Clough Deuteronomy Session 6
Deuteronomy
1:19-46 – Kadesh and the Wasted
Years—Choice and Consequences
Fellowship
Chapel; 17 Nov 09
You all have the handouts and on that I always have
the introduction and review, just a basic quick summary of where we’ve been to
get the continuity, and in Deuteronomy 1:6-4:40 it’s that first chunk of
material, and this is the first exposition of the Torah, meaning that this is a
chunk of material, narrative material in the book of Deuteronomy that appears
to be one integrated address by Moses.
So we break that down, we see in Deuteronomy 1:9-18 a recollection of
the population growth. Now why is
that there? We have to keep going
back to this first chunk of material, and the whole point of this is
motivation, and it’s useful to see why and how Moses motivates. His argument throughout these first
four chapters is basically historical facts properly interpreted. So he’s
pushing to have obedience motivated.
Well, how does he motivate this obedience? He’s going to present them with the
facts of God’s revelation, hoping, of course, that that generates the feelings,
the emotions, and then from there we have the obedience. But the point to think about is that at
no point in any of these four chapters does he attempt to motivate by an appeal
to some sort of mysticism. The
motivation is objective history and this is why he narrates and he goes into
details, referring back to the book of Numbers, is that he wants people to
remember. And that’s something
about our Christian faith that we want to understand is that revelation is not
continuous in history; revelation is sporadic and then it stops, and then God
is silent for long time periods.
And that revelation is preserved in the text, and that’s our only
context; we can’t hope for revelation all the time. So that’s the point in this large section.
Then from verses 9-18 he went through and talked about
the need for leadership. That was
last time. And how does that
fulfill his argument? Well, he’s going back and he’s building a case that the
Abrahamic Covenant is coming to pass, that those promises given centuries
before to Abraham are coming to pass, the land, the sea promises. So already, remember in verses 6, 7 and
8 of chapter 1 he’s talked about the land, and he says
we’re going to go into the land.
So there’s the land promise.
Then verses 9-18 deals with the population explosion that they’ve had
and that obviously is the people problem and that’s why in verse 10 he actually
cites and alludes to the Abrahamic Covenant because in verse 10 you see where
he says, “The LORD your God has multiplied you, here you are today as the stars
of heaven in multitude.” That’s
the very same language that God spoke to Abraham so it’s no accident. So he’s tying this together. Then he says in verse 13 choose
leadership, and he gives us a model of qualifications, wise, discerning, and
known by the people.
Then in verses 16 and 17 he deals with the shoterim or the deputy judges, and there’s a
whole dialogue there and we went into that last time, but it’s very important
because we’re going to hit this again and again and again, over and over
because we need to come to grips with this in our thinking, as we dialogue with
folks. Everybody wants to make a
political judgment or a social judgment today, but that’s fruit; what we need
to deal with is the root. What is the criteria on
which you’re making political and social judgments? That’s the more deep
argument and it’s often not made.
And so we said, therefore, in 16, and in the outline it says, “large populations tend primarily to look at social
justice.” So this is just a
preliminary look at social justice.
And we made basically two points, that equality before the Law is
grounded on the transcendental justice of God, that social justice has to have
a foundation, and the foundation that the Bible insists must be there is
transcendental justice.
Now what do we mean by “transcendental?” We mean that it’s above all different
societies, that it’s a universal, that it’s an absolute, that it’s anchored in
something over all of us, because the point is if someone tells me that I ought
to do X, Y and Z, my question is, why should I, who are you to tell me? In other words, where is the standard
coming from? You see, the
point is that on a non-biblical basis, let’s about this just for a moment,
again we’ll go over this and over this, it’ll become ingrained after a while,
but if I’m an unbeliever and you challenge me and you ask me, what’s my basis
for making judgment calls, how do I use o-u-g-h-t, ought? Where do I get my “oughts?” Well, I could go and say the universe,
but the universe, I’ve already said as an atheist, as an unbeliever, is
unintelligent. So are we saying
that we are getting our transcendental standards from a mindless, purposeless,
meaningless universe? Is that
where we’re grounding it? Well,
people don’t want to say that, but that’s one of the other options.
Another one is that direct and absolute or social
judgment comes out of us, but on a non-Christian basis who
are the “us?” Well, they’re evolving biochemical globs of protoplasm. So on that basis where do you have
moral judgment from? This is a legitimate question, I’m not trying to be funny
here. The point is that if that’s the worldview then if I were an unbeliever then I
would have to be obligated to justify my standards of right and wrong on the
basis internal to my worldview.
And what is my worldview saying?
