Lesson 77
Accusation Against Israel -32:9-18
We have been studying the rib
doctrine or the indictment song that the nation
In Deut. 28 God had promised to the nation certain blessings and
cursings in history; blessings if the nation were on positive volition,
cursings toward negative volition. In
other words, as this nation became recalcitrant and reacted and rejected the
revelation of God, then certain cursings would inevitably follow in
history. Remember the rule of God’s
Word, that promises are not necessarily good for you. We have blessing promises but don’t ever
forget that God also promises discipline and He promises cursing and those
promises are as valid as the blessing promises.
It’s nice to remember all the sweet little promises of the Bible but you
also, when you remember this, ought to remember that for every promise of
blessing there is a corollary, an opposite, and that is a promise of discipline
and cursing on disobedience.
Therefore God, in chapter 28 lists some of His blessing promises. Some of these, and we have gone over them,
but I would like to go back to verses 7-13 for you remember this form, what we
call a chiasm in the Hebrew, there are three rings in the text, by rings we
mean spheres of blessing; the outer blessing was the international position of
the nation Israel. The inner blessing
was the domestic condition of the nation Israel, and the center was the Lord
who would be ruling in Israel; these three areas of blessing. In verse 7, “The LORD shall cause thine
enemies who rise up against thee to be smitten before thy face; they shall come
out against thee one way, and flee before thee seven ways.” That’s verse 7 and the chiasm is completed in
12b-13. In 12-b it says “thou shalt lent
unto many nations, and thou shalt not borrow,” that’s economic prosperity, [13]
“The LORD shall make thee the head, and not the tail.” So here we have a blessing that God has
promised in history.
Please remember that this blessing could be measured and this is the point that
we’re going to go back to in the lawsuit.
God worked in this time in history in a measurable way. You could measure God by certain actions that
occurred in history and God was empirically verifying Himself to the eyes and
minds of men in that day. The inner
ring, or the domestic status of the nation is in verse 8, 11-21a. In verse 8, “The LORD shall command the
blessing upon thee in thy storehouses,” that’s economic prosperity on the home
front, verse 11, “And the LORD shall make thee plenteous in goods, in the fruit
of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy ground, in
the land which the LORD swore unto thy fathers to give thee,” etc. So here we have domestic prosperity.
Then finally in verses 9-10 a “The LORD shall establish thee an holy
people unto Himself, as he hath sworn unto thee, if thou shalt keep the
commandments of the LORD thy God, and walk in His ways. [10] And all the people
of the earth shall see that thou art called by the name of the LORD” or “the
name of the LORD is called over you,” literally in the Hebrew, in other words
the Lord Himself, Jehovah, would be the King over this nation. This is the pattern of blessing. This is not something abstract or abstruse,
maybe it happened and maybe it didn’t.
It was exact and measured in history.
Now we come to chapter 32 and God is going to review the fact that He
personally has kept the words of this treaty.
Last time we covered verses 7-8.
Remember chapter 32 has to be understood in its entirety; you have to
get the overall picture and then come in and look carefully at the different
parts of this chapter. The chapter is
broken down as follows: 32:1-14 deal with the court procedure; in this court
procedure we have the prophet who is writing standing as the court clerk and he
says look, God has done this and such, God is introduced, Israel is introduced,
the treaty and the trial is introduced.
Then we have in verses 15-18 an accusation that God lodged in that
courtroom against His nation. The third
thing that we find in verses 19-26 is the sentence that the court passes. The court reviews the case and the sentence
is given out to Israel, it’s all done legally.
That is where a normal secular rib
document ends. This is how a lawsuit
looks in the ancient world, parallel with modern lawsuit proceedings, if you
had studied a lawsuit in any nation that existed and lived in history at this
time. However, there was one additional
feature of chapter 32 that was never, never in a lawsuit, except in the Bible,
and that’s verses 27-43 and that is grace.
God, after pronouncing sentence up-girds the nation with a gracious
promise which shows you that chapter 32 teaches the doctrine of eternal
security. Even though God would pass law
against the nation He had a gracious assurance that he would bring that nation
back home. So we have the doctrine of
eternal security clearly taught here.
Verse 8, last time we spent the entire time on verse 8 to show you the
form of history, to show you that the nations of the world, seventy, there are
seventy races and sub races in the world, we went over the various doctrines
contained as a result of verse 8, where God said He “set the bounds of the
people according to the number of the children of Israel.” Here we have seventy sub divisions of the
human race, created by the division at Babel, they consist of racial, linguistic
and cultural divisions. We went through
the Japhetic line, the Hamitic line, and the Shemitic line and we dealt with
Canaan and there are seventy nations.
This does not teach that these races cannot intermarry for the reason
there are Russians, they are members of the Hamitic line, cross lines with the
Japhetic line, there are the Gogites, the Magogites and there are dozens of
different races and there is no problem in that area. So we have seventy subdivisions in the human
race according to verse 8. The number of
subdivisions equals the number of Jacob’s children. Jacob’s children numbered seventy as we
proved from Gen. 46:27 and we showed in Gen. 10 there are seventy names. So this verse teaches that there are seventy
subdivisions in the human race and that these subdivisions are set according to
a pattern.
