Lesson 73
Closing Challenge – 30:19-31:6
Turn to Deuteronomy. The percent
of the population that is open to the gospel as it used to be presented in a
straightforward fashion, presuming the person to whom you spoke understood
G-o-d, s-i-n, and a few other words; this is no longer valid and now
when we find in presenting Christ we practically have to begin at 2 + 2 = 4,
you have to go back further, on back down the line and the techniques for doing
this are being worked out today in some of these other areas. We are facing a
totally new missionary situation and people that are worried about sending missionaries
out to the hotten-tots some place ought to adjust their vision a little bit
because sooner or later Texas Tech is going to become one of the most difficult
missionary fields that we could ever possibly be faced with. So I’m just reminding you that missionary
activity is very much in a state of flux and change as far as we as a nation
are concerned and particularly on the college campus because of the changing
intellectual climate that’s coming in more and more. Christians can sit around and fiddle around
with all the rest of the nonsense that goes on in fundamental circles and not
get digging down deep in the Word of God so that their mentality is saturated
with the divine viewpoint framework.
It’s necessary to right now begin to dig; we are training the teenagers
how to become independent students of the Word of God. The time may come when that’s all they are
going to have, is what they can get on their own and this may go for other
believers. This is a war we’re in and we
might as well play it like it is a war and stop playing games.
Deut. 30, once again we come to the last portion of this section. We began in chapter 1; verses 1-5 are the
preamble. In chapter 1-4 is the
historical prologue; from chapter 5-26 are the stipulations; chapters 27-30
deal with the procedures of ratification, how to ratify the covenant; chapters
31-34 deal with the continuity of this covenant. The overall outline to this book is no
accident. This book is a very interesting book as far as the Bible is concerned
because the format or the outline of this book corresponds to what we now know
of the suzerainty vassal treaties of the Ancient Near East, which means that
this book is what we have always said it was, namely a treaty between God and
the nation Israel. You have Jehovah or
He is known technically in Scripture as Yahweh, making a treaty with the twelve
tribes and the format of this treaty or the legal document that bound Him to
these twelve tribes is in exactly the same form as the legal treaties of that second
millennia BC.
We now come to the last portion of this treaty and here we have the
closing verses on the invitation. In
chapters 29-30 we’ve been dealing with Moses’ final challenge to the nation and
here he gives a true Biblical invitation, not like a lot of invitations that
you are used to hearing. The invitation
that Moses gives is different from what you are used to hearing in traditional
churches because it deals with facts and not emotions. Moses’ invitation is based on historical
facts and he says you can take it or leave it but this is the factual basis on
which you have to make a decision. Moses
did not arm-twist, he did not produce a mass of psychological conversions
through pressure, he produced genuine spiritual conversions because he appealed
to a factual basis on which people could trust.
And he comes to the last part, verses 19-20 when he makes the statement,
“I call heaven and earth to record this day against you,” last time we closed
with an explanation of what it means to call heaven and earth against
them. The suzerainty vassal treaties
were legal documents; if you have a legal document that legal document is no
good unless that legal document can be enforced by a legally constituted
authority. If you have the doctrine that
binds Jehovah to the nation, who is going to be your jury, who is going to be
the judge, who are going to be the legal administrators to the treaty. The legal administrators of the Old Testament
treaties are the angels, and this is included in this expression “I call heaven
and earth to witness against you today,” the angelic council that we studied,
Deut. 4; Acts 7; Gal. 3; Heb. 2; Dan. 10, those passages dealing with the
angelic council as the administers of this treaty.
Then he continues verse 19, “that I have set before you life and death,
blessing and cursing,” and I believe we left there. Now at the end of verse 19 we pick up the
sentence, “therefore, choose life that both you and your seed may live.” In other words, the future generations of
this nation depended upon the decisions made by the generation in Moses’
day. Here you have Moses’ generation,
here you have Joshua’s generation, here you have the generation of the judges
and all these future generations are set up and determined in history by what
the previous generation has left them spiritually. The
That was one generation and the next generation, you might say,
inherited the benefits that were caused by the previous generation’s
spirituality. This goes on and has been
going on in a deteriorating gradual decline in our nation from about 1750 on
down until it hit rock bottom about 1930-1940 in this country with the
fundamentalist/modernist controversy. So
we do not really inherit much from our previous generation spiritually. Therefore it behooves us in our generation,
we have to build all over, it doesn’t do any good to try to reconstruct a
building that’s cracked, that’s twisted, knocked half way off it’s foundations,
and it’s the same thing spiritually in our generation. We essentially have to go right back to the
roots and not try to patch up things, not try to go back and try to save the
National Council and all the rest of the things that Christians are trying to
do today. Let the National Council rot,
and let the World Council of Churches rot and that would be the best thing,
treat them just like rubble, they should be bulldozed out in the field and left
there; don’t fiddle with them, you’re wasting your time. In our generation we have to start all over.