That the universe is unintelligent and mindless, that I am an evolving
concatenation of protoplasm. Now
given those things that are part and parcel of my worldview, how do I justify
moral judgment? So this is the
issue that has to be pressed before we get into all the little details and
particulars; we haven’t justified the big picture yet. It’s like trying to go into a stadium
and saying one side is playing football and the other is playing soccer. Before
we start the game we’ve got to agree on what the game is. And until we have this discussion we
can’t argue the issues because we’re following two different things here.
So the Bible is unambiguous and we’ll see this over
and over again and it’s a very important lesson, that social justice in the
Scripture is anchored in the transcendental nature of God Himself.
Now if the non-Christian can’t, in practice, justify
moral absolutes, like I said, here’s the expedient way to do it, and this is
where it winds up in the final analysis, and that’s why I said there’s such a
thing… you go to law school and read in legal literature, they talk about
“positive law,” that’s an expression, “positive law.” And what they mean by that is that the law doesn’t come from
man’s value; it doesn’t come from social good, it comes because it has been positively enacted by some social authority. And the argument for positive justice
or positive law is that until you have it enacted, you don’t have an objective
standard to refer to. In other
words, if it isn’t in the law it doesn’t count. So this is why we have in our society a tremendous
generation of thousands and thousands of regulations, because everyone is
operating like positive law in that we’ve got have a regulation because until
we do get a regulation we don’t know what to do.
Now isn’t it remarkable, when God speaks to social justice
He says it in ten words. Now isn’t there something, a disconnect going on,
don’t you sense a disconnect? Here we have in a society with
thousands… in fact you can go to a government agency sometime and ask to see
the Federal Acquisition Regulations, FAR’s, the
F.A.R. I was amused when the young
new President we have was going to say that he could dispense federal dollars
very quickly and all of his little think tank people that apparently had no
experience in government regulations thought it could happen very fast. You can’t go through the Federal
Acquisition Regulations fast; they won’t let you. You can put an order in and by the time it clears through
all eighteen different layers of bureaucracy it’s not going to get
purchased. And that’s why the
dollars haven’t come out, they can’t come out because the regulations prevent
them that Congress enacted.
So the problem here is that when we come to the Mosaic
Law what we want to look for… I’m throwing all of this out because I hope it
generates questions in your mind that you want to ask the text. You want to be on the lookout because
we want to go through the text of this law code as people living in the
beginning of the 21st century, who have these very serious questions
about social justice. We want to
ask God, through the Word, what’s the answer to these questions? Everybody is asking them what are the
answers? So positive law basically
is the expedient way of solving the problem: pass a law, make a regulation, and
that solves the problem.
You’ll see this in other places,
for example, increasingly in some of our institutions we have the term “zero
tolerance.” Now zero tolerance is
a mindless thing, there’s no zero tolerance in the Scriptures. People pass zero tolerance because they
don’t want to make a decision.
It’s easier to have a zero tolerance policy than having common sense
policies because it absolves the leader from getting involved in the details of
things. But if you look at the
Scripture there never is a zero tolerance policy in the Word of God. How come? A zero tolerance to sin, yes, but then it’s the matter of
the situation and so forth and so on, it goes on. It’s absolute standards, but
there’s a common sense in application.
That’s why we have 610 amplifications, case law, of the Ten Words.
Okay, so much for that. The second thing on the shoterim, the first one was
equality before the Law is grounded on the transcendental justice of God, and
the second thing we said under the shoterim is that the statutes that Moses taught, that
he’s talking about, were in Exodus 18, which was before Mount Sinai, and since
the statutes existed pre-Sinai, it means they had a source other than the Sinai
revelation. So that raises the
question: where did the statues come from? And we answered that. It comes from
two things: it comes from universal moral consciousness given by God at creation. This is Paul in Romans 1; everybody has
an innate conscience. It doesn’t
mean that it’s perfect; it doesn’t mean that it can’t be defiled; it doesn’t
mean it can’t be twisted and deceived, but everybody has a compass, a moral
compass. And the second source is
a residual memory of the Noahic Covenant.
Every people group on the planet comes from one family, from one boat
after the flood. That means that
in the heritage of every people group, somewhere back there, they had exposure
to the Noahic Covenant.
All right, tonight we come to the next section and
you’ll see on the outline, we’re now down to here; we’ve gone from Sinai to Kadesh, we’ve got them to Kadesh. And now the question is what happens
next. And so we’re going to finish
chapter 1 tonight, Kadesh and the wasted years. And this section deals, basically if
you can think of it this way, as showing a choice that was made and showing the
consequences that flowed out of that choice. So this is choice and consequences. And this is important because we are
going to, out of this, learn some very vital things that are amplified in the
New Testament when it comes to living the Christian life, but this choice and
consequences theme is part and parcel of the whole legal literature of the
Bible.
