Lesson 70 - God’s “Lawsuit” - Court Procedure and Accusation

Deuteronomy Lesson 70

God’s “Lawsuit”—Court Procedure and Accusation

Deuteronomy 32:1–18
Fellowship Chapel
17 January 2012
Charles Clough
© Charles A. Clough 2012
www.BibleFrameworkApplied.org

… work on the song of Moses. This will take two sessions I think to finish. It’s a long chapter of 43 verses; but it’s all one unit. Tonight I’m going to introduce the kind of structure this song has because once you see the structure it’ll help you understand every prophet in the Old Testament.

We’ve looked at…on the outline you’ll see where we’ve talked about the handover procedures from Moses to Joshua. In chapter 31 we dealt with the inauguration of Joshua that it was both public, and it was direct in a theophany. Remember God came down in a cloud at the tent and made Himself physically visible to authenticate the fact that the leadership was going to be passed on to Joshua.

Then we also pointed out that that there was a…and on your outline there are two blanks here. Right under the table or under the chart I say Joshua has been inaugurated publicly by God. That was the public declaration of God in front of all the nation and a clear warning of Israel’s future defection. Israel’s future defection has been heard.

The reason apparently for that emphasis on the future defection of the nation wasn’t to discourage Joshua. It was to give him a real picture of what history was going to look like - that in fact there would be a decline. As a leader he had to anticipate that. That’s why in the parenthesis there; the key is the nation’s relationship with Yahweh, not the charisma of its leaders. I think in trying to understand why God made such a federal case out of emphasizing the future apostasy of the nation; it must have been oriented basically to Joshua - that Joshua is the fellow who is going to have to lead. He is the guy that is going to have to face this. Therefore Joshua as the new leader is going to have to rely on the Lord. It’s a serious leadership crisis this man is going to have to face. It’s sort a preparation for that leadership crisis, I believe.

Now we’re going to come to Deuteronomy 32. We need in order to understand this block of text that a lot of background we’ve got to cover here in the first two pages of the handout. If you’ll follow with me in the handout under A under II, the prophetic anthem of Israel, the investiture of the covenant witnesses; I use the word anthem there because this song of Moses could also be viewed as the national anthem of Israel. This is the biblical national anthem.

When you think about it, it’s a much greater in scope than our national anthem. You go to Fort McHenry and hear the story of Frances Scott Key out here in Baltimore Harbor watching the British. One of the things when I went to Fort McHenry I learned about our national anthem; we sing “the bombs bursting in air.” I never realized that. I should have having worked with ammunition at Aberdeen Proving Ground for 25 years. The reason Frances Scott Key in the national anthem is talking about the bombs bursting in the air is because the British did such erroneous fuse setting that the rounds that were being shot at the fort were exploding in the air instead of on the fort. That’s why Scott Key put that in the poem. It was a blessing for the Americans in Fort McHenry to have the bombs bursting in air because it means the fuse settings were wrong and they were prematurely detonating in the air instead of... Somebody on the British ships obviously didn’t do his mathematical calculations too well. So in our national anthem we commemorate an actual event.

Well, this national anthem back in Israel’s time not only looks to the past; but it looks into the future. This has caused a lot of trouble for the liberals because this song is written as though the future departure from Yahweh has already occurred. So it’s almost like somebody took a time machine went into the future and then looked backwards on the Old Testament. So liberals being anti-supernatualists to the core have a problem with this kind of a text. So they have always postdated this text. This text should have been according to them written much later, toward the exile years.

Under item A under the background is an important archeology point here. This is a case where archeology has not changed the interpretation of the text; but it has encouraged us to see things about this text that we didn’t see prior to these archeological finds.

Archeology has discovered various ancient legal documents. I talked about this when we started the book of Deuteronomy - the suzerain vassal treaties, the royal grants and so on. The suzerain vassal treaties, you remember, were international treaties between a super power like Egypt and lesser nations, smaller nations. That word suzerain means the great power. The vassals mean the subsidiary lesser powers. The super power Egypt, in this case pharaoh, would make treaties with some of the Canaanite city-states and so forth. They would have international treaties. It turns out that those treaties were written in a format very similar to Deuteronomy and date from the 2^nd millennium.

Now if you follow what I’ve just said, liberals try to postdate this book, Deuteronomy, which means they try to put it in the 1^st millennium BC. They’ve got to do that because the book is showing this progress in history that couldn’t have been anticipated. Because of that the liberals date it in the first millennium. But now the liberals have a problem because archeologically now we know that this text form of a suzerain vassal treaty is 2^nd millennium B. C. which is exactly the millennium in which the book of Deuteronomy claims to have been written. This is a warning. This is an example. When you hear critics of the Bible make these declarations about what can and can’t be; they’re all speculating in the absence of eyewitness data. Then lo and behold when the archeological finds come about and all of a sudden we have archeological data then oops then the liberal start back pedaling.

I mean for a while the liberals questioned whether Pontius Pilate existed. Then of course they dug up a plaque I think it was in Caesarea, you can see photograph, and there it is dedicated to Pontius Pilate. It talks about him. It’s in Latin there inscribed in a rock. So this is so much for liberal speculations.

You’ll see in that point suzerain vassal treaties.

The second kind of document is royal grants. Now a royal grant is when the super power granted blessing to a lesser power, and it is not contingent.

In other words, the suzerain vassal thing was, “You better do what I tell you to do; you better love me; you better love pharaoh with all your heart and all your soul or I’m coming after you.” In the royal grant it’s more of a granting. The significance of that second kind of literature is that it is exactly what conservatives have argued for years is the difference between the unconditional Abrahamic Covenant and the unconditional Davidic Covenant and the conditional Mosaic Covenant. So God gives a grant to Abraham and a He gives a grant to David.

Lo and behold now in archeology we discover, “Oh yeah, that was known in the second millennium.”

Now if you’ll look on the list after suzerain vassal treaties, royal grants; and now we come to tonight’s issue that’s called riv proceedings.

The word looks like r-i-v-. In the Hebrew is pronounced reeve like it’s a V as in Victor.

A riv document is a lawsuit brought about because of a treaty violation. Those are now known archeologically. So say for example pharaoh had a suzerain vassal treaty set up with say a Canaanite city-state. The king of the Canaanite city-state went off and he made alliances with Babylon or the Mesopotamian area and therefore was disloyal to the pharaoh. The pharaoh would bring a lawsuit on the basis of a prior treaty. So that’s called a riv document. That riv principle is what we’re going to look at right now.

