Entering Your Inheritance

Five Studies from Deuteronomy on Moses’ Final Address to Israel

by David Gooding

The opening chapters of Deuteronomy mark a crucial juncture in Israel's history where trust in God's promises was of paramount importance. David Gooding delves into this historical moment, highlighting the challenges faced by the Israelites, such as the risk of compromising with the surrounding heathen nations. He underscores the necessity of appreciating God's glory and adhering strictly to his holy law for overcoming these challenges. By exploring this material, we can discover the timeless principles in these stories; and with the advantage of the indwelling Holy Spirit in our lives, we are equipped to live out the principles in our unique circumstances, deepening our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

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1: Rejoicing and Rebellion

Greeting and introduction

My brethren and sisters, you will judge how Christian is the perseverance, endurance and tolerance the organizers of this conference have shown over the years. They have not only received me and graciously supported me, comforted me, advised me, fed me and waited upon me, but they dare to invite me again! They will most certainly be rewarded in the days to come.

Let us begin our meditation this evening by reading the first verses of the book of Deuteronomy.

These are the words that Moses spoke to all Israel beyond the Jordan in the wilderness, in the Arabah opposite Suph, between Paran and Tophel, Laban, Hazeroth, and Dizahab. It is eleven days' journey from Horeb by the way of Mount Seir to Kadesh-barnea. In the fortieth year, on the first day of the eleventh month, Moses spoke to the people of Israel according to all that the LORD had given him in commandment to them, after he had defeated Sihon the king of the Amorites, who lived in Heshbon, and Og the king of Bashan, who lived in Ashtaroth and in Edrei. Beyond the Jordan, in the land of Moab, Moses undertook to explain this law. (1:1–5)

So may God give us good understanding of this holy word.

Moses' final address to Israel

Now, my dear brethren and sisters, I would like you for a brief while to accompany me in your imagination and come and stand with me among the thousands of Israel in the plains of Moab. With imagination fired by God's inspired record of what took place there, you will sense how dramatic the situation is when Moses stands with his people and addresses them for the last time. Before we have gone very far we will realize how tense the atmosphere is, with the gigantic decisions that now have to be taken.

As we're standing facing west, there, on the not too distant horizon, flows the River Jordan as it has flowed for centuries, marking the border between Moab on the east side and the promised land on the west side. Behind us, caught up in the clouds, is Mount Nebo, which Moses must presently ascend and from there be taken home to glory. It is a very dramatic situation, and dramatic for this reason. Forty years earlier the nation of Israel—the fathers, grandfathers and some great-grandfathers of the present generation—had stood in a similar situation at a place called Kadesh-barnea. They had journeyed thus far, first to Sinai to receive the law of God amidst the thunders and lightnings of that theophany, and from there, having built the tabernacle, they journeyed guided by the pillar of fire and the cloud, with the presence of God deigning to dwell in their midst in the tabernacle.

In ordinary timescales it was eleven days' journey to get from Mount Sinai to Kadesh-barnea, and when they arrived they sent spies into the promised land to survey it. The spies came back with the majority report that it was a good land. But the majority report also indicated that there were to be found fortified cities reaching to high heaven, and giants—the Anakim and the Rephaim and all that ugly brood. On hearing that, the whole nation except two, and one or two others, put their foot down and determinedly refused to go any further into the promised land. They rebelled against Moses and talked of stoning him, and Caleb and Joshua into the bargain. They deliberated about choosing a captain and returning to Egypt, which would have nullified and made a nonsense of the whole story of redemption.

In response God said (if I may with reverence paraphrase him), 'Gentlemen, you don't have to go in. I don't force anybody to go in. If you won't go in, don't go in'. That was a solemn word from God. It's true still. God doesn't force anybody into his heaven. If you don't want to go, you don't have to go. God will give you the choice and, though it breaks his heart, he will say, 'Have it your way'. And God sentenced the nation that for the next forty years they must travel through the wilderness until that evil generation died out. Their children and their grandchildren would be given the opportunity which the earlier generation had refused.

Now that moment has come, and it is dramatic indeed. God is going to give this generation the chance to go into their inheritance. Israel, of course, would one day go in: by hook or by crook they'd go in, because God had covenanted it with Abraham that Israel should go in. Israel as a nation will yet possess that inheritance because the title deeds are vested in Jesus Christ our Lord who, according to Paul in Galatians 3, is the promised offspring in terms of the covenant of Genesis 15. It was to Christ, as Abraham's offspring, that God covenanted to give the inheritance. I'm not persuaded that modern Israel can thumb its nose to God and tell him it has no intention of receiving Jesus as God's Son and Messiah. The title deeds are vested in Abraham's offspring who is Christ, and those in Israel who accept Christ as Saviour have the right to that inheritance along with all other believers in Christ. Israel shall inherit as a nation. The question now facing them is, will this be the generation that will rise up and renounce the unbelief of their fathers and grandfathers, and by God's help enter into the great inheritance?

It is a dramatic moment, for Moses exceedingly so because he has given his life to that nation. He could have slept on the feather-down pillows of the palaces of Egypt but he had chosen to suffer affliction with the people of God. Many nights he had gone to bed in his tent, not to sleep but to break his heart before God, for the wilfulness and sheer cussedness of the people to whom he had given his life. Bitter years they were. They were bitter too for Caleb and Joshua, but bitterer still for Moses because there came a moment when Moses' patience got to its limits and ran out. With an outburst of uncontrollable temper against these foolish people, he smote the rock. God in his mercy gave the water, but solemnly he told Moses that he would never enter the promised land because he had misrepresented God's feeling towards the people. In spite of their waywardness and their moaning and groaning, the God of compassion looked upon their tongues, swollen with thirst, and heard the cries of their babies, and the lowing of the cattle as they roared their heads off because of lack of water. God, who is merciful, determined to give them the water and all Moses needed to have done before the people was just humbly to ask God for some water and God would have given it. But his patience failed. 'Hear now, you rebels,' he said, 'shall we bring water for you out of this rock?'

And he struck the rock and misrepresented God.

'You didn't uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people of Israel,' said God (see Num 20:10–12).

It's a sorry and sad thing when God's people are suffering and in pain, to beat them and call them rebels, and to misrepresent the heart of the Father towards them. For that mistake, Moses was not to enter the promised land.

You can imagine what he felt like. He was 120 years old, and the end of those long years seeing the promised land from Pisgah should have been the culmination of his labours—to see the people in, and to be with them in the day of their triumph as he had been with them in the day of their temptation. But it was not to be. There is forgiveness with God but sometimes the consequences of our mistakes live on. Now he must leave them at this critical moment. Would they or would they not decide to go in? What should he say to them? How should he stir their godly ambition? How will he nerve them for the fight that lay ahead? He foresaw it well: nobody had ever told them that entry into their inheritance would be a birthday party, full of balloons and hot air. There would be sorer temptations there than they had ever met before. There they must meet the giants, the Rephaim, the descendants of that ungodly mixture that began to happen in the days of Noah when evil forces tried to pervert the human race. They would have to fight. It was one thing fighting a few old Amorites in the desert; that was bad enough. To fight the enemy with their fortified cities and their technology, that would be a different story.

There would be other temptations, and perhaps chief among them would be the temptation to compromise with the idolatry of the Canaanites. For these were nations whose ancestors had long since abandoned, or deliberately suppressed, the knowledge of the one true God. But when people suppress the knowledge of the true God, the creator of heaven and earth, they wake up to some inevitable facts. If there is no one true Creator God, even the atheist has to face the fact that he didn't make himself. It's an inconvenient contemplation every Monday morning. Since we are creatures of God, our first duty is surely to show gratitude and thanks to God for having made us. But if there is no God, and we didn't make ourselves, how did we come to be? Did we come out of the primeval slime, by some fortunate accident? But it is difficult to find any gratitude in your heart to the primeval slime, is it not? It would be very difficult to sing hymns to it, 'Oh, thou primeval swamp from which I and my intelligence have come'—sounds odd!

And getting rid of the idea of God and being aware they didn't invent or create themselves, they then turned to the great powers of the universe and deified them—the moon god and the sun god, and the power of fertility (a great mystery to them) and the storm god and the god of war. They deified their psychological urges too, and Love became a goddess, and being a goddess, it was absolutely wrong to resist any emotion that she provoked in your mind. The modern press seems to agree with that, and the modern atheist is no better than the ancient pagan. Your modern atheist doesn't keep gods of gold and silver in his drawing room and offer them gifts now and again as a present. But if you ask the modern atheist what are the forces which control us human beings, that brought us to our present state and may one day destroy us, the modern atheist will answer the same as the ancient pagan—the forces of nature. The strong atomic power, the weak atomic power, electro-magnetism, gravity, anti-gravity (if there be such a thing), these are the great powers that have caused us and made us—under the direction of Madam Evolution, apparently.

And one day those same mindless forces will not only destroy us as individuals, but they will also destroy our planet. To crown the irony of it, when they've destroyed us and the planet, they won't even know they've done it. They will take your intelligence and pull it to pieces with whatever bug or cancer they choose. And when they've destroyed your intelligence, they haven't any intelligence in their heads because they don't have heads, and they won't know what they've done. Marvellous fruit of the use of intelligence in science, isn't it, to have discovered that our intelligence is the fruit of mindless forces—so much for intelligence!

Israel were to go among a people, not advanced in science, but who had already embraced the idolatrous interpretation of the universe. There would be not only the temptation of running away from the battles, but the temptation of compromising with the idolatry. Down in the south, in its hot temperatures around Moab and its enervating ease and its sexually permissive religion, there would be a temptation for many a young Israelite to think that Moses was somewhat old fashioned, and that modern religion ought to be more accommodating and user friendly. And when they got north and met the Canaanites, they would marvel at their advanced technologies. They had, as the author of Judges observes at one stage, nine hundred chariots of iron—magnificent technology in terms of that era. And their civil engineering and their water systems were amazing even by our own modern standards. When the Israelites came across this kind of technology, the temptation for many a young student would be to say there must be something in it. 'Look at their advances in technology, and is not the thing we heard from Moses old fashioned tradition?'

It is a temptation that confronts many a young believer still, when he leaves the cosy domain of the Sunday services in the assembly, and the Sunday school, and goes out in a world of deliberate and systemic atheism. Woe betide them if they go unprepared so that they come to think of Christian faith as a fairy story—such as you'd tell to children to quieten them when they go to bed at night—whereas the real world is the world of atheistic methodology, technology and progress. There is nothing anti-scientific in the Christian faith: Christians ought to support true science with might and main, and we all benefit from its technology. But it's a lie that the Christian faith is built on superstition, that belief in God is an exploded myth.

Dear old Moses was worried, as you will presently see. If the Israelites today should rise up and say, 'Yes, by God's grace, we're going into our inheritance', then the battles would begin: battles against the principalities and powers in the great fortified cities of Canaan, battles against moral perversion among the Moabites, and battles in spiritual terms amidst the technologies of Canaan. There would be one further temptation, a mighty wave of temptation, and all the more subtle because it would come to them in very pleasant circumstances.

As Moses will presently remind them, when they get in, that God would give them houses that they never built themselves, and vineyards that they never planted, and farms and milk, and honey and cows, and perhaps a donkey or two each. And the very kindness of God in giving them this wealth will, for some of them, become a temptation. In Egypt they had known about the wealth of Egypt and they were used to build the store cities for the pharaohs; but making store cities out of bricks without straw was nothing short of penal servitude. When they at last were free and in the desert it wasn't like the Sahara, for here and there were trade routes from which they got the wool and the skins and the linen to build the tabernacle. With the craftsmen among them, they built a glorious tabernacle for the presence of God.

But life was simple, very simple, and they'd had it for forty years. Now all of a sudden they were going to be wealthy, by their standards. We in the West know that temptation. I used to live at one stage in the northeast of England, and lodged with a mining family. They would tell me from time to time what conditions were like in The Great Depression. I remember one good lady telling us, 'In those days, we women had to get down on our knees to ask God for the next meal to put before the family. We were spiritually minded then, but now we're wealthy.' And the spirituality had slackened. Of course, if you don't have a car and you don't have a radio or a television, and you don't have a garden anyway, there's nothing else to do but go to the prayer meeting. But if you have a car, it's no good if you don't use it. It's not that these lovely things are bad but life is limited in its time, and the danger of wealth is that it detracts from the energy and the time and sometimes the cash to go in for our spiritual inheritance with God.

Talking to our fellow Christians in Eastern Europe and seeing what the conditions were in the difficult days and their zeal for the Lord, they would sometimes ask me how many come to our prayer meeting in the church. I was ashamed to tell them. I fear personally that, in these coming years, if their economies improve, they will suffer a test worse than the persecution was. For when you are persecuted and you have very little, all you have is the Lord and his people, and you come together as often as you can. When the persecution goes and life is fair and goods are plentiful, then comes the insidious temptation to give less time to the Lord and less zeal and less cash.

What will Moses say to them as he sees what lies before them? We will find that, though Deuteronomy is a repetition of the law, that repetition fills chapters 12–26. But before he begins to repeat the law and expound its detailed significance, he spends what for us is eleven chapters preaching sermon after sermon to motivate the people to rise up and grasp the opportunity, and to be that generation which goes in for God and for the inheritance. So to prepare them for the fighting and the temptations that await them, what will he say?

Learning from history

The first lesson he taught them was to take them back to what happened at Kadesh-barnea. Why there? Because it was there that the nation made their fatal decision not to enter the land. Their children and grandchildren had better reflect on it. It's no good being carried away with mere excitement and adventure, and agree to enter the land without seriously considering why it was that their parents and grandparents refused to go in. So in chapter 1 Moses takes them back historically to what happened at Kadesh-barnea. It was a sorry story indeed. They had come out of Egypt, groaning as they had been under the burden and taskmasters of Pharaoh's Egypt, saved from the destroying angel and the wrath of God by the blood of the Passover lamb, delivered by the miraculous intervention of God's power at the Red Sea. As they stood on the further bank of the Red Sea, they sang until their little lungs were liable to burst from their enthusiasm. Moses sang and the people sang, and Miriam sang, and all the ladies bashed the timbrels and sang. They'd been delivered; marvellous. They felt so near heaven that if they'd jumped an inch or two, their heads would poke through the floor of heaven, so near it seemed. 'And you will bring us in,' they said in their confidence (see Exod 15:17).

So they journeyed, not without some difficulty because the journey didn't turn out to be quite what they expected. And God, they found, was rather different from what they had hoped: he allowed the water supply to run out sometimes. But in the end they got to Sinai and heard God himself speaking from heaven. They heard his voice though they didn't see any form. Then they heard from Moses the invitation of almighty God, that if they would build him a sanctuary, he would come and dwell among them. Did the nation ever hear any such thing or ever be confronted with such an astonishing miracle? How could the transcendent Lord, whom the heaven of heavens couldn't contain, come and presence himself inside his creation in a tabernacle? That isn't a difficulty that the church has yet got over, though we believe it. Don't you believe that the one who created heaven and earth, and the millions of its galaxies, has not only died to redeem us but, by his Spirit, comes and makes a temple of the body of his believing people?

