Clough Divine institutions Lesson 18

Divine Institution #4 – Sovereignty in History – Genesis 18:20-33

Before we get into the final message on the divine institutions I’d like to answer two questions that have been handed in on the feedback cards. The first question was: would you please explain what a Christian standpoint on astrology should be and why a Christian should not depend on horoscopes. Please give specific verses. I honestly do not make these questions up; some people think I do. If you’ll turn to Deuteronomy 4, this is a live issue, incidentally, apart from beer and cigarettes probably more is spent on horoscopes than any other single function in the United States today. It’s a fantastic thing, so fantastic you can get computers to do it for you and you can get practically anything. You’ll encounter this; a lot of people run their whole life by horoscope. I would say if any Christian is running by horoscopes you are in slavery. In Deuteronomy 4:19 it’s one of the key verses in this regard. “And lest thou lift up your eyes unto heaven, and when you see the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and all the host of heaven, you should be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the LORD thy God has divided unto all nations under the whole heaven. [20] But the LORD has taken you, and brought you forth out of the iron furnace…” and so on.

And the point there was that God had given the stars to the Gentile nations in the sense of turning them over; this is that common grace feature again where God responds to negative volition by taking the wraps off and letting it play itself out. And so to the Gentile nations He has said if you want to worship something, go ahead and worship them, you’ve rejected Me, you haven’t got anything else to worship, so go worship the stars if you’d like to. Well, the tie-in here is with certain ways people in practice respond to this; it’s as though the stars are somehow determinative and what is happening is that they’re taking God’s essence, which we again picture, He’s sovereign, He’s righteous, He’s just, He’s love, He’s omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, immutability and eternality. They’re taking this attribute of sovereignty and they are attributing it to the stars. The stars have some influence; that’s nonsense, God has influence.

Now to some degree of course, at one time in history stars were used; there’s some evidence that stars were used, not in the way horoscopes use them but the stars were originally used to teach the gospel of Jesus Christ at the time of Abraham. 2000 or 3000 BC the stars, the constellations and many of these constellations obtained their names in the most peculiar ways and people who have done study on this have written several books and in these books there’s a reasonable case that the original constellations and so on were within a perspective of Scripture. For example, it’s clear that the virgin Mary, the prophecy of the virgin birth is in the stars; it’s clear that Noah’s ark and the judgment upon the world is in the stars and various things like this, which teach you that the stars were not considered to be in a modern sense determining history but rather simply that these people were using them as kind of like a flannel graph, you might say, to teach spiritual truths. So the stars have been important but please remember that horoscopes in the sense of determining one’s life is a denial of the sovereignty of God.

The other question we have is why don’t we ever hear anything about fasting. Is it legalism? Well it depends on how you use the word “fasting.” Nowhere significantly in the key sections of the New Testament epistles is the believer ever commanded to fast. Why do you suppose that is? Fasting occurs in the New Testament but it never occurs in a command or an imperative, fast and do this. Nevertheless, fasting did occur. Why did it occur and yet it wasn’t commanded? Because if you look at fasting in Scripture, fasting actually is a byproduct, it has to be seen as a byproduct, fasting is a result of your intense occupation with some area of the Lord’s work; God has put it upon your heart to pray, you are busily engaged in ascertaining the will of God for your life and you’re taking this thing seriously and you’re taking the Word of God as a personal message from Him, not just as an impersonal code, but as a personal message, you’re trying to seek His will, you’re praying about it or you’re doing some other activity in the Lord’s name and therefore you do not have time for the normal necessities of life. This is technically fasting. In other words, you don’t deliberately abstain from these things as a work of merit; it’s rather that because you are engaged in some phase or activity you don’t literally have time to do these essentials. And that’s fasting.

The key example is the Lord Jesus Christ; when Jesus Christ fasted it’s a significant thing about the fasting, and it’s found in Matthew 4:2 so turn there. There’s a significant little statement made in verse 2 that tells you a lot about the nature of fasting. The Lord Jesus Christ had to go out into the area which incidentally is probably near where Bishop Pike died, it’s the wilderness area near the Dead Sea, and He wandered around there for some time, forty days; forty because the number forty in Scripture is always associated with testing. The Jews spent forty years in the wilderness; you have forty occurring in many other contexts. For example, Jesus crucified, thirty, you add forty and you get 70 AD which is when the temple was destroyed; Israel was put on a forty year trial. So forty is a significant number.

The Lord Jesus went out and He was tested forty days. Now the problem here was Jesus engaged in one of the most profound struggles with Satan that has ever been fought in history. It was at this point that Jesus in His humanity became fully aware that now was the time to launch His ministry. He had prepared by studying the Scripture, the Torah, and so on, in His humanity He grew and He grew in understanding of Scripture and He studied it and so on. At the age of 12 He understood His mission, but nevertheless was not fully prepared until approximately the age of thirty. This time Jesus Christ, as He embarked on His ministry, faced a tremendous assault of Satan. We’re not given the details except that which is found in verse 1, “Jesus was led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tested of the devil.” Now we don’t know all the details that are involved there except that in His humanity Jesus personally had to confront Satan in a life and death struggle. He fought off Satan again, and the last time that He fought Satan was in the Garden of Gethsemane when it literally broke His heart. So therefore you have these two intense areas of struggle of Jesus Christ. We know that, for example, His heart was broken in Gethsemane because of the sweat that became His blood, and we know it also broke His heart there, ruptured His heart, not on the cross but in Gethsemane because when He got to the cross and the Roman soldier pieced His side with a spear, blood and water came out, which indicates that the blood had already begun to separate, which means it had been sitting in the sack around the heart for some time, not just on the cross. So Jesus Christ shows you His tremendous power that with a ruptured heart he was able to withstand 24 hours of interrogation and trial, beating up by Roman soldiers, carrying a cross down and being crucified. So in His humanity He was fantastic in His strength.

But earlier in His ministry when He first began He encountered this problem of Satan. Here’s when Satan offered Him the world and so on, but it says, “after He had fasted forty days and forty nights, He hungered.” And usually the concept of fasting which we have is that well, fasting is you feel hungry but you’re just going to kind of discipline yourself; and people on reducing diets often kid themselves that they’re fasting. Well what you’re doing is something else but you’re not fasting in the classical Biblical sense. What fasting is is that you’re so preoccupied with the task that the hunger pains don’t even come. And it’s interesting that it was here, verse 2, after He had gone through the trial and the pressure was off, then He became aware of His hunger. And then in Matthew 4:11, when Satan left Him, “the angels came and ministered unto Him.” The angels did not minister to him during this period of intense trial.