So let me address the issue first of choice and then
we’ll get into the text and see what the choice was. Choice in the Scriptures basically is another way of saying
human responsibility. We are held responsible. Now this is a fundamental lesson. When we come to grips with the legal literature we’re coming
to grips with fundamental truths of society. These are basic stuff, and we have to engage and we have to
think about these things. But
responsibility starts with the Genesis creation. God gave responsibility to every man, woman and so
forth. So it’s an institution, I
call it a divine institution. It’s a social structure that it didn’t evolve;
it’s there by design. Now think
about what’s going on in our contemporary environment. What happens when something goes wrong
in the schools? It’s the teacher’s
fault. What happens if something goes wrong in a corporation? It’s the worker’s fault. What happens if you ask teenagers the
problem? It’s the parent’s fault. If you ask the criminals in
incarceration, it’s society’s fault.
If you ask the government bureaucrat it’s no one’s fault. In the first generation of Moses it was
Jehovah’s fault, and Moses’ fault. We’ll see that very graphically
tonight.
So what’s the deal? It’s blame shifting.
That’s the opposite of acceptance of biblical responsibility. That is a fundamental social lesson
that has to be taught. And
children have to understand this and parents have an obligation to teach
personal responsibility; it’s a revolutionary act in our society, nobody wants
to accept responsibility. If you think about the response we have politically going on, it’s
to solve this problem, solve that problem. Wait a minute, before you try to solve the problem, let’s
find out where the responsibility was for the mess to start with so then we can
understand how to solve the problem.
But we don’t want to talk about personal responsibility, we want to
blame somebody else, nobody wants to accept responsibility. It would be so refreshing to have
someone say yeah, I was responsible for that; I screwed up. You know what, I’d trust that person to
fix it because that person has told me that they accept personal responsibility
and that makes me trust them. It
doesn’t make me go away from them; it would be healthy to acknowledge a little
bit of responsibility. So that’s
the key behind this whole passage: responsibility, choice.
So let’s see what the choice was all about. Next slide just basically is the map;
they’ve come to Kadesh and the issue is whether
they’re going to go north whether they’re going to accept God’s challenge or
they’re going to turn, and we’ve already gone through this preliminarily the
first night we were here, but if you look at Deuteronomy 1:19, here begins the
drama. And from verse 19 through
33 we have the choice. Now let’s
look at it.
“So we departed from Horeb,
and went through all that great and terrible wilderness.” So the map situation
gives you the location of what’s going on, they are right there, they’ve come
up here, and from this point, this Kadesh-barnea
location to the land that they’ve been given is eleven days journey, and it
took them forty years before they got there. So this is why it’s called the wasted years. And I wanted to also show you, just so
we go through this again, another review: the Sinai terrain. Impress this upon
the mind’s eye in your imagination so when you read these texts, because the
Bible is full of references to this, the wilderness wanderings, that in your
mind’s eye you can imagine you and your family having to go out here. Now just think of the logistics
problem. Where is the water? Where’s
the food? Where’s the clothing?
And your family has to survive out there; we’re talking survival
here. And that wilderness was
designed by God to give them this test where He is going to be their solution.
And then we come to one the first springs, this is Kadesh, and that’s why they came there to that spring
area. Well, it’s from there that
they want to launch their invasion.
So verse 19 begins the story of that incident, the Numbers incident that
we said earlier, except the difference tonight from what we did the first night
when we were dealing with a quick summary of this incident, tonight we’re going
to learn about a way God tests us and how we respond to testing, and we’ll see
that as we go on here.
Verse 19, “So we departed from Horeb
and went through all that great and terrible wilderness which you saw on the
way to the mountains of the Amorites,” the mountains of the Amorites is the
southern section of the Promised Land, “as the LORD our God had commanded us. Then we came to Kadesh-Barnea. [20] And I said to you, You have come to the mountains of the Amorites, which the
LORD our God is giving us.” And
verse 20 has an interesting construction.
If you look in the notes, again I’ve mentioned that, sort of translating
it literally, “which Yahweh our God is giving us,” it’s a participle; the
emphasis is on the fact that the giving is in motion now. Yahweh is in the act of giving this to
us. So the Lord is giving. [21] “Look, the LORD your God has set
the land before you; go and possess it, as the LORD God of your fathers has
spoken to you; do not fear or be discouraged.”
Israel at this point is a nation and the Sinaitic Covenant is with Israel as a nation—not just
as a people, but as a nation. And as we said, in certain circles today
theologically we say we have Supersessionism, or
Replacement Theology in which the Church replaces Israel in the plan of
God. But the Church is not a
nation. People can’t seem to
understand there’s a distinction here.
The Sinaitic treaty is made with the people of
God as a national entity; the Church is not a nation, the Church is a
transnational group of people from many nations; it can’t replace. That’s why the New Testament doesn’t
have laws on how to dig latrines; the Mosaic treaty does. Why is that? Is it that we don’t need latrines? No, it’s because they were to dig them in a special way and
their public health was to be structured and designed in such a way that it was
a testimony to God and His purity.
