say come forward. I’m not saying all evangelists use a
technique that is bad, but I’m saying that this has been misused in our
generation. People are so fouled up on
this idea that you have to go through some emotional experience. Look, Moses isn’t asking these people here to
have an emotional experience; he has given them information in verses 1-9 and
now as he gets to the invitation he lays it on the line just what is involved
in the invitation. He makes sure that these
people understand that the issue is are they going to submit to the will of
God as expressed in the Law, that’s the issue.
He never asks someone to decide without (1) information and (2) unless
that issue is clear.
For example, we have Christians today that go around and say do you go to
church on Sunday? You don’t, well you
must not be saved, and the whole conversation is shot from there because
they’ve just made the topic going to church.
Who wants to go to church? Have
you ever asked a non-Christian… why would a non-Christian logically want to
come to church? I can even tell you why
some Christians don’t want to come to church.
So here’s the point, you completely foul the issue up at the beginning;
you don’t talk about church, you don’t about baptism, the issue is Jesus Christ
and do they trust in Him, that’s the issue and the other things will come. I’m not saying they’re not important but
you’ve got to take them in order. Moses
is not knocking other things, he is simply saying you’ve got to start out with
a certain starting point and there’s where you’ve got to start. In evangelism, the evangelistic invitation,
there must be only one issue, are you or are you not going to accept what God
has done on your behalf, or are you going to substitute some human gimmick,
operation bootstrap where you try to solve your own problems by yourself. That’s the issue in evangelism. Sin, incidentally, is a secondary issue
because that has been dealt with at the cross.
The issue is are you going to accept grace or are you going to throw it
out and in its place put human good.
That’s the issue. So Moses, when
he gives the invitation in verse 12 it’s saying now look, let’s get it squared
away as to what we’re choosing.
Therefore in verse 13 he gives you what God is going to do as a result of
this thing, “That He may establish thee today for a people unto Himself, and
that He may be unto thee a God, as He has said unto thee, and as He has sworn
unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” He backs it up with promises from the Word. When Moses says here in verse 13, “as He has
sworn unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob,” he is going back
to the words of God and saying look, didn’t God back here promise this; didn’t
He promise these things to you, can’t you remember your father and grandfather
telling you these things; can’t you remember them passing on from father to
son, father to son, what God would one day do.
This is a continuity with what God has previously told you. So what is he doing? He’s giving the acts of God and now he’s
saying look, this is what God has done in our generation and here are His words
from the previous generation and they both fit together.
This should be clear in your mind.
Any person who can’t see, for example, in the area of evangelism that
the gospel is a beautiful thing, the gospel fits all together and it has
tremendous structure to it, it’s logical, it’s rational, it’s intelligent. The faith that you have in Jesus Christ
should flow naturally out of the fact of your trust in His character. If you know His character through the words
of God in the Bible, then your trust naturally flows in response to this
thing. There is a natural flow because
you are convinced of His trustworthiness so you cast yourself upon Him. You can’t do that unless you really trust
Him. Oh, you can go through some
emotional experience where you try to work yourself up, and maybe today you’re
successful working your feelings and your emotions up and tomorrow you’re not
and they go away. Then you say this
thing called Christianity doesn’t work.
The reason why it doesn’t work is because you never had it in the first
place. Christianity means you respond to facts and the facts are the revelation
of God’s character.
So here Moses is doing the same thing, he’s saying God has revealed
Himself to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob, and now in your generation… he’s
brought this whole thing to an issue, this whole thing has come to a head and
now you must choose.
Verse 14, “Neither with you only do I make this covenant and this oath,
[15] But with him who stands here with us this day before the LORD our God, and
also with him who is not here with us this day.” This is characteristic of this whole thing in
the Old Testament; the covenant goes on to the unborn children. This goes on again, there is a tremendous
responsibility to the children yet unborn.
