Gooding, David: 3 - Leading God's Nation

We come now to discuss, to dis- uh, to discuss together the first of the captivities. We're looking for the source of it, where things went wrong, for the deliverer, and the question of how he was equipped and qualified to be a deliverer, and the tactics that he, he, he, he used, and the nature of the enemy itself. So let's begin to read in the book of Judges, chapter one and verse twelve. And Caleb said, He that smiteth Kiriath Sepher and taketh it, to him will I give Axar, my daughter, to wife. And Othniel, the son of Kenaz, Caleb's younger brother, took it, and he gave him Axar, his daughter, to wife. It came to pass when she came to him that she moved him to ask of her father a field. And she lighted down from off her ass, and Caleb said unto her, What wouldest thou? She said unto him, Give me a blessing, for that thou hast set me in the land of the south, give me also springs of water. And Caleb gave her the upper springs and the nether springs. And with that, we come to chapter three and verse five. And the children of Israel dwelt among the Canaanites, the Hittite, and the Amorite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite. And they took their daughters to be their wives, and gave their own daughters to their sons, and served their gods. And the children of Israel did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, and forgot the Lord their God, and served the Baalim and the Asheroth. They are the masculine and the female gods. Therefore, the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he sold them into the hand of Cushan Rishathaim, king of Mesopotamia. And the children of Israel served Cushan Rishathaim eight years. And when the children of Israel cried unto the Lord, the Lord raised up a savior to the children of Israel, who saved them, even Othniel, the son of Kenaz, Caleb's younger brother. And the spirit of the Lord came upon him, and he judged Israel, and he went out to war. And the Lord delivered Cushan-Rishathaim, king of Mesopotamia, into his hand. And his hand prevailed against Cushan-Rishathaim. And the land had rest forty years, and Othniel the son of Kenaz died. So, um, uh, we come then to, uh, this, the first, uh, captivity and the first, uh, deliverer, and we start reconnoitering the enemy. The enemy was a certain Cushan Reshathaim, the name of the king. Now, whether he was christened that name, I can't tell you, because it is in Hebrew, it means the king of double wickedness, and I fancy that this is, uh, what Hebrews very often do and people in different languages do. They take a foreign name, uh, which is a foreign name, and they put it into their own language in a way that it makes sense in their own language. And, uh, therefore it comes out to be in their language, Kushen Rishathaim, king of double wickedness. He dwelt in Mesopotamia. Better put it the right way around, I suppose. And if we think of Mesopotamia and where it was, its name in English means Meso, in the middle of Potamia. It's in the middle of the two rivers, the river Euphrates and the river Tigris. Now, where Abram came from in the, uh, uh, beginning was Ur of Chaldees, right down here in the south. But you will remember that Genesis tells us how he left that city and with his father and went up, and he dwelt in Haran until Terah died. And from there he came over to the, uh, uh, land of Canaan, past Lebanon, Syria, Sea of Galilee, and down here, Dead Sea. Here is the land, uh, given to Israel. This is the Fertile Crescent. A lot of people did that kind of thing, this being largely desert. If they were going to travel, they wouldn't come straight across because of the desert. They would come round in Mesopotamia because the two rivers and the thing being, uh, much more, uh, um, fruitful and come round the northern crescent, they call it, down that way. Many an invading army came that way. But, um, since Abraham lived for a time up here in north Mes- Mesopotamia, Judges is quite, um, uh, realistic when he says that Israel at the first fell under the power of the king of Mesopotamia at that stage, who oppressed them. That was therefore the, the enemy. If you ask what was the trouble, how did Israel get under his, uh, rule and so forth, then it is, Judges tells you that explicitly. That is because Israel, contrary to God's, uh, uh, explicit, uh, instructions, they married the Canaanite girls and gave their daughters to the Canaanites. They intermarried, and that without those others being converted, genuinely converted to faith in the God of Israel. Rahab, you may remember in the time of Joshua, had been converted and turned to the living God from idols to serve the living and the true God. But at this stage, Israel didn't bother to make sure that their wives were converted, so to speak, to faith in the true God, married them in spite of it, what we in modern days would call married unbelievers. Hence the trouble that their wives insisted on maintaining their own heathen practices, and before long, uh, the true faith was all muddled up with paganism. How was Othniel qualified to be the deliverer? Well, because, as we were saying earlier today, and we read it then in chapter one, his own experience was not to be a hard old wizened