History and the Grace of God
Judges 2021
Judges Lesson #022
July 20, 2021
Dr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org
Opening Prayer
“Our Father, You are the God of history. You are the God who has a plan. You have laid it out. We understand the outworking of that plan by observing what has taken place. History is reality. It is what took place. But it is Your Word that gives us the insight, the framework for interpreting history and understanding it. For it is through Your Word that we are able to understand that You are moving history toward a specific goal, and that is the Kingdom and then eternity and Your glory, and demonstrating Your grace, Your love, Your justice and righteousness in the midst of this angelic rebellion.
“So Father, we pray that as we continue our study in Judges looking at the breakdowns of cultures and why that happens and why history is important, we pray that You would help us to understand these things. We pray in Christ’s name. Amen.”
Slide 2
Open your Bibles with me to 2 Chronicles. We’re looking tonight, continuing our look at history, and I’ve titled the lesson, “History and the Grace of God.”
Now the slides may look a little different on your whatever you’re using—on your iPad, or your computer or on your television—and in the coming months, we’re going to be changing some things. We’re going to be getting some new projectors in here, and we’re going to be changing up some things as a result. I’m going with a different ratio on the PowerPoint, and I’m still learning, so there are a couple of you who will be more than happy to tell me that my font is too small or this is too wide or whatever it may be. I know it’s going to look different because some of these things were designed with the other ratio in mind, so it’s just a trial and error and that’s how we learn things.
So, we’re looking at history and the grace of God, and we are reminded of this outline that we’re going through in Judges.
Slide 3
We’ve gone through the Introduction, and now we’re in the main part, which is the “Paganization of the Leadership.” How does a nation get paganized? What is really going on here, and so part of this is understanding that at its root, what we’re seeing in the first verse in this next section in Judges 3:7, is that the people forgot God. Earlier, we read that they abandoned God and what that means is that, like all pagans, they are rewriting history. That is part and parcel of what happens in all pagan environments.
But before we get started, I had two questions asked of me this last week that fit together and fit what we’re studying, and I think that it’s relevant to take a little time and look at both of these questions because I know they’re on the minds of lots of you as we think about what happened during the period of the Judges and the breakdown of the spiritual life in Israel and the breakdown of the leadership, the people, the priesthood. Everything just became more and more paganized.
The people ask these two questions frequently because we see through Judges, we see through that lens, we’re looking at what’s happened in our history in the United States of America here at the beginning of the 21st century. Some of us have been around for more than five or six decades, and so we have seen certain patterns taking place, and that gives us perspective.
I know when I was young in terms of my number of decades, I was somewhere working on my third one, and I would hear people who were a lot older than I—they were in their 40s—and they would say, I remember one professor said, you really shouldn’t be writing anything until you’re past 40 or 50, because you’re still growing and learning, and there’s a lot of perspective you need to gain before you write anything. And now that I’m well past that, I think that’s true. It’s amazing the perspective you gain after you’ve gone through about five or six decades.
So, we’re watching; we’re looking at what we’re studying in Judges, and we’re saying, “where are we in our country in terms of this and what is going on?”
Slide 4
To these two questions we’re asked—the first one is one that is often asked by people, and that— is, “Why is it inappropriate to claim 2 Chronicles 7:14 as a promise for the United States?” I have said that many times that this is a promise that is quoted in almost any kind of Christian patriotic literature, and they just jerk this verse right out of context. It’s not a promise for us to claim. But I’m asked that question and I want to answer it clearly and precisely.
The second one that is somewhat related to it is, “How in the world did the United States get here and are we witnessing the fall and the collapse of the United States, and is it irreversible? Can we recover?” So, I want to answer both of those questions tonight, and then we’ll get back directly into our topics. Let’s look at 2 Chronicles 7:14. Why is it inappropriate to claim 2 Chronicles 7:14 as a promise for us today?
Slide 5
Let me read the passage. It says, [2Chronicles 7:14] “If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
So, the first question we need to ask is, “Who is saying this?”
The second question is, “To whom is He speaking? We know that it is God because that “My” is capitalized. To whom is God speaking?
Third, “What is the context? Why is God saying these things? Why does God give this reassurance that if His people humble themselves that He will restore or heal their land? What is going on here?” And as you know, context is everything and unfortunately most people don’t look at context. And then, as part of that we have to say, “Well, to whom does this phrase refer? To whom does ‘my people’ refer?”
You will hear people say “my people” refers to the Church. We are God’s people, so this applies to God’s people. But that’s not true. We are not “the people” here. There is a specific reference to these people, and we will see this as we go through the passages. So, “Who’s talking? And why is God saying these things?”
Slide 6
Let’s look at the immediate context, and the immediate context means going back just a couple of verses, and that answers the first couple of questions. 2 Chronicles 7:12, “Then the Lord appeared to Solomon by night and said to him—so what we learn here is that this is a vision or an appearance, perhaps of the Angel of the Lord; we’re not sure. So, the Lord appears to Solomon and says to him—I have heard your prayer—wait a minute. What does that tell us? That tells us that this is a response to a prayer that Solomon gave. Where do we find that prayer? Well, we find that prayer in the previous chapter, in 2 Chronicles 6, and we’ll go there in just a minute.