To draw the spiritual illustration from this, that is that when God
elects, that means you, if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, God has elected
you, He has chosen you. What does this mean?
It means that He has beforehand prepared your destiny, He has designed
spiritual reality for the Church and you are a part of the Church if you have
received Christ, He has designed it for you, just as history has been primarily
designed for Israel. Israel was the
criterion; Israel was the model, even though Israel had not yet come into
existence. See, this is the funny thing
about election, predestination, all of this, is that here God designs the whole
thing before it’s really there in history. And in verse 8 when God is speaking
about how He set up these seventy sub groups of the nation, Israel was not in
existence then but God prepared beforehand all of history. History has form and control and they were
set up to have a place for Israel. So we
have many valuable lessons we can derive from verse 8 but mainly concerned with
the outline of history, that God has a place for Israel in history. History will not be complete until Israel
fulfills here designed goal.
Verse 9, here is the reason God did this, “For the LORD’s portion is His
people; Jacob is the lot of His inheritance.”
So God has played favorites in history by setting up a culture, special
for Him. Rom. 9, various other passages
in the New Testament show you why God had to design this culture. There had to be a culture designed for many
things, a special culture, number one, to develop a language, a language which
would convey to the human race the thoughts that God wanted to convey to the
human race. That language was
Hebrew. That is a Shemitic language and
when God designed the New Testament He wrote it in Koine Greek which is a
Japhetic language, showing what you learned last time, that the Japhetics shall
conquer the Shemites but the Japhetics shall dwell in the tents of Shem. Here you see it linguistically; the New
Testament is written in Koine Greek but the words of the New Testament in Koine
Greek correspond to Hebrew usage.
This is why, just because you understand classical Greek does not mean
you can understand the New Testament.
The New Testament is written in a special form of Greek and that Greek
was developed by its use. For example, the word “Kurios,” in the Greek means Caesar and it meant the lord and
master. Now Koine is used in the New
Testament but it doesn’t mean Lord, and this is why Christians have preached
this business about if Christ isn’t Lord of all He’s not Lord at all, are way
off the track. They get it because they
look at this word Kurios and they
attach it with a Greek meaning, and you can’t do that. You have to understand Kurios as how it is used in the Old Testament and Kurios is used as a translation of the
Hebrew word Jehovah, therefore it means God.
You accept Christ as God and then later on you accept Him as Lord, that
process is a process of growth where it becomes more and more in your conscious
mind the command that Jesus Christ has on your life. But at the point of gospel
hearing you do not accept Christ as Lord; you accept Him as God and this is
what it means to confess Christ as Lord, it means to confess Him as God. So we have then Kurios, a Japhetic word, from a Japhetic language that has taken
over the Canon of Scripture, conquered it, but it dwells in the tents of Shem,
meaning that the word, although it has been victorious the Greek has moved into
the Canon of Scripture, that Greek is determined by Hebrew usage. And so we have just another example in
history of this.
God had to develop Israel for another reason; God had to develop a
system of typology, God had to say look, I am going to develop a Holy of Holies
here and a holy place, this is the tabernacle.
Inside this holy place there’s going to be an ark, on that ark is going
to be two cherubs; in between those two cherubs is the mercy seat; on that
mercy seat, that gold, there’s going to be blood splattered. The priest had one job, to walk in there and
spatter blood all over the place, spill it onto this dish, and these two
cherubs which represent God’s righteousness and justice would look down at that
blood and say we are satisfied, showing that blood satisfies God’s
righteousness, a life for a life, infinity for infinity. Then outside in the holy place there was a
certain incense there representing prayer, there was the lights, the showbread,
etc. Now all of that physical building has spiritual reality behind it. In other words, that building is a copy of
what heaven is like. You often want to
know what heaven is like, study the Old Testament because you have a physical
literal model there of what heaven itself is like. So this is the second reason why you had to
develop a special culture.
Thirdly, the reason God had to develop a culture was to develop family
life so that when Jesus Christ came into the world He would be raised in that
tradition. He had to develop a system of
family centered living that the world has never seen equaled. No race on earth, including the Japhetics,
have ever developed a family institution like the Jews. This is why you can go to juvenile delinquent
statistics in the United States and it’s remarkable that percentage wise the
Jews have it all over the Gentiles because even today with the breakdown in
classical Jewish home life they still have discipline in the home. The man is still the one who is in authority,
and they have a wonderful type of situation that is a carry over from the Old
Testament. God designed that culture for
His own purposes. So this is what it
means when it says “the LORD’s portion,” the portion among the cultures and
races in the world, “the LORD’s portion is His people; Jacob is the lot of His
inheritance.”
Verse 10 begins to describe, from verse 10-14, the faithfulness of God.
Actually it began in verse 7 but here is where it attains a real clear
expression, verses 10-14, the faithfulness of God. Faithfulness to what? Faithfulness to the terms of Deuteronomy
28. That was the legal document and now
the test is was God or was He not faithful to this document, to this
treaty? If you look carefully in verse
10 you’ll see something is missing because if you look at verse you see
something that God’s faithfulness is not mentioned as far as the Exodus is
concerned and you wonder why, wasn’t that a sign of God’s faithfulness, leading
the nation Israel out of Egypt, doing all these supernatural miracles at the
Red Sea, why is it that in verse 10 it says God “found him [Jacob, the nation]
in a desert land, and in the waste, howling wilderness,” the word “howling
wilderness” literally reads “in a tohu,”
if you’ve done some study in Gen. 1:2, here’s how “tohu” is used. In Gen. 1:2 the
world and the earth is described as a tohu
wabohu or a wilderness without form.
