Category: 66 in 52

“Israel served the Lord all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua and had known all the work that the Lord did for Israel.” Joshua 24:31

We come to the end of Joshua with some grim foreshadowing of what is to come. In chapter 24, Joshua lays out the challenge to the people: choose whom you will serve. And all the people say, “We’ll serve the Lord.” (15-18)

Then Joshua dies, and verse 31 says that the people continued to serve the Lord “all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua.” 

But how many were those days? Based on what we are about to read in Judges, they didn’t last long. And I have to wonder: did Joshua mentor anyone the way Moses mentored him? The first time we hear about Joshua is all the way back in Exodus 17:8-9. He is called Moses’ assistant in Exodus 24:13. He is with Moses on the mountain when Moses receives the Commandments from God (Ex. 32:17). And when Moses speaks to God in the Tent of Meeting, Joshua, “a young man”  stays in the tent even when Moses goes back to the camp (Exodus 33:11).

But if Joshua invested in anyone from the next generation to that extent, we don’t read about it in Scripture. And so while the elders were able to keep Israel on track, we will see in Judges that when that generation dies, Israel goes off the rails in a big way.

Joshua did not pour into someone the way he himself was poured into.

The lesson for me here, both as a middle aged man and as a pastor, is to develop the next generation of disciples. I can look at my church and be content that all the leadership positions are filled. A full choir, no vacancies on any committees, all volunteer teams up and running. A healthy turnout at midweek prayer meeting. Good attendance on Sunday morning.

The problem is, with a few exceptions, they are all people my age or older. What happens when our generation dies out? What happens to the next generation when they grow up and their parents are no longer “making” them go to church?

Where is the next generation of leaders? On our worship team? In our volunteer base? What am I doing to invest? If I can’t point to anyone from the next generation that I am pouring into, then I fear I am making the same mistake as Joshua. And that the church will have the same results as Israel in Judges.

““All these curses shall come upon you and pursue you and overtake you till you are destroyed, because you did not obey the voice of the Lord your God, to keep his commandments and his statutes that he commanded you. They shall be a sign and a wonder against you and your offspring forever. Because you did not serve the Lord your God with joyfulness and gladness of heart, because of the abundance of all things,” (Deuteronomy 28:45-47 ESV)

I struggle with chapter 28 because it is a threat to my systematic theology. It’s a challenge to my core conviction that every word of the Bible agrees with every other word of the Bible. Here’s what I mean: Deuteronomy 28:63 says,

63 And as the Lord took delight in doing you good and multiplying you, so the Lord will take delight in bringing ruin upon you and destroying you. And you shall be plucked off the land that you are entering to take possession of it. 

The issue is that twice in Ezekiel, God says he does not take pleasure in the death of the Israelites:

For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Lord GOD; so turn, and live.” (Ezekiel 18:32)

Say to them, As I live, declares the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel? (Ezekiel 33:11)

So which is it? God delights in the destruction of rebellious Israel, or God takes no pleasure in the death of anyone?

The NIV Quest Study Bible (online) gives us one possible way to reconcile this. It suggests that, “punishment does not please God in the sense of making him feel good. Rather it pleases him that justice is done.”

Which makes me feel a little better, I guess. But it sounds a little like “God-splaining” (which is like man-splaining, where a guy tries to rationalize and justify something that he shouldn’t have said, only its on God’s behalf).

I hear Tara-Leigh say that verse 63 is typical covenant language that doesn’t reflect the character of God. But if it doesn’t reflect the character of God, then why is it in the Bible? Unlike the book of Job, where anything that seems contrary to God’s character can be written off as coming from a human being that doesn’t speak the truth about God (Job 42:7), we don’t get an easy out in Deuteronomy 28, because these words are coming from God himself, through Moses.

But if I struggle with seeing God’s character in this chapter, I don’t struggle at all with seeing human nature. Because for whatever reason, we are wired to respond to the fear of bad things more than the promise of good things. In the 68 verses of chapter 28, only 14 of them are about the blessings of obedience, compared to 54 dealing with the curses of disobedience. Nearly four times as many!

