Lesson 74

The Lord’s Challenge to Israel – 30:14-21

We are going through chapters 31-34, the conclusion of this book which includes all of the provisions for the continuity of this covenant. In chapters 31-32 we have the final charges, one given by Moses to the nation, to the people, to the priests and to Joshua; the other one, which we will study tonight, the charge that the Lord Himself gave to both Moses, Joshua, and the nation through the so-called song of witness. And then we will study in detail chapter 32 which is the so-called famous Song of Moses, probably one of the great highlights of this book and one which, if you do not understand you will not understand the role of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah and the other later prophets. Finally the book will conclude in chapters 33-34 with the death and the funeral of Moses. After we finish this book we’ll go into Joshua.

This section that begins in verse 14 is the charge that God Himself gave to Moses and the second charge that He gave to Joshua. Verses 14-22 deal with the charge that He gave to Moses and in verse 23 the charge that God gave to Joshua. The subject of the verb “he gave charge” in verse 23 is not Moses, as your King James would have it. The subject of that verb is God Himself; that is a new paragraph in the original.

Beginning at verse 14 we have the Lord coming to Moses and demanding to speak. “And the LORD said unto Moses, Behold, thy days approach that thou must die.” It’s the perfect tense which means they have already come, that you must die. We reviewed why it was that Moses had to die; it was because of discipline, because after forty years with putting up with these kooks running around all through the Arabian Peninsula, wandering around from oasis to oasis, that he finally had had it and he made the mistake of getting out of fellowship and banging the rock twice. It indicates, however, that Moses had a great deal of restraint because he could have very well taken a stick and beaten some of them over the head. But Moses, of course, kept control and he at least took it out on the rock. But this is an act of disobedience and for this the Lord kept him out of the land. Now the days are going to come, He says, that you must die, this sin unto death, and we will see some of the characteristics of the sin unto death in chapter 34. Moses did not die gradually; Moses was a very healthy man. At 120 this man was in excellent physical condition and he dropped dead after he finished this sermon. He dropped dead not because of some disease. Moses died because of the sin unto death and God Himself took his life.

So these days are just about upon Moses so God says, “Call Joshua, and present yourselves in the tabernacle of the congregation,” now the tabernacle of the congregation is important, it involves some important principles about the Old Testament and about worship. First of all it’s not “tabernacle of the congregation,” the word is “tents of the appointment,” for the Hebrew word means appointment, “tents of the appointment.” And there were two phases in this tent of appointment in the Old Testament. The first one is found in Exodus 33 so let’s go back and get some background on this tent of appointment so we can tell why it is that God spoke to Moses and Joshua at the tent of appointment and nowhere else. Even though God is omnipresent, here are the characteristics of God once again, He is sovereign, He is righteous, He is just, He is love, He is omniscience, He is omnipresent, He is omnipotent, He is immutable and He is eternality. He is all of these characteristics. One of those characteristics is omnipresence and if you are sharp you’ll say wait a minute, if God is truly omnipresent and omnipresence means that He is completely present at each point in space, if that is really true that God is omnipresent why then is it that He speaks to men only at one preferred location. And this is the question that’s under consideration here when we go to Exodus 33 and the tent of appointment. “Appointment” means that they had a point in time and space where men were to worship God. Even though God Himself is infinite, even though He is omnipresent, still He insists that men meet Him at a location, at a point location to worship.

Exodus 33:7-11, “And Moses took the tent, and pitched it outside the camp, afar off from the camp, and called it the tent of the appointment [tabernacle of the congregation]. And it came to pass that every one who sought the LORD went out unto the tent of the appointment [tabernacle of the congregation] which was outside the camp. [8] And it came to pass, when Moses went out unto the tent [tabernacle] that all the people rose up and stood every man at his tent door, and looked after Moses, until he was gone into the tent [tabernacle]. [9] And it came to pass, as Moses entered into the tent [tabernacle], the cloudy pillar descended and stood at the door of the tent [tabernacle] and the LORD talked with Moses. [10] And all the people saw the cloudy pillar stand at the tent [tabernacle] door: and all the people rose up and worshiped, every man in his tent door. [12] And the LORD spoke unto Moses face to face, as a man speaks unto his friend. And he turned again into the camp: but his servant Joshua, the son of Nun, a young man, departed not out of the tent [tabernacle.]”

Here you have Joshua being trained in the presence of the Lord to replace Moses, but I want you to notice something that this tent here was given for a number of reasons. This is before it turned into the great tabernacle that it will turn in phase two. At this point there isn’t any furniture in there, there’s just the presence of the Lord indicated by a cloud; a cloud in Scripture always indicates the presence of the Lord. For example, in 1 Thess. 4 at the rapture of the Church we, as believers, are resurrected and go to meet the Lord in the air, in the cloud, and whatever it is, there’s a cloud there and the Church disappears into that cloud. That cloud is the same cloud that you meet in the Old Testament. The cloud again is met in Matt. 24-25 at the Second Advent. At this time when Jesus Christ comes again He comes with great signs in the heaven. One of these signs will be the cloud, explained in the book of Daniel as the Son of Man; you shall see the Son of Man coming in clouds of glory.

It was this that the high priest rent his clothes at when the Lord Jesus Christ went under trial and was interrogated, and he said are you the Christ? And Jesus said I am the Son of God. Now the Son of God was a weaker term, actually, in that day than Son of Man, even though it sounds like Son of God would be a more powerful term to portray the deity of Christ, the Son of God had become distorted in Jesus time so that it simply meant Messiah. But Son of Man was an apocalyptic term that is found in the book of Daniel and when Jesus got up there and said to the high priest, you ask Me whether I’m Messiah, I’m going to tell you something, that you’re going to turn around one of these days and you’re going to see Me coming as the Son of Man in clouds of glory. And when He did this the priest tore his garment which was a sign that Jesus Christ had committed an act of blasphemy. You see, Jesus’ enemies knew very well what these terms meant and even if you have college professors and high school English teachers who are a group of idiots who have never read the English Bible, you have these people walking around saying Jesus never claimed to be God, you can safely ignore them. Jesus definitely claimed to be God because of the reaction of His enemies. His enemies could have easily understood Jesus point; they knew the cultures, they knew the terms and they reacted. They reacted because they knew Jesus Christ was claiming to be God. So next time you hear this malarkey that’s peddled in the public schools you can just tune it out, it’s not even worth listening to.