And here’s how it’s used in the Hebrew, “He found him in a desert
wilderness, in the waste,” what is translated “waste” in the King James is the
Hebrew word tohu. And tohu
is the same word described as planet earth before it was refurbished in the six
days in Gen. 1.
So, “He found him in a desert land, in a tohu [comma], a howling wilderness,” and howling wilderness means
the shrieks of the wild animals as these people would go to bed at night out in
the desert and the wanderings, they would hear these wild animals shriek in the
mountains and this made an indelible impression them, so when they describe
that land they say that land was a shrieking, howling wilderness, and it’s in
that land that God found His people. But
if you’re sharp and you think back historically you’ll say just a minute, why
is it… here’s the southeastern corner of the Mediterranean, here’s the Nile
Delta, here’s the Red Sea, here’s the Sea of Galilee, etc. and we have Mt.
Sinai about there, the nation Israel moved across what is now the Nile Delta,
across the north end of the Dead Sea which probably extended up into there in
that day, and then they moved down there and then they went into the wilderness. Why is it that verse 10, when it goes back to
describe the faithfulness of God does not go back before this point? Those of you who have been following the
argument of Deuteronomy should spot immediately why. Why is it that God’s
faithfulness doesn’t go back to the salvation; it goes back to the
post-salvation experience of the nation.
It’s simple: they weren’t under the Law until Mt. Sinai, that’s when the
treaty was formed and this is a trial and the test is has God lived up to the
treaty that He formed. Well, He didn’t
make the treaty until Mt. Sinai so all of this work that God did getting the
nation from point A to point B, all that work is not under consideration in the
trial. God’s salvation work for the
nation is not under trial. What is under
trial is when God promised at Mt. Sinai to do certain things, has God delivered
the goods. That was the contract, has
God fulfilled His contract. So this is
why verse 10 picks up the narrative, not with the Exodus but with the
experience of Israel out in the desert land, in the tohu, in the howling wilderness.
“…He led him about, He instructed him, He kept him as the apple of His
eye.” Now “He led him about is a guess,
it’s a translator’s guess at the Hebrew which means He encompassed him, and it
was used of people who were in love, this is the embrace, the word for embrace,
God embraced the nation. “He instructed
him” and this is another guess, they were really guessing when they translated
this in the King James, they did not have the power of the vocabulary we have
today. “He embraced them and he gave
them attention,” it means to devote attention to. The imagery here is a father devoting
attention to a young infant. So here it
is now, “in a desert land [in the tohu],
in the howling wilderness, He embraced him and He gave careful attention to
him, He kept him,” not as the apple of his eye, but “as the pupil of His
eye.” Those of you who wear contact
lenses, does it or not feel bad when you get dust in them; you know and you
can’t stand to have dust in them, when you get a piece of dust in your eye,
anybody, leave along with contact lenses, when you have something like that you
know how it feels. This is why the Bible
takes the most delicate portion of the body to describe the sensitivity God has
toward His elect nation. In other words,
if you get dust in the pupil of your eye, you know it and you’re not going to
tolerate it there for long, it’s very sensitive. And that’s what this “apple of the eye” is;
it sounds like “apple of the eye” means an object of desire, it’s far stronger
than that, it’s not “apple of the eye” at all, it’s “pupil of the eye,” it
means God is highly sensitive to this, a person that lays their hand on His
elect object lays on their hand on Him.
This is why in the Gospels, do you remember Jesus said it would be
better for these people who lead these children astray, people who lead these
children away, it would be better that a millstone be wrapped around their
neck and they’d drown. Why does Jesus say that?
He says it because it’s this same doctrine, that God is so highly
identified with His elect object that to touch it is like touching your eye,
touching the pupil of your eye. If you
want to see some gory surgery some time just look at some ocular surgery, or
surgery of the eye where they go in there and take the lens out and start
fiddling around with a knife and you can imagine someone with a little knife
working on your eye. If you can think of
that for a couple of minutes, somebody with a knife working on your eyeball you
will have a feeling for what the sensitivity of God is toward His nation, “the
pupil of His eye.”
Then in verse 11 there’s another illustration, it’s full of
illustrations that these people would have understood who had lived in the
wilderness for years and years. “As an
eagle stirreth up her nest, flutters over her young, spreads abroad her winds,
taking them, bearing them on her wings,” now there’s a debate whether the eagle
in the American sense is meant here.
Apparently this word means vulture.
This was the bird that inhabited the high rocky cliffs of the
wilderness, and as these people would walk by they’d notice a peculiar feature
of these vultures. When the mother bird
would get her nest, and she’d have her little baby birds, she’d start flying
over the nest, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth trying to
generate an interest in those little birds to fly. And this was how she would start interest in
them. And the picture is that God is
doing the same thing to the nation Israel.