And so there are all kinds of issues with the Mosaic Law because it is
dealing with a nation. That’s why this book is so important for us as Christian
citizens today in a nation, because it addresses God’s designs for national
structure. We’re not a theocracy
like Israel so we’re not arguing one to one correspondence here; we’re arguing
wisdom. There are wisdom
principles in the Deuteronomic code that we can look
at to see how we might apply them.
So we go through this horrible place, this land, and
we come to the oasis and then God is now giving it to us. Now in verse 21 there’s an instruction,
and this is the setup for the choice.
He says look, “the LORD God has set the land before you,” verse 22, “And
every one of you came near to me and said, ‘Let us send men before us, and let
them search out the land, let them bring back word,” and so on. [23] “The plan pleased me; so I took
twelve of your men, one from every tribe.
[24] They departed and went up into the mountains, and came to the
valley … spied it out,” and so on.
And then in verse 25, they “brought back word to us, saying, It is a good land which the LORD our God is giving us.”
Now that little section deals with mechanics and I
want to outline it in sort of a procedure way because the neat thing about the
Old Testament is if you live these events in your mind’s eye, and project
yourself back in, almost like you could take a time machine in your
imagination, and place yourself back and live in your mind’s eye these events,
it becomes easier to grab onto some things that might be abstract theology in
the New Testament. But if we think
about this, Moses says, don’t fear, don’t be dismayed, and then he tells them
to go in and get the facts. See,
everything in verse 22, 23, 24, 25, ask yourself, what is the point of all
that? Why would you send spies
into a land? To
obtain facts. They’re
basically after two things, they want to find out the lines of invasion, one of
the things they need to reconnoiter, the best attack route and they want to
know about the enemy defenses.
Those are the facts of the situation. So right away, God doesn’t give them the facts; notice. They
have to go search out the facts.
God has told them to do something but it’s up to responsible individuals
to find out the facts.
Now after you get the facts, now we have to have the
interpretation of the facts. So that’s why it’s proceeded with, don’t fear,
don’t be dismayed, don’t interpret the facts you are going to find subjectively
and separated from God’s revelation.
Encompass the facts with the revelation of the Word of God. That’s a basic thing. I often talk about the faith-rest
drill, basically three parts. One is that you grab onto some promise, some
fragment, some memory verses, some truths from
Scripture. Number two, you go and
you digest that, you work with it until that Scripture encompasses the facts at
hand. And then the third thing, of
course, you can enter into a peaceful, stable environment. And these people are going to get the
facts but they are not going to do step two. They’ve got step one, they know what happened in Egypt, they
know what God spoke to them on Mount Sinai, so they know all that, that’s
Scripture they know. But when they
get the facts they can’t put the facts together with the revelation; they can’t
interpret the facts correctly.
So in verse 26 we have the response, and from verse 26
down all the way to verse 33 we are going to have their choice. “Nevertheless you would not go up, but
rebelled against the command of the LORD your God.” It’s very picturesque here
in the Hebrew. In you’re outline
you’ll see where I have 1:26, where I translated “not willing … you rebelled
against the mouth of Yahweh your God,” that’s just the way the Hebrew pictures
it, “you rebelled against the mouth,” now that’s just a Hebraic expression of
the words that came out of the mouth, but I think it’s kind of a very
picturesque way of saying it; it’s picturing God with a mouth with lips and
He’s spoken these things and you’ve rebelled against His mouth. These words aren’t Moses’ words, they’re
not Aaron’s words, they came from the mouth of God and you, by your rebellion
are setting yourselves up against His mouth; it’s God’s mouth, and you’re not
willing to do it.
And then it says, “Nevertheless you would not” do
this, [28] “And you complained in your tents, and said, ‘Because the LORD hates
us, He has brought us out of the land of Egypt to deliver us into the hand of
the Amorites, to destroy us.” Now
notice the little phrase that you did it “in your tents.” Now can’t you just see how this spreads
through the camp. You see, first of all it’s a discussion around the family
gatherings, so now it’s in the family, so this cancer of an unbelieving
interpretation is spreading through families, and then it’s the tent that’s next
door, then it’s the neighbors, then it’s the whole neighborhood, then it’s the
whole tribe and finally it’s the whole nation, and now you’ve got the whole
nation, one frantic mob of people that are just going on an emotional revolt
over the facts because they can’t subdue the facts with the Word of God. They can’t interpret them
correctly. And verse 27 says, “you
complained … the LORD hates us,” now look at this. And this illustrates an interesting point about
theology.
I want to diagram what’s going on in their heads so
that we can understand how we can think, or should think when we face these kind of things.