When we come to this first phase of the tabernacle in Exodus 33 we notice several things about it. We notice first of all in verse 11 that it is this location where God verbally speaks to man. Now that’s very important today. Here is Moses and here is the Lord; now if there’s one concept of Scripture that the 20^th century rejects en toto it is the concept of verbal revelation. No theologian, no modern theologian can claim that God literally verbally spoke to man. They aren’t doing this; they’re rejecting it because of the philosophical climate in which we live. But the Bible insists that God does not reveal Himself like a shadow form and let you guess at things; God literally verbally speaks, and here is one of the most powerful passages in the Old Testament to show [it]. You can argue that these writers in the Old Testament didn’t know what they were talking about but that’s not the point at the moment; the point is what did the writers themselves say, and the writers themselves of the Bible said that God “spoke face to face as a man speaks to his friends.” That’s very clear in verse 11; it shouldn’t require any deep exegesis. It is obvious that the Lord Jesus Christ, in His preincarnate form, for remember, the doctrine of the Trinity says that wherever you have God revealing Himself it is God the Son. Remember God is one in essence but He is three in personality. God the Son is the One who is always involved in the revelation process. Whenever God reveals Himself it is through the Son. This just simply goes back to the doctrine of the Trinity.

So here we have Jesus Christ in a preincarnate form speaking to Moses in verse 11 and He is speaking verbally. Now this clues us in as to one reason why there must be a point location. God is communicating, although God up here is infinite, He is omnipresent, when He reveals Himself He must reveal Himself to finite man. And He reveals Himself from a point location to this man sitting out here, in this case Moses. And therefore this communication has to originate at a point in space, and a point in time, finite communication. So that’s at least one reason why it can’t be all over the heavens and all over the universe; it’s narrowed down to one point location and God is speaking to His prophet.

Now it is the custom of Scripture and it is the custom of the progress of revelation that God does not directly reveal Himself to the masses. Why doesn’t He directly reveal Himself to the masses? Because of the divine institutions; the divine institution of marriage, God reveals Himself to the man, not the woman. Divine institution number three, God reveals Himself to the head of the family, not the children of the family. You see this again and again in Scripture. Divine institution number four, God reveals Himself to the head of the nation, not to the citizens of the nation, because God in His revelation process always uses it and designs it in such a way to edify the divine institutions. So we have here Moses is the head of the nation, to substantiate and strengthen his authoritative position God goes to him. And it is in this tent where the revelation takes place.

But there’s something else that’s kind of interesting about this. This tent is also, later on, is the place where the sin question is resolved. Now it isn’t here, here you have the camp of Israel. This tent was located way outside this camp. There’s a reason for this because at this point the tent of appointment hasn’t been transformed into the tabernacle yet, hasn’t got all the furniture, hasn’t got all these things set into it, and so therefore there’s no real solution to the sin problem and so therefore God’s tabernacle must be separate from where men dwell. This is typified by the fact that that tent is way outside the camp. Moses has to go way out there to pick up the revelation and bring it into camp. We’re going to see that that shifts; it shifts in Exodus 40 so turn to Exodus 40:2 when the tent of the meeting or the tent of the appointment is transformed into the tabernacle.

Exodus 40:2, “On the first day of the first month shalt thou set up the tabernacle of the tent of the appointment [congregation]. [3] And thou shalt put therein the ark of the testimony, and over the ark with the veil,” etc. In other words, Moses is going to take this tent and he is going to do certain things with it. There will be a Holy of Holies, a holy place, and there will be the ark inside here, and there will be the altar of incense, the showbread, the candlesticks and so forth; outside the laver bowl and the brazen altar. So you’ll have this typology set up. Now once the typology is set up, then the camp is around the tent. In other words, the tabernacle comes to be in the camp when this furniture is established and when the processes are all established to take care of the sin problem, showing that God cannot exist with men unless the sin problem has been resolved.

Now we have something very similar to this, turn to Rev. 21 and that point where God is replacing the universe. When the fall, at the historic place of the fall in Eden, and at that time in history, there was a sentence upon all creation. God said “the wages of sin is death,” this doesn’t just mean some spiritual thing, this means literal physical thing besides the spiritual. Therefore the universe is sentenced by an irreversible sentence, you can’t go back and change this thing, the universe is doomed. This is why the Christian lives a separated, or should, live a separated life; he is separated unto the new universe that is going to be. We are citizens of a universe that is not yet. And we are living in the old universe that is doomed, and all the things in the old universe, including man’s concepts of good, society’s concepts of good, right and wrong, are also condemned. And it’s significant that the last chapters of the Bible feature the destruction of the old universe and the replacement of the new.

Rev. 21:1, “And I,” that’s John, “saw a new heaven and a new earth,” that word pair means universe, “for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away, and there was no more sea. [2] And I, John, saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. [3] And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying,” now watch this, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be with them, and be their God. [4] And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things have passed away.”