He goes back and forth over the nation, teaching them spiritual truth,
back and forth, He puts them in one jam after another to get them used to His
grace.
For example, you know that they came to a situation in the wilderness,
no water, and what did they do? They
panicked, but what was God trying to show them—if you wait on Me in a no-water
situation I will provide the water. Case
after case, He gave them military science, they would be in one military jam
after another, God would always come up with a superior military strategy. God had a situation of food, they didn’t have
any freezers so He couldn’t provide them with frozen peas, therefore he gave
them manna, manna from heaven and it was fresh every day and you didn’t have to
worry about going to the freezer to pull it out; the freezer would be stuck in
a sand dune some place. He couldn’t use
freezers so He used fresh food every day, delivered right to the door, that was
manna. So God provided them with this
and this went on and on.
This is not just a story in the Old Testament; it had to be true because
if it wasn’t then God’s faithfulness gets knocked out. This is why the Bible has to be accepted
literally. Here you have a whole trial
depending on it. Yet I hear every once
in a while some idiot walking around saying oh, I don’t believe these stories,
they’re just little stories. If they’re
little stories then you have no proof of the God who is faithful. I always love to come back on the person and
say oh yeah, suppose they are stories; now you prove to me that God is
faithful. And you can’t, absolutely no
way you can. Apart from the experience
of the Word of God you can’t prove a thing, in fact you can’t even prove God’s
there. So these stories are meant to be
taken literally as living proofs in history that God was faithful.
The next thing they noticed is that after the eagle “flutters over her
young and spreads abroad her wings, taking them, and bearing them on her
wings.” What these mother birds would do
from ornithologists who have been in the area is that when the bird starts to
fly, that little bird may start out of his nest, the mother will fly under him
and if that bird is in trouble she’ll pick him up and actually he will ride the
mother’s body back to the nest. So the
mother lets the baby bird come out to exercise, but she’s always there to catch
him. That’s the picture of the Lord; the
Lord is allowing the nation to go into one experience after another, but He
doesn’t abandon the nation, He’s right there to pick her up in case she
falls.
So this is a tremendous picture and just to show you that this made a
very indelible impression on the people’s mind, let’s take some Scriptures,
four in particular and I will show you what a fantasatic impression these
vultures made as illustrations of the faithfulness of God. Exodus 19:4, this was used as an illustration
again and again and again in the Old Testament.
Here God is at Mt. Sinai, He’s ready to give them the Ten Words or the
Ten Commandments. “You have seen what I
did unto the Egyptians and how I bore you on eagle’s wings, and brought you to
Myself,” and here you have the care of God.
The care of God is likened to eagle’s wings, or vulture’s wings, the
illustration again, God cares for this nation.
We have another illustration and it’s one of the great promises, Isaiah
40:31, one of the most fantastic promises in the Old Testament. This, in principle, is applicable to
you. This promise in context is speaking
of those horrible times in history when the nation Israel after 586 would go
into disaster conditions; it would be a disaster of all disasters, a complete
national collapse. Homes would be
burned, there would be armies invading, the nation would be destroyed, young
men would lose their lives by the thousands in military warfare, women would be
raped and all the rest of it would happen because the invaders, the Chaldeans
would come in and destroy this nation in front of their eyes. And Isaiah says even in that situation, even
in the situation of military occupation with complete destruction, complete
chaos all around you, he says God will do these things. The conditions will be so bad that even the
young men, the word “youth” here [verse 30] is the word for teenager and it is
used of people when they are at their peak physically. “Even the youth shall faint and be weary, and
the young men shall utterly fall. [31] But” and here’s the promise, “But they
that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with
wings like vultures; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and
not faint.” God is promising a renewed
physical strength to those men who would trust Him.
If we are to believe some of the hymns that we have from Psalm 119;
Psalm 119 was written by the son of a man who went through hell, a man who went
through those horrible marches into the dry hot desert of the wilderness, when
Nebuchadnezzar and his men marched these people off in chain gangs all the way
over to Babylon and the Tigris-Euphrates valley. Psalm 119 comes out of that experience,
apparently, and Psalm 119 relates what went through that man’s mind after
experience after experience of disaster.
He experienced verse 30, the youth fainting and being weary, without
water, without food, the fainting in the hot sun and all of the rest of the
adversities that went along with a chain gang.
He’s experiencing these; there’s one thing that went through his mind
and never left, the Word of God. And
that’s why Psalm 119 apparently is a eulogy to the Word of God; over and over
again Psalm 119 elevates the Word of God.
You can be in a disaster condition and lose everything, you can lose the
clothes off your back, you can lose your loved ones, you can lose your home,
you can lose anything but if you have the Word of God on the inside nobody can
take it away from you, absolutely no one.
And that is what carries you through disaster after disaster, the Word
of God on the inside. And no matter what
the situation is, no matter how adverse it is, just remember the Word of God is
designed for pressure. Why we have
crybaby Christians that have a catastrophe in their life and they think an
earthquake or the Second Advent happened, no such thing; the Word of God gives
you the resources to take it and here is one of those great promises from the
Word of God, “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they
shall mount up with the wings as these vultures,” what’s the picture?
