Why God Commanded Israel to Destroy Entire Nations — Deuteronomy 7

Welcome to Through the Bible with Les Feldick, a 30-minute walk through the Scriptures, teaching in-depth Bible truths that change people's lives. Now, here's your host, Les Feldick. It's good to have everyone back once again, and we're not going to take time for announcements on this program. We're just going to go right back into the book, and again, we want to welcome all of you watching and listening with us on television, and we trust that you'll do, even as our in-studio class do, have your Bible and take some notes. And I guess maybe I should announce that we do have videos of all the programs all the way back to Genesis 1, and we also have now a booklet containing the first 12 lessons available. If you care to have one, we're giving them out without charge. You write to us, and we'll be more than happy to send one to you. But for sake of time, I'm always running out of time, as you well know, so we're going to get right into this one in Deuteronomy chapter 7. Now, for those of you out in television that have been waiting for us to get into prophecy, I'm hoping in about two or three more weeks we'll be out of all the goings-on in Israel and going to go through their history in the next program or two, and then we'll be ready for the book of Daniel. And when we teach Daniel, we teach Revelation, Matthew, the whole nine yards, as they say. But for now, let's come back to Deuteronomy chapter 7 and get the picture now again, the nation of Israel is set out here on the deserts of Moab, just on the east side of the Jordan River, just east of the city of Jericho. And the king of Moab, as we saw last week, has tried to hire a false prophet to curse the children of Israel. He didn't totally succeed, but he did to a certain extent because he had advised the Moabites to put their prettiest young ladies and their best-looking young men right out there next to the Israelites and seduce them. And they did. They succeeded in quite a few thousand of them. And, of course, God had to, as they say today, He had to do some ethnic cleansing, and so quite a few thousand Israelites lost their life as a result of their losing their separated position. But nevertheless, the nation of Israel remained intact. The Moabites just couldn't do anything about it. And they're going to have to put up with them until they finally cross Jordan. And they're going to go in now in just a short order and occupy the promised land. Now, they're not going to have the easy go they could have had at Kadesh. You remember when they went up from Sinai to Kadesh? They could have gone right in, and they could have had the whole thing without losing a single young son. They could have had it without having to lift a sword. But because of their unbelief, they just didn't believe that God meant what He said. And so God, in His wrath, turned them back into the wilderness for that 40 years of wandering. So now as they're about ready to go in, almost 40 years later, now we'll point it out, when they cross the River Jordan and they get on the other side, they're going to stop for Passover. And do you know that that Passover that they will celebrate just having come into the land will be exactly 40 years from the Passover in Egypt? Now that's how meticulous God is with His timing. But now, Deuteronomy chapter 7. Now, the workbook of Deuteronomy, of course, is written in that final month or maybe two months while they're sitting here opposite the Jordan River. But, as Moses writes from that time frame, he's going to reflect back and sort of review everything that has taken place from the coming out of Egypt. So when you read Deuteronomy, just always remember that this is a lot of recap. But now as you come to chapter 7, he is dealing with the here and the now. They are about ready to go in and occupy the land of Canaan, but Moses is going to give some strict commands from God, of course, as to how they're going to accomplish it. Verse 1, Moses says to the children of Israel, When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou, and when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee, thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them. Now don't get shook up at God as being cruel and unkind. I'm going to show you in just a little bit why he gives these kind of instructions. So they were to utterly destroy them. Thou shalt make no covenant or treaty with them, nor show mercy unto them. Neither shalt thou make marriages with them. See, they've already been guilty of some of it. But he's making it very plain, you're to have nothing to do with these Moabites or with the Canaanites that they're going to run into. Verse 3, Thou shalt not make marriages with them, thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter, that is the Canaanite's daughter, thou shalt not take unto thy son. And here's his reason, for they will turn away thy son from following me. Now stop and think for a minute. Who was the classic example in Israel's history that did this to the extreme? On the one hand, he was a righteous, godly man to almost the extreme, but on the other hand, he followed other women and their gods to the extreme. Who was it? Solomon. Unbelievable. When I read again the account of Solomon, here as he dedicated that new temple that he had built, or at least had been the architecture and the master builder of, and God so honored the man that as he stood there to dedicate the temple, that Shekinah glory again came into the picture, which has been gone now since when we go into Israel. So that's how God felt about Solomon. And yet by the end of his life, where is he? Do you know that he too was guilty of offering little Jewish babies