Man, Deuteronomy chapter 29, we're entering something of a new section.
If you remember last week, we had this really long chapter that went through the blessings
and the cursings based on whether or not the children of Israel follow God's commandments.
And again, it's very applicable to us today as New Testament Christians, although we can
never lose our salvation, although our faith in Christ has saved us and we are eternally
secure, yet when it comes to how we do in this life, there are a lot of punishments
and bad things that we could face in this lifetime.
And then there are a lot of blessings and things that we enjoy in this life for the
good deeds that we do.
So there is still a lot of punishment for bad and reward for good, even outside of heaven
and hell.
I mean, just in this life, right?
Heaven and hell is based on whether or not you have believed on the Lord Jesus Christ
as your Savior.
But when it comes to blessings in this life, you've got to follow Christ.
You've got to live for God.
You've got to keep his commandments.
That's how you get blessed in this life.
And so that's still very applicable for us today in the New Testament.
So he went through all of the curses upon those who disobey.
And then we start out in chapter 29, verse one.
These are the words of the covenant, which the Lord made, which the Lord commanded Moses
to make with the children of Israel in the land of Moab, beside the covenant, which he
made with them in Horeb.
Now, remember, the land of Moab is east of the Jordan River.
So just to give you just a quick geography here, okay, when the children of Israel are
crossing over into the Promised Land, and this always confused me as a kid, because
I always wondered, you know, if they're leaving Egypt, you know, I'm looking at the little
maps in the back of my Bible.
And I'm thinking like, if they're leaving Egypt, why do they have to cross the Jordan
River to get into the Promised Land?
Like that didn't make any sense to me, because if you go straight from Egypt to Israel, you
would not have to cross the Jordan River.
But of course, the reason why is that God said that he would not bring them through
the land of the Philistines, because he didn't want them to see war and repent.
He just knew that it was going to be too gnarly taking them straight there.
There'd be too much hostile territory right away.
And so he took them a roundabout way where they pretty much overshoot the Promised Land,
and then they come back and approach it from the east.
So hopefully that clears up any confusion, because that was something that confused me
as a kid, right?
But then also, we got to remember, they've been wandering in the wilderness for 40 years.
So they're not coming straight from Egypt.
They've been wandering and wandering and wandering in the wilderness.
And so now they are approaching the Promised Land from the east, right?
So on the west border of Israel, you have the Mediterranean Sea.
On the east, you have the Jordan River, okay?
So the modern day nation of Israel is west of the Jordan River, right?
Just like it was in this time.
But if you remember, there were those three tribes or two and a half tribes who wanted
to inherit on the east side of the Jordan River, Ruben, Gad, and the half tribe of Manasseh.
So in ancient times, Israel was also on the east side of the river as well when it came
to Ruben, Gad, and the half tribe of Manasseh.
So today, we have an area called West Bank, which is obviously on the west side of the
Jordan River, right?
That is Palestine.
And then around that, you have Israel.
And of course, even in West Bank, it's like Swiss cheese, all the little Israeli settlements
because they're slowly taking over the West Bank until they'll just control everything
ultimately.
That's what their end game is.
So today, east of the Jordan River, you have a country called Jordan, right?
So you have Israel, and you have the river, and then you have Jordan.
And the country of Jordan pretty much represents the biblical lands of Moab and Ammon and Egypt.
Esau or Edom, right?
And this is why the capital of Jordan is called Ammon, which is like Ammon.
And that is, Ammon Jordan is literally in the land of the Ammonites, as we read about
it in Scripture.
You have Ammon, Moab, and you have Edom.
So here, it says that the children of Israel, when they're getting this covenant from Moses,
they are in the land of Moab.
So this means that they're on the east side of the river.
They've not yet crossed over into the promised land, but they're right on the brink of it,
and they're in the modern day country of Jordan, okay?
So they're in the land of Moab, and then it says he's making a covenant with them beside
the covenant, which he made with them in Horeb.
Now Horeb is another word for Sinai, right?
So Mount Sinai is also called Mount Horeb.
These are the same place.
And Mount Sinai, or Mount Horeb, is where Moses received the Ten Commandments, and where
Moses also received a whole bunch of other laws that are written down in the book of
Exodus, and so he got a whole bunch of laws, including the Ten Commandments, at Sinai.
That's when God made that covenant with the children of Israel, what we'd call the Old
Covenant, the Old Testament, Mosaic Covenant, but now he's making another covenant with
them on the brink of going into the promised land, in the land of Moab, about to cross
over into the Israel proper from the east side of the Jordan River.
So what does the word covenant mean?
Well, the word covenant means a deal, or a contract, or some kind of an agreement.
And so when God makes covenants with people or nations throughout the Bible, sometimes
he makes a covenant that is a one-sided deal.
This is like the covenant that he made with Abraham.
He made a one-sided deal with Abraham.
It's unconditional.
Abraham doesn't have to do anything for this covenant to be in place, okay?
Whereas the covenant that he makes with Israel at Sinai, and also the covenant that he's
making with them here in the land of Moab, these are very conditional, and he's constantly
bringing up conditions if you keep my commandments, if you keep my statutes, if you follow my
laws.
So it's a two-party thing, right?
Because I could make a covenant where I just promised to do something, sign my name to
it with no stipulations, but then there are other contracts between two parties where
it's like, okay, there's my part of the deal, and then there's your part of the deal.
And if you don't live up to your part of the deal, well, then that's a material breach
of contract, so I don't have to live up to my part of the deal either.
And that's the kind of covenant that we have between God and the children of Israel, which
is why the old covenant is no longer valid.
It is no longer enforced.
Why?
Because that covenant was broken by the children of Israel, and so now God is no longer honoring
that covenant.
He says this in the book of Hebrews, they continued not in my covenant, and I regarded
them not.
So the old covenant is null and void.
You can't claim any kind of status as God's people under the old covenant, because the
old covenant is replaced by the new covenant.
So in 2024, these are not two covenants that are both operating.
No, my friend, it's 100% the new covenant.