So the fasting then, as far as I can tell from Scripture is a time when it’s a byproduct, not a religious exercise, it is a byproduct of your engagement in a spiritual task that just, in your conscious mind obliterates the normal functions of life. And fasting, incidentally might not just be applied to eating and drinking; it could be applied to anything, any normal activity of life that is temporarily suspended because of some period of intense concentration. Now people have often said that fasting is needed today. I think it is in this sense; you take the average college student or the average adult and you’re wrapped up in life and you have one pressing thing after another and it’s really to our detriment the way the whole system is running that the adults and the mother and the father can’t even find time to think alone, leave alone be alone, but if they would and if they could, you would have times here where it would be of high spiritual benefit, if you could just get away and just have the Word of God all by yourself alone to think through things, to pray, it would be a time of tremendous spiritual uplift, when you could just blot out things for a while.

Now this isn’t monasticism; this is simply a time when you can be alone by yourself. You have to fight, literally, you try it sometime, just try to be alone by yourself with the Word of God for more than five minutes and you’ll find how quickly our whole life and culture is oriented against this, and why you find you almost have to eat the Word of God on the run, you might say, but you never can seem to get a time when you can be alone. So I would say that fasting has value in this sense. And I would say this, that where fasting would come in would be if you wanted a time alone and it happened to be during lunch hour and if the only place you could eat would be with some people an illustration of fasting would be you’d say I will forego eating at this time so I can have at least this half hour or forty-five minutes off the job or something to go and be by myself and be in peace and quiet and think through the Word of God and pray. So I would say that would be an example of fasting and it would be beneficial; but please don’t think of fasting as a religious exercise.

Now we come to the last; tonight we finish with the fourth divine institution, and we finish with the area of all of the divine institutions. Next Sunday evening we will have Arnold and then after that we will begin with the book of Joshua. We will be comparing the book of Joshua in its original historical context with the principles we can use in the Christian life. So even though this is a history of some fourteen centuries before Christ, it will be contemporary because the principles of spiritual conflict hold true today.

In finishing up this section on the nation I would like to go back to one thing we dealt with last week and that is war. We dealt with the doctrine of war last week and there’s one area that we omitted, and that was the area of nuclear war. What is the Christian to say who seeks to follow the Lord Jesus Christ and yet is called upon to vote or not vote for various policies and so on, what is he to say when it comes down to the issue of nuclear war. What does the Bible have to say on it? Well, we gave you the Biblical background for war last week, connected it to the overall Biblical picture of government; the government is to judge evil. The government has been given a sword; this is Romans 13. Turn to Romans 13, go back to that passage and we’ll start from there tonight. This is the classic, one of the classic passages in God’s Word that teaches the function of government. Please notice something, that government was not designed in the Word of God to bring in welfare. The government was designed in the Word of God to judge evil; as a result of its judging evil the welfare should normally follow. It should follow as a byproduct of a just government; but the government itself cannot promote this directly. It’s only indirectly. When the government gets in the welfare business then you have problems of injustice that develop right within the system.

So in Romans 13:2 it says, “Whoever resists the authority, resists the ordinance of God,” that’s the divine institution of government, “the ordinance of God,” there you have a specific reference to the divine institution of government, “and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.” And this is a reference to police action or military action. Any person who undertakes to destroy a government in an anarchistic way and not through legitimate change is asking for discipline and we as Christians, frankly, cannot sympathize with those who would try to overthrow the government, no matter what the cause… no matter what the cause! The reason for this is the apostolic precedent of the book of Acts, when the apostles were persecuted by a dictatorship nowhere in the book of Acts do you ever find believers told to demonstrate against the government. You’re not even told, hey go to Rome and talk to some of the Senators and maybe we can reach Caesar that way and have some of these policies changed. No, you never even see that either. In the New Testament the theme is changing the individual; if you can change the individual then you can change the society but if you can’t change the individual there’s no chance at ever changing the society. You must change the individual, then if necessary you can change the society.

Here of course in our country we face a slightly different situation in that every believer has the right to vote; now this makes it hard and some Christians don’t like to think in these areas but you have a responsibility on your shoulders given to you by the right to vote. And so therefore we find some Christians that don’t like to vote thinking that well, I don’t know how I’m going to decide the issue. You ought to learn because God has placed upon your shoulders the right to vote and any Christian who does not exercise his right to vote is not fulfilling the submission to Romans 13.

Romans 13:3, “For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Will you, then, not be afraid of the power?” and so on. And then in verse 4, “For he is the minister of God to thee for good,” now that may be hard for some of you to swallow and immediately in your mind may come some person in politics that you just can’t stand and you say that man is a minister of God to me for good? And you get a reaction here, but just remember something, what was the situation when this was originally written. Who were the people? Who were the ministers of God then? It was the Roman soldier, it was the Legion, it was the corrupt society in the city of Rome with all of the pollution that we mentioned in Romans 1. Those were the people that Paul called “the ministers of God to thee for good,” not that the people themselves as individuals are good, but that the structure of government is good. “But if you do that which is evil, be afraid; for he bears not the sword in vain; for he is the minister of God, an avenger to execute wrath upon him that does evil.”

You couldn’t have, except in these first four verses of Romans 13 a philosophy of government. This is the Christian philosophy of government; the government is mainly judgmental, it rests on two foundations, the foundation of law and a foundation of power; power expressed by police and military; law expressed through the various codes and so on that control the nation.

So what do we do then when the sword turns into a nuclear bomb? What then? What is the Christian answer to this problem? If we turn to our liberal friends we find people saying well, the nuclear weapon has made war obsolete; no longer can we ever contemplate war so today we must think in terms of limited war, insurgency and counter insurgency types of operation. We cannot think in terms of an all out nuclear war, it’s inconceivable.

Now there are two problems with this view. The first problem is the prophetic problem, so let’s go back to prophecy. We have information from infinity, from God, given to us in the Bible, that the human race is going to be around when Jesus Christ returns. The human race will be here when Jesus Christ returns. Well, what then does this imply about the so-called awful devastations of nuclear war. We know for a certainty that the human race cannot be annihilated; it cannot be annihilated for to annihilate it would invalidate the very prophecies of the second return of Jesus Christ. Therefore, no nuclear war, even if it occurs, is going to annihilate the human race because to do so would be against the sovereignty of God.