So, the Lord is answering a prayer. There’s something specific going on here in terms of what Solomon prayed. He says I’ve heard your prayer—and I have chosen this place for myself as a House of sacrifices.” So, to what does that refer? That refers to the temple, the temple that Solomon built, and actually as we’ll see, the prayer was Solomon’s prayer of dedication of the temple. So that gives us more historical context.
And then God says, 2 Chronicles 7:12–13, “I’ve chosen this place for myself as a House of sacrifice. When I shut up heaven and there is no rain or command the locust to devour the land or send pestilence among my people”—so that’s how He is starting His answer. He doesn’t say “if,” He says “when,” which indicates that it will occur, but it doesn’t tell us the time frame in which it will occur.
The phrase, “my people” is used and often it is “my people, Israel,” some 15 times in 1 and 2 Chronicles combined, and we know that in the original it was all one book, so, 15 times in Chronicles, “my people” always refers to Israel. You can go back, and you can look at numerous previous books, in Samuel, “my people” always refers to Israel; it never refers to anybody else.
So, God is not saying that if “my people, the United States of America,” or “Christians” or “Christian nations.” There’s no such thing as a Christian nation. He is talking about something specific in relationship to Israel.
Slide 7
Now what He is saying is, [2 Chronicles 7:12–13], “if there is no rain or I command the locust to devour the land or cause pestilence among my people”—so there are three specific examples that are given: no rain, a drought; the locust that devoured the land, which means no harvest; and pestilence, which means disease. So, there are three things.
Where does God come up with that kind of language? Is He just coming up with that as examples of bad things that happen to people, or is there something more significant about this?
What we learn is that this is related to the five stages of divine discipline that God had promised back in the Mosaic Law. So we have this Mosaic Law, we have this covenant, this contract that God makes with Israel. As I have pointed out, it follows the pattern of the Hittite suzerain-vassal treaty form. And in that treaty form, the first thing that is stated has to do with history, a rehearsal of how the king, the suzerain, the great king has benefited or blessed or provided for the vassal, that is, his client nation.
So that’s how it follows. It begins with this reminder of all the things the King has done, that’s history. And then it goes into what the king expects of this client nation, and then it closes with a statement of positive things the king will do if the client nation is obedient and supportive and helpful to the king, and the negative things that will happen if it’s not. So that’s where we get it; we get the blessings at first and then the curses. These are outlined in two places.
Slide 8
They’re more systematized in Leviticus 26, and that’s where we see five different stages in this divine discipline on Israel. This doesn’t apply. The Mosaic Covenant applied to no other nation, only Israel. It was a covenant made between God and His people Israel, and second, it summarizes.
These curses are summarized in Deuteronomy 28 and 29. Now that’s important. So, in Leviticus 26:19 and 25, and in Deuteronomy 28:24 we see the mention of in Leviticus 26:19, “I will make your heavens like iron and your earth like bronze.” There’s not going to be any rain. That’s a very poetic, dramatic way to say the skies are going to be like bronze, and there’s nothing leaking through the bronze, and nothing will link through the iron and the earth is going to be like bronze. It’s not going to grow anything. That is the second stage of divine discipline. So, when God says that His promise—shutting up the heaven, there is no rain—He’s referring to that.
Leviticus 26:25, which is in the fourth stage, He says that—if you look down the third lines is—“when you’re gathered together within your cities, I will send pestilence among you,”—so there is the reference to pestilence; that’s in the fourth stage of divine discipline.
And then in Deuteronomy 28:24, which is the summary of all the things that will come as curses, the Lord mentions the rain and says, Deuteronomy 28:24, [I will] “change the rain of your land to powder and dust.” So, God is specifically alluding to the covenant, that He’s made certain promises that if you obey Me, I’ll, bless you in certain ways; if you disobey Me, I’m going to bring judgment in certain ways.
So that’s what God is talking about when He says, “when I shut up heaven, there’s no rain or command the locust to devour the land and send pestilence among my people.” And then we see, in Deuteronomy 28:42, “Locusts shall consume all your trees and produce of your land.” So, you have locusts, you have pestilence, you have drought all mentioned within these particular curses.
Now we go back to saying, well, why is God bringing this up? Why does He bring this up to Solomon? Because Solomon brought it up in his prayer. We see this if we go back to the previous chapter.
Slide 9
I just have a few verses here and in 2 Chronicles 6:19, 20, and 21. We see Solomon pleading with God to listen to his prayer and to respond to his prayer. Basically, what Solomon is doing is claiming a promise. He’s claiming promises related to those curses and blessings. I’ll show you what that promise is in just a minute.
So, he says to the Lord, [2 Chronicles 6:19–20] “[R]egard the prayer of your servant … listen to the cry and the prayer … that your eyes may be open toward this temple day and night and You may hear the prayer which your servant makes towards this place.” So he’s pleading with God, pay attention, listen, keep Your eyes on the temple, as God has promised.