There’s a reason “judgment house” presentations at churches are so popular at Halloween. There’s a reason why the only sermon most people know from Jonathan Edwards is “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Human nature tells us that fear motivates. A recruit in boot camp is trained for battle by a drill sergeant, not by Mister Rogers. Many preachers spend more time on graphic depictions of hell than glorious depictions of heaven.

So while the whole of Scripture is God saying to us, “This is who I am,” Scripture also says to us, “This is who you are.” It is a horrifying thing to turn away from God. The truth of Deuteronomy 28 is that I need constant reminders of the consequences of rejecting God. Because I am a sinful, fallen, forgetful, broken, rebellious child, and sometimes that’s what it takes.

16 But if he says to you, ‘I will not go out from you,’ because he loves you and your household, since he is well-off with you, 17 then you shall take an awl, and put it through his ear into the door, and he shall be your slave forever. (Dt. 15:16-17)

In the Eighties and early Nineties, guys wearing one earring was a thing. It showed you were living on the edge. You were a rebel. It was cool. And all the guys on MTV had one.

It was important, though, that you pierced the correct ear. “Left is right; right is wrong” was the way to tell the world that, while you were going out of your way to imitate Duran Duran, you still liked girls.

So, of course, I wanted to get my left ear pierced. But I was also a seminary student and a part time youth minister, which meant that looking like one of the guys in Duran Duran wasn’t going to be a good reason to get an earring.

So I spiritualized it. I found this verse in Deuteronomy, which describes the process for an indentured servant binding himself to his master’s household. I said, “This will show that I’m so devoted to the Lord that I want to be His servant forever!”

I strengthened my argument even further when I found Psalm 40:6, which, in the 1984 version of the NIV, read,

Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but my ears you have pierced ; burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require. Then I said, "Here I am, I have come-- it is written about me in the scroll. I desire to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart."

(Note: the 1984 NIV was an outlier in translating this “My ears you have pierced.” Every other English translation understood David’s intention to be that God had opened his ears to understand God’s Word, not pierced them. When the NIV was revised in 2001, it changed Psalm 40:6 to bring it more in line with the consensus of biblical scholarship, so that now, it reads, “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire—but my ears you have opened.”)

The earring lasted, oh, about a year. And for what it’s worth, not a single person ever came up to me and said, “Wow– you’ve got an earring. I can tell you really love the Lord!” Not even once.

Mercifully, the earring went away before I met my wife’s father for the first time, which turned out to be my one moment of exercising good judgment of the whole episode.

I’m thankful that my wife (girlfriend at the time) didn’t break up with me. I’m thankful that the church didn’t fire me. I’m thankful that God loves me, no matter how much I misuse His Word.

And I’m thankful that, thirty years later, I’ve maybe learned a little more about not taking God’s word out of context or cherry-picking verses to justify what I want to do. Lord knows, we all have an amazing capacity to twist God’s Word for our own ends. Just in today’s passage alone, I could excuse binge drinking with Deuteronomy 14:26 (“Look– the Bible says I can spend my money on strong drink!”); ignoring the poor (“Deuteronomy 15:11 says there will always be poor people in the land, so there’s nothing we can do about it!”); and even slavery, with the same passage I used to justify my earring.

God will use God’s Word to accomplish God’s purposes. We don’t use God’s Word to justify our purposes.

And I’m sure there’s a verse for that, somewhere.

13 “If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder, 2 and the sign or wonder that he tells you comes to pass, and if he says, ‘Let us go after other gods,’ which you have not known, ‘and let us serve them,’ 3 you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams. (Dt. 13:1-3)

There are two tests in Deuteronomy for a false prophet. The second one is in Deuteronomy 18:22, which we will get to in a couple of days. It’s the easy one:

22 when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him. 

A prophet says something will happen; it doesn’t. Therefore he’s not from God. Problem solved.

But the first test, the one we get to today, is a little harder. A prophet speaks, and it does come true. And his words are accompanied with signs and wonders that amaze the people. HOWEVER, if the so-called prophet follows this up by enticing the people to go after other gods, then he also is a false prophet, even if what he said comes to pass.

