When thou shalt beget children, and children's children, and ye shall have remained long in the land, and shall corrupt yourselves, and make a graven image, or the likeness of any thing, and shall do evil in the sight of the LORD thy God, to provoke him to anger: I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that ye shall soon utterly perish from off the land whereunto ye go over Jordan to possess it; ye shall not prolong your days upon it, but shall utterly be destroyed. And the LORD shall scatter you among the nations, and ye shall be left few in number among the heathen, whither the LORD shall lead you. And there ye shall serve gods, the work of men's hands, wood and stone, which neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell (Deut. 4:25-28).
This was a warning. Its theocentric basis is the second commandment: God as a jealous God.(1) He alone is to be worshipped. Moses warned of sanctions to come, sanctions based on the second commandment. Moses prophesied that the people would build another golden calf to serve as their god. A calf would again serve as the nation's representative to the world of spirits and power. There is no exclusively future tense in Hebrew, but it is clear from the structure of the passage that Moses' comments were directed at a distant generation. That generation would be carried into captivity, where they would be forced to worship lifeless foreign gods. The nation's punishment would fit the crime.
The Prophet's Job A biblical prophet, as God's voice of authority (point two), set forth the law of the covenant: point three.(2) Then he warned what the penalties would be if the people broke the law: point four.(3) Biblical negative prophecy was always ethically conditional. Sometimes these conditions were explicit. If the listeners would turn from their covenant-breaking ways, the sanctions would not arrive.
The word which came to Jeremiah from the LORD, saying, Arise, and go down to the potter's house, and there I will cause thee to hear my words. Then I went down to the potter's house, and, behold, he wrought a work on the wheels. And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter: so he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it. Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying, O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the LORD. Behold, as the clay is in the potter's hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel. At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it; If that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them. And at what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it; If it do evil in my sight, that it obey not my voice, then I will repent of the good, wherewith I said I would benefit them (Jer. 18:1-10).
Sometimes, the ethical conditions were implicit. For example, God told Abraham that his heirs would conquer Canaan in the fourth generation (Gen. 15:16). Yet God told the third generation to invade the land. He knew that they would disobey Him, which is why He could be specific with Abraham. The prophecy was ethically conditional; God knew that the prophecy's conditions would not be met by the third generation. God also knew that the Canaanites would not repent. Thus, the promise to Abraham was historically reliable. God had predestined the fourth-generation Israelites to covenantal victory and the Canaanites to covenantal defeat. God had ordained the Canaanites to condemnation.(4) They fully deserved to be annihilated. This in no way denies the fact that the prophecy regarding their defeat was conditional.
Moses spoke here of successive generations. The King James translators properly inserted "ye," although the Hebrew text does not include the plural pronoun. His warning was directed at the conquest generation, but it is clear that God's sanctions would come much later, to future generations that would rebel: "ye shall have remained long in the land, and shall corrupt yourselves, and make a graven image, or the likeness of any thing, and shall do evil in the sight of the LORD thy God, to provoke him to anger" (v. 25). Moses spoke to those future generations through their covenantal representatives: the generation of the conquest. He could do this because he knew that his words would persevere. He had already warned this generation to tell their children and grandchildren the story of the giving of the law (vv. 9-10). In order to preserve the landed inheritance, he said here, all successive generations would have to obey the terms of the covenant. That is to say, the maintenance of the kingdom grant was conditional. It always is. This raises the enduring theological question of the relationship between prophecy, promise, and conditions.
Prophecy, Promise, and Conditions This issue of covenantal conditionality has been a favorite debating topic for hundreds of years among technically precise Calvinists, who regard themselves as covenant theologians. This debate never gets settled. Paul's words are the point of contention: his contrast between law and promise. "For if the inheritance be of the law, it is no more of promise: but God gave it to Abraham by promise" (Gal. 3:18). Covenant theologians have argued that there are unconditional promises in the Bible; otherwise, there can be no true promises, and therefore no true grace in history.