In other words, that old condemned universe is removed; a new universe is set up and once this is set up, the sin problem has been resolved, those who inhabit the new universe are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ and these people, because they are in the new universe, because they have received grace, have had the sin problem resolved. Once the sin problem is resolved then God’s tabernacle can truly be with men, but not until. This is the great proclamation of the gospel that the sin question must be resolved before God can stand in your presence. Now in one way it’s for your own benefit for if we look at the essence of God that He is sovereign, He is righteous, He is just, we have these two attributes which combine oftentimes into one called in the Bible as holiness. What would happen if we were physically in the presence of the Lord as sinners? We would be destroyed, literally. This is why the people were so shook up in the Old Testament when God spoke the Ten Commandments they said look, let’s turn this thing off because we can’t stand in the presence of a holy God. And it’s significant that every vision in the Bible, Daniel, Isaiah, John, all these people get a glimpse of the holiness they faint, pass out, the thing is so fantastic, such a strain on their system; even though they’re believers, they live and we live with our sin natures in a deteriorating physical body. Because of this we cannot stand the strain of the presence of a holy righteous God, and therefore until we receive our resurrection body we really literally cannot dwell in His presence. This is the reason for man being separated from God among other reasons, but one of the reasons is we can’t stand to be in His presence.

This incidentally solves the problem that many of you have found when you have tried to share the gospel of Christ with some unbeliever and some times they’ll come back and say if God really is good, and if He really is holy, why doesn’t He do away with evil in the world. And a quick come back to this, although it’s not a deep one necessarily, is simply say this: let’s suppose God would eliminate all evil tonight at midnight; would you be around at 1:00 a.m. In other words, what the man is asking for is just for God to do away with all evil; fine, but if He did do away with all evil where would you be. This places the burden of argument back on the person that challenged your position, because he’s also evil. So this is one way of getting across the fact that God can’t eliminate all evil from the system; He can’t do it right at the moment without eliminating all humanity, so He is marking time and grace for people to trust in the solution to the sin problem.

So we have here the principle that worship depends on the sin problem being resolved. Now back to Deut. 31, that tent of appointment. God called both Moses and Joshua to this point location, and a pillar of a cloud descends over the door of the tabernacle. At this point God is verbally communicating and the verbal communication begins in verse 16. “And the LORD said unto Moses, Behold, thou shalt sleep with thy fathers;” and it’s a Hebrew participle meaning you are just about to sleep, your death is imminent, “you are about to sleep with thy fathers.” This is a term used in the Old Testament for Paradise, which is Abraham’s bosom, which was the place of the Old Testament dead. The Old Testament dead do not go to heaven; no one went to heaven until Jesus Christ, in His humanity, was raised and was personally admitted to the throne room of God and sat down. When Jesus Christ accomplished that, heaven was open to receive the dead; not until. Until that time it was Abraham’s bosom; this is why you do not have the concept of heaven in the Old Testament, not because they couldn’t think of it, because the mechanics weren’t available to have it operate correctly.

And so in verse 16 God saying that Moses is going to go into phase three, he is about to depart this life. But He gives Moses a prophecy and He says and He says this out of His omniscience, not out of His sovereignty. God is not decreeing that these people sin, He is simply saying that in My plan because I have decreed a plan which includes personal responsibility, volition, I know how these people are going to react, and one of the things I know about these people Moses is that no sooner are you going to die than these people go a whoring after the gods of the strangers in the land, [“and this people will rise up, and play the harlot after the strange gods of the land,”] now we want to examine this phrase because throughout the Word of God there is a strong parallelism between a man’s spiritual relationship and divine institution number two, marriage. It is again and again in Scripture and there are reasons for it for God has given divine institution number two to teach us in the realm of the soul certain principles that apply over into this other area.

And so when he says “go a whoring,” it is the word “fornicate,” they are going to commit fornication with the “gods of the strangeness of the land,” not the people of the land, the gods of the strangeness, meaning that these are these strange gods that inhabit the land of Canaan. These are the false gods, these are the gods, actually demons in disguise as we will discover in Deut. 32, that all of these gods of the ancient world were actually counterfeit gods, they were angels, the fallen angels of Satan that appeared to these men in Ancient Near East and disguised themselves as gods. They were actual delusions sent by God Himself to delude these people who had gone on negative volition. If a person goes on negative volition as a result of rejecting what you know of God, God darkens your mind and will literally send delusions to deceive you. He will allow and open you up to satanic attack and as a result of this you will receive these delusions as these people did.

And these people received all sorts of delusions and they thought literally that Baal and Ishtar and some of these gods were real; they were real but they weren’t gods, what they were were demons and these demons appearing and talking to these people pawned themselves off as gods, saying look, I can do all sorts of supernatural things, I can do this, I can do that. You have a picture of what one of these demons looked like if you go to any text book that discusses the code of Hammurabi; at the top of the [can’t understand word] of the code of Hammurabi you have Hammurabi seated on his throne and he’s getting his laws from this god, and that god evidently is some sort of a fallen angel. I believe it’s a literal personage that Hammurabi saw and later had engraved. This is not some sort of a myth, a whole scale invention of the ancient world of superstitious people. These people were superstitious but they didn’t generate this out of nothing, they had reasons for saying some of the things they said.

So these demons would come along and delude the people and it’s these gods in verse 16 that are the demons, the counterfeit gods of the strangers of the land. “Strange” means that they do not fit with the experience of Israel, it goes back to the empirical test, they are strange, they cannot be validated on the basis of the Word of God or cannot be validated, what is not compatible with the Word of God is declared as strange, something that doesn’t fit, a strange God, “Word of God which they go to be among the, and will forsake Me, and break My covenant which I have made with them.” Now why is it that again and again in the Bible there is this strong analogy between divine institution number two and Israel’s covenant. It goes back to some of the things we were discussing this morning but we find this, for example in Proverbs. In Proverbs again and again and again Solomon warns against getting involved with a strange woman. Why? Something wrong with women? No.

What the problem is is that the women would come into Israel bearing human viewpoint and in a marriage relationship, because this is such a powerful relationship, you have the man and you have the woman together, because this is such a powerful relationship, if there’s human viewpoint in one mind it can be easily transferred in the other, and God says no intermarriage. Now race didn’t have anything to do with it. The issue was the culture and therefore He forbade the Jewish young men from going out and getting involved with these Gentile girls. And every time that they did, barring some exceptions, every time they did they had problems. Samson went down and asked his parents if he could pick out some Gentile girlfriend that he liked and he got in trouble. You can go on down through the Bible, every time because they violated this principle.