to the fires of the god of Moloch, Solomon? And so don't think for a minute that the average Israelite wasn't faced with that kind of a temptation, and it's no different for us today. But we'll come to that a little later. So he said, they will turn away thy son, verse 4 again, from following me that they may serve other gods. Now, when we talk about other gods and we talk about idols, of course, the first thing we think of are the cultures, probably predominantly in the Orient, who actually worship the idols of Buddha and so forth. But listen, there's another idol that's sneaking in on the American scene faster than we can shake a finger at. And you know what it is? The idol of materialism. The idol of materialism. Things. See, that can become an idol just as fast and just as much as a wooden stone. So always keep that in mind when you read some of these things. Because I was talking to somebody the other day who had just read an editorial in one of the major newspapers out in the Northwest, where this secular paper was literally decrying Christianity and its influence, that it was actually an enemy of our nation. Because after all, we're living in different times than Bible times. This is 1992, they like to say, and we're not under that kind of a culture. Listen. You know what I have to say to that? Yes, people change, economies change, society changes, but there's one who never changes. God does not change. God hates the same things today that he hated back here in Israel's history. And we're going to see them. And so we have to remember that. And as I said in our last program, we don't stand here and try to shove this stuff down people's throats. But I think the American people have to be made aware once again that the God that made our nation what she is, is the same God that laid down these requirements back here. He hasn't changed, or our society has changed, our outlooks have changed, but God has not changed. And we've got to remember that. All right, now to follow up this concept then of Deuteronomy chapter 7, come all the way over to chapter 20. Now again, I'm skipping a lot, and I just hope that people will take the time to read what I'm skipping, because a lot of that is self-explanatory. But now you come down into chapter 20, and beginning with verse 1, he is explaining to the Jews how they are to operate in warfare. But now I want you to come all the way down to verse 17. This is something beyond ordinary warfare of occupation. Now he is talking about how they are to deal with the people who occupy the promised land at that time. And remember, this is a holy, righteous, just, and fair God that is speaking. Deuteronomy chapter 20, verse 17, where God says, Thou shalt utterly destroy them, namely, and here they come now, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, the Jebusites, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee. Don't spare a one. Now read the next verse. Why? That they teach you not to do after all their, what's the next word, abominations. Now remember, what was an abomination to God back here is an abomination to God today, and we better be aware of it. So he says, Lest they teach you to do their abominations which they have done unto their gods, small g, meaning their idols and their pagan worship, and so should you sin against the Lord your God. Now isn't that exactly what Solomon did? It says it so plainly that after Solomon had married those 900 wives out of all the various pagan cultures, I sure feel sorry for his first one, don't you? That poor first wife, to think that she was sharing him with 900 others and they were pagans at that. But in order to satisfy the demands of those pagan wives, what did Solomon do? Built shrines and places of worship to those pagan gods, and then like I said a few moments ago, actually condoned the sacrificing of little Jewish children into the fire which was part and parcel of the sacrifice to Molan. I mean, it's unreal. All right. Now then, if you'll come back with me to Genesis chapter 15, and again, here's another good reason I like to have people follow me all the way from Genesis 1, because as I've said so often and I still repeat, unless you have a good understanding of the book of beginnings, the book of Genesis, a lot of these things are kind of hard to comprehend. But back here in Genesis chapter 15, you'll remember, God has just called Abram out of the Ur of the Chaldees in chapter 12 and given him the covenant, and in that covenant He has promised the man Abram that out of him would come a nation, a race of people totally different than anything that's been on the scene, and that race of people, when they would become a nation, He would put in a geographical area of land, and of course He points it out here in chapter 15 where that is, and then at some point in the future, He Himself would come in the flesh and be their Messiah and their King. Now that's the whole concept then of the Abrahamic covenant, and we're going to review that one of these days, but we haven't got time for it today. But now in chapter 15, as God is dealing with the man Abram, and He has given him the covenant, given him all these promises, verse 8, in spite of all his faith, what does Abram say? I'm still using the word Abram, he'll become Abraham a little later. But he said, Lord God, whereby shall I know that I'll inherit it? What's the proof? Now he's a man of faith, isn't he? And yet he says, God, I want some proof that I'm going to inherit this land that You're promising. All right, so as I explained when we were teaching, what happens now in these next few verses is the then typical means of transferring real estate according to the ancient Babylonian rules of, I think, Hammurabi had