Blessing and Cursing: Pattern of Israel's History

The core of the instruction in Deuteronomy chapter twenty is in verse 18 ^NASB “so that they may not teach you to do according to all their detestable things which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin against the ^LORD your God.” There is a specific rationale for what God is doing and why God mandates the absolute annihilation of the Canaanites. Not only are they to be destroyed—every man woman and child; total warfare—but their cattle. Everything is to be destroyed because it teaches something about the infectiousness of sin. This concept of total war doesn’t sit well with modern man. The Canaanite worldview, their culture, represents for us and foreshadows for the believer the fact that we, too, live in the world but we are not of the world and we are supposed to have a certain attitude of separation from it. This is what is portrayed historically for us in these Old Testament events.

When we get into the Old Testament these are literal historical events, but God has so chosen to reveal this to us and to record these particular events and not other events in order to teach spiritual principles. The Jews understood this and Paul reiterates this in 1 Corinthians 10—these things happened as an example to us. We must remember that in the Old Testament concept of foreshadowing and typology Israel stands as the individual believer in the church age. It is not that every person in Israel is saved but Israel as the nation is portrayed as the redeemed nation, portrayed as saved.

We have seen that when the nation Israel left Egypt they went to Sinai, and then from Sinai they went to take the land. They went to Kadesh-barnea on the southern boundary of the promised land. The spies were sent out not to see if they could take the land but how they could take the land. The same thing is true in the spiritual life of the believer. God has already given us the victory in the Lord Jesus Christ—1 Corinthians 15, “Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” We are saved at the moment of salvation from the penalty of sin but the spiritual life itself is the process whereby we realize that victory on a day-to-day basis in gaining control over the sin nature. We are freed positionally from the power or enslavement to the sin nature but we nevertheless have to implement biblical doctrines and principles under the filling of the Holy Spirit, walking by means of the Spirit, in order to realize that victory in our day-to-day life; and that is the whole process of the spiritual life. What we have to realize is that the principle is true in the spiritual life today just as it was in the national life of Israel, and that is that the battle is the Lord’s. In the ultimate victory that God is giving Israel in giving them what He has promised them—it is His to give; it is not theirs—the procedures are divine procedures, not human viewpoint procedures. God is going to show to Israel in all of this, and show to us, that the issue is obedience to God, not relying on what may appear to us to be common sense, the way everybody else is doing it, or pragmatic and successful therefore it should be right. The issue is: what does God say?

In terms of this command to annihilate all of the Canaanites the background really goes back to the Noahic covenant. Just after that Noah pronounced a blessing on Shem and on Japheth and a curse, not on Ham but on Noah’s grandson Canaan because Canaan foreshadowed all of the sexual proclivities and perversities of the Canaanite people. God has given them time and time and time again in grace to turn to Him but they have sunk deeper and deeper into all of their various perversions, and so God is going to discipline the Canaanites by annihilating them. They have now given up their right to life and God is going to take their land away from them and take their culture away from them through discipline, and using the Israelites to execute that discipline. God mandates this because He knows that once the Jews go into this Canaanite culture the devastating consequences it would have on their thinking; it would take them away from God. The picture there is the same picture the Lord has for us in the spiritual life. He wants the complete removal from our life and separation from those influences that distract us and tempt us and take us away from an exclusive devotion to the Lord.

God going to give Israel a specific foreign policy and a specific military policy and strategy to take the land which goes against all normal concepts of military and foreign policy. There are two phases of this foreign policy. Deuteronomy 20:10 ^NASB “When you approach a city to fight against it, you shall offer it terms of peace.” These are cities far off, not cities inside Canaan itself, on the eastern side of the Jordan River. [11] “If it agrees to make peace with you and opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall become your forced labor and shall serve you.” So right there we see how God institutes as a matter of course, slavery.