And in 2 Chronicles 6:21, “And may You hear the supplications of Your servant and of Your people Israel when they pray toward this place. Hear from heaven, Your dwelling place, and when You hear, forgive.” So, he’s praying to God to forgive Israel from their sins when they pray toward the temple.
Slide 10
In 2 Chronicles 6:26–27, we hear him saying, “When the heavens are shut up and there’s no rain—He’s now referring back to that second series of judgments in Leviticus 26:19 and also Deuteronomy 28:24—because they have sinned against You, when they pray toward this place and confess Your name, and turn from their sin, because You afflict them, then hear from heaven.” In other words, he’s saying, You said if they turn to You and confess their sin, that You’ll forgive them.
So Solomon is praying when that happens, forgive them for the purpose that You may teach them the good way in which they should walk. Part of the purpose of divine discipline and forgiveness is to teach us about God’s grace. That’s part of what history teaches is the grace of God. And so he says, forgive them and send rain on the land.
In 2 Chronicles 6:28, he prays that when there’s famine, pestilence, locusts, or grasshoppers, whenever there’s a plague or whatever sickness there is, and then he’s going to say in 2 Chronicles 6:36–38, “When they sin against You (for there is no one who doesn’t sin) and You become angry with them and deliver them to the enemy and they take them to take them captive to a land far or near; yet when they come to themselves in the land where they were carried captive and repent—and that’s a keyword. It’s the Hebrew word shuv which means to turn to turn back to God; when they turn—and make supplication to You in the land of their captivity, saying, ‘We have sinned, we have done wrong and have committed wickedness’; and when they return [shuv] to You with all their heart and with all their soul in the land of their captivity, where You have had them carried captive and pray toward the land, which You gave to their fathers, the city which You have chosen, and toward the temple which I have built for Your name:” Then he says:
Slide 12
2 Chronicles 6:39, “then hear from heaven Your dwelling place their prayer and their supplications and maintain their cause and forgive Your people who sinned against You.” So, what Solomon has said here is when You scatter them, and they are in all of the nations where they’ve been carried captive, and they turn back to You, then forgive them, and restore them to their land.
Slide 13
Now why did he say that? Because of what God said in Deuteronomy 30:1–3 where God said, “Now it shall come to pass when all these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse which I have set before you, and you call them to mind among all the nations where the Lord your God drives you, and you return—there’s that word shuv again, you return—to the Lord your God and obey His voice according to all that I command you today—this is Moses speaking all that I command you today—you and your children, with all your heart with all your soul, that the Lord your God will bring you back from captivity, and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where the Lord your God scattered you.” So, here’s the promise. God is saying that when you turn back to Me, I will restore you to the land.
Slide 14
So, what is 2 Chronicles 7:13–14 saying? “And when I shut up heavens and there is no rain, or locusts devour the land, or send pestilence among my people, if My people who are called by My name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
It’s pretty simple. He’s talking about Israel. He’s talking about the covenant promises that relate to blessings and curses. He’s talking about the fact that when they sin, He’s going to bring about all these curses, the pestilence, and the famine and drought and everything. But He is also answering Solomon’s prayer, and saying, when they turn back to Me, I will heal their land. I will restore them to the land. So, Solomon is claiming the promises in the blessings and curses, and praying to God that when this happens, fulfill Your promise to Your people when they pray toward this temple, and God is saying I will do that.
It doesn’t have anything to do with Canada or Mexico or England or Germany or Italy or anybody else because it doesn’t relate to any other people. No other nation has been promised land, and all of those blessings and curses have something to do with the land. They’re either saying the land’s not going to be able to produce fruit; there’s going to be a drought; there’s no production; there’s no agriculture, or eventually, if they’re so disobedient God is going to take them out of the land.
So that helps us understand the first one. Now I’ll come back and talk about what we should pray when I finish dealing with the next question.
Slide 15
So, the next question is how did we get here? How did the United States get to this point? And is this the fall and collapse of the nation, and can we recover? So how did we get here? Here is this chart. This is an historical chart. I didn’t have time to put all the dates in here as I was drawing this out today, but what we have as a timeline, we’re starting in 1620, and the dominant worldview in the colonies up until the late 1700s is Calvinism.
Now by Calvinism, I don’t necessarily mean a high Calvinism or a lot of it was we know from various demographic records that about 75% of the colonists went to denominations that were moderate to strong Calvinists, and that influenced them in tremendous ways. How did it influence them? Well, that’s why I have these three statements here.
This is what’s important in Calvinism. You have a very high view of God. God is the Creator God, and He is distinct and separate from His Creation, God is a holy God. He is a righteous God, and a just God, and God rules in the affairs of mankind. So, you have a very high view of God, and you consequently have a very high view of Scripture. They believed in today’s language that the Bible was the infallible, inspired, and inerrant Word of God, that there were no errors in the original documents, and that the power of God comes through the Word of God as it is revealed by the Spirit of God.