So I would rest my first plank on this point, namely that I have a certainty in history and I can stand and I can look at history and I can say ha-ha, go drop your bomb because I have the words from God to tell me that your bombs are not going to destroy humanity. And in this sense, and I have suggested this several times, when the Christian comes to an eyeball to eyeball confrontation with the communists, with the materialist, remember the communist is a materialist, when you get down to the eyeball to eyeball confrontation and he fingers are inches away from the button, it’s the Christian that always has the ace in the hole because the Christian always knows what is going to happen in history; the communist can’t know, and if the communists were to blow everything up it would destroy his whole hope, because the communist hope is grounded on that which is an immediate and material, and in the end, in an eyeball to eyeball confrontation, I as a Christian can always put my hand a fraction of an inch closer to the button than the communist because I know he will flinch first before I will, because I have certainty from prophecy that nuclear warfare will never occur.

And so you may say this is an illegitimate use of prophecy. I don’t think so; I think we are threatened by evil we have every right to use whatever means are at our disposal to eliminate that evil. And when communism threatens to blackmail me into submission then I have the right to rely on the prophecy of my God. And I will stand here and I will put my finger on the button, looking the communist in the eyeball, knowing that he must flinch and in the end he must take his finger off the button and I win. So therefore the Christian need not be afraid of an all out nuclear confrontation at this point. I’m not saying be reckless here at this point, you misunderstand me if you think that. All I’m saying is that when all is said and done and it comes down to the eyeball to eyeball confrontation, I as a Christian who believes in a literal prophecy of the literal Word of God can always go farther than my opponent, and I always can cause him to flinch first, simply because of this supernatural element that I have.

The second thing that we would say here is involved in nuclear war is going back to this very fourth verse. If I were in a situation where if my country, an evil will be done to my country and I have only one sword in my scabbard and that sword is a nuclear weapon, the issue now becomes, in verse 4, do I use my sword to judge evil, even though when I use that sword I may destroy many, many innocent people in the process. When I come down to that situation do I use my sword to destroy and to cut evil when it threatens me and I only have one sword left and it’s a nuclear weapon, will I or will I not follow through. And my claim is I see no other way in God’s Word than to follow through. I would say with General Harrison, who was a Christian general, who was the negotiator at P'anmunjom, and I don’t know whether he’s still alive or not, he was quite an elderly man when he wrote this in Christianity Today, but he said this: “Where the sword is the Lord’s and the vengeance is His, and where He seeks that vengeance by the hand of those to whom He has delegated His authority, then even that sword is justifiable whose use leaves God alone standing upon the scene of a nuclear holocaust.”

Now this seems hard; the reason it seems hard is that in our day we have been brainwashed by humanism. Humanism worships Man with a capital “M.” Not man, Man, and they have replaced God with Man, and the sacred temple now is the human race; the sacred temple must not be defiled and therefore we must not use nuclear warfare because to do so we defile the holy temple of man. And we say that this is not true; we have another temple to consider and that’s the temple of the Holy God and we must therefore when we come down to this situation say with Paul in verse 4 that “he bears not the sword in vain,” including the nuclear bomb, “he is a minister of God, an avenger to execute wrath upon him that does evil.” And if the communists would threaten a homeland of the United States with devastation, I don’t see how as a Christian I could but for one second say all right, you have earned it and that we will use nuclear weapons on you.

So therefore this is not a type of vengeance type situation, it’s not a case of playing one off against the other where nobody wins. It’s simply the case of whether I as a Christian, whether we as Christian citizens, put into that historical situation are going to respond with Romans 13:4 or not. Whether we’re going to trust God to pick up the pieces which He may well be doing, whether we’re going to say that You are Lord, You are the Sovereign of history, You Lord have told us that the sword of the government is to execute evil; we have only one sword left, that of the nuclear weapon; we consecrate it to You and we use it. And God help us if it ever comes to that situation.

I saw when I was in the military how close we could come because I can remember back in the Cuban crisis, when I was in the Air Force I can remember at one point one particular base that we were close to, where the fighter planes were on the runway, loaded with nuclear weapons and the pilots in the cockpit, and they were ready to go. I can remember during that same crisis when Strategic Air Command was on alert to the highest level; the next level would have been launch, and that really happened, and people were, for days and hours, and days and days and days and days on alert. So we have come close and we probably will come close again. I don’t think we’ll ever come that close because I think the will of the United States citizen is so weak today that we would fold up before we went close enough to that escalation level. We do not have moral fiber left in the country, it’s deteriorated so far since 1962 I doubt seriously whether we would have the guts to support any President, regardless of his party, if he wanted to do what happened in 1962. Well, we’ll leave nuclear war and conclude now with the discipline upon a nation.

The discipline upon a nation; turn back to Genesis, that will be the first place to start, Genesis 18,

We are first going to deal with some examples of what we call the discipline of the damned, or the people who have lived out their purpose in history and must be exterminated. Genesis 18 is the story of Sodom. We take you to the gruesome examples first to show you how far God will go in history. In Genesis 18 we read about Abraham bargaining with God; you see the bargaining characteristic of the sons of Israel was there from the beginning.

In Genesis 18:23 Abraham bargained with God for some time, and it was give and take, but I want you to notice that the Lord would not punish a nation if he could find, somewhere in that nation, a remnant, and I want you to see in Genesis 18 as Abraham desperately bargains and he comes down to the last verse of chapter 18, “the LORD when His way” as soon as He stopped talking to Abraham. The point of this story is this: that God will never damn a people to extinction in history if there is some remnant left who believe. There is always a remnant, the salt, the preservative of a nation are the believers, and whenever you have a pocket or a remnant of believers they are the nation’s… really the nation’s insurance, they are an insurance policy that that national entity has before God’s wrath. And whether this nation realizes it or not it is the individual believers in this country who actually represent the insurance policy we have, this country holds before God’s throne. We have a remnant of believers. Here in Sodom the remnant of believers was probed and it was nonexistent. Abraham thought it was there; certainly he thought even my own family, there must be somebody who believes, and you know the rest of the story.

In Genesis 19:1 “There came two angels to Sodom at evening, and Lot sat in the gate of Sodom; and Lot seeing them rose up to meet them; and he bowed himself with his face toward the ground. [2] And he said, Behold now, my lords, turn in, I pray you, into your servant’s house, stay here for the night and wash your feet, and rise up early and go on your way. No, we will abide in the street all night. [3] And he pressed upon them greatly and they turned in unto him and entered into his house; and he made them a feast, and did bake unleavened bread, and they did eat. [4] But before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom compassed the house round about, both old and young, all the people from every quarter.” Verse 5, “What are these men, which come in unto thee? Bring them out unto us, that we may know them,” and so on.