The New Testament is the only covenant that's valid today of those two, I should say, because
obviously the Abrahamic covenant is still enforced through Christ.
And so that's going to become important in this chapter, it's just important to remember
that in general.
So the Bible says in verse number two, Moses called unto all Israel and said unto them,
You've seen all that the Lord did before your eyes in the land of Egypt unto Pharaoh and
unto all his servants and unto all his land.
The great temptations which thine eyes have seen, the signs and those great miracles.
Yet the Lord hath not given you an heart to perceive and eyes to see and ears to hear
unto this day.
Now let's stop and think about this for a minute.
Who is he talking to?
Everyone who was more than 20 years old when they left the land of Egypt is dead.
Right?
They all died in the wilderness because God swore in his wrath, they will not enter into
my rest.
They will not come into the promised land.
And so the only two people that are going to enter the promised land that were over
20 years old when they were leaving Egypt are Joshua and Caleb.
Those are the only two people that God makes an exception for.
Everyone else is someone who was less than 20 years old when they left Egypt.
But still, there are a lot of people who would have been old enough to see the miracles that
he could address when he says to them, you've seen the, you know, you've seen all that the
Lord did before your eyes in the land of Egypt.
He's talking to those people who saw these things when they were 19, 15, you know, 16,
17, maybe 10 years old, maybe even a five-year-old or something, four-year-old or something.
Right?
So he's talking to those people who saw those things.
They grew up in Egypt.
They started out living in Egypt.
But then there is another group of people that's in the group that he's preaching to.
People that are born in the wilderness.
Anybody who's under 40 years old wasn't really there to see the stuff that happened in Egypt.
Right?
So when he says your eyes have seen, he's obviously talking to the people that are above
40 years old, 45, 50, 55, 60, because they're the ones that would have some memory of growing
up in Egypt and, you know, seeing all the plagues happen and going out and crossing
the Red Sea and all that.
And then, of course, when it comes to people above 60, well, they're all dead because that's
what God promised would happen.
And so what we see here is that even though they had seen miracles, even though they had
seen the Red Sea parted and all of the other things associated with the children of Israel
leaving the wilderness, even though they've been eating manna from heaven for 40 years
in the wilderness, yet the Lord hath not given you an heart to perceive and eyes to see and
ears to hear unto this day.
So Moses is already saying, and this is not the only place in Deuteronomy that he does
this, repeatedly he criticizes the children of Israel because these are kind of his last
words.
He's about to die and he's just letting them know that he's disappointed with their spiritual
condition.
Okay.
Now, obviously, this generation is not as bad as the generation from 40 years earlier,
the ones who were destroyed in the wilderness.
Okay.
They've obviously improved enough to where God's even going to let them in the Promised
Land at all.
But yet they are not exactly spiritual giants, are they?
They're not exactly super right with God, super godly.
They still have a lot of spiritual problems, even on the verge of going in.
They're going to be allowed to go into the Promised Land because in general, they're
willing to follow Joshua and in general, they're willing to, at least on the outside, obey
the Lord, go with the flow.
The general culture is, hey, we're God's people.
We're going to do this.
We're going to follow Joshua.
But that's why as soon as Joshua is dead, and as soon as all the elders that outlive
Joshua are dead, well then all of a sudden, guess what?
Now they're worshiping other gods because of the fact that they're just, they're following
the leadership.
There are enough people who are righteous to make it happen, but there's still a lot
of people who, as the Bible says, you know, they don't have that heart to perceive.
They don't have the eyes to see.
They don't have the ears to hear.
That's interesting because it says, God has not given you a heart to perceive.
Now we don't want to misunderstand this into thinking that, well, you know, some people
God gives a heart to perceive and some people he doesn't.
And so it isn't my fault, you know, whatever.
God picks one for heaven and God picks one for hell or God picks one to follow him and
God picks one to be rebellious.
Folks, that's garbage.
The Bible clearly, from Genesis to Revelation, teaches that you have a personal responsibility
to make the right choice and that following Christ is a choice, believing in Jesus is
a choice, getting saved is a choice, after you're saved, living the Christian life is
a choice.
You're constantly being given choices, even in the book of Deuteronomy.
He's going to say in a few chapters, you know, I set you before you this day, life and death,
choose life, blessing and cursing.
You know, there's a choice to be made.
The last chapter of the Bible says, whosoever will, which means whosoever wants to, let
him take the water of life freely.
So we don't want to take this verse and take it to an extreme view that says, oh, it's
all just fatalistically predetermined and just some people love God and some people
don't.
And hopefully you're just one of the people who loves God.
Wrong.
What does the Bible mean when it says God hasn't given you a heart to perceive?
The Lord hasn't given you eyes to see and ears to hear?
Well, here's what you have to understand is that first of all, God responds to man's actions
as well, because like the Bible says, draw nigh to God and he will draw nigh to you.
And so this attitude that God doesn't react is not a biblical doctrine.
God does react.
If I draw nigh to God, that will prompt God to draw nigh to me.
If I go out and do a bunch of wicked stuff and harden my heart, well, then you know what?
God's not going to bless that.
And not only that, God's not going to give me wisdom and understanding.
Whereas what does the Bible say?
If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God.
They give it to all men liberally and upbraideth not.
But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering.
For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea, driven with the wind and tossed.
For let not that man think that he shall receive anything of the Lord.
A double-minded man's unstable in all his ways.
The Bible's saying, look, you need to not be double-minded.
You need to ask for wisdom.
You need to ask in faith and then God's going to give it to you.
Okay.
It's not that God's just like, eh, I'm going to give wisdom to this guy and I'm not going
to give it to this guy.
And it's just, it's just my own caprice.
Wrong.
The will of God is not the caprice of God.
It's not just God's randomness.
No, my friend, God is willing that everybody be saved.
God is willing that all Christians follow him and obey him.
God is willing that people have eyes to see and ears to hear.
But if we shut our ears and shut our eyes and ignore God and go out and do these things,
we're not going to be blessed with the blessings of spiritual understanding, spiritual vision
and a heart for God.
