23 - History, the Believer, and the Justice of God [B]

History, the Believer and the Justice of God
The Book of Judges
Judges Lesson #023
July 27, 2021
Dr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org

Opening Prayer

“Our Father, we are so thankful that we can come together this evening to focus upon your Word, to continue to look at Your Word as it shines light, not only on what happened in the ancient world, but what typically happens as nations and civilizations go through their various cycles.

“Father, we see that the main issue is always the spiritual life, and Father, we are reminded that, as goes the believer, so goes the nation. Today we live in a world where there are fewer believers, and in a nation where there are fewer believers, and those believers are woefully ignorant of Your Word because they have wolves in sheep’s clothing residing in their pulpits.

“So, Father, we pray that you would continue to raise up schools, seminaries that will train pastors, and men willing to lead, willing to make the sacrifice that is necessary to focus on serving You and teaching Your people. How desperately that is needed.

“And so Father, we pray for evangelists also who will take the gospel, the accurate gospel to the people. We pray for our nation, that it may be responsive to the light of Your Word. And Father, we pray too for the prayer requests we have for people in this congregation who are facing serious illnesses, cancer and paralysis. Father, we pray that You would give them doctors with wisdom and skill to diagnose, to treat and whatever as Your will that we might accept it and rejoice in You, and the witness that You will receive through these situations. And Father, open our eyes to Your Word this evening. We pray in Christ name. Amen.”

Slide 2

Alright, we’re back in Judges Chapter 3, and we’ll say a few more things tonight about history. It is so important. In fact, I came across an article that was given to me, and I read it last night. It is by Andrew Roberts, who was a noted historian, once again, writing on the importance of history and the importance of teaching our children historical truth because they’re not going to get it in a public school. They may not get it in a private school. If it is a good Christian School with well-trained teachers, they might get it. But ultimately, parents and grandparents are responsible for educating the children and not putting it off on Sunday School or putting it off on the school teachers.

It’s their responsibility, and that means reading Scripture every day to your kids, praying with them every day from the time they’re born. We have no idea how or what the impact is of the Word on those formative connections in the brain as the Word of God is read to them and preparing them because over time, that becomes familiar, and it’s processed in the brain and that prepares them for when they’re old enough to communicate and truly understand it. It is something that is already familiar.

The pathways in the brain have been established, and also to teach from a young age, there are organizations that put out solid material, patriotic material based on accurate history for very young children all the way up to high school. Also, Hillsdale College in Michigan puts out—go to their website. They have lots of courses. I’ve signed up for several, and I have listened to several times and have been listening to one now that has to do with American history. It is taught by the author of this book. His name is Wilfred McClay, and he is the one who is teaching this particular course. He just published a book on American history entitled, Land of Hope, an Invitation to the Great American Story. And this, I believe, just was recently published (it came out in 2019).

It is written by a conservative, not that it is putting forth a conservative agenda. But what we mean by conservative agenda is someone who sticks to the facts, the truth, and presents what happened. He says that just like any other nation in history, the United States has its blemishes, but all nations have their blemishes. That doesn’t justify any of them, just as human being has their blemishes. We’re not perfect, and we cannot create a perfect society.

We cannot create a utopia because the basic problem with human beings is that we are sinners. So anyway, this is an excellent resource. I’ve been reading through it in light of the fact that I will be teaching the second half of the Church History—two semesters of Church History for Chafer Theological Seminary this Fall—and the focus will be on, “The History of Christianity from 1600 to the Present.”

Now there’s no way you can cover the history of Christianity as it relates to South America, Africa, or Asia—all of the missions, movements and activities—anymore in this section than in the first section. I could spend more than ten minutes on the history of Eastern Orthodoxy, and I have a series of books at home, I mean on Logos, that covers the history of Eastern Orthodoxy, but that would take another semester just in itself. And to cover all of the other nations in the world, and the expansion of Christianity would take volumes and semesters to go through.

Frankly, the reality is the development and history of theology and the development and understanding of historical orthodoxy took place in the West. It took place among the descendants of Japheth as Noah prophesied back in Genesis 9. Yet it was the descendants of Japheth who dwell in the tents of Shem forecasting, prophesying that the descendants of Japheth, that is the Indo-European peoples, would be finding their abode in the Scriptures of the Jews, one branch of the of the Shemites.

So, it’s important to understand all of these things. Anyway, I’ll be going into that through the semester, and it’s a great opportunity to learn a lot about the history of this nation, and what was really going on because I am firmly convinced after 30 or 40 years of studying history that the driving forces in history are theological belief: What we think about God drives history, and that is the most important thing.

It is not all these other things that people focus on when you go to any secular school. You look at all of the secondary causes. You don’t look at the primary cause. We look at the secondary causes. You look at things such as trade. You look at economics. You look at politics. You look at geography, and your politics and all of these other things, but what the Bible says, we see in our study of Judges, is what is determinative is God’s plan and God’s outworking of that plan in history, and so to understand the Scriptures is one of the most important things that we can learn. So that’s one reason I’m taking some time to look at history. We’re going to kind of wrap that part up, get back into the flow of the text a little bit more.

