Lesson 70

The Palestinian Covenant – 30:1-3 (29:21-29)

We are continuing with this section of Deuteronomy which sets forth a Biblical invitation. This is important to see because we have a fundamentalist position and apparently you are a heretic if you disagree with it. Therefore, I am a heretic because I don’t go along with the fundamentalist tradition in the area of invitations; it is only a tradition, it is not taught by the Word of God as you will see as we study this invitation of Moses. This is a public invitation to a nation to accept the Law. I want you to notice the parts of the invitation that we’ve been going through. The invitation began at the beginning of chapter 29 and it has certain parts to it. The first part was in verses 1-9 and Moses gives the factual basis for this decision. This is to be a national decision by faith but faith has to have an object, and this business of getting people emotionally worked up, singing hymns, etc. is fine except it cancels out the mentality of the soul. A lot of people have become so wrapped up with emotionalism, with traditionalism that they have never seen the issue.

Notice that when Moses asked his generation to believe he doesn’t play a few hymns and invite them forward. In verses 1-9 Moses gives them facts, facts, facts, facts, Bible doctrine, more Bible doctrine, more Bible doctrine because faith has to have an object; faith always must have an object. Here is where fundamentalists are funny about this because basically they’re doing exactly what the liberals are doing. They raise holy horror when a person doesn’t give an invitation and yet isn’t it interesting that the liberal does exactly what the fundamentalist is doing and that is he asks you to have faith without an object. That’s exactly what the fundamentalists are doing except they fill in emotion, faith and emotional feeling. The liberal will say have faith in some ideology, or some sweet sounding words or some liturgy or something, but basically they do very much the same thing. It’s very interesting to watch this and yet here you have a fundamentalist and here you have a liberal and they always disagree, and yet when it comes down to practice, they do precisely the same thing, ask people to believe without an object.

The object of the faith in the Word of God is the Word of God and that’s given in verses 1-9, but Moses says it’s not just believing the Bible, it is believing the Bible because the Bible has been verified in history. And Moses appeals over and over again, verse 3-4, you have seen this, you are eyewitnesses, you have empirically perceived the foundations of the Word of God and therefore you can believe. It’s not like you have a roulette wheel and say there are 2,000 books in this library and I’ll spin the roulette wheel and whoops, it just happens to land on the Bible so now I go out and blindly accept everything that’s in the Bible. That’s not Christianity. Christianity says just a minute, the Bible is what it is because of the God who stands behind it and the Bible is inerrant and inspired and it is the Word of God because God Himself has written it, through human authors but God Himself is the One that has written it. That is why we accept the Word of God, not because it’s just a sweet book but because of the God who wrote it that stands in back of it. If, for example, this is impossible to imagine, but if, for example, God ceased to exist in the next second, the Bible would be an absolutely worthless book. The Bible by itself would be a worthless book if God ceased to exist. The fact that the Bible is worthwhile in importance is because of the God who stands behind it.

This is why in verses 1-9 Moses focuses on the words and the works of God that verify it in history. You remember when we went through that there are always two tests: one is in Deut. 13, the other is in Deut. 18. The one in Deut. 13, the logical test, says is the Bible self-consistent, and the test of Deut. 18, does the Bible check with experience or the empirical test. My claim is that you can’t know anything that’s true unless you apply these tests. One individual said to me, wait a minute, you say this thing verifies in history and he says how do you know about history, how can you know that the historical records aren’t wrong, how can you know this. I said ultimately you can’t know, you have to check it out as well as you can, it’s a probabilistic sort of thing. You can’t absolutely be sure but if you take the Biblical framework it gives you a reason suspect it’s right. But the point was this person said how can we be sure the history isn’t wrong. I said well suppose it isn’t wrong, then where does it leave you? It leaves you there by yourself, your bare naked self standing there without any experience or any history, including your own personal history; that’s a bad place to be in. The person said I guess so, come to think of it. So after a while, talking to this person, I found out he was reacting against the authority of the Word of God, he didn’t like it because I got up here and said this is it and I didn’t give 1005 different options. That always causes people to vibrate and that’s good. I’ve found if you bear down hard and you get people to either hate you or love you, they do something but they just don’t sit there and that’s good because you produce an action. I’d a lot rather have someone hate me and oppose what I believe than just passively sit there and do nothing because it shows you’re they’re interacting; at least they’re interacting. In the apostle’s day they interacted, they picked up and threw rocks, but at least they were interacting; there was a reaction produced.

Therefore we find that the Bible gives us sufficient reason to believe and this is verses 1-9. And incidentally, in witnessing and sharing Christ with a person there are two kinds of questions that you will face. One kind of question is the smoke-screen type of question, this is where you’re starting to share the gospel and someone comes up with an objection and they say wait a minute, and they bring in what about the hotten-tots, what about the people who haven’t heard, what about somebody else, and they’ll bring up all these hot air questions. Those are one set of questions, but then there are genuine questions that people wonder about. Don’t be afraid to answer them, if you don’t know the answer, don’t pretend you know, just say I don’t know, I’ll see if we can find the answer. But don’t try to put on a phony front when you don’t know an answer; just simply say I don’t know the answer. You’re not required to know everything about the Bible; you’re not required to explain every little detail of Christianity to every single objection.