So, they have a very high view of Scripture. And they are extremely concerned about their salvation. They view all men as being corrupt. They believe that all human beings are spiritually dead, and they are under condemnation from Adam’s original sin. Therefore, every human being is in need of salvation, and until you are saved or regenerate, you do not have a clear understanding of truth.
So, that was so important to them that that is why they had such a high level of literacy in the New England colonies. The lowest was probably 94 or 95 percent. Everybody knew how to read the Bible; that was the purpose. So, this is Calvinism. Calvinism is the dominant view up through, depending upon how you want to classify it, but mostly through the 1700s.
What happened by the time you get into what is called the national period into the early part of the 1800s? Depending again on where you’re going to peg the beginning of the Second Great Awakening, you see a shift to Arminianism. In Arminianism, you have a lower view of God, and of course, a higher view of human ability. In the worst-case scenario, you have a lower view of God, who is completely responsive to an autonomous human volition.
So man is, for example, one of the major influences is an evangelist named Charles Finney, and Finney believed that every believer was born in the same neutral condition that Adam was in. They are not born under Adam’s original sin at all, and therefore, they are perfectible. And if they are perfectible, then the nation is perfectible.
So this is part of what becomes revivalism, that begins to significantly shape, especially the religion on the frontier in 19th century America. If you want to learn more about this, I will be teaching the second half of Church History [for Chafer Seminary] this Fall, and even if you’re not a student and you just want to hear it, you can sign up to audit the course. I will start with the 1600s. We’ll do a little bit about what’s going on in Europe as we go through it, but mostly it will be on the history of Christianity in America.
So, Arminianism from about 1800 to roughly the close of the War between the States, dominates what we would call American evangelicalism. You have the dominance of Wesleyanism and Methodism, the beginnings of the Holiness Movement, revivalism dominates, and so you shift. You have a lower view of God, lower view of Scripture, and a higher view of man. They will still talk the talk—the Bible’s the Word of God, but it is not quite as sufficient in practice, as it was under Calvinism.
Then you have a major shift that takes place in Europe during this period of time and begins to influence the United States, and you have the rise of Darwinism because this is a major shift that occurs away from a Christian or theistic worldview. Calvinism and Arminianism are still basically a Judeo-Christian worldview, but when you shift to humanism and modernism, then God is now irrelevant.
So you go from a high view of God to a lower view of God to an irrelevant view of God. God isn’t necessary because everything evolved. Man is just an accident that there was an electronic discharge on a piece of some protoplasm somewhere, and you began to have a development of life. You go from the goo to the zoo to you.
And that is what you have with the development of modernism. And along with this, at the same time, you get a pagan economic view for the new culture, which is Marxism.
You get the rise of socialism from Herbert Spencer and others, and you get the psychology of Sigmund Freud, which is designed to do away completely with any view of man that is biblical or is Christian because he hated Christianity.
So, now you do away with sin, and you just have other problems, but man is no longer a sinner, so that is a natural progression from the Arminian view. Also during the period of Arminianism, there is the rise of transcendentalism and other things of that nature.
What you now have from the roughly the 1860s on is that man is now basically good, and the Scripture is just another book, like every other book; there’s nothing special about it. In fact, it just might cause you problems and give you a guilt complex.
So, modernism really goes into the 20th century in America, but by the end of the 19th century, modernism is bankrupt in Europe, and it’s being replaced by postmodernism; they just really couldn’t come up with anything any more creative than that. So, it’s whatever happens after modernism. And in postmodernism, there’s very clear no God; there’s just us. They ignore Scripture completely, and each person is the center of every sentence. It’s just paganism again, and with new trappings and new clothes.
Then postmodernism is going to go through another evolution, and starting in the late 1970s to early 1980s, depending on who you’re reading, that is now clearly stated by them as a worldview called the Critical Social Justice movement. There is no God. They also ignore Scripture, but now they say everybody is racist. So racism is the original sin, and there is no forgiveness whatsoever, and so there’s no atonement. There’s no forgiveness; there’s just bitterness and anger and resentment. You have Christians falling for this left and right. It’s so sad because it’s so clear from Scripture that we’re not to be bitter or angry or resentful. And so the values, the ethics of Critical Race Theory, are just completely against anything biblical. That’s how we’ve gone.
Now, can we reverse the course? Yes. We see this all through the Book of Judges. There’s forgiveness from God over and over again. And God’s grace occurs over and over again even though there may not be, as we’ve studied, any repentance and turning back to God, or real confession; there’s just crying out for the pain, and then God, in His grace, changes things.
So, yes, can things change? Yes, they can. Can they go back? Yes, same principle in anybody’s individual life. If you’re still alive after you have messed up to the max, and God has left you alive, you can still recover and there is still grace, and you can still grow to spiritual maturity. There’s always forgiveness.