bachelor himself. He too was given the gift, the charisma to be married. But look at the wife he chose. Gentlemen, if I were going to preach a p- a a a a practical lesson from this, do you see? Uh, um, but I'm not, because I am, after all, a bachelor, you see, so I'm not qualified to to say that. But if I had been going to preach a letter, what I would have said is, do be careful whom you marry, because this can be an exceedingly powerful help towards fulfilling your duties as a man of God, or it can be a very big hindrance. As in our professions, we have to work to earn a living, so we've got to work anyway, but it's a good thing to lay it out before God, that he may take our very professions, if he please, and use them for the furtherance of his kingdom, or may a- may ask us to give up our profession, that we might give ourselves to the work of his kingdom. For most of us, it is that our work becomes a part of the ongoing rule of God in our lives, and therefore is part of the whole scheme, whatever our work is. You see, as we said this morning, Axar was the daughter of Caleb. It was rising to the challenge of Caleb to go and fight the giants in Kiriath-Javim, reacting to that and going and smiting them earned him Caleb's daughter to wife, and she proved to be a veritable Caleb herself. The instigation not only get the steal- getting his heart and conquering him, but the instigation in helping him to go forward and enlarge his inheritance. He, as you can see, had a right to, uh, lead Israel back to the worship of God. How shall we apply to ourselves the enemy, so to speak? What does the enemy represent? Well, to be his fair to the history, Mesopotamia was the place, let's say it again, from which Abram came out. And Acts chapter seven gives us his motivation. Says Stephen at the beginning of his speech, the God of glory appeared to Abraham when he was in Ur of Chaldees and brought him out. Ur of Chaldees, down the south of Mesopotamia, was a very famous city in the ancient world and civilized according to those times. But it wasn't a merely a negative thing. This city is very wicked, get out of it. Notice his motivation was a positive motivation. Why did he leave it? For the sake of a bigger glory, he left it. The God of glory, says Stephen, Acts chapter seven, appeared to Abraham. When he was in Mesopotamia, even before he dwelt in Haran. And said unto him, get thee out of the land and from thy kindreds, and come into the land which I shall show thee. Then came he out of the land of Chaldeans and dwelt in Haran, and from thence, when his father was dead, God removed him into this land wherein you now dwell. And he gave him none inheritance in it, no, not so much as to set his foot on. And he promised that he would give it to him in possession and to his seed after him, when as yet he had no child. And so forth and so on. It was the attraction, the supreme attraction of the glory of the living and true God that got hold of his heart and of his vision and drew him out. It was, of course, an exercise of faith, for having left Mesopotamia, even Haran, and come into the land of Canaan. It was a pilgrimage still. He was never given so much as a, a foothold to own it actually, though it was promised to him and to his seed, eh, for a possession. He himself never possessed it, and he lived as a pilgrim still, for he trusted the promises of the God who had revealed himself to him, that one day his seed would inherit it. And Hebrews comments that in all those long years, he could have gone back to Mesopotamia from which he came out, but he didn't. He remained and lived as a pilgrim in the land of Me- uh, in the land of Canaan, for he looked even beyond Canaan to the city that hath the foundation, whose builder and maker is God, sustained by vision of the God of glory. So now, if I suggest to you that Mesopotamia and its king are a picture of the world, I think you will see my thinking. Mesopotamia, the place from which Abram came out. He had dwelt in her, that was a poly- polytheistic place with all its gods. He left it drawn by the supreme go- uh, glory of the God who appeared to him. The God of glory appeared to him. If then I say that, uh, Mesopotamia represents the world, then of course we shall immediately think of the exhortations in the New Testament that bid us not to be worldly. That raises the question, gentlemen, of what worldliness is. And secondly, how do you go about treating worldliness to cure it? And here we have to be very careful, for we can get very narrow ideas of what worldliness is if we are not careful. In my youth, years and years ago, ladies all wore black woolen stockings, occasionally brown, but mostly black, and they were wooly- woolen, as far as I knew, never did examine them very closely. But every lady wore them. And then in the course of time, manufacturers manufactured different kind of stockings, and they were these flesh colored stockings, you'll see, made of nylon and various other things like that. And little by little, uh, these stockings, uh, were worn by more and more ladies. They were held to be very worldly. And for a good Christian woman to come along to the assembly in these, oh, flesh-colored stockings was desperate worldliness, to see. However, in the