This is something our generation can’t get through its head but the
Bible lays it down clearly that this generation has responsibility for the next
one and the next one and the next one and the next one after it. It’s true the previous generations may have
fouled up history but this generation, our generation has a moral, spiritual
responsibility for the coming generation.
And this flows through the Word; you see this again and again and
again. Moses says when you, when you, this present generation in this
present hour, make the decision nationally, you are going to affect the destiny
of your children’s children’s children’s children. All the way down in history your destinies
will be affected. History is continuous;
you can’t break history up and say oh, we’ll just live it today and forget what
happened yesterday and we’re going to forget what happens tomorrow. That’s not
the way to live in history; history continues and the Bible says that one
decision made in this moment has tremendous repercussions all the way down the
line. And this doctrine goes back to
Adam’s fall. When Adam fell, what
happened? He fouled the entire human
race up, that’s called the doctrine of original sin, which no one understands
when they say “original sin,” first of all the word original is not in the
Scripture. But the point is Adam made a
boo-boo back here, negative volition; that negative volition had fantastic
repercussions; it meant that every living human being from that moment on would
have an old sin nature. It meant that
all children that were born would be born with sin natures. It doesn’t mean that they have no access to
salvation; it simply means they’re born with sin natures. This is taught very
clearly in Psalm 51.
So here you have the old sin nature; the old sin nature is common to all
[can’t understand word]. Why? Apart from the literal Adam’s fall, the
Adamic fall, apart from a literal fall you have no explanation whatever for
man’s problem. The next time you get
this feeling that comes over you that maybe you should compromise on your
interpretation of Gen. 3, just remember, fiddle with Gen. 3 and you’ve
destroyed all hope of ever answering the question, why is there suffering in
the world. No person who does not take
Gen. 3 literally can answer that question.
No person who takes Gen. 3 allegorically and throws it out has an answer
to the question, why is there suffering in the world. The Bible hangs together as a unit. You can’t tamper with it, it is either all
there or the whole thing goes down the drain.
You can’t pick and choose.
So here in verse 14-15 this problem of historical continuity is
emphasized. I might point out that this
thing is emphasized again in John 17:20, when the Lord Jesus Christ in His high
priestly prayer says “Father, I pray not just for these men in My generation, I
pray for those who will believe on My name through them.” So there’s a spiritual continuity that
operates in history and when you lead someone to Jesus Christ just remember
this, you are affecting the whole stream, downstream, it’s like you stand in a
stream of water and it’s flowing by you and you cause ripples that carry on
downstream; you introduce eddy currents in that stream that disturb the whole
energy balance of the system, all the way downstream.
It’s the same thing in history, when you win someone to Jesus Christ you
set up things that go on after you’re dead; maybe he wins someone else to
Christ over here and they win someone else to Christ, you start a chain
reaction in history. And only at the
judgment seat of Christ will you ever realize what happened when you won that person
to Jesus Christ because you will be lifted from the scene. You’re going to die and when you’re dead you
won’t know what has been the long-term repercussions of winning that person to
Jesus Christ. This is why God waits to
judge you, He doesn’t judge believers when you die, to be absent from the body
is to be face to face with the Lord, and the reason why He holds us, you might
say, without judging us, is until after the Church Age is finished so that the
whole repercussions of our testimony go downstream and He measures it and it’s
all there. So you may have been lifted
out of history in 1970 through death and suppose the rapture doesn’t come until
the year 2000, for 30 years the Church Age goes on and for 30 years in heaven
you stay in the presence of the Lord and when those 30 years are finished He
trots out what happened in history. And
He says that when that one person you led to the Lord, he led this person to
the Lord, this person to the Lord, etc. all the way down those 30 years,
tremendous repercussions. And you
couldn’t have known that when you were pulled out of history, when you died,
but you do now because God takes all of the records of history and compresses
it and shows you, this is what happened, this was the long term effect of that
one moment that you spent in sharing Jesus Christ with some individual.