Deuteronomy 13:3 goes on to say that God could allow this in order to test the people, to know whether they loved the Lord with all their hearts and souls.

This gives us a rare opportunity to understand the Pharisees’ mindset in the New Testament, at least a little. I’ve sometimes wondered how the Pharisees could still reject Jesus, even when He performed so many miracles in front of them. But in their minds, Jesus was leading the people away from Yahweh, and therefore the Pharisees were justified in putting Him to death. You really see this in the healing of the paralytic at the pool of Bethesda in John 5. Even after healing a man who had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years,

18 This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God. (John 5:18)

Of course, Jesus wasn’t enticing the people to go after other gods, and if the Pharisees were really studying the Scriptures, instead of fixating on all the man-made traditions they had developed to ensure people kept the law, they would have known this. This is why Jesus will say to them a few verses later in this same passage,

39 You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, 40 yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. (John 5:39-40)

So there’s a reason Deuteronomy insists that we write God’s words on our hearts. Why we talk about them when we lie down and when we rise up. Why we inscribe them on our doorposts and bind them to our hands and tie them to our foreheads (See Day 072: Taking God at His Word). God’s word is really the only thing that will help us discern whether a prophet is speaking truth. It can’t be merely external: “He performed a miracle! His prophecy came true! He must be from God!” No. You have to internalize God’s Word. You have to know it so well that when a leader says something that contradicts it, alarm bells will go off immediately, regardless of how flashy or inspiring or motivational that leader is.

Beloved, know God’s Word! Pragmatism is a false idol. A thing will never be true just because it “works.” But a Biblical teaching will always work because it is true.

“And the congregation shall rescue the manslayer from the hand of the avenger of blood, and the congregation shall restore him to his city of refuge to which he had fled, and he shall live in it until the death of the high priest who was anointed with the holy oil.”
‭‭Numbers‬ ‭35:25‬ ‭ESV‬‬

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“For he must remain in his city of refuge until the death of the high priest, but after the death of the high priest the manslayer may return to the land of his possession.”
‭‭Numbers‬ ‭35‬:‭28‬ ‭ESV‬‬

For the most part, what I thought I understood about Numbers 35 had more to do with church history and Disney cartoons than with the Bible. Let me explain.

Then, there’s Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Quasimodo swinging down from the roof of the Cathedral, then rescuing Esmerelda from being burned at the stake, then landing back on the parapet and screaming SANCTUARY! SANCTUARY! as he held her unconscious body aloft before the cheering crowd.

Given my fear of heights, I wondered if Esmerelda would have been better off on the ground.

I am thankful for Tara Leigh Cobble’s Bible Recap podcast, because it wasn’t until she explained the detail about the death of the high priest that I really understood what a beautiful passage this is.

You see, death—any death, even an accidental one—had to be paid for. Verse 33 goes on to say, “blood pollutes the land, and no atonement can be made for the land for the blood that is shed in it, except by the blood of the one who shed it.” But when the high priest died, his death paid the debt. Not just for one person in one city of refuge, but for every person who had shed innocent blood throughout Israel.

Numbers 35 is the first time in Scripture the word “refuge” is used. But it definitely is not the last. In 2 Samuel 22, David wrote, “The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold and my refuge, my savior; you save me from violence. I call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised, and I am saved from my enemies.” (v. 2-4)

“Refuge” is a frequent word in Psalms (46 times), Proverbs (7 times) and the prophets (14 times). It became a dominant metaphor for God’s loving protection for His children.

Curiously, “refuge” is used once in the New Testament, by the author of Hebrews:

“we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.”
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Hebrews 6:17-20

The author of Hebrews talks about two unchangeable things, and they are both in this passage:

• Jesus is the shelter to which we flee for refuge. Through Christ, we have strong encouragement to hold fast to the anchor of our soul.
• Jesus is the high priest who enters into the inner place behind the curtain, to make atonement for our sin.

Do you see it? Jesus is our Shelter and our Savior!

Our refuge and our Redeemer.

Our protection from sin and our propitiation for sin.

Our shield and our sacrifice.

Hallelujah.