And here you have the rise of the homosexuality of Sodom and the complete deprivation of this society, the complete degeneration of it here displayed in chapter 19. And you finally find in verse 17, these angels who have come from God are messengers. Please notice, incidentally, too often you look in the Sunday school material and you see these angels with big wings on them because they’ve been influenced by the cherub. All angels aren’t cherubs, and these angels apparently were normal people. And this is why Hebrews makes a startling statement, that angels you may have met unaware in that the believer operating in history, you may have come across a stranger whose name you never knew and whose name you’ve probably forgotten, that could have been an angel. That’s why Hebrews says you may have entertained angels unaware. Angels can manifest themselves as normal individuals, walk around normally and so on. As you might say God’s G-2 squad, but not quite. God is omniscient and doesn’t need any G-2 squad.

But in Genesis here we have an illustration of this; there’s something normal about this; you’ve got to see this about Scripture. The liberal comes to Scripture and immediately when he comes to this passage he wants to begin with his razor blade and separate the natural from the supernatural and cut out the angel but leave the men, and cut out this and leave that, always remove the supernatural and keep the natural, but the Bible doesn’t do this; it just flows naturally from one to the others. The angels walking around in this city, walking out in the street are just as people walking out in the street. There’s no natural/supernatural division here whatever.

Genesis 19:17, “And so it came to pass that they brought them forth, and he said, Escape fro thy life; look not behind you, neither stay you in all this plain; go to the mountain lest you be consumed. [18] And Lot said, Oh not so, my Lord! [19] Behold now, thy servant has found grace in thy sight, and thou hast magnified thy mercy, thou has showed unto me in saving my life, and I cannot escape to the mountain, lest some evil take me, and I die.” Now Lot was one of the most ignorant, slow believers. Here’s two angels; can you imagine this? Here you are in the city, two angels come, special delivery, just to get you out of the city. The city is going to be blown up and these two men knock on your door and get you out of the city. God has preserved you from one of the most fantastic catastrophes of all time but you’re afraid to go out in the woods because it’s a little dark out there. In other words, God can’t take care of you out in the woods; He can get out of the big crisis but the boogie man might be waiting for you out in the woods. And this is Lot, of course. Lot always was slow, he had problems with Abram, that’s why they split up and he took what he thought was the big deal and he got a big deal of it all right, he got kicked out of the city.

But in Genesis 19:20, “Behold no, this city is near to flee unto, and it is a little one. Oh, let me escape there and my soul shall live. [21] And he said unto him, See, I have accepted thee concerning this thing, also, that I will not overthrow this city,” and so on. Now in verse 23, “The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar. [24] Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven; [25] And He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. [25] But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.”

It’s interesting, people laugh at verse 26 but there is a large salt deposit there; in fact I have read scholars on the Old Testament who have said that the reason why this story was made up in the first place was to explain some of the pillars of salt that to this day exist in the southern part of the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea has a little prominence in it at the south end and most scholars believe that what happened here was that this whole section, a pentapolis actually existed here, five cities, and these five cities were completely destroyed in a fantastic explosion. In fact, later on archeologists in probing around the edge of this southern end found glass underneath, sheets of glass. Now you don’t have to be a chemist to realize the implication. What this implies is that this tremendous explosion that was used in verse 24 was so intense that it turned the sand into glass, that this was the equivalent of a nuclear detonation. In fact, that was the conclusion of some Russian scientists who probed here and they wondered what people were doing with atom bombs in 2000 BC. But nevertheless, the signs of the devastation are there; terrific devastation. And this area is now called the place of bitter waters. And you can take a boat across the southern end of the Dead Sea and look down into the waters and you’ll see the remains of these cities; they’re still there, still under the water, untouched over the centuries. The water has preserved them and the pieces lie down there underneath the water.

And so this is a real historical incident. We have accounts of it throughout history. In one bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geology, 1936, said this: Vast areas exist in which petroleum source rocks may be present and in some places they contain 10 to 16% crude oil. Whether commercial supplies exist in the Dead Sea area or not, the region is on record as having produced bitumen’s or petroleum’s since earliest known habitation, and hence is of definite scientific and historic importance.

And so we have suggestions from this and other things that there were vast areas of gas, trapped natural gas in this area, and some feel that through a combination of explosive geology and God’s supernatural invention at just that particular point you had an utter complete overthrow of these cities. When the Bible says it overthrew them, it did.

Now I take you back first to this example for how God can discipline a nation; how sovereignty can operate in history because it was done without the aid of any army. It was done without the aid of any human; it was done solely through a natural catastrophe. God is the Lord, and He is the Lord and the Sovereign of the natural order. And it means that when God fights His war and when God disciplines He has tremendous weapons in His arsenal that man will never have, and this is natural catastrophe. You see this, for example in the book of Revelation.

So this is one illustration of how God can overthrow a people. And please remember that this illustration is not just a little fairy story, like Santa Claus or something, tacked in the front of your Old Testament, because the Lord Jesus Christ will use this very illustration to talk about the devastations that will come when He comes again. In other words, this was something fantastic. We have lost the full dimension of this disaster through the incomplete records we have of history. But if we had the whole story you would be amazed at the tremendous cataclysm that operated here at this particular point in time.

Now let’s turn to Acts 17:26 for the principle. We’ve had one illustration of how God is able to utterly and totally destroy a nation from the face of history. And now in Acts 17:26 we have one of, I think one of the greatest statements of the Biblical philosophy of history in all of the New Testament. God “has made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and ha determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” Watch that, “the time before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” Don’t you see, here is the dimension of the nation in space and time; you have the geographical dimensions, the actual political boundary line. These are all determined by God. And the time interval for the rise and the fall of that nation is also determined by God. Here you have sovereignty in history operating and this is one of the most crucial verses you can point to for an explicit statement of the sovereignty of God in controlling history. History is not run by some Chance system; it is run by God’s plan.