When it says “the LORD hates us, He has brought us out of the land,” you
see, it’s an affront to God’s character.
And the battles in our mind have a lot to do and hinge the spiritual
conflicts that go on in our heads basically are conflicts over the glory of God
and what kind of a person He is.
And when they come out with this statement, “the LORD hates us,” it’s
the idea that He could care less for us.
Now does that fit with the revelation of Sinai? Does that fit with the revelation of
the Red Sea? Does that fit with
the plagues? No, it doesn’t fit,
so since it doesn’t fit we know what they aren’t doing; they’re not taking
these facts and interpreting them in the light of the known revelation. It doesn’t require extra revelation,
they don’t need more revelation, they just need to remember the revelation they
already have, that’s all, and use it.
In this diagram, I have a diagram for you here trying
to illustrate the way of thinking that goes on because you know, if you’re like
me this goes on all the time and I want to give you four verses as tools. Four verses from the New Testament that
take you step by step through this process of thanksgiving and why it’s so
important. The theology of
complaining: both the theology of thanksgiving and the theology of complaining
start with the same thing: God is in charge. Isn’t it amazing that a hard-nosed atheist who spends all
his time denying that God exists, what does he do the first time he gets in a
jam? Who does he curse? All of a sudden God’s existence has
popped up again. Isn’t that
interesting? Why does that
happen? Because underneath all the
time he’s believed in God, he knows God exists; it’s just in the fury of the
moment his suppression mechanism stops and it pops up, oh well, gee, you really
do believe in God, why are your cursing Him for the situation that
happened. So everybody believes
that.
Now, on the left side the Theology of Thanksgiving:
God is gracious and gives me what I do not merit. That’s the heart, the motive that goes on here: God is
gracious and gives me what I do not merit. The Theology of Complaining: God claims to be loving and
gracious, but I don’t really believe that, and this test certainly doesn’t show
it in my life, He doesn’t really care for me. And so it’s expressed right here in the Hebrew, “the LORD
hates us,” a great text to show you the mental process that we all fight, every
day of our lives we go through this.
Then we come down here, on the “Theology of Thanksgiving” God has my
ultimate good in view as He administers providential circumstances in my
life. See, that’s putting it
together, it’s saying God is in charge, He’s providentially working in my life,
but He has my ultimate good in view while He’s doing that. You have to believe that. That’s the struggle, right there. Over here: “He treats me like He
doesn’t care or, He treats me like He delights in my misery. Now that’s the choice.
Now the problem is that the Bible in the New Testament
tells us, great emphasis on thanksgiving, so here are the four verses and we’re
going to take a few minutes here because I want to take you to these verses so
you see the sequence. The first
verse is found in 1 Corinthians 10:13, I think when the Navigators, or they
used to, when someone first becomes a Christian and they take them to basic
verses 1 Corinthians 10:13 was one of them I believe. But this is what’s happening to the people right there in Kadesh-Barnea.
1 Corinthians 10:13, it’s a promise and if you don’t know this promise
you need to put a reference on it, write it on a 3 x 5 card or use it, this
should be memorized. “No
temptation has overtaken you, but such as is common to man, God is faithful,
who will not allow you to be tested above what you are able, but will with the
testing make a way of escape that you may be able to bear it.” And that’s a good anchor verse to start
correcting bad thinking. Right
there, that’s a powerful statement, He WILL NOT allow you to be tested above
what you are able.
Many years ago I knew this fellow out in Texas, and he
was having all kinds of problems, a believer, had all kinds of problems and it
was like he was sinking, and getting into depression, a pity party and all the
rest of it, and it all ended one night on a Texas lonely road when he went out
there with his pickup and racing down with the police after him, and stopped
the truck. He had a gun and the policeman, of course, obviously knew he had the
gun and they were closing in on him, and he pulled the gun out and shot
himself. And I remember his niece
told me as a Christian, she had a great word, she used 1 Corinthians 10:13, he
didn’t understand that God is able, he couldn’t believe that the testing that
he was undergoing was something that he could and would, if he had trusted the
Lord, he would have gotten through that.
But in his depression he thought the trial was bigger than God’s
sovereignty. And so it led to
suicide, and she was absolutely right.
So that’s number one verse.
So what I’m going to do, I’m going to take these four
verses in sequence and basically show you that this is a mental map that these
folks should have used. 1
Corinthians 10:13, now Romans 8:28, all of us know that, “All things work
together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according
to His purpose.” So Romans 8:28, 1
Corinthians 10:13 reinforce each other. Verses #3 and 4 are in that little box
on your notes, where it says: PRINCIPLE:
The mental attitude of “thanksgiving” [is a barometer of our spiritual
state!] 1 Thessalonians 5:18,
where it says, “in everything give thanks for this is the will of God in Jesus
Christ for you.” Then that clause
is haunting there, “in everything
give thanks,” it doesn’t mean everything is great; it just means in the
circumstances we give thanks.