more or less laid them out. And again, the pagans, remember, did everything based on blood sacrifice, everything in a pagan culture. They don't do anything without offering a blood sacrifice. So even in transferring real estate, they took these animals, kill them, part the carcasses and leave sort of a walkway down between the halves, and then the two men who were transferring real estate would make a blood covenant by virtue of probably a cut in the hand, and they would shake hands and thereby make a contract. All right, now God is going to come down and do the very same thing. And so this is what He says, verse 9, Take a heifer of three, a she -goat of three, and a ram of three, and a turtledove, and a young pigeon. Divide them, lay each one against the other, except the birds, ye leave them whole. And then, of course, in verse 11 and 12, In order for this covenant to be as all covenants are from God and God alone, to make sure that Abram has nothing to do with this covenant responsibility. What does God do with him? He puts him to sleep like He did Adam a long time before. I mean, God is a master anesthesiologist, you know, and so He puts old Abram to sleep so he can have nothing to do with this transaction. Now then, come down to verse 13. And I always say this is probably the beginning of genuine prophecy. God is now telling Abraham things that are going to take place in the future, long into the future, and it's going to come true exactly as He says it. Now verse 13, So God said to Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed, in other words your children and your children's children, shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs. He's referring to Egypt. And they shall serve them, and they shall afflict them four hundred years. Verse 14, And also that nation, Egypt, whom they shall serve, I will judge, and afterward they shall come out with great substance. And we've seen that that's exactly what they did. Thou shall go to thy fathers in peace. He's going to die a physical death. Thou shall be buried in a good old age. Now here comes the verse that I'm tying to Deuteronomy 7 and 20. Why does God tell Israel to utterly destroy the Canaanite peoples? Well, here's the reason. But in the fourth generation, they, that is the children of Abraham, shall come thither or here, because he's talking to Abraham in Canaan, remember. But in the fourth generation, your children's children shall come back to Canaan again. Why does God wait four hundred and almost ninety years when you start really counting them up? Well, the next statement says it. For the iniquity or the wickedness of the Amorites, now that's indicative of all your Canaanite tribes. For their wickedness, God says, has not yet reached the full mark. Now for four hundred and almost ninety years from the time of Abraham's call until Joshua leads them in, what has God been waiting for the Canaanites to do? Will turn from their iniquity, but they don't turn from it. Instead, where do they go? Deeper and deeper and deeper into their wickedness, into their immorality, into their abominations, and they finally get to the place where God can now tell Joshua, instruct the children of Israel, don't you spare a one of them. They are so rotten that unless you totally cleanse the land of them, it won't be long until your sons and your grandsons will be just like they are. Now I can give you a classic example. I guess potatoes work that way as fast as anything. Potatoes and apples are the worst, aren't they? What if you've got a nice container full of good apples or good potatoes? Would you think of putting a half rotten one in the middle of them? How long would it be until the whole group would be just as rotten as what you put in there? Not very long. All right, now this is exactly the lesson that God is trying to teach Israel. You have to remove the rot, because unless you do, it's going to infect you, it's going to destroy you, and then I'll have to deal with you. And isn't that what happened? That's exactly what happened. All right. Now then, if you will come back with me as we'll go on into Deuteronomy, and the thing I'm going to leave with you to read in your own spare time, I don't like to read it even on the air, but those of you who especially are adults, you can read it. And again, I'm simply going to make the statement that you cannot, you cannot take for granted that the God of Israel is any different than the God of today. And that would be back in chapter 27, beginning with verse 15. You read it at your leisure. I'm not going to read it on the air. But he starts out, and he says, Cursed, that is of God, be the man that maketh any graven or molten image, an abomination unto the Lord, the work of the hands of the craftsman, putting it in a secret place. And all the people shall answer and say, Amen. They agree to that. Well, you read on down through verse 26. But now we're going to go into chapter 28. Now into chapter 28. And again, don't forget the setting. Israel is ready to go in and occupy the land of Canaan. Under Joshua, we're going to see in a moment or two that God is going to tell Moses, boy, now this is something, isn't it? To write your own obituary, to write your own funeral while you're still alive. But that's what Moses does. He writes the whole thing as if it was in the past. And yet, you see, this is the beauty of Scripture. God is leading every word. This is what we call the inspiration, so that Moses can literally write the account of his own death. But we'll come to that in a moment. Now in chapter 28 of Deuteronomy, verse 1, it shall come to pass, if, now you grammarians, what kind of a word is if? What do we call it? Conditional. It's a conditional word. And so