In 1962 French scholar Julian Harvey discovered how suzerain vassal breaches were dealt with; in this case by an Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta about 1200 BC. Notice it’s in the second millennium - who went after an unfaithful vassal king named Kashtiliash IV. The format of that lawsuit proceeding was an indictment, an accusation, included interrogation and formal brief accusation. It included judicial proof. Interestingly it spoke of this history as occurring before the gods (plural) of the treaty and recitation of the good deeds of the suzerain. In other words it was this disloyalty on the part of that vassal king was uncalled for because the great king had done him good. So it was a breach.

Point 3, there was a declaration of a sentence. The value of all this background I’m giving you here is this - that when you see a literary genre or a set of procedures and you see it depicted in the literature around Israel you’re looking at pagan literature. Now when you see that format in the Bible, you’ll see modifications of that pagan form. It’s those modifications that should raise red flags and say, “Ah, ah! Theology point here! Doctrinal point!” It becomes a very great tool for observing the text more carefully than you would knowing all this background material. I am going to show you how it works tonight.

On your slide that you’re looking at this is how the riv format looks generalized to the whole ancient Near East. On your handout I think I have that for you. This generalized method (this generalized text form) is a compilation of the different evidences of riv lawsuit proceedings where scholars have simply seen this example, this example, this example and then they generalize the format. So this is a generalized format of what that kind of a document did – what it looked like.

Now if you go to the next slide, Deuteronomy 32 follows this format except for something. Just looking at this, you’ll see that it has the court procedure. We’re going to look at that tonight, verses 1 to 14. Then point 2 the accusation, verses 15 to 18 - we’ll deal with that. Then next week we’re going to deal with the sentence.

And then point 4 which is not found in pagan counterparts; lo and behold passing a sentence to extinction like the great king would do; Pharaoh had it. If you violated pharaoh in a suzerain vassal treaty, baby, your city is doomed. He wasn’t going to mess around. There is no grace in pharaoh. When he gives a sentence, it’s holy war. The difference is in this document of Deuteronomy 32 when you get to the sentence (III); it is followed by gracious assurance that is not found in the pagan documents.

This is an eye opener. This is an alert that we have God deliberately being profoundly different than the pagan culture around, the milieu around Israel. This is comparative literature. This is where it’s legitimate. This is a great tool for Bible believing Christians because it picks up things that we wouldn’t normally know. So we’re very thankful that this kind of a treaty form is unique to Israel. It is unique to Israel because of the uniqueness of Israel’s God and His mercy. That’s the first thing that stands out.

Verses 27 to 43 are an assurance that Israel’s future will be okay. That is not a case in the pagan documents.

The next point that I make in the outline for you by way of background is that this song is prophetic.

The blank there on page 2 (IV), part 4 is unique implies we need to focus on this element as a flag that shows a major difference between theocratic Israel and pagan culture. So there’s a major difference here. We want to grab hold that major difference because that sets up our doctrinal understanding of Jehovah God. It’s an important feature of special revelation in the Word of God.

The song is prophetic and provides the underpinning of later Old Testament prophetic indictments against Israel. We want to come through the slides because I’m going to show you how…once you see this and the theology of Deuteronomy 32 will help you when you read the prophets. Why I am making a point out of this is because when you take religious studies in school if it’s influenced by liberalism they always have things backwards. They have the cart before the horse due to an evolutionary perspective. What they teach college students in education is that the prophetic literature of the Bible was social reformers that were evolving a new standard of social justice.

So the heroes to a lot of liberal reformers and socialists are going back to Isaiah, going back to Jeremiah, going back to Micah and saying, “These men were our forefathers. These were the men crying out for social justice. These were the men who lifted Israel’s society from primitive sort of polytheistic origin on up to lofty monotheism.” You can see the evolutionary model working here. But that’s backwards.

When you look at the format, the format is in Deuteronomy 32. That’s where it started. So all the prophets that are using this format aren’t inventing a thing. They are simply implementing the riv proceedings. See old-fashioned liberals didn’t know about that. They didn’t know about riv. They never studied about lawsuit literature so they were again same idea pagan unbelief making all these grandiose assumptions, grandiose statements which are pure hot air. No basis for them.

So now to show you this if you’ll look in the notes … Let’s go to Isaiah 1. This is an example. Isaiah 1 is a riv proceeding. Once we understand a riv proceeding in Deuteronomy 32 it helps us understand what Isaiah is talking about and makes these prophetic books very interesting.

Isaiah starts out in ^NKJ Isaiah 1:1, “The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, …”

It anchors it in history. He’s talking about a specific dynasty, a political dynasty that was in existence at the time. As God’s spokesman, Isaiah is coming against the nation because he is going to announce the implementation of God’s cycles of discipline. God doesn’t arbitrarily discipline the nation. He’s going to explain why He is disciplining the nation. This is not the word of a social reformer. This is the word of a prosecuting attorney.

So in verse 2 you’ll see where it says if you follow this outline. It is a court proceeding verses 2 through 4. Then in verses 5 to 23 are the accusations. Then there is the sentence of doom in verses 24 to 27. But in this outline of Isaiah one of the things you want to notice are the red ones on this PowerPoint. On your handouts you’ll see them in italics. So let’s follow this a minute to get the idea behind this.

The court procedure verses 2-4 has the same three elements that Deuteronomy 32 has. There is a call for witnesses. There is an introduction of the case. Then there is a quick depiction of the faithfulness of Yahweh and the unfaithfulness of Israel.

Let’s look at verses 2 through 4. ^NKJ Isaiah 1:2, “Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth! …” Those are the exact same words in Deuteronomy 32:1. That’s the call for the witnesses because obviously a contract has to be a formal document that’s witnessed. So these are the witnesses, actually the angelic powers behind nature.

^NKJ Isaiah 1:2, “Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth! For the LORD has spoken: …” Now he’s depicting the introduction of the case. “… I have nourished and brought up children, And they have rebelled against Me; ³ The ox knows its owner And the donkey its master’s crib; But Israel does not know, My people do not consider.” ⁴ Alas, sinful nation, A people laden with iniquity, A brood of evildoers …” Then notice packed into that in verse 2b the clause: “I have nourished and brought up children”. That’s the faithfulness of Yahweh over against the unfaithfulness of Israel.

Then we have in verse 5 all the way down to 23 we have a series of accusations. ^NKJ Isaiah 1:5, “Why should you be stricken again? You will revolt more and more. The whole head is sick, And the whole heart faints.” He goes on and on and on. ^NKJ Isaiah 1:7, “Your country is desolate …” Then ^NKJ Isaiah 1:8 So the daughter of Zion is left as a booth in a vineyard, As a hut in a garden of cucumbers, As a besieged city. ⁹ Unless the LORD of hosts had left to us a very small remnant, We would have become like Sodom, We would have been made like Gomorrah.”