But notice in Acts 17:27, why and how He does this. Verse 26 gives you what He does; verse 27 gives you why He does what He does. “That,” purpose, “they should seek the Lord if haply,” or by chance, “they might feel after Him and find Him, though He be not far from every one of us.” And we studied Romans 1, we know God-consciousness. But the point in verse 27 is this, that God so superintends history to keep a society from going totally apostate. God will not permit a society to go completely apostate. I showed you what happened when they do. If a society goes completely apostate, and by this I mean you do not have the significant residue of believers, such as in Sodom and Gomorrah. These were two cities among three others. And in this pentapolis in the southern part of the Dead Sea the society did become corrupt, and in that situation God erased it from memory. God just completely destroyed it. So there never will be a situation, no man can ever come before the Great White Throne and say God, my parents lived in a totally apostate society and I was born into the situation, I never had a chance to hear and this society was so apostate that it utterly prevented me from ever hearing the gospel of Jesus Christ. The person who makes that claim fails to realize God’s sovereignty operating in history.

Some have asked, well what about the poor Arab child who grows up in the Islamic culture, here it is surrounded by a whole totally anti-Christian system, doesn’t that child…how can he have a right to hear and see. All I can tell you is this: that God honors men who seek the light, and if a man will respond to the light that he has God is obligated by certain promises such as John 7 :17, Jeremiah 29:13 and others, to respond to that positive response. In other words, if the man takes advantage of what light he has, listed for you in Romans 1, conscience and so on, seeks moral life, God will supply. I can also tell you that there will be no child in any society ever that will be a victim, totally of his culture. This protects the child, in verses 26-27, it protects them because it says God has determined the times and the boundaries so that this won’t happen, so that that culture if it gets to that point will be either destroyed or modified, one or the other.

We have many cases, we don’t have time to go into them all, but I would like to take you to Genesis 15:16 to get the principle. We’re going to take another case in point of what we call a damned culture, one that is condemned by God for extinction because it has reached the upper limits of His tolerance. Remember now when we talk about the Biblical philosophy of history we’re talking about the fact that we have a personal God reigning in history. History does not go on by an impersonal machine. Now if you’ve studied history at all and you’ve been involved in history since Hegel and Kant and Marx and so on, obviously everyone here, the tendency is to think of history as the outworking of some process, either economic determinism, Hegel’s absolute idea, or something like this, some process is behind it to work it out. Now that’s false, it’s not a process that’s behind history, it’s a person that’s behind it, and a person who has emotions and will and intellect, and a person who becomes angry and happy, a person who laughs and cries. This is the kind of God that runs history. It’s not run by a machine, we’re not put and jammed into a computer program to come out and read out and say something. History goes on moment by moment by moment by moment by moment under the sovereign direction of a person. Grasp this! It’s not the sovereign direction of a computer; it’s the sovereign direction of a person who reigns, a person with intellect, will and emotion.

Now in Genesis 15:16 we deal with the Canaanites. We’ll have more to say about these people when we begin Joshua. That’s the book of the holy war. Now the Canaanites occupied the land of Israel; the Canaanites, however, were due for a clobbering. They had become progressively apostate, they had progressively rebelled against the truth that they had known, and from what we can gather in archeology and if you want to see some of the statutes and so on I have some pictures in there, I’m not going to show them to a mixed audience. You can guess what they are like. This was the result of the Canaanites culture.

Now in Genesis 15:16 it says, this is the instructions that God gives to Abraham’s family, Abraham here but also given to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the whole family. I am going to send you on a long vacation, for four hundred years down in Egypt. There were several reasons for this, we won’t go into them. But during these four hundred years the people that are occupying My real estate, they think they have squatter’s right but they don’t, they’re occupying My land. Now Abraham, I’m going to let you cool your heels in Egypt for four hundred years; but in verse 16 he says, “In the fourth generation they” that is your children, “shall come here again; for the iniquity of the Amorites,” another synonym for the Canaanites, “the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.” Now what does that imply? It implies that a culture and a society is measured on a scale; you might say God…I kind of envisioned God, not too seriously but nevertheless, envisioned God having a series of charts here, and on those charts are various levels of various nations, the levels of apostasy that those nations have reached. And God’s sitting on the throne and He looks at the chart that says Amorites, and He says Abraham, in My omniscience I know because I have planned the history this way, these people have not yet peaked on their chart, they have not yet reached the upper limits and therefore since their iniquity is not yet full I am required by My love to let them have the opportunity of repentance; but Abraham, I know in My omniscience that they’re going to eventually forego their repentance and that graph is going to climb and climb and climb until it peaks, and hits the top and when it does they are doomed for extinction from history.

So now we turn to Deuteronomy 7, here’s the beginning of the holy war. Now you can understand why the Jews were commanded to utterly and completely destroy the Canaanites. Critics of the Bible say oh, how can you believe that a holy loving God could possible order the extermination of the people, I don’t believe in a God that would have all those bloody wars of the Old Testament. You worship that kind of a God? How gross, I wouldn’t be bothered with such a God. Now of course this is a little bit hypocritical because most of these people don’t understand the theological problem here. If you don’t have that kind of a God you don’t have any moral absolutes. If you don’t have any moral absolutes you have no purpose for existence. So you are a mess if you don’t believe in this kind of a God.

In Deuteronomy 7:2, “The LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee, and you will smite them, and utterly destroy them,” and the Hebrew word here is charam, it’s a hard “h”, it’s kind of like a “ch,” a charem, by the way, the word from which the man got harem, it means to set aside something; the man would set aside all his girlfriends and call that the harem, and it was a place that was set aside. Well now here it’s in the verb form; the verb to utterly destroy in the Hebrew is charamet, in other words, set it aside. Now don’t you see, this gives a completely different view of holy war than what you’ve probably heard from some professor somewhere. Holy war in the Bible was not Israel going in and just completely clobbering people for the sake of clobbering people. That was not holy war. In holy war they had to come up to a city and have a prayer over it and dedicate it to Jehovah because at that particular point in history they were operating as the sword of the Lord. They were the sword of the Lord, and they couldn’t even touch, even if they had nice gold Cadillacs in that city they weren’t allowed to touch a particle of the booty, they weren’t allowed to touch anybody in that city. Everybody was to be destroyed.

Now this sounds harsh until you realize that armies lived in the ancient world by loot; and it was an actual sacrifice for an army in the ancient world to come up to a target city and actually totally and completely destroy it; it meant that they wouldn’t get any food, it meant they wouldn’t get any supplies, they wouldn’t get any weapons, they wouldn’t get any slaves, it was actually a sacrifice for an army to come in and totally and completely destroy a population. So when God is saying in verse 2, this has to be looked upon as a tremendous sacrifice to an army in that day, to come up to a city and not take loot. That means they don’t get paid; they have to depend on the Lord to supply them but the army cannot get paid by taking loot.