Moses dealt with a generation that inherited nothing and so he said
therefore in verse 19 that you, this generation is going to have to choose and
this generation is going to have to choose not only for itself but is going to
have to bring down upon its own head the responsibility for its own spirituality
and the spirituality of future generations. But he doesn’t stop there, verse 20
is a purpose clause and verse 20 gives a fantastic picture of the national
history of the nation Israel. “That you
may love the LORD thy God, and that you
may obey His voice, and that you may cleave unto Him; for He is thy life, and
the length of thy days,” the purpose, then, of the positive decision to accept
this covenant nationally was that they may love the Lord thy God. Remember love in verse 20 is not the
sentimental type of love; this is the love that was used in the legal documents
of the Ancient Near East for the suzerain and the vassal. When the vassal king
said to Pharaoh, I love you, he wasn’t thinking about going out in a chariot on
a date with him; he was thinking in terms of loyalty politically to the
Pharaoh, and he would say I pledge my loyalty to you, or I pledge my love. The
two words were interchangeable. In fact,
we have one word in the Hebrew that’s translated in you King James as love and
it really means loyal love; the two are all wrapped up in one word, it’s chesed.
So we have in verse 20 a political loyalty, “that thou mayest love” or
adhere “the LORD thy God, and that thou mayest obey His voice, and that thou
mayest cleave unto Him,” obeying His voice means following the Word of God,
“for He is thy life,” this causal clause that begins with the word “for” is an
explanation of why it is that they are to obey the Word of God, “for He is your
life,” please notice this “your” is not an individual, this “your” here is the
nation. Those of you who have King
James, there is one benefit to the King James, when it came to the second
person you can tell in the King James text whether it’s singular or plural. If it’s singular it’s “thy,” if it’s plural
it’s “ye” or “you,” usually. So when you
see “thy” then it’s singular and therefore it’s a collective concept here and
this refers to the singular nation.
“…and thou mayest cleave unto Him; for He is thy life,” nationally He is
thy life, “and the length of thy days,” nationally. Now the word “life” is an abstract plural
noun in the Hebrew, chayim, and when
you have the “im” ending it’s always plural in the Hebrew. You say what’s plural about life? Plurality in this noun for live evidently
refers to the moment of time, in other words here you have the moment of time,
each moment becomes a present, then the next moment I jump to here, the next
moment I jump to here and the Hebrews looked upon life as a series of moments,
therefore the very word for life was plural, it was a collective plural noun
and referred to life as a sum or a pile of parts and the parts are these
individual moments showing that life must be lived moment by moment and you
can’t live in the past and you can’t live in the future; you can only live in
the present. You can think about the
past and worry about the past and fret about the past but you can’t change the
past. Actually there’s only one thing
you can do about the past and that is to receive God’s grace for the past that
it might be erased spiritually. But
there’s nothing under the sun you can possibly do to eradicate your past
actions. It’s an irreversible reaction
that’s going on moment by moment by moment and you can’t erase your past. There’s no way of getting away from it except
through God’s plan of salvation. So the
past is erasable only in grace. You can
dream about the future but if you tend to live in the future too much then they
call for the men in the white coats.
Most normal people live in the present; you live then and this is why
the Jews had this plural word for “life,” the succession of present moments,
moment by moment He is thy life.
Now what does it mean that God is the life? Well, he’s drawing an
analogy here between the body and the spirit and the nation and God. We’ll see how Ezekiel picks this analogy of
Moses up later on. You have the body
prepared, Adam’s material physical body was prepared in the Garden of Eden and
into that material body God breathed the spirit of life. We don’t know exactly how it happened, all
we’re to say is that in a moment of time had you been standing there with your
stop watch and a camera you could have recorded it physically, in the Garden,
that’s not a story. That’s an eyewitness
account of what went on. So Adam, then,
became living as of the moment that his human spirit hit his body, he became,
produced a soul. That’s the way a soul
is produced, it’s produced by the union of a spirit in the body together make a
soul. So Adam became living, it says, at the moment that the spirit entered
into the body.
Now it’s the same thing here, in 1400 BC entered this nation; He had
built up this nation just like He had build up Adam’s body. He built Adam’s body out of the clay, out of
the dust of the earth and He built up the nation Israel out of a family coming
from Jacob, known also in Israel as Israel.
That was Jacob’s name, Israel.
And Jacob had twelve sons and so therefore out of this maturing them
carefully in the heat and the fire of servitude in Egypt, God brought into
existence physically a nation, but it wasn’t His nation until in addition to
just the population you had God Himself working with that society. So you had the physical elements of the
society, the body you might say, and added to the body was God’s spirit, and He
says now I am your life, Israel, and I depart from you you’re going to be
deader than a doornail, just like when we die God removes the human spirit and
the body decays immediately. So it’s this analogy that’s kept up.
You can see this by the way this business of the national life caused by
the presence of God in Israel is said to be true again and again in this
book. Turn to Deut. 1:10; you will see
after going through these passages why it is necessary to be a
premillennialist, i.e. one who believes in a future millennium as the only way
to solve world social problems. “The
LORD your God has multiplied you and, behold, ye are this day as the stars of
heaven for multitude.” In other words,
it was a supernatural generation of the material elements of that society, God
did this. In 1:21, “Behold, the LORD thy
God has set the land before thee, Go up and possess it, as the LORD God of thy
fathers has said unto thee; fear not, neither be discouraged.” Here you have the emphasis and God creating
the physical nation. 1:30, “The LORD
your God, who goes before you, He shall fight for you, according to all that He
did for you in Egypt before your eyes,” and there you have the presence of God
there at the moment, that we’re going to see as we go in the book of Joshua
later on, the conflict, etc. that can only come about victoriously for Israel
if God is there.
