Testing, Internal and External Enemies - Judges
We have not been making much progress in Judges but I stopped for
the purpose of orienting our thinking to what’s happening overall in Judges,
how to give us sort of a frame or reference to be able to understand God’s plan
and purpose for testing because there is one word that is used about three
times in Judges 2:22, Judges 3:1 and Judges 3:4 and this is the Hebrew word nasah.
It means to test, it means to try, it means to assay something in terms
of its value, it means to prove or to demonstrate and it means to train. The context tells us which of these
particular nuances are important and we will see some of the uses of this word
in the Old Testament to try to fill out our understanding of why God tests us
and what this testing is all about and what it’s purpose is and how it is used
to advance us in the spiritual life.
By way of review, point one, definition: a test is any situation
in life when the believer has the option of choosing between applying doctrine
or using his own resources to solve the problem. “Any situation in life,” that I define as whether it’s a mundane
every day situation or whether it is a more intense overwhelming surprising
event in life that can be either negative or positive. Sometimes we think of a test as something
big, like a final, but more often what these tests are are pop quizzes and they
come up moment by moment, day by day.
And the emphasis in testing is that the test, the real test is not the
external circumstances. If you can get
that through your head, and I say that to myself as well, if I can just get it
through my head that the test is not the external circumstance, it is not the
loss of a job, it is not being told that you have a fatal disease, it is not
learning that your child has some terrible debilitating problem. It is none of those things. The test is what’s going on in your soul in
response to that external circumstance.
The issue in a test is always doctrine or the sin nature. Those are the only two options. We studied the sin nature and we have seen
that the sin nature produces not only personal sin but also human good. We used a familiar diagram that the sin
nature in motivated internally by lust patterns. There are all kinds of lust.
There are all kinds of categories of lust and these lusts are what drive
us in many of our activities whether we’re aware of it or not. There is approbation lust, the desire for
approval, recognition. There is power
lust, the desire to control, the desire to have power, authority over people
and to exercise that. There is money lust;
there is a lust for the things that money can buy, materialism lust. There is a lust for chemicals, like alcohol
or drugs along that line. There is
criminal lust; there are all kinds of lust patterns that drive us.
Now they can drive us in one of two directions. The sin nature has an area of weakness. The area of weakness is those areas where we
are prone to give in to temptation motivated by the lust pattern and this
produces sins in three categories: sins of the tongue, overt sins, and mental
attitude sins. But we have an area of
strength. The area of strength is that
area where we are not prone to give in to temptation but we easily resist it
and we do good instead of doing wrong and we pat ourselves on the back. Remember, there are unbelievers who do many
wonderful good things. This is not a
good that cuts ice with God; it’s not a good that has any divine approval
because God says that all of our righteousnesses are as filthy rags. We need to think about that verse a lot, it
always strikes me that most people don’t recognize the impact of that
verse. God does not say all of our
unrighteousnesses are as filthy rags.
He’s not talking about the things that we do that are wrong in that
verse. He’s talking about the things
that we do that are right in that verse.
It is all our righteousnesses that are as filthy rags, it’s all the good
deeds that we do from our own power apart from God the Holy Spirit.
So this produces what we call human good, small “h”, small “g”,
human good, and this is the problem I think in much of the Christian life is
that very few people are willing to grapple with the issue of human good, that
man on his own apart from God can produce many good things. They can read their Bible, they can pray,
they can go to church, they can get involved in all kinds of small group Bible
studies, you can even witness and explain the gospel to somebody, all motivated
by the sin. You can witness to somebody
thinking that it’s going to gain you approbation with God or get you some
recognition in the local church, that you get to stand up at the end of the
year and tell everybody that you witnessed to 400 people this year. And they do that in some churches, it’s just
appalling; it’s between the individual and the Lord and it’s not something we
should get up and brag about, even when we want to call it a testimony.
So the sin nature can produce all these things. And that was the problem that Paul addressed
to the Galatians in Galatians 3:3, he said did you begin by the Spirit and now
you’re trying to be matured by the flesh, the sin nature. Then he came back to that subject in Galatians
5:16 and he said “Walk by means of the Spirit and you will not bring to
completion the lusts of the sin nature.”
And that’s exactly what they were trying to do, to follow the legalistic
Judaizers to come in under the moral requirements of the Mosaic Law. They were trying to live their Christian
life purely on their own effort, apart from reliance of God’s grace provisions
through the Holy Spirit.
So the test is whether or not we are going to try to handle the
situations in life, either through personal sins generated from the area of weakness
or through human good generated from the area of strength. Or, whether or not we are going to operate
under the filling of the Holy Spirit and walking by the Holy Spirit and apply
the Word of God and Bible doctrine to our lives at that point of the test. That’s the real test, it is not the external
circumstance, it is what’s going on between our ears. That’s where test is. And
every time we have a decision to make where these two options can be expressed
in terms of divine viewpoint or human viewpoint then that is the issue. So the major test in life boils down to
volition; we are what our decisions make us, we can’t blame environment, we
can’t blame our parents, we can’t blame others, we can’t blame negative
circumstances for what goes on in our lives, the issue is what we do with
whatever we’ve been given. And people
have been given all kinds of different circumstances, some are worse than
others, but you never know, some people are handed wonderful circumstances in
life but the way they respond to it, out of arrogance, you would think that
they grew up in the worst circumstances in life. So the issue always boils down to volition.