For example, take a physics student, when a physic student is up telling about, say Einstein’s theory of relativity, he’s not called upon to go into what about Dalton’s theory or somebody else’s theory over here, what about all these different theories. He can’t control all these things at one time in his mind unless he’s a super genius, so he says I don’t know, I’ll have to check it out. So there’s nothing embarrassing about admitting to a person who’s objecting to what you’re saying, “I don’t know but I’ll check it out.” Nothing whatsoever, don’t feel embarrassed because you don’t know something, just admit it and you will communicate honesty to that individual.

In verses 1-9 we have the importance of the factual basis of faith. God does not ask you to believe nothing; He asks you to believe in the facts after you’ve considered them. Then verses 10-15 are a clarification of what it is that they are to decide. That’s the second thing in a bona fide Biblical invitation, verses 10-15, and that is that the issue must be clear. What is it that you are believing? At the point of gospel hearing the issue is do I or do I not accept God’s gracious solution to the sin problem in Jesus Christ. That’s the issue. It’s not am I going to come to Lubbock Bible Church or not; it is not whether I am going to be baptized or not; it is not whether I’m going to give money to the church or do something else. That has nothing to do with the gospel. The gospel is one simple issue, do you or do you not accept God’s solution to your problems as the only solution to your problems; that’s it, and that’s where you focus and bear down hard in evangelism. That issue, not inviting people to church, that’s not the point. So verses 10-15 give the clarification of the decision.

So the facts, it declares the issue, and then in verses 16-29 the section we’re in now Moses is developing the implications of various decisions. Here he develops the implication of rejection. He says you’re free, you are a responsible person, God is not treating you as a robot, He’s not banging you over the head, He’s not going to twist your volition, you are free to choose or to reject. The responsibility of Moses ends here; the responsibility, as far as I’m concerned as a pastor, my responsibility ends with the clear communication of the Word. Your responsibility starts by interacting, testing if what I say is true. One of the questions I had not long ago was how can we be sure that it’s not just your interpretation and not the Word of God. Friend, don’t accept my words as authoritative, check it out. And how do you test it? Check it out with the Word of God. If it doesn’t agree, fine, but you check it out. I’m not up here expecting you to believe everything that drops out of my mouth; I expect you, however, to give me a fair hearing and I expect you to take what you hear and test it by the standard of the Word of God and see whether it checks out. That’s something else again, the authority is in the Word, not in me. The authority is the inerrant Word of God.

So we have then Moses explaining, well suppose we choose negative. We’re free to choose, suppose we choose negatively, what is going to happen. And Moses says his responsibility includes a proclamation of the issue and what is going to happen if I reject the grace of God; what is going to happen if I say no. So verses 16-29 we’re working with now, what is going to happen if the nation says no. God says, particular in verse 19, He says… consider the individual that’s listening there in the crowd, and they’re listening to Moses preach and getting kind of tired because he’s gone on now for 29 chapters, and now in verse 19, “And it come to pass, when he hears the words of this curse, that he bless himself in his heart, saying, ‘I shall have peace, though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart,’” and that’s the end of that quote, and the rest of it is the continuation of verse 18, this is what the man says on the inside, he’s comforting himself in saying well I’m free to reject.

Moses says that’s right, you are free to reject, however, the thing that’s serious about Christianity is that it’s not just that you are free; you are free, but you’d bear certain consequences of your actions. You’re free to choose positive or negative but you’re not free to choose the results of the decision. It’s like you’re driving along and you come to the fork in the road; you are free to go one way or the other way but you’re not free to remake the road. You have two already made roads ahead of those, you can’t change those, you can choose either one or the other but you can’t fudge the road yourself. That’s the same thing in the Bible. You are given the right to choose but you are not given the right to determine the results of your decision. So this is what Moses is spelling out; this person in verse 19 is free to say this, absolutely free to say it. But it bears certain consequences, 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 in this book shall lie upon him, and the LORD shall blot out his name from under heaven.”

This is the seriousness of Christianity; it says you are free to choose but you are not free to choose the results of your decisions. You can choose to be miserable; Christians can choose to be miserable. A Christian on negative volition is the hardest kind of person to live with, they are miserable, they make everyone else miserable, and they are doubly miserable because an unbeliever go along in comfort, he’s used to negative volition, but a Christian has the Holy Spirit indwelling and the Holy Spirit just won’t let him be comfortable in negative volition. I’ve been impressed in recent weeks as I’ve studied certain issues to see how many times in history bad ideas have been introduced by Christians. It is amazing. It seems like every major apostasy has come out of out of fellowship Christians. It’s amazing the spiritual pollution that Christians are responsible for. Think, for example, of Solomon. Here’s a believer out of fellowship, we have evidences that are starting to show up in historical research that Solomon stands behind early Greek philosophy. If that is true and in the next generation or so it’s proved that this is really the root of western philosophy, look what kind of a horrifying chain of events came from one very brilliant believer but one very carnal believer. Today philosophy is the greatest enemy Christianity has. We have certain things happening in this town that started because one Christian fellow was out of fellowship. We have Christians that get involved with certain tongues group that are spreading around satanic doctrines. Who’s spreading it around? Out of fellowship Christians. Do you see how dangerous out of fellowship Christians are; they’re dangerous to everyone around them; very dangerous people, out of fellowship Christians. We have cases in the Old Testament, out of fellowship Christians. Moses gets out of fellowship and almost blows it, so it is a very dangerous thing of getting out of fellowship.

