Why Israel Failed to Enter the Promised Land (Exodus 23 & Deut 1)

Hello, and welcome to Through the Bible with Les Feldick. An Oklahoma rancher and farmer, Les Feldick has been teaching homestyle Bible classes for 20 years in Iowa, Oklahoma, and Texas. Les Feldick's unique style of Bible teaching has made the books of the Bible come to life. When Les is teaching, it's so interesting that people say time just seems to fly by. And now, here is Les Feldick. Okay, it's good to have everybody back after the break, and for those of you on television, we wish you could share the coffee and the cookies with us. We try to keep it down to 10 minutes, but I'll tell you what, they can't get away from my wife's cookies, so it usually gets a little longer. But anyway, we're glad, and those of you in the studio can be turning back to Exodus, chapter 23, I think, this time. We're going to skip a couple in here. I'm trying to go as fast as I can, because I had an interesting call the other day from a dear lady here in Oklahoma, and she said, Les, would you please just digress, stop where you are, and go back and teach the book of Revelation. She said, I'm 89 years old, and I want you to teach it before I pass on. And bless her heart, I said, well, we'll try to hurry. We'll try to move on up, and I think we will. After we get through the book of Exodus, we certainly don't go chapter by chapter and verse by verse, as most of you know. We'll take a brief look at Israel's history, leading up to, of course, the book of Daniel. And then we get to the book of Daniel, we're going to stop and, indeed, study prophecy for a while, because when you study Daniel, you've got to study Revelation, and when you study Revelation, you have to study Daniel. So we'll be doing that in the not -too-far-distant future. Now again, I'm always having to be reminded that even though we're here for a whole afternoon, this is a new week for those of you in television, and again, we'd like to remind you that our programs all the way back to the beginning are available on VCR. We've also had a lady in Colorado come forward, and on her own, and again, without any compensation, she is putting our VCR tapes into print, using a computer, of course. And so now we have the little booklets available. And again, my wife is taking care of the VCRs and the booklet orders. So if you'll just call or drop us a note, and we're hoping to get this into a little larger booklet than the first one. We're amateurs at this, and we're just sort of going by trial and error. But I think the next little booklet will be a compilation of the first 12 programs, whereas this one is still only three. But anyway, we know a lot of you are interested in getting it in print, so contact us and we'll get it. And it'll be larger print. This first one was too small a print, and we're making corrections as we go. All right, now then, let's get back into the book, back to Exodus once again. And now that the law has been given, and of course, man being what he is, even Israel, they're going to be shortly breaking it. And so God has to not only give the Ten Commandments, but He's going to give what we would call the whole system of law. Now, in that whole system of law, of course, I probably haven't—yeah, I guess I got room enough. We like to break it down into the moral law, which of course is the Ten. And then He comes right down the line, and He gives Israel the civil law. In other words, if their bull gets out and tramples down someone else's grain, there had to be a system to make compensation. And if someone did someone wrong, and that was all part of the civil law. Then on top of that, in order to compensate for their breaking of the moral law, God gave them what I like to refer to as the ritual, or the system of worship, however you want to use the term, or the ecclesiastical part of the legal system. And that involved, of course, the—I've already put a drawing on the board. That's why we're soon going to be studying the tabernacle, and establishing the priesthood, so that Israel would know exactly what to do under any set of circumstances. But before we get to the tabernacle, I'd like to have you stop in chapter 23. And the reason I want to have you stop here, we are all acquainted with the story of the ten spies, twelve spies, that go into the land of Canaan to spy out the land. And I imagine that 99 out of 100 casual Bible students, at least, do not understand that that was not part of God's plan at all. God intended for them to trust Him explicitly. After all, He had already brought them out of Egypt miraculously. He had brought them through the Red Sea. After all, what are some measly little Canaanites, even though they may have been seven, eight feet tall? What are they with such a God? And so God's intention was that as soon as the tabernacle is completed—and like I said, we're going to be studying it, starting it, and I'm going to spend a lot of time on it. But I do want to teach the tabernacle, because it is so beautiful in type. But as soon as the tabernacle will be ready, which will be in a year, God wants them to raise it up, and He's going to take them right straight north into the Promised Land. No delay with twelve spies or any such thing. Now, this is so clear now in Exodus chapter 23. Now, ordinarily I don't like to read too much, but on the other hand, sometimes people have told me that as I read, they'll see things they never saw before. So we'll just trust that the Word will speak as I read it. Beginning with verse 20. Now, we may skim some of this. We may not just read everything word by word, and as I've always encouraged my classes, when you get home or sometime in the next few days, go back and indeed read these, so that if I have skipped something, you can pick it up. Behold, verse 20, chapter 23, I send an angel. I always have to stop. Who's the angel in this case? Well, it's Jehovah