It's not going to happen.
So don't get the wrong idea that somehow it's predetermined or it's out of our control.
No.
If we draw an eye to God, he will draw an eye to us.
Now there are a couple of different aspects to this.
One aspect of this is of course salvation.
Okay.
Here's the thing about salvation.
When you get saved, God gives you a new heart.
God creates a new creature in Christ.
So when you are saved, you have a new heart.
There's a new person, there's a new Steven Anderson that loves God, that has a heart
for God, eyes that see, ears that hear, a mind that gets it.
But of course we still also have the flesh.
The old Steven Anderson is also here.
That's why we constantly have to make the effort to put off the old man, put on the
new man.
Okay.
So salvation is part of this idea of getting a new heart.
I mean, how can you have eyes to see, ears to hear and a heart to perceive if you're
not even saved?
It's not going to happen for you.
You're not even to first base yet.
Okay.
So you have to be saved.
So if Moses is saying to them, the Lord has not given you a heart to perceive, eyes to
see and here's, ears to hear, you know, part of the problem could be that they're not saved,
that a lot of people aren't saved.
Not all these people are on their way to heaven.
So is God going to give you a new heart if you haven't believed, if you haven't put your
faith and trust him, if you haven't called upon the name of the Lord, no.
So again, God gives us the new heart, but we have to believe in Jesus to get the new
heart.
We have to call upon the name of the Lord to be saved and then we receive the new heart.
Now in the New Testament, we are also indwelled by the Holy Spirit.
We're permanently indwelled by the Holy Spirit in the New Testament.
That is not an Old Testament phenomenon.
In the Old Testament, that was not the case.
In the Old Testament though, people who believed and got saved still became a new creature.
You know, they still received a new heart.
They still have the new man.
They don't have the Holy Spirit, but they have their own personal spirit that has been
quickened through salvation.
So part of the problem here, you could read this as, you know, the Lord hasn't given you
a heart to perceive, eyes to see and here's to hear, you know, because you don't believe
in him.
Because you still don't believe and that fits the context because he's saying, look, you've
seen all these miracles and yet you still don't get it.
Now a lot of people think, well, if you saw evidence, you know, you'd just be saved no
matter who you are.
Everyone would be saved.
You know, the atheist says, show me evidence and I'll be saved.
But yet there were all kinds of people in Jesus' day that saw all kinds of miraculous
things and yet they hardened their hearts.
They didn't want to see the truth.
They didn't have eyes to see, ears to hear, and they ended up rejecting the truth and
not being saved.
And so, you know, even one day when there's a millennial reign of Christ in the future,
the second coming of Christ, there are still going to be people that don't believe in Christ.
You say, well, how could they not believe in him?
They're looking at him.
Well, I don't know.
How did they not believe in him the first time when they were looking at him?
So you can't just assume that the second time he comes, everybody's going to believe
in him.
They're not.
Okay.
That's, that's, that's what the Bible is teaching.
And so even though these people have seen a lot of miracles, they still, one way of
reading this would be they're still not saved.
Okay.
And we know, even if this verse isn't specifically referring to that, we know that's the case
that not every one of these people is saved.
Obviously.
A lot of reasons for that.
And so again, how do we get saved?
Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God.
And we hear and then we believe and then we call upon the name of the Lord.
That's what Romans chapter 10 teaches.
And so we don't necessarily get saved because we saw something miraculous.
We get saved because we heard God's word and we believed God's where we put our faith and
trust in God's word.
And that's what these people in many cases are not doing.
And you kind of scratch your head sometimes reading the story because all these amazing
things are happening around them.
And then yet so many people are just hardening their hearts and grumbling and they're, they're,
they're, they're saying, make us a golden calf and you know, we're, we're sick of listening
to Moses.
We're sick of following Aaron and so forth.
And you just, you can't believe it, but how does the Bible interpret this in the new Testament?
Hebrews chapter three, harden not your hearts as in the day of provocation, in the day of
temptation in the wilderness, when your fathers tempted me and proved me 40 years, I was grieved
with that generation.
Why?
They are hardening their hearts.
They see something and they just, just explain it away or just decide that, you know, it's
not an act of God or whatever is going on in their twisted mind.
So number one, salvation is obviously key to having the eyes to see, the ear to hear
and the heart to perceive.
But even after we're saved, it's possible for us to harden our heart and to grieve the
Holy Spirit and to just walk in the flesh and walk in the old man.
And if we're obviously walking in the flesh and we're not sowing to the Spirit, we're
not reading our Bible, we're not going to church, we're not doing the right things.
Well then obviously we're not going to have the same level of seeing and hearing and understanding
as the guy who's over here reading his Bible, praying for wisdom, trusting in the Lord day
to day.
So obviously just because you're in a good church, I mean, you know, at this time this
is the church to be in, you know, Pastor Moses, Wilderness Baptist, like that's where you
want to be.
Obviously they're in the right church, they're around the right people, they're listening
to the right preaching.
But you know, at the end of the day, it's a personal decision to be saved, number one.
And number two, it's a personal decision after you're saved to actually take the next steps
and live for God and study your Bible and care about the things of God.
And the more you care about the things of God, the more God is going to give you a heart
to care about the things of God.
And it's basically a positive feedback loop and you're just going to keep on growing in
grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Whereas you can also go on a downward spiral the opposite direction.
And so he said, you know, the Lord has not given you at heart to perceive and eyes to
see and ears to hear unto this day.
Whose fault is that?
Is that God's fault?
Is Moses like, man, I mean, this is what's so stupid about the Calvinist view.
Moses is like, man, I'm just waiting for God to just give you guys the heart and it's just
not happening.
It's really, you know, it's just like really frustrating.
Like what's going on here?
Like basically, I guess it's God's fault because God didn't give them the heart.
No, that's not what Moses is saying.
Right.
That's not, or Moses isn't blaming God here because it's the people's fault that God didn't
give them a heart to understand.
And because God's ready to give that heart to whoever wants it.
God's willing to give that eyesight and that hearing to anybody who wants it, whosoever
will may come.