Slide 3

But tonight, I’m going to summarize some things on history, and the believer and the justice of God as we get into the next section dealing with the first of the Judges. Our outline again is that we are seeing that there’s an introduction that introduces the basic themes and structure of what we see in the Book of Judges, and the problem is not that they were militarily untrained. The problem is not that they had a lesser technology or that their men were not trained in the latest strategy and tactics, but that they compromised with God’s plan; they compromised God’s orders for them in defeating and annihilating the Canaanite tribes. That incomplete obedience and their compromise led to eventual failure. And we see the cycles of discipline taking place.

In the Book of Judges we see it gets worse through each cycle. Othniel is the first judge; Samson is the last, and it’s a pretty big and degrading progression, deteriorating conditions from Othniel to Sampson. And then the last four chapters have to do with the paganization of the priests and of the people.

Slides 4–5

We started this last time looking at Othniel, the first judge, Judges 3:7–11 and that the divine indictment is set forth in Judges 3:7, “The sons of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and forgot the Lord their God and serve the Baals and the Asherah.” I pointed out that the indictment is that they did evil.

It’s very interesting—and I have thought about this; I thought a lot about it at the time—but after 9/11 when President George W. Bush identified the perpetrators of the attacks as evildoers, the left and leftists went absolutely berserk; they just flipped out, and they had a visceral hatred of that man for the next seven years because he bought into the idea that there were absolutes and that there is absolute evil, and these perpetrators of those terrorist attacks were evil and the left denies the existence of evil.

But if you deny the existence of evil, you must also deny the existence of good. You must deny all ability to discern right from wrong. You must abandon making any moral judgments about anything which, as we have seen over the last 20 years, that is exactly what has happened in the extremist side on the left wing of the political spectrum, the things that they are saying are good is just beyond comprehension.

Slide 6

So evil is described ultimately as being in the sight of God; God is the ultimate reference point, and that is how we determine evil is what God says, and then it is defined in the second half of the verse is forgetting the Lord their God.

Slide 7

The Hebrew word is shakhach, and of course, in this slide I didn’t insert the vowels, but it’s two a’s between the sh and the k. What you have in this slide is they “forgot the Lord their God,” and that means that they foolishly chose to disregard Him, to ignore Him, to deny His very involvement. They acted as if God were not there, which is extremely foolish to deny God.

Which is why the writer of the psalm says that the fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” It is not because he is first a fool and then he denies God; it is that because he denies the existence of God, he is a fool. As you go to Proverbs and we see that Proverbs begins that, [Proverbs 1:7] “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” and so the opposite is to deny God or to act as if He’s not there or not involved in our lives is the mark of the fool.

There are many people who will tell you they believe there is a God, but functionally they live as if there is no God. They deny Him with everything they say, everything they do even though in one sense they affirm it.

So, it is more than just intellectual atheism; it is functional atheism. They forget, they disregard the Lord their God, and they serve the Baals and the Asheroth, which I will point out and have pointed out. It means they enslaved themselves to these false gods, and from what we learned in Deuteronomy 28, these false gods are simply personifications of very real demons and demonic personalities.

Now in the previous lessons, I have gone over several things about postmodernism, and its view of history, which because it rejects absolutes, it rejects the existence of objective reality.

If you think about that, if you reject objective reality, then you can just make up your own reality, which is what they’re doing. They’re living in a fantasy world. And so, if there’s no absolute truth, then there’s no absolute history. You can’t really know it. I mean, if you think about it, they’ll say there’s some truth. And if you think about it, there’s always a kernel truth or a large kernel of truth in Satan’s lies because Satan knows that it’s not the truth part that is destructive, it’s the lie part that he deceives with that is so destructive. And so there’s always a kernel of truth that sucks people in.

So when they get sucked into these various views like postmodernism, they say, “Yeah, nobody really can know. I mean you take witnesses at a crime scene, and you have five people see the same thing and say five different things, so we can’t really know what happened.” So they just dismiss all of the eyewitnesses from that period of time in history, and say they were just making it all up, and we all feel very comfortable about that because now we can make up our own history and make the world in a way we’d like it to be, which is exactly what we see every time we watch these crazy stories on the news.

Or we hear people talk about things, and it’s just insane what they believe to be true, or they say they believe. They enslave themselves to these false views. They have professed themselves to be wise, but they are fools according to Paul in Romans 1. The result is that they’re serving the creature rather than the Creator. They serve the creation; they worship the earth. There’s no surprise in the fact that that we have such a rise in the whole green environmental religious movement, because that’s what it is. It is a religion.

If you take God out of the picture, you have to have something to explain how everything got here, so you follow Darwin’s theory of evolution, because it has a pseudo-scientific façade. When you come to environmentalism, you convince yourself that you can actually change the temperature of the earth by separating out your garbage and putting some things into one basket and other things into another basket, and you can tell you little children that when they do that that they’re saving the planet.