In verse 23 Moses warns them nationally, this so far has been written to individuals. This, so far has been written to individuals that get out of fellowship, but he says an individual getting out of fellowship, it’s like a root, here’s your ground and this root grows up and pretty soon you have a whole plant that’s developed and then this seed starts other plants going, etc. and you spread this thing around; carnality spreads, it’s contagious. So one Christian out of fellowship gets a lot of others out of fellowship. If you’ve ever been in a congregational meeting of some church and somebody will spout off something out of fellowship and bam, about 60% of the congregation gets out of fellowship right there and 1 John 1:9 is forgotten for the rest of the meeting. That’s how church business is conducted and people wonder what’s gone wrong with the church. It’s very easy what’s wrong with the church. So carnality is contagious and Moses says eventually this thing is going to become nationwide, and in verse 23 this is what God is going to do.

Last time we showed how God will physically intervene in history, like He did in Sodom and Gomorrah. We traced verse 23 archeologically; we traced it through the prophets and showed you how again and again Sodom and Gomorrah had a literal physical explosion in the south end of the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea looks like this at the south end, there’s a little bit of land that comes out here and the Dead Sea goes down to 1200 feet here, south of that it goes to 50 feet, and archeologists believe that this small plain, where those five cities, the pentapolis of Genesis 14, are buried. They were buried because God judged Sodom and Gomorrah because these cities had gone on a maximum of negative volition toward the Word of God and when that happens, God says there comes a limit, we don’t know, don’t ask me what that magic limit is, but there’s a limit in history to negative volition in any given nation. We may be close to the limit in the United States but God has His limit and He says unbelief can develop and mature up to a limit, but when that unbelief gets to the point where it permeates the whole culture, so that they young children that are growing up don’t have a fair chance to hear the Word of God, when that happens, then for the sake of the next generation God destroys that nation. This is a rule in history and it began back in Sodom and Gomorrah. And God is saying in verse 23 is saying back to Israel, this rule holds especially for you, literal physical catastrophe.

And please remember that these catastrophes in the Bible are meant to be literal, not allegorical. It’s very interesting that we have certain people that always like to read Isaiah and they read in Isaiah how it’s going to be, you’re like Sodom and Gomorrah, and all the nation is left desolate and they say oh, that’s just poetic license. What right do you have to say that’s poetic license? Isaiah is speaking of a literal, physical catastrophe, an earthquake described in Zech. 14 that occurred in the time of Uzziah the king, a literal thing that destroyed physically many, many cities in the nation Israel, and he said see Israel, God’s Word is coming true. That’s what Moses said back in verse 23 and now it’s upon us. And Isaiah used that as a platform of preaching the Word in his generation.

Now verse 24 and following, he continues the dramatic dialogue to show the results of negative volition toward God. [Verse 24, “Even all nations shall say,” this is Moses’ way of depicting what’s going to happen, he draws a picture for you in his sermon and he says look, this is the way it is, imagine the rubble, just like an atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima and you remember the pictures of the rubble, just rubble for miles. Well imagine the rubble and here are two groups of people standing around looking down at the bricks and the slime and the broken bodies in the streets, and this is what they are saying, Moses says, “Wherefore hath the LORD done this unto this land? What means the heat of this great anger?”

Verse [25, “Then men shall say, Because they have forsaken the covenant of the LORD God of their fathers, which He made with them when He brought them forth out of the land of Egypt,” this covenant is the Mosaic Covenant, and I want you to notice something in verse 25, a principle about the working of God, a principle that is never violated, no matter how you choose, God is going to be glorified. Notice that these nations here in verse 24-25 are looking at judgment. What has happened? It’s a fore view of the time the nation Israel will go on negative volition toward God’s Word and they will result in judgment and they are looking at the debris of a physical catastrophe upon the nation. And when they look upon this, who gets the glory? What do they say here, “the LORD God of their fathers,” they broke His covenant. So who in the end always gets the glory? Who in the end always gets the last word? The Lord! Who in hell itself gets the glory? The Lord! The Lord gets the glory, “every knee shall bow,” every knee will bow to Jesus Christ in eternity. That’s not teaching universal salvation; that’s teaching the fact that every person in hell and in heaven will bow their knee to Jesus Christ. Some will bow voluntarily out of the spirit of worship because they’re believers; others will be forced to bow and that is what is going to make the Lake of Fire the Lake of Fire, that men will be forced to worship Him whom they have totally and completely rejected and they will be forced to bow down before the throne.