Now let’s look at this problem of this parallel with divine institution number two. We have an analogy in the Old Testament just like we have an analogy in the New Testament. In the Old Testament we have the analogy between God and Israel as between a man and his wife. And this analogy is carried forth in many ways. One way in which it is carried forth is that God is the one who initiates the love. God is the one who started Israel in motion. It was God, for example, turn to Deut. 4:37, you’ll find where God initiated love toward the nation. “And because He loved thy fathers, therefore He chose their seed after them,” in other words, the motivation of God was love but that love was expressed before Israel became lovable. There was nothing lovable about Israel but God initiated the love toward Israel while yet Israel was in an unlovable status.

The same goes for our salvation; God loved us when we were unlovable and so we have this [can’t understand word] that one of the features that comes out, and by the way, you can study the divine institution’s from the analogies backwards, as we’ll see in a moment. God is to Israel as man is to the wife. Why? Because one, God initiates love toward Israel and Israel did not deserve the love, Israel did nothing to get that love, Israel did not ask for the love. The male, the man initiated it and love, this kind of love, is an initiation type love.

Then we have another analogy between the divine institution number two and this national relationship and that is that who was it that protected and provided? It was God who protected and provided, and as we shall see in the New Testament, Eph. 5 it says even so the man shall cherish and provide for his wife. So here we have the provision made once again, the analogy between divine institution number two, the male and female function, the divine function and Israel’s function. God was the one who initiated love, God was the one who protected.

As a result we have a third analogy here between the two and that concerns the fact that Israel is a receptacle for the glory of God. In other words, Israel becomes the one in whom there is the glory of God, through whom that glory is revealed to the human race. This is why Paul does what he did in 1 Cor. 11 and made the woman the glory of the man, for the woman receives the glory of the man, the man is in her soul; the man is received into her mentality. If she is in love and responding to a man the man is in her mentally, in her mentality, and so therefore she begins to radiate the result of that union. So here we have Israel is the receptacle of the glory of God just as the woman is the receptacle of the man.

Now the second thing that we have, the parallel between God and Israel, the man and the wife, that’s one, but we also have the same thing in the Old Testament as we do in the New Testament and that concerns this man plus the plan plus the woman, in that order. You can run the parallel out, first you have God, He had a plan of salvation and then He brought Israel along to accomplish the plan of salvation. In that sense Israel was God’s helpmeet in history. It was Israel that was used to complete the plan of God throughout history. So we have that second item that we find in studying the Old Testament.

Then we have a most interesting thing and this is the subject here in Deut. 31 and that is that when this union is violated it is declared by God to be adultery or fornication. To see the details of this turn to Ezek. 16. I’m just trying to develop the highlights of the analogy so that you can have some understanding of why the prophets keep harping back to making this the analogy. Why is it that we have to do this today? I’m afraid that we have to do this today because of the fact that divine institution number two is under such a fantastic attack that nobody really understands what adultery is any more because no one really understands the role of the male and the female and because of this we have breakdown all over. So these analogies that the prophets knew because of the strict law in their society made sense to them. But it doesn’t make sense to us because we are bombed out with this human viewpoint that we pick up in the press, the TV, the movies, the arts, the literature, etc. We do not have the picture of the family relationship that these men had and the people had who read their message.

In Ezek. 16 we have Ezekiel making an analogy but we’re going to reverse Ezekiel’s analogy. What Ezekiel is doing is taking the experience of adultery and then he is using that as an illustration to back up the spiritual problem of the nation. Now we are going to reverse it, we’re going to say all right, I think most of us understand the problem of the spiritual thing but we’re going to reverse it and go back to the physical relationship that Ezekiel was using. So we’re going to use this illustration in the opposite way Ezekiel was using it. Ezekiel assumed that the people of his day understood the physical, so then he said, “knowing this,” he proceeds from the unknown and so now we’ll deal with the spiritual. What we’re going to do, since we understand the spiritual is go back and reverse the analogy and we’re going to go back and study the physical on the basis of Ezekiel 16.

Now, where we start here, we go through an extended discourse in which Ezekiel picks up the refrain of Deut. 31. Remember all of these prophets picked up their ideas out of Deuteronomy. And so it begins in Ezek. 16:3, “And say, Thus saith the Lord God unto Jerusalem: Thy birth and thy nativity are of the land of Canaan; thy father was an Amorite, and thy mother, an Hittite. [4] And as for thy nativity, in the day thou wast born, thy navel was not cut, neither wast thou washed in water to cleanse thee; thou wast not salted at all, nor swaddled at all. [5] No eye pitied thee, to do any of these unto thee, to have compassion upon thee, but thou wast cast out in the open field, to the loathing of thy person, in the day that thou wast born. [6] And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live.”

What is he saying here? The picture here is of a child that has just been born and its mother doesn’t want it and casts this newborn infant out into the field, like some mother threw a baby in a garbage can here in Lubbock. It’s the same thing that Ezekiel is talking about where this baby has been born and left; the navel hasn’t been cleaned up, the baby hasn’t been cleaned up and in verse 6 the baby is just sitting there, the newborn baby in all the blood from birth. So the Lord is pictured as a man who passes by and has compassion on this infant.

Verse 7, “I have caused thee to multiply as the bud of the field, and thou hast increased and become great; and thou art come to excellent ornaments; thy breasts are fashioned, and thine hair is grown, whereas thou wast naked and bare. [8] Now when I passed by thee, and looked upon thee, behold, thy time was the time of love; and I spread my skirt over thee, and covered thy nakedness, Yea, I swore unto thee, and entered into a covenant with thee, saith the Lord God, and thou became mine.” Here is the picture of the man, now, with this baby whom he has raised, he now marries this child, this is an older man marrying this younger woman. And now what happens?