I shall do my best here to clear up this matter.(5) Paul's contrast between law and promise seems absolute, but it really isn't. There was an unstated condition in God's promise to Abraham that neither Paul nor the theologians mention: sexual union. Putting the matter in biological terms, Paul's allegorical contrast between Sarah and Hagar was not based on the differences between the normal conception method and the virgin birth. "For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a freewoman. But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh; but he of the freewoman was by promise" (Gal. 4:22-23). The promise to Abraham regarding Isaac was conditional. It was biologically conditioned, and it was also ethically conditioned. He was not to imagine that Sarah would become the judicial equivalent to the mother of the messiah. God's promise to Abraham was not on a par covenantally with the messianic promise of the virgin birth (Isa. 7:14), although it was analogous to it. Isaac was not Jesus. Had Abraham misinterpreted God's promise in terms of the virgin birth, he would have been ethically out of line. He would not have gone into Sarah's tent. The prophecy would not have been fulfilled.
Conclusion: we must not attempt to separate historical conditions from the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Historical conditions are an inescapable aspect of every human action. No Calvinist argues that God sovereignly predestinates occasional events in an otherwise chance-governed world. That argument is the Arminian's intellectual burden. The Calvinist argues that God predestinates everything. The Calvinist speaks of the decree of God as providentially undergirding all that comes to pass. In short, as I have said from time to time, God does not predestinate in a vacuum. The fulfillment of a specific prophecy is not some imposed event that God inserts into an otherwise autonomous flow of historical events. The Arminian thinks it is, but the Arminian is wrong.
Human action is therefore inescapable in the fulfillment of every covenantal promise. Human action, in turn, is always ethically conditional, for everything that men say, think, or do is under the authority and jurisdiction God's comprehensive law (Matt. 15:10-20). To argue otherwise is to adopt antinomianism: a theology of neutral, impersonal gaps in the law of God.
The antinomian's view of prophecy parallels his view of ethics. He sees the fulfillment of biblical prophecy as a discontinuous intrusion by God into the autonomous processes of history, in much the same way that he sees the jurisdiction of God's law as sporadic and under tight boundaries. In his view, history is mostly autonomous and chance-conditioned. History is not predestined and decree-conditioned. History is not seen by the Arminian as covenantal in the sense of being the providential outcome of human action within the context of God's sovereignty, authority, law, sanctions, and inheritance. But for a covenant theologian to defend the total separation of promise from ethical conditionality is necessarily to adopt some form of Arminianism-antinomianism: the God of the Bible as the God of the intrusion, whether historical or judicial.
Invoking Covenantal Witnesses Moses invoked heaven and earth to witness against the nation that day (Deut. 4:26). This is covenantal language. Moses was not invoking living organisms. He was not a believer in Gaia, the earth-goddess. He was invoking a double witness. He was putting the nation on alert: these two cosmic witnesses would stand guard, day and night, to testify against them. A double witness was required to convict someone of a capital crime. "At the mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses, shall he that is worthy of death be put to death; but at the mouth of one witness he shall not be put to death" (Deut. 17:6). Heaven and earth are the limits of history; there is no place for men to commit sin that is outside of the boundaries of heaven and earth. David asked rhetorically: "Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there" (Ps. 139:7-8). There is no escape from God and His word. "Out of heaven he made thee to hear his voice, that he might instruct thee: and upon earth he shewed thee his great fire; and thou heardest his words out of the midst of the fire" (Deut. 4:36).
God had said to Cain, "What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground" (Gen. 4:10). Blood has no vocal chords. But Abel's blood was in the ground, and God saw this evidence of murder. The existence of historical evidence in the presence of an omniscient God constitutes a valid witness against lawless men. What Moses was saying was that God would see their acts of rebellion, their worship of rival gods. This evidence could not be covered up in God's cosmic court. The evidence would cry out against them. This would constitute a covenantal witness against them.
The proof of God's covenantal sovereignty is the inheritance. When Israel successfully claims this legacy on Canaan's battlefields, Moses announced, Israelites will know that God can and will enforce the terms of His covenant. The positive sanction of gaining the inheritance will testify to the reality of the negative sanction of its future revocation. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.