Slide 16
Now earlier in the first question I said, well, if 2 Chronicles 7:14 doesn’t apply, what should we pray? Well, Jeremiah 18:7–8, and you can go on to the next couple of verses. But I just put these in there that God makes the statement, He says, Jeremiah 18:7–8, “The instant I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom—see, He doesn’t specify Israel, although that’s really the immediate application, but He states it as a generic principle. But when I speak concerning a nation or concerning a kingdom—to pluck up, to pull down, and to destroy it—so in other words, when God says, I have determined that I’m going to end the kingdom and whatever nation it is, bring it to an end, He says—if that nation against whom I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will relent at the disaster that I thought to bring upon it.” That’s a great promise. God’s grace is still available now.
Can you think of any example in the ancient world where we know for certain that God had determined that He would destroy a nation, and then because they turned to Him, He relented and withdrew the punishment? What about Assyria? Nineveh? When God sent Jonah to announce His judgment on them, the people immediately responded and turned to God. That’s what prevented the destruction of Nineveh and Assyria at that time, and that hope is always present for us.
That is why we continue to give people the gospel; we continue to teach the truth and proclaim the truth is because we prayed that the people would respond and wake up, realize the bankruptcy of modernism, postmodernism, and Critical Race Theory, and say there’s got to be something else that gives me meaning in life and purpose, and that only comes from understanding God’s purpose in our lives.
Slide 17
Another important passage is in Daniel 2:21 and there, as Daniel has interpreted the image that has appeared in Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams, the great image standing up, the head is of gold, the torso is of silver, and then from the waist is bronze and the thighs, the lower legs are iron, and the feet are a mixture of iron and clay.
This is to represent all the great kingdoms in history related to Israel, and at the conclusion we read, [Daniel 2:21] “And He changes the times and the seasons; He removes kings and he raises up kings; He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those who have understanding.” God handles things. He is in control, working out His plan and purpose.
Now there are a lot of people today that think that we’re very, very close to the Rapture; very, very close to the Tribulation, and that very well could be. And that is a different scenario than what we’ve had in the last 2,000 years. It could be that even if all of the people in the United States turned to God and trusted Christ as savior, that it’s not going to improve because the Rapture is around the corner and God has a different scenario and a different plan. But we don’t know that. So we just go forward maintaining our mission.
Now, if you want to learn some things about prophecy right now, although tonight is the end of this conference. I think you can still log on and upload the conference and watch some of the videos. The videos will be available online, I understand, for the next two weeks. Friends of Israel ministry has had a conference, and Sunday evening’s called Jerusalem in Prophecy. And there’s been some really good presentations. They’re all solid.
We would agree with, I don’t say everything because I don’t even agree with everything I’ve ever said, but we agree with most everything. And they’re very good speakers. Mike Stallard, who’s spoken here at the Chafer Conference a couple of times, had a couple of very good presentations—I only got to watch one of them; I’ll watch the other one later. Randy Price gave an outstanding presentation this morning and is finishing up about now—those were just exceptionally well done.
Then Chris Katulka, who is one of their staff members who’s also a Dallas Seminary grad, has also done a good job in the presentations I saw him, and a couple of the others—they’ve all done well; no, no negatives that that I can see. But I tell you, Randy, who I have heard on this stuff two or three times and of course he goes out and speaks on the same topics over and over again, which really allows him to refine everything, but I just thought his presentation this morning was the best I’ve heard him do. It was just outstanding, so that answers those basic questions.
Slide 18
Now we’re not through looking at history, but I want to just take us back to where we are in Judges 3:7–11. The first judge is Othniel.
Slide 19
We have the divine indictment of Israel given in Judges 3:7, “And the Sons of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” Now that opening statement is the indictment. Then, the rest of the verse explains what that evil was. You will find many times in the Scripture that evil is defined as idolatry, and that’s what the next part of the verse says: Judges 3:7, “[They] forgot the Lord their God,” which is not talking about something that was, oh, oops, I forgot to go to church this morning and overslept, but it is an intentional rejection, an ignoring of something, denying of something, and that’s why we’ve been talking about history. Because when you deny God and the existence of God and the work of God in establishing your nation as Israel, and you have denied Him, you’re denying history. You’re having to rewrite history, and that is what always happens in paganism.
Paganism has two options: Ignore history or rewrite history. And the reason I’m belaboring this is because that is exactly what we’re watching today. We are seeing fake history taught in our schools. We are seeing fake news. Why fake news? But if the Lord tarries, and we are to last another 100 years before the Lord comes back, then you will see historians 100 years from now looking for an understanding of what happened in the early 21st century, and where are they going to go?
Just like we, they go back to diaries and letters and speeches and things of that nature in the past to look at the first-hand accounts of what went on. For example, during the founding generation, and they’re going to come back and look at our social media posts, and they’re going to look at news items, and if the news items are dominated by fake news, they’re going to get a what? A fake history. And so this is all part of the Satanic plan, I believe, to destroy this nation.
What we see is that they’re going to forget the Lord their God. They intentionally cut Him out of their life and brought in the Baals and the Asheroth. So they’re going to go into the cycles of discipline, which I talked about already. What we learn in the divine indictment is that this is in the sight of the Lord.