I was talking with some missionaries who had come back from Africa and one of them was telling me about an incident that happened, this missionary came back to this country and he had been involved with various demonic activities in Africa and he came back to the United States on furlough one time and when he got back here he said, isn’t it interesting, I see more demonic activity in the United States than I ever did in Africa, so he quite the mission field and came back here and started Christian counseling, a bigger mission field here than there was in Africa. And I agree with him, bring back our missionaries, we need them here. But he was telling me one incident that he remembered out there of how the witch doctor in this tribe was leading these natives, etc. obviously it was a demonic situation where he was demon possessed, and he got involved with a situation where there were some Christians in the village, about 15 or so of them and down the road a piece there was another village. The Christians had quite a healthy group of believers, young believers, didn’t have much of the Word of God but down in this village was this witch doctor and this witch doctor thought he was going to cause some trouble. The same thing in the book of Acts, you have these people that are demon possessed, they love to bring people into captivity to themselves and run their lives. And this witch doctor couldn’t stand to have these people liberated so he was going to send some of his troops up and mess them up. So they came up there and they led a demon possessed person, the head of this column, surrounded by these men, and picked out this woman who was demon possessed, and then they lined up on both sides of her, a line of these warriors, and they marched her right into that village and the objective was to see if they could get more people playing around with demons by bringing this demon possessed person in the village.

So the Christians didn’t know anything about it so all they did was they set up a roadblock and they began to pray. They didn’t know anything, they didn’t know what to do but they just prayed. And they asked the Lord to protect them and to stop this procession. And they no sooner got to within about 50 feet of this situation and this woman all of a sudden started screaming and going into a convulsion and she wouldn’t go, and these warriors started beating her up and said get going, get going, and she couldn’t because in front of her, evidently invisible to both the warriors and to the Christians an angel or some tall white figure standing there blocking her path. She saw that and it really created some problems. But he was pointing out the fact that in this situation you find these demonic powers very active but you find the Lord always answers the prayers of protection to the believer. So it’s a very interesting illustration that this man pointed out and I think this is another illustration of the fact that God always gets the glory.

Jesus Christ is always going to get the glory and here in verses 24-25 Jesus Christ is getting the glory, “LORD” refers to the preincarnate Christ, here we find God Himself as a result of His divine plan always gets glory. When we are disciplined He gets the glory, when we are blessed He gets the glory.

Verse 26, “For they went and served other gods, and worshiped them, gods whom they knew not, and whom H had not given unto them.” We have a lot in this verse about history, about rejection and about judgment. “They went and served other gods” tells you basically the reason the nation Israel went down. They broke the first commandment in verse 26, and it was an announcement that this first commandment is always broken before the others. It’s very interesting, when you think of the Ten Commandments, logically, you can’t break any one of the Ten Commandments without breaking the first one. The first one, logically, always goes first, so here in verse 26 “they worshiped other gods” is the root source and sin of Israel. They worshiped them, but then there are two phrases in verse 26 that you should fasten upon because this tells you a lot about these gods. The first thing about these gods is that they were not known, now isn’t this amazing. Remember I said that the Bible asks you to trust in God on the basis of facts. I’ve said again and again how the Gospels call you to faith in Jesus Christ, not as an emotional appeal but consider the facts… consider the facts. Consider the facts of the life of Jesus Christ and what’s your response. What’s your response to the facts? And when you study the facts you come to know Him. Believing in God and responding to Him is like responding to any other person. How do you know another person? How would you know any other person with whom you have a personal relationship? Just think for a moment. The only way you can know another person is to know their character. How are you going to know their character? By the way they reveal themselves. How do they reveal themselves? Another person reveals himself to you two ways; through what he says to you and through what he does in front of you. Those are the two ways you can read a person’s character.

Now if that’s the way to read a person’s character it means that before you can have any kind of a personal relationship with them, you must know them as people. One of the questions I got this morning was about premarital sex, what’s wrong with it, expecting me to give the usual pat answer and say it’s a no-no. I said it’s negative but not because it’s a no-no; the reason is that the Word of God tells you get hurt seriously by messing around and furthermore, the Word of God tells you cannot fall in love with a person in this fashion, it’s not a form of testing to find out whether you know them because nothing about the person is revealed in sex. In order to have a love relationship you’ve got to respond to the person’s character and that character can only be revealed by words and works. And people who play around promiscuously are cutting themselves off from the revelation of the character in the one whom they supposedly love. The more they fool around in promiscuity the more they cut themselves off from knowing the person as a person. They get to know a response but they don’t know the person; they’ve done exactly opposite to what they want to do. It’s ironic but they’ve done exactly the wrong thing because in so doing they’ve cut out the revelation of the character. You can only know a person through the words a person says to you and what the person does in history.

In a nutshell, this is why I believe in God. People ask me sometimes to defend your belief in God, how do you know God? I know Him just like I know anybody else, I know by what He tells me in the Word of God, testing it out for consistency and I know Him by what He has done in history, the resurrection, the cross, etc. It’s a very simple answer why I believe in God; it’s irrefutable basically, irrefutable. If you refute my system of knowing God I can refute your system of knowing anybody and then where are we? We’re left hanging in the air with nothing. So it’s either nothing or it’s God. So we know people by what they say and what they do.

In verse 26, it’s very interesting, but these are “gods whom they knew not.” Do you know why they knew them not? Because they couldn’t know them, there were no gods there, they were empty idols. Those gods couldn’t make themselves known to the people because there was no god there; there was just a stone statue there. A stone statue can’t reveal himself by words or by works. Therefore it’s saying, isn’t this funny, isn’t this hilarious, these people that rejected God who had spoken to them and done things for them, and then they turn around and worship these gods who can’t speak and can’t do anything. Isn’t that ridiculous! God gives you enough data and enough facts to trust Him; these stone statues give you absolutely nothing, in fact Isaiah gets very sarcastic; some of these prophets in the Old Testament are really a riot to read because they’re so sarcastic. Isaiah says ha-ha you Canaanites, here you sit worshiping your gods and you know what, your gods are so stupid and so idiotic and so weak that your craftsmen have to chain them to the wall to keep them from falling over, that’s a brilliant form of worship Isaiah says.