The picture is fantastic, the picture is that you have these high rocky
cliffs, some times thousands of feet off the dessert floor and as these people
would walk by they’d look up there, these mountains represented barriers to the
nation and what were these birds flying, right over the barrier; that’s what it
means the wings of vultures. Those wings
take those birds way over the barriers; those birds don’t know any barriers,
there are no barriers. And that’s the
promises of the Word of God, those take us over the barriers and that’s what
this verse is talking about, “they shall mount up,” they shall mount up with
wings and they’ll go over any barrier that’s there. These people had to detour around one cliff
after another but those vultures could go right straight, they were not
obstructed. In fact, one of the most
interesting things about observing these birds, we are told, is that the
barriers caused them to go over the barriers because you have the desert winds
blowing, the wind hits the barrier and you get up drafts and so the very
updrafts that are caused by those barriers are what the birds used to fly over
the barriers, and that’s one of the peculiar things about the Christian
life. These things that you would think
would tear you apart, the things and adversities that you think are the worst
possible things are actually those things that set up grace in your life and
enable you to go over them, just the same as these birds fly over these
barriers. So that’s the promise and that
shows you what a lasting image these vultures played in revealing the omnipotence
and faithfulness of God.
Turn back to Deut. 32 and go on with this rib document. Verse 12, here
we have the situation, “So the LORD alone did lead him, and there was no
strange god with him.” Verse 12 teaches
something very vital and it’s saying that when God worked in the nation Israel
He didn’t need help; He didn’t need the help of the Israelites, He didn’t need
the help of the gods of Canaan, He didn’t need the help of demons, He didn’t
need the help of anything else, it was Him and Him alone. When it says him alone, “the LORD alone did
lead him, and there was no strange god, that means foreign god, a god that was
outside of the covenant, there was no foreign god with him, meaning that God in
the past history of this nation is faithful.
See, this is written from the perspective of Moses’ day, all the way up
until say about 1000 BC, and all during these 400 years as they reviewed
catastrophe after catastrophe that hit this nation, no matter what it has been,
God has always been sufficient, and it was always the Lord working alone, never
in tandem with something else, always the Lord alone.
Verse 13, “He made him ride on the high places of the earth,” this is an
idiom which means prosperity, “that he might eat the increase of the fields,’ and
he made him to suck honey out of the rock, and oil out of the flinty rock, [14]
Butter of cows, and milk of sheep, with fat of lambs, and rams of the breed of
Bashan, and goats, with the fat of kidneys of wheat; and thou did drink the
pure blood of the grape.” This is the
animal and vegetable production, etc. and by the way, verse 14, “thou didst
drink the pure blood of the grape,” for those of you who are spleeny about
alcohol I’m sorry, that was fermented grape juice. That’s verse 14, that’s what they drank in
the Old Testament and God says… now obviously the Bible is not condoning
alcoholism and it’s not condoning getting stoned.
There’s a principle, do you know why the Bible councils against
alcohol? Not because it’s a bad badie,
the reason why the Bible councils against alcohol is because alcohol destroys
your ability to think and you can’t live the Christian life unless you can
think straight. That’s why the Bible is
against drugs or anything else, because the Bible says if you are to live the
Christian life you have to have agility in the brain, you have to be able to
think, you have to be able to walk into a situation that comes your way and
think through the doctrine and say to yourself, now let’s see, what areas of
God’s Word apply in this area, and you have to think through and you can’t
while you are bombed out of your mind with alcohol or some other ridiculous
thing. Of course, the reason people have
alcohol and these other things is they don’t want to think. The Bible says in order to live the Christian
life you’ve got to think and that means nix on things that interrupt your
ability to think. That would include
anything, including some of this ridiculous music. Anything that hinders your thought is against
the Word of God. The Bible says you must
be able to think.
That ends the section from verses 1-14; this is the end of the
introduction to the court. The statement
has been made that God is absolutely faithful. Verses 13-14 describe in detail
the fulfillment of Deut. 28, domestic blessing, so much so that it would spill
over in the international area. Verses
13-14 relate that this has actually so transpired, God has held to His
Word. He has kept His Word. Now verse 15-18, the accusation. This, by the way, in verse 15-18, if you
study it carefully, will give you the concept of sin in the Bible. I’m taking this passage deliberately because
so many people look at s-i-n and they think of sex or they think of something
else; it has nothing to do with it. Sin
here is the mental attitude of going your own way in defiance of God’s law,
God’s Word, and that is the essence of sin.
Now you are going to see in verses 15-18 sin portrayed in a way you
probably have never seen before. The
imagery of which sin is portrayed in verses 15-18 is the imagery of a parent
versus a disobedient child. The parent
has done their best to raise the child and in verses 15-18 this child turns
around and kicks the parent in the face.
Verse 15, “But Jeshurun,” now Jeshurun is a sarcastic term applied to
the nation Israel, and Jeshurun comes from this word, Yasher, Yasher equals upright or obedient, straight if you will. So
therefore when it’s applied to the nation it’s sarcastic reference. Why, the upright nation, look what has
happened to it, the straight nation has become crooked, and it’s a term of
sarcasm.