God is the ultimate determiner of right and wrong. God is the ultimate determiner of righteousness and justice. So, as they forget the Lord their God and serve the Baals, they’re just going to shift things around and we see historical revisionism, which is why I mentioned these two passages last week.
You have Aaron in Exodus 32:4, and he is taking the gold, melting it down, and making a golden calf. And then you have Jeroboam in 1 Kings 12:28, and he’s going to have two golden calves made, and both of them tell the Israelites that this is the God who brought them out of Egypt—that is historical revisionism.
Historical revisionism is always going to be replacing the truth. What we have to do—I just got to have some random thoughts that I was thinking about today—that everything in the Bible is based on two things: It’s based on accurate history and actual geography. Every statement in the Bible is grounded on history and geography.
You go look at any other religion, and they are not based on history and geography. You go look at any other religion, and they are not based on history and geography. There are some Christian cults, and they are not truly Christian—they’ve just borrowed a lot of concepts from Christianity.
For example, Mormonism. And Mormonism has created their only mythology and their own continents and their own land and their own people. None of those names can be traced anywhere in any archaeological remains. None of those cities are found anywhere. None of those races are identified anywhere. You can’t go to a single place in the whole planet where you can find the archaeological remains of anything that is mentioned in the book of Mormon.
But you can go to Israel next year. In July, June we’ll go, and you can go, and we can go to place after place after place, and you can see the excavations and the discoveries and in just the last couple of weeks they have announced three significant discoveries. Coins they found an inscription of the name Gideon that is the inscription that is in a layer or area that dates back to the time of the Judges. Or it could be a reference to Gideon, the judge, and they have discovered this enormous underground room below the Western Wall tunnels that was a public meeting area during the time of Christ and it’s just phenomenal.
But all the things that you see are there, so the geography is important, and historical events undergird almost every promise and prophecy in the Bible. A lot of prophecies start with some historical events, some something that happened in space-time history, and prophecy is just telling history before it happened rather than after it happened. But paganism rejects it.
With a pagan worldview, history is used to propagandize people, and they accused us—anyone else who uses history—of just using it for propaganda purposes—that all those things didn’t happen; the Founding Fathers weren’t Christian. You look at the history of how the Founding Fathers had been treated during the period from about the 1890s up through World War II, and all of the Founding Fathers were, at best, deists; at worst, they’re just giving lip service to any kind of religious language, because that’s what the people want to hear.
None of them were Christians that cared about God, and they never mentioned anything about their deeply held Christian convictions, not on any of them. And actually, that’s what most of our teachers were trained on. That’s why we were trained on that.
It wasn’t until the late 1970s to early 1980s that you began to have Christian scholars, I mean genuine scholars who are coming out and doing the research, reading the journals, reading the diaries, reading the letters, and determining that the major cited influence on the thinking of the founding fathers—and I’m thinking of Donald Lutz’s study that was done here at the University of Houston back in about 1983–1984, that the vast majority of cited quotations came from the Bible. That has all been ignored and is still ignored because that’s how pagans treat real history: They ignore it.
When we look at Scripture, we see that it is structured chronologically moving from Creation in Genesis all the way, it goes from Creation to the Fall. That’s the problem. And then the rest of the story is talking about how God solves the problem of sin and the Fall, and it’s ultimately resolved when Christ returns in Revelation 19. And then there is going to be the establishment of the Kingdom and on into eternity. So we see the ultimate redemption of the planet as Paul talks about in Romans 8, so there is progress and resolution and then going on into a perfect future.
Paganism ultimately has no reference point, because without history, you just make up your morals without any external reference point. The creature just makes up all of his own reality, and this is why they can change history over and over again. History becomes fluid until you end up with concepts where they think about the Bible or the Constitution as living documents and every generation can just interpret it according to their own desires.
That eventually leads to either atheism or agnosticism. Agnosticism you just see this pseudo humility of the unbeliever, where they claim that they really don’t know anything for sure. “Yeah, we know one thing for sure: the Bible can’t be true.” That’s the one thing they know for sure. Well, how do you know that? How do you know that? Well, if you can know one thing for sure, maybe you’re wrong. Maybe you can validate some other things.
Norm Geisler used to say he loved to be able to talk to an agnostic because a lot of people say oh, I’m just agnostic; I don’t think you can really know. And he’d say, “Are you sure about that?” And they would say, “Oh yeah I’m sure about that.” He’d say, “Okay, then we can know one thing and that is we can’t be sure about anything, but isn’t that self- contradictory? But anyway, you say you know one thing, let’s see if there’s something else that we can know.” And then he would build and develop it from there.
I just want to look at a couple of key passages before we hang it up for the night. I want to turn to Psalm 78. I just want to hit a few things. We’ve got about maybe 10–15 minutes left, and so we’re going to go through about three passages. Psalm 78 is a contemplation of Asaph.