This is the irony of apostasy, always, people will reject God, they have all these deep intellectual arguments, oh, I have so much intellectual difficulty with the gospel, and then they go off into something that is absolutely ludicrous intellectually. So here we have the same thing in verse 26. They probably had intellectual difficulties with Yahweh, and yet they go and worship some statue and they can’t even communicate with him.

But then there’s another phrase that’s even more important and that’s the next one, “and whom he had not given unto them,” now this is a strange thing because the subject of this clause is God and look at that clause again and what is it saying? “Whom,” those are the gods, “whom gods God had not given unto them.” Do you know what he’s saying? He’s saying here you have God above and this God assigns gods to these peoples, and you say that’s a peculiar statement, why on earth is God, who doesn’t want men to worship anybody but Himself, assigning gods to people to worship; it sounds like God’s defeating His own purpose. Why is this going on? This is a peculiar way for God to be working in history. And yet here’s the strange thing about the Bible; it tells us that at one point in time, in Gen. 11, we had the nations all one. When these nations were all one they all worshiped evidently God from what they knew because they had come down from Noah. Noah survived with his family and came down from Noah’s generation down to the generation of Babel. Turn to Gen. 11.

As I study the Bible more and more I come to have a greater and greater appreciation for these early chapters of Genesis. You can’t build any doctrine of sex and marriage apart from a literal rendition of Gen. 2 and 3. If you reject the literalness of Gen. 2-3 I can prove to you that you have no doctrine whatever for marriage; none whatever. If you reject Gen. 11 you have no basis whatever for consideration of any political or social question under the sun, not a basis, not a shred if you do not accept Gen. 11 literally. Some of these Christians that always like to allegorize Gen. 1-11, I’m going to go out and buy some cheap paperback bibles and then I’m going to take an Exacto blade and I’m going to cut off the first 11 chapters and then I’m going to hand it to them, here, this is a Bible you’d obviously be more comfortable with, it starts at Gen. 12, and hand them to these people that can’t stand Gen. 1-11.

In Genesis 11 we have the situation, verse 1 where “the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.” Here we have the first United Nations building. The people in verse 2 go to the east and they say in verse 3, let’s get together now and build this big tall tower, we’re all brothers, the fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man, we’re all going to get together. So you have a movement toward world unity at this point. This is a very crucial point in history, and this is why fundamentalism is opposed to world government, it’s not because we just don’t like the color of the flag of the United Nations or something, we don’t like the shape of Rockefeller Plaza or something else, that’s not the point. The point is that in the philosophy of history this was tried one time and failed miserably and brought the world under the judgment of God and we don’t want it to happen again. That’s why we’re against one-world government. Here in verse 4 they build the first U.N. building, and they want the top to reach unto the heavens, an amazing thing.

Verse 5, “And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower,” to check in on this thing, and verse 6 is His analysis, “And the LORD said, Behold, the people are one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them.” So here we find the fact that God says look, the whole human race is one, racially, linguistically, culturally; now here is the danger: who is in charge of the world, basically? Satan, he’s the one that’s ruling. Now just suppose you have one-world government, here’s the dilemma, of course one-world government has the potential of peace, I don’t deny that. I don’t deny the argument that you could end war if you had one-world government; I’m not denying that but I’m saying look what you do? You jump from the frying pan into the fire; you wind up with something worse than you had before because now it’s true, you’ve got one-world government, everything is one, but look who gets in charge of the thing—Satan. He can manipulate, if you put all your eggs in one basket and he has the basket, what do you do then? You’ve no way to break out of the thing. You are setting the whole world up for a satanic takeover in a form which is absolutely horrifying and this is why God says in verse 6, “this they begin to do, and now nothing will be withheld from them, which they have imagined to do.” Do you see what He’s concerned with? Jesus Christ here is not being and old fogy, He’s not saying I don’t like this and I’m jealous of it, He’s simply saying this, that the human race is a race of sinful people; if you coagulate everything into one-world government, what’s going to control? Satan’s going to rule to the sin nature of man, you’re going to have one of the most horrible tyrannies of history. So God says what I’m going to do is fracture this thing.