Deut. 2:7, “For the LORD thy God has blessed thee in all the works of
thy hand: He knows thy walking through this great wilderness. These forty years the LORD thy God has been
with thee; thou hast lacked nothing.”
Socially, materially, physically this nation lacked nothing. Please don’t allegorize this Scripture, this is
not allegorical interpretation, you take it literally, just as the people then
would have taken it. They’re not talking
about some ethereal blessing up there where they all got behind the nearest
sand dune and contemplated their navel all their life. This is not the kind of spirituality that’s
mentioned in the Old Testament. What is
mentioned here is real, physical things that happened.
Deut. 4:32 and you see the same thing summarized, “For ask now of the
days that are past, which were before thee, since the day that God created man
upon the earth, and ask from the one side of heaven unto the other, whether
there has been any such thing as this great thing is, or has been heard like
it? [33] Did ever people hear the voice of God speaking out of the midst of the
fire, as thou hast heard, and live? [34] Or has God ventured to go and take Him
a nation from the midst of another nation, by testings, by signs, and by
wonders, and by war, and by a mighty hand, and by an outstretched arm, and by
great terrors, according to all the LORD
your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes?” See, here’s the historical base for
Christianity; people always dump the Old Testament. Good night, if you dump the Old Testament you
lose all the control you have over history.
And here you have the whole basis that God supernaturally worked with an
entire society.
Now I’ve given you so far how He brought this society into being. Remember this phrase, it should be in the
back of your mind, “Yahweh is the life of the nation,” Yahweh is responsible
for bringing into existence.
We have passages in Ezekiel that show you the death of the
theocracy. One of the things that
Ezekiel has to watch for again and again is that Ezekiel was the prophet of
doom; he watched his nation destroyed.
He was like Jeremiah, he was a man that stood by and watched and was
given the privilege, actually, by God to watch the mechanics of the destruction
of the nation. Jeremiah and these other
prophets stood there and watched the armies march in and just destroy
everything. You should have seen from
the historical accounts what the Babylonians did to the city of Jerusalem when
they got through with it; you wouldn’t even know it was there, they even
disposed of the rubble. And the people
that were left they took them out and the people that were too young to march
across the desert he lined them up and slaughtered them and this is what the
crying and the screaming is called, and why in the Gospels it says when the
babies were killed, Herod killed all the babies and they say a scream has gone
out from Ramah, well the reason why that’s there is because that prophetically
refers back to the time where Nebuchadnezzar lined all the people up for
marches, like the Communists do, and the people that were too weak to march,
they just slaughtered them, people that were too old to march they slaughtered
them and left the people in the middle and marched them across the Saudi
Arabian Peninsula, back over to the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. So you have a tremendous thing here that
these other prophets saw physically.
But Ezekiel was different.
Ezekiel was the first man to really write what we call apocalyptic
literature. Apocalyptic literature is when the author gets his visions directly
from God and it is not mediated. In
other words, when he writes down here he is writing things that he actually
sees in the presence of God. Ezekiel has
been taken by the Holy Spirit over to watch the termination of the life of the
nation. Just as the spirit leaves the
body at death, so God’s Holy Spirit left the nation, His presence left the
nation and in Ezekiel 9 you begin to have the sequence.
Ezek. 9:3, “And the glory of the God of Israel was gone up from the
cherub, upon which he was, to the threshold of the house.” Now what he’s describing here is the Temple; the
Temple, from what we know, Solomon copying off of the tabernacle looked like
this. It had a Holy of Holies, and it
had a holy place, in here was the ark of the covenant, on top of the ark of the
covenant was a very strange thing, what they called a mercy seat; actually a
layer of beaten out gold where the high priest would come in there once a year
to splatter blood on the thing. This is
not slaughter house religion, it’s simply the fact that Judaism and Christianity
alone, among all the worlds religions, recognize that man’s sin exists and that
this sin must be solved in some way, not by man’s human efforts but by God’s
divine efforts which we call grace. So
this high priest had to go in there and there were two cherubim on top of that
thing; we don’t know what cherubim look like, the latest findings are that they
probably looked somewhat like the sphinx but whatever these cherubs looked like
they were guardians or statute of the real cherubs that guard the holiness of
God that are surrounding His throne in these visions. Between these two cherubs dwelt this cloud;
we call that cloud the Shekinah glory, it was a physical manifestation of the
presence of God. And in that Holy of
Holies is where God’s presence dwelt.
But in Ezek. 9:3 the Shekinah glory is leaving the nation and this is a
sign that the nation is going to die, not in a permanent sense but right this
moment God is withdrawing His Spirit from the nation. “The glory of the God of Israel was gone up
from the cherub, upon which he was, to the threshold of the house. And he called to the man clothed with linen,”
etc. so you have the first movement of this.
Now in Ezek. 10:4 you have the next jump of the glory of the Lord. “Then the glory of the LORD went up from the
cherub, and stood over the threshold of the house; and the house was filled
with the cloud, and the court was full of the brightness of the LORD’s glory.”
See, the brightness was usually confined to this inner sanctuary, this Holy of
Holies. Now it’s moved out here and the
glory is shining out over the court.
That’s what Ezekiel sees in 10:4.