A nation disorientated

In a way suited to that early age, God proposed to come and dwell in a tabernacle among them. But while Moses went up the mountain to receive the details, the people got disorientated in the desert. Those who travel in places like the Sahara tell me that that's all too possible. When there are no landmarks it's very easy to get disorientated, and on this occasion Israel got completely disorientated. It's not that they lost their way geographically so much. They knew if they kept their noses facing north, northeast, they would arrive at Canaan. It wasn't that. But somehow they lost the goal in life, what they were meant to be aiming at in the wilderness. They sat at the bottom of Mount Sinai while Moses had gone up for forty days and forty nights, to receive directions for the tabernacle. As they sat there twiddling their thumbs, one said to another, 'Have you realized what a funny position we're in? Here we sit in the middle of a wilderness getting nowhere very fast. And as for this Moses, we don't know what's become of him. We're told he's coming back again but that's what they told us last week and he hasn't come yet.' So they got tired of sitting in the wilderness, aiming at nothing and going nowhere.

You can't do that in life, can you? You've got to have something to aim at, that you can believe in and follow. 'We must have gods to go before us,' they said. So on Aaron's advice, they broke off their earrings—funny things to make gods out of—and they made a golden calf, and they said, 'These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!' (Exod 32:4). That was to make a nonsense of their redemption from Egypt, and a personal insult to the God of heaven. Had it not been for Moses' intercession, the nation would have perished. God could have started again with Moses because he was of the offspring of Abraham. God would not have broken his promise if he had destroyed everybody else and started with Moses and made a nation from him. But Moses was faithful to his people, and in response to his intercessions, God forgave them, wrote the law again, and they journeyed on to Kadesh-barnea, just eleven days up the road. I don't know how many days they took with all those thousands, but that was the normal journey time.

When they arrived at the land, they sent in the spies who came back with the report that the land was very good: it was indeed a land flowing with milk and honey. But the spies also said that there were giants there—the Anakim and the Rephaim—and the cities were fortified up to high heaven. So they rebelled against Moses, and talked of stoning him, and going back to Egypt. What went wrong? Why such a complete volte-face in so short a time? How is it that some who were apparently running well, can in a very short time turn right round and go the other way? What is it that gets hold of people? How were the inner fortifications of their hearts and their motivations so soon overthrown? Moses is wise enough to bid their grandchildren, now standing before him, to examine the past history lest, mistaking zeal for true spiritual determination, they eventually suffer the same as their grandparents suffered at Kadesh-barnea.

'God hated us'

What was it? Well, according to Deuteronomy in its brief descriptions, we read:

Yet you would not go up, but rebelled against the command of the LORD your God. And you murmured in your tents and said, 'Because the LORD hated us he has brought us out of the land of Egypt, to give us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us.' (Deut 1:26–27)

Sad, sad words from the mouths of people who had sung to the glory of God on the banks of the Red Sea—'God hated us'. The wilderness had played some funny tricks with their understanding and belief in God. Life can do that and can play some very funny tricks with believers. It happened with Job who, when afflictions first came upon him, rebuked his wife for her indiscreet advice, 'Curse God and die'. He said, 'Foolish woman. We received all these good things from the hand of the Lord; shall we not also receive evil? The good things that he gave us of his grace, we didn't deserve. We knew they were but temporary. If God now asks them back, have we any ground of complaint?' In all that, Job did not sin (see Job 2:9–10). Ah, but his brethren eventually made him sin. Poor Job came to feel that God was unfair, that God wasn't playing the game with him. 'If only God would come here,' said Job, 'and I could talk to him. That's what God is like when you want to talk to him; he just disappears into the shadows and doesn't talk to you. Why doesn't he come and argue his case?' Poor old Job, and he a believer (see Job 10:2).

2: Where it all Went Wrong

We begin our meditation this evening by reading once more from the book of Deuteronomy.

And they [the spies] took in their hands some of the fruit of the land and brought it down to us, and brought us word again and said, 'It is a good land that the LORD our God is giving us.' Yet you would not go up, but rebelled against the command of the LORD your God. And you murmured in your tents and said, 'Because the LORD hated us he has brought us out of the land of Egypt, to give us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us. Where are we going up? Our brothers have made our hearts melt, saying, "The people are greater and taller than we. The cities are great and fortified up to heaven. And besides, we have seen the sons of the Anakim there."' Then I said to you, 'Do not be in dread or afraid of them. The LORD your God who goes before you will himself fight for you, just as he did for you in Egypt before your eyes, and in the wilderness, where you have seen how the LORD your God carried you, as a man carries his son, all the way that you went until you came to this place.' Yet in spite of this word you did not believe the LORD your God. (1:25–32)

May God give us good understanding of his word.

Recap for later arrivals

My good friends, it is a joy and delight to my heart to see so many of you gathered here, and to see so many of you who, over these past nearly twenty years, have been such an encouragement to me. You have strengthened me by testimonies that you have given at these conferences for missionaries, and some of you in your patience and forbearance have even allowed me to visit you on the field, and put up with me, and spent all kinds of time helping me, and comforting my soul. And here you are again. It is a tremendous stimulus to me to be with you.

Your kindness allows me to make a confession to you right from the very start. Those of us who were here before you, have yielded to temptation and stolen a march on you. In our imagination last night, we took ourselves off to the plains of Moab without you! Well, there was excuse, of course. We'd heard that the Israelites, the whole nation, were to be assembled there to listen to Moses. Moses, who had been with them for forty years, was now being called home to glory and these would be the last sermons he spoke to Israel in his official capacity. So we couldn't wait and we got ourselves to the plains of Moab. From what we heard, we gathered the atmosphere was electric, and tension filled the air because of the gigantic questions that had to be solved and the decisions that then had to be made.

You say, 'Where are the plains of Moab?' Well, if you can remember the map of Israel, you've got some idea where the Dead Sea is. Right at the top of the Dead Sea, on the right-hand side, east of Jordan, are the plains of Moab. Further east, Moab begins to rise into those beautiful purple-coloured mountains. There on the plains, Israel were gathered. If you stand there and you turn your face west, you'll see the Jordan River flowing quietly by, disturbing nobody. And if you look behind you, you will see Mount Nebo rearing its head. There presently Moses will be called to ascend, for while Israel now stood at Jordan on the borders that separated Moab from the promised land, Moses had reached the border where time meets eternity. And as a man soon to be home with God, he addresses the people, for now eleven chapters long.

The point of decision

The situation is tense. Forty years earlier their fathers and grandfathers had stood at a place called Kadesh-barnea, and had sent spies into the land to reconnoitre. They were given the report that it was indeed a very good land, but giants dwelled there, and the sons of the Anakim. And hearing it, almost with one accord the people had rebelled against God and refused to go into the inheritance, and thus made a nonsense of their redemption from Egypt. The result was that God sentenced them that they shouldn't go in: if they didn't want to, they didn't have to, they could have their way. And so for forty years Israel were condemned to wandering through the wilderness until that generation died out. Now forty years have passed and their children and grandchildren stand once more at the banks of the Jordan, and the decision was to be put to them. Would they rise up with God and go into their inheritance, no matter how many giants might oppose their way? Or would they, like their fathers and grandfathers, refuse to go in?

The decisions were tremendous, affecting them and countless future generations, and you can understand Moses being urgent. He himself, because of a mistake he made in the desert, was not to be allowed to lead them in; he must go home to glory. But in spite of that disappointment, what joy would fill his heart if he saw his life's work complete—the Israelites deciding in this generation to take courage in both hands and go into their inheritance. And so he preaches to them and tries to motivate them. When he thinks of their going into the land and the temptations that will meet them there, he warns them and advises them, and encourages them with inspired words of wisdom given him by God.

Getting to the root of the problem

But we noticed last night that the first thing Moses does, as he prepared this new generation to enter into their inheritance, is to take them back in history to where their grandfathers had stood forty years before at Kadesh-barnea. As an old septuagenarian myself, I gather sometimes that younger people are so much looking forward, they don't like looking back too much. 'What's the past got to do with us? We're the great pioneers of the future.' But sometimes it is necessary. If the Israelites were going in and facing these giants that had so put off their grandfathers, they had better know perhaps why it really was that their fathers and grandfathers had refused to go in. And we shall find tonight that when all was said and done, it wasn't really the giants that were the trouble.

Last night we began to read the diagnosis that Moses gave them, and we must spend a little more time on it this evening.

And you murmured in your tents and said, 'Because the LORD hated us he has brought us out of the land of Egypt, to give us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us.' (Deut 1:27)

A sense of amazement came over us as we read that. What were they jabbering about: 'Because the Lord hated us'? Hadn't they stood on the further banks of the Red Sea and joined Moses and Miriam, and sung until their little lungs nearly burst about the Lord triumphing gloriously over Pharaoh and his hosts, and how he'd sunk the enemy in the depths of the Red Sea? For the Lord was a great man of war, and they had avowed their profession of faith that God had not only brought them out of Egypt, but would bring them into their inheritance and guide them to his most holy hill. What had happened? How could they have conceived the notion that God hated them? But now you notice the implication of what they're beginning to say.

They're saying that God brought them out of Egypt because he hated them. That wasn't the story that Moses had told them. Moses had told them that God, in his faithfulness to the covenant made with Abraham, was now visiting them because he had heard their cry and, in his compassion, had come down to deliver them from Egypt, and to bring them to a land flowing with milk and honey. But now they're saying that the whole thing was a lie, a deception, and never was true. 'It was a yarn that Moses spun us. The only purpose God had was bringing us out here to destroy us because he hated us.'

How can people flip like that all of a sudden? My dear brothers and sisters, you surely haven't gone through life without meeting similar cases of people who in early life professed faith in Christ, and sang his praises, and all of a sudden they flipped and lived to deny not only their own salvation, but to deny that there's anything in the gospel whatsoever. Even as I speak I can remember a married couple—not teenagers with their turbid emotions, but in their settled years—that once had made profession of faith in Christ, now sitting before me and telling me that the New Testament was a lot of nonsense, that the manuscripts all disagreed, the miracles were false, there was no evidence for the resurrection. And when I tried to give the evidence, I soon saw that they weren't interested in any evidence. They were determined to reject the thing, root and branch—Christianity a deception, made up by the church with rules and regulations designed to inhibit people, and holding out standards in front of them that no mortal man could possibly reach, and which the church hypocritically didn't even practise itself.

Disbelief and disobedience

If these Israelites are going into the land really, they're going to face the giants on the other side of the river so they'd better understand what it was that made their fathers and their grandfathers suddenly flip over and reject their very redemption. Here in Deuteronomy, Moses recites the people's diagnosis. I'd like to read to you from the book of Numbers to hear God's diagnosis of what went wrong. Here in chapter 14 is God's diagnosis: you'll see it has nothing to do with giants, not really.

And the LORD said to Moses, 'How long will this people despise me? And how long will they not believe in me, in spite of all the signs that I have done among them?' (Num 14:11)

It's not merely that they were afraid of giants. It's almost too awesome to mention it, but they had come to despise God. What kind of an affront is this to almighty God that little ant-like creatures, faced with the Almighty, should despise him? I could perhaps understand the human heart enough to know that when people are in pain, they could blaspheme God or rebel against him. But to despise him? When one looks at the awesomeness of the vast creation around us, how could we despise the mind that made it or the power that upholds it? I think of God's deliverance of Israel out of Egypt, but for us there's something even greater:

And when I think that God, his Son not sparing, Sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in, That on the cross, my burden gladly bearing, He bled and died to take away my sin.[^1]

How could I despise him? And yet, as I listen to Paul and his companion preaching in the synagogue at Pisidian Antioch, he's been showing God's faithfulness to the Israelites, his constant deliverance of them through Moses, through the judges, through David. And then on to the coming of Messiah and his glorious resurrection, and the offer of mercy even to his murderers, and the magnificence of the width of his gospel.

And by him everyone who believes is freed from everything from which you could not be freed by the law of Moses. (Acts 13:39)

And I see Paul watching the face of the Jewish congregation, and the rabbis in particular, and he sees the contempt on their faces and cries out in their midst, 'Look, you scoffers ['despisers' KJV], be astounded and perish' (Acts 13:41). They despised God. Well, I tell you straight, there was no point in going into the promised land, even should it be knee deep in honey and full of milk. What's the point of going if in your heart you despise God? If you think God is so small that you can despise him, you'd be well advised not to go to heaven.

There was worse than that.

But truly, as I live, and as all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the LORD, none of the men who have seen my glory and my signs that I did in Egypt and in the wilderness, and yet have put me to the test these ten times and have not obeyed my voice, shall see the land that I swore to give to their fathers. And none of those who despised me shall see it. (Num 14:21–23)

Let them do as they will, for here God stands on his dignity. The whole earth one day will be full of the glory of the Lord from end to end. 'But none of those will see it who have seen my glory and my signs and wonders and have despised it.' Nothing to do with giants.

I tremble for those Israelites, many of them now in their younger years, faced with all the difficulties and the fighting that will go on in Canaan if they cross over the river. Nobody's pretending it's going to be a birthday party. There are the fortified cities, there are the chariots of iron, there are the high technologies of Canaan. There'll be battles every way. I tremble for them, and I ask myself, what will keep them going? And then I think of how Moses prayed to God after the incident of the golden calf.

Appreciating the glory of God and his salvation

As a result of Moses' intercessions, God had consented to spare the people and to adhere to his purpose to have them build a tabernacle that he might dwell among them, and lead them to their promised land. But before Moses led the people further, he asked God, 'Please show me your glory' (Exod 33:18). My dear brothers and sisters, what will keep us resolutely pressing on in the Christian pathway, fighting the good fight of the faith, wrestling with principalities, powers and the wickedness of this world in high places? What will keep us going when nature's pains beset us? When the cynicism of middle age gets hold of us, what will keep us going? If you have any care for the likes of me, don't just give out rules and regulations. Yes, there are certain verses of Scripture that are absolutely vital, simple verses so that the way of salvation is abundantly clear even for a child. But if you have any care for souls and the battles of life that must be faced, don't reduce the Christian faith to just a little handbook of rules such as you have to pass if you were going to drive an automobile on the road. Rather, ask God to give you the grace to show the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Don't say it's impractical—I want to be practical, but if I'm going to put up with the fight here, I do need to get a realistic estimate of the glory of God. Oh, what a story our gospel is! It's no little cheap cure. I find myself wondering sometimes what Michael and Gabriel thought of it. Can you just imagine it? Can you believe it that the creator of those billion galaxies with their multi-trillion stars, whose mind was big enough to conceive it, and energy big enough to carry it out, that he should die for me even when I rebelled against him and went my own way? And not only did he die for me, but he proposed to come and live in me, and eventually share his very throne with me. Do you find that easy to believe?