Secondly, tests are not merely difficult situations, serious
decisions or handling unforeseen obstacles.
If you think this, that is that tests are the serious aspects, then
you’ve already lost the battle because it’s those day to day mundane decisions
that give us the opportunity to drill ourselves in the spiritual skills of
using the stress busters and problem solving devices. That’s where we put it into practice, day in and day out, the
mundane decisions, how you handle your money, how you handle your marital
responsibilities, husbands loving your wives, wives being submissive to your
husbands, children obeying your parents, parents teaching your children,
fathers especially are given that mandate that they are responsible to raise up
the children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. It’s those day to day decisions that we
make, and in many cases we think well, this really doesn’t matter, whether I do
it this way or do it that way, in fact, maybe I’ll just operate on my sin
nature and confess it and it doesn’t really matter. But what you’re doing is you’re establishing habit patterns,
patterns of thought, patterns of behavior and then when the major tests come,
instead of having trained yourself and disciplined yourself to walk by means of
the Spirit and use the problem solving devices what happens is you’ve been
training yourself to handle things in the sin nature and you fall apart, press
the panic button and fragment on the inside and then you just implode and
explode all over everybody else and that’s the problem.
Point three, we saw the tests are the opportunities to demonstrate
the doctrine we have learned and assimilated into our souls. It is not something negative, it is
something positive, to demonstrate the perfect quality of the plan of God and
what doctrine has done in our soul.
Point four, we saw the test may originate from one of three sources. Externally it can come from the devil or the
world; the world, the word in the Greek is kosmos,
it is a system; kosmos in the Greek
always recognizes something that is a system.
It is not merely external activity.
We always caricature it this way but in the old days, the old fundies
used to talk about worldliness as dressing a certain way, going to movies,
dancing, smoking, drinking, and they talked about worldliness in terms of
activities. And activities in the Bible
are always described in terms of the works of the flesh, the sin nature. That’s called personal sin. Worldliness is an attitude, it’s a mental
attitude, it’s a way of thinking, it’s all of the philosophies of life, all of
the religions in the world that produce solutions to life’s problems apart from
total radical exclusive dependence upon God and His Word and His power. And we are always being pressured by the
world, it is always there. You have
been inculcated with this kind of thinking from the day that you were
born.
You have a sin nature that has an affinity to worldly thinking, so
that like a sponge soaks up water your sin nature was soaking up cosmic
thinking almost from day one, as soon as you began to understand some
things. It’s amazing, you watch your
kids, how quickly they pick up ways to rationalize and justify wrong
behavior. It’s all part of the sin
nature and those phrases, those terms, those rationales that we use to justify
sin are all part of the cosmic system, that’s all part of cosmic thinking. And I love the illustration Charlie came up
with, the believer is in some sense like a submarine down about 200 feet and
has that tremendous pressure from the world, it’s always there, it surrounds
us, it’s always putting the pressure on us, and there’s only one thing that
keeps us from collapsing and that is an equal pressure on the inside that comes
from the Word of God and comes from doctrine.
And if that is not continuous there, if we are not continuously pumping
that into our thinking, then what happens is that outside of the pressure of
the world is just going to spring all kinds of leaks and get into every area of
our thinking and before long we’re just going to implode, sink to the bottom
and that’s it for our spiritual life.
Unfortunately that’s what happens with too many believers because we
don’t understand these dynamics.
This is where I ended last time, and building on the illustration
that Dan was developing during the time that he was teaching Hebrews, and this
is the idea that there are only two places in which we live; one is heaven
where there is absolute perfection and no pressure, and the other is we are
living in the world system. Satan is
the prince and power of the air, he is the god of this age, he is the
originator of every category of worldly thinking. And every believer is regenerated living in this life in the
world system. And here we are, we’re
born again in whatever circumstances we might be in and we are completely
surrounded by the enemy, by enemy thinking.
And the only way to protect ourselves from that is to start building a
fortress. We have to build a
fortification and we have to live inside that divine fortification and that’s
what I’ve spent a lot of time developing, that I call the spiritual fortress of
the soul. And it is built brick by
brick by learning and applying the spiritual skills which are the ten stress
busters, starting with confession because what happens is once we construct
this, when we’re living inside that divine fortress there is a traitor inside
that fortress and that traitor is our sin nature. And that sin nature constantly is tempting us that look, you can
go out there and do battle, you don’t have to stay in here in this defensive
position but there’s really not much of an enemy out there. There are all kinds of rationalizations that
it presents and temptations and when we respond positively to the temptations
of the sin nature then we are immediately ejected from our spiritual fortress
and that means that we’re out in the world system with no protection. The only way to get back in is 1 John 1:9,
and we confess our sins and God instantly forgives us and forgets and as far as
God is concerned the sin is separated from us as far as the east is from the
west and He remembers it no more, and we are immediately back inside that soul
fortress.