Himself. Remember I pointed that out several weeks ago, that the angel of God, the angel of the Lord, is always God the Son. It's Jehovah. We picked that up in Genesis 46, where Jacob referred to Him as the redeeming angel. Now, there's only one Redeemer in Scripture, and that's God the Son. It's Jehovah in the Old Testament, Christ in the New. So it's the same person now that is referred to here then as the angel. Behold, I send an angel before thee to keep thee in the way, and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared. See, now this is Jehovah speaking, and He's going to lead them. Oh, let's see. Verse 23. Now, I'm going to skip a few of these just for sake of time. For mine angel shall go before thee, and bring thee into the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hivites, the Jebusites. And God says, I will cut them off, thou shalt not bow down to their gods. Verse 25. You shall serve the Lord your God. He shall bless thy bread, thy water. I will take sickness away from the midst of thee. Now then, verse 27. I will send my fear before thee, and will destroy. Now keep the subject in mind here. Who's going to do the destroying? God is. He's not telling Israel they have to. God says, I will destroy all the people to whom thou shalt come. I will make all thy enemies to turn their backs and run before thee. Verse 29. I will not drive them out before thee in one year. In other words, this isn't going to happen all of a sudden, because otherwise Israel wouldn't be able to keep up with it. So I'll not drive them out in one year, lest the land become desolate. In other words, they wouldn't be able to keep on taking care of it. And the beasts of the field multiply against thee. But little by little, I will drive them out from before thee, until thou be increased, and inherit the land. And now look at verse 31, and remembering those of you who've been with me all the way since Genesis 1. Here comes the promise given to Abraham of how much they would inherit. And remember, it was to be all the way from the River of Egypt to the Euphrates River on the east, northern Lebanon or Mount Hermon on the north, and the Red Sea on the south. That whole Middle East had been promised to the nation of Israel. And so he says, I will set thy bounds from the Red Sea even to the Sea of the Philistines, which of course would be the Mediterranean, from the desert, that is the Judean desert I'm sure, to the river. Now when the Bible says the river, what is it? Euphrates. That's the river in Scripture. For I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand, thou shalt drive them out before thee, thou shalt make no covenant with them, that they not dwell in thy land, lest they make thee sin against me. Now in line with that, I'd like to have you turn with me just for a second, and we'll look at it again in weeks to come. Go to Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy chapter 1, where Paul, where Moses is now, the book of Deuteronomy is a synopsis, it's just a repeat of everything. And so he is going back here at the book of Deuteronomy from when they had first come away from Mount Sinai, and were indeed ready to go, as we see here in Exodus, to go into the Promised Land. Verse 19 of Deuteronomy 1, now Moses says, when we departed from Horeb, that is of course Mount Sinai where they're going to be building this tabernacle, when we departed from Horeb we went through all that great and terrible wilderness, which you saw by the way of the mountain of the Amorites, as the Lord our God commanded us, and we came to Kadesh Barnea. And I said unto you, verse 20, you are come to the mountain of the Amorites, which the Lord our God doth give unto us, behold, the Lord thy God hath set the land before thee, go up and possess it. Does he tell them to send in 12 spies? No. So whose idea was it? Well, it was the Israelites, see? They were the ones that backed off, and weak in faith and forgetting all of the power that their God had manifested, they say, hey, we can't go in until we know what we're up against. And God condescended, see? But oh, don't you imagine, those Jews must have wished those 12 had never gone in, because it was because of their report that Israel got weak and got afraid and said, oh, we can't do it. And then, you know, the amazing thing, and we look at this from time to time, you get back to the book of Hebrews, we won't take time to look at it, but I think it's in Hebrews chapter 4, when Paul, by inspiration, is referring to those 40 years that they wasted in the wilderness. And he says, you could have gone in, you could have had the land of promise, but you did not because of your, what, unbelief, not their immorality, and oh, they'd been guilty of a lot of that. And it wasn't because of any other thing, but it was because of their unbelief, see? And oh, listen, that is so appropriate for us today. What's the matter with Christianity tonight? Unbelief, see, unbelief. People just cannot break down and say, yeah, I believe what God says. But they got the intellectual world, with all of their intelligence and with all of their education, poo-pooing the Scripture, and so what does man say? Well, now really, how can I believe this? That's unbelief, see? And this is what gets to the very heart of God. All right, back, if you will, now then, to Exodus. So God is preparing the nation of Israel. Remember now, we got several million strong. They're gathered around Mount Sinai. They have now been given the law, the Ten. God has already begun to give them a certain amount of the civil law in these intervening chapters, and now He's getting ready to set up the ecclesiastical, or that part of the law which establishes their, what we would later call their, temple worship. Now of course, it's going to be a tabernacle. Now who knows why this is called a tabernacle? What's the other word for tabernacle? Tent, see? And what is