I wonder what Gabriel said to Michael when the serried ranks of angels parted and they saw the Son of the Eternal descend from his throne, and step lower than the angels. Did Gabriel nudge Michael and say, 'What thing is this, the Son of the Highest making himself lower than we are?' I don't think Michael and Gabriel have got over it yet. And what did they say when they saw sinful, arrogant men take the unresisting Son of God and nail him to a tree? Did Michael protest under his breath, 'Why doesn't he call for the twelve legions of us?' I don't know that it would have helped Michael to understand the reason why. How would it help Michael to know that he suffered there at the hands of men that he might redeem the likes of me and you? Oh, the wonder of it.

I can understand Paul saying that through the ages to come, even as now, the variegated manifold wisdom of God will be known through the church (see Eph 3:10). And what did heaven say when they saw the Son of God—now both God and man, in the man Christ Jesus—bid to enter the eternal gates and be raised, carpenter of Nazareth, above the angels? The thought is absolutely staggering beyond comprehension. And I don't think they'll get over it for all eternity to see the likes of you and me raised to sit with Christ in the heavenlies, far above all principalities and powers.

The glory of God has provided for us a salvation which has—I say it with bated breath—changed the Godhead eternally. Won't you allow me that statement? For he whom we call the second person of the Trinity was not always human. Verily God, yet become truly human, and now he's risen he has not conveniently left his humanity behind. For all eternity, the second person of the Trinity, being never less than God, shall eternally be human. I don't know whether I might be allowed to dance for sheer joy and excitement at the colossal dimensions of our great salvation! Refuse to believe it if you must, but don't despise it as something small.

What kind of a person is it that despises it? They not only despised it.

None of the men who have seen my glory and my signs that I did in Egypt and in the wilderness, and yet have put me to the test these ten times . . . (Num 14:22)

What does it mean, they put him to the test? Well, they tempted him ten times, the most notable of which was at a place called Massah, where the water temporarily ran out. They came to Moses and said, 'We've had enough of it, Moses. You get up there and preach to us that God is amongst us, but now you have to prove it. Unless you can bring us water out of that rock, you can stop talking about God being among us. If you want us to go on believing that God is among us, God will have to do better than this' (see Exod 17:1–7). Really, they tempted God, saying if he didn't do better, they would cease to believe in him. Tell me, how do you assess these men who refused to go into the land? I say again for the seventeenth time, it's nothing to do with giants. It was a heart altogether out of gear with God.

You say, 'Why should we bother with them? After all our labours and trials we came here to this conference to be encouraged, not to be asked to survey such abominable sinners.' Yes, I understand, but the lesson is important because a major part of the New Testament is devoted to applying this same lesson to us. I refer to Hebrews 3–4, where the writer reminds his readers—for they were Hebrews themselves—of what happened to their ancestors at Kadesh-barnea. And how, as a result of their refusal to go into the land, God said, and indeed swore an oath, 'These men shall never see it', and sentenced them to forty years' wandering in the wilderness until their carcasses were destroyed in it.

Disobedience and unbelief

Why didn't they enter in? In Hebrews 3 we have a precise diagnosis.

And with whom was he provoked for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, but to those who were disobedient? So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief. (vv. 3:17–19)

Two things are alleged: that they were disobedient, and that they did not believe. Those statements have made some genuine Christians shake in their shoes. Understandably so, because the honest Christian will say, 'Well, there have been times when my faith has been wobbly and I deserve the Lord's rebuke, "you of little faith".' And worse than that, haven't there been times when all of us have been disobedient? Could this apply to us then? We should, therefore, be very careful to notice the precise terms. The word that is used here for 'disobedient' is one of two possible words in Greek for disobedience. The one that is used here means basically, 'to refuse to be convinced' and therefore 'to disobey'.

It is, I hasten to add, nowhere used in the whole of the New Testament of believers in Christ. If you are going to say that this applies to people that are genuine believers, you'll have to establish your case! In this verse, the verb used, and the cognate noun and adjectives, are nowhere else used of believers in the whole of the New Testament. Just let me cite you some examples of how the word is used. For instance, in Acts 14 we read:

Now at Iconium they entered together into the Jewish synagogue and spoke in such a way that a great number of both Jews and Greeks believed. But the unbelieving [disobedient–same word in Greek] Jews stirred up the Gentiles and poisoned their minds against the brothers. (vv. 1–2)

Now, what about these Jews? It says they were disobedient. What does that mean? That they were nice believing Christians, but they had a bad Monday and got a little bit disobedient? Of course not. They stand in contrast to those who believed. These were Jews who, having heard the gospel, deliberately rejected it. They were unbelievers.

Look at what Paul writes to Titus:

They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works. They are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work. (Titus 1:16)

Notice the term 'disobedient' again. Just who is Paul describing? Dear genuine believers who have a bad Thursday morning at work and have taken it out on their wife, or something? No, indeed not. These are people who've professed to know God, but in their works they deny him, being detestable and disobedient. The gospel itself describes the division.

Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him. (John 3:36)

Two classes: the believer who has eternal life and the disobedient, for that is the same word as here in Hebrews 3, who shall not see life. Says the Holy Spirit, the reason that these Israelites did not enter the land was because they were disobedient—unbelievers. Doesn't it ring true to you? People who despised God, who had seen his glory and rejected it. People who rebelled against him and talked of stoning Moses. People who said the whole story of redemption from Egypt was a lie and a religious deception. By their works they were proven to be disobedient and unbelievers.

But you say, all of us could be weak and wobbly in faith at times. We could indeed. The question at issue at this point is what was it that they didn't believe? And Hebrews tells us quite plainly.

Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it. For good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened. (Heb 4:1–2)

Not believing the gospel

What was it they didn't believe? They didn't believe the good news or, as normally translated, they didn't believe the gospel. But some may say that the good news they didn't believe was about the land flowing with milk and honey, and that God would bring them into the land. They had believed about redemption by the blood of the lamb in Egypt and so surely, in our terms, they were saved; what they didn't believe was the 'promised land' side of it.

But can you make that kind of distinction? What was the good news that Moses preached to the Israelites when he came to them in Egypt? Did Moses preach like this: 'Now, the gospel is that God has come down to deliver you from the wrath of God through the Passover lamb and from Pharaoh, by his almighty power. That's the main thing—to get out of Egypt. Now, once you've got out of Egypt, I will come and tell you that there is a deluxe course for the keen. I will offer you a chance to take this deluxe course of salvation and go on into the inheritance that's incorruptible and flowing with milk and honey. But, of course, you don't have to take that, because that's an extra to the gospel.'

Would you have it that way? To put it in modern terms, would you have it that the main thing is to be saved and forgiven and be delivered from the lake of fire? Once you've been saved then, if you're keen, you'll be offered a possibility of going on to live as a devoted disciple of Christ. But that's not optional, is it? Our New Testament teaches us that being a disciple of Christ will change every aspect of our lives, so that all around will see that we are one of his—even if, like Peter, we should deny him in a time of difficulty.

Restoration and recovery

You will recall that incident in the high priest's court when the maid challenged Peter. 'You're one of his disciples, aren't you?' Peter denied it, and when the relative of the man whose ear he had cut off looked across and said, 'Didn't I see you somewhere else tonight?' Peter said, 'No, you didn't', and swore all the swear words he knew. If you had been standing there and somebody had asked you, 'Is he a believer or isn't he?' what would you have said? You couldn't deny what Peter had just said, but then looking back, you would remember the evidence. You would remember his love for the Lord Jesus, and how he would have risked his life in the garden to save Christ had it been legitimate to do so. Looking back, the evidence says he was a believer. What's happened to him now, we can't tell: we can only see people's works and listen to what they say. But thank God that God knows the heart. He demands the works, but I personally find great encouragement in this by the writer of Hebrews.

Yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things—things that belong to salvation. For God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love that you have shown for his name in serving the saints, as you still do. (Heb 6:9–10)

Reviewing the evidence, the writer was satisfied in his heart of hearts that these were genuine believers though their behaviour was intolerably inconsistent at that moment.

What a marvellous God! He treasures up every bit of evidence from my past works, even though at the moment I'm a bit wobbly. He's not unjust. And I can tell you something more. He has provided a Saviour for us as he provided for Peter who, before the trial came, said to Peter, 'I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail' (Luke 22:32). Everything else failed. His testimony was blown sky high and his courage failed, but underneath his faith remained. Even in the moment when he was denying the Lord, he was speaking a pack of lies for, at heart, he was a believer still, and he came back as the Lord said he would come back and lived to strengthen his brothers.

No believer will be lost where there is genuine faith. The great high priest intercedes that their faith shall not fail.

Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them. (Heb 7:25)

But, oh, my brethren, what about the years in the wilderness? Let us not take advantage of that and be content with inconsistent behaviour. Let me tell you a story. I may have told it to you before, but old men reminisce!

When I first went to Belfast, I was asked to preach the gospel in a certain place where, at night, they had about four hundred of a congregation. I preached on the confessions of the apostles, how each one of them came to Christ and what they saw in Christ. One night I preached on Peter and his confession of Christ as the rock, the great, solid cornerstone, and I pointed out what that meant to Peter because, in his life, he knew more than one occasion where he felt he was sinking. In the water, for instance, and then that awful ordeal in the high priest's court when panic seized him and, do as he might to struggle against it, he felt himself slipping. And I used the phrase that he was like somebody falling into a pit and trying to grab the sides but finding it was slimy and letting him down, and how he was brought through.

Unknown to me, there was a businessman present, and the next day I received a telephone call asking me to come and have lunch with him. He told me his story. As a young man he was a believer, had acceptance as a preacher, and went into business. He looked around and saw other Christian businessmen doing shady deals in business. He was offered such a shady deal and, encouraged by what he saw other believers were doing, he took part in the shady deal, and thus began a slippery slope. He gained a seat in parliament. He was very successful in business. He never went near the believers. He would drive his aged father to the assembly on a Sunday night, drop him at the door, go away and come back and collect him. He would not go in. He told me he had been on the point, with his daughter, of writing a book against the believers.

Then he lost his seat in parliament, his business began to go downhill and then his health began to cave in. He was coming out of his office at about 2 am one Sunday morning, trying in desperation to keep his business afloat. He happened to pass the Victoria Hall in Belfast and saw that the preacher the following day would be a certain dogsbody. He didn't know the preacher from Adam but felt an overwhelming urge that he must come to that meeting, and he came. And the first sermon he heard for forty years was the story of Peter who had denied the Lord and felt himself sinking. And he said, 'That was me. When you said those words, I said to myself, "that's me".' Just think of the mercy of the Saviour. It was the first time that gentleman had listened to a sermon in forty years, and yet despite the constraint to come and listen, he came back to the Lord and lived to prove it—what marvellous grace in restoration.

But oh, those wasted forty years. My dear brothers and sisters, many of you have gone valiantly through life and yet we think of ourselves and our younger brothers and sisters about to rise to the challenge, to go in not only to their inheritance but to the wider mission fields, boldly for Christ. Let us listen to this story and see to it that, by God's good grace, we let the riches of the glory of his grace and the wealth of his gospel, and the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, to so take a grip of our hearts and imaginations that it ceases to be a little thing, and shall nerve us for the fight, however great the difficulties and however great the pains, so that we can overcome.

Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? (1 John 5:5)

3: Beware—Temptations Ahead

We begin our meditation this evening by reading once more from the book of Deuteronomy, and tonight some verses from chapter 4 and then from chapter 5.

And now, O Israel, listen to the statutes and the rules that I am teaching you, and do them, that you may live, and go in and take possession of the land that the LORD, the God of your fathers, is giving you. You shall not add to the word that I command you, nor take from it, that you may keep the commandments of the LORD your God that I command you. Your eyes have seen what the LORD did at Baal-peor, for the LORD your God destroyed from among you all the men who followed the Baal of Peor. But you who held fast to the LORD your God are all alive today. See, I have taught you statutes and rules, as the LORD my God commanded me, that you should do them in the land that you are entering to take possession of it. Keep them and do them, for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, 'Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.' For what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as the LORD our God is to us, whenever we call upon him? And what great nation is there, that has statutes and rules so righteous as all this law that I set before you today? Only take care, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. Make them known to your children and your children's children—how on the day that you stood before the LORD your God at Horeb, the LORD said to me, 'Gather the people to me, that I may let them hear my words, so that they may learn to fear me all the days that they live on the earth, and that they may teach their children so.' And you came near and stood at the foot of the mountain, while the mountain burned with fire to the heart of heaven, wrapped in darkness, cloud, and gloom. Then the LORD spoke to you out of the midst of the fire. You heard the sound of words, but saw no form; there was only a voice. And he declared to you his covenant, which he commanded you to perform, that is, the Ten Commandments, and he wrote them on two tablets of stone. And the LORD commanded me at that time to teach you statutes and rules, that you might do them in the land that you are going over to possess. Therefore watch yourselves very carefully. Since you saw no form on the day that the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves, in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female. (4:1–16) And Moses summoned all Israel and said to them, 'Hear, O Israel, the statutes and the rules that I speak in your hearing today, and you shall learn them and be careful to do them. The LORD our God made a covenant with us in Horeb. Not with our fathers did the LORD make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us here alive today. The LORD spoke with you face to face at the mountain, out of the midst of the fire. (5:1–4)

May the God who spoke then, and had Moses write these words, grant us to hear his voice again here, this very day.

Introduction

We return this evening to the plains of Moab and jostle ourselves amongst the thousands of Israelites who are standing there. All ears are tuned in the direction of Moses who is giving them final directions to encourage them now to rise up and do what their fathers and grandfathers had refused to do. At Kadesh-barnea the Israelites, given the opportunity to rise up and enter their inheritance, downright refused to do so. Now, forty years later, the children and grandchildren of those men are standing in the plains of Moab. In the distance, there is the River Jordan and in the other direction sits Mount Nebo where Moses, not long to be with them any more, must ascend and be taken home to glory.

He's standing before them exhorting them with heart and soul, and stimulating them to take their decision that they will now rise up and do the great thing, and enter into their God-given inheritance. Not only does he stimulate them to do so, but he will counsel them and prepare them to face the great temptations that they will meet on the other side of Jordan. As we saw on our last occasion he began to prepare them by taking them back to Kadesh-barnea, the very point at which their grandfathers and fathers had stood and, receiving the report of the land, had refused to go in.