A challenge to our thinking: God does not give principles for regulating sin. So when God gives certain policies that regulate an activity we need to pay attention to it if we from our self-righteous culture think presuppositionally that that activity is sinful. The Bible doesn’t say slavery is wrong; the Bible says slavery practiced in certain conditions is wrong. If we examination the Mosaic law and its teaching on slavery there is always a way for the slave to buy himself out of slavery. It is not based on racial prejudice, it is based on economics usually. In this case it is based on the fact that these nations have given up their right to freedom because of their sinfulness and idolatry. So ultimately what we see here is that every issue sooner or later must be understood in terms of spiritual dynamics. Remember that the source of all problems is sin and so the source of all solutions must be the spiritual solution that God provides.

Deuteronomy 20:12 ^NASB “However, if it does not make peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. [13] When the LORD your God gives it into your hand…” The victory is going to be determined by the Lord, not from their military prowess or technology; it is dependent upon the Lord. “… you shall strike all the men in it with the edge of the sword.” Remember this is talking about the cities outside the land. [14] “Only the women and the children and the animals and all that is in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourself; and you shall use the spoil of your enemies which the LORD your God has given you.” So the Lord authorizes that they take all this booty for themselves as a foundation for their future economy. [15] “Thus you shall do to all the cities that are very far from you, which are not of the cities of these nations nearby.” The point that is being made is that these nations have an opportunity to keep their positions and keep their lives, are given offers of peace, and if they reject that then they lose everything.

This is no different from the offer of the gospel today. There is only one way to come to peace with God and that is through Jesus Christ at the cross. Modern man and the world’s system have a terrible problem with the exclusivity claims of Christianity. The world despises the fact that Christians claim that there is one and only one way to have peace with God, and that is through Jesus Christ. The inference of that is that every other system is completely and totally false.

God wants to establish the fact here in conducting Israel’s foreign policy, the annihilation of the Canaanites, and is providing a framework whereby this new nation, a kingdom of priests, can live in the land as a righteous nation and an example of righteousness to all of the nations. The first stage of the foreign policy deals with those nations in the Trans-Jordan area and then vv. 16ff deal with the foreign policy towards those who are in the cities.

Deuteronomy 20:16 ^NASB “Only in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes. [17] But you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the LORD your God has commanded you, [18] so that they may not teach you to do according to all their detestable things which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin against the LORD your God.” This variety of ethnic groups was a cultural melting pot and they all hold to the same cultural values and the same basic religious systems which by this time is practicing human sacrifice, is deeply involved in all kinds of sexual perversions, the phallic cult, fertility worship everything that went along with it, including temple prostitution, and they are a degraded society. So it is time now that the cancer is excised and removed from the body, for the Canaanite culture to be removed from the human race. This is God’s mandate. God is going to provide the way for them to conquer them, and this is what Israel failed to understand at the first Kadesh.

In Joshua chapter one we see the outline of organization, God’s instruction to Joshua. Joshua 1:6 ^NASB “Be strong and courageous, for you shall give this people possession of the land which I swore to their fathers to give them.” This is a reference back to God’s unconditional promise to provide the land for the nation Israel. [2] “Only be strong and very courageous; be careful to do according to all the law which Moses My servant commanded you; do not turn from it to the right or to the left, so that you may have success wherever you go.” This is the foundation by which the nation is to conquer. It is by obedience to God’s will.

The analogy for the Christian life is that as long as we are following God’s Word and applying God’s Word then it is God who then gives the victory. What we see in Joshua is that the victory is not given because the Israelites practiced the latest in military strategy or because they had the wisest of military generals or because they had the latest technology. It is because God gives them victory. The foundation is to be obedient to the law. We have seen that this is the issue in the entire history of the nation Israel: they will be blessed as long as they are obeying the law; if they are disobedient there is going to be a whole series of five cycles of discipline culminating in the fifth cycle which is the removal of the people from the land.

Joshua 1:8 ^NASB “This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it; for then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have success. [9] Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous! Do not tremble or be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.” The words “Do not tremble or be dismayed” are found again in 1 Samuel chapter seventeen by David going against Goliath. Israel trembled and was dismayed. They always related to the failure to apply the law and to be obedient. “…for [because] the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.” So the foundation for their victory is in the Lord and His provision for the nation.