That’s what their teachers are telling them, so if you’re going to train them as Christian parents, you need to teach them that that’s a lie. But don’t tell your teacher that because then they’ll want to take them away from you, because that’s coming.

Slide 8

I want to make some observations about some of the things that I’ve said about history. The first thing is really a statement in relation to a quote I gave you from a renowned historian. The reason I quote these people—I know I’ve said this before, but you may have missed it—is that these elite historians that are accepted and recognized by the faculties of our universities have false views of history. As a result of that, they influence our professors and our students at these universities with their false reviews. Because when you’re 19, 20, or 21, you’re not adept enough to figure some of this out, and so it leads you astray.

Slide 9

The quote that I gave you was from Fernand Braudel in his book, The Identity of France; this is a final passage. He says, “Men do not make history,”—which denies personal responsibility, Divine Institution Number One—men do not make history. Rather it is history above all that makes men.” Think about that.

How does history make people what they are? That seems like a causality that cannot be resisted. History, he personifies history, “it is history, above all, that makes men and absolve them of all blame.” That denies personal accountability.

Now this is called structuralism; that’s the broad philosophical movement of which Braudel was apart according to the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. So this is an approach to history that focuses on certain structures. Now structures are important. We’re not saying they’re not important, but they’re not all that there is.

When you look at or develop a philosophy of history, you focus on three basic questions. When I went into the doctoral program at Dallas Seminary on Historical Theology, the first course I had to take was one on historiography, which is the study of history. You can breakdown different basic historical philosophies.

That is, these are broad ways in which historians interpret history, and you can well imagine that if an historian has rejected God, he doesn’t see God as being part of the causative factor, then you’re going to have a skewed view of history.

But there are three questions that you have to identify, and one of my assignments was reading through a host of major historians and being able to articulate their philosophy of history based on three questions. First of all, where is history going? Is history going anywhere—that’s part of it—is history, going anywhere, or is it like the pagans in the ancient world that just saw history as being endlessly cyclical, and so it’s not going anywhere, and there’s no resolution, it is all random, and we go forward?

Christianity introduced—and by that, I mean Judeo-Christianity going back to understanding the Hebrew Bible—that history was God’s plan, and it was linear. History is going somewhere; it has a purpose. All of the minutia, all the details of the dates you may have to memorize, all that stuff is ultimately important in trying to put together the directionality of history because that is going to be determined by details.

What happens in postmodernism is you reject factuality, and you reject truth. So that by removing facts and truth, you can make up whatever you want it to be, and there is no real meaning in history other than what you assign. Nobody wants to be sitting in history class if you have a professor that thinks it’s all random and there’s no meaning and it’s all an accident. That class is just going to be nothing but random dates and facts that mean nothing. That’s postmodernism, and that’s why history is often very boring for a lot of people.

Second, what is the ultimate causative factor in history? Economics. That would be someone like Karl Marx. He stole the directive idea from Christianity, and then he sees economics as being the driving cause. It is something within Creation; it is not the God who stands outside of Creation.

And then what is the purpose of history? Does history have a purpose? Is it meaningful? Is it insignificant? Do I need to understand the meaning of history? If there’s no meaning to the broad scope of history, then there’s no meaning to the narrow, minute history of you. If there’s no big picture of history that has meaning, then your life has no meaning, your history has no meaning. It is not significant. If history in general isn’t going anywhere, neither are you, that’s depressive. That is dark. No wonder nobody wants to really study history and learn anything.

So, in terms of the ultimate causative factor, biblically, God is the one who overrules in history. He is the one who takes history in various directions.

Slide 8

I’m going to look at some examples of that biblically, so that we can see it, but let’s just start with the first point here that causality in “structuralism.” In other words, what is it that moves history? What causes things? Ultimately, it’s the structure of history itself, that’s why it’s called structuralism, and not the individual. It’s a denial of the importance of the individual. The emphasis is on structures such as geography, natural resources.

Now, all of those things are important, and all of those things play a role, but it’s a secondary or tertiary role in history as I will point out in a little bit. It is not the ultimate purpose of history. So, we have to look at look at that.

Slide 10

The second point is that the components in the case of history—man—becomes basically irrelevant. The components in history, man, animals become irrelevant because they’re just a pawn in in the impersonal force that makes up history. How many times have you heard it? I’ve heard it.

I know you’ve heard it: You’re talking to somebody who says, “Well, I just figured the universe was balancing things out.” The universe is impersonal; it’s matter. How can you balance anything? Balance implies there’s some sort of external criteria? How can pure matter balance anything? It has no knowledge. It has no morality, no ethics.

But you see people who just pray in the universal. They should just say my favorite is when somebody’s in trouble. “Well, you’re in my thoughts.” What does that mean? I don’t care if I’m in your thoughts; I want you to pray to the God who can intervene. And other than that, whatever you’re thinking about is irrelevant to anything.

But that’s what happens when you don’t know God. So, what happens in historical study is that the focus is on these impersonal forces. Impersonal, volitional decisions becoming irrelevant. That’s why they don’t talk about the role of religion, the role of Christianity, the role of peoples’ belief systems on their culture and what they do.