Valuable experiences on the journey

Now he takes them on the rest of the journey, and his words are recorded in chapters 2 and 3. Having analysed the reasons why their grandfathers refused to go in when they were at Kadesh-barnea, and found themselves sentenced to wandering forty years in the wilderness, Moses now reminds their children of the journey that they had taken, these long forty dusty years from Kadesh-barnea to the plains of Moab. He asks them to remember how they got here today. It's a good question to ask from time to time. When I've decided where I am, which is not easy, to ask how did I get here: how did I get myself into this situation where I had to make this choice? So it was with Moses.

While the forty years served the judgment of God so that the people who refused to go in at Kadesh-barnea had now died off, it wasn't a case of wasted years and a wasted journey for the rest of them. On that journey, God had taught them many valuable practical lessons that should serve them in good stead when they got into the land. Moses will speak of that on a later occasion but this time, as he recalls how they got here, he chooses to concentrate on the very last stages of the journey. They had come to Mount Seir and had camped around about Mount Seir for a good deal of time until God blew his whistle and said, 'Time. You've gone and spent too long a time round this mountain. Get up and start to go.'

An important detour

But instead of letting them go straight east, he made them turn back down south. That seemed at first to be the very opposite direction to which they wanted to go, right down south to the bottom of the Dead Sea, and then across and up the other side, east of Jordan. As they begin to travel, God told Moses to tell them, 'As you come up the east side of the Dead Sea, you will come through three nations. There will be Edom, there will be Moab, and there will be Ammon. And as you come through them, you are not to fight them for they are your national brothers, so to speak. And what is more,' says God, 'tell them that I gave the Edomites their land, and I gave the Moabites their land, and I gave the Ammonites their land'.

I suspect when Moses told that to the Israelites, it raised a few eyebrows. 'Exactly what are you saying, Moses? You have told us that God has given us the land of Canaan. Are you telling us that just as God has given us Canaan, he's given old Edom his land?'

'Yes.'

'And Moab?'

'Yes.'

'And Ammon? God gave them their land? I thought we were special.'

'Well, you are in a way,' said Moses. 'We shall see how in a minute.'

So there they go, trotting along, and they come to Edom, and then to Moab, and then they come to Ammon. They weren't allowed to fight them. They had to pay for anything they got.

Lesson 1: Giants can be overcome

I wonder if they talked to the Edomites and the Ammonites. I think I can imagine a conversation.

'You've got a nice country here. Do you know that our God gave you this country?'

'Oh, did he really? That's what you think!'

'Well, that's what Moses said. And God has given us a land too, but we're a bit scared because there are giants there. We don't suppose there were any giants when you came to your land, were there?'

'Giants? Of course there were: the place teemed with giants.'

'How did you get into the land, then?'

'Well, we fought them, of course. What do you think? We're not a lot of children. We're grown-up men. We fought them and conquered them.'

'Oh, they must have been tiny giants, not like our giants.'

'Tiny giants? What are you talking about? Haven't you seen old King Og's bedstead? Go to the local museum: it is on permanent display. Some people say it's not a bedstead; they say it's a sarcophagus. It's a colossal thing, for old King Og was about 13.5 feet high.'

'And you overcame them and have been settled in your inheritance? Whereas we, for these last forty years, have been trudging through a wilderness because we were afraid of giants!'

Why do the people of God show themselves so weak at times, I wonder? Weaker than the world. I'm well aware, and you are even more aware, that if you put your hand to the work of the Lord, you'll find it is no hobby. However innocent it might be, sooner or later you will find opposition, and such opposition that will lead you to think that it comes from more than human sources. Problems there will be, like the stars of the sky. But, my dear brothers and sisters, don't let's magnify our problems. The world has had its problems. The godless atheists of Marxism had their problems to establish atheism in China. And the story of the Long March[^2] in all its privation and persistence stands to us like the Moabites stood to the Israelites. The world and its atheists have not buckled under their problems but have persisted. Surely we who believe in the living God should do likewise. The Lord of hosts is with us, giants or no giants, and he will triumph.

Lesson 2: We can fight when we have to

Anyway, they got through Edom and Moab and Ammon and they didn't have to fight, which pleased them very well. Then, all of a sudden, as they progressed northwards up the east side of Jordan, the king of Heshbon came out against them and started a fight. So they had no option: they had to fight. And Heshbon and company had fortified cities going up to high heaven. The Israelites had to fight them, and fight them they did, and they proved God to be with them, and overcame their enemies and destroyed the fortified cities. And then God, to their surprise, gave them that countryside as part of their unexpected inheritance. But God warned the two and a half tribes who took that inheritance, 'You can have it provided you are prepared to go across Jordan with the rest and fight the other giants'.

Learning from experience

But there it was; God had made them face fortified cities. Do you remember the excuse that the men gave at Kadesh-barnea, why they couldn't go into the promised land? Because they had fortified cities, they said. Now Israel has got to face going over Jordan. They'll certainly face fortified cities. They'll strain every nerve in their body. But the God who knows what lies ahead has, in these last months, prepared them by their personal experience to tackle fortified cities so that now they would lose some of the fear of it, and be ready to go across. I think that is immensely kind of God: how merciful he is. One generation jibbed like a horse that, being ridden up to a big jump, puts its front legs down and turns the rider over its neck and refuses to take the jump. The rider mounts again, and wheels the horse around and around and it loses sight of the big jump. Oh, there's a little jump and here it goes over the little jump. And then a slightly bigger jump, and it goes over the bigger jump. And then once more it's faced with the big jump, and this time it has conquered the fear of it, and over it goes.

What a God we have! If one generation of Israel would jib at the jump, he wheeled the nation around until their successors, being trained now to face fortified cities, would be ready to go in. And what's true of nations is sometimes true of us as individuals. At an earlier part in life, faced with a challenge from God, we ducked it, and God in his mercy doesn't always say, 'Well, now you've had it: I'll never give you another chance'. Instead, he wheels us around through life's varied experiences and presently brings us back to the same jump, by his mercy now more prepared to pass the examination.

Preparing for bigger temptations

But when Moses had reminded them how they got there, he must turn in chapters 4–5 to prepare them for the bigger temptations and tests that would meet them on the other side of the Jordan. Granted that they had lost their fear of fortified cities, and giants for that matter, but there would be bigger temptations. Once Israel got among that pagan idolatrous society that had long since jettisoned faith in the one true God, and had gone over to an idolatrous interpretation of the universe deifying the forces of nature, fighting wouldn't be the difficult thing. The difficult thing would be to resist the temptation to compromise with that idolatrous society.

As they came across the Moabites in the south, with their permissive religion that mixed superstition with sexual immorality, all in a mix up of supposed religion, Israel would be sorely tempted to say, 'Well, times are different and Moses was a dear old boy but he was somewhat out of fashion. You have to move with the times.' Whereas Moses had denounced certain things as sin, our psychologists have taught us to interpret these things differently. And we mustn't now say homosexuality is sin, seeing it's all in our genes anyway. That would be homophobia, and nobody wants to be accused of that. So the church must give its sanction to the marriage of homosexual couples and then to artificial insemination and surrogate motherhood so that this perversity can continue of homosexuals joined in marriage and having children by somebody else. And we mustn't protest or we're depriving people of their civil rights: the church has to compromise or be threatened by the government if it doesn't.

And when they got up north to those strong fortified cities of Megiddo and Hazor, with their technological development abreast of everything—nine hundred chariots of iron, if you please—and hard-headed Canaanites with the most recent technology, Israel would feel a little bit inferior. They hadn't got any technology like that; and people that could produce chariots, how could they be wrong? The Canaanites had a new attitude to the universe, and to science and technology. Mustn't Israel compromise with their gods as well? That would be Israel's temptation; a bigger temptation than having to face fortified cities as Israel found, and as the Christian church has found.

How would Moses prepare them? In chapter 4 he begins some of his longest sermons at this time, to prepare Israel for going in amongst these idolatrous nations.

And now, O Israel, listen to the statutes and the rules that I am teaching you, and do them, that you may live, and go in and take possession of the land that the LORD, the God of your fathers, is giving you. You shall not add to the word that I command you, nor take from it, that you may keep the commandments of the LORD your God that I command you. (Deut 4:1–2)

A pertinent lesson

Moses pressed home the exhortation with a lesson from recent history that they had gone through on the way from Kadesh-barnea to this part of the world. He reminded them what had so recently happened when they came near Moab, near Baal-peor, and the Midianite girls had come out. Old Balak, king of Moab, had called Balaam the prophet and promised a very fat fee if he would come and use his mumbo-jumbo magic stuff to curse Israel. Being unsuccessful with that, Balaam—to earn his fee—taught Balak how to cast a stumbling block before the children of Israel, to engage in fornication and to eat things sacrificed to idols. That is a good summary of Moabite religion, where idolatry lay at its core and sexual immorality was part of the religious process. The Israelites, perhaps tired with the hard slog through a desert, fell to the temptation, and Israel was yoked to Baal-peor. And, says Scripture, God was jealous: 'For the LORD your God in your midst is a jealous God' (Deut 6:15) and in his love for his people, when that love was compromised by Israel, his jealousy was aroused.

A jealous God

The New Testament speaks that same warning to us believers. Writing to Corinth, Paul reminds them that they cannot go and sit in the restaurant attached to the heathen temple and be served meat fresh from being offered to idols. 'You cannot eat of the table of the Lord and the table of demons,' says he. Well, physically you can, but remember if you do, it will provoke the Lord to jealousy, and he's stronger than you are. Our God calls for absolute loyalty, and Paul, writing to the Corinthians once more says,

I betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ. But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. (2 Cor 11:2–3)

In the East, before a girl was engaged ('betrothed' in those days), she could keep an open mind. 'Shall it be George or shall it be Thomas? Or perhaps Robert? So she chooses Robert, and who knows why she chose him. But once she has chosen him and she's betrothed, then she can't keep an open mind. For then to keep an open mind is not a symptom of intellectual prowess but a symptom of defective morality. 'And I've betrothed you to Christ,' says Paul. Once you had an open mind and God offered you the evidence that Jesus was his Son, and you received his Son and were joined with him, so you cannot keep an open mind now as to his deity. You are required to show intellectual loyalty to God's dear Son. Let Israel be reminded by their experience at Baal-peor, therefore, as they go among the idolatrous heathen, that God will expect from them uncompromised loyalty.

And then he urges them not to be ashamed either of their God or his doctrines. You don't get anybody's respect by compromising the truth, or your faith either. The world has no time for a corrupt church that is afraid to stand for what the Bible teaches and goes in with modern immorality and all the rest of it, trying to curry favour with the people. They'd despise the thing. Keep to the commandments of your Lord and the nations around will come to say,

Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. For what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as the LORD our God is to us, whenever we call upon him? (Deut 4:6–7)

The roots of their faith

How then would Moses strengthen them to be loyal to God and to his doctrines? He reminds them and takes them back to the very roots of their faith.

On the day that you stood before the LORD your God at Horeb, the LORD said to me, 'Gather the people to me, that I may let them hear my words, so that they may learn to fear me all the days that they live on the earth.' (Deut 4:10)

Moses is taking them back, not just to Kadesh-barnea, but to that earlier stage when, as a nation, they stood before Mount Sinai (which was part of the Horeb range and, therefore, in Deuteronomy is called Horeb) where they witnessed the self-revelation of God. This was the root of their faith. The Israelites' faith was not a superstition dreamed up in the minds of bedrugged priests or something. It wasn't a philosophy thought up with the great intellects of Greece, Plato and Aristotle and the rest of them. Jewish faith was founded in the self-revelation of God in history, made at a particular time, made at a particular place, when the living transcendent Lord came down from his heaven and stood on Mount Horeb. Horeb shook under the weight of the glory of God and through the fire and the flame, the transcendent Lord spoke at that time and at that place—the historic self-revelation of God to his people.

'You heard his voice' says Moses. He hasn't forgotten that it was not this generation standing in front of him, but their fathers and grandfathers who stood there. Many of the people now standing in front of him were born during this last forty years. But if they were going to profess the historic faith—the God-given revelation at Horeb—then they must stand in heart and spirit at Horeb and know where they got their faith from. Israel's faith, as I say, was founded in God's historical self-revelation at Horeb. Our Christian faith stands there too. 'All Scripture', says Paul, 'is given by inspiration of God' (2 Tim 3:16 KJV), and he's talking about Old Testament Scripture, given by God. And as Moses brought it to the people and wrote it down, it was true. Peter explains the process.

No prophesy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophesy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. (2 Pet 1:20–21)

Prophecy did not come on man's initiative, but 'being carried along by the Holy Spirit, there spoke from God, men'—that is the order of the Greek and follows the order of the occurrence. God wanted to convey his word and so the Holy Spirit was brought in to move, to carry men, so that the message coming from God would now, from God, come to men and men would speak it. That's inspiration. As Moses came down the mountain, he brought the words of God and spoke them, and eventually wrote them in written revelation, and Israel heard that word.

We Christians have to stand by it too, and we of course have a further revelation which likewise is an historic thing:

For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known. (John 1:17–18)

Listen to John talking to us and you can sense the excitement. 'We saw him, we handled him, we heard him, we touched him' (see 1 John 1:1–3). What an awesome thing it was to wake up to the fact that the man who travelled in the boat with you was God incarnate, the very self-revelation of God to men. And as Christians, we stand there too. Haven't you heard him, my good brother, my sister? We can say with the hymn writer,

We saw thee not when thou didst come To this poor world of sin and death; Nor yet beheld thy cottage home, In that despised Nazareth; But we believe thy footsteps trod Its streets and plains, thou Son of God.[^3]

We rest on revealed truth.

Modernism

Of course, we meet opposition. In the West not so much from the fancies of Eastern religions, but we meet modernism. Modernism took its rise in the Enlightenment when men ceased to believe that there was a truth given us by God and substituted for God's revealed truth the power and authority of human reason. Descartes[^4] is said to be the source of this error. Descartes had his doubts whether it could be said in any sense that he existed, and he came to this conclusion that he had his doubts, and if he didn't know anything else, he knew who he was doubting, so he must be there to do the doubting! And then, beginning to think a bit more, he decided that he was doing the thinking and, therefore, 'Because I think,' said he, 'I am'. That seemed all very good but it began a slippery slide. Instead of accepting God's revelation because God said it, from now on it was man's reasoning which was going to be the umpire of what could be regarded as truth or not. From that, modernism permeated not only the scientific world but, alas, the religious world. And a hundred more years of modernism in theological colleges has put human reason at the top.