Please notice how sarcasm is used in the Bible. Some day we’re going to get to 1 Kings where
Elijah deals with the prophets of Baal and you are going to see sarcasm like
you have never seen sarcasm. Some of you
get out of fellowship when you hear sarcasm.
That’s because you’re not students of the Word of God, the Word of God
uses sarcasm. There is a time and a place for sarcasm. Jesus used sarcasm, He used sarcasm with
Nicodemus when He said, oh, are you a PhD, well how come you don’t know ABC,
that’s essentially what He said to him, sarcasm. This is not a blanket approval of sarcasm
but sometimes sarcasm is necessary to communicate and so here the composer,
Moses, uses sarcasm. “But Jeshurun,” he
says dear sweet Jeshurun, little Brownie, upright, look what happened to him,
Jeshurun, “waxed fat, and kicked.” Now
“waxed fat” means that he has grown fat on the nourishment of God’s
faithfulness. What has been in verses 13-14? The products of God’s
faithfulness.
So what this nation has done is take God’s blessing, just like the
United States as a nation is taking blessings that flowed out of the Puritan
era and God has respected the Puritan ideals, etc. that set up America, and the
Puritans were the ones that set up America, not Thomas Jefferson or a few other
idiots that had deism; Thomas Jefferson almost destroyed America, he didn’t
start it. So we have people like this,
the great Puritans who set off America and these people started it and God
blessed, and the blessing becomes the downfall, and here in verse 15 you see the first move, “You have become fat”
on God’s blessing, and you “kicked,” and the word “kicked” means to rebel, “you
are waxen fat, you are grown thick,” and the word “thick” is really something
because if you’ve heard it used in the English in a sarcastic reference to
someone that’s an idiot, “boy is he thick,” that’s exactly the way it’s used in
the Hebrew, “thick.” And it was used of
a person who was insensitive, you know, duh, one of these kind, and that’s how
the word “thick” was used, the guy is “thick” between the ears. And this is how the Hebrew is used all
through the Word of God. The prophets
would use this, duh duh God, and that’s their way of saying this, this person
is thick.
And so he says not only is this person got fat, not only has he
increased prosperity as a result of God’s blessing, but he’s become
stupid. In other words, what has
happened is that you have
God –> blessing , blessing, and the people get their eyes on the
blessing and not on God; that always happens, it happens in the Christian
life. This is why God can’t trust me and
can’t trust you with a lot of blessing because if He did we’d get our eyes on the
blessing and not on Him. The same thing
happens over and over again, and of course in this age it’s no so structured in
this way deliberately. The Church of
Jesus Christ is never promised material blessing like the nation Israel—NEVER,
because in history this happened once.
People say oh, why can’t we have a just society, why can’t we get rid of
all the social evils? Deliberate design of God, that’s why. God is not going to allow a nation to totally
prosper because if He does, repeat performance of verse 15.
You grow fat, you are covered with fatness, you become thick, and “then
he forsook God who made him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of his
salvation.” Now it’s pathetic here
because “the God who made him” refers to the fact that… you use the word this
way when you say so and so has it made. What do you mean? How do you use the word “made” when you say
that? You mean that so and so has it
made in the sense that physically or economically he’s got it, it’s all his
now. That’s the way “made” is used here, God made him, God made this nation,
God made this nation prosper the way it’s prospered, “and the Rock of his
salvation,” we explained Rock in verse 4, what Rock meant. So these are two words for God and His
blessing.
Now the prophetic thing about forsaking God in verse 15 is highlighted
in history by a famous example in Saint Augustine. It’s always funny to read men like Augustine
and others who were born again Christians and read some of their writings and
then when you go to the college campus you’ll read what the professor says
Augustine meant and if you’re a Christian you’ll sit there and it’s about all
you can to not to laugh in the professor’s face, because they don’t understand
what Augustine meant any more than the man in the moon. There is a famous passage in Augustine’s
works where he’s reviewing his childhood, and one of the things that depresses
Augustine was the fact that he was walking around with some teenage boys,
friends of his when he was a teenager, and they saw somebody’s garden and it had
some fruit in it, I forgot what it was, let’s say watermelons, it wasn’t
watermelons but let’s say it was, it was a hot day and Augustine’s mother had
all the watermelons he could desire in the house at home but Augustine and
these guys went by this garden and they could have had watermelons all they
wanted, but they decided just for the heck of it they were going to go in there
and take watermelons. And they went in
there and took these things out and just smashed them.
Now Augustine writes about three or four pages on that and he sweats
over it. And the modern professor says
Augustine has a guilt complex, Augustine didn’t get on the couch with the
psychoanalyst and isn’t this too bad that Freud didn’t examine Augustine and
deal with all his repressions, etc. this man was a neurotic and they go into
these big long explanations of poor dear Augustine and his watermelon. But they miss the point, why was Augustine
upset about this? Because when he looked
back in his life that, to him, more than anything else pointed out sin. It pointed out sin because he didn’t need
those things; if he had been in need of it and taken it, it wouldn’t have
bothered him, but what bothered him about the exceeding sinfulness of sin is
that it drives you to do things you don’t need to do. That’s what makes sin sin.