God would have all men to be saved and to come into the knowledge of the truth.
God's not willing that any should perish.
Right.
So, you know, we don't want to twist this into some kind of a fatalistic, it's God's
fault.
No, it's, it's your fault.
It's my fault.
It's our fault.
Right.
As human beings, if we're not where we need to be.
And I've led you 40 years in the wilderness, your clothes are not waxing old upon you.
Thy shoe is not waxing old upon thy foot.
So it seems that God supernaturally allowed their clothing and their shoes to be more
durable.
He's blessing them.
He's making their stuff last longer.
It's sort of like when God blessed my Hyundai Sonata and it went like 300,000 miles without
having any mechanical problems, even though I used and abused it pretty hard.
And so, you know, God can miraculously obviously make their stuff last.
He's blessing them in that way so that they can be clothed.
And then he says in verse six, you've not eaten bread, neither have you drunk wine or
strong drink that you might know that I am the Lord your God.
Why would that make them know that he's the Lord their God?
Well, because he's been feeding them with manna from heaven, which should obviously
be seen by them as miraculous.
Obviously, though, to the hardened heart.
And here's the thing that you'll notice about a lot of the miracles in the Bible.
A lot of the miracles in the Bible are pretty amazing and impressive.
But you know what I've noticed, though, is that a lot of the miracles in the Bible, God
almost leaves a little room for someone to explain it away if they want to.
You know what I mean?
And people do this all the time.
I mean, you can watch all these like History Channel type things because I remember seeing
these as a teenager.
And it's like, oh, in the fiery furnace, there's this cold spot or whatever, you know.
And they literally have like a computer diagram of the fiery furnace showing how you could
like be in a certain spot.
It's funny, even the guys who threw them in burned up, right?
And isn't it funny how they came out, they didn't even smell like smoke.
The ropes burned off their hands, right?
I mean, it's like, hello.
But yet, somebody in the 20th century is sitting there going, you know, I think that this might
have just...
And then, you know, same program, had a thing about the Red Sea, how, you know, oh, one
other time in history, it kind of did this because it was really windy and blah, blah,
blah.
And they didn't really cross the Red Sea, they crossed the Reed Sea, you know, and it's
like waist high water or whatever.
It's kind of funny how Pharaoh and his armies drowned in, you know, waist deep water.
But man will try to explain these things like, oh, Jesus walked on the water, you know, they
look at the bottom of the Sea of Galilee and they found this little elevated part and like,
you know, maybe he was walking on that elevated part.
You know, people, right, I mean, this is what they're going to, people will always try to
find a way to kind of explain away the miracles of God.
If their heart is hardened, they're just not going to see it.
Even if it happens right in front of them, well, Lazarus just wasn't really dead or something.
You know, they're going to find a way to explain it away if they don't want to believe in it.
People believe what they want to believe.
And so therefore, people with a hardened heart, people who have a bad attitude toward God,
people who are bitter toward God, they're not going to believe even if they see the
miracles.
You know, though he had done so many miracles before them, yet they believed not on him,
it says of Jesus in the book of John.
And so this is a common theme in the Bible.
And so he did feed them with manna so that they would know and understand that man does
not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeded out of the mouth of God.
And so he caused them to hunger and thirst in the wilderness so that they would seek
God, so that they would not just be full of bread and wine and strong drink and just say,
well, who is the Lord?
You know, what do we need him for?
He's literally causing them to rely on him every day for their daily food.
And by the way, these same programs, these History Channel programs from the 90s were
also trying to say the manna, it was some bug or something that like, it like molts
its skin and you can eat the, I don't know.
They had some stupid theory about it.
But anyway, yeah.
What do they think of next, right?
I mean, you'd almost have more respect from if they just said the Bible's made up or something,
if that's what they believe, than to sit there and try to twist the Bible to fit these weird
like non miracles.
I mean, if God can speak the world into existence, I'm pretty sure he can feed them with manna
from heaven and part the Red Sea, like, and the Bible ends up being clear.
Like the Bible says, you know, there's a, there's a wall of water on either side when
they cross the Red Sea, right?
So how does the wind do that?
It says they went on dry land, you know, but again, you know, people who have a hard heart
though, they're just going to find a way to explain it away and whatever.
And that's probably what Pharaoh was doing.
He probably just thought, Hey, we were probably just going to get hit with a lot of frogs
anyway.
It's a coincidence or whatever.
But the Bible says in verse number seven, and when you came onto this place, Sihon,
the King of Heshbon and Og, the King of Bashan came out against us on the battle and we smote
them and we took their land and gave it for an inheritance under the Reubenites and the
Gadites and the half tribe of Nasi.
And that's a portion of land on the east side of the Jordan River.
But there's still room for Moab, Ammon and Edom on the east side of the river.
And we took their land, gave it for an inheritance.
Look at verse nine, keep therefore the words of this covenant and do them that you may
prosper in all that you do.
Ye stand this day, all of you before the Lord your God, your captains of your tribes, your
elders and your officers with all the men of Israel, your little ones, your wives and
thy stranger that is in thy camp from the hew'r of thy wood unto the drawer of thy water
that thou shouldst enter into covenant with the Lord thy God and into his oath, which
the Lord thy God maketh with thee this day.
Now notice that this covenant that God's making, he's not just making it with the ethnic Israelites,
but that he's also making it with, you know, their wives, their children, which may or
may not be totally ethnic Israelites or whatever that means, but also, you know, even just
with the stranger that's in the camp, right?
What's a stranger is a foreigner, okay?
The stranger in the camp from the hew'r of thy wood unto the drawer of thy water.
He's like, hey, I'm talking to you, buddy.
I'm talking to you, wood chopping guy who's not even an Israelite.
I'm talking to you, water boy.
And so, you know, they're included in this as well.
That thou shouldst enter into covenant with the Lord thy God and into his oath, which
the Lord thy God maketh with thee this day, that he may establish thee today for a people
unto himself.