Human reason will decide what is true, so if there's a God and what may be thought to be God's word, if it doesn't match up to my reason, then God will have to withdraw it. Your Professor Searle of Berkeley, if you won't mind an Englishman quoting him, says that even if there's a God, he'll have to submit to our reason and fit into our rational scheme, and if he doesn't fit, too bad for him. That is idolatry, idolizing human reason as distinct from revelation. Young men and women, do listen. If you're going to work for God in the West, and in many countries influenced by the West, you should know what they think, and where you stand. You do not stand against reason, but for the position that reason is not enough to find out the truth. If God did not first reveal his truth, reason could never know it. Science has made such progress in understanding how the world works, and that's good. You can understand how atoms work without bringing God in, if you want to, just like you can understand an automobile engine without calling God in to explain it. But explaining how the universe works doesn't mean that you can now account for how the universe came to be there in the first place.

The analogy that my colleague, John Lennox, and I use constantly with Russian atheists is the story of Mr Ford. If you haven't heard it, listen now! There was this rather primitive tribe who came across a motorcar for the first time. They didn't know what it was, but as they handled this and that, one of them accidentally turned the ignition switch and the engine started. They were frightened about that and decided there must be somebody inside the car, making that noise. Then they looked at the front and saw some sort of letter things, F-O-R-D. Eventually they thought that must be somebody's name—the name of the god who was inside the machine. When it hummed nicely like Ford engines sometimes do, they thought that this god-Ford was well pleased with them. And when it backfired, they got frightened and thought the god was now against them, and they offered it sacrifices. But then, as they grew up, they learned about engineering. They took the thing to pieces and found they could understand how it worked, and there was no Mr Ford inside. So they said, 'we don't need to believe in Mr Ford anymore, and we very much doubt whether there ever was a Mr Ford'.

You can see the fallacy at once, can't you? Understanding how the car goes, doesn't tell you how the car came to be. Science can tell you how the universe works, to some extent, but it can't tell you how it came to be. The scientists tell you they're going to find out one day and we needn't think about God who designed it. But that is manifestly absurd. If reason is going to understand the universe, the universe has to be there to start with. But we understand atoms and things, and inside atoms, and nuclei and all the rest of it. But long before the Greek Democritus had the notion that the world was made of atoms, and long before our modern generations found out what the nucleus of an atom is like, the atoms were all there. Science didn't invent them, nor reason either. A part of reason is to understand what God the creator revealed and made. That's how it is with God himself: we look at creation and we see God expressing himself in his works, and reason tries to understand it, not to deny the Creator.

Knowing God

But when it comes to knowing God, then of course God is not a bit of stuff. He's a person, and there's a difference between getting to know an atom and getting to know a person. If you wanted to get to know an atom, you don't need a lot of brains but you become an atomic physicist. And you get hold of a little atom and put it into one of these hurly-burly machines in America or Switzerland, and you push it up to speeds near the speed of light. And then you bash it with an electron or something, and the poor old atom has no chance. It has to give up its secrets, poor old thing, as it gets bashed to pieces. That's how they do it. But I'm telling you now, you could put me into a cyclotron and get to know every atom in my body, yet you wouldn't know me. You can examine with your machines all the electrons and the things in my brain that go fizz and bang, and know which part of the brain I'm using to think and locate where the activity is going on. But no machine that ever has been or will be invented will be able to tell you what I'm thinking, because I'm not just a bit of stuff like an atom. I am a person.

And God is a person. You can never know him unless he chooses to reveal himself. This is not a weakness in Christianity: this is the only rationality of the situation. If ever we're to know God, we must start with God's self-revelation of himself. And there are conditions, of course. Jesus said,

I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children. (Luke 10:21)

It's not because God is nasty and miserly, but if we're going to know him, we shouldn't suppose we're going to bring him in front of us and, with our reason, tell him what he may be like. We must adopt the position of children, and humbly come to almighty God and let God reveal himself to us. That is our Christian faith, and that is our Lord's claim, 'I am the truth. No one comes to the Father except through me' (see John 14:6). The truth of God manifest then, not only at Horeb, but now much more God has spoken to us in his Son, in his incarnation, his birth, ministry, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and coming again.

A new covenant

How did Moses get Israel to keep God's commandments in that idolatrous society? By taking them back to the roots of their faith, and asking them to feel themselves standing at the foot of Horeb, and hearing again the voice of God, speaking his commandments and making a covenant with them. And in that strength, knowing themselves to be, so to speak, there spoken to by God, and in the reality of God to find the strength to obey those commandments without compromise. So he takes them back to Horeb to remind them of that occasion when God made a covenant with them, and wrote his law on the tablets of stone. And they accepted his covenant, saying, 'All that the LORD has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient' (Exod 24:7).

Times have gone on, so how shall we in our day keep God's covenant loyally, in an idolatrous world? Well, because our blessed Lord has made a covenant with us too. Now, I know there are some believers who think that the new covenant has nothing to do with us in the church: it was made for the sake of Israel. And if what I now say offends you, and you think I have lost my dispensational stance or something, come and see me afterwards and we'll talk about it. So far as the covenant being made for us, Hebrews 8 says that this new covenant not will be made but has already been enacted. When our blessed Lord sat with his disciples around the table in the Upper Room, and passed them the cup, he said, 'This cup is the new covenant in my blood' (see Luke 20:20). And just as Moses, when the old covenant was instituted, took a basin and filled it with the blood of the sacrificial offering and sprinkled the book and the people, so our blessed Lord took the cup, and holding it full of wine, said to his apostles, 'This cup is the new covenant'.

So what is the new covenant about? It runs like this.

I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbour and each his brother, saying, 'Know the LORD', for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. (Jer 31:33–34)

Were you there when the Lord made that covenant? Says Moses to the Israelites standing in front of him, 'You were there at Horeb when the Lord made his covenant, and he made it not just with those at that time, he made it with you'. And when it comes to the new covenant, my brother, my sister, were you there in that Upper Room? Were you there when they crucified your Lord? 'Well,' you say, 'I wasn't physically there but I've been there many times since. As it is commanded, I have gathered with his people, to stand to the covenant.' As the Lord, being with us, has taken the bread and said once more in your hearing, 'This is my body given for you', and has taken the cup and said to your heart, 'This is the new covenant in my blood, promising to write my laws ever more deeply on your heart. Co-operate with me, learn to discern yourself and judge yourself, and then you will not be judged, but if you come carelessly, then you will be disciplined'. And you say, 'Lord, I'm unworthy to come. I confess my sins. Must I stay away?' He says, 'Have you listened to the covenant? For its last terms are these, 'I will remember their sin no more'. How shall we be prepared to face and triumph in our idolatrous societies? Oh, my brothers, my sisters, we must ever and again come and meet the Lord at his supper, and stand and see him make the covenant with us, writing his laws on our hearts.

Do not misinterpret the covenant

Beware of misinterpretation of the covenant. God, through Moses, warned the Israelites, 'You heard a voice: you didn't see any form. Don't pervert God's self-revelation at Horeb and suppose you saw forms and then go and make idols.' And we are warned not to pervert the Lord's new covenant either. Sacramentalists have, and when they take the bread and the wine they not only claim it is the literal body and blood of Christ, but they offer it to God as a sacrifice to get forgiveness of sins. That is a perversion. Our Lord did not say, 'This is my body, offer it to God'. He did not say, 'This is the token of my blood, offer it to God'. The whole notion is a perversion. 'This is my body, my blood; you eat, you drink, and do it in remembrance of me.'

Would you ever think that evangelicals might be in danger of going to the other extreme and banishing the Lord's Supper to once a month or once a quarter, or never? I was in a country, let it be nameless, where in certain assemblies I was asked the question, 'Is the Lord's Supper not irrelevant in our modern age?' I was elsewhere to find, to my grief, the Lord's Supper celebrated as a ten minute interlude in the course of a long meeting devoted to other things. It won't do, my brothers and sisters. If we are to stand in our modern idolatrous societies, with idolatrous religion and godless atheist scientists on the other side, we must come constantly back to the roots of our faith and stand at that supreme self-revelation of God in his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, at Calvary and the resurrection. The next verse of that hymn we quoted earlier says:

We saw thee not when lifted high Amid that wild and savage crew; Nor heard we that imploring cry, 'Forgive, they know not what they do!' But we believe the deed was done That shook the earth and veiled the sun.

We do well to come back to our roots and hear his voice, the very voice of God incarnate, and treasure his precepts, and seek his grace to stand with undeviating loyalty to him in the midst of our modern world.

4: The Temptations of 'The Good Things'

Let us begin our study this evening by reading from the book of Deuteronomy.

Now this is the commandment, the statutes and the rules that the LORD your God commanded me to teach you, that you may do them in the land to which you are going over, to possess it, that you may fear the LORD your God, you and your son and your son's son, by keeping all his statutes and his commandments, which I command you, all the days of your life, and that your days may be long. Hear therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them, that it may go well with you, and that you may multiply greatly, as the LORD, the God of your fathers, has promised you, in a land flowing with milk and honey. Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (6:1–9)

I do trust that by now you have found a comfortable place on the plains of Moab to pitch your tent. These days we are assembled there amidst the thousands of Israel to listen to Moses, the apostle and high priest of Israel's confession, as he addresses them for the last time before they go over the Jordan into their inheritance. We have been thinking that, as he encourages them to go across the Jordan to their inheritance, he's also preparing them for three major dangers and difficulties that they are liable to meet. The first one, of course, was that they would have to face the very thing their fathers were afraid of. They would have to face the giants, the Rephaim and Anakim, and cities fortified up to high heaven. We were considering the other night the preparation that God had made for them, when God took them, first of all, east of Jordan, into countries that had been infested with giants, and let Israel see how other nations, under God's merciful providence, had coped with those giants. And then he had led them until their enemies came out against them and they had no option but to fight. And they fought the king of Heshbon and his fortified cities, and found that the enemies yielded to them and they gained, by God's gift, inheritance unexpectedly on the east side of Jordan. That prepared them to cross Jordan and deal effectively with the giants that they might find there, and particularly the fortified cities.

There was a bigger danger awaiting them across Jordan. That is when they came across this advanced civilization, morally permissive, expert in technology, but with an idolatrous interpretation of the universe. The Israelites, nowhere near so sophisticated in technology, would feel inferior and be tempted to compromise their faith in the one true God with the ideologies of the Canaanites. How Moses prepared them to meet that particular danger, we meditated on last night.

The greatest danger

Now we are to observe from chapter 6 onward the way Moses prepared them for yet a third danger, a third temptation. We notice the length to which Moses went about this topic, for it extends through chapter 6 to chapter 11. The danger was precisely this: that the very blessings of God that they would encounter and experience when they entered their inheritance, might adversely affect their heart attitude to God. The very blessings of God could have the effect of lessening their gratitude to God and inducing in them, not gratitude, but selfishness, pride and arrogance. That might sound strange at first, but we will see in a moment how all too true that was. It wasn't, of course, the fault of God's blessings. It would be the fault of their misinterpreting God's blessings, and failing to show to God the necessary gratitude of heart which those blessings should have evoked. It was an insidious temptation and, if I'm not mistaken, it is a temptation with us still.

The heart of the problem is the problem of the heart

So to come to the first one, we read in chapter 6 what lies at the heart of Israel's faith. Verses 4–5 are what is technically called the Shema, the imperative of the verb 'to hear'.

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

Millions of times it has been repeated from the heart and mouth of millions of Israelis, all down the long centuries. It is the expression of the fundamental foundation of their faith—their monotheism. But not only does it stand for the doctrinal expression of their monotheism, it immediately carries with it a duty of response from those who profess that doctrine. Thus Moses comes right to the centre of what he now has to say. In his next sermons it is going to be a question of Israel's heart, their heart attitude to God, and many times we will find reference to what goes on in the human heart in relation to God. The doctrine that there is only one Lord means that our devotion to him must be uncompromised and total. If there were many lords, then our heart's devotion and love might be distributed equally among them. But if there is only one Lord, then the love he claims is the absolute love of the totality of our hearts.

An exclusive love

Moses, at once, shows Israel that the love that God requires of their hearts, and of their souls, and the strength of their bodies, is not mere emotion, and even less is it sentiment. In order that the love may be maintained, he says in verse 6, 'these words that I command you today shall be on your heart'. Love shows itself in keeping God's commandments, as the Apostle John reminds us:

And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. Whoever says 'I know him' but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him. (1 John 2:3–4)

It's common amongst us to say to somebody, 'Do you know the Lord?' And it's easy to answer, 'Yes'.

'Do you know the Lord, my sister?'

'Well, yes, of course I do.'

But wait a minute, how do you know that you know the Lord? The answer John gives is we know that we know the Lord when we love God and keep his commandments.

Suppose you came to me and said, 'Do you like Switzerland?'

'Oh, yes, I adore Switzerland?'

'Do you like mountains?'

'No, I abominate mountains. I wouldn't go anywhere near a mountain if I possibly could.'

'Well, you just don't know Switzerland then.'

If you love God but you don't keep his commandments, that's a contradiction in terms. That is the test of love, and so that that might be true, his word shall be in your very heart; and you shall teach it to your children; and you shall put it on your wrists; and as a mark on your forehead; and you shall hammer it on the doorposts so that you're reminded of it as you go in and as you come out; and you shall speak of it when you get up and when you lie down. We excuse the hyperbole because it's driving home the point. The love of God must mean the word of God in our every activity and in our hearts, not just as a question of keeping rules in a book.

The potential and the pitfall

When the LORD your God brings you into the land that he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you—with great and good cities that you did not build, and houses full of all good things that you did not fill, and cisterns that you did not dig, and vineyards and olive trees that you did not plant—and when you eat and are full, then take care lest you forget the LORD, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. (Deut 6:10–12)

They got these marvellous things in their inheritance free and for nothing. They didn't have to work for them. Cisterns for water supply that they didn't dig, vineyards that they didn't plant, houses that they didn't build. They got them free, gratis, and for nothing, without their works. You say, 'Hallelujah, that's an example of our salvation too'.

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. (Eph 2:8–9)

But then there is a danger. For sometimes in human psychology what you get as a gift, in the end you don't value. If people work for something, they tend to value it. If they get it as a gift, they are in danger of not valuing it, and the more they are given, the less they value it. That's a perverse streak in human nature, and the danger was that getting it for nothing, and eating and being full, they should forget the cost that was paid so that they might receive these good things and the freedom that went with them. So Moses says 'take care lest you forget the LORD, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery'. In Egypt they had been nothing better than slaves, living in slaves' hovels, and spending life in the drudgery of Egyptian servitude. Now they would have beautiful houses, with a donkey or two, and all the children would have donkeys (no one-donkey families here!) and vineyards and grapes, and everything else. And they would get used to it, and the memory of the old slavery would easily fade as they took these wonderful gifts for granted.