Moses is not allowed to go into the land because of his sinful failure in hitting the rock when he was to speak to the rock for the water to come forth. He disobeyed God and because of that disobedience, in spite of all of his obedience and all of the wonderful things Moses did and his tremendous spiritual maturity, he was not allowed to enter the land. The only two that were allowed to enter the land were Joshua and Caleb, and at this time they are close to eighty years of age and everyone else is at least twenty years younger.

They come into the land and the first place they hit is Jericho, a fortified city. When we see that the fortification of the city is emphasized in the text our minds should go back to the first Kadesh. When the spies went in to the land and came back they said there were three problems. There were giants in the land, the people were numerous, and they had fortified cities. God is saying: You have lots of problems in your life and I am going to show you that I can solve all of the problems. The first problem they faced was the military problem of a fortress. God told them to go out and circle the city once each day. Think about this. There were approximately two and a half million Jews at this time.

Joshua 6:2 ^NASB “The LORD said to Joshua, ‘See, I have given Jericho into your hand, with its king {and} the valiant warriors. [3] You shall march around the city, all the men of war circling the city once. You shall do so for six days.” There were about 600,000 men of military age. This is a huge number of people walking around the city blowing trumpets. We can imagine what the inhabitants of Jericho were thinking at the time. [4] “Also seven priests shall carry seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark; then on the seventh day you shall march around the city seven times, and the priests shall blow the trumpets.” During this whole time no one was to say a word, the only noise to be produced was to be the blast of the trumpets. [5] :5 “It shall be that when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, and when you hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city will fall down flat, and the people will go up every man straight ahead.”

What God is demonstrating here is that victory comes on God’s terms, not on man’s terms, and that God’s way may seem foolish to man. The whole point is that God has a specific procedure for exercising victory over the city states in Canaan and they are conquered one at a time according to God’s rules, not according to human viewpoint thinking. The picture that we should have in or minds in terms of spiritual application is that this whole promised land here that God has given to Israel represents the believer’s life. At the moment of salvation we have a life and thinking that is dominated by all kinds of sin patterns, sin habits, cosmic ideas and worldly thinking, and our job in sanctification is to eliminate all of that from your life under the power of God the Holy Spirit through studying the Word of God. This is analogous to what happens here. Israel goes into the land and first they take out Jericho, then they take out Ai and go into the central hill country. Then they send out troops south and begin eliminating the major strongholds. They send another force up north and eliminate the various strongholds in the land.

This is analogous to what is to happen in the spiritual life. We start dealing with certain bad habits, with certain major sins that dominate our lives, through application of doctrine and the filling of the Holy Spirit. But what happened in the life of Israel is so often the same pattern we see in the life of a believer. We see somebody who is saved and have a lot of problems in their life. They come out of a problem, whatever it is, are miserable, unhappy; but now they are saved and they start growing and advancing and they deal with the major problems in their life. Now there is a measure of stability, a measure of happiness, a measure of success in their life. What happens? They lose momentum, they stop at that point and they relapse; they don’t pursue the spiritual life all the way to spiritual maturity. This is exactly what happened in the life of Israel in the shift from Joshua to Judges. In the book of Judges we see the nation victorious over the Canaanites but they are simply taking out all of the major strongholds. When they come into the book of Judges what happens is that they don’t carry out God’s commands to the fullest extent; they do not annihilate every man, woman and child among the Canaanites and the Canaanite culture. They begin to exercise their own judgment and authority independent from that of God, and so there are pockets left, strongholds of Canaanite culture that are left in the land. It is from these strongholds of Canaanite culture that there is an influence now on the nation, and so the whole book of Judges is a description of what happens in the life of the nation. They reach a certain level of victory and then they begin to compromise, everything begins to fall apart and they go through seven different cycles of disobedience, discipline and deliverance. That is basically the story of Judges.

The key verse in Judges is stated twice to make sure that we don’t miss it. Judges 17:6 and 21:25 ^NASB “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.” Judges is a book for our times. It is a book about the impact or result of cultural relativism on the Jews after the conquest because they failed to execute God’s plan precisely and in its place they compromised. Compromise always leads to the assimilation of false values. The underlying issue is authority, and that is why authority is the foundational issue in everything in life. Cultural relativism is what we see in the book of Judges: everybody does that which is right in their own eyes.