But then we have to start applying all those stress busters again
and all of the spiritual skills in order to stay there and handle all the
problems and situations in life. And we
are constantly under attack from the outside through Satan’s cosmic system and
we are under attack on the inside through the sin nature. We’re always living in enemy territory so we
always need to be on the defense. This
is all part of the broader scheme that the Scripture calls spiritual warfare. Unfortunately today spiritual warfare is too
often presented as some kind of one on one hand to hand combat with demons and
Satan and casting out demons and rebuking the devil and all sorts of concepts
that are borrowed from paganism and for those of you who are interested, a new
book is coming out next week called What
the Bible Teaches About Spiritual Warfare; it’s a revision of the earlier
book that Tommy Ice and I wrote on spiritual warfare. Spiritual warfare, unfortunately, is always understood in terms
of this mystical spirit warfare, like we’re to go out and engage demons, but
the interesting thing about the Scripture is that it always uses a word, aphistemi in the Greek, and aphistemi is a defensive word, it’s not
an offensive word, it means to stand firm, it doesn’t mean to attack; it’s
stand firm. Over and over again, put on
your armor, which is analogous to the spiritual fortress, “put on the full
armor of God that you may resist the devil,” and that’s that word aphistemi, which means to stand your
ground, to stand firm it’s purely defensive and when we try to take on
offensively apart from using these stress busters, then what does is put
outside the soul fortress and in a position of vulnerability.
So we need to learn to not rely on our own resources, and the
point of testing is that we can’t learn these principles any other way. If you were not to have a sin nature at the
point of your salvation, God removed your sin nature, how would you learn to
appreciate the grace and the omnipotence of God. How would you learn to appreciate all that God has provided for
you as a believer at the moment of salvation?
If you could reach a point in your spiritual life where you were, what’s
the term they use, “holy sanctified,” the perversion of a Biblical term, where
you were now in a state of perfection, then how would you learn to trust God,
how would you learn what God can do and God’s provision.
And you see, this is the exact situation that is taking place here
in Judges by analogy. I want you to
understand what I’m doing here by drawing these analogies because we’re going
to do it all the way through Judges.
The New Testament tells us that many of these events in the Old
Testament were given to us for our example.
I am not developing allegory.
Let me explain what allegory is.
Allegory means that there is an original story from which there is drawn
application through some sort of analogy, but the original story does not have
to be historically accurate or literally true.
That’s why this is not allegory; all of these things actually happened
the way they did. What happens is in
the New Testament God goes back and demonstrates that shows us that these
events illustrate doctrinal principles in the New Testament.
Now one of the reasons I’m emphasizing this is because this is one
of the great ways to teach kids doctrine, is to know Old Testament situations
because those are New Testament doctrines lived out in the day to day lives of
real flesh and blood people. So there’s
a correlation there. And one of the
great ways, especially with younger kids who can’t understand abstract
principles very well because they
haven’t reached a developmental state to comprehend anything more than just
concrete things, you go back and you illustrate doctrinal principles through
these Old Testament stories. They’re
not just stories. One of the biggest
mistakes people make is they just tell Bible stories like they’re telling a story,
but they’re not even presented that way in the Scripture. All of these events, all of these people are
there to illustrate doctrinal principles and the point is not the story, the
point is what does it teach us, what does this illustrate. One of the things, in a broad sense, that is
illustrated in this whole period of Israel’s history, in Joshua and Judges, is
the doctrine of sanctification and the spiritual life.
In Joshua, here’s a rough map, you have the Sea of Galilee up
here, the River Jordan, the Dead Sea down here, and Israel came in under Joshua
and entered the land and took out strongholds.
Now in a sense the land represents the soul and the spiritual life of
the believer, that at regeneration we are saved but we are still filled with
pagan thoughts. Now what I mean by
pagan is non-Christian thinking. Pagan
is not a pejorative term; it is a technical term for non-Biblical thought. Just because you’re a pagan doesn’t mean
you’re bad, doesn’t mean you’re ugly, doesn’t mean you’re some kind of nasty
pedophile or anything else, it simply means that you are not thinking
biblically. And the land is filled with
the Canaanites and the Perizzites and all the other groups, the Hivites, the
Jebusites, and they all operate on non-Biblical thinking, they’ve all rejected
God and idolatry pervades their soul.
Now what happens is Israel goes in and they are commanded to
annihilate the Canaanites, every man, woman and child and their animals. Why?
God is teaching the principle that in the spiritual life the believer
needs to annihilate every bit of pagan thought that is left over from your
pre-salvation days. That’s a battle, it
demands aggressiveness, it demands thought, it demands strategy and tactics,
and it also demands something about knowing your enemy. One of Sun Tzu’s Art of War, which has been very popular to use in military schools
for the last 20 years to teach a lot of principles on strategy and tactics and
one of Sun Tzu’s principles is that you have to know your enemy. That means you have to have an understanding
of how cosmic thinking is affecting you in your cultural situation, whether
you’re here, in Europe, Asia, even in the U.S. depending on where you are, your
situation, you may be pressured in different aspects of cosmic thinking, you
have to know the enemy. But you have to
know the truth. You know the enemy
because only in understanding the enemy are you able to root out a lot of these
ideas, especially some of the more subtle ideas that are going around. It always amazes me how many times
Christians have picked up concepts from cosmic thinking that they think are
Biblical.