God, again, is going to leave it up to the nation of Israel. He's going to leave them with their free will. He's not going to make robots out of them. But he says, "...if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe and to do all his commandments which I command thee this day, that the Lord thy God shall set thee on high above all the nations of the earth." Boy, now that's quite a promise, isn't it? Here they're going to be the greatest nation on earth, if they're just obedient. Now, I know that under law it was far more demanding than what you and I have to be responsible for, but nevertheless, it wasn't impossible. He wasn't asking them to live a life of misery to keep his commandments. They would have been blessed to the hilt. They could have had the happiest, the most contented nation of people on earth. But it was up to them. And then he goes on and he lists all the blessings that would come their way. Now, I always have to qualify. We want to remember that in the Old Testament economy, God rewarded obedience with material blessings. I mean, this is just all through the Old Testament. That's why so many of these great patriarchs were wealthy. God rewarded them materially. Now, we're being deluged. Now, I was going to mention that I ran out of time in our last program when we were dealing with the error and the doctrine and the error of Balaam, but we're being deluged today with what I call prosperity salvation. And that is that if you just get saved, then God will just pour out all kinds of wealth upon you. Now, you heard it? Sure you have. Some of you have given me brochures from some of these outfits where they guarantee that if you'll just send them $50 or $100 that tomorrow morning your debt is gone and within a week or two, you'll be a half a millionaire. Now, listen, that's not according to this book. This is not according to the book. Now, they can preach it. They can scream it. They can yell it. They can do whatever they want with it, but it's not according to the book. All God has promised the believer in the age of grace is a roof over our heads, clothes on our back, and food to eat. That He has promised. Beyond that, it's just His grace, His blessings. Now, there's nothing wrong with material blessing. There's nothing wrong with accumulating wealth. Of course not. But if it becomes a priority, then of course God's going to frown upon it. We know He is. But nevertheless, here in the Old Testament, God is promising that if they're obedient, He will bless them in every which way, mostly material. But, now you come down to, in that same chapter, down to verse 63. Did I want to go that far? I didn't think I did. No, verse 15. I'm sorry. Verse 15. I thought I was going too fast. Now, in chapter 28, verse 15. What's that first word? And what have I told you over the years? One of the crucial words in Scripture. It's just one of the crucial words in Scripture. It just shows the flip side, see? And now, but it shall come to pass. And again, it's conditional. But if they will not hearken, if you will not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God to observe, to do all His commandments, and so on and so forth. Now, beginning with verse 16, instead of the word blessed, what is it? Cursed. Cursed shalt thou be in the city and in the field. Cursed you'll be in your basket and in your store. Verse 18. Cursed shall you be by the fruit of the body and the fruit of the land. And he comes all the way down as to how Israel is going to receive the wrath of God because of their disobedience. Now, you come all the way through, and as you read this, I want you to be aware from your knowledge of even recent history. Do you know that every one of these things has happened to the Jew? Every one of them has happened to the Jew. I remember reading again, I think it was from the Jerusalem Post, that's where I usually get most of these things taking place over there, where one of their most popular talk show hosts had a rabbi, a rather elderly rabbi on his talk show program. And that rabbi made the statement that the reason the Jews had been under such adversarial attack, including the Holocaust, was because of their sin. And you know what happened? The phone just rang off the wall with angry Israelites, maintaining that that had nothing to do with it. Listen, it has everything to do with it. Now, I know, I know that Satan is doing everything he can to thwart the work of God, and consequently he does attack God's chosen people. But, on the other hand, they are responsible for their actions. And so he lists them all here. And then I'd like to have you come all the way down, if you would, to verse 37, as part of these curses. And this is exactly what the Jew experiences in almost every nation on earth. Verse 37, where God says, If they are disobedient, thou shalt become an astonishment, a, what's the next word? A proverb, a byword, a slur word. People will just use a word on you that they wouldn't dream of using on anybody else. Has the Jew gotten there? Yes. Yes, he has. And it's all because of their rejecting the love and the mercy of their Jehovah God. Verse 38, Thou shalt carry much seed out into the field, and gather little of it. And so all the way through with these curses and these blessings, but it was up to the bank. Thank you for watching Through the Bible with Les Feldick. Through the Bible is a partner-supported ministry. If this program has been a help to your study of the scriptures and you'd like to see others enjoy the teaching, your support would be greatly appreciated. Write to us at Les Feldick Ministries, 30706 West Lona Valley Road, Kenta, Oklahoma, 74552. Or call 1-800-369-7856. 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