So there’s the accusation, the first one. Then there’s a second accusation beginning in verse 10. He goes into more specifics all the way down to verse 15.

Then in verses 16 through 20 if you look in your outline you’ll see it’s italicized. The reason I italicized that is in the corresponding pagan version of a lawsuit, there isn’t an appeal for repentance. What does that tell you? You see a discontinuity in the genre between what’s going on in the pagan culture versus what’s going on in Israel. What is different is the personal relationship with God and God’s concern.

^NKJ Isaiah 1:16, “Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; Put away the evil of your doings from before My eyes. Cease to do evil …” Learn to do good. That’s the repeal for repentance. Now I guarantee you when pharaoh comes against his city-states with a lawsuit, he’s not asking for repentance. There is no room for repentance because there is no grace.

This is another little lesson tonight is when people talk about, “Well, the God of the Old Testament is this meanie God. There is no grace in the Old Testament.” You’re seeing grace right here. People who say that haven’t got a clue about the Old Testament text. All these italicized things here; this is where grace does occur in the Old Testament. It goes on and we see the proof of what’s going on here, the appeal.

The third accusation – verses 21-22. By the way verse 18, that’s that verse you hear quoted so often. It’s in the appeal section, the appeal for repentance. God says: ^NKJ Isaiah 1:18, “Come now, and let us reason together,” Says the LORD, “Though your sins are like scarlet, They shall be as white as snow; …” “I am offering you grace.” So don’t buy into this image that the Old Testament is law and the New Testament is grace. There is plenty of grace in the Old Testament.

So then we come down to the third accusation in verse 21 - how the faithful city has become a harlot. Now he’s focusing on Jerusalem. So there are 3 accusations here. Then beginning in verse 19 he brings on the sentence. ^NKJ Isaiah 1:19, “If you are willing and obedient, You shall eat the good of the land; ²⁰ But if you refuse and rebel, You shall be devoured by the sword; For the mouth of the LORD has spoken”.

The rest of that text goes on with this problem of the sentence. Then if you’ll look at verse 25. ^NKJ Isaiah 1:25, “I will turn My hand against you, And thoroughly purge away your dross, And take away all your alloy”. There again in your outline you see where it says mercy clause. It’s in italics. There is an example of what you do not find in corresponding pagan literature. That shows you the reality of God’s historic relationship with Israel versus the imagined pagan religion in the surrounding nations without any mercy.

So that’s a little outline of Isaiah 1. That helps us understand that Isaiah is not just winging it. Isaiah is following in his approach standard lawsuit proceedings even though it’s poetic.

Then we come to the next example. This is Hosea. So if you’ll turn to Hosea. Hosea is one of the Minor Prophets so it’s not just the Major Prophets that are doing this. We want to show that Deuteronomy 32 underlies a lot of the Old Testament. In Hosea 4 you have a riv proceeding. Here we see - it’s only 3 verses; but it has the same idea sequence.

^NKJ Hosea 4:1, “Hear the word of the LORD, You children of Israel, For the LORD brings a charge against the inhabitants of the land: …” The word “charge” there is the word riv. That’s the word for a lawsuit. So when Hosea uses that vocabulary you would expect then that this is going to follow the same kind of procedures. Sure enough it does. You have: “There is no truth or mercy Or knowledge of God in the land. Verse 2 is the accusation. ² “By swearing and lying, Killing and stealing and committing adultery, They break all restraint, With bloodshed upon bloodshed.” The sentence is in verse 3: “Therefore the land will mourn; And everyone who dwells there will waste away With the beasts of the field And the birds of the air; Even the fish of the sea will be taken away.” There’s the announcement of discipline upon the nation. So that’s Hosea. That’s an example again of this recurrent kind of literature.

Then if you follow in the outline we come to Micah. So after you get into Hosea, Amos -you go over and finally get to Micah. Micah 6 in the middle of Micah’s book we now see the same kind of procedure – same kind of riv format. ^NKJ Micah 6:1, “Hear now what the LORD says: ‘Arise, plead your case …’ ” “Plead your riv. Plead your lawsuit.” “… before the mountains, And let the hills hear your voice …” There is the call for witnesses. So we see again the same format. ² “Hear, O you mountains, the LORD’s complaint, And you strong foundations of the earth; For the LORD has a complaint against His people”. He will contend with Israel. There’s the court proceeding. There’s the call for witnesses.

Then in verses 3 to 4 is the declaration of Yahweh’s faithfulness: ^NKJ Micah 6:3, “O My people, what have I done to you? And how have I wearied you? Testify against Me.” There is the call to a legal confrontation. “Go ahead! Testify against Me. Tell Me where I have not been faithful to you.” ^NKJ Micah 6:4, “For I brought you up from the land of Egypt, I redeemed you from the house of bondage; And I sent before you Moses, Aaron, and Miriam” … and so forth and so on.

Now in verses 5 and 8 you have an italicized section that you won’t find in the corresponding literature outside of Israel. What you find in verses 5 to 8 is the reluctance, the amazement, the personality of Micah entering in.

^NKJ Micah 6:5, “O My people, remember now What Balak king of Moab counseled, And what Balaam the son of Beor answered him, From Acacia Grove to Gilgal, That you may know the righteousness of the LORD.” ⁶ With what shall I come before the LORD, And bow myself before the High God? Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, With calves a year old?” That’s the reaction of Micah to this. Then further down in verse 9 you’ll see where the accusation is made: ^NKJ Micah 6:9, “The LORD’s voice cries to the city -- Wisdom shall see Your name: “Hear the Rod! Who has appointed it? ¹⁰ Are there yet the treasures of wickedness In the house of the wicked, And the short measure that is an abomination?” He goes on and on and describes the accusation.

Beginning then in verse 13 you see the sentence. ^NKJ Micah 6:13, “Therefore I will also make you sick by striking you …” What do we get out of all this? Think about what we’re looking at here. God when He prosecutes has reference to reality. It’s not an arbitrary thing. God is building a case. He is using the prior relationship of the Word of God as the structure.

I think why this is so important is because we are going to be judged at the Bema Seat by the same standard. The New Testament text was given to us and we’re going to be held to account for - “What did you do with it? I gave it to you. I gave you the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. I was faithful to you. I forgave your sins and now I want to see what fruit you’ve generated.” So it will be with reference not to some esoteric mystical thing. It’s simply going back to what God says.