We have to root it out and what happens by analogy, Israel goes
in, takes out the major strongholds like Jericho, Ai, which was just north of
Jericho, then they moved into the south and then they moved into the north and
they captured the major strongholds.
But let’s say you’re 18-19 years old and you’ve got some real problems
and somebody comes to you and presents you with the gospel and you trust Christ
as Savior but you’ve got problems with drug abuse, alcohol, you’ve got problems
with disobedience because you grew up in a home where you were never taught
authority orientation and so your parents were miserable failures and you’re
going to struggle most of your life with trying to understand authority,
especially the authority of God. So you
start taking on these things and that’s usually what happens, we start taking
on some of the overt sins in our lives because they’re the most obvious ones
that the Holy Spirit points out to us and we deal with them with doctrine and
we have some victory.
But then after we sort of straighten things out in our lives and
reach a level of equilibrium where there’s some stability because we’re not
going out and getting drunk and spending all of our money on drugs, we’re
beginning to learn some responsible principles, we reach a level of stability,
and then we begin to coast. We see that
pattern happen time and time again.
What happens there is you forget that there’s hundreds of thousands of
minor enemies, minor thoughts, minor concepts, minor habits that are still
present in your soul, and you have to take those out as well. But they’re minor, so they’re not as
obviously devastating as the major ones were so now you begin to relax and to
compromise and to coexist with these lust patterns from your sin nature.
That’s exactly what happened in Israel, after they captured the
major strong points they began to compromise and coexist in the land. So we have to realize that the tests are
going to arise internally. That’s what
we see in Judges 2:22, these nations are left alive to test Israel by them,
“whether they will keep the way of the LORD to walk in it, as their fathers
did, or not.” That’s the test, to see
whether or not you’re going to obey God or not. “So the Lord allowed these nations to remain, not driving them
out quickly, and he did not give them into the hand of Joshua. [3:1] Now these are the nations,” and then
there’s a catalogue at the beginning of chapter of the nations that the
Lord…and the Hebrew word there is a hiphil perfect and it means “the Lord
caused to remain. “Left” is kind of a
passive term, and this shows the active plan of God, “He caused them to
remain,” they didn’t remain by accident, God was specifically involved in their
remaining there; in fact that was part of His plan, “to test Israel,” that’s
the purpose clause, they are “left to test Israel,” so the sin nature stays in
us and tests arise from our sin nature.
We are going to be tested just as Israel was tested by the enemies that
stayed within the land we are continually tested from our own sin nature. It is the sin nature; there may be external
circumstances that provide the occasion but the occasion appeals to the
internal sin nature and the test is sin nature of Bible doctrine. So tests arise from the sin nature.
Now that is why when the sin nature is attracted to something in
the external environment it presents what is called a temptation. That is why we call it a temptation; it’s
the same word that’s used…sometimes it means temptation, sometimes it means
test, you have to look at the context to determine the difference. That is point five.
Point six, when we fail in that test and we yield to the sin
nature and we make bad decisions flowing from that sin nature, even though in
the short term it may make things work.
There’s a lot of human good that we can do that makes life functional,
makes us temporarily happy, brings a certain amount of peace and stability into
our lives simply because we’re no longer feeling the tension of the test. It’s easier to coexist sometimes than it is
to be in a state of conflict and so because we’re not in a state of conflict
any more in a battle, there seems to be a relaxing of that, we think oh, good
this must be God’s will. That’s one of
our great rationalizations, I have peace now.
Just because there seems to be a semblance of something that works
doesn’t mean that it is correct and so eventually there are going to be
negative consequences from those bad decisions.
If it’s human good it flows from arrogance. Remember that, human good, no matter how
consistent something may be with Biblical principles, because you’re doing a
right thing from a wrong motivation it’s wrong and sooner or later it’s going
to come right back and get us. And a
great illustration I’ve used on this historically is what happened in the way
the United States handled the slavery question versus the way England handled
the slavery question. In the United
States the issue on handling slavery was generated, the abolitionist movement
was generated by two groups, both of which were operating on extreme
arrogance. One was the Charles Finney
(quote) “evangelical” group, it’s amazing to me how many Christians think, I
mean conservative Christians think that Charles Finney…his works are still
published today, in some churches they read them all the time. But most people do not realize Finney did
not believe in substitutionary atonement, he did not believe in total
depravity. He did not believe that
Christ died on the cross as a substitute for our sins. He did not believe, therefore, that
salvation was by faith alone in Christ alone and he thought that man was
ultimately improvable on his own; therefore it’s a works system. That’s nothing but arrogance and he applied
that politically and to a nation, therefore nations are improvable and perfectible
and he was postmillennial which means that he believed that Jesus would not
return until the end of the millennium so the Church would bring in the
millennium. Therefore the role of the
Church becomes reforming society so let’s go out and figure out what all the
problems are in society and start reforming them. They came up with a list and the first one on the list was
slavery so they get on their arrogant bandwagon.