A summary of the entire book of Judges: Judges 2:11 ^NASB “Then the sons of Israel did evil in the sight of the LORD and served the Baals.” This is subsequent to their conquest under Joshua. The first ten verses of chapter two rehearse Joshua’s victory over the Canaanites when they first entered the land. Then the next generation comes along, and because their parents generation failed to apply God’s Word one hundred per cent, and learned from their example that you can have a measure of success without complete obedience, so they said they would do what they wanted to do. The term “Baal” literally just means “lord” and it is a reference to the second person in pantheon of the Canaanite religion. [12] “and they forsook the LORD, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt, and followed other gods from {among} the gods of the peoples who were around them, and bowed themselves down to them; thus they provoked the LORD to anger. [13] So they forsook the LORD and served Baal and the Ashtaroth. [14] The anger of the LORD burned against Israel, and He gave them into the hands of plunderers who plundered them; and He sold them into the hands of their enemies around {them,} so that they could no longer stand before their enemies.” Here we see the exercise of the cycles of discipline as outlined in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. First there is disobedience to God, rejecting God, vv. 11, 12; then there is divine discipline, vv. 14, 15. [15] “Wherever they went, the hand of the LORD was against them for evil, as the LORD had spoken and as the LORD had sworn to them, so that they were severely distressed.

Then there is deliverance. There is always grace in judgment. God always provides a solution to the sin problem. Judges 2:16 ^NASB “Then the LORD raised up judges who delivered them from the hands of those who plundered them.” The people would come to a point where they were devastated, were being dominated by a foreign power, and eventually they would turn back to the Lord and confessed their sin, and at that point God would deliver them. [17] “Yet they did not listen to their judges, for they played the harlot after other gods and bowed themselves down to them. They turned aside quickly from the way in which their fathers had walked in obeying the commandments of the LORD; they did not do as {their fathers.}” As soon as things were going good again they would turn their backs on God and they would go back. This has a common ring to it. When life gets bad people often turn to the Lord and get interested in doctrine and everything smooths out. Then they start getting distracted until everything falls apart again, then they come screaming back to God because God is simply there to take care of them when they have problems. [18] “When the LORD raised up judges for them, the LORD was with the judge and delivered them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge; for the LORD was moved to pity by their groaning because of those who oppressed and afflicted them. [19] But it came about when the judge died, that they would turn back and act more corruptly than their fathers, in following other gods to serve them and bow down to them; they did not abandon their practices or their stubborn ways.” There is not only this cycle of disobedience, discipline and deliverance, but there is a decline; it gets worse. There are seven cycles through the book of Judges and each one gets worse and lasts longer until the last one where the Philistines are dominating. God raises up Samson but nobody wants Samson to deliver them and when the book ends the nation is still under the heel of the Philistines.

There is a great picture here because what we see is the nation still under the oppression of the Philistines and it is not until David, the picture of Jesus Christ the Messiah, that the people are ultimately delivered.

Judges 2:20 ^NASB “So the anger of the LORD burned against Israel, and He said, ‘Because this nation has transgressed My covenant which I commanded their fathers and has not listened to My voice, [21] I also will no longer drive out before them any of the nations which Joshua left when he died…” At that point the Lord is going to leave them there. Why? [22] in order to test Israel by them, whether they will keep the way of the LORD to walk in it as their fathers did, or not.” There is a continuous challenging and testing and it is a picture of how we are continually tested by our own sin nature to see if we will continue our walk with the Lord.

When we read through Joshua, Judges and Ruth the picture is: Joshua, the conquest, when God has given us the victory in the Lord Jesus Christ and the issue to recognize that is to live the Christian life according to God’s principles and procedures. When these principles and procedures are violated then there is defeat. God has given us the victory but we must learn the principles of Scripture in order to realize that in our present experience. Judges is the picture of what happens when the believer fails, when the believer compromises, when the believer fails to submit himself to the authority of God. Ruth is the picture of how God is going to provide the Kinsman-Redeemer. Jesus Christ in order to redeem us has to be a kinsman, true humanity. Only true humanity could pay the penalty for the sins of the human race on the cross.