Giving thanks is a barometer of our spiritual life. And finally, Philippians 4:6-7 takes
the last step. So you’ve got four verses, 1 Corinthians 10:13, that limits the
test; Romans 8:28 tells you the purpose of the test, the providence; 1
Thessalonians 5:18 tells us we are to do a check, can we give thanks in this
situation. And sometimes it takes
hours and days to work through to where you can honestly give thanks. It doesn’t just happen, you can’t just
burp this out; this takes a struggle, oftentimes, before you can really get in
a position of giving thanks. And
then Philippians 4:6-7, “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer
and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto
God.” And then it says, “the peace of God which passes all understanding shall keep
your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” So those are four powerful packed verses.
Now let’s to back and see what
happened in this historic disaster. Well, we already see they’re not giving
thanks so immediately we know their theology is off base. Now we’re talking about the theology of
complaining instead of the theology of thanksgiving, so mentally these people
are out of it. They are believers,
we know they’re believers because previous references in Exodus 14:31 where it
came out it says they believed. So
it’s not that these people weren’t believers; they were believers, but they weren’t believing in this situation. So in verse 30 it says, “The LORD your
God, who goes before you,” this is Moses now saying, “…goes before you,” and
it’s interesting, if you look in your notes on Deuteronomy 1:30, if you
translate literally in the Hebrew it says: Yahweh, your God, is walking before
you. The word “go” is just… it’s a
word usually translated for walking, going somewhere, and it’s in the process,
God is in the process of walking with you.
And by the way, I mentioned that earlier on the thing,
vocally I didn’t but on the notes, and that is do you notice what pronoun he’s
using before he uses the word for God?
In English grammar there’s the first person plural, and there’s the
second person plural; which one is he using? Remember English literature? Second person plural. Now what does that tell you? Why do you suppose Moses is
deliberately using the second person plural and not the first. I think it’s to make the intensity of
the rebellion; He’s your God, not mine.
He is his, He’s ours, but in this situation Moses wanted to make the
choice so clear, you are rebelling against the mouth of your God, deliberate,
second person plural pronoun.
All right, he does the same thing here, in verse 30,
“The LORD your God, is walking
before; He will fight for you, according to all He did for you in Egypt,” and
by the way, now when he mentions Egypt, which nation do you suppose was
stronger, militarily, Egypt or some Canaanite two-bit city? Egypt. So it’s the argument from the lesser to the greater. If God did that, then why can’t He do
this for us? See, that’s why in
that other box on your notes I mentioned Romans 8:32, there’s an example of
Paul using the same logic, arguing from the greater to the lesser. What does Romans 8:32 say? “He who did not spare His own Son, but
delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him freely give us all
things.” He did the biggest thing
for us; all the rest of the stuff is clean-up stuff. The big thing’s already been done; see. And that’s how biblical authorities
argue from the greater to the lesser.
Then it says in Deuteronomy 1:30-31, “…He did it
before Egypt, before all your eyes,” and then it says, “the LORD your God,” and
look at the delicate way of phrasing this. This is a verse that shows you
something about the Old Testament that people that yak-yak about the Old
Testament, God is a meany God or something, never
have read the Old Testament seriously.
Now come on, look at verse 31; now come on, that’s not the verse
describing some meany
god. What does it say? “…the LORD your
God carried you as a man carries his son,” it’s a picture of a dad with his
little kid holding him in his arms.
Now is that descriptive of what you often picture of the caricature of
God of the Old Testament? No, this
is the God of the Old Testament: “he carried you as a man….” [32] “Yet for all hat, you did not
believe the LORD your God, [33] who went in the way before you, He searched out
a place for you to pitch you tents,” every night on the journey God scouted
ahead and picked the perfect campsite, “to show you the way you should go, in
the fire by night and in the cloud by day.”
See, those are describing specifics of God’s
logistical grace. God pushed them
into a trial. You saw the landscape, I showed you
those slides the last couple of times.
Now visualize that, I said keep it in your mind’s eye because if you
picture you and your family out there in that wilderness, that’s a challenge,
that’s a test, that’s a logistics test; can I or cannot I not trust the Lord to
supply my logistics, my food, my water, my clothing, my safety, my shelter;
those are all logistical things.
And by putting them out in the wilderness and then deliberately, in a
supernatural way supplying their logistics. What was God teaching them? That "I am the
God of grace and I can provide for you logistically". But then when it comes down to the
battle here, the test for spiritual combat, they’re going to fail the
test. And so it says here, He went
in, He did all these things, and yet you did not believe. So verse 33 kind of ends Moses’
sermonic pericope here where he’s talking about their
choice.