a tent? Well, it's temporary. When you live in a tent, you're not living in something substantial and permanent. You're living in something that you can pick up and move. Now Paul also refers to our body as a what? As a tent, as a tabernacle, see? It's not here forever. It's temporary. And consequently, we have to tie all this together. All right, verse 1 now then of chapter 25. God has called Moses up again into the top of the mountain, and the fire and the thunder is taking place. And the Lord, verse 1 of chapter 25, spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, that they bring me an offering of every man that giveth it willingly with his heart ye shall take my offering. Now remember, what was the word? Willingly, willingly. And this is the offering which ye shall take from them, gold, silver, brass, purple, or blue, purple, and scarlet, and fine linen, goat's hair, in other words, skins or whatever put together of goat's hair, ram skins dyed red, badger skins. Now I always have to identify or, what should I say, define that word badgers. We in North America think of the animal that's about that wide across the top and big long claws. Well, they don't know that animal in the Middle East. And so the badger here was really a seal, a seawater animal, a seal. And I want you to remember that because of the hide of these seals that will be put on the outside of the little tabernacle tent, and I'll point that out when we come to it. Now the first thing, I'll read on for a little bit, oil for the light, spices for the anointing, the sweet incense, the onyx stones, and we know the stones that were in the ephod and in the umen and the thumen, beautiful stones. Now here they are. They're out there in that wilderness. They're out there in the Sinai desert. Where are they going to get all this material? Where did it come from? Egypt, see? You remember when they came out of Egypt, they spoiled Egypt, and the Egyptians just gave everything to these Israelites? God had all this in mind, see? It was a sovereign God who caused those Egyptians to just give of their wealth. Several years ago I read a book of ancient, ancient history, and there isn't an awful lot of written material back from other than the Scriptures, but they are beginning to find a little on the papyrus and some of the hieroglyphics and so forth, that Egypt was indeed a complete shambles economically, socially, militarily, and everything by the time the Israelites had left. Well, here's the reason. Israel just simply took the wealth of Egypt, not because they took it by deceit or anything like that, but simply the sovereign God had laid it upon the Egyptians to just give them everything they had. Now then, we're going to just start for a little bit on the tabernacle building here in verse 10, because I'd like to point something out. As God is now giving instruction—now I said verse 10, I want verse 9—as God is now beginning to give instructions for this tabernacle, an amazing thing comes up, and I think very few people have caught it, even though they may have been reading their Bible all their life, and that is that the tabernacle plan, the floor plan, that God gave to Moses was a copy of one not on this earth, but where? In heaven. All right, now let's look at it in verse 9—or verse 8, rather, I'm sorry. Let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them, according to all that I show you after the pattern—see, now that's the crucial word—after the pattern of the tabernacle and the pattern of all the instruments thereof, even so shall you make it. In other words, God isn't just dreaming this up from nothing. God says, Moses, I'm going to give you the instructions to build this tabernacle on earth, patterned after one that is in heaven. All right, now we've got to show that from Scripture, don't we? That would take us back to Hebrews, Hebrews chapter 9, Hebrews chapter 9. Now, we alluded to this several weeks ago, and I've had several requests to repeat it, so if we've got time in this half hour, we're going to try and do it. If not, we may just wait until the next program, because I don't like to get rushed in those final minute or two. But here in Hebrews chapter 9, you drop down to verse 11. Hebrews chapter 9, verse 11, where Paul writes, But Christ being come a high priest of good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, what's the next statement? Not made with hands. See? In other words, not something that was made like the tabernacle in the Sinai, not something that was made like Solomon's temple by men, but see, we're talking about a tabernacle that God has constructed, see, a tabernacle not made with hands, that is to say, not of this building. Now, if you've got a newer translation, maybe they've put it in the text, otherwise I hope you've got a marginal Bible that'll give you some help. That word building would have been better translated what? Creation. In other words, this, what Paul is referring to, not made with men's hands, is not on this earth, it's not on this creation, so it has to be where? In heaven. In heaven itself, into the very throne room. And evidently God had set this up in heaven so that even though we see it all practiced back here in ancient Israel, yet this becomes so appropriate for you and I in the age of grace, you see, and we'll be coming to all this in the next few lessons, but when that high priest went in and sprinkled the blood on the mercy seat, he came all the way through and sprinkled the blood on the mercy seat as the high priest of Israel, what did Christ do for us? Well, He did the same thing, only instead of going into the tabernacle of Israel or into Solomon's temple, He went into the tabernacle where? In heaven. Now read on, verse 12 of this same chapter, neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by His own blood, He, Christ, entered in once into the holy place, now remember this back