Slide 11

So ultimately, what this does is make man the victim of these impersonal forces. This is the original development of victimology. Man, therefore, is a victim. We are only what history and our culture has made us. We are victims in the way that modern man would never admit to.

We’re victims of Satan and his temptation of Eve. We’re victims of Adam’s decision, but what the Bible infers is that any human being would have made the same decision Adam made under the same conditions. That’s why God, in His omniscience, is just in saying that all are guilty of Adam’s sin, because we would have done exactly the same thing, and God in His omniscience knows that.

Slide 12

So ultimately what this does, is the way they think of history dehumanizes human beings and reduces their significance, so man is not individually responsible. What I’m formulating is what I think is a pretty good theory, that every Satanic attack ultimately is directed at destroying one or more of the six Divine Institutions. You destroy personal responsibility, and it’s a domino effect. Eventually, every other Divine Institution will collapse, but first we have to destroy human responsibility and accountability.

Slide 13

Fifth point. In contrast, the Bible says that the ultimate cause in history is God who, first of all, created ex nihilo (out of nothing) everything from nothing. Let’s think about this for just a minute. Can you imagine absolutely nothing? Probably not. We can’t imagine absolute nothingness as we’re going to place that nothingness within the space-time continuum. So therefore it’s not truly nothingness.

But to the best of our ability, try to imagine absolutely nothing, and God spoke, the universe—the space-time continuum—not necessarily the stars; they are not there yet. The stars in the heavens didn’t come into existence, but what we have is God created the heavens, which is the space-time continuum and the earth, just the singular planet going through darkness. Genesis 1:1.

But think about what that meant. You have absolutely nothing. To create anything out of nothing demands not just an extraordinary knowledge, but an exhaustive knowledge of all things, omniscience. It also requires that you have the ability and the power to bring into existence whatever you can think of, and the thought is so complex that it comprehends intuitively in a flash, that is an eternal flash, all of the inter-relationships from the most microscopic, minute subatomic particles we have no idea exist, up to the most enormous macro systems of galaxies.

All of that is perceived exhaustively by God, and He is able to bring it about without a flaw, so that every system works perfectly. It means comprehending it from the largest to the most minute. And so that involves a level of knowledge that, as the psalmist says, is too wonderful for us. We cannot attain to it. We just can’t grasp it. And that’s the God who overseas His Creation. So, the Bible says that the ultimate cause in history is God who created everything ex nihilo, from nothing.

Second. He overseas His creatures and Creation to bring about His desired will. But He’s not micromanaging it. Because to micromanage it when it comes to volitional creatures is to override their volition and their responsibility.

So, He is powerful enough to orchestrate the results that He desires without overriding on human volition. That He was able to take decisions that seem random, and work them all to His end for His glory. It is this combination of His unlimited knowledge and His unlimited ability, His omniscience and His omnipotence, that enables Him to accomplish His will without destroying human volition. And so we have a causative factor within us and that relates to our spiritual volition. That relates to what we determine in relation to God, and that is what’s important as we will see from biblical examples.

Slide 14

Thus, God is the ultimate cause in human history working through intermediate causes. I’ve mentioned this before, but the Liberation Trilogy written by Rick Atkinson, which the first volume starts at the beginning of the United States’ involvement in World War II up through the North African is phenomenal. When you study all of the logistics, and he brings in lots of details.

The amazing thing is we didn’t do anything right. The Nazis were doing everything right. We did nothing right, and God in His sovereignty still brought about their defeat and our victory. And that kind of ineptitude, as it were, followed all the way through Normandy and beyond. The number of fatal mistakes that we made that were not fatal, blows your mind. I don’t know anything about his theology or his overall view of history, but it fits in helping us understand that ultimately, God has a plan, and He can override human decisions and be involved in a number of different ways.

Slide 15

That takes us to the sixth point that in terms of causation. It is not laws that are discovered within Creation that are the ultimate causative factor in moving history. Depending on the historian you read, its political theories, economic laws, natural resources, military technology, numerical superiority, etc., but volitional decisions in relation to God and Bible doctrine, what the Bible teaches, other laws or secondary observations impacted foremost by rejection and application of biblical teaching. That’s the issue ultimately.

Think of these examples. Look back at the events that we see in the Old Testament, look at Abraham’s defeat of the five kings that come in as marauders and just wipe out everything; they defeat every army in their path, and it is Abraham and his servants that take out and destroy this alliance and rescue all of the people that had been taken captive, and they recover all of the plunder.

You think about the ten plagues in Egypt. The mightiest nation on earth at the time, and God absolutely destroyed it through a series of ten plagues and redeemed or rescued His people. He intervenes in history. That can’t be measured; that can’t be developed in a master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation because there are no laboratories for repeating it. But that’s what we see is God intervenes and changes things. And He delivered Israel.

Then you see their defeat of the Amalekites. Remember that scene in Exodus where they’re coming across the Sinai, and this ancient population of terrorists and land pirates or whatever you want to call them attack them. And so, God tells Moses—how’s this for military strategy; they don’t teach it at any of the military academies—you take the main leader and have him stand out where everybody can see him, and as long as he can hold his hands up, his side’s going to win.