Now in Deuteronomy 9:3, there would be the tendency of some self-righteous believers in that day to say aren’t we so great. So to cut that off, as they go in towards the elimination of the Canaanites, God warns them about a little mental attitude problem. This goes on; a wonderful thing about God’s Word is that it focuses the attention on the inner mental attitude. Probably you know a lot of believers who emphasize the outer behavior pattern and they emphasize the way the girls have their make up on or the way something else happens, this, that and the other thing. God’s Word always emphasizes the inside, because it’s the inside where the problem is, in the human heart. So in Deuteronomy 9 we have the mental attitude that is to accompany these wars.

Deuteronomy 9:3, “Understand, therefore, this day, that the LORD thy God is He who is going before you,” participle, it’s He that is right now in the process; the Hebrew participle is the motion picture tense. Think of a movie camera panning, here it is, God is now going, going, going, going, going before you, “as a consuming fire He will destroy them, and He shall bring them down before your face. So shall you drive them out, and destroy them quickly, as the LORD has said unto you.” And then in verse 4, watch it; when you’re behind the sword the tendency always is to gloat, and say oh, aren’t I wonderful, God has chosen me to be His sword. But then in verse 4 he says, “Speak thou not in your heart, that the LORD thy God has cast them out from before thee, saying,” [quote] “For my righteousness the LORD has brought m e in to possess this land; but,” and that’s the end of the quote in the Hebrew, there’s a little quotation, it doesn’t have it in the King James because the Hebrew doesn’t have quotes, you have to get it by syntax, but there’s a little quote, “For my righteousness the LORD has brought me in to possess this land,” in other words, that’ll be the thought going through their mind, ha, I’m so great, why we’re such a wonderful nation, God owes us this land. Now God says if you have that thought come into you mind just click it off right now, because “for the wickedness of these nations the LORD is driving them out,” in other words it’s not any feather in Israel’s hat for driving them out.

Now let’s go to Joshua 6 to see one case where they did drive them out; this is one illustration, this is Joshua at Jericho. When we get into Jericho you’ll see something, all these popular songs have Joshua dancing around Jericho or something. When you see what actually happened to Jericho from Scripture you’re going to be amazed. Talking about psyching an enemy out, he had his soldiers march around that thing without a sound, without a sound, the instructions were don’t even whisper. You walk around that city for six days, just walk around, don’t make a sound, don’t even clap your armor, just walk quietly. And you can imagine these people on the wall wondering what is going on; silent parade around the city for six days and then whammo, and here’s what happened in Joshua 6:17. “And the city shall be accursed,” there’s your word charam, and it means this city will be set aside for the Lord, not to loot, not to torture, not to take slaves from, not to take any booty. Not, in other words, to finance the military operation by conquest. This was a sacrificial move of the military. “And the city shall be accursed, it and all that are therein, to the LORD; only Rahab, the harlot shall live, she and all who are with her in the house, because she hid the messengers that we sent.” That is an illustration of divine grace in God’s Word. These believers went into an area and this woman, who was a whore, was the only one in that city with positive volition. And the Lord honored positive volition and as a result this woman now stands in the genealogy of Jesus Christ. So there’s operation grace in action. This is a wonderful illustration, God accepts people not because of their background or whatever they did; He accepts people purely on the basis of their mental attitude toward Him, and this was the story of Rahab.

Joshua 6:18, “And you, in any wise keep yourselves form the accursed thing, lest you make yourselves accursed,” now don’t you see; in other words, all of this loot, all the people, the whole city was dedicated to God to be destroyed under the sword of the Lord and He said if you touch this, if you take a piece of metal to yourself, take some coins to yourself, take a person, a slave to yourself, then you share in this accursedness, [19] “All the silver, and gold, and vessels of brass and iron, are consecrated unto the LORD; they shall come into the treasury of the LORD. [20] So the people shouted when the priests blew with the trumpets; and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, and the wall fell down flat,” I hope to have a picture of this so you can see the walls that are today flat, they have fallen flat and they were dug up and they are flat, just like Scripture says, “so the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city. [21] And they utterly destroyed…” now here’s operation holy war in action, “they utterly destroyed al that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword. [22] But Joshua had said unto the two men that had spied out the country, get to the harlot’s house and bring out this woman” and so on. So we have the execution of holy war.

This was an illustration of how God disciplined the nation in history by natural catastrophe like Sodom and Gomorrah? No! This was by direct military action. What other illustrations do we have; turn to Daniel 5. You say this is nice, that all happened to nations just immediately around Israel; what about major Gentile powers. Turn to Daniel 5, is God capable of destroying a major power in history. Is His sovereignty limited such that He can’t do this by some means? In Daniel 5 we have the answer. The background on Daniel, this was written during the captivity; in 586 BC the southern kingdom was destroyed. At the time of the destruction there was a young teenage boy by the name of Daniel. We don’t know what happened to his mother and his father, they may have been killed in the invasion from the east, but this young boy along with the rest of them, the youths of the nation, were marched in chain gangs across the desert.

The story of that devastating march and how many during that march were hanged by the wayside and would die, the weak believers who were unable to see the sovereignty of God and to claim it would fall dead by the wayside. All that’s explained in Psalm 119, one of the great psalms written by a man who went along in the chain gang and he described in the Psalm what happened as the people were raped in the night times, the men and the women by homosexual soldiers and so on, and this horrible thing goes on night after night, day after day, and the tortures continue and by the time they get back to the land, into the land of Babylon, there’s only a remnant left. But that remnant of believers that made that long march across the Arabian desert are a group of tough believers and one of the toughest of all was a man, a young boy by the name of Daniel. And it’s one of the most inspiring stories of all Scripture, how a young teenager who lived through the complete devastation of his country, saw probably his parents killed before his eyes, saw his home destroyed, saw his friends destroyed, and yet he came out of it as one of the all time greats of history. That man was Daniel.

Now in Daniel 5:1 Daniel lives through another devastation; here it’s not his homeland, here it’s the homeland of his captors. “Belshazzar, the king, made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand.” Now Belshazzar was, for many years, taken as aha, an error in Scripture, why we have all the king lists of Babylon and there isn’t any Belshazzar there, the Scripture is wrong. And for years and years and years the liberals proudly touted this, see believers, there’s contradictions in God’s Word. Now of course, these were all arguments from silence, because we did not at that time understand how these kings actually ruled in the ancient near east. Now it turns out that Belshazzar’s very name has been discovered. He was a co-regent, the king, I forget his name right now, didn’t like ruling at that particular time in history, he liked his summer house, he had a summer house about thirty miles away and he decided he’d rather spend time down there than bother with his nation, it was a pain in the neck, and so he appointed Belshazzar to take over and this general was down in this summer home enjoying the thing, he had a perpetual vacation while he was king. And that’s why his name is on the king list, but the man that actually did the work was this Belshazzar, who was kind of an idiot. Now why this man ever appointed this man to rule we do not know but he made a big mistake.