And then he may be unto thee a God as he had said unto thee and as he had sworn unto thy
fathers to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, neither with you only do I make this covenant
and this oath, but with him that standeth here with us this day before the Lord our
God.
See what I'm saying?
He said, look, it's not just a certain ethnicity.
Anybody who wants to can get in on this.
Anybody who's physically here, not just Israel, but even strangers that sojourn among them,
they can get circumcised, they can keep the Passover, they can get in on the old covenant.
They're all invited.
It's not an ethnic thing.
It's not a genetic thing.
He says, but with him that standeth here with us this day before the Lord our God and also
with him that is not here with us this day.
For you know how we've dwelt in the land of Egypt and how we came through the nations
which he passed by, and you've seen their abominations and their idols, wood and stone,
silver and gold, which were among them.
He said, look, you know, this really just applies to anybody who's hearing this.
Anybody who's reading this right back then can get in on this.
Okay.
Obviously in the New Testament, we have our own covenant, we have a better covenant, we
have the new covenant through Jesus Christ.
And so that's also available to every person in the world, whosoever will may come.
And so he says, you know, the nations that you've passed through, they're idolaters,
they've got all these stupid gods of wood, stone, silver, gold, whatever.
He says in verse 18, lest there should be among you man or woman or family or tribe
whose heart turneth away this day from the Lord our God to go and serve the gods of these
nations lest there should be among you a root that beareth gall and wormwood.
Here's what he's saying, because notice that verses 16 and 17 are in parenthesis, right?
So if you have parentheses around something, that means that if you read the sentence without
the parentheses, it's grammatically going to make sense.
The parentheses are adding more information, obviously it's necessary in the sense that
every word of God is necessary, but what I mean is it's not grammatically necessary to
the sentence.
Does everybody understand that?
That's what that punctuation means and you'll find this in the New Testament as well.
And so sometimes it can be helpful to read it without the parentheses just to kind of
understand how the grammar is working and then you can put the parentheses back in once
you understand that.
So you could say, you know, neither with you only do I make this covenant and this oath.
This is the meat of the sentence.
I'm not making this covenant with you only, I'm also making it with him that standeth
here with us this day before the Lord our God and also with him that is not here with
us this day.
Now let's jump down to the end of the parentheses, lest there be among you man or woman or family.
Here's what he's saying, nobody's excused.
Nobody gets a pass for worshiping idols.
Like, oh, well, you know, I'm not an Israelite or I wasn't even there when he said that.
I wasn't even there.
I live somewhere else.
I mean, no, God expects the entire world to worship him.
No one in this world just gets a pass like, well, I'm Hindu cause I live in India or something.
Now I think we all kind of understand that today as Christians that people living in
Thailand or Japan or India, they don't get a pass for worshiping the devil.
No, they need to be worshiping the God.
He's the God of the whole earth, but here's what we have to understand.
It's always been that way.
Never was it okay to worship the gods of the Philistines.
Okay.
God is saying, look, I'm opening this up to anybody who wants to worship the Lord and
anybody who worships these false gods is under a curse cause you're worshiping the
devil.
And so he says, lest there should be among you a root and that, and all that say this,
that's what kind of, that's the idea that connects verse 15 with verse 18, right?
And then 16 and 17 is the kind of explanatory extra information to help us understand the
point that he's making.
But he says that basically this man, woman, family, tribe, whose heart turneth away this
day from the Lord our God to go and serve the gods of these nations is basically being
equated unto at the end of verse 18, what?
A root that beareth gall and wormwood, right?
So the idea here is that, okay, we're the nation of Israel.
We're going to serve the Lord.
We're not going to worship idols.
Let's say one person starts doing idolatry.
One man, one woman, one family, or even one tribe or one certain group, one town.
Well then what that ends up being like is a cancer that's going to spread.
It's going to be basically a root of something that is going to destroy many people, right?
Lest there be among you a root that beareth gall and wormwood, basically a little root,
whether one person, one town, one tribe that ends up poisoning the rest.
This is similar to what it says in Hebrews chapter 12 where the Bible says, lest there
be a root of bitterness, lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you and thereby
many be defiled, right?
So if the root of bitterness springs up, it defiles many.
Gall and wormwood are two bitter fluids, right?
And so the idea here is the root of bitterness, right?
The poisonous seed of false religion is going to spread and contaminate and mess up a bunch
of people.
Verse 19, it came, and it come to pass when he heareth the words of this curse.
So he hears, you know, hey, anybody who makes a graven image and puts it in a secret place
is cursed by God.
Remember we saw that in Deuteronomy chapter 27.
Idolatry is cursed by God.
No matter who you are, according to verses 15 and 18, you could even be someone who's
in another country.
You're still cursed because God's the God of the whole earth.
But when they hear that curse, you know what they do?
They bless themselves.
So basically God says, hey, you're cursed if you do such and such the activity.
You hear that and you say, no, I'm, I'll be blessed.
I'll be fine.
You know, and look, God curses those who commit fornication.
God curses people for committing all manner of wickedness and sins and, and what you,
when you hear those curses in God's word, those warnings about things that we as Christians
should say away from.
Don't bless yourself in your heart and be like, oh, that's not going to happen to me.
I'm going to be fine.
And that's a lot of people just think, well, you know, that's somebody else that's going
to suffer that fate.
He blessed himself in his heart.
Verse 19 saying, I still have peace.
I'm going to be fine.
You know, pastor Anderson's up there screaming about how one out of five people in America
have a, an STD infection right now at any given moment.
One out of five adults are, are dealing with an STD and like active infection right now.
Oh, but then you just bless yourself in your heart and say, well, that's not going to be
me.
I'll have peace.
Think again, buddy.
You know, you hear the preaching about how God is going to chastise Christians who live
in sin.
You're the preaching against fornication, drunkenness, drugs, whatever, and you bless
yourself in your heart and say, well, I'll have peace.
God's saying, don't even think about it though.
You know?
Yeah.
I'll have peace.
Though I walk in the imagination of my heart, I'm going to do what I want and I'm going
to be fine.
These threats, they're just idle threads.