Do you see the point I’m making; it’s not whether or not slavery
is good or bad that’s the issue? It’s
how you handle it; it’s not just doing the right thing but a right thing done
in a wrong way is wrong. And the result
was that because of the arrogance of both the (quote) “Christian” wing of the
abolitionist movement and the utopian wing from the transcendentalists like
Horace Greeley and others, that there was extreme arrogance there. But in England you had people like William
Wilberforce and Granville Sharpe who were true evangelical believers, they
believed in the total depravity of man, they believed in a substitutionary
atonement of Jesus Christ on the cross, that Christ died for our sins as a
substitute. There was no arrogance in
their system. They both wanted to do
the same thing, which is to end slavery, but in one approach it’s flowing from
human good and arrogance, the other approach it is not flowing from human good
and arrogance and the results historically are that you had a civil war in the
United States which you did not have in England and we still have major racial
problems in this country which you don’t have in England. Why?
It’s how it was done.
So when you think that you have somehow solved problems in your
life apart from God and it seems to work, watch out. It may be five years, it may be ten years, it may be twenty years
before that comes back and bite you but it will eventually, because a right
thing done in a wrong way is always wrong and we tend to focus so much on doing
the right thing that we don’t focus on doing it the right way, which is the
Biblical way under the filling of the Holy Spirit. So we have to recognize that some further tests are going to come
because of the consequences of our own bad decisions based on the sin
nature. That sooner or later this may
come back and we may just generate our own problems. And we generate one problem after another and people get out of
fellowship and Christians start backsliding and get into reversionism where
they completely reverse course in the Christian life and instead of advancing
they’re regressing until it gets to the point that their life looks no
different from an unbeliever, in fact, they may put many unbelievers to shame
in terms of their sinfulness and their immorality. What they have done is they’re just compounding one problem upon
another and it becomes more and more of a challenge to reverse course. So there are many tests we run into in life,
we can’t blame God; we can’t say well God is testing me. Guess who screwed up.
Point seven, the solution to every test is found in the character
of God. “Every test” means just what I
said, every single test, there’s not
problem, there is no difficulty, there is no prosperity, prosperity can be just
as devastating as some calamity. I have
a friend I’ve known for ten years and back in those days he hardly had two
nickels he could rub together; now he is extremely prosperous. One day he told me he’d almost give
everything back to go back to those days because then I just had to grab hold
of the grace of God every minute, every day and other things weren’t a
distraction. He said now everything is
so smooth it’s a real struggle to listen to get doctrine every day, to focus on
the word because life is so smooth and I have every resource that I can use to
solve my problems instead of doctrine.
So prosperity is not as easy as most of us think it is. It can be the test that really destroys our
spiritual life. That may be why God
never gives some of us that test.
The solution to every test is found in the character of God. That’s why it’s so important to review the
essence box time and time again. I’ve
been in situations where I just sit down and think through the essence of God,
that God is sovereign, that means He is in control, there is no situation in
life outside of His plan, outside of His decree and therefore He has made
provision for it. God is absolutely
righteous and just and that means that He is going to be faithful to His Word;
He cannot be unfaithful to His Word or go back on His promise. God is love, He loved me so much He sent His
Son to die on the cross for me and now that I’m a member of the royal family of
God by virtue of regeneration and adoption, how much more is He going to
provide for me. He is not my
enemy. He is eternal life so there
never has been a time when God did not know that I’m going to go through this
particular problem. God is omniscient,
that means He knows all the knowable and He’s been fully aware of every
problem, every difficulty I’ve got and this is no surprise to Him even though
it’s a surprise to me. God is
omnipotent which means He is more powerful than any problem that I’m ever going
to face. God is omnipresent which means
He is with me now, even if I don’t realize it.
God is immutable, He will never change, therefore I can constantly rely
upon Him because situation, circumstances, people and emotions are always in
flux, God never is in flux, He is not in process, He is not open, that’s the
new heresy, one of these days I’ll have to spend time talking about this new
open view of God that is becoming popular among evangelicals, that is basically
God really doesn’t know the future, He is as open to whatever is going to
happen as the rest of us, in fact, He gets as surprised as the rest of us do. You’d be surprised at some of the places
this is being taught today in terms of colleges that were traditional seats of
fundamental conservative thought. God
is veracity, absolute truth. That means
that He has revealed His Word to us and it is true and I can rely upon on
it. So the solution to every test is
found in the character of God.
Read through the Psalms, that’s one reason the Psalms mean so much
to us at times when we are going through difficulties, especially when we read
the Psalms David wrote when he was in the wilderness being pursued and
persecuted by Saul. He consistently
goes back to the character of God as his source of strength to remind himself
that God is greater than Saul and Saul’s persecutions.