Beginning in verse 16 Moses warns the nation. This warning continues on down to the end of
chapter 29. The warning is this, that
God is faithful to His cursings as well as He is faithful to His promises. As Christians we can say that God’s promises
are sure, “casting all your care on Him for He cares for you,” and although you
may have trouble claiming that promise, and you may be in a situation in life
where it’s difficult and you struggle as you try to claim that promise, and it
doesn’t seem real and it seems like you just get your hands on it and it slides
out, and you have difficulty, the reason you are having difficulty is because
you have not yet got a true picture of the trustworthiness of God’s character,
and you ought to pray, not for a solution to the specific problem, you ought to
pray for the cause of the problem; the cause of the problem is that you do not
yet know enough of God to be able to cast yourself fully upon Him. That’s the problem and this is why the
promises are hard to claim. They’re hard
to claim, not because of the promise, but because of the Man who stands in back
of them and His character and you don’t know that character well enough yet to
trust Him fully with your problem.
But nevertheless, Moses says, in verses 16ff, God is also true to His
cursings, and when He promises that He is going to discipline you for this, He
means He is going to discipline you for this.
And He means there’s no getting around it, there’s no avoiding it, it’s
going to happen. So beginning in verse
16 we have the preview of the cursing.
Moses has been with these people forty years and he knows, it would
require a genius to know that they were going to have trouble after he
left. Remember, after he finishes this sermon
Moses drops dead, this is his last sermon; if you gave a sermon this long you’d
probably drop dead too, but nevertheless this is his last invitation to the
nation.
Verse 16, “For ye know how we have dwelt in the land of Egypt, and how
we came through the nations which ye passed by,” and you’ve done all these
things, he’s giving the historical experience of heathenism and he appeals to
this historical experience. He says you
went through Egypt, you know how these nations lived and you’re aware that their
gods… in fact later on in the Bible Isaiah says look at these funny gods, here
they are, these weirdoes and they have to have steel chains to keep them from
tipping over, and you worship that. And
that’s what Isaiah says, ha-ha to you he says, silly people, you sit around and
you fail to worship the God who is there, the God who exists and is omniscient
and infinite and you turn around and make this your god and your god is so weak
he can’t stand up without having a silver chain hold him in place, how stupid.
That’s what Isaiah says to his generation.
And Moses is saying the same thing, you ought to know this, and that’s
the point he makes in verse 16.
These abominations in verse 17, “And ye have seen their abominations,
[and their idols, wood and stone, silver and gold, which were among them)]” and
this word is not the usual word for abominations as elsewhere used in the Old
Testament, here this word means detestable or disgusting, it is repulsive,
putrid in God’s sight, these things that are made of wood and stone, and silver
and gold.
And he warns them, verse 18, “Lest there should be among you man, or
woman, or family, or tribe, whose heart is now turning away,” and the turning
away here is a Hebrew participle and it means right now, during this decision
he says, I offer you this as a national decision and there may be citizens of
you, he’s saying, standing right in front of me and you can look with your
poker face into my eyes and mask the fact that you have negative volition
toward God and you have no intention of going along with it, and you can fool
everybody but you are not going to fool God.
So therefore, as he says here in verse 18, the “heart is now turning,” a
Hebrew participle is a motion picture tense of continuous action, “whose heart
is now turning away this day from the LORD our God, to go and serve the gods of
these nations,” that’s one point he makes.
Then “lest” is repeated again, and this is in apposition to the first
one, an explanation of it, and with this he begins an analogy. “…lest there should be among you a root that
bears gall and wormwood,” the word “bear” is the Hebrew participle again,
meaning continually bearing, and here you want to catch his illustration
because this is going to solve the problem some of you have had, what about the
epistle to the Hebrews and what about that expression in Heb. 12. This sets you up for that because Heb. 12
quotes from this section.
Understand this analogy and then we can move over into Heb. 12 and pick
up an interpretation in the New Testament.