Verse 9, “Then washed I tee with water; yea, I thoroughly washed away thy blood from thee, and I anointed thee with oil.” And he goes through all the things that he did, see this is the male initiating the love. Go back to the male/female analogy and Ezekiel picks this analogy up and uses it to explain God and Israel. And he says Israelites, look, you know what the male/female role is like, of course he couldn’t assume this today because we have it completely reversed, but in that day people understood what the male was supposed to do and people understood what the female was supposed to do and he said now look, this male has initiated love, he has done all these things, and thou wast decked out in all these things.

In verse 14, “And thy renown went forth among the nations for thy beauty; for it was perfect through my splendor, which I had put upon thee, saith the Lord God.” This is another feature; the beauty of the woman came from her response to the man. Now it’s a very interesting principle, you pick this up in the New Testament also. Verse 14 says that the beauty, the comeliness was put there by the Lord. Analogy, back to the physical: the female’s beauty came, this is the inner beauty of 1 Peter 3, this is the inner beauty that the woman has when she is responding to a man who loves her. So we have here the beauty comes from the Lord just as here the woman’s beauty comes from the man. It comes not because of the man; it comes because of her response to the man who exercises love toward her.

Then in verse 15 we have the beginning of the downfall. “But thou didst trust in thine own beauty,” in other words, here is a crucial point and change in the logical development. The female’s beauty, Ezekiel says, comes by way of her response to the man. The man loves her, she responds to him, result: beauty. Now verse 15 she starts in by assuming that she can produce the beauty herself without responding to the love of the man, “you did trust in your own beauty and you played the harlot,” now what does he mean hear, “thou didst trust in thine own beauty.” He has just prepared us for verse 15 in the last part of verse 14, whence came the beauty in the first place? It came in this cycle of love/response, there’s a love/response cycle going and that is what cranked up the beauty in the woman. That beauty was cranked up on the inside of her, her soul rejoiced because of her response to the man who loved her.

Now what happens? She says oh, I can produce that myself. And as a result she breaks this union and it’s severed and the cycle is broken and now you begin to have the downfall of this woman. And you will see something here in verse 15 that is not well understood in our time; it was very well understood in the time of ancient Israel, and that is that true blessing in life, the fun in life, the things that are beautiful, the things that are worthwhile in life, come when you are observing the restrictions of God. We have a mentality in our generation that seems to equate restrictions with badness or suffering. This goes back to Satan. Do you remember what Satan said to Eve? Why is it that God gives you all these trees in the Garden and isn’t He a meany for not letting you eat this one. In other words, he said that a restriction, by definition, is bad. That’s a satanic lie. Restrictions are not, by definition, bad. But that’s what Satan would have us believe.

And here it’s the same kind of thing beginning in verse 15 the woman is going to say I can be autonomous, I can generate my beauty and I can choose my man, independent of God’s plan, independent of the fact that he has designed me as a woman, I can do what I want to and still be beautiful and still have a fantastic life and still enjoy myself. And the tragedy is beginning in verse 15 you are going to see the destruction of this woman. This is based on a physical analogy that she cannot enjoy what she wants to enjoy in an autonomous state. She has to get what she wants, this beauty comes only by virtue of this relationship with a man who is her lover. In verse 15 it says that she began to “trust in her own beauty, she played the harlot because of thy renown,” in other words she began to hear people say oh what a nice wonderful woman you look like, you look beautiful and all the rest, and there’s one thing about a compliment, don’t believe them. They are nice to hear but don’t ever believe them because the moment you begin to believe compliments about yourself then you are in trouble. And that’s exactly what happens here. Ezekiel knew woman. Women respond like crazy when you tell them you look nice, your hair is nice, what you wear is nice, etc. And this woman really got turned on and she began to believe it. That was her trouble. She began to believe all this malarkey that was being cranked out and the result, it led to her downfall.

By the way, the Bible also recognizes that the male, in a very humorous way the male is not responsive in this line. If you’ve ever read in James where it says a person who is the hearer of the word, it’s very interesting the illustration James gives there, he says you know, a person who hears the Word of God and doesn’t do it like a man and the word “man” there is the word “male” in the Greek, is like a male who goes and looks in the mirror and goes his way. In other words, James is saying that the man, he can look in the mirror and if things aren’t right he doesn’t particularly care, and just walks on. But if a woman were to walk by a mirror she’d spend the next hour and a half trying to fix it up so that it would be perfect before she left the mirror. That’s the difference and the Bible recognizes there’s a difference, so this is why James says that a hearer of the word is like a man, he can look in the mirror and his hair might be combed with a fan, he doesn’t mind as long as somebody else doesn’t nag him, and he just walks on out and forgets it, and James says this is the analogy of a person who looks into the Word of God, sees what he is and just walks off, it doesn’t matter. He says this is very much like the male.

Here in verse 15, here’s the female now and she’s trusting her own beauty and she pours out her fornications on everyone that passes by. Now verse 15 is a summary statement. We’re going to watch the progressive deterioration and destruction. This process, I believe, is not well understood in our generation. It’s tragic that it isn’t because the pitch that young people get today is have your fun and enjoy it and you’ll never get hurt. The slogan is have your fun as long as it doesn’t hurt someone. There’s only one little problem with that proposition and that is there is no way you can operate outside of the restrictions of God without hurting someone. That’s the catch. How do you know you’re not going to hurt somebody; that’s nonsense, this business that you can go ahead and do what you want as long as you don’t hurt them. You cannot understand some of the psychological processes that go on; you can destroy a person. Here you’re going to see the destruction.

Verse 16, “And of thy garments thou didst take, and decked thy high places with various colors, and played the harlot on them; like things shall not come, neither shall it be so.” By the way, if some of you are prissy, I will warn you that this is one of those chapters in the Word of God where Ezekiel gets quite frank, so if you’d like to tune out you can turn some place else and avoid the text. But this is one place where Ezekiel gets down and he explains things.