After a while, what’s going to happen is he’s going to get tired, and his arms are going to start to drop, and the further down they go, the tide turns and his side begins to get defeated, and he struggles to get his arms up, and finally he gets two men, one on each side, to prop up his arms for him, so he can keep those arms up. That’s a great military strategy.

Sun Tzu never thought of that. It’s not even in the footnote. And you look at all the things in the Book of Judges, walking around a city, circumnavigating the walls once a day, then the last day you go around seven times and you don’t say a word, you don’t utter a sound and then at the end, you blast on the on the ram’s horns, on the shofar, and the walls come down.

It’s not in any engineering text. You’re not going to study that at West Point. See, the determinative factor had nothing to do with the military skills of the Jews, their tacticians, their generals. It had nothing to do with that. It was the power of the Lord. In the event with the Amalekites earlier, Moses said, “stand still and watch the deliverance of the Lord.” The battle is the Lord’s. It’s always about that. When things seem impossible, they are not impossible for God. He has been in the process of overcoming the impossible throughout history.

So, you have this example of the blessings and the curses in Leviticus 26. God is going to bring meteorological disaster, agricultural disaster, military disaster, social disaster, all on Israel in five successive stages, and none of it has to do with anything except their obedience or disobedience to God. That’s it. It has nothing to do with their intelligence, their skill, their education, their understanding of weather patterns.

I don’t think that God had been going out and saying, “Now if you separate your garbage a certain way, then you can have better weather.” They had an early form of this kind of climate heresy, and they would go, and they would offer live sacrifices to the gods and goddesses, or they would engage in sexual activity with the cult prostitutes at the Temple of Baal, who was the storm god.

We all remember the episode when Elijah goes to Mt. Carmel and gathers all of the priests of the Baal and Asherah, and says, “Okay, we’re going to have a little contest here: If Baal is god, and he’s the god of rain and the god of lightning, you build your altar and you sacrifice your animal on the altar, and then you call on Baal to come down and light the fire.” That’s the early version; it was come on Baal, light my fire. That’s in the footnotes.

So, nothing happens, and he taunts them because God isn’t politically correct with evil. He taunts them; he ridicules them saying, “He’s off taking a nap; cry out louder.” Or “Oh, he’s gone to the restroom; you better knock on the door.” He goes on and on and you see all of these things taking place.

And then, not only does Elijah at the end of the day, build his altar very precisely, but he has them haul up water from the brook, from the Kishon, and completely, thoroughly drench and soak and saturate the altar three times. And then he just offers a simple prayer, “Lord, if You’re God, please accept this sacrifice,”—something to that effect—and this enormous pillar of fire comes down from Heaven and just incinerates the whole thing.

Now God intervenes in history just as He did then, he can intervene now. He does it not in direct ways, but in indirect ways.

I want to take you to two passages. Let’s have a little fun with this. These are two passages, and in my Bible reading the last week, I ran across both of them, and when I listened to them, I thought man this is just such a great illustration. Turn first to 2 Kings 3. This is a situation where God is going to deliver Israel. Moab, is a descendant of Lot, Abraham’s nephew. So they’re cousins, and they’re going to rebel against Israel. Israel had defeated them, and they had been under their control, and so Jehoram in the north, the son of Ahab is now king over Israel and Samaria, and Jehoshaphat is the king of Judah in the south.

Jehoram does evil, and he continues to persist in all of the idolatrous sins of Jeroboam I, and so Mesha, the king of Moab, decides that he’s going to attack Israel. So, Jehoram goes to Jehoshaphat and says, “The king of Moab has rebelled against me. Will you go with me to fight against Moab?” And Jehoshaphat says, “I’ll go with you. I’m with you. I’m your people,” etc. And so they say, “Which way should we go? And they say, “Go by the way of wilderness of Edom.”

Those of you have been there, you go by the wilderness of Edom, it is not a watery location. There are very few wells, very few sources of water, and after three days the armies are just out of water and thirsty, and they’re just about to go home. So Jehoshaphat says, as Jehoram is ready to give up, “Isn’t there a prophet of the Lord here?” He does this several times. He calls on a prophet. Let’s get God’s advice. So the king of Israel and Jehoshaphat and the king of Edom went down to Elisha, and Elisha said to the king of Israel—I love this; he’s the king of Israel coming up and says—[2 Kings 3:13] “What do I have to do with you? Go to the prophets of your father and the prophets of your mother.” That’s Ahab and Jezebel.

Okay, go back to the Baals and the Asherah. And Jehoram says, [2 Kings 3:13] “No, for the Lord has called these three kings together to deliver them into the hand of Moab.” He’s a defeatist. [2 Kings 3:14] “And Elisha said, ‘As the Lord of hosts lives, before whom I stand, surely, were it not that I regard the presence of Jehoshaphat, the King of Judah. I would not look at you, nor see you— and this is really interesting; he says—But now bring me a musician.’ ”

I’m not going to get off on this, but remember how many times I have said there is a connection between the role of the prophet and music. We go to another passage in 1 Chronicles that deals with David establishing all of the orchestras and choirs for the temple, and it says that—I forget who it was now, maybe the sons of Asaph—one of the three guilds, prophesied with lyre and stringed instruments and tambourines, and in other words, prophesy is related to singing praise to God.