In Ezek. 11:22 you have the final departure of the glory of the
Lord. “Then did the cherubim lift up
their wings, and the wheels beside them; and the glory of the God of Israel was
over them above. [23] And the glory of the LORD went up from the midst of the
city, and stood upon the mountain which is on the east side of the city.” And that was the end of it and in 586 BC
Israel died spiritually. After this time
you have the times of the Gentiles that begin in 586 BC. Israel still survived, doctrine of the
Abrahamic Covenant, but from this point on you have Gentiles that have been
given free reign to rule over Israel all through history until Jesus Christ
returns. Example: at the time of Jesus
Christ what power ruled in Palestine?
The Romans. Before them who ruled?
The Greeks. Before them who
ruled? The Medo-Persian Empire. Before
them who ruled? The Neo-Babylonians. So
you had four great Gentile empires.
These Gentile empires in the future course of history were dealt with by
Ezekiel and Daniel; these were the exilic prophets, these men predicted after
the spiritual death and decline of the nation so that although that nation
would still exist, and although the nation might come back partially into the
land, Israel could never rule again.
They could rule independent, like she is today, but don’t ever forget
Zionism is of Satan and has nothing whatever to do with the Word of God. Zionism is Satan’s attempt to bring back
Israel into the land before the Lord Jesus Christ returns to call them back
under His authorization. So although we know of course prophetically Israel has
to be in the land before prophecies are fulfilled, it’s not God’s direct will
for Zionism to occur.
So we have in Ezekiel the death of this nation but later on Ezekiel,
these men, although they always prophesied of doom, they were not total
pessimists, because God in the end always said but Israel, because of My
promises I will again restore you. So in Ezekiel you have that famous vision of
dry bones, Ezekiel 37. I realize that a
few popular song writers have picked this thing up and used it but just for
your own edification that you, when you hear these crazy songs, you might
realize where all the bones came from, they came from Ezekiel 37. And in Ezek. 37 Ezekiel was given a vision of
what the nation looked like to God and the in breathing of the future
Millennial Kingdom.
Ezek. 37:1, “The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the
Spirit of the LORD,” I always get a thrill out of this, is just looks like the
Lord grabbed him by the nap of the neck and picked him up, “The hand of the
LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the Spirit of the LORD, and set me down
in the middle of the valley which was full of bones, [2] And caused me to pass
by them round about; and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and
lo, they were very dry. [3] And he said
unto me, Son of man, can these bones life?
And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest. [4] Again he said unto me,
Prophesy upon these bones: and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of
the LORD. [5] Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones, Behold, I will cause
breath,” that’s spirit, in the Hebrew the word nephesh, the word ruach here
is the word for “spirit,” “I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall
live. [6] And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and
cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall
know that I am the LORD. [7] So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I
prophesied, there was a noise and, behold, a shaking, and the bones came
together, bone to its bone.” This would
be a fantastic picture for Cecil DeMille, to make a motion picture of this
thing. You can just see this guy there
and the Lord just says you just go ahead and prophesy to these bones, and he
says are you really serious. And the
minute the goes ahead and prophesies all of a sudden there’s a rumble and these
bones start moving around. And in verse
7 there was a noise, a shaking, and the bones came together.
Verse 8, “And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came upon
them, and the skin covered them above, but there was no breath in them. [9]
Then said He unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to
the wind, Thus saith the Lord God: Come fro the four winds, O breath, and
breathe upon these slain, that they may live. [10] So I prophesied as He
commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood upon
their feet, an exceedingly great army.
[11] Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house
of Israel; behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost; we are
cut off on our part. [12] Therefore, prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the
Lord God: Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come
up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. [13] And ye shall
know that I am the LORD, when I have opened your graves, O My people, and brought
you up out of your graves,” Zionism has opened no graves, [14] “And shall put
My Spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land;
then shall ye know that I, the LORD, have spoken it, and performed it, saith
the LORD.”
So you have a resurgence of the nation Israel and this resurgence of the
nation brought about divinely by God’s in-breathing Spirit is a prophecy that
will eventually, of course, result in the mechanics for the millennium. But it’s this, when the Spirit of God comes
back into the nation, we in our generation and for every generation back to 586
BC, as far as all of us Gentiles are concerned, and as far as any Jewish people
are concerned, we have never seen history in a normal sense. History in a normal sense means that the
nation Israel is the guardian nation in which God’s Spirit dwells, and this
means that Israel leads, not because of how great she is. That’s not the point;
the point is that God works through her and it means that God doesn’t tolerate…
He’s strict with her and He doesn’t tolerate many things. But the point still remains that we in our
generation have not seen normal history.
In fact no generation in the past 20 centuries has really seen normal
history, straightforward history. So
Ezekiel is prophesying the reverse, when God’s Spirit comes back to
indwell.
Now what’s the conclusion of this Ezekiel passage and this whole point
about God is your life, so God is your life of Deut. 30:20? “God is your life” means that the nation
Israel can only prosper when God’s Spirit directly works with nation. Since we know that God’s Spirit does not work
directly with national entities today, never has and never will, because
there’s only one national entity that God will ever work with and that is
Israel, since we know this and since we know that no Gentile nation is
selected, then we know who is it that is the spirit behind the principalities
and the powers that control Gentile history. We know, therefore, that these
principalities are satanic in origin and why it is that culturally we face a
darkness, you can’t see the darkness physically but if you try to share Jesus
Christ with people, if you try to communicate the Word of God to people, if you
examine Christians, if you talk to Christians that are having problems, you
know the darkness is there. The darkness
is all around, the darkness is in this room, and that darkness can only be
removed by the Holy Spirit. So the
darkness that rules today is the darkness of Satan and the spiritual forces are
basically satanic.