It’s all broken up into pieces, so we have all these pieces and they’re all broken; this represents God’s fracturing of the tower of Babel, He breaks it up linguistically and geographically, etc. Why does God break it up; here you have the beginning of many cultures in the world. Now when this happens it’s like putting holes in a ship. Remember back in the days of the Titanic, when they first got the idea of putting holes in a ship and they said what we’ll do is put holes in the ship so that if there’s a whole in the bow, and there’s a hull, the hull fractures or something, the whole boat won’t go down, what will happen is just one compartment will flood, we can save the ship by confining the damage to one compartment. That’s the same thing as world government. God has fractured us culturally, separated us linguistically, so if one area of the world goes on negative volition, such as the Canaanites, that negative volition can be contained and not spread its putrid-ness over all the rest of the human race. So you confine it and then God can cancel that out by some local war or something like that, or some judgment. So world government has been declared null and void as of Gen. 11 and any attempt today to bring unity under man is a satanic attempt to undo the work of the Lord of Gen. 11. This is why no Christian… I don’t feel a person can be a consistent and Christian and back world government. I think you’re fighting the Word of God; I think you’re asking for judgment upon you, and I think you’re asking for the destruction of your own nation because you are fighting God’s clear declared will of history. And I say this even all the young children are getting this jazz, United Nations Day, and oh what a beautiful thing the United Nations is and all the rest of it. And if you are against the United Nations what right wing extremist are you? What right wing sewer did you come from? Well the point is we didn’t come from any right wing sewer; we came from the Word of God. You can all it right wing extremism if you want to, I don’t care, you can call me all the names you want to anyway but it’s the Word of God and the Word of God says that there will be no world government, period.

So what happened here? Here is where God evidently, as we will see later, assigned for each cultural piece a set of gods; these people had all rejected. Now under the principle of negative volition God says I judge you. What is one way God judges? Have you ever thought that God doesn’t have to judge you directly? God can judge you by allowing your sin nature to just take its normal course. God can judge a nation as He is our nation today by letting the wheels of history roll. He doesn’t have to supernaturally intervene; all He has to do is take His restraining hands off and let the caldron boil over. That’s all He has to do, and that’s all He does here. When He split these nations up we can deduce from the angelic doctrine that there was a council of angels began to assume administration for each one of these units of nations. Among these council of angels were good angels and bad angels and then you have these bad angels that began to have jurisdiction over them. We find this in ancient history, the Code of Hammurabi, for example, supposedly given to Hammurabi by a god; we know it wasn’t the Lord Jesus Christ that gave Hammurabi his code so by process of elimination it must have been a bad angel. So we have these codes given, actually supernaturally, in the ancient history, but they are given through the medianship of angels whom the ancients called gods. And the ancients began to worship. If you look on the ceiling of some buildings you see Hammurabi and then you see a picture, a personage of this angel and the angel is giving this thing to Hammurabi. You can see this in archeology. So I don’t believe that this is mythology; I believe that Hammurabi and these men actually did talk to gods and the gods they talked to were not just idols, they were actual fallen angels that gave these things to them.

My support for this is found in Deut. 4. In Deut. 4:19 we have a section that I passed over quickly when I first went over it that says the same thing as the verse in front of us. “And lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, that you should be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the LORD thy God has divided unto all nations under the whole heaven.” This expresses a judgmental decision on the part of God at the point of the tower of Babel in which He said all right people, if you want to go on negative signals, I’ll give you something to worship, I’ll give you these gods. And so He assigned gods to all these nations. The Babylonians had their set, Egypt had their set, and all the nations got a set of gods except one nation and that nation was Israel. And Israel was forbidden to worship any of these gods because God Himself picked Israel out to work with. But when He fractured the unity of the race and drove apart all these nations He gave them these gods.

Turn to Deut. 32:8, “When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of Adam, He set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel,” and there is a long extra-Biblical tradition which I won’t comment on too much that retranslates that last phrase when God separated the boundaries of the nations according to bena ha Elohim the sons of God, or the angels. So there’s a tradition down through history that God had a system, whether it was according to the sons of Israel or the sons of God we’ll find that when we get to Deut. 32. But we had this administration of all the nations under the angelic council, with one exception, and that was Israel. Israel was directly administered by God, through the angelic council, but the Lord Himself was the one that picked it out.

What does this mean basically, turning back to Deut. 29? It means that we as a Gentile nation, as all Gentile nations, are not God’s chosen people. There is only one political entity on earth that is God’s chosen people and that is Israel. No Gentile nation can claim this because the Gentiles, as of the moment of the tower of Babel judgment, have been put out of the program of God and have been turned over to these angelic forces. This is why in Daniel the angel has to go and fight with the king of Persia; it’s not a literal human king he’s talking about, it’s an angelic king. So we find that for the political entities of the Gentile nations over and above and working through them are these angelic dominions of government that are controlling history. The Gentile nations are under the wrath of God and they are expressed here when God says that you are not, Israel, to worship them, because I haven’t given you them; I have given them however, to the Gentile nations.

Verse 27, “And the anger of the LORD was kindled against this land, to bring upon it all the curses that are written in this book; [28] And the LORD rooted them out of their land in anger, and in wrath, [and in great indignation, and cast them into another land, as it is this day.]” speaking of the accomplishment of the five cycles of discipline. Remember from Lev. 26 that God had five degrees of discipline. He said I’m going to spank you once Israel and we’ll see what happens, and if you don’t behave then I’ll spank you seven times more, and that was step two. And if that doesn’t work I’ll spank you seven times more, that’s step three. If that doesn’t work I’ll spank you seven times more and by the time the fourth discipline would come the fourth degree of discipline, God said I will have total military occupation over your nation, you won’t have any political freedom left and by the time you get to the fifth cycle of discipline in Lev. 26 you have complete dispersion. That’s the Diaspora. So you have these five cycles of discipline or five degrees of discipline and when God says in verses 27-28, He’s saying when all of this has come to pass, when we’ve gotten out there under the fifth degree of discipline.