end, woolen and black stockings were no longer manufactured. You couldn't get hold of them anyway. So all the ladies had to wear flesh-colored stockings. No other choice, and they wore them. I remember the occasion when, a- after some years, a bright young thing came down to our assembly from London, and you know what? She wore black stockings. Wow, they said, look at that for worldliness. The latest fashion. But you know, worldliness isn't dependent on the color of the stockings. There's something much deeper in worldliness, isn't there? In the first epistle of John, John gives us three descriptions of worldliness. In chapter two, he talks about the world and says, love not the world, neither the things that are in the world, for the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eye and the pride of life, these are not of the Father, but of the world. Don't love the world. Here John is talking about the attractiveness of the world. We are not to love it. In chapter three he talks about the world, but he talks about the hostility of the world. Don't be surprised if the world hates you. It's another aspect of the world. And in chapter five, he talks about another aspect of the world. God's commandments are not grievous, they're not a heavy weight, they're not grievous. Why? Because whatsoever is born of God overcomes the world. Now the world is a heavy weight. It's not necessarily hostile to the believer, but the world is so arranged as can make life difficult for a man that is determined to keep the commandments of the Lord. What would you do if you were in some other Eastern European country- countries where bribes are the order of the day, where policemen make up their salaries by demanding payment? If you don't pay, you get a ch- a charge. Where civil servants all the way down the line demand bribes as payment. What would you do? Not to pay, and of course, in countries where we work, we know the problem, but not to pay means that you encounter many, many difficulties. You can escape them, if you will, by paying, but then you put a noose around your neck. If you refuse to pay, in the end, people get tired of asking. But you see, in situations where commerce from the managing director down means cheating in the books, like Enron, or all sorts of things, then it can be very difficult for a believer who wants to keep the commandments of God. It's not that the world is hostile to him, but if you don't cooperate, it can be very difficult. Worldliness, then. There are different aspects to it. I commend to you John's first epistle because of his analysis of it. But the Gospel of John also talks about the world in that bad sense of the world. And our Lord came to deliver us. They are not of the world, says he. I have chosen them out of the world. They're not of the world. What is meant by worldliness? A good example in the Old Testament, of course, is is Pharaoh and his treatment of the Israelites. He had the Israelites in bondage. God sent Moses to talk to Pharaoh and said, let my people go so that they may go out of Egypt and a- into the wilderness and worship God. Nonsense, said Pharaoh. I tell you straight, Moses, I don't believe in your God anyway. I don't know your God, Jehovah, and it's a lot, a lot of nonsense. And as for your story, that when you came into Egypt, God had appeared to your fathers in the past, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and given them great promises of an inheritance in the time to come. That's a lot of nonsense, Moses, legend. You don't have a past, and you're not going to have a future. All there is for you and your people in this country, for your people, if not for you, is the daily round, work, eat, sleep, sleep, eat, work, and an odd game of football now and again if you want, but that's all there is to it. All this notion that there were promises of God to your parents who hold out a marvelous future that lies ahead of you yet, that's all poppy corn, as you will find out, he says to Moses. That's worldliness too. Living in this world as if this world were everything, with all your ambitions just in this world. What breaks that? Well, listen to, uh, Abraham again. The God of glory appeared to Abraham and lit up his heart and therefore his faith and his ambitions, that there was a bigger world. And our Lord says in the Gospel of John, talking about this very thing, you'll see, now get hold of this, gentlemen, is that I came into the world, I left the Father and came into the world. Now I leave the world and go back to the Father. There is another world, and be careful that you're not deceived into living as though this world were everything. When Moses was commissioned of God to deliver Israel out of Egypt. He took the precaution of asking God, when I come to my, uh, uh, co- uh, uh, co-nationals, you see, and I say to them, the God of your fathers has appeared, and I've sent you to deliver my people, and they say, what is his name? What shall I tell them? And God said, what you will tell them is this, I am that I am, the eternal, unchanging God. Tell them, I am has sent me. And Moses went and told the Israelites the name of God, that their faith in God might be provoked, and their faith in the eternal God. True, of course, to all his promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and true about the future promises he held out. So does our Lord speak, reporting to the Father the effects of his mission. These are the men you gave me out of the world. How did I get them out of the world? I declared to them your name, says he. Yes, because if we are to be delivered from worldliness in all its senses, the God of glory must appear to us as well. We must allow the Savior to expound to us the name of the Lord with all its attendance, glory, and majesty, and the wonder of it. Our faith and our affections and our ambitions might respond thus to the God of glory. Ever since I noticed that, I sort of tucked it under my helmet. If ever I were to meet an assembly or group of Christians whom I thought now had become rather worldly, how should I go about helping them? Laying down the rules, don't wear black stockings or white stockings or whatnot. Uh, how would you go about helping them overcoming worldliness? And I said to myself, my boy, this will be a difficult thing, but God helping you. Tell them the name of God, the glory of God, lest they should think that you're merely criticizing and denying them the good things of life, to become kind of Puritan hermits in their cells, wearing nothing but hair shirts, which isn't true, is it? It's the vision of the God of glory that brings us out from worldliness. Let's look at two Peter to see what Peter says about the matter. Two Peter chapter one s- verse three, Seeing that his divine power has granted unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that called us by his own glory, not simply to his glory, called us by his own glory and virtue. That's Peter telling you of his experience of Christ. It was the sheer glory of Christ. It was the quality, the virtue of Christ that got hold of his heart. He made many false moves and many stumblings, but that he never forgot. And in this same chapter, second Peter chapter one, he tells you of the time when he was in the Holy Mount and he saw the glory. And if we would be kept from worldliness and its false attractions, or sustained through its persecution, or strengthened to keep God's commandments in an ungodly world, then the first thing we shall need is to see the glory of God. Gentlemen, it's very easy. Well, I don't know how you count it, but I have come to the conclusion, and I came to it long ago, it's easy to get up and exhort God's people and to talk tough to them. Sometimes it's necessary, I suppose. It's much more difficult to so to expound scripture as opens the very glories of God to them. If we're to save folks from worldliness, and ourselves included, we need to get at the heart, don't we? Listen to John, love not the world. It's a question of love. Why shouldn't I love the world, John? Well, he says, you're stupid if you love the world, because all the love you spent on it you'll lose because the world passes away, and the fashion thereof. We can use the world. In one sense, it's God's world still, isn't it, with all its lovely things. We are not despising the lovely things that God provides. We have to watch our hearts, lest we come to love those lovely things and forget the giver, and let the lovely things, instead of leading our hearts nearer God, lead them further away. And there will come a point, will there not, when God will ask us to forego and sacrifice some of the good things. You've noticed that, haven't you? God never asks you to sacrifice bad things. You shouldn't have them to start with. Genuine sacrifice for the Lord's sake means sacrificing things that are in themselves good. Mm. So you will notice, to come back to our story, where did things go wrong? They went wrong in the hearts of the people. The attractiveness and their loves, and in it all, they thought it wasn't all too important whether the girls were believers or not believers. They were very attractive and very cultured and perhaps a bit more attractive than some of those that professed to be believers that are a little bit dull. Mm-hmm. So they married the young converted girls, with what disaster for themselves and in the coming generations you see. Who was the deliverer? A stern old bachelor that lived in a cave? No, no, no, no. A man who felt the attractiveness of the dear lady called Axar. What a lady she was. Who in for all that God had promised by way of the inheritance, and was the spur behind him to go in for God, to be a deliverer amongst the people of God, to extend his inheritance, and so forth and so on. That then the first of the captivities in the book of Judges, its cause, the nature of the enemy. You'll see he was called the Cushan Rishathay, at least in Hebrew, somebody named him that. King of double wickedness, and gentlemen have it from the Lord's own mouth. When he talked of worldliness as he did, in particularly in the Gospel of John, it is there for the first time that you meet in the New Testament the phrase the prince of this world, the archon of this world. He knows ever since the time of Eden how to use the beautiful things of God's creation to draw people's hearts away from God, in that he is indeed the king of double wickedness. And the rest of the story is clear, isn't it? Let us therefore proceed to the second of the