Let’s go to Deut. 31 and we will briefly introduce the last section of
this book. Chapters 31-34 deal with the
last phase of this book, provisions for the continuity of this treaty. In chapters 31-32 we have the final charges,
both by Moses to the nation and by the Lord to the nation. The nation had to memorize chapter 32 so if
you think you’d like to memorize a section of Scripture, every person in Israel
had to memorize Deut. 32; it’s a song, probably sung to some tune. The Bible has hymns, we’ve got hundreds of
fantastic hymns just sitting there in the text, waiting for someone with
musical skill to take these words, you don’t even have to write lyrics, they’re
all there, to take these lyrics and set them to music that would really be
honoring to the Lord Jesus Christ.
In chapter 31 Moses gives his charge to the people. In verses 1-6 it’s his charge to the people
as a whole; in verses 7-8 is Moses’ charge to Joshua; verses 9-13 is Moses’
charge to the priests. Moses is going to
drop dead when he finishes this sermon.
“And Moses went and spoke these words unto all Israel. [2] And he said
unto them, I am an hundred and twenty years old this day,” and you say no man
can live to be 120 or this is just a freak out, something like that. No, if you study the genealogies of God’s
word carefully you will see a consistent curve; you can do this on a piece of
graph paper, test it in any way you want to but go to Gen. 5 and 11 and then
pick out the ages of the people in the text between these and you’ll get a
curve that looks like this; to the flood, after the flood you get a decay curve
that looks like this. This represents a
real decay. Incidentally, here it was 930
years, so if you didn’t like somebody you had to sit around for nine centuries
until they dropped dead, at least today you only have 50 years and you’re rid
of the person or something. But imagine
getting married to the wrong person for 930 years. The age had declined by Moses day to 120
years, he’d be right about here on the graph, around 1400 BC.
He says “I am an hundred and twenty years old this day; I can no more go
out and come in.” This “go out and come
in” is just a Hebrew idiom for activity of life, so don’t get too literal about
this, this just meant… incidentally in Deut. 6 where it says that you will
teach your children in terms of the Word of God, when you go out and when you
come in, it means all the activities of life.
“Also the LORD hath said unto me, Thou shalt not go over this
Jordan.” In other words, God had
prohibited Moses from going into the Promised Land and here we have probably
the most pathetic examples in the Old Testament of a man who obeyed the Lord,
who had fantastic responsibility put upon his shoulders who goofed once, only
once, and that was enough to exclude him from the privileges of the land. You say that’s unfair discipline; it may be
from our viewpoint but from the Lord’s viewpoint it wasn’t. It happened this way: when they brought the
people out from Egypt, they went down to Mt. Horeb and they picked up the Ten
Commandments and then they were to move directly northward and invade from the
south. It was a southern penetration
into the land.
Well, they got up here to a place called Kadesh-barnea and they hit the
panic button because they sent a few spies into the land and these guys came
back with their eyes on circumstances and their eyes on all sorts of things
except on the Lord and they came back and they whined, cry-babied around and
said oh, it’s just so terrible, and all the circumstances of life are so bad
and we’ve got all these problems and all the rest of it, and these whiners and
crybabies came back and got everybody else whining and there were two people,
Caleb and Joshua, who gave them the straight facts, they said sure there are
problems over there, but we have seen the Lord operate with Pharaoh and He
knocked Pharaoh out so He certainly can knock these people out, they aren’t
half as strong as Pharaoh so we don’t see too much of a problem for God’s
grace. The rest of these people, it
always happens, word went out through the camp, oh we can’t do this, and oh we
ought to have a prayer meeting for Moses, etc. and all the rest of it, and poor
Caleb and Joshua, they’re just going out on a limb. So they get everybody in hysterics and
finally they just fell apart and panicked and were unable to go forward in the
southern penetration tactic that the Lord had advised to penetrate the
land. At this time the Lord had just
about had it, but earlier, before this had happened, this was apparently, what
looks like in the text, that set them off to the 40 years in the
wilderness.
But earlier than there was an incident that happened at the base of Mt.
Horeb that’s tied to this and that was when Moses was up on the mountain and he
was getting the verbal revelation in prepositional form from God, when God was
speaking to him verbally, none of this business about Moses went up there and
contemplated infinity and clouds came down, it got foggy, visibility went to
zero and he couldn’t think of anything else to do so he sat there and dreamed
up some laws. That’s not the way it
happened. God verbally and literally
spoke to Moses; in fact He spoke the Ten Commandments so loud that three
million people heard him and they said turn down the volume Moses, you go up
there and take care of it. So God
literally spoke.