Teach the children

There was a special danger with the children because many of them had never even known anything of the servitude of Egypt. They were brought up with much bounty and took it for granted. In fact, not only having failed to realize the cost, they were now becoming discontented, tempting the Lord and saying, 'This isn't good enough: the Canaanites have more and so should we'. Therefore, lest that happen, they should be reminded. The word of God would be written in their hearts, so that when a child asked, as young people will sometimes, 'What is the meaning of all these statutes and judgments and commandments, what is the point of all these rules and regulations? We find them irksome and a bit of a slavery'; then they would be reminded of the history—though it would be difficult for them to grasp because they didn't live through it—how that once the nation was in very real slavery until, by God's mercy, he redeemed them and set them free.

That is true to life, my brothers and sisters. Some of you older believers, before you got converted you knew the slaveries of sin. You got converted and then your children got converted, and they didn't know the depths you went to—by your goodness and God's grace they were brought up differently. Now the grandchildren have arrived and they know nothing but Christianity from the start. They don't know the bondage of sin like you knew it and, therefore, salvation doesn't quite seem so important to them: it doesn't make the big difference in their lives. And there comes a very big danger, for the story of redemption brings freedom, but it also brings an enormous responsibility.

Says the apostle to the Corinthians, 'you are not your own, for you were bought with a price' (1 Cor 6:19–20). And writing again in his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul says that the love of Christ controls us as we reason this way—it's not a question of emotion, it's a question of logic.

One has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised. (2 Cor 5:14–15)

If he hadn't died for us, we wouldn't have a life to live. That's what coming out of Egypt entailed. The firstborn were particularly reminded that they were no longer their own. They had to be given totally to the Lord and his service. Why was that? The logic simply was this: that on the night when the angel came through Egypt to destroy the firstborn, Israel's firstborn would have been destroyed had it not been for the blood of the Passover lamb. Without that blood, they would no longer have had a life to live and, since that life had been bought by the blood of the redeeming lamb, God claimed that life. And they who feel the constraining love of Christ will own the logical implication of that sacrificial love, and own they are no longer their own and all they have is his. That is the only safe way, my brother, my sister, to stop us taking the gifts of God's grace and abusing them ungratefully for merely our own pleasure and satisfaction.

The danger of mixed marriages

Then there was another insidious danger.

When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you [and the nations are now listed], and when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them. You shall not intermarry with them. (Deut 7:1–3)

Why is that?

For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. (v. 6)

With this we come to the statement of God's calling for Israel. It re-echoes the words that God himself spoke to Moses, and recorded in Exodus 19, when God summoned Moses to the mountain and said to Moses, 'Now I want you to go and make a proposal in my name to Israel. You have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I bore you on eagles' wings, and I brought you to myself. I have redeemed you. Now that I have redeemed you I have a proposal to make to Israel. Please go and tell them.' And the proposal was this:

Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. (Exod 19:5–6)

That was God's astonishing proposal to Israel. When the prophet Jeremiah thought about it in later centuries, the Spirit of God moved him to describe God's action here as that of a lover going to court the girl he had chosen to be his bride, and enticing her with his promises. Oh, what a thought. Almighty God, transcendent Lord, owner and maker of the vast universe and all that's in it, coming to court Israel, leaving his heaven and coming to Mount Sinai to meet the bedraggled lot of ex-slaves in the middle of a desert, and wooing them with a persuasive love of his divine proposal. 'You ex-slaves, if you'll keep my covenant and agree to it, you shall be to me the treasure par excellence throughout the universe, and I propose to make you a kingdom of priests, for me.' What a proposal.

And says Moses, 'When you get into the land, you will find that the nations that come against you are easily destroyed, for it's God who will destroy them' (see Deut 7:23–24). Why will he destroy them in front of you? Not so that you can go off to some holiday camp for the rest of your life, but because he has chosen you for this spectacularly unique privilege: to be a holy people, utterly dedicated to God, and rise to this holy ministry of being priests for God.

Now when that dawned upon them—their unique honour and glory as a kingdom of priests to God, a holy nation—there would lurk a danger, and you can see what it is.

It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the LORD loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. (Deut 7:7–8)

The danger was that they would get it into their little hearts that it was because of their superior merit and qualities, compared with the Gentile Canaanites, that God had chosen them. What a folly that would be. The Lord hasn't set his love upon you because of your merit, because of your size, because you were an outstanding nation, full of advance and qualifications, full of wisdom and strength. Nothing of the sort. You were a bunch of slaves. You have been chosen not for any good in you. 'I've chosen you because of the oath I swore to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, your fathers, and faithful to that oath, I give you this unique privilege, not because of who you are.'

Paul the apostle had to remind the Christians of Corinth of that. They were full of such gifts—'they were not lacking in any gift'. They began to think of themselves as somebody and Paul had to remind them.

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. (1 Cor 1:26–27)

The danger would be that if, as priests to God, they thought their priesthood depended on them and their superiority over other people, it would turn them overnight into Pharisees, arrogant men thinking that their ministry depended on their superiority. And they would despise others when all the time they were to be a holy priesthood to God, to advertise to the world the virtues of the one who had called them out of Egypt. That is the point behind Peter's quotation of this calling. Some have been disobedient and have stumbled at the rock of offence.

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. (1 Pet 2:9–10)

We too are called to be a royal priesthood. Ponder it, my brother, my sister, as you sit on that seat: you are called to be a holy priesthood, a royal priesthood to God. How could you be any such thing? Did I hear somebody say, 'But you have to be specially qualified for that, two PhDs to start with, and many other qualifications in order to be an effective royal priesthood!' No, but listen to what you're a priesthood for:

That you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness.

How does his calling of us out of darkness show his excellence? Well, consider what you were. 'You were a nobody,' says Peter. 'You were not a nation, you were just a harum-scarum lot of slaves from Egypt, a non-entity in this world, and God called you out of darkness into his marvellous light. You had not obtained mercy. You were on your way to perdition, and God had mercy. As you act as a priest and the world looks at you and sees you were a nobody, and learns that you deserve God's wrath instead of his mercy, and finds that God has mercy on you, they'll say he must be some God. Fancy him saving Gooding, that non-entity. Fancy him saving Saul of Tarsus in spite of his rebellion.

The fact that he saves the likes of us makes us exhibitions of the grace of God. What a stupendous thing that is. It's not because of our superiority: it wouldn't be quite so remarkable if we were superior people and he chose us for that reason. But when he calls the principalities, powers and dominions in heavenly places to consider you and me, my dear brothers and sisters, that God has made us priests, has had mercy upon us and constituted us his people, then the reaction of the principalities and powers will not be to credit us with anything. The worse sinners we were, the more it will magnify the grace of God. What a thing you are called to—to be an eternal exhibition of the grace of God.

Chosen not for good in me, Wakened from coming wrath to flee, Hidden in the Saviour's side, By the Spirit sanctified— Teach me, Lord, on earth to show By my love, how much I owe.[^5]

Let us beware lest our spiritual gifts and blessings should produce in us an inappropriate spirit of pride and arrogance and superiority, and a despising of other people.

The danger of prosperity

Then we come to chapter 8, and that too tells us of another danger which is this, that if we're not careful, our very blessings could make us independent of God. At least that was the danger with Israel.

For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing out in the valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines, and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you can dig copper. And you shall eat and be full, and you shall bless the LORD your God for the good land he has given you. Take care lest you forget the LORD your God. (Deut 8:7–11) Beware lest you say in your heart, 'My power and the might of my hand have gained me this wealth.' You shall remember the LORD your God, for it is he that gives you power to get wealth, that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your fathers, as it is this day. (vv. 17–18)

You can see the danger. The very richness of the land that God brought them into, with its abundant supply, carried with it a danger that when they ate and were full, they would come to feel in their hearts—even if they did not say it publicly—that they were independent of God: 'My own hand earned this cash, and I don't have to depend upon the Lord for it.'

This chapter is dealing with very down-to-earth things. Our daily bread and butter, and it was more than bread and butter for them: it was olives and goodness knows what else, rich fare indeed. But there lurked a danger, lest the very richness and plentifulness of the food that God gave them should induce in them a sense of independence of God. That is disastrous. And so God, who foresaw the danger, started to train his people in the wilderness.

You shall remember the whole way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD. (8:2–3)

In the first instance it's talking about our daily bread and butter. Knowing the riches that one day would be theirs, God trained his people in the desert. He humbled them, it says, and there were times when he allowed them to go without, and allowed them to hunger, and wonder where the next meal was coming from. Why did he do it? To teach them that man is dependent on the providential will of God. So it was with Israel in the wilderness. In Egypt, they had been slaves, their daily work was slavery and they just about got a subsistence allowance in return. Daily work is a very important thing, and when God saved the Israelites out of Egypt and from slavery, one of the first things he began to teach them was a proper attitude to their daily work and their food, lest they should maintain the same Egyptian slavery in their daily work, and let their daily work become a slavery.

So God first humbled them and let them hunger, and when they began to get uneasy, God sent them the manna, coming down out of heaven, and he fed them every day of the week. Some people nowadays would be sceptical about that story! It would be nice if we didn't have to go to work and every morning we just found the heavens opened and rained the Corn Flakes straight down our throats! Wouldn't that be marvellous? This going to work business can be a trouble if you've got to drive an hour and a half into New York or something, and back again. But of course, the coming down of the manna didn't obviate the need to work. For when the manna came down from heaven, it was a very small thing, and it lay on the ground, and they had to go out to get it. I expect the women did most of it—the men were settling the affairs of state! And the women went out and had to bend right down to the ground, picking up this little thing with their two fingers and a thumb, perhaps, and picking up enough of it to feed the whole family for a day, under the increasing rays of the sun. I tell you that was hard work.

What is true life? It's a lie that Satan first suggested in the garden of Eden, that you can live without God. Pointing Eve to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he said, 'My dear, just look at it. Open your eyes; it's good to look at, isn't it?'

'Oh,' she said, 'yes. Now that I come to look at it, it's absolutely beautiful, the aesthetics are marvellous.'

'Yes,' said Satan, 'there's nothing wrong with aesthetics, and it's good for food too. And that will give you physical satisfaction. There's nothing wrong in enjoying things, and it's good to make you wise, and that's intellectual satisfaction. My dear girl, aesthetic satisfaction and physical satisfaction, and intellectual satisfaction, that is life.'

'But God has said we mustn't take it.'

'Oh, do grow up—word of God? Nobody believes in that round here nowadays. That's old-fashioned stuff. God is only trying to keep you down. He puts all these lovely things in front of you, and tempts you and tantalizes you, and then says you can't have them. That's God. He knows that in the day you take it, you'll be independent of God. You'll have all that life can offer you. That is life. You don't need to bother about the word of God.'

What a lie it was. Man shall not live by his aesthetics and his intellect, and physical satisfaction alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. What would you say to a young lady who seems a little bit awkward with her left hand as she hands you a cup of coffee. And then you notice there's something particular about this left hand today, and there's a ring on the appropriate finger! Of course you comment and you know enough to admire the ring, and when you've done that you say, 'Now tell me, my dear, who is the fortunate young man?'

'What young man?'

'Well, the young man who gave you that ring.'

'There isn't any young man. I don't believe in young men. I don't want a young man.'

Now what do you say? Engagement rings are beautiful but if there isn't a man behind them, they're meaningless. Is there a hand behind our daily bread? Oh, you haven't lived. You haven't tasted the real significance of life if you haven't taken your daily meal from the hand of the Creator who uses these humble things to express his love and, with them, draws us to himself to form an eternal friendship both here and in his heaven when the daily bread has long since been forgotten.

The danger of pride

Now there's another danger, and chapters 9 and 10 are given over to it. The nation were called, says chapter 9, to join with God in his judgment on the Canaanites. Well, the Canaanite civilization was rotten to the core, but when they had joined God in his judgments on the Canaanites, he says,

Do not say in your heart, after the LORD your God has thrust them out before you, 'It is because of my righteousness that the LORD has brought me in to possess this land,' whereas it is because of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is driving them out before you. Not because of your righteousness or the uprightness of your heart are you going in to possess their land, but because of the wickedness of these nations the LORD your God is driving them out from before you, and that he may confirm the word that the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. (9:4–5)

They were called to join with God in his judgment on that evil society. The lurking danger was that when they had done so, they would come to think that they were righteous compared with those Canaanites and it was for their righteousness that God had driven them out. What a mistake that would have been.

'And I want to tell you now,' says Moses, 'that though you have been used of God in the judgment of the Canaanites, you yourselves, basically, are sinners like those Canaanites. So not for your righteousness has God brought you in, but in his loyalty to his oath that he swore to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In fact, if only you care to remember history, you are a stiff-necked people. Look back on your history. You've nothing to be proud of.'

And he cites the rebellion at Horeb, that is Sinai, when Moses had gone up the mountain to receive directions for the tabernacle, so that God might come and dwell among them. And at the bottom of the mountain the Israelites had thrown back God's invitation in his face and made themselves the molten calf, to follow other gods and return to Egypt. 'You should remember it,' says Moses. 'You are of the same stock as those people that did that, and not very long ago either. And you wouldn't be here today had it not been for my intercession' (see 9:6–24).

Moses' intercessions

I love to listen to Moses' intercessions to God on that occasion, because they remind me of the intercessions of Christ himself. Let me briefly remind you of the steps in Moses' intercession. God called to Moses when he was still up the mountain with the tablets of stone, and said the people had utterly corrupted themselves on the earth. 'I'm going to destroy them,' said God, 'root and branch, and I'll make of you a nation.' And if God had done so, he would still have been faithful to his oath to Abraham because Moses was of the seed of Abraham; so if he'd destroyed all the others and started with Moses and produced another fresh nation, God would still have honoured his oath to Abraham. What a temptation that was to Moses; at least it would have been to me if I'd have been Moses. The people were down there and they couldn't see him up the mountain, and they had criticized him up hill and down dale. I think if God had made me the proposition, I'd have said, 'Well, God, it's a pity perhaps to destroy them, but really, when you come to think about it, they are a beggarly lot, so destroy them right now before I get down the mountain, and then they won't know what's happened to them, and they won't blame me.'

That's what I would have said, but not Moses. 'No, God,' says he, 'no, thank you.' I think of him being faithful up there when Israel couldn't see him, and then I think of my blessed Lord. Says the writer to the Hebrews, 'Consider him faithful' (see 11:11). We can't see him, but when our sins arise, he, as our advocate, pleads our cause and remains faithful to us, though out of sight. 'And what is more,' says Moses, 'you can't destroy them, for if you do, what will the Egyptians say?' Well, if I'd have been God and Moses had said that to me, I would have said, 'Moses, I don't care what the Egyptians say. Why should I bother about them? Old Pharaoh and the rest of them have defied me so long, and you tell me I have to be careful of what the Egyptians are going to say?'