That’s another meaning. And so we see the importance of singing the way God wants it sung for worship. Anyway, so he says, now bring me a musician. [2 Kings 3:15] “Then it happened when the musician played that the hand of the Lord came upon him.” And now he speaks; he’s a prophet. So there’s this connection again between music and prophesy.

And the Lord says this is what you do. Go out here and make a valley of ditches out here in this dry soil. That must have been fun. Hopefully it was winter, and they weren’t in 120-degree heat. He said, [2 Kings 3:17] “You shall not see wind, nor should you see rain, yet that valley shall be filled with water, so that you, your cattle, and your animals can drink.” And so he calls upon them and they go out.

And then we read that in the process God gives them instructions, that after they win the battle, they are to go into Moab and there they are to destroy every choice city, cut down every good tree, stop up every spring and ruin every good piece of land with stones. Now the next morning they offered a grain offering and suddenly water came by the way of Edom. So, a storm comes and the land, and all of these ditches that they dug are filled with water.

When the Moabites heard where these armies were, they came out the next day, early in the morning, and as they’re approaching because they don’t know, they don’t believe there’s any water, there never has been. Now the sun is coming up and it’s reflecting off of all of this water, and it’s reflecting as red, and they think it’s blood. They had no idea there was water there; that’s the “God factor” in causing history.

So, because they see all of this blood, they say, “Oh these kings attacked each other; these groups hate each other, so let’s go gather up the plunder. They’re all dead.” When they got there, they discovered they weren’t dead, and it was an ambush, and they’re the ones who were defeated. That’s the story that’s told in the rest of the chapter. So they defeat the king of Moab and go in, destroy the cities and various other things.

Now the other episode is at the end of 2 Chronicles 20. This again is showing that God is the causative factor in these events. It doesn’t have anything to do with military technology, military skill. It has to do with God. In 2 Chronicles 20, Jehoshaphat is still the king. It happens that this episode isn’t mentioned in the Book of 2 Kings; I don’t know when it happened in relation to the other. I think it was before.

[2 Chronicles 20:1] “It happened that the people of Moab, with the people of Ammon and others with them besides the Ammonites came to battle against Jehoshaphat.” Then some came and told Jehoshaphat about this huge army also coming down from Syria. So, he’s going to be caught in a pincer movement. And they are down near Hazazon Tamar (which is En Gedi) right there along the Dead Sea between Qumran to the north and Masada to the south.

[2 Chronicles 20:3] “And Jehoshaphat feared, and he set himself to seek the Lord.” His focus isn’t on the details and the size of the army; he knows that God can defeat them. So he proclaims a fast. Judah gathers together to appeal to the Lord, and Jehoshaphat comes out and stands in the temple and calls upon the Lord. And he says in 2 Chronicles 20:6–7, “O Lord, God of our fathers, are You not the God in heaven, and do You not rule over all the kingdoms of the nations and in Your hand is there not power—omnipotence, power—and might, so that no one is able to stand against You? Are You not our God who drove out the inhabitants of this land before your people Israel?”

Notice what he’s doing. He is building an empirical case on why God should intervene. He’s saying, You’ve done this in the past. We know that You have the power and the ability to do that, and all of this goes back to the Abrahamic Covenant.

He says in 2 Chronicles 20:9: “ ‘If disaster comes upon us—sword, judgment, pestilence or famine—we will stand before this temple and in Your presence, for Your name is in this temple, and cry out to You in our affliction, and You will hear and save.’ ” Have you heard that recently? Last Tuesday night I looked at why is it that 2 Chronicles 7:14 isn’t a prayer for any other country to pray, and I looked at the fact that what God says in 2 Chronicles 7:14 is a response to precisely what Solomon prayed. That based on the promise of Deuteronomy 30, that if God’s people, who are Israel, called out to God, humbled themselves and obeyed God, then God would intervene, and that’s the promise that Jehoshaphat is claiming here.

And he says, [2 Chronicles 20:10] “And now, here are the people of Moab, and Mount Seir— whom you would not let Israel invade when they came out of the land of Egypt,” and now they’ve turned against us. These ungrateful people, and You, O God, [2 Chronicles 20:12] “O our God, will You not judge them? For we have no power against this great multitude that is coming against us, nor do we know what to do, but our eyes are upon You.”