Verse 17, “Thou hast taken thy fair jewels of my gold and of my silver, which I had given thee,” here’s the man, the lover, he had given her all these things, “and made to thyself images of men, and didst commit whoredom with them.” Now you have to get the progression. Verse 16 says that she went into the high places, so here’s the deterioration. The first step in the decline is the fact that she is now committing… in Israel the analogy is that Israel is engaging in Canaanite religion at this point, “high places” means fornication, this person is engaging in fornication. Now as a result of this, this leads on further because of the law of hedonism, which says that if you are going out to merely please yourself you can please yourself today but tomorrow when you try to please yourself in the same way that you did today you’ll find you don’t please yourself quite as much, so therefore you have to do something else to get a greater kick to produce as much pleasure as you did the first time you did it. Therefore in verse 17 you have the fact that this woman is taking idols and this is autoeroticism where she is working with these idols, etc., and committing whoredom personally with these idols. So that’s the second deterioration where you have autoeroticism, etc.

Verse 18, “And she took thine embroidered garments, and covered them; and hast set mine oil and mine incense before them. [19] My food also which I gave thee, fine flour, and oil, and honey,” you see, she’s taking upon the resources of her lover and she takes these things, “I fed thee, thou hast even set it before them for a sweet savor; and thus it was, saith the Lord God. [20] Moreover, thou hast taken thy sons and thy daughters, whom thou hast borne unto me, and these hast thou sacrificed unto them to be devoured. Is this of thy whoredoms a small matter? [21] That thou hast slain my children, and delivered them to cause them to pass through the fire for them?” This is the worship of the god Moleck. [22] And in all thine abominations and thine harlotries thou has not remembered the days of thy youth, and when thou was naked and bare, and was polluted in thy blood,” in other words, don’t you remember the love that you had, you don’t have that love any more, why do you keep on going down this path.

Verse 23, “and it came to pass after all thy wickedness (Woe, woe unto thee! Saith the Lord God), [24] That thou hast also built unto thee an eminent place, and has made thee an high place in every street.” So beginning in verse 24, prostitution; here’s the houses of prostitution and he says you have a house of prostitution on every in Jerusalem. By the way, notice the diplomatic way the prophets address the nation. I would say that they didn’t win friends and influence people but they certainly communicated their message. So we have in verse 24 prostitution. Verse 25, “Thou hast built thy high place at every head of the way, and hast made thy beauty to be abhorred,” you see the destruction of the beauty, “and hast opened thy feet to every one that passed by, and multiplied thine harlotries.”

Now verse 26 represents the fourth step in the deterioration; she’s become a professional prostitute and in verse 26, “Thou hast committed fornication with the Egyptians, thy neighbors, great of flesh;” and the point here is that these Egyptians were kind of the dirty old men of the day, these were fat, sloppy looking characters, always pictured as such by the prophets, and he says now you as a prostitute can’t even get customers, the only customers you can get are these fat old Egyptians, and that’s what he’s telling her, “and has increased thine harlotries, to provoke me to anger.

Verse 27, “Behold, therefore, I have stretched out my hand over thee, and have diminished thy ordinary food,” you see here’s the law of destruction. A person operating outside of the will of God will always reap the results. It always works that way, sow to the flesh and of the flesh you shall reap corruption. It’s an inviolable principle, and here this woman is trying to frantically search for happiness. Every time she advances one more step she’s trying to get satisfaction because she no longer gets it back here. When she was just merely fornicating that was one thing, then she had to go to autoeroticism, then she had to go to prostitution, now that doesn’t give her kicks, now she has to go out with the Egyptians. And this goes on and on and on and you’ll see where it goes; he’s building to a climax here. “… and delivered thee unto the will of them that hate thee, the daughters of the Philistines, who are ashamed of thy lewd way.”

In other words, what he’s saying here is that you got so bad and you committed all of these aberrant practices that even the daughters of the Philistines look down at you. The Philistines were known in the ancient world for people that engaged in all sorts of practices, bestiality, etc. practices that would be utterly abhorrent to the Word of God. And these things were so offensive that this woman was doing he said that even the Philistine prostitutes would look down their nose at what you’re doing, this is how bad and how deteriorating.

Verse 28, “Thou hast played the whore also with the Assyrians, because thou was insatiable; year, thou hast played the harlot with them, and yet could not be satisfied.” And the Assyrians were people that were known for vicious and very crude forms of sex in the ancient world and he says you have even gone beyond the Assyrians. Verse 29, “Thou hast, moreover, multiplied thy fornication in the land of Canaan, unto Chaldea; and yet thou was not satisfied with this. [30] How weak is thine heart, says the Lord God, seeing thou doest all these things, the work of an imperious whorish woman. [31] In that thou buildest thine eminent place in the head of every way, and makes thine high place in every street; and has not been as an harlot, in that thou scornest hire,” in other words in verse 31 now she goes to the sixth step, a prostitute requires money but she has gotten so down in the gutter that she has to pay people to make love with her. In other words, this is a reverse prostitute, it is so bad, she has destroyed her beauty that no one wants here and now she has to pay people to make love to her. That’s verse 31.

Verse 32, “But as a wife that commits adultery, who takes strangers instead of her husband! [33] They give gives to all the whores but you give gifts to all thy lovers, and hire them” do you see the point he’s making there, the whores take the money but he says you have to hire your lovers, “that they may come unto thee on every side for whoredom. [34] And thou are different from other women in thine whoredoms, whereas none follows thee to commit whoredoms, and in that thou givest a reward, and no reward is given unto thee; therefore thou are different. [35] Wherefore, O harlot, hear the word of the LORD. [36] Thus saith the Lord God: Because thy filthiness was poured out, and thy nakedness uncovered, through thine harlotries with thy lovers, and with all the idols of thine abominations, and by the blood of thy children, which thou did give unto them, [37] Behold, therefore, I will gather all thy lovers, with whom thou has taken pleasure, and all them that has loved thee,…” and I will discipline you with them, etc.