Then finally verse 29, Moses concludes his discussion of the negative decision by saying, “The secret things belong unto the LORD our God; but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.” Now the “secret things” here in context refer to the future councils of God. This refers to specifically, in context, to how God is going to bring this about in history. In other words, Moses already told them look, you play with fire you get burned; you mess around with Jehovah God and He’s going to discipline you. But don’t ask me now how He’s going to do it, I’m just telling you He’s going to do it. And when the time comes He’ll tell you how. Who in the Bible finally gave them the clue on how He was going to do it? The prophets, you see the prophets exposed the hidden things of God and when the time came for the judgment to occur God sent Isaiah and Jeremiah and said this is how this is going to be phased into history.

Now we can apply verse 29 to our own life, to our own day and say this: it is not true that the Bible gives me complete information about God. We’re not defending that. What we are saying is but what is given in the Bible is absolutely true and can never be annulled by future revelation. That’s the point. What I now know in the Bible is securely valid for all eternity. You never need fear some cult, some other religion coming in and saying oh, we just got a new set of revelation that’s going to invalidate the Bible. That is not true. Never, never in the progress of revelation… the next time probably God will open up the Canon again will be in the Tribulation when you have the living prophets. So you have live revelation there but we live in an age of silence since 70 AD or since about 100 AD there has been no revelation in history. You’ve had people that claim it, people that start up cults, you’ve had people doing all these weird things but you had no legitimate bona fide verbal revelation from God since about 100 AD and the death of the Apostle John. When John died he was the last man who lived in history to experience the process of divine revelation.

But the secret things which we do not yet know is fine, that belongs to the Lord, but those things which are revealed belong to us for our obedience. This verse should also stop you from engaging in the sin of occultism where you desire future things that God has not yet revealed. If God has not revealed it in His Word, you have no business trying to seek it through some spiritist, through some medium through some unauthorized area. God doesn’t play around. I throw that out as a warning, don’t tamper with God and play games. You respect what He has given to you in the Word and if it’s not in the Word you’re not going to know, except through the illumination ministry of the Holy Spirit in your life for small details. But as far as major truths you will not find it if it’s not in the Word of God.

That’s the end in verse 29 of the negative thing and we have a few remaining minutes so I want to deal with the first couple of verses in chapter 30 where Moses starts with the positive aspect. He says I’ve shown you what’s going to happen if you go on negative volition, now in 30:1ff here’s what’s going to happen if you go on positive volition toward the Word. We have in chapter 30 something that theologians call the Palestinian Covenant. The Palestinian Covenant is something that theologians refer to as an expansion of the Abrahamic Covenant. The Abrahamic Covenant said three things basically; it was found in Gen. 12, Gen. 15, etc. it gave them many things but three basic ones. First it promised that Israel would be a worldwide testimony to God. Secondly it promised them real estate; they had eternal title to a set of land. Then He promised them survival, that they would survive in history; these three basic things.

As you go down through the Old Testament each of these three provisions of that Abrahamic Covenant are expanded. The first provision, the real estate provision is expanded here, by the Palestinian Covenant. The Palestinian Covenant is an amplification of the real estate clause of the Abrahamic Covenant. It develops and expands it; it is an extension of the Abrahamic Covenant. The second thing is the survival clause of the Abrahamic Covenant is expanded by the Davidic Covenant of 2 Sam. 7 when God promised survival through the monarchy, etc. That’s the second expansion of the Abrahamic Covenant. The third expansion of the Abrahamic Covenant is found in the Jeremiah and the late prophets and it’s called the New Covenant when Israel will be the source of worldwide blessing to the world. But these three later covenants you want to connect with the Abrahamic Covenant, they are just expansions of it. And here we have the expansion of the real estate clause of the Abrahamic Covenant.

Let’s look at verses 1-3 quickly, “and it shall come to pass, when all these things are come upon thee, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before thee, and thou shalt return to your heart among all the nations, [call them to mind]” now let me explain this phrase, “thou shalt return your heart,” this means that you will cause the mentality of your soul to do an about face. “Return” means that these people who have picked up a human viewpoint situation in the mentality of their soul, they’ve filled up with this chaos of human viewpoint, etc. that they’ve absorbed in the culture, their minds will now turn from human viewpoint to divine viewpoint. The times when this occurred when, during the exile we had various prophets, Ezekiel was one, Daniel was another one, later on Zechariah, and these men, while they were in captivity, you might say post mortem, after the nation died in 586 BC these men got together and said well now look, the nation went down, let’s see if we can put together an analysis of history that will tell us why the nation collapsed. That analysis is in your Bible and it’s called the Book of Kings, 1 & 2 Kings represent the exilic analysis of the nation to find out why it went down. So in 586 when the nation Israel went down, after the blessings and cursings had fell upon it, for 70 years they sat in captivity.

In 516 BC they came back into the land, but only some of them. This was a partial restoration. The same cycle was repeated in 70 AD, just after the epistle to the Hebrews was written, the fifth cycle of discipline came once again upon the nation when Titus destroyed Jerusalem. When Titus destroyed Jerusalem you had a situation develop that the Jews went into the Diaspora which they are still in, in spite of what the Zionists would say. As far as God is concerned the Jews are out of the land and they will stay out of the land until Jesus Christ Himself calls them back. This is the Diaspora; to date the conditions of verse 1 and 2 have not been fulfilled by modern Israel, therefore the return to the land is not the direct will of God. Now obviously God is working behind the scenes to bring them back into the land to fulfill prophecy, but it’s not in the sense of His direct over-riding will.