Isn’t that great? When we look at what’s going on in the world around us, and we look and feel helpless and powerless to do anything, this is the prayer that we should be praying that God is the One who can turn the tide, and our eyes need to be upon Him. [2 Chronicles 20:13] “Now all Judah, with their little ones, their wives, and their children— emphasis on Divine Institution two, marriage and Divine Institution three, family—stood before the Lord.” It is their volitional response, Divine Institution number one. 2 Chronicles 20:14a–15] “Then the Spirit of the Lord came upon Jahaziel the son of Zachariah,—and he is going to announce God’s answer—And he says, ‘Listen, all you of Judah, and you inhabitants of Jerusalem, and you, King Jehoshaphat! Thus says the Lord to you: “Do not be afraid nor dismayed, because of this great multitude, for the battle is not yours, but God’s.” ’ ” The battle is the Lord’s, and He gives him instructions on what to do. So, Jehoshaphat does exactly what He says to do, and they go down to the wilderness south of Tekoa, which is Amos’ home, and they go down into the desert there and prepare themselves.

In 2 Chronicles 20:20–21, they go down to the wilderness of Tekoa, and then in order to prepare for battle, what does Jehoshaphat do? Does he order the men to go dig trenches? Set up the latrines, dig trenches, build fortified walls, all of those things? Not at all. He appointed those who should sing to the Lord and who should praise the beauty of holiness as they went out before the army, saying, [2 Chronicles 20:21–22] “ ‘Praise Yahweh for His mercy endures forever.’ Now when they began to sing and praise, the Lord set ambushes against the people of Ammon, Moab and Mount Seir—that’s the Edomites—who had come against Judah, and they were defeated.” What that means is God caused them to start fighting one another, and these three armies destroyed each other, so that it is Judah who wins the battle.

In 2 Chronicles 20:23–24 it says, “For the people of Ammon and Moab stood up against the inhabitants of Mount Seir to utterly kill and destroy them. And when they had made an end of the inhabitants of Seir, they helped to destroy one another. So when Judah came to a place overlooking the wilderness. They looked toward the multitude, and there were their dead bodies fallen on the earth. No one had escaped.”

The result of that is that they plunder the dead bodies. They take their valuables, their jewelry, they stripped them of their clothes, and then they go to a place called the Valley of Berachah [2 Chronicles 20:26] “for there they bless the Lord; therefore the name of that place was called the Valley of Berachah until this day.” Then they go back with joy and celebrate and rejoice, because God has given them the victory.

So, who is the ultimate causative factor in history, and in your life, and in my life? It’s God. It is not these other things, not that they’re not important. It’s important to be educated. It’s important to labor hard, to work, to earn money, to make wise decisions in purchasing property and home and make investments, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that it has to be done under the authority of God, looking to Him, trusting in Him to direct our paths.

It is not for us just to throw up our hands and expect God to just mystically make things happen, to wave His magic wand. But as we go forth studying the Word, applying the Word, trusting in God, God is the one who works in our lives and directs our paths. And so, this is what we see illustrated here: on the big picture, the macro picture, God is in control of history. He directs things to His end. On the small picture, the history of your life, the same is true.

Slide 16

So, our conclusion is that as goes the volition of the individual at God consciousness, and secondly at gospel hearing—you know a person can be negative at God consciousness and change their mind. Just because you go negative at God consciousness doesn’t mean you can’t change your mind five years later, ten years later. You may be positive at God consciousness and then get deceived in the way you are learning about God and worshipping God and be persecuting Christians and killing Christians and throwing them in jail and causing all kinds of things and be the last person on earth that anybody would ever think would become a Christian. And then suddenly Jesus Christ appears to you on the road to Damascus, and you’re the greatest believer of all the Church Age.

So, just because somebody is hostile and hates Christians today doesn’t mean they’re going to be that way forever. God may intervene because God is the ultimate causative factor in everything. As goes volition at God consciousness and at gospel hearing, so goes the nation. As goes the volition of the believer, so goes the nation. It ultimately is going to turn on the spiritual focus of the people.

Slide 17

Now let me wrap up by going through these three principles. These three principles govern post- modern history. The first principle is that since there are so many different opinions and views of history, there must not be any historical truth. I mean, who do you believe? You can understand how people get caught up with this, since there are so many views on vaccines and on the COVID virus and on all of these different variants, who do you know to believe? Nobody knows anything. but you can’t conclude that; that’s irrational.

There is a truth. We’re just not sure what it is related to that, but for the postmodern they give up. You can’t know truth, so you simply impose your own meaning on the past, the present, and the future. You just make it up to make yourself feel comfortable, whatever works for you. “Oh, you’re a Christian. Great, I’m glad that works for you. I’m a Buddhist that works for me; all truth is God’s truth.” I want to go throw up.

Slide 18

Second, there are so many events that the historian imputes his own values and judgment into every historical analysis. He’s not omniscient, so he doesn’t know which events are significant and which events aren’t. So he just has to pick on the basis of whatever he thinks using his own limited knowledge. And so he imputes his own values and judgment into every historical analysis and thinks that we have to just discuss and deconstruct those values.

“So, you have Western civilization historians? We have to deconstruct their values. You have Asian historians? Well, you know they’ve been looked down on by those white racists in Europe, so let’s give them a little more play. Let’s give more value to their culture and to the culture of the Africans.” And you deny all kinds of things because there’s no grid for evaluating anything. So, this leads to pure ignorance in all things.