It's no big deal.
It's my life.
I'm not hurting anyone.
I'm going to do what I want.
But he blessed himself in his heart saying, I still have peace though.
I walk in the imagination of my heart to add drunkenness to thirst, right?
So Hey, I'm going to get drunk and I'm not going to be the one that gets taken advantage
of.
And you know, I've, I've spent the last 18 years preaching at faith for Baptist church
warning about alcohol, right?
Just warning about alcohol, about all of the bad.
And I've told story after story after story.
In fact, I've read entire books written by alcoholics just so I could get more stories
to just, just to give horror stories in my sermons, you know, to talk about the horrible
things when people blackout drunk and, and all of the dumb things and just people that
I've known.
Even I knew a guy who got so drunk that he blacked out and blackout is not pass out.
Pass out is like you're unconscious, you're asleep.
Break out is when you're just operating on like an autopilot and you don't remember anything
that happened and you're just doing stuff.
I mean, and I mean, you could be fornicating, you could be committing adultery, you could
be committing crimes and you just don't remember.
Well, you know, I had a friend on the Navajo reservation, he blacked out and literally
the next thing he knew, he was just walking down the street with some electronics in his
hand, like some kind of VCRs or something that he had just stolen from a store and the
police were chasing him and he didn't know like how did he get there.
He didn't remember stealing these electronics, whatever they were, DVD players or whatever.
He had broken into some store that was closed and stolen these electronics and next when
he snaps out of, he's walking down the street with stolen merchandise and he's just like,
how did I get here?
What am I doing?
There are all kinds of stories where people just, they black out and next thing they know,
they're just in bed with a stranger and they don't even know how they got there, who they're
even with, what they're even doing, what's going on.
People constantly waking up in strange places, not even knowing what happened and you say,
well, that's just extreme, that's just, that's just drinking a lot, but you know what?
The first thing that goes out the window when you drink even one drink, I learned this from
the driver's handbook when I was studying for my permit in California is your good judgment,
your decision making and so therefore when you lose the good decision making, now all
of a sudden one drink becomes two, becomes three, becomes four and even if you don't
black out, you can just lose your inhibitions a little bit being drunk and easily fall into
a situation where you're fornicating or committing adultery or whatever.
You know, again, I knew a guy who was faithful to his wife.
He and his wife were both virgins when they got married.
They're Roman Catholic, both virgins when they got married, faithful to each other.
The guy's friends at work thought it would be funny to get him drunk.
He's not a drinker.
They pressured him into drinking at a company party and he got drunk at this party, committed
adultery and then ended up ruining his marriage because his wife found out about it and they
just weren't able to work past it.
Obviously they should have but they didn't and so therefore they ended up getting divorced
and you know, just their life was just completely changed, marriage completely ruined based
upon this one event when a bunch of work people just thought it'd be funny to get this straight
laced guy drunk.
You know, and again, I'm not just going to stand up here all night telling stories, but
I've, you know, you could go back and listen to all the drinking sermons and get more stories
and there are plenty of just people out there have written books about this stuff because
it's a big deal.
But you know, no, that's not going to be me.
I'll have peace.
Yeah, sure.
Right.
But if God chastens his people, you should be very afraid of that and the Bible says
then the Lord will not spare him.
So if you sit there and have this attitude that says, well, pastor Anderson's trying
to scare us straight with all this talk about drugs and alcohol and fornication, right?
You know, that's not going to work on me.
I'm not going to fall for that.
That stuff's really rare.
Well, if you say I'll have peace, if you bless yourself like that, then God up in heaven,
according to this verse is going to say, well, I'll make sure that it happens to you then
because you're sitting there blessing yourself while the word of God is pronouncing curses
on sin.
You're sitting there blessing yourself and saying you're going to have peace.
Well, then God's not going to spare that man.
That's a good way not to get spared.
He's going to say, well, some people will be spared.
Some people will do a bunch of bad stuff and get away with it.
Yeah, but not you because you're a saved Christian sitting here blessing yourself when God is
warning you about sin in his word so many times about the dangers of alcohol, the dangers
of fornication, whatever.
And alcohol specifically brought up here because what does it say at the end of verse 19 drunkenness?
Is that alcohol or what?
The Lord will not spare him, but then the anger of the Lord and his jealousy shall smoke
against them.
I mean, look, this reminds me of a cartoon where smoke is coming out of somebody's ears
like they're so mad, their face turned bright red smoke.
I mean, do you really want God up there smoking in anger?
Just his wrath is smoking hot against you.
That's a really scary thought.
And all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him and the Lord shall
blot out his name from under heaven.
Now what does that mean?
Blot out his name from under heaven.
Basically, here's what it's saying.
This guy is going to be the end of his family line.
He's going to get wiped out and nobody's going to remember that this guy even existed.
And you know what?
God frequently did this to nations in the Old Testament.
He talked about how he's going to blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.
And this is why literally the only way that we know about Amalek is from the Bible.
Like there's no archeologist digging up and saying, hey, look, I found Amalek and what
you know, or, hey, you know, uh, I'm over in the Amalek studies department over here
at this university, you know, because the evidence that we have of Amalek is the Bible
because God blotted out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven as he said he would.
Okay.
So they were a group of people that ultimately were completely annihilated.
And so God is saying he is going to annihilate this person and they're not going to have
a legacy to leave behind.
They're going to be destroyed and forgotten.
It says, and the Lord shall, because name here in verse 20, name means reputation.
You know, a good name is rather to be chosen than silver.
And so, you know, uh, he'll blot out his name from under heaven.
And the Lord shall separate him unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel, according
to the curses of the covenant that are written in this book of the law.
So the generation to come of your children that shall rise up after you and the stranger
that shall come from a far land shall say when they see the plagues of that land and
the sickness, which the Lord had laid upon it and that the whole land thereof is brimstone
and salt and burning that is not stone nor beareth nor any grass grow it there in like
the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah admins of Boem, which the Lord overthrew in his anger
and his wrath.
So now he's kind of expanding it.