So the summary of the background material – there are 4 points there.

1. God is not casual in His relationships. He frames His relationship with contracts in order to define, measure and evaluate the relationship. You can see how this fits together now with all this emphasis on contracts.
2. The history of Israel is a public model reveals a personal relationship with dynamic interaction involving prophetic indictments of contract violations. That’s the Old Testament. That’s what the Old Testament is about.

The prophets are the prosecuting attorneys that are bringing indictments against the nation. It’s not just guys mad at society. It’s not some Occupy Wall Street group of beggars. This is a group; a legal proceeding that is carefully structured on text of the contract.

3. The final outcome is that Yahweh is glorified and fallen man shown his need of a Savior-God. In each one of these lawsuits Yahweh proclaims, “I was faithful. You had no reason to rebel against me. I gave you X, Y and Z.”
4. The remarkable difference between Yahweh-Israel relationship and the pagan-suzerain vassal relationships is God’s grace in finally restoring the relationship.

That’s what we want to look as now we go back to Deuteronomy 32.

So if you’ll turn back there where we started tonight, we’re get into the first section, the court proceedings. Verses 1 to 14 have 3 parts – call to witnesses, the introduction of the case and faithfulness of Yahweh. Those are the same elements we see in Micah. We see it in Hosea. We see it in Isaiah. This is the original song; national anthem taught by Moses to Israel anticipates all of Israel’s history and the lawsuit proceedings. The prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Micah) – they are not inventing anything new. Those men are going back to Deuteronomy 32. They’re basically using the argument of Moses. So they are not social innovators. They are simply custodians of a contract.

So let’s look now at Deuteronomy 32:1-3. Here’s the first section, the call to the witnesses. Remember what we read in Isaiah now. Here it is. ^NKJ Deuteronomy 32:1, “Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak; And hear, O earth, the words of my mouth. ² Let my teaching drop as the rain, My speech distill as the dew, As raindrops on the tender herb, And as showers on the grass. ³ For I proclaim the name of the LORD: Ascribe greatness to our God.”

That’s the call for witnesses. So Israel in a contract violation can’t argue that, “Well that’s not really true. This happened.” Well, no. We know on the basis of witnesses that you violated these things. It’s all of nature – your whole environment around you. So the call for witnesses ends in verse 3. Then we have in verses 4 to 6 we have an introduction of the case – just like the prophets.

^NKJ Deuteronomy 32:4, “He is the Rock, His work is perfect; For all His ways are justice, A God of truth and without injustice; Righteous and upright is He. ⁵ They have corrupted themselves; They are not His children, Because of their blemish: A perverse and crooked generation. ⁶ Do you thus deal with the LORD, O foolish and unwise people? Is He not your Father, who bought you? Has He not made you and established you?

This next section follow the outline there verses 7 to 14 the important part is once the courtroom so to speak is there, once the witnesses are called in; now we have God pleads His case – His own faithfulness. So verses 7 to 14 is when He proclaims His faithfulness case and proclaims His faithfulness.

^NKJ Deuteronomy 32:7, “Remember the days of old, Consider the years of many generations. Ask your father, and he will show you; Your elders, and they will tell you: ⁸ When the Most High divided their inheritance to the nations, When He separated the sons of Adam, He set the boundaries of the peoples According to the number of the children of Israel. ⁹ For the LORD’s portion is His people; Jacob is the place of His inheritance. ¹⁰ He found him in a desert land And in the wasteland, a howling wilderness; He encircled him, He instructed him, He kept him as the apple of His eye. ¹¹ As an eagle stirs up its nest, Hovers over its young, Spreading out its wings, taking them up, Carrying them on its wings, ¹² So the LORD alone led him, And there was no foreign god with him. ¹³ He made him ride in the heights of the earth, That he might eat the produce of the fields; He made him draw honey from the rock, And oil from the flinty rock; ¹⁴ Curds from the cattle, and milk of the flock, With fat of lambs; And rams of the breed of Bashan, and goats, With the choicest wheat; And you drank wine, the blood of the grapes.”

So there Yahweh proclaims His faithfulness. By the way you notice what He uses to proclaim His faithfulness. What is the case? The case is His historic performance. That’s why history is so important in the Bible. That’s why the first historians were not the Greeks. The first historians were the prophets of Israel. The reason they were historians is because history was the domain of God’s revelation. They were fascinated by history because they were interested in the God of history.

This is why students today in history classes don’t get it because no secularist can teach a history course and give you the real purpose of history. History is not some grand scheme in a secularist mind. History is just a concatenation of random events. But as Bible believing Christians we ought to be very interested in history because history is the stage on which God’s drama is enacted. History is fascinating. I could care less about history in school before I became a Christian. All I knew it was memorize dates so I’d get an A on an exam and forget about it. But once I became a Christian I became very interested in history. I’m sure many of you have had that same kind of sense intellectually.

So Yahweh’s case rests upon His historical performance. Now He says in verse 15 – now verses 15-18 is the accusation. This is important because we are going to see how He brings out the accusation about.

If you’ll trace the notes now under 1 where I call for witnesses, heaven and earth. It’s not a metaphor for the environment. He’s talking about angelic beings behind the environment.

When he says: ^NKJ Deuteronomy 32:2, “Let my teaching drop as the rain, My speech distill as the dew, As raindrops on the tender herb, And as showers on the grass.” The idea is that water permeates just as His word permeates the environment. Then in verse 3 it says: “For I proclaim the name of the LORD: Ascribe greatness to our God”. That sets up the whole proceeding. Then the introduction of the case verses 4 to 6. That’s why if you’ll look at the logic here beginning in verse 4: “He is the Rock, His work is perfect; For all His ways are justice, A God of truth and without injustice; Righteous and upright is He”.

The reason for that verse (and the reason for that argument) is like I say in the outline, when you discuss justice you deal with the ethical question. And we talked about the ethical question here before- that on a non-biblical basis all ethics amounts to nothing more than private personal autobiography. That’s all. That’s all it can be. Every person has his own thing. But when you discuss justice you deal with the ethical question. The option is either God or man and since man is finite and fallen only God can be the transcendent non-subjective standard. So the ethical questions need a transcendent absolute. That only can come from God. It can’t come from man. Man is finite. He doesn’t know all the facts. He’s fallen and if he knows the facts he doesn’t want to abide by them. So the pagan gods and goddesses were mere projections of man.