Well Moses went up there and before he could get things straightened out
he had his brother down below; Brother Aaron and Aaron was another kind of a
weak individual and he decided his brother had gone up on the mountain and
there was nothing much left for him to do, so he had a party. They came to him
and said you know, when we were back over in Egypt we found it was very
psychologically beneficial to worship the calf, actually the golden bull, the
bull-god of Egypt. And they said how
about setting up this god down here and we’ll just worship the bull. Aaron didn’t know what to do and finally he
said well, I guess we’d better do it, keep peace in the family and he had
everybody bring their gold and he made this bull and started worshiping this
bull. Now this was direct apostasy,
violation of the first commandment; Moses came down and broke the
covenant. Most of you see these pictures
in Bible stories of Moses holding the tablet up like this and it looks he’s
going to bring them down on Aaron’s head.
Undoubtedly Moses felt like doing that but the significance of him
breaking these tablets wasn’t that he wanted to crown his brother; the significance
of breaking those tablets was this was always done in a ceremony in the ancient
east when a treaty was broken. The
suzerain would send men in, they’d grab the tablet or the treaty and they’d
just smash it in front of the people, signifying that the covenant had been
broken. That’s the significance of the breaking of that thing.
So Moses broke the covenant after this thing, of course Aaron was
sitting around and Moses said, say Aaron, what was the story back here, I
thought I’d left you in charge. And
Aaron said yeah, but you know Moses, the trouble was all these people brought
this gold and we put it in the fire and you know, this bull just happened to
pop right out. That’s what he said, it
just popped right out, couldn’t help it Moses, just somehow put the gold there
and this is what happened; things have been happening strange around here, you
know what happened at the Red Sea, well now we’ve got a bull popping up out of
the fire. This was his excuse; Moses didn’t take it. But Moses was a man of grace and Moses
high-tailed it back up the mountain and said look God, I realize that legally
the treaty is over; this treaty is broken, we haven’t even got off the ground
and the whole thing is permanently grounded.
So therefore Moses did something that was fantastic. God said listen Moses, I’ll make a deal with
you, I can start another nation from you, you don’t have to worry about it,
we’ll just work from you and forget these other people, I’ll just kill them, have
an earthquake or something, get rid of them.
But Moses was a man of grace and even though he couldn’t stand these
people and even though it meant as a result of this prayer that he prayed that
he would have to put up with their malarkey for 37 years, Moses prayed that God
would forgive that nation. Moses acting
in the place of Christ as the intercessor and he made intercession for them and
the nation was saved so that they went up to Kadesh-barnea and fouled up,
etc. But they went around this
wilderness for 40 years, the number of testing, and all during that time Moses
was probably saying to himself, Lord, why did I ever ask You to forgive this
nation, because all he got for 40 years was static, static, static, static.
Well, finally he had all he could do and they came back to a place where
there was no water. They had been there
40 years before, God had supplied their need and so they go to this point and
they said oh, we don’t have any water, something new and different; God had
always supplied their need. God had supplied their need perfectly for 37 years
and it was just a matter that the water was delayed and they were just going to
have to wait on the Lord for the water.
And so they came, sending a little committee up to Moses, Moses we don’t
have any water and all the rest of it. And so Moses finally got mad and hit the
rock twice. He hit the rock the second
time and that was the signal for his discipline, and when God saw that He said
Moses, you have just excluded yourself from the land, and Moses was sidetracked
from then on and that meant that Joshua would then have to take over to lead
them in. Now this the story behind Deut.
31 and this verse, that God said “thou shalt not go over this Jordan.”
Verse 3, “The LORD thy God, He will go over before thee, and He will
destroy these nations from before thee, and thou shalt possess them; and
Joshua,” here’s Moses designating the next leader, “Joshua, he shall go over
before thee, as the LORD hath said. [4] And the LORD shall do unto them as He
did to Sihon and to Og, kings of the Amorites, and unto the land of them, whom
He destroyed.” Now what God has done as
He always did in this generation, because remember when God begins a plan in
history, He always shot-guns the miracles.
In other words, if you chart a frequency graph throughout the Bible of
miracles you do not get an even frequency.
You get scatters like this, where it peaks. You have basically three peaks of miracles in
the Bible; Moses’ era; Elijah’s era with the collapse of the kingdom and then
you have the New Testament with Jesus and the apostles. You have three peaks; miracles are not
continuous in the Bible. They peak
out. Well, the signal for these clusters
of miracles is when God is going to do something new, so what He did here was
when these people started coming up, instead of the southern penetration they
were going to try an eastward penetration and under Joshua they were going to
move in this way. Incidentally, that
same track is militarily important and this is why the defense force of Israel
today took in the Six Day War and made sure that they had secured the Jordan
Valley. Israel is very sensitive to this
area militarily because ever since Biblical times this was how that land was
conquered. You’d drive your military
force quickly across here, split it and then you can go to the north and to the
south.
So you have this eastward penetration, but on the way they had to
eliminate two kings. The reason for
eliminating these two kings, Og and Sihon, was to be a demonstration of God’s
power and His grace, in that that generation was to actually see before their
eyes, before the death of Moses, that God could do it. He was to provide empirical evidence of His
grace, that God was able to perform this.
So when Moses says here in verse 3 that God’s going to go before him, he
appeals to empirical evidence. He
doesn’t say oh, we can just sit here and hypnotize yourself that God can do it,
God can do it, God can do it, God can do it, and sooner or later you think God
can do it. That’s self-hypnosis and that
is not Scripture. Scripture is based on empirical facts and as God did it then,
so He can do it now; the argument is simple, what God did in the past God can
to today. [Verse 5, “And the LORD shall
give them up before your face, that ye may do unto them according unto all the
commandments which I have commanded you.”]