[small glitch in tape] …the Spirit of God, because God has given
us the Holy Spirit who indwells us and fills us and He is our resource for
surviving everything. This was modeled
and pioneered by Jesus Christ during the time of the incarnation. When Jesus Christ went into the wilderness
to be tested by Satan He was led there by God the Holy Spirit. Some of us have a view of testing that
somehow God won’t lead us there, but God the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the
wilderness and Jesus Christ in His humanity resisted all temptation, not
because He was God and perfect but because He relied exclusively on the power
of God the Holy Spirit and Bible doctrine.
And He pioneered the spiritual life.
His spiritual life was not the spiritual life of the Old Testament. He was pioneering the spiritual life of the
Church Age. That’s why He is the
precedent for the Church Age, not the Old Testament Law. We don’t go back to the Old Testament in
order to find the precedent for the Church Age spiritual life. It is in Jesus Christ. Now there are examples and illustrations in
the Old Testament but that does not mean that… [tape turns]
…spiritual life, did not know the power of God the Holy
Spirit. When God the Holy Spirit came
upon certain individuals in the Old Testament, and I think there were less than
100, it was for certain purposes related to leadership and military power and
certain other functions like building the temple and tabernacle, giving them
the skill and wisdom to build and construct the temple and tabernacle. It was all related to administrative and
leadership functions in the nation Israel.
It was not related to the spiritual life and we’re going to see that in
Judges because time and time again we’re going to see some of the greatest
losers in history that the Holy Spirit comes upon them and they didn’t have a
clue spiritually. So it didn’t have
anything to do with their spiritual life so that’s what makes this spiritual
life of the Church Age unique.
So the solution is found in the character of God, the Spirit of
God, and the revealed Word of God. It
is the Word of God that is alive and powerful.
Jesus Christ said “Sanctify them in truth, Thy Word is truth.” 2 Peter 1:2-3 tells us that it is by means
of God’s magnificent promises that He has provided everything for us for life
and godliness. So the solution to every
test is found in the character of God, the Spirit of God and the revealed Word
of God.
Point eight, therefore there is no problem, no circumstance, no
situation good, bad, wonderful or disastrous that is too great for the grace of
God. Every time you get in a situation,
and we all have done this, where we think somehow God must be taking a nap or
He’s busy with somebody else, or there are world problems and circumstances
that He must be distracted with we are just impugning His character. There is nothing too great for the grace of
God, there is no situation that surprises Him, and He has given us everything
we need in the Scripture. He has left
nothing out.
This is a verse that everyone ought to memorize, 2 Peter 1:2-3,
that “His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and
godliness,” “His divine power,” that’s His omnipotence, “has granted to us
everything pertaining to life and godliness,” there’s nothing you can come up
with that doesn’t fit into one of those categories, life and godliness. Godliness is the Greek word eusebeia which means the spiritual
life. So those two terms encompass
every circumstance in life and “His power has granted to us everything
pertaining to life and godliness” so there is no exception. The central issue, therefore, in the
Christian life begins with being in fellowship and then proceeds on the basis
of the faith rest drill.
Now in the Old Testament they didn’t have the filling of the Holy
Spirit, all they had was fellowship with God, they didn’t have the filling of
the Holy Spirit, their spiritual life was based on simply the faith rest drill,
simply mixing faith with the promises of God and trusting God and doing what He
said. That is why the spiritual life in
the Old Testament was inadequate but the expectations were not what they are
for the Church Age believer. God does
not expect us to perform above and beyond the provision that He has given us. And one of the things in terms of the
history of the Bible and the history of the spiritual life that God does is in
each dispensation is to demonstrate certain things about the inadequacy of man
and his inability to solve problems on his own. So in each age there are different criteria, different things
going on and it always demonstrates man is in capable on his own to live up to
God’s requirements. In the Old
Testament they had certain requirements and they couldn’t do it so God gives us
the Holy Spirit in the Church Age and even then men are going to fail.
And then in the millennial kingdom there will be perfect
environment, there will be a perfect government, perfect administration,
perfect bureaucracy, perfect everything, nature will be perfect, the natural
kingdom will be perfect, the lion will lie down with the lamb, the child will
be able to put his hand into a cobra’s den; nature will be redeemed so that
there will be no environmental factors.
So man is not going to be able to blame the environment for his problems. Guess what?
Man fails. Why? Because he still has a sin nature. So in every dispensation God is
demonstrating man’s complete inability to solve his problems and make life work
apart from reliance upon His grace. So
the central issue begins with being in fellowship, for the believer that means
using 1 John 1:9, being filling of the Holy Spirit and being in fellowship with
God and then proceeding on the basis of the faith rest drill which is
foundational to every other problem solving device.
Point ten, Israel failed and we fail because… first, we fail to
make doctrine the number one priority in life.