Well, Belshazzar was a party boy; he figured that if the old man was down there living it up in his summer house and he had to stay around the palace and run the nation he was going to have a few parties too. And he was known for his big parties, and he had a party to end all parties, literally here in verse 2. “Belshazzar, while he tasted the wine, commanded to bring the golden and silver vessels which his father, Nebuchadnezzar, had taken out of the temple which was in Jerusalem, that the king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, might drink from them. [3] Then they brought the golden vessels that were taken out of the temple of the house of God, which was at Jerusalem; and the king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, drank from them. [4] They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver,” you have to catch this; this is all put in here by Daniel. Daniel wrote this and he saw this happen. He was in the court and he had access to these parties and so on, and he puts this in to tip you off, something’s going to happen here. God does not permit His sacred vessels to be profaned. Remember, history does not run by a computer; it runs by a person who can become angry and incensed something, and here they’re taking His very vessels and they’re not only taking the vessels, His very own, out of His own temple, but they’re laughing in His face and saying ha, let’s worship the gods of silver and gold. And they take God’s very vessels out of the temple in one of the most blasphemous acts in all of the book of Daniel.

Daniel 5:5, “In the same hour came forth fingers of a man’s hand,” we don’t know what happened here, all we know from the Aramaic, this is the Aramaic section of Daniel, and in the Aramaic all we know is that there’s something, “the fingers of a man’s hand,” and it says here the hand can be the whole thing down to the elbow, and nobody knows this, whether Daniel himself was just sitting there at the party and he saw this thing happen, it apparently is that everybody was so bombed out of their minds that they didn’t see what was going on, if there hadn’t been the man there they wouldn’t have seen it. But nevertheless Daniel evidently caught this out of the side of his eye, all of a sudden he looked over on the wall and here’s this kind of half a hand up here. And “in the same hour came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace; and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.” Evidently Belshazzar didn’t so many under his belt as everybody else and he saw the thing.

Daniel 5:6, “Then the king’s countenance was changed,” now that’s a mild way of putting it; it means that he got shook. That was the Hebrew way of saying it; see, the Hebrew mind is very descriptive, very descriptive and you start reading the Old Testament and you see this. For example, when a man’s anger the word for anger means to breathe thorough the nose. So they’re very descriptive, and so when a man gets angry at something they watch his face change, and so the king’s face changed. And Daniel must have thought this is pretty cool, you know, he’s sitting here and he probably knew what was going to happen because it was ripe for… he had already had the dreams of Nebuchadnezzar and he knew what was going to happen, his kingdom was going to fall, and so he probably thought it was a pretty cool way of doing it, this little hand pops out and starts writing on the wall and then old Belshazzar there in his party, he gets all shook up, so I imagine Daniel had a good relaxed time, he wasn’t shook because he knew God would take care of him. “The king’s countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against the other.” See, there is humor in Scripture.

Daniel 5:7, “And the king cried aloud to bring in the astrologers, the Chaldeans, and the soothsayers.” You can just see him pressing the panic button; get the State Department here, something’s happened. “And the king spoke, and said to the wise men of Babylon, Whosoever shall read this writing, and show me its interpretation, shall be clothed with scarlet, and have a chain of gold about his neck, and shall be the third ruler in the kingdom. [8] Then came in all the king’s wise men; but they could not read the writing, nor make known to the king the interpretation of it. [9] Then was King Belshazzar was greatly troubled, and his countenance was changed in him, and his lords were astonished. [10] Now the queen, by reason of the words of the king and his lords, came into the banquet house; and the queen spoke and said, O king, live forever; let not thy thoughts trouble thee, nor let thy countenance be changed.”

Evidently the queen isn’t one of his girlfriends; they were all at the party but the queen she stays outside. There’s evidence this queen, evidently as so many times happened here, we have the whole book of Esther that shows this behavior, that some of these women that ruled as queens were actually the salvation of the nation because we have several cases in history where the queens are the ones who appear to be the believers; they appear to be the ones with the sense. For example, you go back to Egypt and you get Queen Hatshepsut, the only queen who ever ruled Egypt and yet she had such a fantastic rule that she actually began the new kingdom; the new kingdom owes its existence to Queen Hatshepsut. So Queen Hatshepsut was an example of this, we have Esther another, and this queen another one, even though she lives in the middle of all this debauchery she herself has a certain spiritual sensitivity.

And in Daniel 5:11 she tells him, “There is a man in thy kingdom, in whom is the spirit of the holy gods;” now the King James translates this ambiguously; all we can say is it could be God, it’s written, the Aramaic equivalent to Elohim, and you can take that as to be God or gods, and the translators made the choice here God; we don’t know at this point whether she may have been a believer and she may have actually understood what Daniel’s God was, that he wasn’t gods, He was the one God. “…in the days of thy father light and understanding and wisdom, like the wisdom of the gods, was found in him, whom the king, Nebuchadnezzar, thy father, the king, I say, thy father, made master of the magicians, astrologers, Chaldeans, and soothsayers.” And she recommends him and so on, and she brings him back.

And then in Daniel 5:17, “Then Daniel answered and said before the king, Let thy gifts be to thyself, and give thy rewards to another; I will read the writing unto the king, and make known to him the interpretation. [18] O though king, the Most High God,” now watch this, here you have a classic exposition of the sovereignty of God in history. Now this is something fantastic to claim. If you think you’ve got a problem, let’s be very practical about this, if you think you’ve got a problem that in order to solve that problem all sorts of things have to happen, great corporations have to be moved around, the government itself has to change certain things. In other words, to solve your particular problem all of history would have to be manipulated; now don’t automatically conclude that it’s impossible because right here, beginning at verse 18 you have God dipping His hand down, as it were, into the historical stream, the historical flow of humanity and working around and being able to manipulate all nations; this is a world power, this would be like dipping His hand down into Moscow and changing the whole thing, or into Washington, or London or Paris. This is the equivalent.