Now Asaph was one of the temple musicians at the time of David, so he lived toward the end of David’s life and probably overlapped with Solomon to some degree. I want you to notice how history is used in this particular psalm. First of all he is calling the people to attention. He says, Psalm 78:1–3, “Give ear, O my people to my law; incline your ears to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings of old, which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us.”
What’s he talking about? He’s talking about history. So he’s going to start with history, what our fathers have told us. He says, Psalm 78:4, “We will not hide them from their children, telling to the generation to come the praises of the Lord’s strength and the wonderful work that He has done.” When did He do those? He did those in space-time history. So he begins to narrate a series of events.
Skip down to Psalm 78:12, and he says, “Marvelous things He did in the sight of their fathers in the land of Egypt, in the field of Zoan.” So, here is going to talk about the Exodus. So he talks about the Exodus event, and he explains that and the parting of the Red Sea. In Psalm 78:13, “He divided the sea and caused them to pass through; and He made the water stand up like a heap.” Now everything that he says in this psalm, which is quite long; it goes down to Psalm 78:72, he ends by saying, “So he shepherded them according to the integrity of His heart and guided them by the skillfulness of His hands.”
What he is doing is he’s giving all these historical examples to make a point that God is in control of what happened in Israel, and we can trust Him. If these things didn’t actually happen, then there’s no application. We can’t apply that; there’s no divine control in history, and everything is just random.
So he goes through the Exodus event, the parting of the waters at the Red Sea, the fact that God led them with the cloud and at night, with the pillar of fire, that He split the rocks in the wilderness, gave them water—all of these different things.
Then in Psalm 78:17, he says, “But they sinned even more against Him.” Look at that: they sinned even more. Sounds like almost every other generation in every other nation in history. God gave them grace, and what did they do? They just sinned more and more and rebelled against God. In Psalm 78:18–19, he says, “[T]hey tested God in their heart by asking for the food of their fancy. Yes, they spoke against God: They said, ‘Can God prepare a table in the wilderness?’ ”
What did God do? Turn His back on them? Wash His hands of them? No. God struck the rock and waters gushed out, and He gave them manna, and He gave them the quail. All of these things God provided out of grace. So, history teaches us about God’s intervention in the lives of people in history, and His Grace.
Now today when we see so many books written that God had nothing to do with the founding of the United States of America, He had nothing to do with the thinking that shaped the leaders who founded this nation. What they’re trying to do is to take God out of the picture. But when we study from a divine viewpoint and see how God worked in His providence in the founding of this nation, and that does not mean everybody was right all the time, or that they were good, or that they always made right decisions. But God, in His providence, brought all of that together for a purpose.
So when we see that, we learn of the grace of God. We learned that not one of us deserves, no one in the history of this nation deserved any of that. But God, in His grace, provided that for this nation.
When you deny the role of God or Christianity, you’re losing the lesson, and that’s one of the major lessons. Go all the way back to the Bible again and again. History is designed to teach the grace of God.
That’s what we see in Judges. As I pointed out in a previous study, you don’t find in the Book of Judges mentioned, except one time, the Israelites confessing, and when they did, God called their bluff and said, “You don’t really mean it.” Then they really were afraid and so then they got serious about confession.
But what you see is God is gracious. He delivers them again and again and again even though they didn’t deserve it. So you go through Psalm 78, and you see all of these different things going on here as Asaph takes them through these historical events, that history is important.
Now outside of Israel, what’s going on historically? The Greeks, the pagans have a cyclical view of history. History isn’t going anywhere; it just goes in these endless cycles, and it’s not meaningful at all. Most of us were all taught that the Greeks were the fathers of history, and that’s just garbage. The Greeks—Herodotus and Thucydides—lived 1,000 years after Moses was writing history, and Joshua and Samuel were writing history, and so they are just writing chronicles. It doesn’t have any meaning or real pedagogical value. So we go through Psalm 78, and see history has a pattern, and that history has meaning and significance.
And so I could say more, but I want to skip over to Nehemiah. Asaph wrote about the time of David. So we’re going to say roughly 1000 BC, and we’re going to go from 1000 BC to the period right after the Babylonian captivity. This is Nehemiah 9.
So we go back in the Bible to Nehemiah, and this takes place around 450 BC, so this is almost 600 years after Asaph, and a lot more is happening. Israel’s been disciplined and taken out of the land. Now some of them have come back into the land, and Nehemiah has rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem. They’re going to have a true spiritual revival in the nation that’s described in Nehemiah 9.
I just want to emphasize a couple of things as we go through this. It starts off, Nehemiah 9:1, “Now on the twenty-fourth day of this month, the children of Israel were assembled with fasting and sackcloth, and with dust on their heads.” You have to imagine that you’ve got around 20,000 people; you’ve got a huge crowd; only about 60,000 or 70,000 by this time have come back to Israel, so we’re going to assume that not every one of them showed up—you might have 30,000—this is a big crowd, and they come to the Temple Mount, and they’re fasting in sackcloth, and they’ve got dust on their heads, which is sign of grief and mourning.