Here’s Moses’ point; he says there’s a root here, and that root is
already there, it’s already there and it’s budding, it’s sprouting up into
“gall and wormwood.” Gall and wormwood
are bitter herbs that were used in the ancient world. I guess if they wanted to threaten their kid,
if you don’t eat your spinach I’ll give you some gall or something, but they
had these bitter herbs and these are plants particularly foul to the people’s
taste and he’s saying look, here’s your root and right now that plant is
growing, and when it gets to the mature stage it can be ground up and used as
these bitter herbs, and he says beware that this person whose negative
volition, watch the analogy, roots of the plant correspond to negative volition
in the individual, and this negative volition is going to result in divine
discipline. So we have the analogy
between the bitter herbs and discipline.
Discipline results from negative volition and these bitter herbs result
from this fruit growing.
So he says in verse 18 this heart is turning away, negative volition,
“Lest there should be among you a root that is now sprouting forth these
results of gall and wormwood,” and verse 19, “And it come to pass, when he
hears the words of this curse,” that’s the threat that we’ve covered before,
“that he bless himself in his heart, saying, I shall peace, though I walk in
the stubbornness [imagination] of mine heart,” and you want to end the quote
after the word “heart,” there should be quotation marks, “I shall have peace, though
I walk in the stubbornness of mine heart,” the imagination there is the word
that means stubbornness. Then with the
word “to add drunkenness to thirst,” is a King James translation that’s wrong,
you get this correct translation in the RSV or ASV, those are the two good Old
Testament translations, the ASV is probably the best, it was made in 1901; the
trouble is, it’s difficult to get hold of.
So in these translations you have it corrected as it should read, “to
sweep away the moist with the dry.” That’s
literally what it says, “to sweep away the moist with the dry.” The King James translators tried to interpret
for you here and they tried to say they moist or the drunken and the dry and
the thirsty ones or something, but it’s an interpretation translation.
Literally it means, he says what’s going to happen to this man? Go back to your analogy, this thing is going
to bear root, along in the same garden where these herbs are growing there are
other plants that are growing and these other plants grow up here and these
things are watered; these plants are watered because people want these plants,
and so they take care of them and they water them; they don’t like the herbs
and so they let them dry. But he says
when God’s going to discipline and He lowers the boom on this thing, both the
moist and the dry are going. Now here’s
the concept of suffering in Scripture that you have to master or a lot of
suffering in your life will become very puzzling to you. God, when He disciplines, can often discipline
you because of your close association with someone else who is being
disciplined. And that’s the point he’s
making here in verse 19. He says this
man, this one lone individual, he is blessing himself in his heart, there’s the
root, negative volition, it’s going to result in discipline but the tragedy is
that it’s not just going to be discipline on him as an individual, but he’s
going to bring down discipline upon his community and upon his society. This is what the tragedy of this discipline
function is in Scripture. And that’s the
point that he’s making here in this business of this analogy with this plant,
it grows up, it continues, it starts the analogy in verse 18 and continues the
analogy in verse 19, “to sweep away the moist with the dry,” for total
annihilation.
Verse 20, “The LORD will not spare him, but then the anger of the LORD
and his jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are
written this book shall lie upon him, and the LORD shall blot out his name from
under heaven.” That sounds horrible and
it sounds like fire and brimstone until you recognize why the Bible says
this. This verse will teach you
something about God’s righteousness and His justice. Let’s go back to the character of God. God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is
justice, God is love, God is omniscient, God is omnipotent, God is omnipresent,
God is eternality, God is immutable. God
is all these things. Now look at this
for a moment, God has these characteristics of righteousness and love. Many of you have been around Christian
environments for so long that you’ve forgotten this; many of you have been
around the concept that God loves you and has a plan for your life, God has
done this, God loves the world and He gave His only begotten Son, etc.