For example, verse 2, look at these of prerequisites, first, “the blessing and the cursing, which I have set before thee,” and now when these things come to pass, “and you shall return your heart,” that means turn back to divine viewpoint, “when you’re among the nations to which the LORD thy God has driven thee,” verse 2, “Then you will return unto the LORD thy God, and shall obey His voice according to all that I command thee this day,” the “then” which occurs in verse 3 should really be in the first verb in verse 1, you see where it says “and it shall come to pass when all these things are come upon thee, the blessing and the cursing, which I have set before thee,” that first “and” is really the verb that sets off the predicted things that are going to happen, after all these things have happened then the following set of actions will occur. The first action is in verse 1, and the first action in verse 1 is “you shall return your heart among the nations,” so there will be repentance in the true Biblical sense of the Word; a repentance which means a return to divine viewpoint. Has that happened to the worldwide Jews in Diaspora? No.

Look at the next action, verse 2, You “will return unto the LORD thy God,” here you have through reconsideration in the mentality of their soul they now make a positive decision to return to the Lord, “and you will obey His voice,” this is the third action, this is another action and this means positive volition toward the Lord, the third action means obedience, they will seek God’s will for their life, “according to all that I command thee this day,” the Law will be the objective, “thou and thy children, with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, [3] …the LORD thy God will turn thy captivity,” notice who is doing it, not the Zionists, “the LORD thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and will return and gather thee from all the nations where the LORD thy God hath scattered thee.”

We know that a certain part of the nation Israel has to be in the land for prophecy to be fulfilled but the point we’re making to you is that that is the overruling will of God. The ones that are back there today are not back there in obedience to the Word of God. They are back there through just the sovereign working of God in history. But the return that is prophesied here is the same kind of return that occurred in 516 BC when you had a genuine Biblical back to the revival movement among the Jews in the Diaspora, they began to repent and then God called them back. Who was it that called them? God called them back, He was the one that verbally called them back. And so again after the rapture of the Church and we go through the seven years of the Tribulation Jesus Christ will call them back, it says He will whistle for them and they’re going to come. But it’s going to happen when there is first a fulfillment of the conditions of verses 1-3.

Please remember this because Christians that love Israel and I do, I’ve been involved in Jewish evangelism, etc. but you want to be careful that you don’t say that Zionism is the program of God in this age. That is not true; Zionism is a necessary prerequisite for the Second Advent but Zionism is Satan’s attempt to anticipate the movement of Jesus Christ in history. If you want a confirmation of this you can get it from a very strange source, because if you want confirmation of the satanic attempts of Zionism you have but to listen to the Orthodox Jews in the city of Jerusalem. The hyper Orthodox Jews that look forward to a literal Messiah refuse even to use the money of Israel today; they say this is polluted; there is no bona fide state of Israel until Messiah come again and they are absolutely right… absolutely right! The modern state of Israel is legitimate as far as the nations are concerned but it does not represent the direct will of God in fulfillment of this prophecy. The nation will come back in unbelief but not totally; the complete and total return of the nation occurs at the Second Advent of Christ and that is the direct will of God because it’s by grace, it’s not by politics and not by human money and things behind the scene.

I just want to clarify the record, when we are premillennial it doesn’t mean that we say that everything the Jews do are automatically because they’re Jews is the will of God. This is not a blanket approval of everything the Jews of Israel do. We just say this, that as far as Bible prophecy is concerned, the nation Israel will win out, that we know, but we’re not saying that the winning out is in the direct will of God. You say isn’t this a paradox? Not at all, was it or was it not God’s direct will for Jesus Christ to go to the cross? It wasn’t good for Jesus Christ but it was His direct will. It was absolutely certain that He would go to the cross, but you couldn’t say that well, when Jesus offered the Kingdom in His day that it was a phony offer. Jesus came and He said I offer you the Kingdom, it was a genuine offer, and yet it was absolutely certain they’d reject it; absolutely certain, but Jesus went ahead and did it anyway. There are certain things that are sure to happen in history that are not in the direct will of God and you have to be careful and distinguish the issues here.

Verse 3, “The LORD thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee,” please notice that He can’t have compassion until the first set of actions occur, and notice the sequence. First, there is repentance, there is a consideration in the frontal lobe of Bible doctrine; there’s a return to Bible doctrine first, before there’s an outward behavioral change. We see this principle again and again, Bible doctrine first, then a volitional decision, then thirdly the outworking into the behavior. You must follow that, you can’t slam, bang people over the head and expect them to behave a certain way when they have human viewpoint. We have to, that’s the role of government, to insure that people will behave a certain way, but my point is you can’t get voluntary obedience to the law until you change the way people think. So here’s the same thing, God is not going to do what He does in verse 3, having compassion upon them, pouring out His grace upon them, until certain conditions are met and those conditions are return to divine viewpoint and a positive choosing for divine viewpoint over and against human viewpoint.

Next time we’ll finish chapter 30 and develop premillennialism and we will develop the doctrine of inspiration from verses 11-14.