Then in the next verse in that case he says they corrupted themselves. You’ll see where I put on the outline the NET Bible translation which gives you a more, how shall I say, more of the spirit of the Hebrew text. There’s a lot of innuendo and a lot of pathos to this. So that’s why I gave you that text.

^NKJ Deuteronomy 32:5, “They have corrupted themselves; They are not His children, Because of their blemish: A perverse and crooked generation”. That’s their sin. It’s interesting. They’re saying that they should not have done this. They were denying reality. They haven’t acted like His children. It’s like the prodigal son thing. The whole thing centers on the character of God. That’s why in verse 6: “Do you thus deal with the LORD, O foolish and unwise people? …” The center of gravity is the Lord. And the people are in the periphery. They are measured by their relationship to this.

Now in verses 7 to 14 we have the loyalty. Here we have history. There is an enormous amount of history packed in these few words. This gives you a span of thousands of years. It’s a few casual verses almost. Look at ^NKJ Deuteronomy 32:7, “Remember the days of old …” See that starts off we’ve seen so often in the Word of God – remember, remember, remember, remember - because history is the domain of revelation. “Consider the years of many generations. Ask your father, and he will show you; Your elders, and they will tell you…” “Days of old” means prior to Moses. So this goes back to the flood. This goes back to Noah. “… Consider the years of many generations. Ask your father, and he will show you; Your elders, and they will tell you: [8] When the Most High divided their inheritance to the nations …” That is Genesis 10. This is where the Bible is an integral whole. You can’t just waltz in and say well this section of the Bible is not really original or something. If it isn’t; it’s like unraveling a sweater. What do you do with a verse like verse 8? Verse 8 presupposes Genesis 10. Verse 8 is talking about the Most High divided the inheritance of the nations. We covered that in Deuteronomy 4.

In your notes you’ll see and I listed all this. Look at the number of times “70” occurs. ^NKJ Deuteronomy 32:8, “…When He separated the sons of Adam, He set the boundaries of the peoples According to the number of the children of Israel”…or the children of Jacob. 

There were 70 and there were 70 nations in Genesis 10. So now all of a sudden we find something that Genesis never told us about. Gee, there is a numerical similarity between the sons of Jacob from which this nation Israel grows and 70 nations, 70 people groups back in Genesis 10. So that shows you the inherent design that Israel is going to be the blesser of the world. Israel is designed to fit the human race in this numerical sense. I listed for you in the outline how Genesis 10 has 70 nations. The sons of Jacob in Genesis 46 is 70 sons. The years that they’re going to spend in captivity in the future are 70 years. The elders on the Moses’ board in Numbers 11 are 70 elders. When the Lord in Luke 10 picks out His disciples He has 70 disciples.

The critic of the Bible sees something like that recurring pattern of 70, and “Oh, that can’t be. History is too chaotic. You can’t put it in 70s. It’s silly to say there are 70 people groups. Maybe there are 102.6.” That’s the way we think; but that’s not the way God thinks.

I think one of the funniest and ironic features of that kind of thinking is today we talk about DNA with no embarrassment and it’s a four-letter alphabet. Isn’t that exact? Isn’t that discrete? Doesn’t that have correspondence to the idea there is order in the universe?

I quote Ephesians 2:10: ^NKJ Ephesians 2:10, “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them”. Here God is preparing Israel beforehand to have a ministry to the human race. Of course, in verse 10 is the history. ^NKJ Deuteronomy 32:10, “He found him in a desert land And in the wasteland, a howling wilderness …” “You say. Wait a minute.” “I thought Israel was in Egypt.” That’s where God found him. That’s not where God made Israel a nation. God made Israel a nation at Sinai in the wilderness. That’s when…It was just a rabble of Jews that He freed from Egypt. They became a nation in the wilderness. There is no historical inaccuracy there.

Then notice: ^NKJ Deuteronomy 32:12, “So the LORD alone led him, And there was no foreign god with him”. See that’s kind of a preparation for the future departure of your faith.

“Where were these gods that you’re flirting with, you are tempting with? Where were they? Were they in the Exodus? No! Were they out there getting you water out of a rock? No! Well why are you worshipping them when I was the one providing for you logistically? Your clothes didn’t wear out. Your shoes didn’t wear out. You had food delivered every 24 hours delivered fresh. You had water from the rock. Where were all the gods then?” This is a sarcastic way of setting up for the coming defection.

^NKJ Deuteronomy 32:13, “He made him ride in the heights of the earth, That he might eat the produce of the fields; He made him draw honey from the rock, And oil from the flinty rock…” So obviously verses 7 to 17 are showing the faithfulness of Jehovah. See how the ideas flow in this genre, this kind of literature. So we’ve seen the court proceeding. In verses 15 and 18 now we get into the specific accusation. We’ve already talked about God’s faithfulness.

^NKJ Deuteronomy 32:15, “But Jeshurun grew fat and kicked; You grew fat, you grew thick, You are obese! Then he forsook God who made him, And scornfully esteemed the Rock of his salvation. ¹⁶ They provoked Him to jealousy with foreign gods; With abominations they provoked Him to anger. ¹⁷ They sacrificed to demons, not to God, To gods they did not know, To new gods, new arrivals That your fathers did not fear. ¹⁸ Of the Rock who begot you, you are unmindful, And have forgotten the God who fathered you.

There is some powerful language being used here in this accusation. If you look on the handout you’ll see under point C accusation. I make a comment about the Jeshurun kind of word and why it’s in there. Jeshurun is a derivative from the Hebrew word yashar, which means to be upright. The word and the noun becomes the upright one. If you think that’s the meaning of the word, why in verse 15 would that word be used? It’s in the middle of an accusation where the nation is rebelling. Why would Moses under the Holy Spirit call the Israel, Jeshurun, the upright ones? That’s the same kind of thing you see in the New Testament text.

What’s happening there is God through Moses is saying, “You positionally were the upright nation and you didn’t act like your position required you to. So it’s to heighten the contrast, the depth of the accusation. “You were Jeshurun. You were the upright one. You were the nation I picked to bless the world and look how you’re acting.” It’s sort of a provoker of shame: ^NKJ Deuteronomy 32:15, “But Jeshurun grew fat and kicked; You grew fat, you grew thick, You are obese! …” The picture there is that they were blessed. Remember and I point out lessons 23 to 24 back in Deuteronomy 8. They failed the prosperity test. God gave them blessing. That’s what He’s saying here. “I gave you all the blessing. You were economically benefited. Your crops grew. You were one of the wealthiest nations on earth. Look what happened.”