Verse 6, the mental attitude of these people, “Be strong and of good
courage, fear not, nor be afraid of them; for the LORD thy God, he it is who
doth go with thee; he will not fail thee; nor forsake thee.” Now this sequence of words, “fear not,
neither be afraid of them,” is used again and again; we’re going to see this in
the book of Joshua. It occurs again as
the commission of Joshua, “Be strong and of good courage” means to place your
trust in the Word of God; “fear not” is the verb of respect, but here it’s
reversed. Here instead of saying respect
your enemies he’s saying don’t ever respect them. In other words, his point is when you look at
this enemy, and it’s going to be bad, Moses is not promising an easy life;
Moses is not saying you’re just going to cruise in there and take over the land
and say ho-hum Canaanites, I’m sitting here and no fighting. There’s going to be a fantastic fight. But, in spite of all the adversity and the
pressure and the circumstances they are not to fear.
Fear not” means that they are not to place something else in the place
of God. In other words, the tendency
would be in their day to have a hierarchy; God would be here, circumstances
would be here and they’d put circumstances above God and that’s what this word
“fear not” means, in other words, you keep things in perspective, “nor be
afraid,” this means to tremble and this is the physiological result of the
mental attitude, “for the LORD thy God, it is He who is going with thee,” or is
about to go, and “He will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.” These are two very precious verbs because
these verbs also speak of eternal security for us as Christians. “Fail not” is a word which means to grip, the
verb means to release or relax, it means you have a grip on something and then
you lose your grip on it and the thing slides out of your hand. That’s what he’s talking about, God has you
in His hand Israel, just like John 10, you see that’s the imagery of John 10, I
am in my Father’s hands, that John 10 passage on eternal security. There it is, the Lord Jesus Christ has us in
His hand just like Jehovah had Israel in His hand back in the Old Testament. And the promise here is that that grip
continues, no matter how bad the pressure, no matter how bad the circumstances,
God’s grip is never broken.
He will “not forsake you,” here’s the mental attitude of God, God will
never forget you. God will never leave
you; God will never cease to be occupied with us. He can’t incidentally, because the moment you
receive Jesus Christ you are put into union with Christ, you are put into that
top circle. This means that He must
treat you, in spite of what a stinker you are, in spite of how many times you
drop the ball, in spite of how many times you fail the Lord, He can’t fail you
because it’s in the bargain to treat you just as He treats His Son.
Verses 7-8, Moses’ challenge to Joshua; after treating the people in
verses 1-6 he turns around, in the middle of the people still, the people are
all there watching this thing and now he turns to Joshua. “And Moses called unto Joshua, and said unto
him in the sight of all Israel,” notice he does it publicly, this is the way of
transferring public leadership, “Be strong and of good courage, for thou must
go with this people unto the land which the LORD has sworn unto their fathers
to give them, and you will cause them to inherit it.” This means placing the responsibility on
Joshua’s shoulders. Verse 8, “And the
LORD, he it is who does go before thee; He will be with thee, He will not fail
thee, neither forsake thee; neither fear, neither be dismayed.” There’s that verb again, fail, every time you
see that verb “fail” or “forsake” the imagery of the verb fail is the physical
image of a fist or a grip, He will not relax His grip and He will not remove
His concentration on you and His occupation with you.
Then in verses 9-13 he turns to the priests and in verse 9 we have a
phrase that for years and years our dear liberal friends laughed at and said
ha-ha, Moses wrote this law, Moses couldn’t write and so therefore this is
wrong. Of course we have written
documents that antedate Moses by about a thousand years. So there’s no problem about Moses writing,
and once again shows that what Nelson Glick who is probably one of the world’s
leading archeologists today said, no finding of archeology has ever
contradicted Scripture. That’s a
fantastic statement, and he wasn’t interested in proving Christianity. But Glick made the statement that he, in his
findings and his work, he has never found one archeological finding that
disproves the Bible. Some of them are
neutral or they prove but they never disprove and that should be your answer to
these wise guys that walk around and say ha-ha, the Bible has never been
proved. It’s funny, every time it’s put
to the test where you get some scientific objective controls it always
works. This is why I believe Gen. 1-11 is
going to be verified and we don’t have to retreat into some fanciful system of
interpreting. Gen. 1 will be verified
just like the rest of the Bible has been verified when all of the facts are
in.
Verse 9, he gives this, however, after he writes it, to the
priests. “And Moses wrote this law, and
delivered it unto the priests,” why does he give it to the priests? The priests were the Bible teachers of the
nation. The nation Israel took one third
of its budget on welfare; they had welfare in the nation to keep people from
starving. There wasn’t one person in the nation Israel that ever starved; this
was not a strict lassie faire economy
either. They had a system of welfare
divinely designed, one of the most fantastic systems the world has ever
seen. And two-thirds of their national
budget went into Bible teaching and missionary activity. If you want to see what impact that had, you
just take the billions of dollars the United States is spending annually on
welfare; multiply it by two and figure what that would do in teaching people the
Word of God, in training people, etc. The nation Israel realized that these other
problems will be solved if you can solve the spiritual ones first. So he gives it to the priests; the priests
were the teachers of the Bible. They
were given the Bible at this point, “who bore the ark of the covenant of the
LORD,” and he also gave it “and unto all the elders of Israel.” These are the men who were in control.