captivities. You'll notice that very small space is given to the first one in the book of Judges, very few verses comparatively. A longer story now of the second captivity beginning in chapter three verse twelve. And the children of Israel again did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord strengthened Moab, Eglon, king of Moab, against Israel because they had done that which was evil in the sight of the Lord. And he gathered unto him the children of Ammon and Amalek, and he went and smote Israel, and they possessed the city of the palm trees. And the children of Israel served Aegon, the king of Moab, eighteen years. But when the children of Israel cried unto the Lord, the Lord raised them up a savior, Ehud, the son of Jera the Benjamite, a man left-handed. And the children of Israel sent a present by him unto Eglon the king of Moab. Now, geographically, Moab's territory is the other side of Jordan, but at this stage, king of Moab came across the Jordan and fought against Israel and took the city of the palm trees. Perhaps you don't recognize the city, uh, under that name. It was Jericho, of course. Now, in the manner of the ancient world, cities got built and then destroyed by some enemy and then rebuilt. And sometimes they were rebuilt upon the foundations of the older, now destroyed city, so that you got, you get various levels, or they would be built next door to them, slightly a, a, a, a, a, a, a distance, small distance away from the original one, and tended to be name n- n- known by the same name. This, however, came to be called the city of the palm trees. But Jericho was the city of the curse, wasn't it? According to the story in Joshua, the city that was put under the most extreme ban of a curse and anathematized, and the city that was eventually cursed in another sense. For Joshua ha- when he had destroyed it, said, cursed be he that rises up and builds it again. The city of a curse. But the Moabites came and they rebuilt, or built on that site, a city. They called it the city of the palm trees. That's very nice. Sounds nice, anyway. And the king dwelt there, at least from time to time. But how should we reconnoit to this enemy? What does he stand for? And how should we do that without becoming fanciful and saying the King of Moab represents the devil or something, or he represents the world, or he represents my next door neighbor or whoever? How should we decide these things and guard ourselves against being fanciful? You'll remember, I hope, what we said earlier on, the danger of stereotyping people. Not all Moabites were exactly the same, of course they weren't. Not all Englishmen are exactly the same, mercifully. On the other hand, there is such a thing as culture, built up in nations by their origins and their corporate history and all the struggles that they've been through, and their genetic inheritance, and this and that and the other. We should be foolish to deny or even neglect the manner of c- the matter of culture. It has often been pointed out, has it not, that some of the early missionaries going to uh countries abroad took not merely Christianity with them, but a lot of um European culture. So, uh, the missionaries to Spain, God bless them, they were courageous, the early missionaries in Spain. I refer to the missionaries in the eighteen hundreds odd. Very brave people they were. I knew some of their children. And they did marvelous things for God in those days. They not only preached amidst persecution and goodness knows what, but when folks got converted, they had to do everything for them. Many of the people could not write or read nor write, so they opened schools for the kids and and taught the folks how to read and write. They didn't have any hymns to sing, so the missionaries had to write the hymns, you'll see. Missionaries had to marry them, bury them, baptize them, and goodness knows what else, had to do everything for them. Well, as I say, they wrote hymns for them, and what they did mostly was to get English hymns and translate them into Spanish, you'll see. Well, some of them are okay, and I must say that the Spaniards for many generation love those hymns. But when I first met them, they struck me as a little bit comical to hear the English hymns put into a Spanish and then sung to tunes that weren't Spanish whatsoever at all. For Spaniards, kind- a sense of music is a very different thing from the English sense of music, of course. Yes. And folks going abroad to the Far East have not only taken the gospel, but had, uh, buildings built, like English churches and things. And it is so foreign to the people, yes? So that we have to be sensitive about culture, don't we? It is a reality, and some culture is good, even though it's different from the English culture. It's good, even some Englishmen will admit it. A- a- and, uh, you'll see it's not all bad, but there are things in culture that are bad. So it seems to me we are justified in looking upon these ancient nations and thinking up their characteristics. Well, how shall we go about it? I don't know how else to go about it than to consider what is said of these nations in Holy Scripture about their history, their origins, and where Scripture talks about it, the things that God condemns