Now something is going to happen and what’s going to
happen from verse 34 down to the end of the chapter is an amazing thing about
consequences. And we want to look
at this carefully because it happens, it happens to Christians, it may have
happened to you, it happens often time to believers, and it’s hard to
take. We’re going to look at a
discipline test. Now up to now
it’s been a logistical test and they have failed. On the basic logistical test God said okay, you passed the
logistical test, now I want to give you a spiritual combat test. And they flunked this one. So now God is going to give them a
discipline test. A discipline test
is a little different because in a discipline test what happens is that we’re
suffering the consequences of a previous bad decision. We’re on plan B now; not plan A. So now we know we’re on plan B, we know
we’re suffering consequences of a foolish thing we did in the past. Now the question is, not that I’m
involved in suffering the consequences of a bad decision can I trust the Lord
in that situation to carry me through to live with the consequences in a
victorious spiritual way? That’s
the discipline test. Now watch
what happens because they’re going to fail the discipline test. They’re going to fail two tests.
Watch it now; look at the Lord in verse 34. Now the Lord here… in the Hebrew it’s
very picturesque, the Lord is angry and when you see passages like this in the
Old Testament this is God coming down and interacting with people. In other words, if He were to appear
and carry on a conversation with you these are some of the emotional
characteristics of a conversation with God. Now it seems a little strange to think of God doing this
because we normally don’t think of God banging on the table, like that [hits
table] but this is what he’s doing; watch. “The LORD heard the sound of your words, and He was angry,
and He took an oath, saying, [35] Surely not one of these men of this evil
generation shall see the good land which I swore to give your fathers, [36]
Except Caleb…” and so forth.
Now in your notes I have translated this, Deuteronomy
1:35, on page 3; this is a curse; it says God “took an oath,” it’s an
incomplete oath, it’s an incomplete curse, and this is the way it reads: “if
any one of these men, this evil generation, sees the good land which I swore to
your fathers,” and it is incomplete, you fill in the blank. Probably the best way of translating
it, and there’s no translator would have the courage to say this, but basically
we could translate it in our vernacular: I’ll be damned if any one of these men
is going to hit that land. Now can
you imagine God saying something like that? If you can’t it’s a challenge from the Scripture to think
about that. Why can’t you think of
God getting that mad, as a man would get mad, and saying, you know, I’ll be
damned if any of you are ever going to get into that land. Wouldn’t that be kind of horrifying to
have the God of the universe talk to you like that? And yet this is what He did here. And it shows you God’s anger when we don’t trust Him; it
really ticks Him off because it’s an impugning of His character. So He heard this, He took an oath;
that’s just the translators way of telling you this sentence doesn’t end in the
Hebrew, so the only way you can do it is say if He took an oath.
[36] “[Except Caleb … he] shall see it,,” and say to his children “I am giving the land on which
he walked, because he wholly followed the LORD,” and that’s another
problematical sentence in the Hebrew; it’s used of David and it’s in contrast
to Solomon in 1 Kings and literally it says, “because he filled up after
Yahweh,” the verb there is “he filled up,” and the translators are tying to
make sense of that and so they translated it as “he walked fully after the
Lord.” Now I’m making this point
because the way it’s translated in the English, where it says “he wholly
followed the LORD,” it sounds like the claim to perfection, and yet we know historically
and theology that that’s not the claim that’s being made here. He’s not arguing that Caleb and Joshua
were perfect, and yet it’s the word “full.” I interpret that to mean that these guys passed the test; in
other words, the last test in the sequence of tests, they completed that one
and they passed it because the other place it’s used, in 1 Kings 11, it’s
talking about David after he sinned.
So it can’t be talking about his perfection; it’s talking about his
recovery. He was able to make… he blew it, he was able to recover, and he was
able to move on, and the Lord was pleased with that. And then you have somebody like Solomon that never recovers;
he just goes down. And that’s the
contrast.
So here Caleb and Joshua, they pass the test. [37] “And the LORD was also angry,” now
look at this injection, in verse 37-38, Moses humbly… you know Moses, they say,
is a meek person. He’s a strong leader but he’s very humble and he admits
something, and he throws this in.
Not only has he said in verse 34 that God created and oath about these
people that had sinned, but now he says He was even angry at me, even you won’t
go in there. So it shows you God
was angry with the leadership as well as with the people.
Now in verse 39 Moses is directing them, he’s
narrating what happened, and here begins a test of discipline. Verse 34 has told us there’s an
irrevocable disciplinary sentence passed.
By the oath in verse 34 there’s nothing these people can do to go into
the land; they’re doomed. They are not going to go into the land. That is the consequence of their
choice. It’s not God’s fault but
that’s the consequence and God isn’t going to change that. So what Moses is arguing for in verse
39 is this is the fallout of a bad decision you guys made, these are the
consequences and you’re stuck with them.