Do you know what's extraordinary? God didn't rebuke Moses. God was concerned with what the Egyptians might say, for they would have said 'That's it, he brought them out of Egypt and wasn't able to bring them in, and he's been defeated. He made them all sorts of promises and he couldn't keep them.' What was at stake was the character of God. God cares what we think of him, and he cares what Satan thinks of him. His faithfulness to us, and the guarantee of his salvation is because, having begun to save us, his very character is at stake (see 9:25–29). Marvellous, isn't it?

Moses identifies himself with the people

Of course Moses demanded severe self-discipline of the Israelites, but having done that, he went back up the mountain to God and there he said, 'Oh, Lord, the people have sinned a grievous sin, but now, if you can't forgive them, blot me out of your book' (see Exod 32:30–32). In other words, he wasn't going to survive if the Israelites were destroyed. He refused to stand aside. He insisted on identifying himself with the Israelites. Oh, what magnificent grace that is. And I think of our blessed Saviour. You're not going to be saved because of your merit, none of us will: it's not because of our faithfulness since we were saved. We shall be saved by him who is our advocate and intercessor who refuses to be separate from us, and has identified himself with us for ever. That puts our pride in its right place. We owe it all to him.

Says God to Moses, 'Moses, all right, I promise to give them the promised land: they can have it, but tell them I shan't go with them'. What would you say if God came to you and said, 'Look here, I'm upset with your behaviour, but I promise to give you heaven, so I'll give you heaven, but I shan't be there when you arrive'. What would you say? 'Oh, I'm sorry about that, Lord, but heaven is a nice place anyway, even if you're not there'?

'No,' says Moses, 'if your Spirit doesn't go with me, I don't want to go. And anyway, you can't let us go alone and not go with us because how will the nations know about your grace? You say I found grace in your sight, but what kind of grace would that be, to tell us to go to Canaan and not come with us? No, you'll have to show the uniqueness and the wonderful glory of your grace by not only forgiving the people, but going with us and amongst us, to Canaan' (see Exod 33:12–17).

Marvellous man, Moses. Not for their goodness, for they were a bad lot, but for the sworn mercy of God to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and because of the intercessions of Moses.

There's one more lesson, but we mustn't consider it tonight lest the wilderness way would be so hard to bear that you would never invite me again to preach to you! But there are dangers, and we're called upon, therefore, to guard our hearts, that we may love the Lord our God with our all heart, mind, soul and strength, and store his word in our heart; lest not just the enticements of the world, but our very spiritual blessings get misinterpreted and produce in us ingratitude, unholy living, pride, false superiority and lack of sympathy with sinners. So may God bless his word to our hearts this night.

5: Establishing the Law in Canaan, and in Us

Let us begin this evening by reading from holy Scripture, but tonight let us make our reading serve the practical purpose of showing us how the book of Deuteronomy is put together. In other words, what its major structure is, so that we may learn a lesson from the emphasis that the very structure of the book delivers to us.

The title of this fifth book of Moses is, in English versions, 'Deuteronomy'. It is taken from the title given to it in the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament called generally the Septuagint. It is not the title given to it in the Hebrew. The Hebrew simply calls the book after the first two words in the Hebrew, Eleh ha-devarim: 'These are the words'. The translators chose to entitle the book 'Deuteronomy' which appears they intended to mean 'the second law' or, 'a second law'. If they meant it so, the title is somewhat misleading, for the book of Deuteronomy isn't a second law; it is a repetition of the first law. Now it is true that in chapter 5 the Ten Commandments are repeated by Moses as he addresses the people, but the substance of the law—the repetition of the law in its detail and accompanying exposition—is to be found concentrated in chapters 12–26. That, strictly speaking, is the repetition of the law.

What I would like us to do now, as we read, is to notice the paragraph at the end of chapter 11, for this concludes this grouping of Moses' sermons and comes immediately before the repetition of the law. And when we've read that passage, we shall turn to chapter 27 and read the first paragraph that comes immediately after the repetition of the law. And if it should turn out that, even at this late hour in the evening, you see a certain similarity between those two paragraphs, then your sight hasn't deceived you, and the similarities will invite us to ponder the significance.

See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse: the blessing, if you obey the commandments of the LORD your God, which I command you today, and the curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the LORD your God, but turn aside from the way that I am commanding you today, to go after other gods that you have not known. And when the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, you shall set the blessing on Mount Gerizim and the curse on Mount Ebal. Are they not beyond the Jordan, west of the road, towards the going down of the sun, in the land of the Canaanites who live in the Arabah, opposite Gilgal, beside the oak of Moreh? For you are to cross over the Jordan to go in to take possession of the land that the LORD your God is giving you. And when you possess it and live in it, you shall be careful to do all the statutes and the rules which I am setting before you today. (Deut 11:26–32)

So much for the last paragraph that immediately precedes the repetition of the law. Now, let's turn to chapter 27.

Now Moses and the elders of Israel commanded the people, saying, 'Keep the whole commandment that I command you today. And on the day you cross over the Jordan to the land that the LORD your God is giving you, you shall set up large stones and plaster them with plaster. And you shall write on them all the words of this law, when you cross over to enter the land that the LORD your God is giving you, a land flowing with milk and honey, as the LORD, the God of your fathers, has promised you. And when you have crossed over the Jordan, you shall set up these stones, concerning which I command you today, on Mount Ebal, and you shall plaster them with plaster. And there you shall build an altar to the LORD your God, an altar of stones. You shall wield no iron tool on them; you shall build an altar to the LORD your God of uncut stones. And you shall offer burnt offerings on it to the LORD your God, and you shall sacrifice peace offerings and shall eat there, and you shall rejoice before the LORD your God. And you shall write on the stones all the words of this law very plainly.' Then Moses and the Levitical priests said to all Israel, 'Keep silence and hear, O Israel: this day you have become the people of the LORD your God. You shall therefore obey the voice of the LORD your God, keeping his commandments and his statutes, which I command you today.' That day Moses charged the people, saying, 'When you have crossed over the Jordan, these shall stand on Mount Gerizim to bless the people: Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Joseph and Benjamin. And these shall stand on Mount Ebal for the curse: Reuben, Gad, Asher, Zebulun, Dan, and Naphtali. And the Levites shall declare to all the men of Israel in a loud voice: "Cursed be the man who makes a carved or cast-metal image, an abomination to the LORD, a thing made by the hands of a craftsman, and sets it up in secret." And all the people shall answer and say, "Amen".' (vv. 1–15)

And thus for all the remaining curses that are listed there down to verse 26. Then look at chapter 28.

All these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of the LORD your God. Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the field. (v. 2)

And thus and thus all the way down to verse 14, the blessings. But then look at verse 15.

But if you will not obey the voice of the LORD your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes that I command you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you.

And now, once more, come the curses: dark, sinister, terrible. They fill that long, long chapter of 68 verses, describing the almost indescribable sufferings that shall come upon Israel for their disobedience to God's law, suffering so terrible that we could hardly credit them if we did not know the recent history of the last century.

Establishing the law in Canaan

These two passages then tell us what lay at Moses' heart as he repeated the law in the presence of the people before they went over the Jordan to inherit their country. Objective number one: they were, as soon as possible, to establish the law in the land of Canaan. What a triumph it would be in that pagan society which had insulted almighty God by its idolatry and had filled the land with accursed styles of living, until the land was polluted to the point where it was about to spew them out. What a triumph when the evil was driven out, there in that very land to establish the law of God, and to establish it with the full-throated agreement of the gathered and assembled people of God. But each time when the Levites pronounced the law against this or that, and its accompanying curse if anyone should practise such a practice, then the full-throated voices of the assembled thousands of Israel made their reply. 'Amen', they said to the curse pronounced. And when the blessings for obedience to God were pronounced by the Levites, then once more, the full-throated response of the assembly was this, 'Amen'. It was to be done with a deliberate ceremony, with an altar built with noted thanksgiving offerings and much rejoicing, and the law written out on the plaster, and read in the ears of the people, and with the ark of God in attendance. This was no little personal response after a particularly moving meeting. This was the grand ceremony of the establishment of the law in the land of Canaan.

Moses instructs

Moses' understandable prime objective was not just to get the people into their inheritance, but to get the people to agree to the establishment of the law. But now I have to tell you a little thing about Moses. I suspect you have noticed it. Moses was very good at framing objectives, as you see here, and Moses was very good at telling other people to carry them out. Moses wasn't quite so good at actually carrying them out himself; and especially so with this objective, his great objective to see the law of God established in Canaan. They'd have to do it without him, for he couldn't go over Jordan with them because he himself, on an occasion, had broken God's holy law. Though forgiven, he had to bear its consequence and was now summoned to the top of Nebo, there to be taken home and, therefore, he could not bring the thing to completion and see the law established. That would have been a melancholy tale if it had ended there. Oh, but thank God that what Moses couldn't do, let me tell you, Joshua did.

Joshua completes

Get hold of that because I'm biased! Well, I oughtn't to be, but I am a little bit about Moses because he talks to you so roughly at times. I get a little bit biased in favour of this Joshua because his very name is a Hebrew form of 'Jesus', and when I repeat the historical fact that what Moses couldn't do, Joshua did, as a Christian I can't help thinking that what Moses couldn't do, Jesus our Lord has done, and does still.

For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. (Rom 8:3–4)

So indulge my little fancies and read with me now the story in Joshua where it tells you straight that what Moses commanded, but couldn't do, Joshua did. The story comes in chapter 8 of the book of Joshua. It comes after Joshua had destroyed Jericho, and had eventually defeated the king of Ai, and destroyed that city too.

At that time Joshua built an altar to the LORD, the God of Israel, on Mount Ebal, just as Moses the servant of the LORD had commanded the people of Israel, as it is written in the Book of the Law of Moses, 'an altar of uncut stones, upon which no man had wielded an iron tool.' And they offered on it burnt offerings to the LORD and sacrificed peace offerings. And there, in the presence of the people of Israel, he wrote on the stones a copy of the law of Moses, which he had written. And all Israel, sojourner as well as native born, with their elders and officers and their judges, stood on opposite sides of the ark before the Levitical priests who carried the ark of the covenant of the LORD, half of them in front of Mount Gerizim and half of them in front of Mount Ebal, just as Moses the servant of the LORD had commanded at the first, to bless the people of Israel. And afterwards he read all the words of the law, the blessing and the curse, according to all that is written in the Book of the Law. There was not a word of all that Moses commanded that Joshua did not read before all the assembly of Israel, and the women, and the little ones, and the sojourners who lived among them. (vv. 30–35)

God bless his word to our understanding that its purpose in us, likewise, should be fulfilled and that the law of God will be established in our lives.

Fulfilling the law in our lives

My starting point is what I've already mentioned. It was Moses' grand objective that the law should be established by this ceremony at Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal, but Moses could not attend it. And then the glorious message that what Moses could not do, Joshua did. It is common knowledge from our reading of the New Testament that the law of God, as given by Moses, was good, holy, spiritual, but it had its weakness. It's not that there was anything wrong with God's holy law: but it wasn't just a mechanical thing, it was a spiritual thing. As Romans 8 remarks, what the law could not do because of the weakness of our flesh, God has done through Jesus Christ our Lord. So let us turn to thinking about how our Lord, through the gospel of Christ, establishes the law.

Justification—but not by works

We gather from what Paul says in Romans 3, that when he preached that justification is not by the works of the law, but through faith in God through Jesus Christ our Lord, many people accused him of undermining the authority of the law. So towards the end of that chapter he argues like this:

Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith. For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law. Or is God the God of the Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one—who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith. Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law. (vv. 27–31)

He had heard that criticism a thousand times, particularly in the synagogues of the Jews throughout the Roman Empire. When he had preached his doctrine of justification by faith they said, 'You are undermining the law'. And Paul's constant answer was this, 'Indeed we are not. We are in fact upholding the law by the doctrine of justification by faith'. How is that? How does the doctrine of justification by faith uphold the law? For a detailed answer to that, I ask you to turn to Galatians 3, and we shall begin the argument in verse 10.

For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, 'Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.'

Christ upholds and establishes the law by insisting on the curse of the law to its fullest extent. You will have noticed as we were reading from Deuteronomy 27, the almost pessimism of Moses. At the great ceremony they were to pronounce the blessings on those who kept the law and the cursings on those who broke it. But in the actual comment by Moses in chapters 27 and 28, there is no doubt where he put the emphasis as he looked down the centuries to how Israel would behave. Poor old Moses, I suspect he had grey hairs beyond his age. He'd given his life to them, brought them by the Passover out of Egypt, stood them under the mount of God until they'd heard the very voice of almighty God coming out of the fire and the smoke. He brought them as far as he could get them to their promised land, hoping there to establish the law. But he saw it plainly enough: some few sentences of blessing, and then those terrible chapters of cursing. Moses was a realist and knew in his heart that even the law of God by itself would not be enough to save or to guarantee the establishment of the law in the hearts of the people.

But now comes our Joshua, Jesus Christ. Notice what he does to establish the law. He does not begin by saying, 'Take no notice of the law: it was over-severe, and God, you know, is love'. On the contrary, Christ begins by upholding the law and insisting on putting into effect its curse. 'Cursed is everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law.' Notice that little all. A seventy-five percent performance will not be enough. A ninety-nine percent performance will not be enough. It must be one hundred percent, or else the law must curse us. The law, ladies and gentlemen, is not just advice. Though the Hebrew word Torah means 'teaching', it is direction, very good and healthy, but it's more than advice. It doesn't come along and say to us, 'Now, a good way to go through life, if you can manage it, is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength. But of course nobody is really expecting perfection from you, so sixty-five percent will do.' In any respectable university, if a student does his best to get sixty-five percent, they give him a degree. If he gets seventy-five percent, they used to give him a first class honours! But some people have that notion of God's law; that so long as your intention is good, a fifty-one percent is good enough to see you into God's heaven, and a ninety-nine percent is worthy of sainthood and canonization! Not so Christ. 'Cursed be everyone who does not abide in all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.'

Christ insists on establishing the law's authority, and demanding its curse. How then could he possibly save us? You say he came with his Sermon on the Mount to give us a helping hand, to reach the standard of the law and avoid its curse. He did no such thing. He knew we could never come up to the standard, but then he must insist on the law's curse, and so he did. How then did he free us? Oh, hear it again with bated breath.

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree'. (Gal 3:13)

Oh, my brothers and sisters, at this very moment pause in your heart and see what is transpiring as Jesus Christ was hung upon a tree for you and for me. Having faced us realistically, not allowing his love for us to hide or to gloss over our failures, and knowing as none other knew the holiness of God and what it would mean to be cursed of God, he took our place and was made the curse for us, to his last drop.