Then we read in Nehemiah 9:2–3, “Then those of Israelite lineage separated themselves from all the foreigners—because only Israelites were under the covenant with God—and they stood and confessed their sins and the iniquities of their fathers.” This is a corporate, national confession. How long did it last? Sometimes people say you don’t leave enough time in silent prayer. Well, I’m assuming that you’ve kept short accounts.
But, I’m not going to give you three hours because that’s what you have here—”And they stood up in their place—notice they stood up in their place—and they read from the Book of the Law of their Lord.” Why did they read from the Torah? Because you have a historical record of what sin is. When God revealed himself, He revealed those absolutes. You have a historical record of what sin is, and once you’ve read through the Law in three hours, everybody standing, nobody sitting down—and people complain about Bible class goes a little long. It was about an hour and 10 minutes. For three hours they stood. And they listened to the reading of the Law and the explanation of it as well. And then for the next three hours they confess sin. And they worshiped the Lord their God. That doesn’t mean they sang. That means that they were confessing, and they were learning the Scriptures.
Then we go on and we see the prayer and starting at Nehemiah 9:5, “Stand up and bless the Lord your God—which means to praise Him—forever and ever! And they focus on God and beginning in Nehemiah 9:6, “ ‘You alone are the Lord; You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens with all their host, the earth, everything on it’ ”. So they start with Creation. Creation is important and it isn’t evolution. Some people said, “Well, let’s just stick with the Cross.” You can’t get to the Cross unless you understand Creation and then the Fall.
Then it goes to Abraham. Nehemiah 9:7–8, “You are the Lord God who chose Abram and brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans and gave him the name Abraham; You found his heart faithful before You and made a covenant with him.” So it goes from Abraham to the covenant.
And what is God doing? What’s going on here? Nehemiah is reminding them of the things that happened historically. And then down in Nehemiah 9:9, “You saw the affliction of our fathers in Egypt.”
So what’s going on there? Grace! It was grace that God gave a covenant to Abraham. It is grace that He responded to the affliction of the fathers in Egypt and heard their cry by the Red Sea and showed signs and wonders against Pharaoh. So you see grace. And then down in Nehemiah 9:13 “You came down also on Mount Sinai.” So there’s the Law, and all of this happened. It’s historical. If it weren’t historical, then all of this is meaningless. It’s history.
Then we constantly come back to the theme of grace. Look at Nehemiah 9:16–17, “But they and our fathers acted proudly, hardened their necks, and did not heed Your commandments. They refused to obey, and they were not mindful of Your wonders that You did among them, but they harden their necks and in their rebellion they appointed a leader to return to their bondage.” This is the golden calf incident.
Nehemiah 9:17, “but you are God ready to pardon, gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, and did not forsake them.” History teaches grace. Nehemiah 9:18, “Even when they made a molded calf for themselves, and said, ‘This is your God that brought you up out of Egypt,’ and worked great provocations. Yet in Your manifold mercies, You did not forsake them in the wilderness.” Again and again, this is talking about grace.
And we come to the period of the Judges, talked about in Nehemiah 9:26, “Nevertheless, they were disobedient and rebelled against You, cast Your law behind their backs and killed Your prophets who testified against them to turn them to Yourself; and they worked great provocations.” But what happened at the end of Nehemiah 9:27–28? “You heard from heaven, and according to Your abundant mercies You gave them deliverers who saved them from the hand of their enemies. But after they had rest—they went right back to it again—they again, did evil.”
Again at the end of Nehemiah 9:28, “[M]any times You delivered them according to your mercies.” So history teaches about grace. That takes us to—I was going to go to Acts 14. where Paul does pretty much the same thing and walks his way through history, that without history and the factuality of the history of the Bible, the inerrant record of history, then everything that’s built on that is just made up.
So, history is important. You can’t be like a pagan and just say, “Well I don’t care about history; it’s just a lot of dates and names, and it’s not really important.” Well, that’s because you had pagans that taught you in the background and didn’t show you why it was important that this changes your life if it’s grounded in an understanding of God as the God of history.
In history, we learn of God’s grace and His goodness. So let’s close in prayer, and the next time we’ll come back and go a little further in our analysis of history, a couple of observations to make, and then we will look at Cushan of the double evil.
Closing Prayer
“Father, thank You for this opportunity to look at Your Word and to come to understand how important it is that history is Your story. It records the outworking of Your grace, Your goodness. Even when we don’t deserve it again and again, You are good to us. Your mercies are abundant.
“Father, we pray for our nation. We pray for our leaders. We pray for the fact that we have many believers in this nation who are true to Your Word. There are the 7,000 who haven’t bowed the knee to the false systems of thought that dominate our culture today. And Father, we pray that you would raise up more.
“And if not, Father, we pray that you would give us the strength and the wisdom and the perseverance to endure the judgment, the discipline that may come upon this nation. For whatever happens, we know You will be glorified because You are the God who oversees history, bringing it to its proper redemptive conclusion.
“And we pray that You would help us to understand all these things in Christ’s name. Amen.”