These are familiar to you until you’ve done something very subtle in
your mind, very subtlety, almost imperceptibly, you’ve readjusted this essence
box of God so that now in your mind you have a new essence box and it looks
something like this, all these characteristics are there all right, and they’re
still lurking, but you’ve got love and it stands out and you’ve exaggerated
God’s love beyond all bounds that the Scripture allows you to exaggerate it. So this is your God, it’s an adjusted picture
of what God really is like. And when you
see verses like verse 20, remember this should shift your mind back into
balance and say that His holiness is not less than His love; His love is always
bounded by His holiness. God loves you
within a circle and within that circle there is love, but outside the circle
there is no love.
In other words the love of God is defined by His righteousness and by
His holiness. So when we come to the
cross, when we think of this, just remember when Jesus Christ died on the cross
God loves you but God, in loving you, doesn’t negate these. God when He loves you and says I forgive you
from your sin doesn’t say I’m giving up my righteousness and justice; He says
oh no, what I’m doing is setting up a system, a plan of salvation by which I
can forgive you and still be righteous.
This is why 1 John 1:9, if you look at it what does it say, “he is
faithful and just to forgive us our sins,” it means that even with 1 John 1:9
He has not compromised a thousandth of an inch His righteousness and His
justice, because Christ has borne it.
You don’t bear it, Christ bears it, but that doesn’t mean that God has
compromised His holiness; it simply means He’s transferred judgment from your
head to someone else’s, Jesus Christ.
Now we have this individual in verse 19 who’s saying well, I’ll be all
right, and this person presumes on God’s grace and he goes negative at the
point of gospel hearing, at the point of the gospel this man is negative and he
says I reject the grace of God, I will not accept God’s solution because I
believe God is a God of love. And so
since God is a God of love, He has to pat me on the head. I’m such an important person that God just
can’t get along in the universe without me for all eternity and so He has to
open the pearly gates just to let me trot in. So we have this exaggerated
concept of the love of God, and these people, such as in verse 19, think that
God is going to love them on their terms.
Oh no, God loves you on His terms, not on your terms. God loves you according to His character and
not what you think you’d like to have Him love you. This is why He has certain bounds, etc. So
this person says no, I reject the grace that God has provided me on the cross,
I reject this grace, I am not going to accept this grace; instead what I am
going to do is substitute.
Now just remember that this is the unpardonable sin, every once in a
while we have a question, what is the unpardonable sin of Scripture. For your information, the unpardonable sin is
not adultery; the unpardonable sin is not murder; the unpardonable sin is not
all the other things that people think about.
The unpardonable sin is not even denying the Lord Jesus Christ, for Christians
can do it and have done it numerous times in history. The unpardonable sin is rejection of the
cross of Christ for my salvation, and the substitution in place of the cross
for human good. And when I make that
fatal decision to replace the work of Christ with my fat good works and my big
fat record, etc. I am asking for judgment, and that’s what God says precisely I
am going to get. I’m going to get the
Lake of Fire because of my good works.
You say isn’t that unfair for God to punish you because of your good
works. No, because you have rejected
absolute good, which is in Jesus Christ, and because you have tried to
substitute your own human good it just doesn’t make the case.
So this is the reminder that we should have in our mentality as we go
through verses 19 and 20, that this reminds us that God’s love is there but it
has boundaries and all love, incidentally, has boundaries, because a corollary
to love is that you hate; you hate the opposite of what you love and a person
who does not hate the opposite of what he loves does not love. This is why in the Word of God we’re said to
hate that which is false, not people for they are made in God’s image, but
we’re to hate ideas, and this goes back to the fantastic thing we have in the
Word of God, the balance between grace and truth; truth in the realm of ideas,
grace in the realm of people.
Some ideas are 100% wrong and you have all the mandate of the Word to go
out and attack ideas, drive them from the field, smash them, and that’s the
aggressive warfare of the Christian, to go out and not defend the Bible,
attack, attack, attack, attack, the best defense is an offense and Christians
are to go out and challenge the world, attack the ideas that are false and
phony. That’s what you attack, you never
attack people, always be careful, particularly in personal conversations when
you discuss issues to make it clear throughout the conversation, at the
beginning of the conversation, that you have nothing against this person as a
person, but what you’re after is the idea.