Now he goes further in verses 16 and 17 where he introduces the demonic. Here is the spiritual war that is going on. ^NKJ Deuteronomy 32:16, “They provoked Him to jealousy with foreign gods; With abominations they provoked Him to anger. [17] They sacrificed to demons, not to God …” Now that last one, “they sacrificed to demons and not to God”, sounds very strangely familiar to Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 10 when he’s talking about communion. ^NKJ 1 Corinthians 10:21, “You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons …” So Paul clearly in 1 Corinthians 10 – he’s reaching back into Deuteronomy and using this idea that religious worship can become demonic.

We want to think about why that happens because the fathers, the Christians fathers, pointed out to me by a woman (a PhD lady) who had read some of my material. She said that when you go back and look at the church fathers (the first century), these are men that came out of the pagan culture. If you look at their writings, they had to talk about all the gods and goddesses that were statues. Remember the gods and goddesses weren’t always human in depiction. Some of them were animals. Look at the Sphinx for example. It’s a lion with a man’s head on it. So you have some of these gods and goddesses that are anthropomorphic and some are zoological or zoomorphic.

The fathers thought – and these guys are artists. You can imagine how long it took to build the Sphinx. These are big works of art. So you have to ask yourself where did the artists and the sculptors get their idea of the shape of the gods and goddesses? The church fathers argued that those shapes came in demonic dreams to those craftsmen. So when they crafted these idols they were really crafting them to correspond to the dreams that demons gave them so that when a human being would do obeisance to the statue (the idol), they were really bowing down to the demon who inspired that idol. That’s why that thinking carries over to 1 Corinthians 10. So what’s happening here in the end that people who read the Old Testament don’t seem to sometimes. This is a very clear depiction (verses 15, 16, and 17) of the spiritual warfare that is going on behind the scenes. This is why Satan is addressed directly in Isaiah and Ezekiel through a physical human king.

Some have said, “Oh well, that couldn’t be Satan. I mean He’s addressing the king of Tyre.” Yes, he was addressing the king of Tyre; but the king of Tyre was demon possessed. So the prophets with the clarity and focus of God’s spirit saw through that man and they addressed the demon forces behind it. While they’re addressing physical political leader they’re talking to the demonic forces that energize and give guidance to that person.

We mustn’t trivialize the Old Testament here. This is a very serious accusation because this is in the middle of a riv proceeding. Remember the verses we’re talking about here, verses 16 and 17, are part of the accusation. So it can’t be just metaphor here. These are actual prosecuting accusations that are being made by Israel.

It’s a sober warning that when you depart from the Scriptures you create a spiritual vacuum that can be filled by things you don’t want. We’re naïve if we think we’re just living in some society of people with none of these forces that are all around us. This is not to get spooky. ^NAS 1 John 4:4, “…because greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world”. My attempt here is not to get spooky and mystical. My attempt here is to alert us that ideas are generated by minds and humans aren’t the only minds (M-I-N-D-S) in creation. There are other minds, spiritual minds, who are fully capable of creating ideas and passing them on. 1 Kings 22 - one demon can put the same idea in 400 prophets of Baal. That’s the power they have. So ideas come from minds and not necessarily from human minds.

So obviously the accusation here is that they sacrifice to demons. They’re actually worshipping. This is why it makes God angry. It’s not just they’re looking at a rock. They are looking at something far more important spiritually than a rock, or just a statue. They have defected and actually are worshipping demonic forces that are creatures and not the Creator – a fact of the creator-creature distinction.

Then finally it concludes in verse 18. This is one of those poignant phrases because again we’re looking at the accusation. The prosecution here (the Holy Spirit working through Moses) is trying to personalize this conflict. It becomes very personal between Yahweh and Israel. I think this is such a good exercise because this gives us a sense of what our sin does in our relationship to God - these kinds of passages that get you sensing how God responds to us when we sin. Here is a very poignant one.

Let’s read verse 18. Follow me as I read verse 18. I have the New King James here. See if you can’t see in this verse a human social structure. ^NKJ Deuteronomy 32:18, “Of the Rock who begot you, you are unmindful, And have forgotten the God who fathered you”.

Anybody see an ordinary human relationship here? Look at the words “father” - and “begot”. It’s a mother and a father. It’s very fascinating that the family role of mom and dad is given here as revelatory of God’s relationship to the nation Israel. That’s why these social structures that we’re busy redefining marriage - the social structures that God has given to us are intended to be revelatory, not just lived in.

Marriages and families aren’t just social institutions. Yes they are those, but biblically they have another rationale behind them. That is our experience in living with those institutional designs sets us up so we understand the invisible relationship that exists between God and believers. That’s why those social institutions. They’re set up that way to be revelatory regardless of what some legislature is going to do when they get the majority vote. You can’t change the revelatory truths that are involved here. All you can do is pervert the vehicles of that revelation to stop revealing truth to you so you don’t have to bother with the God of creation. That’s the battle.

So here we have in verse 18 a poignant reference to the family. It brings up the idea of the rock that begot and you are mindful and forgotten the God who fathered you. The Hebrew shows you both the male and female in the way it expresses itself here. That should remind us of the fact that in Matthew 23 as I point out in the hand out, Matthew 23:37 Remember when Jesus was going in and He said:

^NKJ Matthew 23:37, “… as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!

That is the answer to the radical feminists who claim that the Bible is patriarchal and doesn’t have any kind of maternal manifestation of God. Here’s another one of those passages. Here you see the maternal nature of the female is also derivative of God’s nature. God is not just revelatory of a masculine profile but also a maternal one. Jesus Himself expresses this in Matthew 23. So both the male and female personas are derivative of God.

So in conclusion, three points. The court case so far - the witnesses are called to examine a historical record. Now that element connected with something. Let your thought flow a moment. If God convicts on the basis of history, what does that imply about this book when it narrates history? It must have integrity. Isn’t this an argument for the inerrancy of Scripture? What does a defense attorney do to testimony that - he tries to do in a court case to defend his client? To undercut the testimony, right, of the prosecution. Well, if the prosecution in this case God’s Spirit is arguing on the basis of history it’s a flimsy case if the history of the book is wrong and erroneous – built into this. The Bible is holistic. The Bible has a rationale to itself. The Bible is rationally consistent. Here the witnesses are called to examine the historical record. Obviously the historical record must be true.

Number two; Yahweh has complied with all aspects of the contractual relationship. Now think about that one for a moment. That’s why when you read things like Joshua and you read these lists after lists after lists. Gee the tribe of Manasseh did this. They were given this land over here. The tribe of Benjamin was given this land over here.