He was kind of talking about the individual, that man, but remember ultimately this was
a man, woman, family or tribe.
And so he says, now it's, it's more expanded to like a whole area, a whole region, a whole
town, a whole part of the country could be destroyed to the point where people would
look at it and say, man, what happened here?
Why is this place so damaged?
And this place is like, this place looks like Sodom and Gomorrah after God completely smoked
it.
Then men, and it says, you know, what meaneth the heat of this great anger?
Then men shall say, verse 25, because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord God
of their fathers, which he had made with them, which he brought them forth out of the land
of Egypt.
Now let me bring this back to the level of the individual.
Let's say you are a Christian young person.
You're growing up in church, you're hearing the preaching of God's word.
Your parents are bringing you up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
And you hear these curses, then you're blessing yourself in your heart.
You're going to go out and party.
You don't have to follow these rules.
You're going to do what you want, whatever.
And then God brings these curses upon you.
Your life, your personal life becomes a wreck.
Maybe you even die an untimely death.
And then here's what people say, you know what people say?
Guess what people are going to say?
They're going to say, well, you know, it's really isn't that shocking because he did
rebel against the Lord.
He did get out of church and go out and be a whoremonger and a drunk.
So does it really surprise us that now at age 23, he's dead?
Or does it really surprise us that his life is a wreck or that he's permanently damaged,
permanently disfigured, permanently, or he's in prison or, you know, whatever way a person's
life could be wrecked.
You say, well, how dare you judge like that?
Look, if a Christian young person is just out there living like the devil and then boom,
they're dead.
Isn't any reasonable person going to say, well, this is the judgment of God.
You say, well, you're being like Job's three friends.
Nope.
That's the mistake Job's three friends made.
Job's three friends had no evidence of any wrongdoing on Job's part.
And they said, well, you must be doing something wrong because these bad things are happening
to you.
And Job's like, no, I didn't do anything wrong, man.
I don't know.
You know, I've been doing the right stuff.
And God tells us that Job did do the right stuff.
And they're like, no, you did something wrong.
But see, here's the thing.
Let's say God sends an earthquake or a forest fire on people that we know are wicked.
We know they're idolaters.
We know they're worshiping the devil.
We know that they're not right with God.
We know they're promoting horrific things morally and spiritually.
We can't say this is the judgment of God because the sin is not in question.
So if somebody goes out and commits fornication and then a week later they're dead or something,
it's not like, oh, you're being judgmental, you know, you're trying to connect these dots.
You better know I am.
You better know I am because, hey, if a Christian goes out and spits in God's face and mocks
God's law and goes out and lives like the devil, you know, then I'm not going to be
surprised.
What does the Bible say?
The eye that mocketh at his father and despiseth to obey his mother, the ravens of the valley
shall pick it out and the young eagle shall eat it.
So if some guy's mocking or disrespecting his father and then next thing you know he's
found dead in a field somewhere, am I supposed to just ignore the fact that that's what God
said would happen in Proverbs chapter 30?
Everybody understand what I'm saying?
And so what the Bible's saying is that when judgment comes upon a person or a group of
people, whether you like it or not, this is what people are going to say, even if you
disagree with me that it's a legitimate statement to make, doesn't matter whether you like it
or not, when you die your untimely death, when you end up destroying your life, when
bad things happen to you and all these curses come upon you and you are destroyed and damaged
and disfigured and diseased as a young person because you rebelled against the Lord.
I'm not talking about blaming an innocent person to whom those things happen because
guess what, innocent people can obviously, they can get in a car crash, they can get
a disease, you know, we don't want to make the mistake of Job's three friends.
But when you see someone thumbing their nose at God and then something bad happens to them,
well, you know, wow, shock.
We've had several people that we've thrown out of the church die, several.
People that were wicked and the Bible teaches that if you're thrown out of the church you're
under the curse of God, we've thrown out several people who died shortly thereafter.
Now look, obviously people are going to say, oh, it's coincidence, whatever, okay.
But you know, when I heard that, oh, this person who was just screaming at me and cursing
another man of God to me in my office, oh, six months later someone shoots him and he's
dead.
You know, I'm thinking to myself, well, you know what, God punished that guy for doing
that.
You know, and there's like, I'm not rejoicing at his death, but I'm just saying like, it's
just kind of like, well, that's what happened.
You know, another guy got thrown out of the church, was dead a year later from brain cancer.
You know, it's just like these things happen.
Or what about, there was a guy that was making all kinds of videos I think against like mainly
against like, was it mainly against Pastor Shelley or I don't know who it was, but there
was some, what's that?
He was going after Pastor Jimenez pretty hard or something.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's just like, and then the guy dies an untimely death.
You know, hey, if you want to think that's a coincidence, whatever.
But you know what?
Most people are going to look at that and say, well, this guy's cursing the man of God.
He's cursing this pastor over here or that pastor over there.
And this guy's saying all these wicked things or this guy got thrown out of the church for
his wickedness and God has brought judgment upon this guy.
You know, whether you like it or not, that's what people are going to say.
Even if you don't say it, people will say it.
In fact, I'm saying it right now.
And so he says, you know, people are going to walk by that land and they're going to
say, well, the reason why this natural disaster happened, the reason why this place is all
brimstone and salt and nothing grows there and the place is trashed and it's a natural
disaster.
Well, the reason why is because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord God of their
fathers, which he made with them when he brought them forth out of the land of Egypt.
Isn't that what people are going to say?
Look, I, you know, I said that when, uh, California was experiencing, you know, these, these
really devastating wildfires, I said, you know, that's, that's the judgment of God.
God's punishing them.
Again, there's no question about the wickedness that was going on in those areas.
And by the way, if the same, I'm not being, I'm not one of these anti California people.
You know, I love California.
It's the second best state.
Okay.
You're the first best state.
Well, you're sitting in it.
Arizona's the best.
I love Arizona.
I love California.
I'm from California.
I was born and raised there.
I think California gets a bad rap.
It's really not that different from the rest of the nation as far as its morality.
Okay.