This is exactly what God had told them to do back in Deuteronomy 4 and
5, is that they were to make doctrine the number one priority in their life. They were to talk about it when they were
sitting down, when they were standing up, at night, during the daytime they
were to meditate on the Word of God, day and night, they were to bind it on
their forehead, strap it on the back of their hands, of course they took that
literally and that’s why the Pharisees developed the phylacteries which is a
little leather box, inside is the Law and they wrap it tight on the back of
their hands and they tie it on their around their forehead. That wasn’t the point, they missed the
point. The point is that doctrine has
got to be your priority. You have to
think it day in and day out; it has to encompass every aspect of your
life. That’s why last time I mentioned
the priority of parents in terms of teaching your children, it’s not just that
you say okay, we’re going to have our (quote) “family devotion time,” we’re
going to sit down and study the Bible for 15 minutes. That’s great but that’s almost a legalistic kind of
approach. When you look at Deuteronomy
it’s in your coming and your going, day in, day out, in every situation you
communicate to your kids the importance of doctrine. Every time you go through life and you’re going shopping, you’re
out at some recreation, you’re going to a ballgame, whatever it is, whatever
the circumstances are you help your kids to think about how to respond to those
circumstances through the use of doctrine.
It’s using all of these opportunities as teaching moments, day in and
day out, not just confining it to one time during the day. One of the negative things about that
approach is that it almost feeds our…one of the biggest problems in
Christianity which is compartmentalization.
One of the problems that we have is that we so compartmentalize life
that Christian has to do with what goes on Sunday morning in church but it
doesn’t really impact what I do the rest of the week. And when we restrict our spiritual life to (quote) “morning
devotions” or “family devotions” it almost feeds that compartmentalization
rather than just picking it up every time you have an opportunity, looking for
those opportunities to teach. I don’t
mean lecture, I mean just to make points and some of those greatest points that
you can make with your kids are just the conversation they overhear between mom
and dad, and they overhear them talking about doctrine and maybe they blew it,
maybe they learned some new way to apply a promise, not a major thing, just a
sentence here and a sentence there and the kids pick up on that and it sets
that example. That’s what Israel was
supposed to do but they failed to make doctrine the number one priority in
their life.
Second, we fail to apply doctrine, we get on this intellectual
trip where we fill up our notebooks with all kinds of information about God and
we buy books, we read books, but we don’t really apply it. Sometimes I sit up here and I always make it
a point when I teach, especially if I know of certain circumstances among
people in the congregation, I’m not really pointing my finger at you although
you might think I am some times. But I
am aware of situations at times among the people in the congregation and I can
sit up here and I can teach something and that person, I can tell, they’re
sitting there and they think they’re the last person in this congregation it
applies to. That’s the self-deception
of arrogance and the sin nature, is we just don’t think that applies to
us. So we don’t ever apply doctrine,
the sin nature has a tremendous way of putting blinders on us, and we do that,
usually through a number of dynamics, one of which is the world system, we’re
using cosmic thinking to rationalize the fact that it doesn’t apply to us. 2 Corinthians 4:4 talks about how Satan
blinds the unbeliever, blinds the minds of the unbeliever, that’s their
thinking. He has thinking options,
thought options, ways of thinking that blind us. Not just the unbeliever, that passage is directly related to the
gospel but it happens with believers to, all the time. I see it.
Third, they fail to trust God exclusively; we think that we can
solve our problems through Scripture and something else. And we use all kinds of different
methodology; we forget that it’s not only what you do but how you do it. We fail to trust God exclusively and
radically. God alone is the source of our
problems and too often we think that if we make doctrine number one in our
lives and we’re at Bible class three times, and it’s hard, I know it’s hard, it
has to do with priorities. There are
some things in life you just have to say what’s more important, for me to
exchange these 2 or 3 hours for doctrine that’s going to count for eternity or
exchange these two or three hours for whatever it is that you like to do,
because you only have so many hours.
It’s like, think of your time as money.
What are you going to spend your money on? What are you going to spend your time on? What are you going to exchange it for? Are you going to exchange it for something
of eternal value or exchange it for something that’s just going to give you a
little pleasure for the evening? Or
sometimes we work hard, I know that, and it’s hard to arrange our schedule, but
that’s why we have tapes, because I realize there are times when people just
can’t make it so we need to have a tape so we can be constantly reminded of
these doctrinal principles.
Fourth, we rely on human resources, methods and techniques to
achieve happiness and success. And in
the culture that we’re talking about that meant that they adopted the fertility
religions of the culture around them as a way to achieve happiness, success and
prosperity.
Now let’s wrap up by looking at a couple of examples of how
testing occurred in the history of Israel.
One of the things in doing word studies and studying any category or
doctrine is the first two or three times a word or concept is developed in Scripture
gives us a pretty good understanding of the parameters of that doctrine. So the first time this word nasah is used is in Genesis 22:1. We’re going to pick 2 or 3 Old Testament
examples of divine testing. “And it
came about after these things,” that is after God’s covenant with Abraham and
the birth of Isaac, time went by, Isaac is now a young man, I think Isaac was
probably in his 20’s at this time, but we can’t be sure but I think that; he is
certainly not the 8 or 9 year old lad that is usually pictured in Bible
stories. “And it came about after these
things that God tested Abraham,” there’s our word nasah, He tested Abraham, so this is an evaluation test to see how
much Abraham has learned. He is
approaching spiritual maturity so this test has to do with evaluating his
growth as well as providing a motive, a momentum for him that will spur him on
and move him on into spiritual maturity.