Now later on as you go down and work through the passage you will see a refrain begins to appear. Verse 53, “When I shall bring again their captivity, the captivity of Sodom and her daughters, and the captivity of Sodom and her daughters, the captivity of Samaria and her daughters, then will I bring again the captivity of thy captives in the midst of them. [54] That thou mayest bear thine own shame, and may be confounded in all that thou hast done, in that thou art a comfort unto them.” How is this woman a comfort to these other people? She is a comfort because she has no satisfaction and down through the end of this chapter the refrain that Ezekiel brings out here is that you did this, you did this, you did this, and you weren’t satisfied. You did this and this and this and you still weren’t satisfied, and you went further and did this and this and this and still you weren’t satisfied.

What’s the point that Ezekiel is making? He says that you can never have satisfactions apart from the restrictions of the Word of God. That is the way to true happiness in this area as well as all other areas. So Ezekiel was saying by way of the spiritual contrast with the nation, that nation could not have happiness, could not have prosperity apart from the will of God, even though it thought it could; even though God had given it volition so that it had the freedom to try another way. Just because God has given you the freedom to choose does not mean that all choices will lead to happiness; it does not mean that, that’s not the purpose of volition. But God has given you the choice so that you can experiment and find out, and the Bible warns you that you will always find in the end that outside of the will of God there is never a true satisfaction.

Let’s go back to Deut. 31 and pick up this analogy. Remember Moses is the one that sets out the analogy, Ezekiel and these other men come along later in history and develop it further. In verse 17, My anger, God says, after this country breaks the covenant, they commit adultery, “Then My anger shall be kindled against them in that day, and I will forsake them, and I will hide My face from them, and they shall be devoured, and many evils and troubles shall befall them, so that they will say in that day, Are not these evils come upon us because our God is not among us?” In verses 17-18 you begin to have the inevitable result of negative volition. When you receive as Savior God the Holy Spirit puts you in union with Christ. There at the top circle is the place that never changes; this is the circle of your salvation, that does not change. But in the bottom circle is the place of your experience and you are either in that bottom circle or out of the bottom circle at any point in time. This is what we call the circle of fellowship. Outside of this circle, we get outside through negative volition, sin, then certain processes begin to work on the inside of our soul. One of these processes is a progressive deterioration of our perception.

Just as, for example, if you blindfolded your eyes the unused function of the body would begin to atrophy. You have a common illustration of this if you’re sick; after you’ve lain in bed for a week and now you get up; do you feel like running the mile or not? It’s not necessarily because you’re still sick, it’s because your body has deteriorated through lack of use and you have to build yourself up again. It’s the same thing spiritually, when we are on negative volition the functions of our soul are not being used in the way in which they were designed, with the result that they begin to atrophy. And God says that this law operates in such a way that He calls it spiritual blindness.

In verse 18 is the manifestation of this blindness in the area of fellowship. “I will surely hide My face in that day for all the evils which they shall have wrought, in that they are turned to other gods.” What’s his point? The point is that these people are going to go oh God, oh God, why is this happening to me and all the rest of it. There are a lot of Christians that get out of fellowship and discipline begins to descend and they come crying to you, oh Daddy, will you make this stop hurting, and they expect to do some little gimmick, expect the preacher to give them some gimmick that will get rid of the suffering. And God says to the nation Israel in that day I’m going to hide My face from you and when you come around and you want relief from the suffering I’m not going to give it to. God isn’t just being a meany here, the point that He’s trying to make is that these people would come out of a false motivation. If you have a crybaby Christian that’s suffering and he wants out of the suffering, but it’s been my observation many times that they don’t really want to get back in the bottom circle. What they really want in utter defiance of God is to live in peace outside of the bottom circle; that’s what they really want when you boil it down. They don’t want to say, in other words, if God has a law that says every time you’re outside of this circle you are going to be upset, you’re going to have problems and catastrophes in your personal life, and all the rest of it, business, etc. every time you’re outside. Now if God had a rule like that people would say wait a minute God, I want out, I want out of all this misery and all this suffering. But God says I’m not going to let you get out until you get in the bottom circle; that’s the place where you get out of misery and this is what it means in verse 18 where God says “I will surely hide My face,” He’s not saying that He would not accept true repentance.

What He is saying is that He is going to utterly not listen to any prayer to do away with the suffering unless that prayer is a genuine confession of sin. We can know this by comparing the rest of Deuteronomy. Brought over into our experience it means 1 John 1:9 must be used correctly, not as a gimmick. “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” The word “confess” means to agree; it means to sit down and agree to the divine viewpoint evaluation of sin. Here’s what happens. Some Christians will take 1 John 1:9 and say I made a mistake, they’ll say “I confess my sin” but what really is going through their mind is I just made a mistake, sorry God, I made a mistake, big deal. And that is not divine viewpoint, that’s only half of it, you’ve identified the thing, you’ve got to identify the sin and the second thing you have to do is agree to the righteous standards of God that it is –R, that’s what you’ve got to agree with and if that agreement isn’t there then there will be nor forgiveness of sin. You don’t ask for forgiveness of sin; there is no Biblical basis for that; 1 John 1:9 says “if we confess our sin He is faithful and just to forgive,” He never asks you to ask for forgiveness, He’s told you what to do for forgiveness, i.e. acknowledge your sins before Him and the forgiveness is automatic after 1 John 1:9. So verse 18 does not negate 1 John 1:9 in case some of you have qualms about it. “And I will surely hide My face” simply means that God is going to deprive them of all peace and joy and life outside of that bottom circle.

Verse 19, “Now, therefore, write this song for you, and teach it to the children of Israel; put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for Me against the children of Israel.” As I explained earlier, the phrase “put in their mouth” is an idiom in the Old Testament that means to teach until they can say it quickly, with understanding. It’s that kind of a thing, put it in their mouths; it explains Romans 10, if we confess with our mouth we are saved. That means that you understand the gospel and therefore understanding it you can believe it. You “put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for Me against the children of Israel.” The song that is mentioned in verse 19 is the Song of Moses, Deut. 32.