Verse 10, “And Moses commanded them, saying, At the end of every seven
years, in the solemnity of the year of release, in the feast of tabernacles,
[11] When all Israel is come to appear before the LORD thy God in the place
which He shall choose, thou shalt read this law before all Israel in their
hearing.” And here is one of the most strange institutions, not strange if you
know suzerainty vassal treaties, but strange if you read it first. But when you think about it it’s not so
strange at all because what he’s saying is that every seven years the entire
nation would line up men, women, children, everyone would have to stand at
attention and listen to the entire Law verbally expounded by the priests. Now this is fantastic. The only analogy to make it real to you
probably would be for everyone every seven years in the country, we’d have to
gather down at the county courthouse and have someone read the Constitution to
us. Of course it wouldn’t work today
because people’s span of perception is so short they’d get through article I
and the rest of them would be out on the grass some place. But in that day they could stand it and they
read through the entire Law, and every seven years the nation had to… plus the
fact in between those seven years they were constantly taught, constantly
taught, so you can see the spirituality of the nation could have been fantastic
had they utilized these provision.
Verse 12, “Gather the people
together, men, and women, and children, and thy stranger who is within thy
gates, that they may hear, and that they may learn, and fear the LORD your God,
and observe to do all the words of this law.”
Now he’s going to do a strange thing.
He says in verse 13 another reason for this is “That their children, who
have not known anything, may hear, and learn to fear the LORD your God, as long
as ye live in the land to which ye go over the Jordan to possess it.” What do you suppose verse 13 refers to, that
the children may come there, listen to the Word of God being taught and learn
something that they did not learn and whatever it was that they were learning
would cause them to respect the Lord.
This tells you something about how God worked in the Old Testament, and
how incidentally He still works.
Go back to this idea of this peaking of miracles; you have it in Moses’
time, Elijah’s time, and the Lord Jesus Christ’s time. Moses’ day had a lot of miracles; the miracles
were experimental empirical evidences that God did what He said He would
do. So you had the words and the works
line up, experience and logic checked out.
So you had all of these evidences, sort of piled and crammed on top of
one another, but only in that generation.
Now the children coming into the next generation would not have miracles
performed in their sight. In other
words, relatively speaking, there would be some miracles, but relatively
speaking it would be a time of low frequency miracles. Sir Robert Anderson has written a classic
text on this, The Silence of God, a
fantastic work in this area, but as Anderson, the British astronomer, points
out, these are what he calls just the silence of God periods of history. And they are there, and you can read the
Bible and see that God blanks out and for generation after generation He
refuses to show signs of His presence.
This goes on and the only thing you can do during a time of silence to
gain an appreciation for God is to go back to the Word of God. That’s the principle here in verse 13; when
you get into the period where there is low miracle frequency, as the next
generation would have it, the very next generation would have the problem, the
kids would be raised in the parent’s home, the parents could remember seeing
visually and hearing audibly, the parents directly perceived these works of God
but their children could not and the only way the parents could convey it to
the next generation was to have the children schooled in the Word of God. The
Word of God, then, was the means to respect for the Lord in a silent era.
Now this is what’s happened to the Church. The Church, we had a pile of miracles when
the Church started to authenticate the Church.
These miracles have died out; occasionally they peak up, etc. but the
Church Age as an age is generally a silent age.
You have miracles, for example regeneration is one of the greatest
miracles, but I’m talking about the sign miracles, the authentication
miracles. You have these fade out and during
this time of fade out and silence what is to be the thrust and the
emphasis? The Word of God. Now this is why it’s disturbing in our time
to have people running around for panaceas and spiritism, occultism and all the
rest, everywhere except the Word of God.
You cannot and never will, never can, learn to respect the Lord apart
from the Word of God. Why? Because the Word of God is h-i-s-t-o-r-y. And there is the realm of the proof of God,
history. And if you do not know history
and you have no records of the historical events in which God worked, you have
no basis for faith. That is why we say
Christian is a historic faith; it is based on what really happened in
history. If, for example, you took
Confucius out of Confucianism you could still exist and have the religion; if
you took Buddha out of Buddhism the teachings would still generally be valid,
but you can’t do that with the Bible.
Take Christ out of Christianity, take the miracles out of Christianity,
and you destroy completely the whole thing.
You have no right to say I’ve by the Sermon on the Mount or some other
thing, the golden rule, and dump the miracles.
They both are wedded together in Scripture. This is what we mean by an historic faith;
dump history, you dump the whole thing. You can’t separate it out; in other religions
you can, but not in Christianity. The
two go together and the two fall together.
This is why Moses, in verse 13, at the conclusion just before his death
challenged the nation, remember history, and that’s basically why God has in
your laps, what you hold in your laps is only a little bit in the New Testament
covering a span of, say 30 years, just that much is the New Testament and yet
all of that as the Old Testament. Why do
you suppose God has taken the time and effort to preserve that much of the Word
of God that most people never even read or study; the whole Old Testament, why
did He preserve it? To show you that He
is the God and the Lord of history and He doesn’t need philosophical mystical
substitutes for this. Here is the
historical data and a person who is ignorant of the Old Testament is basically
ignorant of the work of God and if you’re ignorant of the work of God, I doubt
very seriously if you can truly worship Him for what He is.