And because he loved thy fathers, therefore he chose their seed after them, and brought thee out in his sight with his mighty power out of Egypt; To drive out nations from before thee greater and mightier than thou art, to bring thee in, to give thee their land for an inheritance, as it is this day. Know therefore this day, and consider it in thine heart, that the LORD he is God in heaven above, and upon the earth beneath: there is none else. Thou shalt keep therefore his statutes, and his commandments, which I command thee this day, that it may go well with thee, and with thy children after thee, and that thou mayest prolong thy days upon the earth, which the LORD thy God giveth thee, for ever (Deut. 4:37-40).
Israel will break the covenant, Moses announced. This was a prophecy. He knew this was coming unless Israel avoided rebellion. Moses did not mention the possibility that Israel might not rebel, i.e., the conditional nature of the prophecy. The condition of covenantal faithfulness would not be met. Moses spoke in advance to those in the midst of rebellion. God in His mercy will not kill them all for their false worship. Instead, He will strip them of their inheritance, but only for a time. He will hear their cries for deliverance, even as He had heard their cries when they were in Egypt. He will remain faithful to His covenant with Abraham even though the nation would wander into prohibited worship. But there will be a price to pay. There will be corporate negative sanctions. The covenant was still in force.
By invoking heaven and earth, Moses was making this issue a matter of covenantal sanctions. Covenant sanctions are predictable in the ethically conditional sense of "if . . . then." A prophet's task was to persuade his listeners of the predictability of these sanctions. That which identified an Old Covenant prophet was the specific time frame of the predicted sanctions. With the closing of the canon of Scripture, this office was annulled. No man's word today is lawfully elevated to the authority of the Bible. Moses, however, was the nation's premier prophet. His words became part of Scripture, which is why his warning had judicial authority down through history. In Jesus' parable of the rich man and the poor man, He has Abraham invoke Moses and the prophets. "Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. And he [Dives] said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent. And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead" (Luke 16:29-31).
It is clear that Moses did not believe that Israel would listen to his words. He knew they would rebel. This passage was designed to comfort them in a time of captivity. God would deliver them out of captivity as surely as He had prophesied through Moses that He would deliver them into captivity. The promise of deliverance out of was as certain as the promise of deliverance into. Sin being what it is, bad situations are easier to get into than out of. But foretelling the future is a mark of supernatural authority, and God was telling them in advance what would take place. Israel could trust His word.
Removing the Inheritors Land is not mobile; people are. The threat to Israel's landed inheritance was two-fold: 1) invasion by other nations; 2) Israel's removal from the land. Under the judges, invasion was the problem. Centuries later, removal was the threat. The greater of these threats was removal, which is the focus of this prophecy. God threatened to remove the inheritance from Israel by removing Israel from the inheritance.
Under the judges, Israel faced domination by nearby nations that forced Israel to pay tribute. These nations sought tribute, not permanent slaves. They did not seek to carry the people out of the land. Later, under Assyria and Babylon, which were building great empires, Israel was led into captivity. This was the focus of Moses' warning, almost a millennium before Babylon carried off Judah. The prophetic time perspective was long.
The greatest threat to their liberty would be their forced subordination to foreign gods. "And there ye shall serve gods, the work of men's hands, wood and stone, which neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell" (v. 28). To be forced to serve dead idols was a terrible prospect. But Moses knew where rebellious men's hearts are: in their earthly possessions. So, he prefaced this ultimate curse with a this-worldly curse: captivity. They will lose their property. They will lose their military strength. This will culminate in their subordination to dead idols.
The basis of military success, David told Israel generations later, is not weaponry. "Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God" (Ps. 20:7). He was merely rephrasing Moses' warning to Israel's kings not to multiply horses (Deut. 17:16). Moses made it clear that their covenantal faithfulness alone would preserve their independence as a nation. This independence would someday be withdrawn.