The Lord tested Abraham, “and said to him, Abraham: Abraham said,
Here I am. [2]And God said take your son,
your only son, whom you love, Isaac,” this is the child of the promise. Abraham is probably 120 years old, he knows
that he’s not going to get another replacement, Isaac is specifically the child
of promise, that God had promised him, “Take now your son, your only son, whom
you love, Isaac, go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt
offering on one of the mountains on which I will tell you.” We know the story, how Abraham took Isaac,
went up to the mountain, got to the verge of sacrificing him and God stopped
him. It was a test; it’s an evaluation
to see if Abraham would really apply what God had told him. In the New Testament, in Hebrews 11 we learn
that Abraham understood the doctrine of resurrection, and he knew that is not
going to be a problem because this is the seed so if I end up taking his life God
is going to bring him back to life, I am not going to lose Isaac, so he was completely
relaxed in the situation. But he was
trusting God, and that’s what the test was, are you willing to trust Me beyond
your experience, beyond your senses, beyond your limited human reason are you
going to make doctrine the number one issue and your relationship with Me the
number one issue.
Then let’s look at the next use in Exodus 15, this is in the
context of the Israelites coming out of Egypt and the test of logistics; is God
going to provide for their every day needs.
Exodus 15:25, they have been in the wilderness on their way to Sinai,
verse 23 says, “And when came to Marah, they could not drink the waters of
Marah, for they were bitter; therefore it was named Marah,” because that is the
Hebrew word for bitter. So they came to
the wells of bitterness, [24] And the people grumbled at Moses,” notice that
they’re positive to their leadership at that point, and they said, “What are we
going to drink?” They’ve got the idea
that God’s just brought them out into the desert to die, so that’s the test,
are they going to trust God to take care of every provision or are they going
to rely on their own resources, in other words, go back to Egypt to the leeks
and garlics of Egypt. Verse 25, “Then
he cried out to the LORD; and the LORD showed him a tree, and he threw it into
the waters and the waters became sweet: there he made for them a statue and
regulations, and there he,” that is God, “tested them.” He is evaluating them. Verse 26, “And said, “If you will give
earnest heed to the voice of the LORD your God, and do what is right in His
sight, and give ear to His commandments, and keep all His statutes I will put
none of the diseases upon you which I have put on the Egyptians, for I the LORD
am your healer.” In other words, God has just given them a
little teaching moment, like you parents can do with your kids. They came along to a situation and God’s
going to use it to test them and then to make a little point of doctrine about
His ability to provide for them, and if I can turn these waters from bitterness
to a sweet drinkable palatable water then I can certainly handle any other
problem that comes along.
Then we come to Exodus 16, they continue to be tested in terms of
just daily provisions of logistics.
This time it has to do with food.
They are going hungry, they didn’t bring enough provisions with them,
remember there’s about two to two and a half million people moving through the
desert here and if you just break down the logistics that’s thousands of pounds
of food and water necessary to keep them alive. And they could not have brought all that with them from Egypt and
by now it’s run out so they’re hungry.
This is just a few days after the previous test, [1] “And they set out
from Elim and all the congregation of the sons of Israel came to the wilderness
of Sin,” which is between Elim and Sinai, “on the fifteenth day of the second
month after their departure from the land of Egypt.”
So they’ve been out about six weeks now. [2] “And the whole congregation of the sons of Israel grumbled”
they are complaining again, “against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. [3] And the sons of Israel said to them, Would
that we had died by the Lord’s hand in the land of Egypt when we sat by the
pots and we ate bread to the full,” we had everything there, the world can
provide us with the solution to our problems and give us stability; just look
at all the people out there who are managing to survive life and have a good
time and they don’t ever have to make doctrine a priority at all. That’s really what they’re saying, we can
solve our problems apart from God. [4] “Then
the LORD said to Moses, Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people
shall go out and gather a day’s portion every day, that I may test them,”
notice the frequency of the test, it’s every day, if they kept the manna in
their pockets or tried to store it for the next day it would become rotten and
filled with maggots. The issue is
trusting God moment by moment, day by day.
So the test comes day by day as to whether or not we’re going to apply
the doctrine that we know, “…every day that I may test them, whether or not
they will walk in My instruction.”
Now what we have seen so far is that in Genesis 22 the concept of
testing is evaluation for a mature believer and it is a serious test. In Exodus 15:16 what we have is a logistical
test that is a rather mundane issue, it may not seem so mundane if you’re going
hungry or thirsty but it’s an every day issue, and it is for rebellious
believers, it is a test for immature believers. So testing applies to all believers across the board from infancy
to adulthood and each test has different purposes and different functions.
So with that we come back to our study in Judges which is one of
the next places that the word is used with frequency; in fact it’s not used
again in terms of God testing people, later on in the Old Testament, other than
these first three usages in Judges 2 and Judges 3, and they fail the test
because they are going to compromise, they are going to seek a life of
compromise with the enemies inside.
This is too often what happens with believers is we just try to find
some sort of peaceful coexistence with our sin nature instead of following the
mandate in the New Testament which is to put to death the deeds of the sin
nature. So we are going to look at the
consequences of their sin and rebellion starting with the first cycle of
judgment and deliverance in Judges 3:7 starting next time.