Keep that in mind now, to recognize the tremendous greatness of what you’re reading here. “O though king, the Most High God gave Nebuchadnezzar, thy father, a kingdom,” notice who gave, God is sovereign, He gave your father the kingdom, “and majesty, and glory, and honor. [19] And for the majesty that he gave him, all people, nations, and languages trembled and feared before him.” Don’t you see that? No nation can attain world power unless God Himself has permitted that to happen, unless God Himself is behind this thing. And God can raise up nations and he can put nations down. And this is why I frankly think when I look upon many of the Christians who with all good intentions are involved in spending 90% of their time in conservative politics to alleviate certain evils here, there and elsewhere, remember that you’ve got one of the most fantastic super weapons in the gospel and in prayer, far more powerful than just horizontally manipulating people in just one dimension. You’ve got this dimension; you’ve got prayer to the God who raises nations up and pushes them down.

Now if we conduct our business, and if we bring every “thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” over the domain for which we’re responsible, maybe you’re a schoolteacher and you’re not responsible for the community but you are responsible for the minds of those kids in your class. What do you do about it? Or you may be a parent and you say well, I’m just a lowly housewife; nonsense! You have one of the most fantastic tasks available; you have an unlimited and unique opportunity of reaching children, your children, children that will be reached in not other way, and that’s a profound way if you can reach them, and that is one of the most… a minister would give his right arm to be able to have the contact with people that the mother has with her own children, because a lot of potential can come out of this. So there are all sorts of things, so here’s the believers, independently conquering in their own domain; God takes care of the rest. Don’t you see, this is what we mean as Christians, let God take care of this. We’re not saying be passive about it, but we’re saying that after all is said and done, after all the votes are cast, after all the political responsibilities acted you still face the mess, what do you do then? As a believer you keep marching on in your own sphere of responsibility, quietly following the will of God in even the common everyday things of life. God is in charge of Washington, London, Paris and Moscow, just as He’s charge right here in this city.

So in Daniel 5:19, “And for the majesty that He gave him, all people, nations, and languages trembled, and feared before him….” Verse 20, “But when his heart was lifted up, and his mind hardened in pride, eh was deposed from his kingly throne….” Verse 22, “And thou, his son, O Belshazzar, you have not humbled your heart, though you knew al this.” Now that is an accusation, and that tells me that this man Belshazzar knew a lot of Bible doctrine. It tells me that this man had the whole testimony of (quote) “his father, Nebuchadnezzar.” He had this testimony; there was no excuse for Belshazzar; God held him responsible. [23] “But you lifted up yourself against the Lord of heaven; and they have brought the vessels of His house,” and it goes on in verse 23 and enumerates what happened. And verse 25 he gives you the writing, these are in Aramaic, “MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. [26] This is the interpretation of the thing, MENE; God has numbered thy kingdom, and finished it.” And it means that God in time, remember we said Acts 17:26, in space and time God has determined the nations; God has numbered it and He has finished it. In other words, God has said this kingdom has gone on long enough, I am finished.

[27] “TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and you are found wanting.” This means that God had done to thy kingdom what we just saw in Genesis 18 He did to Sodom and Gomorrah, He weighed the nation to see, is there a believing remnant left in that nation; is that society worth preserving because of the believers that are left there. And He evidently said no, apart from Daniel and a few others there’s nothing in that nation worth saving.

[28] PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians. [29] Then commanded Belshazzar, and they clothed Daniel with scarlet, and put a chain of gold about this neck,” I still don’t understand this action here in verse 29, “and made a proclamation concerning him, that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom.” The only thing I can gather from verse 29 is that Belshazzar the king is scared and at the same time he thought that maybe he could bribe his way out of the situation by kind of giving brownie points to God’s man maybe God would remove the sentence.

Daniel 5:30, “In that night was Belshazzar, the king of the Chaldeans, slain.” We know from contemporary history what happened. One of the most clever maneuvers ever done in military history, for that city was bounded by a river, the city of Babylon. It had a wall around it, and Belshazzar thought to himself, I’m safe behind the wall, who can come behind this wall. And we have archeological records and so on that show you this wall was almost invincible; no army possibly could have come through the wall. And so probably he was simply saying to himself, well, this is an interesting prophecy but I really don’t frankly see how God could do it, how He can pull it off. The man who invaded the city had a very interesting military tactic. What he did was simply divert the river, he damned it up and he diverted the thing around the city and the soldiers marched right through on the river bed, and while they were having the big party the Medes and the Persian armies moved right in under the gate and walked in and they knocked on the party. They were the uninvited guests, and they came in and they ended the party all right, they ended everybody’s life. And that was the story of the capture of an entire nation in 24 hours.

So it’s an amazing situation of how God can manipulate, physically, he can manipulate natural disaster and He can manipulate foreign invasion.

I thought we’d conclude by turning to 1 Timothy 2 tonight as we apply it to our own nation. Ultimately our responsibility to our nation is here. Besides just being obedient citizens we have an obligation to pray for our country. And in 1 Timothy 2 we are told to pray for certain specific things, and just as you may pray for certain things each day in your life, for your family, for loved ones and so on, include this in your prayers.

1 Timothy 2:1, “I exhort, therefore, that first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions,” notice, first of all, “and giving of thanks, be made for all men. [2] For kings, and for all that are in authority, that,” here’s your purpose, “that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty, [3] For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God, our Savior. [4] Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.”

Paul gives us here the classic New Testament reference for our prayer obligation to the nation, praying that we might have peace in our day, not necessarily prosperity, this isn’t praying for prosperity there, this is a prayer for peace. What kind of peace? Law and order. Law and order such that within that framework the gospel can be presented and studied and reflected upon. I can’t preach the Word of God in the middle of a riot, in a mob, and nobody ever has. And the greatest help the early Christian church had against mob rules were the Roman soldiers; those Roman soldiers, the men who were the agents of that despicable dictatorship… isn’t it funny in the New Testament they always were the ones to come to the aid of the apostles. They’re always the ones, the police, that come to the aid of the apostles; never, never, never, never in the New Testament are the apostles against the police. The police are always on the right side here, in that they always protect the apostles from the riots that are ensuing.

And when we look upon our nation we see the deterioration coming; we know, I’ve said this enough times so if you don’t know at least you should know now, that there’s a one to one correspondence between the riot and the discord and everything else we see around us and men’s spiritual condition in our society. And all the programs, this country has gone mad with programs; every time we have a problem, why we’ve just got to pass another law. How long must we go before we realize that laws can’t solve problems? Most of the problems are the people, and only God can solve those through Jesus Christ.

With our heads bowed….