Moses offered hope to the scattered captives. "But if from thence thou shalt seek the LORD thy God, thou shalt find him, if thou seek him with all thy heart and with all thy soul. When thou art in tribulation, and all these things are come upon thee, even in the latter days, if thou turn to the LORD thy God, and shalt be obedient unto his voice; (For the LORD thy God is a merciful God;) he will not forsake thee, neither destroy thee, nor forget the covenant of thy fathers which he sware unto them" (vv. 29-31). Nevertheless, the full Mosaic covenant would never be restored to Israel. The civil covenant would be broken forever. After the remnant of Israel returned from captivity, the nation did not enjoy sustained political independence. The age of the empires had arrived. Control over Israel's politics passed from the Medo-Persians to Alexander the Great and his successors, and from them to Rome. This loss of civil authority protected the nation from idolatry. Israel never again worshipped the gods of Canaan. Those gods had been defeated twice: by Israel under Joshua (partial) and by Assyria and Babylon (total), which replaced the Israelites with foreigners who did not worship the local gods of Canaan. Power would no longer come from Canaan's gods under the captivity. Without power, the gods of the ancient world had no claim on men's allegiance. The gods of the ruling empire would dominate while Israel was absent from the land.
When the remnant of Israel returned, pagan gods were seen as enemies, the gods of their conquerors. Israel's leaders could not worship these alien gods and still retain the allegiance of the nation. Israel did not again turn to idols. Israel's post-exilic temptations were legalism, Greek philosophy, and Hellenic culture, not dead idols. The captivity cured them of their older bad habits.
It was one thing for foreigners to reside in Israel as conquerors before the exile. It was quite another for them to remove Israelites from the land. This was the conclusion of pre-exilic idolatrous religions. Idolatrous worship in the pre-empire phase was local worship. The sovereignty of a god was manifested in his ability to extend visible rule to his people. Ancient civil theology was power religion.(6) The success of a god was tied to the success of his people militarily. This is why an invading army was less of a threat to Israel than captivity, and less of a covenantal sanction. Israel's continuing presence in the land seemingly testified to the nation's continuing covenant with God. Israel's defeat was not total. So, to break them of this idolatrous way of thinking, God told them that His covenant with them was valid irrespective of their geography. They would be carried off, yet this would not break God's authority over them or His ability to deliver them. On the contrary, their military defeat would confirm the terms of His covenant. Unlike all the other religions of their day, Moses announced, Israel's military defeat and geographical scattering would confirm them as God's people.
Counting the Cost of Rebellion Moses presented a real-world problem before them. Like every prophet who invoked covenant sanctions, he challenged them with a cost-benefit analysis. What was the cost of rebellion? Captivity. What was the cost of captivity? Loss of land, loss of authority, and loss of the temple.
The prophet had a difficult task of persuasion. He came before people who were confident that the sanctions would not come, either because "we're really not all that bad," or because "God's sanctions are symbolic, not historic" or because "God will not see us," or because "God is merciful," or because "we have the temple." People want to commit sin with abandon. They want cost-free sinning. They refuse to acknowledge that sin has significant costs attached.
Then there is future-orientation. Present-oriented people discount the future. They apply a high discount to future costs and future benefits. They are the grasshopper in Aesop's fable of the ant and the grasshopper, a story resembling a biblical injunction: "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest" (Prov. 6:6-8). Present-oriented people regard the pleasures of sin as immediate, and therefore highly valuable, whereas future costs are distant, and therefore not a significant factor in decision-making today. Such an outlook is the antithesis of Moses' time perspective, for Moses was highly future-oriented. "By faith Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter; Choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season; Esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt: for he had respect unto the recompence of the reward. By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king: for he endured, as seeing him who is invisible" (Heb. 11:24-27).
The Israelites prior to the exile returned to idolatry, generation after generation. No matter what negative corporate sanctions God imposed, Israel returned to idolatry. Moses had warned a future generation of the wrath to come, but no rebellious generation read his warning with this mental reservation: "This might mean us." Like the men in Noah's day, who married and gave in marriage, and were carried away in the flood, so is every generation entrapped by sin. "I'll think about it tomorrow" is the appropriate tombstone marker for generations of covenant-breakers.
In the Old Testament, there is only one example of national repentance prior to the imposition of negative covenant sanctions: Nineveh (Jonah 3). A king in Israel might occasionally repent representatively and thereby defer the corporate sanctions (e.g., Josiah and Hezekiah), but Jonah alone was able to see national repentance from the bottom up. The king of Nineveh repented last, not first (Jonah 3:6). It was this repentance which gained Assyria the positive corporate sanctions that transformed her into an empire, which then brought the long-prophesied negative sanction of captivity to Israel. Moses' prophecy was fulfilled because Nineveh repented long enough to build up its strength as an empire.