People in our generation can’t separate persons from ideas. They make the two the same thing and so they
say somebody with long hair is bad; all right, maybe he is and maybe he isn’t,
you don’t know that. It just may be that
that person is associated with an idea that’s offensive to you and probably 9
times out of 10 you may be right, but the point is, what do you do? Hate the person? No you do not, that person is made in the
image of God. What you hate is the
ideas, that’s the balance between grace and truth. It’s awful hard because the tendency is to
reverse it; the tendency is to hate people and be open to the ideas. You watch your own mind for a while and test
yourself and ask yourself, are you compromising with the ideas or are you being
snowed with personalities, and most of the time you’ll find yourself reacting
to persons but you don’t react to the ideas.
That will test you to show you how much you need to grow, to get the
balance of grace and truth.
This is why Jesus Christ, it wasn’t being a sentimentalist when on the
cross He said, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Jesus hated what the people did to Him, He
hated this, you know He hated going to the cross by His performance in the
Garden of Gethsemane hours before. You
know He feared this thing in the sense that He could fear, legitimately. It was repulsive to him to have to realize
that He would bear your sin, come in contact with the filth that He never came
in contact with, this repulsed Him. But
at the same time, while being buried and drowned in the filth He could still
say, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do,” because Jesus
Christ could separate personality from ideas.
Always remember the balance of grace and truth.
Finally in verse 21, “And the LORD shall separate him unto evil out of
all the tribes of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant that are
written in this book of the Law.” In
other words this discipline process, Moses says is going to go on and on and on
until God finally removes the entire evil system. And if this means that the nation itself has
to suffer, good people with it, so be it.
Now turn to Heb. 12 and see how the idea of this gall and wormwood helps
us in interpreting the New Testament for remember the New Testament was written
to people who already knew the Old Testament.
In Heb. 12:15-16 we have a command given to us as Christians. “Looking diligently lest any man fail of the
grace of God, lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and by it
many be defiled. [16] Lest there be any
fornicator, or profane person, like Esau, who for one morsel of food sold his
birthright.” What is that saying? Now you understand the analogy; the author of
Hebrews whoever he was has picked up this analogy from Deut. 29 and now he’s
applying it to the Jewish Christians of his day and it’s the principle, all you
have to do is go back to the analogy.
What was the analogy? It was the
analogy of a garden and in the garden you had all these good plants and then
you had this one bad one, and this is the bitter herb, and when that bitter
herb came in it was the dry, and the rest of these plants was the moist and God
destroyed them both when He lowered the boom of discipline upon them.
Now what is He saying here in verse 15, “Looking diligently lest any man
fail of the grace of God,” fail of the grace of God means you reject God’s
grace, you reject His plan, either you reject it at one of two points, either
you reject it at the point of salvation or as a Christian you reject it at 1 John
1:9. Some Christians get out of
fellowship and they fail the grace of God.
Do you know how they do it?
Because they get out of fellowship, they have a guilt complex and they
say well God couldn’t possibly forgive me, I don’t feel forgiven and I’ve used
1 John 1:9 and I still don’t feel forgiven.
You see, they are rejecting the grace of God at this point. They have never mastered the concept of the
grace of God and so here we have someone who is “looking diligently lest any
man fail of the grace of God,” in context now this is going to be a professing
Jewish Christian, in other words you have a community here of mixed people,
some are Christians and some are not Christians. And this is the problem of this author of
Hebrews, he’s writing in the eleventh hour when discipline is about to descend
upon the nation and he’s warning them as he did in chapter 2. Turn to chapter 2.
In Heb. 2:1-4 he has warned this nation of what is coming and he says,
“Therefore, we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things which we have
heard, lest at any time we should let them slip. [2] For if the word spoken by
angels,” that’s the Law, “was steadfast, and every transgression and
disobedience received a just recompense of reward, [3] How shall we escape, if
we neglect so great salvation, which at the first began to be spoken by the
Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him.” What is he saying? He’s saying look Israel, you had the gospel
given to you by Moses and now you’ve had it given by Jesus Christ. Now what are you going to do with it, and
it’s exactly the analogous call as in Deut. 29.