So, conclusion, verse 39, oh, this is God speaking, it’s still the Lord
speaking, and here’s where He turns the complaint. Remember what their complaint was: oh well, gee, what about
our kids? So not only were they
complaining about God, they were trying to dress it up in a nice religious
vocabulary to make it sound like it was socially unjust for God to do such a
thing. And so they use the kids as
a bargaining chip. So basically
God said okay, you used your kids as a bargaining chip, try this one on for
size. “Your little ones and your
children, who you say will be victims, who today have no knowledge of good and
evil,” in other words, they’re not responsible, they’re not sharing the
consequences, notice, consequences go with choice and responsibility, “they
shall go in there: I will give it, and they shall possess it.” But for you, get out of here.
So the question then becomes are they going to get out
of there, do what the Lord says, deal with the circumstances, deal with the
consequences and move on, trusting the Lord in the middle. God is not a bad God
now. If you’ll go to the next
slide, this is the last slide and we have a series of test. So I’ve tried to
depict it on this slide. They
passed test 1, passed test 2, they come to test 3 and they blow it. So now we’ve failed test 3 so now the
question is test 4 that comes along.
And test 4 is am I going to trust the Lord with the consequences of a
bad choice? That’s test number
4.
Now let’s watch what happens; Deuteronomy 1:41, “Then
you answered and said to me, ‘We have sinned against the LORD;” now that sounds
very religious, “we will go up and fight,” they still don’t have a clue about
what’s going on here: “We have sinned against the LORD, we’re going to up and
we’re going to fight, just as the LORD commanded us. "And when everyone of you had
girded on his weapons of war you were ready to go up the mountain. [42] And the LORD said to me, Tell
them, Do not go up, do not fight, I am not with you, lest you be defeated
before your enemies.” Now God is
being gracious again, I told you you’re not going to have the land; don’t try
to solve the problem yourself, these are My
consequences. Don’t try to deal
with the consequences by some human gimmick, some cover-up, some
human solution.
[43] “So I spoke to you; and yet you would not listen,
but you rebelled against the commandment of the LORD, and you presumptuously
went up the mountain. [44] And the
Amorites who dwelt in the mountain came out against you and chased you as bees,
and drove you from Seir to Hormah. [45] Then you returned and you wept
before the LORD, but the LORD would not listen to your voice and He would not
give ear to you.” Now what that is
talking about is God didn’t respond to their prayer request. Their prayer
request was I want the land, I don’t want to go walking around here in this God
forsaken wilderness for the next forty years, so get me in the Lord. The Lord will not hear that because He
told them I’m not going to hear that.
The curse was in verse 34, that’s when he announced NO; you are NOT
going in there. Now you see, this
doesn’t work, oftentimes you see this with young parents, and they say no and
the little kid knows that I’ll keep pushing mom and dad, let’s just see if the
third time… no; well, try the fourth time. And you keep pushing and sometimes the parents cave in, and
of course what they’ve just done is train their kid, let’s see, number… I have
to push mom for number 12; about twelve times I can get my way. See, this doesn’t work, and here it
didn’t work with the Lord because they tried to do it and the Lord just
wouldn’t listen to them.
[46] “So you remained in Kadesh
many days….” That’s the end of the story, those are the consequences, and it’s
an interesting test because unlike these people, when David got in his
situation, he flunked the test to, he got test number four. See, David
committed adultery and he also murdered a man, and so the consequences on his
family was his sons were going to be murdered; his family will be torn to
pieces; there would be a national and civil revolt. And those are the horrible
consequences of David’s sin here, but David met those consequences, and the
story of his meeting those consequences is enscripturated
in the Psalms. So David went down
on test 3 but he recovered on test 4 because he endured the consequences by
trusting the Lord, trusting the Word, because God doesn’t change. That’s why on this chart I have up
here, God changes not; He still sovereignly, omnipotently
loves. He’s still Dad and He still
loves us and we’re still in the family, even when we fail. But he’s a strict dad and we’re not
going to manipulate, we’re not going to twist His arm, we’re not going to push,
push, push momma around to turn no into a yes. It doesn’t work that way.
So anyway, this is an interesting depiction of
different kind of tests and next week we’ll go into chapter 2 and we’ll move on
a little bit faster, but I wanted to take you through the mental struggles here
because we go through these struggles all the time. As we say in the conclusion, Deuteronomy 1:19-46 narrates
for us the failure of an entire generation. It’s a failure to pass a spiritual conflict test after
passing some of the previous logistical tests. It shows the law of responsibility: God gives us choices and
He—not us—determines the consequences. After bad choices, we have discipline tests: are we going to
look to Him to help us live with the consequences, or are we going to try human
gimmicks to “relieve” them?