And there are a lot of godly and conservative parts of California.
You know, you don't want to just assume that everything is, you know, hate Ashbury or something,
you know?
But the thing about that is that, you know, if the same thing, if some natural disaster
struck Tempe, Arizona, and just, you know, if a, if a, if a meteor just came out of the
sky and just crashed into Tempe and, and just, you know, it was like a nuke going off and
just flattened a few blocks or, or a few square miles of Tempe, I would, I would say that
that's the judgment of God.
It's not like, well, I live here, so it can't be the judgment of God.
First of all, I don't live in, now I live in Phoenix, but here's the thing.
You say, well, why would that be God judging?
And I would just say, well, you know, you know, we preached under Tempe so many times
and we, we knocked so many doors and so many people rejected the gospel and there's just
so much, uh, uh, so many people despise the word of God and despise the preaching and
God's punishing the wickedness of America and, and you know, punishing Tempe or something.
Now I wouldn't think that God's punishing me because number one, I love God, you know,
and number two, it didn't land on my head and if it did land on my head, then I wouldn't
be saying anything cause I'd be gone.
But if I survived, then God must not have been aiming at me because I promise you that
instead of God aims at me, he's going to hit me.
That's why this one guy, there was some, there was some flooding like 25 miles from my house
and this guy said, Oh, God's judging pastor Anderson.
I'm like, well, you know, God needs to, uh, uh, get his GPS calibrated then, but I don't
believe that because if God's trying to aim at you, he's going to hit you.
It's not going to be 25.
He's not going to get a ballpark and just flood some innocent guy 25 miles away.
Like it doesn't even make sense.
But even if a meteor did land on my head, I still wouldn't believe that it was God punishing
me because I love God and I'm serving God.
I'm not saying that I'm perfect, but you know, I don't expect a meteor to hit me in the head.
That's all I'm saying.
I do think I've reached that level of, you know, not saying that I've arrived cause I'm
not even close.
All right.
Anyway, let me hurry up and finish where we're out of time, but the Bible says they went
and served other gods.
They worship them.
Verse 26, God's whom they knew not and whom he had not given unto them and anger.
The Lord was kindled against this land to bring upon it all the curses that are written
in this book and the Lord rooted them out of their land in anger and in wrath and in
great indignation and cast them into another land as it is this day.
Now notice at the end of verse 26 it says that the false gods that they're worshiping,
God didn't give those gods to them.
Okay.
And I know this is, this should go without saying cause it's so obvious, but you never
know what stupid heresies people are going to dream up next.
But there is a teaching out there literally that I've heard that like God basically had
set things up where each of these Old Testament nations kind of have their own God and then
Israel worships Jehovah and like that it was okay for these other nations to worship
their God.
I mean, it's kind of hard to believe that anybody would be that stupid, right?
But it's out there and this is why it's so key.
What I was showing you in 15 to 18, Hey, this covenant is really being made with anybody
who will listen lest anybody think they can get away with idolatry and, and, and sin.
And so the anger of the Lord is going to be kindled against whatever land, because when
it says the anger of the Lord is kindled against this land, they're walking by a particular
land saying, why did this land get judged?
Well, you know, these people, they disobeyed the covenant that God made with them when
they came out of Israel.
This is going to be any part of the stretches or whatever of Israel, right?
You know, whatever, whether it's the Gad, Manasseh, Reuben guys over here, Dan, all
the way up here, whatever.
But here's the thing, obviously this is being specified more to Israel simply because that's
the primary audience, but we should remember from verses 15 and 18, this applies to other
people too.
You know, nobody should be living in sin and blessing themselves and thinking they're going
to get away with it.
Last verse, the secret things belong unto the Lord our God, but those things which are
revealed belong unto us and to our children forever that we may do all the words of this
law.
I wish I had more time to talk about this verse because I think this is a very important
verse.
It doesn't necessarily tie in super clearly with everything we've been reading.
It's kind of just a standalone thought, but it's a powerful truth and I'll just summarize
it this way.
Maybe you can think about this verse more meditate upon it on your own because I think
it's a powerful verse, powerful truth, but maybe just to give it to you in a nutshell
or kind of maybe give you something to think about.
You know, we should spend more time worrying about what we know than what we don't know.
You know, people spend so much time looking for that missing book of the Bible or, you
know, trying to figure out what God didn't say over here.
What's God leaving out of the story or let's read between the lines.
You know, there are a lot of things that we're just never going to understand.
They're just hidden from us and we're going to have to wait till we get to heaven to understand.
We're not going to understand everything, but you know what we ought to worry about
is the stuff we do understand.
That's why, you know, I hope you're reading your Bible cover to cover in 2024.
What do you do when you get to something you don't understand?
You know, if every time you get to something you don't understand, you reach for Google
or you just get off on a rabbit trail, you're never going to finish.
You're going to get derailed too much.
You know what I do is I read the Bible and I just worry about the stuff I do understand.
I don't worry too much about stuff I don't understand.
I just blow past it and worry about the stuff I do understand because there's plenty that
I do understand for me to put into practice and do and I know that when I read it a second
time I'll understand more.
Read it a third time I'll understand more.
And so don't always be looking for the hidden missing esoteric knowledge.
Go for what's right there on the surface, my friend.
It's a lot to chew on.
The hidden things belong to the Lord, but things that are revealed belong to us so that
we will obey, so that we will keep God's thoughts, so that we will follow the Bible that we do
know instead of worrying about what we don't know.
Let's pray.
Father, we thank you so much for this chapter.
I pray that we would apply these things to our hearts and that we would not bless ourselves
when you've cursed a sinful practice that we're engaging in, Lord.
Help us to fear you and follow you and serve you with fear and trembling, Lord, and also
just to love you with all our hearts and minds and soul and strength and to have that heart
for you and eyes that see and ears that hear, Lord.
Help us to follow what we know and what we learned in church all of our lives or however
long we've been in church.
Help us to put those things into practice and not be that young person that goes astray
or that older person who goes astray.
In Jesus' name we pray, amen.