Verse 21, “And it shall come to pass, when many evils and troubles are befallen them, that this song shall testify against them as a witness; for it shall not be forgotten out of the mouths of their seed. For I know their imagination which they go about, even now, before I have brought them into the land which I swore to give them.” In other words God is saying I have just committed a treaty; these suzerainty vassal treaties had what we call a rib procedure, or a controversy or a lawsuit. This was an accusation, in other words, if you have a suzerain here, here’s the great king and you have a vassal down here and they’re tied into a mutual aid pact, that’s like Deuteronomy, except you have God up here instead of the suzerain and you have the twelve tribes down here instead of the vassal king. They’re linked by the Law, that’s a treaty; the Law equals a treaty. Now when a treaty is broken there are certain consequences. Those consequences were expressed in a rib; the word “rib” is a lawsuit. The later prophets of the Bible are the administrators of a lawsuit based on the older Law of Moses. Here was Moses’ Law, the nation had gone down, here’s 1400 BC, the time when the treaty was made, these prophets were down here and they went back to this Law and said you violated the Law and here’s how. There were always three parts to every rib document, first there was a court procedure in which the court would be called to order, the witnesses brought in. The second part of the court procedure would be the accusation section, and the third section of a rib proceeding was the sentence. So you have these three parts to an accusation treaty and I will now show you where this occurs in the prophets.

Turn to Isaiah 1:2, just so you can see that the whole Bible hangs together as a unit. You can’t take part of the Bible and discard the other part. Isaiah 1:2 is the call to order in the court; Isaiah 1 is a rib proceeding, “Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth,” they are the witnesses that are called into the courtroom, these are the witnesses that Moses establishes in Deut. 32, “for the LORD has spoken: I have nourished” and now begins the accusation section, and you go down, verse 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, is the accusation, etc. Now beginning in verse 10, this is the reasoning, and he comes to all these things, he comes to the pleading with the men to do something, pleading with the men, verse 16, to wash and make clean, verse 17, learn to do good, verse 18, “Come now, and let us reason together,” do all these things and I will do these things to you. God is in His grace always giving them a chance, but this is a rib proceeding, you can tell these ribs in the Old Testament by the court proceeding that is invoked.

In Hosea 4 is another rib, and here we know it’s a rib because it tells us. “Hear the word of the LORD, ye children of Israel; for the LORD has a rib with the inhabitants of the land,” He has a lawsuit, so the rest of chapter 4 of Hosea is a lawsuit proceeding grounded on the Law of Deuteronomy, violations, specific violations of the Law of Deuteronomy.

Finally we come to Micah; you have another rib document in the Old Testament. Micah 6:1, “Hear now what the LORD saith; Arise, contend before the mountains, and let the hills hear thy voice.” Here the mountain and the hills are the jury to this controversy. Verse 2, “Hear ye, O mountains, the LORD’s rib [controversy], and ye strong foundations of the earth” and again God calls in the witnesses for His testimony against the nation.

Let’s sum this up by being very practical in how we can apply this to our Christian lives. Does God have a rib with you? Let’s look at here. Here we have the point we receive Christ, He puts us in union with Himself, at this point the Holy Spirit puts us in union and we never get out of that top circle. But we have a bottom circle; we are either out or in that bottom circle. Now God has a set of standards; He doesn’t have, technically, a rib with you as a Christian, for “there is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus. In other words, you have a situation here where legally there isn’t a rib, but you do have a family matter, and as a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, if you are out of the bottom circle, you face in practice the same thing Israel faced with the rib. With a rib what would happen if someone served a lawsuit on you? You know what would happen, you’d pick up the lawsuit and there’d be two things on that paper, basically. The first thing that you would find if someone filed suit against you would be a specific accusation. You wouldn’t get a lawsuit that says hey, report to such and such because you’re involved in a lawsuit, someone doesn’t like you. You can’t file a lawsuit that way; a lawsuit has to be filed with a specific charge. The second thing you would find is that you had broken the law of the lawmaker. All right, we come to the Christian life, the Word of God, plus your conscience, tells you where you have fallen down. Here is how you tell your guilt before God in this area of phase 2, specifically where you have fallen short of the will of God for your life. There are two opportunities given in the Bible for confession. There is obviously keeping confessed moment by moment but the Bible tells you it is a good thing… Eph. 4 says “Let not the sun go down on your wrath,” which means that at least once every 24 hours you should personally examine your own life, not wait for Sunday morning in the morning service for a few moments of silent prayer. The Bible says that every night before you go to sleep and your mind becomes passive you should check out areas where you have personally fallen short and acknowledge them before the Lord.

The other place is before communion. These are areas where you respond to God’s Word as Israel would have responded to the rib.

This section of Deut. 31 that we’ve dealt with tonight deals with rebellion against the grace of God. It deals with the fact that God has totally provided for something fantastic. The analogy of the woman, the adulterous woman, what was the purpose of that? The purpose of that was simply to show that God in his grace has provided something enjoyable, something wonderful, something fantastic, something that’s just great. God has provided that and if men are suffering it is because men have rebelled somewhere along the line against the grace of God, somewhere along the line they have fouled it up. Don’t say that the Christian life doesn’t work. God has provided something fantastic for you; God has provided unlimited assets at your disposal. God has provided you with great and precious promises from the Word of God. God has provided you with the resources of the indwelling Holy Spirit. God has provided you with 1 John 1:9. God has provided you with an intercessor; do you want to have someone pray for you, do you realize the Lord Jesus Christ is personally praying for you day by day by day by day. You have One whose prayers are always answered, praying and slugging it out before the throne for you.

You have all of these assets going for you and then Christians have the gall to say well, the Christian life doesn’t work. Well it doesn’t work because you personally have rejected the things that God has given, just as with Israel. Just as with the illustration that we saw in Ezek. 16, why was the woman destroyed? Was it because she wasn’t love? No, the woman was destroyed because she rejected the one who loved her and that’s the same thing in the Christian life. We are destroyed spiritually and we are miserable spiritually only because we have violated, kicked in the face, the one who died for us and the one who loved us.