He was lifted up to die; 'It is finished' was his cry; Now in heaven exalted high: Hallelujah, what a Saviour![^6]

Christ, then, has redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us. It is not, therefore, the doctrine of justification by faith apart from the works of the law. It's not that doctrine that undermines the law. The doctrine that undermines the law is the doctrine that says, 'Of course you have to work to earn your place in God's heaven. You cannot be sure of salvation because, in the end, it depends upon your works.' That's the doctrine that undermines the law. You say, 'How does it manage to do that because it sounds, when you first meet it, as if it were maintaining the law?' But it's quite the contrary. I remember in my youth helping in a gospel tent campaign outside the city of Cambridge. A friend of mine—we worked together to help in the chores—had a friend who was a chemist in the town, and fairly wealthy. She invited us round to tea one afternoon and—as we sat in the cushions, the pile upon the carpet was thick, the teapot was silver and the maids had lace around their wrists—she turned to my friend and said, 'William, what do you preach to people in this tent?' She hadn't come anyway, so he told her. And in the course of his telling her, he happened to say he was sure he was saved. She said, 'William, you can't be sure you're saved'. And turning to me, she said, 'And what about you, young man, are you sure you're saved?'

'Yes, madam.'

'How can it be?'

'Well, I'm saved because the Bible says that it's not of works, but through faith in Christ.'

'Yes, but you can't be sure. You're only a young man, a very good-living young man, but you never know, you might go on and do a big sin. Then what would become of your being saved?'

I wasn't much of a theologian, of course, and I said, 'Well, madam, I shall still be saved'.

'Oh no,' she said, 'no, you couldn't.'

'So I can't be sure about salvation? Tell me, madam, what about yourself then? What do you think God will say to you when you stand before him?'

So she thought and she said, 'I don't know, but I think he'll say, "Well, my dear, you did go wrong there, and you did rather bad things there, but you were so provoked." And on the whole, I think God will be merciful to me and let me through.'

I was terribly brash, and said, 'Madam, he won't say anything of the sort.'

'How do you know what he'll say?'

'He's already said it and published it for the world to read.' And I read her those famous words from Romans 3:19: 'Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God'.

And I can see the dear woman's face now; she turned a deathly pale. 'God will never damn me,' she said.

It was cruel of me, and a wiser head would have done better. But this notion that we can earn our way to heaven, and thus we are honouring the law and keeping it up, depends on this, that in the end God will say, 'You broke the law, but it didn't really matter, come in'.

That undermines the law. God will never say it. We know that what the law says is that all the world will be brought under the guilty verdict of God's law. That upholds the law. That is what repentance means. It doesn't mean just being sorry that you insulted your maiden aunts on one occasion or cheated here or there, though those things are sin. Repentance means repentance before God, and knowing the justice of his claim against us that, when all is said and done, we have come short and deserve his curse. That's repentance. And if we come there, then God has his majestic gospel. The curse of the law and its sanction will not be just dismissed, but will be—and has been—fulfilled as Christ paid the penalty and was made a curse for us. Yes, we uphold, we establish the law.

Dead to the law but alive in Christ

But, of course, there is another way in which we establish the law, and that is the verse I have already quoted. For Romans 8 says, and I repeat it once more,

For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. (vv. 3–4)

Oh, thank God, being saved by faith does not mean that thereafter we go on disregarding the law and it doesn't matter if we sin. Christ is determined that the law will be fulfilled, be established in the life of a believer, and the righteous requirement of the law be fulfilled in those who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. Between those two terms—fulfilling under the principle of law, doing our best to keep it, and fulfilling the law through the power of God's Holy Spirit—there is a mighty difference. Paul refers to it in Romans 7, that doleful chapter where Paul records his sincere attempt to keep God's law, and his constant failure. And then he explains what God's answer to it is.

Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. . . . But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code. (vv. 4, 6)

Now what does that mean, 'serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code'? Well, let me tell you first what it doesn't mean, and what sometimes it is popularly taken to mean: that we do okay if we don't keep God's word to the letter, but keep the spirit of it. That is not what it means. That's a nice principle in its way. You can see it in action in every city and on every road. The traffic law says 'You shall not go over thirty miles an hour', and every good citizen keeps it, always—except on occasions! The point of the law, the spirit behind it, is to save life. If people drive too quickly, they're liable to have accidents and kill people, so the purpose behind the law, the spirit of the thing, is to save life. But here comes an ambulance driver. He has a patient with a heart attack in the back, and he knows if he doesn't get him to the hospital within the next five minutes, the man could be dead. He comes across a speed limit, what's he going to do now? If he takes notice of the speed limit, it will take him much too long to get to the hospital and the man might be dead. So to save life, he breaks the speed limit, but in breaking the law he keeps the spirit of it, for the point and spirit of the speed limit was to save life. So he, at this time, breaks the outer letter of the law to keep the spirit of it, and save the life of the patient in the ambulance.

Nice that, isn't it? But that's not what it means in Romans. You say, 'What did you waste the time for, then?' Well, just to emphasize that that isn't what it means. It's contrasting the law of Moses and God's way through his Holy Spirit of getting the law fulfilled. The law of Moses was written by the finger of God, and written on tablets of stone, and made the law very clear as to what it expected and what it prohibited. The only trouble was it told you what to do, and couldn't give you the strength to do it. It told you what not to do, and similarly couldn't give you the strength not to do it. It was good, but it was just letters written on stone. The gospel does something infinitely superior, and in 2 Corinthians 3, Paul describes it in some detail, using a beautiful metaphor.

He points out that the law was written on tablets of stone, and that's moderately easy if you've got a sharp enough chisel. But he says, 'When I came to Corinth and you got saved, do you know what was happening? Whether you knew it or not, what was happening was this. Christ took me as his pen, as a man might take a pen and write in ink, so Christ used me as his pen and the equivalent of ink now was nothing less than the Holy Spirit, and he wrote the very laws of God, not on stone, but on the flesh of your hearts.'

And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. (2 Cor 3:3)

The metaphor is not exaggerated. This is the wonder of the new birth that when a man or woman comes in repentance to Christ, and is forgiven the penalty of the law, simultaneously the Holy Spirit puts into that person a new life, the newness of the Spirit. So that now the outward letter of the law has a chance of being fulfilled because there is the very Spirit of God within the human heart. It doesn't thereby mean that every believer is at once perfect, for the flesh strives against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh, and we are urged as believers constantly to sow to the Spirit, and let ourselves be led of the Spirit.

It means that there is no condemnation for we are free from the curse of the law. Don't mistake it. There's no penalty, but there are consequences. If we live according to the Spirit and sow to the Spirit, we shall reap of the Spirit eternal life, for eternal life is not something you can put in a box and keep it safe until the Lord comes. Eternal life is a life and, like life in babyhood, it has a potential which has to be developed. Likewise the life of God's Spirit in a believer has a potential that has to be developed. But as we sow to the Spirit, we reap of the Spirit an ever-increasing fullness of eternal life. If we sow to the flesh, we shall reap corruption—not eternal perdition, this is consequence not penalty.

Here is a Christian farmer and he has a conviction in his heart. He feels from the Lord that this year he ought to sow wheat in his field. But then the price of barley goes up, and he decides to grow barley instead of wheat, knowing in his heart he's disobeying the Lord. But when the barley begins to come up and begins to form on the ear, and he can see it's barley, he's smitten in his conscience. And conscience-stricken he confesses it before the Lord. 'I've done wrong, Lord. Profit motive got on top of me and I've gone and sown barley instead of wheat. Forgive me, Lord.' And, of course, the Lord forgives him. And there's no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus, and the man will be in heaven, but what about the old barley? Do you suppose, if the man got down and said, 'Lord, now do a miracle, please, and turn this barley into wheat', that the Lord would do it? No, he sowed barley and he'll reap barley.

And if you get drunk and fall out of your bedroom window and break your leg so it has to be amputated, and confess your sin to the Lord for getting drunk, he'll forgive you, and there's no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. Do you suppose you'll grow a new leg overnight? Consequences there will be. But, oh, thank God for the wonder of new life in Christ, born of God's Spirit, for the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death. Thus does the Christian gospel establish the law in both ways.

Do not compromise the gospel

It is a serious mistake if Christians fluff the gospel. It happened once, so Paul tells us in the Epistle to the Galatians. There was a conference, and Peter himself was there along with Paul. At the start of the conference, Peter was quite happy to sit and eat with Gentile believers. They were justified by faith without circumcision, without the works of the law, and even though he was a circumcised Jew, he knew that salvation for him depended solely on faith in Christ and not on account of his circumcision, and he was happy to eat at the conference meal table with the Gentiles. Then some of the tough boys came down from Jerusalem, and they didn't approve of Christian Jews eating with Gentiles. And Peter suddenly found, well, I don't know what he found, but he felt uneasy and withdrew.

As he made for the door, to go to his bedroom or something, Paul stood in the way and said, 'No, you don't, Peter. You're not walking straight according to the gospel. You are guilty of hypocrisy. You're pretending not to believe what you do believe. You do believe that Jews and Gentiles are justified exactly on the same ground and, therefore, you are free to eat with Gentiles. But now you're behaving as if you don't believe it: that's acting an untruth. You mustn't fluff the gospel, 'lest you build again the things that you have destroyed' (see Gal 2:18). When I read that phrase I can't help thinking of Joshua. Does it ring a bell with you, if we build again the things that we have destroyed?

Beware of rebuilding

In our closing moments of this conference, let me just rehearse what you know so very well. That's the story of Joshua and how he established the law in Canaan. We read it in Joshua 8. To establish the law, he took the forces up to Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim. He stationed the Levites, some on this mountain, some on that mountain. He built an altar, he plastered the stones, he wrote out the law. He had the Levites pronounce the blessings and the people said, 'Amen'. He had them pronounce the curses and the people said, 'Amen'. He established the law. But the question is, how did he do it? It was no easy thing to take an army across the Jordan and go like that up to Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim. Before he could establish the law, he had to do two things. He had to destroy Jericho, and then he had to destroy Ai.

What was the significance of the destruction of Jericho? Some dear believers like to think of Jericho as their besetting sin which they have travelled around incessantly for many years, and have not yet managed to get the walls down. Well, if that's helpful, carry on thinking that; but Joshua's destruction of Jericho was far more serious. According to the covenant that God made with Abraham, God promised to give Abraham, in his offspring, inheritance of Canaan, but said at that very moment, 'Not yet'. Why not yet? Because the iniquity of the Amorites was not yet full. The years went by. Moses brought the people out of Egypt, brought them to Sinai, brought them to the very border of Jordan, but he couldn't bring them in. And the promise of the covenant would have remained unfulfilled had it depended on Moses. It was Joshua who was used to fulfil the final promise in that covenant, to bring them in.

You notice when he did it: it was at the time, by God's ordering, that the Gentile iniquity was full. Joshua came, led by the captain of God's host—a pre-incarnate vision of our Lord—with his sword drawn, to execute the judgment of God on that evil world, the Canaanites so-called civilization. As the people of Jericho looked over their wall, they had so fortified the city that they said, 'He'll never come in here', but you couldn't keep God and his ark out of Palestine. For seven days the ark with the LORD of the whole earth sitting upon the cherubim, went round. But you could not keep him out of Jericho, walls or no walls.

The hour came for the judgment of God to fall, and Joshua in God's name pronounced the curse upon the city. It was to be utter destruction, with nothing salvaged from it. That was the demand of the Lord. Oh, yes, Rahab was saved, lovely story. She turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and put her faith in the God of Israel, and trusted his oath. She looked through her window and saw the armies coming to execute the wrath of God on this guilty world. But as she looked, she waited for Joshua, her deliverer from the coming wrath, and she was saved. But not the city. That was Joshua and the angel of the Lord executing judgment, and the curse was that nothing may be salvaged.

You mustn't try and salvage anything from what God has cursed. There was a man called Achan who saw a Babylonian garment and a wedge of gold, and he coveted them. Secretly, as he thought, he tried to salvage something from that accursed system and he troubled Israel and brought the curse upon himself. When Israel went to fight against the next city, Ai, they were unexpectedly defeated because Achan's sin had polluted the people in trying to salvage something out of that system that lay under the curse.

And when Paul wrote his letter to the Galatians, he said, 'My dear brethren, I preach the gospel of the cross of Christ to you. How is it you've moved away from it unless there be some that trouble you like Achan troubled Israel?' They were false teachers, and dear old Peter, although he knew that all who take their stand upon the law are under a curse as it is written, 'Cursed is he that does not continue in all that law' (Gal 3:10), yet he behaved as if he were trying to salvage a bit of circumcision out of that system, and say that it's necessary for salvation. He was coming perilously close to doing what Achan did.

When Jericho was destroyed Joshua said, 'Cursed is anybody who builds it again', and Paul reminded Peter that if we build again that which we have destroyed, we make ourselves transgressors. Israel repented before God. It led to their victory at Ai. I wish I could tell you how they did it, but then you know all about military strategy in the ancient world, and I leave it to you. The Lord's dear people recovered, and then under self-discipline they went forward and under Joshua's leadership they turned defeat into victory, and Ai too was destroyed. It was on those terms that Joshua established the law in Canaan.

And now may God bless our studies, chiefly to turn our attention to our blessed Lord, and the wonder of his sacrifice for us. And so, filling our hearts with gratitude, to remind us of the great reality of God's Holy Spirit who has come so that the righteous requirement of the law should be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

Let us pray.

Our Father, not merely our words, but any words even from the archangel himself, could express the wonder of this, that the Son of God for our sakes gave himself for us, and was made a curse for us. We tremble, Lord, at the thought of it, at the responsibility it puts upon us now to live to thy glory. In our weakness, we pray thee, Lord, fulfil thy promise and thine objective within us that, by thy Spirit dwelling within, the righteous requirement of the law shall be fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.

Use thy word, we pray, to clarify our thinking and not only for ourselves but so that we might find suitable words to explain the wonder of thy gospel to those who toil with religion of one kind and another, hoping to find their acquittal in a way that can never be successful. Give us grace and understanding and the persuasive words of thy Spirit that we may bring them this liberating news of the gospel that they may know themselves freed from the curse of the law, and enter into the reality of rebirth by thy Spirit, a realistic potential for living to thy glory.

Bless us, we pray, and all that has been done at this conference, to the ever-increasing glory of thy Son, for whose name's sake we ask it. Amen.

[^1]: Stuart K Hine (1899-1989), 'How great Thou art' (1949).

[^2]: A military retreat by the Red Army in China which lasted over a year, 1934-1935.

[^3]: John H Gurney (1802-1862), 'We saw Thee not' (1851).

[^4]: René Descartes (1596-1650), French philosopher, scientist and mathematician.

[^5]: Robert M McCheyne (1813-1843), 'Chosen not for good in me.'

[^6]: Philip Bliss (1838-1876), 'Man of Sorrows, what a name' (1875).

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Myrtlefield House · Moses' Final Message

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