And here you have the same thing in verse 15, there is no reason why
they had to forsake God, there is no logic to why they had to forsake God. God had provided everything; the text says
they had grown fat on His provisions, they didn’t need… there was not a shred
of a reason for doing this, and this is why verses 15-18 portray the accusation
in this term, why sin in this passage is portrayed in this context of a child
disobeying a perfect parent. The reason
why this is done is to get across the concept of sin, because if they had said
well, to use Augustine’s example, he went out with a concubine or something and
that never bothered Augustine because a you could always play it of, he had
some libido desire and all the rest of it, but there’s one thing why the
watermelons got to him, he didn’t need those.
And it’s the same thing here, Israel could have said, why, she disobeyed
God when she came to a jam and when she got in a crisis she failed to believe
God. But you see they could reply yeah,
well, we were pushed into it, the circumstances forced us into that.
But this, in verse 15 knocks out all the props, there’s not one
comeback, if you look carefully at verse 15, in the context, if you were
accused of doing what they did in verse 15, given verse 13-14, what would be
your defense if you were on trial. You
see the way it’s phrased you have no reason, it’s shot you down before you get
into the courtroom. And that’s why sin
is portrayed this way, that God has done everything and you can’t accuse Him,
you’ve got only yourself to blame.
Verse 16, “They provoked Him to jealousy with foreign gods, with
abominations provoked they Him to anger. [17] They sacrificed,” now there’s a
shift in the translation here in verse 17, “They sacrificed unto demons—no
God.” “They sacrificed unto demons”
dash, “no God.” Now “no God” the reason
it’s translated capital “G” is because in the Old Testament Elohim is the word
for God, that’s the proper Hebrew noun for God, I AM is plural; this is why the
Trinity is present in the Old Testament, God the Father, God the Son, God the
Holy Spirit, God had a plural name in the Old Testament, I AM, but it was also
a common noun that could refer to the gods, and so “that are not gods” should
not be there, but “no God,” “they sacrificed to demons, that is, no God.” These no gods in contrast to the God who had
provided; these no gods, these demons they sacrificed to, “to gods whom they
knew not,” now the word “know” means to know empirically, to gods that proved
themselves, “to new gods who came newly up, whom your fathers feared not” or
trembled not.
Now verse 17 is important because of the modern thinking of the modern
dilemma and let me phrase it this way, maybe you’ve seen it in your
conversation or run across it. The
argument goes this way. It was
formulated by Kierkegaard, the first existentialist in the 19th
century. Here’s the dilemma, you have
two men praying, Kierkegaard pictured one man as a Lutheran, he was in the
State Church of Denmark, so we have a Lutheran praying and we have a pagan over
here. Now Kierkegaard’s dilemma is this,
if the Lutheran is in his church praying to God, but he’s out of fellowship,
he’s not praying with conviction, is he really praying, or is the pagan who is
worshiping an idol but truly and sincerely is he worshiping God. See the dilemma, on one hand you have a man
who is a professed Christian who is worshiping the God of the Bible, but
without the Spirit; over here you have the pagan who was worshiping his idol
with all his might because he believes that idol is God. Who is right?
And that’s the dilemma of Kierkegaard.
You have that dilemma solved in verse 17. People tend to suggest, I’ve heard Christians
say the pagan is, the man who sincerely worships the idol is right. Verse 17 knocks that out. Any person who worships idols is a person who
is worshiping a demon. “They sacrificed unto demons, to no God.”
Now I want to show you from the New Testament that this is important; 1
Cor. 10:20, just to convince some of you about the sincere heathen who worships
idols. We got on this subject one time
when I was in high school and I debated for half an hour for this poor pagan;
that was before I became a Christian.
They could have shot me down so fast if there had been some Christian
that knew anything the Word of God. “But
I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons,
and not to God; and I would not that ye should have fellowship with
demons.” What are demons? Demons are fallen angels and it’s not
medieval of you to think in terms of demons.
Jesus Christ carried on conversations with demons. Demons are authentic and they do inhabit
people sometimes, they are the source of false doctrine and in our day demonic
doctrine replaces these demonic idols.
So let’s replace our sincere pagan with a sincere man of the 20th
century. So here’s the man of the 20th
century and he has this idea out here.
In our century the idea is the doctrine of demons. To prove that, turn to 1 Tim. 4:1, “Now the
Spirit speaketh expressly that, in the latter times, some shall depart from the
faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of demons.” So when you consider the ideas, why I’ve
harped again and again at Lubbock Bible Church, the fight today is above the
eyebrows. You must be alert to think
through ideas; that is where the demons are attacking, right here, above the
eyebrows, false doctrines promulgated by demons. Do you think these cults were designed by
people? Oh no, first of all, have you
ever notice, all the cults came out of the 19th century, the great
satanic revival of the 19th century.
You had every major cult that we are fighting today and all of them came
within 50 years of each other out of the 19th century. Do you think that’s just a coincidence? Oh no, out of the 19th century
came the modern dilemma that we’re facing today, existentialism, relativism,
Jehovah’s Witnesses, all these things, they all started within 50 years of each
other, evolution, Darwin, 19th century, all of these ideas came out
of the 19th century. So you
can see the 19th century was a time of fantastic satanic revival and
today in the 20th century we are struggling with the fruit that came
out of that 19th century. We’re still fighting that 19th
century and what it dumped into the 20th century. Really, our
century, our 20th century, has produced no new thought; all the
thoughts and ideas that we have today are all carried over from the 19th
century. With the exception of quantum
physics and a few things like this in physics there has been no new thought in
the 20th century.