Sometimes you read that and you think, “Is this a cure for insomnia? Why do I have to read through all the ponderous detail?” Why do you think about that? Those are legal documents to say Benjamin got his just as God said. Manasseh got his just as God said. What’s that testifying to? God’s faithfulness. Those historical details are there not to put us to sleep when we read; those details are there to convince us of the faithfulness of Jehovah God.

Point 3, Israel has deliberately chosen to reject Yahweh’s lordship. There are no excuses here. That’s what the court case is doing. There is no excuse. They chose to defy Him and this is a depiction of what our sin looks like. Here we see the benefits of looking at the law, looking at God’s relationship in the Old Testament because it can help us in our relationship in the New Testament.

Okay that’s the story tonight as far as we can get. We’ve gotten now to verse 18, which is the accusation. Next week we’re going to deal with the sentence. Then we are going to have some fun with IV that is unique to the Bible. So while all the rest of it’s heavy, just, and scary about the accusation against sin and God’s judgment; there is also a word of grace here.

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Okay, we’ll have some Q & A here.

Question

Good question. He is asking whether the letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2 and 3 follow the riv proceeding. I haven’t ever seriously looked at the structure of those letters but it would be very interesting to see because it’s the same kind of thing where Jesus Christ is basically judging the churches. So you would expect yeah that you could probably see that there. That’s a good point. Somebody has probably done it in church history. I just have never done it.

Any other comments, discussion tonight?

Question

The liberals have trouble with it because it is history that is written ahead of the history that actually happened. It’s prophetic in other words. They’ve always had a problem with prophetic literature. This is why one of the most famous illustrations of their problem is for years, for years they dated the book of Daniel so late because here he’s talking about the four kingdoms. It’s quite clear what kingdoms he’s talking about.

“He couldn’t have looked, foreseen Greece and Rome. I mean come on, Daniel could have seen on that far ahead in time.”

So they would always have all kinds of arguments that Daniel must have been written very, very late. Well, archeology began to find the Aramaic. It’s written in Aramaic. It’s early Aramaic, not later Aramaic. Then finally in one section, I forgot what section it was, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, the scroll was predated before the liberal date. So these are examples of why. So the problem the liberals have with 32 is it’s prophetic literature. That’s the problem.

The reason they could speculate and post date it that way was because it was not known when they did that it was not known when they did that about these second millennium riv proceedings. That’s a recent kind of thing – the last 30 or 40 years. So the liberals in the end of the 19^th century that taught things that are still taught in some our local colleges…

One of the great liberal depictions of the Old Testament was the JEPD theory. J meant Jehovah; E means Elohim; D meant Deuteronomy; and P meant priestly. JEDP was the evolutionary sequence of their thinking about God. Notice D - it’s not early; it’s late in the process. So their whole theory of the book of Deuteronomy had to be written late, far later than is shown. The idea that Moses wrote it - it was just written to make you think that Moses wrote it.

Question

This is an example once again – a brilliant man. We’re not saying they are stupid men. We’re arguing that they were deceived by their worldview. They bought into an evolutionary worldview, and then that worldview in turn controlled how they looked at the data.

Question

She is asking the question about this business of human parts and animal parts mixed together in the gods and goddesses. Maybe it was the Genesis 6; that incident contributed to that.

Before I get to Genesis 6, think about this. When Ezekiel looks at the throne of God, Isaiah looks at the throne of God - how do they describe the creatures around the throne? They’re angels. They’re cherubs; but they are described as having animal parts – wings, heads of lions.

I have a veterinary son. One of my sons is a vet. I like to kind of challenge him every once in a while.

I say, “Well, you’re dealing with creatures that are made after angel parts because the angels were created before the animals were.”

I think it’s striking that if angels have animal form, which they do because obviously Isaiah reports on seeing it. The Apostle John saw it. Ezekiel saw it. So either these guys are phonies or when they see these visions these angels can appear zoomorphically and not only zoomorphically but mixed zoomorphically. They can show up as a person and then as an animal. How that happens I haven’t got the foggiest idea. It’s just the text indicates that they do. But we do know that the angels were created before the animals were. So my take on that is that when God created the animals He copied the form the angels have. So when you look at your cow and you look at your pussycat maybe you’re looking at a design that comes off some angel somewhere. It’s not the other way around.

It’s not the case that when these guys saw this, “Oh that’s just a literary metaphor. They knew animals so when they were trying to imagine what an angel looked like they couldn’t conceive of that so they used animal metaphors.”

It’s actually reversed to that. The angels actually are that way and animals have this correspondence to that.

Getting back to her question about Genesis 6, that is a very difficult passage. Something weird is going on there in that passage. People like to smooth over and say the daughters of man and the sons of God; one was godly and the others were the fallen people. The Hebrew text just doesn’t let you do that. The way it’s structured is there are divine beings intermixing with humans. What happened? We don’t know. But it was obviously an element that God was concerned with when He sent the flood. So something screwed up there in that.

Maybe some of that is reflected in mythology. Where in Greek mythology you have the gods kind of half human and half god – that kind of stuff in mythology. Maybe that’s sort of perverted memory of it. That’s another thing. That was real beings rather than the imagined idols that we’re talking about here.

What they’re talking about these idols - they never physically existed in a sense; but they were projections, artistic projections of images, that these craftsmen had. These people were good craftsmen. They would be equivalent people like David who worked with the gaming kind of thing. They were good people. They were really skilled craftsmen. They didn’t get these ideas floating. Where did they get them from? The testimony of the fathers is they got them from demonic forces.

That’s why it’s a concern that you mess with these things; and you’re bringing yourself to admire the demonic.

Question

No, because what I’m saying is that if God is going to use the historical record as a basis of conviction there’s got to be a historical record that’s valid. That’s why you have the emphasis all the way through the prophets. When you get into Micah 6, Hosea 4, Isaiah 1; once they get into the lawsuit proceeding they’re talking about specific historical events.

The point is that the specific historical event is like you would have in a courtroom case. What did the guy do? You are accusing somebody. Did they or did they not do this? That’s why because of the 9^th commandment, it’s an ethical issue if there are errors in the prophetic scriptures - an ethical issue.

Paul recognizes that because in 1 Corinthians 15 when Paul is defending his depiction of the historicity of the resurrection he confesses in 1 Corinthians 15 that, “if Christ did not rise not only are you guys in trouble and your faith is in vain; but I am a liar.”