in them. If you take Moab and ask about its origin, the story is in Genesis chapter nineteen, and a sorry story it is. Moab was both the son and the grandson of Lot. In other words, Moab was the son of Lot by one of his daughters, and that is a very sad story. You'll remember it goes back to the, uh, decision, the choice that, uh, Lot made when Lot and Abram came up out of Egypt and they were with, uh, enhanced with much goods. They got so many cattle that they couldn't dwell together any longer, and Abram, being a senior man, offered his nephew first choice. Here's the land. We must go one way, you go one way, I go the other, because there's not enough grass for it all to be together. And Lot made his choice. He looked south and saw the plains of Moab. In those days, they were very fertile, as distinct from what they later became. There was much grass and a sensible farmer. If you've got a lot of cattle, you've got to have grass, gentlemen. No good being airy fairy minded and say the Lord will send grass down from heaven. You've got to go where there's grass if you've got cattle, haven't you? So he made the choice and went, as the text says, to near Sodom to get the grass. It was good grass. But the men of Sodom were exceedingly wicked. It was dangerous to live too near Sodom, wasn't it? Or at least to bring up children too near Sodom. We know what happened. Lot remained a just man. Two Peter chapter two, that righteous man. In God's estimation, he was a believer, justified by faith. Like Abraham, I hope, was not only a pilgrim originally, but looked for the city that hath foundations. Wow. Ended up living like a caveman. But when A- uh, Sodom became so evil that God could no longer spare it, he sent the angels to to get Lot out of it and his family, and the angels had to drag them out. We can do nothing until you're out, said the angel. Marvelous words. And Lot was saved, but so as by fire, wasn't he? Got out and went and lived in a cave. Now, Abram had been concerned with the problem. How could he have children? For God had promised to give him the land. What's the good of giving me this land when I'm old and elderly and I have no, no children to inherit it? If somebody tomorrow gave me the whole of Ireland, what should I do with it? Well, I'm eighty, I haven't got any children. What might be to tell me I can inherit the whole of Ireland would be nonsense. And Abraham said to God, thank you very much, God, I won't inherit the land, but I- I point out to you, God, if you don't mind, I don't have any children. Who's going to give me this land to inherit if I have no children? Well, there was a question of children, wasn't there? Yes, and you'll know the story, very much involved with Abraham's faith, the question of the child of the promise, yes. And Lot's daughters were concerned that their father's name should not be blotted out, and how he got his children, oh, how they made him drunk, behaved like cavemen. The origin of Moab. You say don't blame every Moabite ever since then for their origin, do you? No, I don't. By merely pointing out it was the origin and the false decisions that Mo- uh, that Lot had made. Numbers twenty five. Balaam teaches the king of Moab to tempt Israel into eating things sacrificed to idols and into committing fornication. He's running through the type here, isn't he? You know the story in Numbers, yeah? The Israelites had been hard plodding. It was foot slogging across the desert. Oh, that was tough going, you'll see. And uh, one day they were going near Moab, you see. There came out these bright young things, oh, from the Moabites core. Ha ha! They were a bit more colorful than the, than the Israelite women. They were that. There's no denying, you see. Ah. All chaps wearied with the journey. This was a sort of a refreshing. They said, how do? Hmm. Nice to see you. Where do you live? And they said, you must come home, uh, with us, uh, uh, like to bring home to our parents, mum and dad. Come and have a meal with us. You say, so you say there's nothing, no harm in that. We can go and have a meal. Surely we can. Off I went and had a meal. Oh yes, hmm. But of course they were Moabites, and when the meal came on, they would first offer the food to idols. Oh, they said, don't know if we ought to do that. Oh, but come on, they said, you know, well, after all, your Moses man, he is very strict, isn't he? He's of that old school, you see, and very judgmental on all other religions. And really we all serve the same gods, don't we? And, uh, you, you shouldn't despise us because we don't belong to your religion. We believe in the gods like you do, and there's no harm in your joining us. We don't agree on all points, but a religion is all about the same thing, isn't it? So come on, tuck in. So they did tuck in, and they ate the food offered to idols. And then before they knew where they were, of course, it was part of their religion, sexual, religious. It was part of their religion. And before they were, uh, knew what they were doing, they not only ate the food offered to the gods, offered to idols, but they were caught up in the fornication that went with it. You say, but that's extreme. You wouldn't talk about that things in an assembly, would you? But wait a minute. Look