Discounting the Cost of Rebellion
Moses warned the generation of the conquest about the cost of idolatry. That generation was soon to compromise with idolatry by allowing idolatrous Canaanites to remain in the land (Josh. 15:63; 17:12-13). The Book of Judges shows how God delivered Israel into the hands of idolatrous foreign nations because of Israel's idolatry. Moses' warning was not taken seriously enough to change men's behavior. Each generation imagined that the covenant's negative sanctions would be delayed indefinitely. Each generation failed to count the cost. The debt to God kept growing, compounding so as to become unpayable. The debts finally came due at the time of the exile:
And the LORD God of their fathers sent to them by his messengers, rising up betimes, and sending; because he had compassion on his people, and on his dwelling place: But they mocked the messengers of God, and despised his words, and misused his prophets, until the wrath of the LORD arose against his people, till there was no remedy. Therefore he brought upon them the king of the Chaldees, who slew their young men with the sword in the house of their sanctuary, and had no compassion upon young man or maiden, old man, or him that stooped for age: he gave them all into his hand. And all the vessels of the house of God, great and small, and the treasures of the house of the LORD, and the treasures of the king, and of his princes; all these he brought to Babylon. And they burnt the house of God, and brake down the wall of Jerusalem, and burnt all the palaces thereof with fire, and destroyed all the goodly vessels thereof. And them that had escaped from the sword carried he away to Babylon; where they were servants to him and his sons until the reign of the kingdom of Persia: To fulfil the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her sabbaths: for as long as she lay desolate she kept sabbath, to fulfil threescore and ten years (II Chron. 36:15-21; emphasis added).
Present-oriented people count temporally distant costs differently than future-oriented people do. Future-oriented people discount those costs at a far lower rate than present-oriented people do. The burden of those future costs looms greater in the mind of a future-oriented person. He pays closer attention to them. This is equally true of future blessings. The future looms larger in the thinking of a future-oriented person than in the thinking of a present-oriented person.
Israel did not respond in the present to the threat of negative sanctions in the distant future. But it is the mark of spiritual maturity that a nation does pay attention to the distant future in making its decisions. Nineveh responded, but Jonah had prophesied a relatively short time period: 40 days (Jonah 3:4). Total judgment in 40 days caught their attention. An unspecified time period did not motivate Israel.
Conclusion Deuteronomy 1:6-4:49 made clear to the conquest generation that God is above all other gods and all other kings: hierarchy. He has the power to deliver His people both out of bondage and into bondage. No one can stay His hand. Moses presented a detailed account of how God had delivered their fathers out of Egypt and through the wilderness. In recent days, God had delivered Sihon and Og into their hands, destroying them completely. The preliminary phase of the conquest was now completed.
Moses concluded his historical account with a warning of covenantal judgment to come. This prophesied judgment was specific: their removal from the land to a foreign nation. The moral cause would be idolatry: worship of the gods of Canaan. The resulting sanction would be their cultural subordination to foreign idols. The penalty would fit the crime. But Moses did not put a time limit on the fulfillment of this prophecy. It was open-ended. This did not reduce its threat to Israel. There were no cases of open-ended covenant lawsuits against Israel in the Bible that were not eventually prosecuted by God. The final one came in A.D. 70.(7)
The nation did not respond in a way which indicated that they took Moses' warning seriously. The Israelites became idolatrous again and again. They did not learn their lesson under the judges. But God gave them time to change their ways. He gave them so much time that they discounted the future costs of rebellion to something approaching zero. In the face of mercy, sinners continued to sin. But eventually the bills came due.
Footnotes:
1. The second commandment was the second in the list of five priestly laws in the Decalogue. Gary North, The Sinai Strategy: Economics and the Ten Commandments (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1986), pp. xv-xvi.
2. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 3.
3. Ibid., ch. 4.
4. "For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ" (Jude 1:4; emphasis added).
5. Fat providence!
6. Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985).
7. David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987).
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