You’ve got the irony then. If you are going to hypothesize erroneous history in the Bible, then it’s undermining the 9^th commandment. How do you reconcile the Jewish emphasis on the ethics with the fabrication of history?

Now the liberal critic would say, “They didn’t put it together – that’s all.”

In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul puts it together. There’s an educated Hebrew, and he clearly sees the ethical implications.

When you look at the riv proceeding, and that’s why I had you go to Isaiah, Micah, and Hosea. You can find it in other places. In all those cases if you look there, they’re referencing historical events. So if the historical event didn’t happen, now the whole case falls apart. Now God didn’t do what He said He was going to do.

This is one reason why not only do we have those laborious passages about the tribe and what cities they had and all the rest. That’s why you have all those genealogies in there. There’s another insomniac medicine.

You read through those and you wonder, “Good grief! Why do we have to go through the genealogy?”

Because - the genealogy is a record of history. Did God do what He said He was going to do or didn’t He? That’s the record of it.

Question

Yes. Yes, good point. That’s why when I went through that text you see that little verse packed in there. You’d miss it if you were reading real fast. But I stopped you and I pulled out that verse and I said, “Watch it!” because that tells you that the editors that wrote that book- in the case of Deuteronomy obviously it was post edited because there are notices such and such is the case until this day. So it was reworked apparently by rabbis.

Why did they put those notes in there? They obviously put the editing notes in the text because they were concerned about the validity of their claims.

The Bible is … you cannot avoid the inerrancy of the text. Once you start playing fast and lose with the text, you’ve got yourself involved in an ethical issue. Now the whole ethics of the Bible might as well be chucked. That’s what it was finally if you follow what liberalism did.

The higher criticism of the Bible began with a Frenchman. You know that of course, Jean (?). He actually if I remember my Old Testament introduction Jean wrote as early as the late 1600’s or 1700’s. France was going down the tubes anyway then.

So this was the thought of those men of the Enlightenment that they could take the Bible and encase it with Enlightenment thinking. That’s how we had higher criticism. Yet if you look at the historic development of higher criticism against the Bible again and again and again archeological data has always validated the conservative position.

That’s why Albright right here at John Hopkins who was the Father of Biblical Archeology in this country. He wrote a famous essay after he got out in the field and began discovering things. It’s a famous essay. It’s called Toward a More Conservative View of the Bible. That was because he didn’t start out really having confidence the Bible was historically valid. After he worked; archeology is slow work. You have to go into these sites and sit there with a little sieve and pick out each square foot and sieve all the dirt out because there might be a pottery shard here. It’s not fast work. It’s dirty work and it takes a long time to come to these conclusions.

But gosh, when they dealt with Jericho, Jericho was a joke. I mean what liberal do you think ever believe the story of Jericho with the walls falling out instead of being pushed in? Guess what they found archeologically? The walls of Jericho went out.

One of my buddies that since has died unfortunately graduated from Dallas Seminary with me, he was on a archeological dig in Jericho and on the east wall they found not only the wall; but they found a hole in the wall that was unusual. They think that’s Rehab’s little place where she let the guys out. It was remarkably unusual but she had a whorehouse. She had a business and she had a little door to the outside and that was how she ran her business. The archeologists were intrigued by it because they’d never seen this in a wall before. Why do you build a wall with rooms inside? You don’t want a hole in the wall; but there it was.

It’s been exciting. There’s biblical archeology research – BAR or something like that. You can check on the Internet. There is so much neat stuff that has been discovered in archeology, biblical archeology. It’s wonderful. The thrust of 98% of the material is always to vindicate what we thought the Bible was saying all along.

The stuff I brought tonight, this riv proceeding, that’s another example. Nobody knew about the riv proceeding in 1690 when Jean was doing his stuff. Nobody knew about it in 1870 when the higher critics were messing around the universities of Europe. Was it 1968 or 1962—all of a sudden they discovered this document.

“Oh gee! Look what we just found! They really did treaties. They really had lawsuits back then.”

Then you take the lawsuit and you hold it next to the text.

“My goodness! There’s correspondence. All second millennium material!”

Anything more?

Question

Good question. What he is asking is whether the format was found in pagan literature and then came into the text. We have to be careful as Bible believing Christians. We think that the format obviously was original with the text and reflects how people think in terms of justice. Therefore, because pharaoh and these other kings, in the final analysis they’re made in God’s image so when they tried to formulate a treaty, they think in judicial terms.

So it’s that they created these documents, which we can now dig up and read. But like I point out to you, that’s why I put those red sections in there tonight and I put the italics. They don’t quite correspond. That’s the trigger for a Bible scholar.

“Ooo! Look at this. This isn’t in those pagan forms.”

Question

It might have. These are national treaties. These are nations. Those were more with private businesses. It grew out of that.

Just think about our modern European history. Why is it that there was so much intermarriage in the royal families of Europe? Think about why that happened. Why were kings and queens exchanging children as late as 1500, 1600? Why do you suppose the nations were having royal families intermarry? For the same reason Solomon was doing it. They looked upon marriage as a clincher. If king A wanted to make sure king B didn’t mess with him, if he pawned his daughter off or he married the guy’s daughter -this went on. There was a little family pressure to be good boys and girls.

Isn’t it interesting in later European history you see the same thing going on? Men don’t change. Women don’t change. We are designed. We vary a little bit but by golly down through the corridors of time we still act the same way.

I’m interested when we get to heaven…imagine what it must be like being able to sit down and talk to these biblical characters that we’re reading about.

“I just talked to Joshua. Well Joshua, back when we were studying Deuteronomy 31 it sounds like you got a tough inauguration there.”

We’ll actually see Joshua. This is intriguing to me - our future.

Question.

I see. I think it’s two-fold. He is asking the question – did Moses in his early education… Obviously he was very well educated, but the key is this. The influence of Moses’ Egyptian education shows up in one area; and it’s not that one. The treaties, yeah, they were going on. He probably knew about them being raised in the royal family. He probably actually thought in terms of that. But we have to say that God told him to write it this way. So there probably was a little bit of that. The fascinating thing is if you take a frequency diagram and plot the frequency of Egyptian words; guess where they’re the most prominent. The Pentateuch - that’s Moses. Egyptian words sitting there. What’s intriguing from our standpoint though is what’s not in the Pentateuch.

Here’s Moses schooled in Egyptian medicine, schooled in the Egyptian theology, schooled in the Egyptian culture forms. Why aren’t those forms part and parcel of Deuteronomy? See there is the purging effect of the Holy Spirit – that the Holy Spirit didn’t let Moses take his Egyptian education and contaminate God’s message with it.