When you have this kind of situation, then what happens is you have people who end up denying the Holocaust. It didn’t happen. There are more and more people as each year goes by who deny the Holocaust. I just thank God that General Eisenhower took so many troops to be eyewitnesses, and films and photographs that it cannot be rationally denied. And today as you have the rise of radical Islam, all Islam is radical; that’s a redundancy, you have neo-Nazi sympathizers and more and more anti-Semites that are developing everything.

How do you like this recent news about Ben and Jerry’s saying they’re not going to sell their ice cream over in the West Bank anymore. That’s fine and good. I loved yesterday. There was a woman in New York City who had been a graphics designer and advertising employee executive for twenty-one years with Ben and Jerry’s, and she said that if you’re going to treat Israel like that, I’m out of here. Turned in her letter of resignation, and the overall conglomerate, Unilever, has tried to distance themselves from that.

But you know a lot of people are just saying, “We’re not going to eat Magnum bars anymore because that’s sent out by Unilever. We’re not going to use Hellman’s mayonnaise.” I’m having to change a lot of my product purchases—Dove soap. Many other things—Unilever handles all kinds of things. But we cannot validate anti-Semitism in this country.

Now what’s interesting is many Pro-Israel organizations are bringing pressure to bear their approaching attorneys general in different states that have passed anti-BDS laws—boycott, divestment, and sanctions—that’s what this is. This is in violation of not knowing the laws of numerous states, but also a Federal, anti-BDS law.

But we’re not going to get any hope or any pleasure out of the Attorney General of the United States in this apostate, relativistic, anti-Israel, anti-Semite administration because they won’t do anything about it, which proves the validity of what I just said. There should be a letter from the Attorney General of the United States and from the Attorneys General of every state to every retailer in the nation saying, “You can’t do business with Ben and Jerry’s or Unilever anymore.” That’s what has to happen. Well, we’ll just see if that happens. So what we have is you just turn everything into relativism.

Slide 19

The third thing: facts and data are boring, uninteresting, and irrelevant; therefore, so is history. When you buy into relativism, you can’t refute anything; all you can do is dispute it. There’s a well-known historian of German history named Gordon Cragg who accepts the relativists’ view of modern history, but he cannot accept the conclusion of no Holocaust. The result is all we can do is argue, but he can’t destroy the arguments.

The Bible makes it clear that history happened. If Jesus Christ was not crucified on a cross outside the walls of Jerusalem in AD 33, buried, and resurrected three days later, then according to 1 Corinthians 15, we have no hope, that Christianity has no basis. History matters. But for modern man, history is fiction. That is the statement of Michael Foucault, who was a modern Nietzschean. So once we remove objectivity, all we have left is impressions and feelings and all we can do is make decisions based on emotion. We can’t figure out who the historical Jesus is without the Bible—that’s a reference to a book written at the turn of the century by Albert Sweitzer called, The Search for the Historical Jesus because the Bible just gives us a myth and a legend; we have to find the real Jesus and the only way you can do that is to not to deny Scripture. So, for the modern man today, Jesus is all about feeling. How did you feel about Jesus? It’s not what you think, which is what the Scripture says.

Slide 20

Our conclusion is, with the removal of truth, we can now revise history to fit our political and social agendas. The example is, what I’ve given already that the Holocaust didn’t happen, Marxism is the best we can do. This is what they say: “No one has ever really tried it.” No, they didn’t really try it in Cuba. They didn’t try it in Poland or in East Germany. They didn’t try it in Ukraine and Russia, and they’re not really trying it in China. “We can do it though.” The hubris of that is amazing. “We’ll do it, and we’ll make it work.”

All that gives birth to the modern critical race theory. The sad part of that is that it’s influencing everybody. I heard early today, read an article exposing the belief of a professor I had at Dallas Seminary, well-known, on the radio here almost every day; he was the first black man to matriculate in the ThM program, the Masters of Theology, and the first black to matriculate and graduate with a ThD from Dallas Seminary. This article quoted him verbatim: He has said many things; he rejects the whole critical race theory, but he comes up with something that is just absolutely pusillanimous. It is so weak, and it tries to buy into certain aspects of the critical race theory, saying that yes, we have a real race problem here in America, and that’s just garbage.

Before two presidents back, the race problem was going away, and then we had a black president who made it who made it explode because that was the basis of his Marxism. That’s what he was taught by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and this is eating away at the guts of this nation. And it is so sad. The only thing that’s going to solve it is a return to the Scripture, not the pusillanimous puke of a former professor of mine at Dallas Seminary. It has to be the unadulterated Word of God, and that’s the only hope.

Closing Prayer

“Father, thank You for this time we have had to look at these things, to be reminded that You are still in control, that You are the God who can win battles, solve situations that none of us have the ability to solve or to address. But our hope is in You because we know that the battle is Yours and that You will bring about Your victory.

“We have no idea where we are on the prophetic timetable, but we know that whatever may happen, we are to trust in You with every ounce of our being, even if it costs us our life following the example of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that You can deliver us. But if You don’t, we still trust You. And we pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”