“Looking diligently lest any man fail,” lest any man fail to believe and
accept “the grace of God, lest any root of bitterness,” this is negative
volition of a person, like in Deut. 29 who says quietly in his own heart, oh
no, I don’t need God’s grace, it sounds nice, I enjoy the people, but I
personally do not need the grace of God because I am so self-righteous that I
can make it on my own human good and because I can make it on my own human
good, therefore I can just shelve the grace of God.
So we have in verse 15 a warning and it’s a warning to people to accept
the grace of God. You can apply it to
the Christian at the point of being out of fellowship also. “…lest any root of bitterness springing up
trouble you, and by it many be defiled,” and the word “many be defiled” refers
to the fact that God in 70AD will lower the boom on this nation because they
have failed to respond to the claims of the Messiah and he says listen, you
latch onto the gracious offer of God in His Messiah or many are going to be
defiled. Do you know who was defiled?
Inside Jerusalem in 70 AD we had horrible things happen. We had some believers trapped in Jerusalem,
unbelievers trapped inside Jerusalem and they both were slaughtered. Why? Because God lowered the boom on that
society and the believers went down with the unbelievers.
You say well doesn’t God protect the believers? Yes He does, but it doesn’t necessarily mean
that sometimes the believers don’t get mixed in with the situation. God preserves you through it, and we have
various ideas of suffering grace, etc. in God’s Word, but that does not mean
that believers cannot lose their lives.
We have had people on the mission field who have lost their life because
Christians at home wouldn’t pray for them.
You get that principle from the book of Acts, the principle that
apostles were slaughtered because the Christians couldn’t spend two minutes in
prayer to pray and so they went out in the field and got bombed out. It’s the same thing here, he’s saying that
many will be defiled; just because this one person, or these few people.
And then in verse 16 he makes the parallel with Esau, “Lest there be any
fornicator, or profane person, like Esau, who for one morsel of meat sold his
birthright.” Esau was this kind of
person, Esau had a twin brother, Jacob.
Jacob means chiseler, and Esau was a hunter. As far as you and I are concerned if those
two men were to walk in tonight and we conducted a personality test, and we
said now everybody for Jacob or Esau, who you’d like to be chairman of
something, the glad-hand committee at the back door or something, the vote
would go about 102 to 1, there’s always one stinker, and so we’d have 102
people voting for Esau and one for Jacob.
Do you know why? Because on the
outside Esau was a handsome man, he was a strong man, he was a man that would
command the attention of a group of people when he walked in the room. He was a man that was the party kind. He was the kind of guy that could socialize,
carry on a conversation with people, get along well with people. He was a man that had everything going for
him except one very basic problem, he had negative volition in his heart toward
God’s grace. And Esau was a man that was
so proud of himself he couldn’t rely on the grace of God.
Then he had a brother called Jacob and Jacob was a rat; Jacob would
cheat you out of anything; if he could cheat you out of your underwear he
would; anything he could get his hands on he would try to cheat and weasel his
way in any kind of a deal. Incidentally,
he got it from his mother; his mother taught him how to do it, so Jacob went
along in his life and got this reputation of being a chiseler. Yet what happened? On the outside you’d say this guy is a clod,
as far as his personality is concerned we couldn’t stand to have Jacob around. And yet on the Word of God isn’t it strange,
who wound up with the birthright? The
man with the scintillating personality or the man who was the louse, but had
one thing going for him, he realized he was a louse and he realized he was a
louse and he couldn’t make it on his own human good, so therefore he cast
himself on the grace of God. Now he made
it and Esau got fouled up, and the story of it is the parallel with Deut. 29,
self-righteousness trusts in human good and not in God’s grace. And that’s the decision that’s about to face
the nation