So now come back to John 4:24 for the true doctrine of worship, just to
balance this off, we’ve still got Kierkegaard with his Lutheran and his pagan
and we want to clear that up. Now
Kierkegaard saw something wrong; he grew up in Denmark with a state church and
everybody was a Christian because it was fashionable to be Christian. Just like in some portions of this part of
the country, oh, I’m a Christian, I go to church once a month, or I go to
church every week. So what, bless your
pointed head, it has nothing to do with being a Christian. Being a Christian means you have personally
trusted in Jesus Christ as Savior, and you are taking in Bible doctrine. You may be flat on your back in a hospital
and never go to a church and you’re still a Christian. So the emphasis on Christianity is on your
spiritual relationship with Jesus Christ.
In John 4:24 Jesus gives you the balance, the true balance, both of these
men are wrong, not one over the other, both are wrong, for Jesus says to have
true worship, “God is a Spirit; and they that worship Him must worship Him in
spirit and in truth.” There’s your
balance. In order to worship God you
have to have two things; you have to have the Holy Spirit operating in your
human spirit. How does the Holy Spirit
operate in your human spirit? We have
drawn diagram after diagram of your soul.
Here’s your volition, here’s your personal affections, your mentality,
here’s you human spirit. The Holy Spirit
indwells your human spirit and He pipes His effect over here when you are
filled with the Spirit, when you are in fellowship with the Lord the indwelling
Holy Spirit works on your positive volition to strengthen it; on personal
affections to produce occupation with Christ, on your mentality to build up a
divine viewpoint framework, which means that you can take God and around Him is
Bible doctrine and that is what you as a believer should be building up.
If you are filled with the Spirit this divine viewpoint framework will
automatically be being built up in your mind, you will take the things of life,
science, history, philosophy, art, music, the so-called culture of our times
and you will conquer that culture and express your Christianity through the
culture. Your fellowship with people,
believers, friends, loved ones, society, your personal possessions, job, sex,
health, etc. all of these things. All of
these so-called details of life have a central unity in God expressed through
the divine viewpoint framework. Bible
doctrine applied to every area of life gives your life meaning, purpose, unity,
something that nothing in the educational system will ever come up with. It’s fine to raise questions and be critical
but there’s no sense in raising questions if you’re never going to find
anything. If you’re never going to find
anything you might as well forget it, and that’s what they’re doing, forgetting
it an dropping out. Modern education
can’t provide a framework, it can’t provide this; this is something you can
only get through the Word of God and nowhere else. You’re not going to get this reading
devotional literature, you’re not going to get this reading some sweet little pious
book, you’re going to get it by taking in the Word of God over an extended time
period. You cannot grow without taking
in the Word.
So this is truth, this is what the Holy Spirit produces, the balance
between the Spirit and truth is the answer to Kierkegaard, both the Lutheran
and the pagan are wrong. The pagan who
was worshiping the idol with sincerity is wrong because he’s worshiping a
demon. The Lutheran who is worshiping
the God of the Bible is wrong because he’s not worshiping in the power of the
Holy Spirit. Both are wrong. Answer: a person who has the truth and the
Spirit and he is the only one that is right.
Verse 17, “They sacrificed unto demons, to no God,” by the way you can
see what these demons looked like, the idols of the ancient world apparently
were carved after the vision that these people had of demons, so when these
people saw demons, etc. they would make an idol up to picture this demons; so
this is how these idols came to be, these freaky looking that you see in the
archeology book, they evidently are pictures of real idols.
Verse 18, “Of the Rock that begot thee thou art unmindful, and hast
forgotten God who formed thee.” The God
that formed thee, this is a word used of childbirth, the God who wreathed in
pain for you, and in verse 18 you have both the father and the mother
together. “The Rock that begot thee” is
the father, the “God who wreathed for you in childbirth” is the mother, and
here you have the two, the father and the mother, bringing forth the believer,
bringing forth the nation Israel. So
concluding with verse 18 you have a tremendous accusation. It’s a disheartening one but it’s one that we
should, as Christians, take to heart, namely that when you and I sin you can’t
blame it on something else, and you can’t blame it on somebody else, somebody
that you live with, somebody you don’t live with, somebody stepped on your toe,
somebody didn’t step on your toe. You
are to blame yourself. And if you don’t
have this concept of sin you can never use 1 John 1:9. 1 John 1:9 means you
have to confess your sin and it doesn’t mean you say oh God, I made a mistake
today, so and so got me so hacked, etc.
Maybe he did but it means you blew your cool spiritually and you were
the one that blew it and that’s what confession of sin means, you confess that
you personally did it. You did not have
to sin. If you don’t have the concept
that you did not have to sin you aren’t confessing your sins. Confession of sin means that you confess that
you didn’t have to do it; you weren’t rammed, crammed or jammed into doing this
thing, you did it by your own free will.
That is sin.