at our Lord addressing the churches. Now some that hold the teaching of Balaam, thou hast some in the church that hold the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to cast a stumbling block before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols, and to commit fornication. That Balaamism had invaded the church, and not one church only, but two of the churches. And second Peter chapter two is a witness to it. It was one of the most powerful enemies in the early church. Listen to the permissiveness of the false teachers in the church, according to two Peter chapter two. and according to Jude. And our Lord is very severe, particularly on the church of Thyatira. Jezebel, that woman, the prophetess Jezebel, because her name wasn't Jezebel, he's using the Old Testament name to characterize the teachers in the church. Taught my church, my servants to com- to eat, uh, things sacrificed to idols and to commit fornication. Gentlemen, you're aware that in modern world there are things called Masons, and the essence of the doctrines of Mason is polytheism, a mixture of all the pagan gods. Yeah, they will worship Jehovah, but Baal, Baal and Osiris and on the Egyptian gods, and they teach people to worship them, the sun god. They will claim it's merely a society to help widows and things and e- educate the children of widows and all sorts of marvelous things. Behind the scenes, it is pagan religion, undiluted pagan religion. I had an accountant once. He was a Christian man. He told me, unfortunately, he knew it from some of his customers, you see. They attended divine service in many churches. They were Masons. Church I know of down in the south, and the man and his wife who belonged to it had become sorely distressed because a large number of the congregation were Masons. It was an evangelical church, supposedly. I gather they have now left it. These things are not just ancient history, gentlemen. And of course, it is to be noticed in evangelical circles all around the West and in America that sexual morality has become a very, very different thing from what it used to be. It's adding up, isn't it, is Moab, at least in my mind, and from the things said about it in scripture, to be a representative of what the Bible means by the flesh, not just by worldliness, but by the flesh. Because the flesh is not merely perversions of sexual behavior. It has other sides to it. Look at Jeremiah chapter forty eight verses eleven and twenty nine. Moab has been at ease from his youth, and what the h- uh, prophet denounces in Moab is his pride, his arrogance, his haughtiness, and his wrath and bad temper. The pride and arrogance of the flesh. Mm-hmm. The fruit, the works of the flesh are? Listen to the apostle enumerating them. In Ephesians and in, uh, Galatians, likewise, I warn you that they who do such things, who practice such things, have no inheritance in the kingdom of God. Of course, in the ancient world, when Greeks professed faith in Christ, places like Corinth and elsewhere, you will gather it from the epistles, gentlemen, that you had to tell them that fornication was wrong. Imagine anybody having to get up in an assembly and give an address for half an hour to convince the believers that fornication is wrong. You had to do it in Corinth because nobody ever suspected it was wrong. Adultery, they knew was wrong, of course. A lot of them practiced it, but fornication, the normal way of life. You had to tell them it was so wrong. And in our modern world, we've reached a situation, haven't we, when it astonishes people outside the Christian community to be told that fornication is wrong. Wish somebody would tell the BBC it's wrong. Well, Moab has bit ease from his youth. So says God through the prophet. Perhaps it wouldn't surprise you to find that the king of Moab, uh, at that time was a very fat man, yes. Was killed through his belly, of course, which was the most prominent feature about him, perhaps. And when old, uh, uh, old Ehud came to deal with him, there he was in his summer palace, of course. Oh, wasn't it lovely, city of palm trees, nice warm weather, and you took it easy, plenty of dates to eat, and why bother about anything? Indulge yourself, my boy. Be kind to yourself. Wow. Good example of, uh, the flesh in all sorts of senses. Mm-hmm. At least that is how I would reconnoiter him. And I'm appealing, uh, to culture, but to the Holy Spirit's own record and description of him down through the ages. Right to the time when our Lord talks to the churches in the revelation, and down to the time when in one Corinthians chapter ten verse eight and then ten twenty one to twenty three, Paul cites that occasion that we referred to in Numbers twenty five. Paul cites it to the believers at Corinth as a warning. It was relevant then, it's relevant still. And, uh, that is my case. Of course, pray disagree if you care, but that is my case, and I would base it on the quotations of scripture itself and Chris- Chris- uh, the scriptures own characterization of Moabites. That will raise the question, if that was the enemy, how did Ehud plan his tactics to deal with Moab? But let's leave that for a moment. We'll devote our last few moments in the next session to considering the tactics used against Moab.