little room behind the veil was called the holy of holies, the holy place. Now Christ didn't go into this one, which one did He go into? The one in heaven, see, as our high priest, He went into the holy place having, since He brought the divine shed blood from His own crucifixion, having obtained eternal redemption for us. Now you see why a study of the tabernacle then is so appropriate, and a lot of people just think, oh, don't touch that, that's so old and dusty and there's just nothing in it for us. Hey, it's got everything in it for us, and we're going to be pointing that out. So now then, if you'll come back again to Exodus 25, we've got to keep making a little headway, Exodus 25, you'll notice that the first thing in verse 10 now that God gives instruction is for this piece of furniture way back here. Now remember, this is east, I probably should put all this on the board, this faced east, and so always they set it the same way, and this would be the west, and of course this was the south. Now then, as man would approach God, of course he had to come from here. Here was the brazen altar on which, of course, they made their sacrifices. But here was the very ark of the covenant, the mercy seat wherein the high priest would come once a year and sprinkle. Now, it's interesting that as God gives instruction for all this, He begins with this piece of furniture, not this one. He begins with this one. Now why is that? Because you see, when God deals with man in salvation, where does everything have to begin? With Himself. With Himself. Always remember, man does not look for and find God. Remember that? Always take you back, those of you who've been with me now, some of you who've been with me for 10, 12, 13, 14 years, I guess. When Adam and Eve sinned, and they sowed those fig leaves, well, I guess they did all right for a few hours, and then towards the evening, who did they hear in the garden? Well, the Lord, God. Did Adam and Eve run to meet Him and say, Lord, You're the one we're looking for? Oh, what'd they do? They hid. See? They hid. Who had to find them? God did. Now listen, it has never changed. Mankind will never, of his own volition, go looking for God. It's just contrary to our makeup. God has to make the first move. Now, that doesn't mean that God has simply forgotten some, and has, according to what we call extreme Calvinism, has already picked out who He will save and who He won't. I do not agree with that one whit, because the work of the cross was sufficient for how many? Everybody. You remember a few weeks ago I used the illustration in John's Gospel, chapter 10, of the door to the sheepfold? Does that door, or is that door located where it ostracizes some people? No. Remember where I said it was? Ground level. Yeah, I'm way glad when people can remember. It's on ground level. It's not beyond the reach of anybody. But nevertheless, it still has to begin with God. And so the first instruction for this tabernacle is going to start with this, the Ark of the Covenant. And then we move on through. Then we come on this side of the veil, and then the next furniture that is listed is the table of showbread. That's in verse 23. Thou shalt make a table of acacia wood. Now, acacia was a little shrub or a little tree that grew in the Sinai Desert. And again, this just tells us of some of the craftsmanship of those Israelis coming out of Egypt. Now, you remember they'd been in slavery, but they had craftsmanship in everything. Now, I was studying this again a while back, and again, like I said, I do most of my thinking when I'm out there in the field, in the open air. But you know, in the last generation, you know, we think they've come up with such technology as particle board and plywood and all these things. And shoot, nothing new. They took this little old acacia tree, and somehow or other, they took the particles about it. And if you read the description, they got boards in here, I think something like 18 inches wide. Well, there were no acacia trees that big, so would they have to do it? They somehow or other glued and particled it so that they had all of these furnishings made out of this acacia wood. Now, it's just an interesting thing to think about. Well, anyway, then the table of showbread is next. Then they go over to the golden candlestick, and God gives instructions on how to build that, and it's going to be all out of beaten gold. And then as you come on through, you'll see that He just gradually keeps moving in the instructions all the way out until He meets with mankind. Now then, I don't know how to do this in just a minute or two, but I want you to come all the way over now then, if you will, to chapter 30. And now after describing how to make the Ark of the Covenant, the table of showbread, the candlestick, then He comes to—let's see, I believe I skipped a chapter. No, I didn't either. We're still all right. Come on over to chapter 30, and now He tells—no, it is chapter 30, verse 1—how to make the altar of incense, which is this third one right here in the middle. Now this all is moving out towards. Now the altar of incense also was made of this acacia wood, covered with gold. And then in the few seconds we've got left, you'll come over to verse 18, and here's where we're going to pick up next week. They were also to make a laver of cleansing, filled with water, where the priest would wash his hands and his feet. Thank you for watching Through the Bible with Les Feldick, a weekly Bible study. If you would like more information about the Les Feldick Ministries, a Bible study in your area, or about this program, write to Les Feldick Ministries, and that's Route 1, Box 760, Kinta, Oklahoma, 74552. That's Route 1, Box 760, Kinta, Oklahoma, 74552. Through the Bible with Les Feldick is viewer -supported, and your gift is appreciated. Thank you, and be sure to tune in next time for Through the Bible with Les Feldick.