Sermon for Flinders Park Church 9th Feb 2020
ESV Deuteronomy 7:1 “When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than you, 2 and when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them. 3 You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, 4 for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the LORD would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly. 5 But thus shall you deal with them: you shall break down their altars and dash in pieces their pillars and chop down their Asherim and burn their carved images with fire. 6 “For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. 7 It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, 8 but it is because the LORD loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. (Deut. 7:1-8 ESV)
We have come quite a way in Deuteronomy from recalling the past in chapter 1 to an assurance that the LORD will give Israel victory over the nations of the Promised Land in chapters 2-3, then a reminder that God is good and his laws wise and righteous. Moses gave the people the Ten Commandments and commanded the people to love the LORD with all their heart, soul and strength. We have now arrived at chapter 7 and a command to wipe out the people of the land and all their religions. The idea of wiping out the people of the land requires some deep consideration. I am going to explain this through the lens of the election of Israel.
In explaining this passage I am going to deviate somewhat from the usual pattern of taking one section at a time and doing so in order. I want to begin in the middle instead of at the beginning because these eight verses hinge on verse 6 and verse 6 helps us to understand all of what is in chapter 7.
“For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth” (Deut 7:6). Let’s unpack this verse bit by bit.
Israel was a people holy to the LORD. The word qadoš means to be set apart. In this case Israel was set apart from all other nations for a particular relationship with God and for his particular use. It is clear that Israel was set apart by the LORD; he was the one who chose them, not that Israel chose the LORD. Holiness always begins in God and it is only in relationship with him that a person or a nation can be holy.
The second half of verse 6 states this in a different way. God chose Israel as his treasured possession (see also Ps 135:4). Technically this part of the verse may be translated like this: “YHWH your God chose you and so you became his special people” (7:6 Arnold and Choi p 71). The way the sentence is structured in Hebrew means that becoming God’s special people is the consequence of being chosen. The point is that Israel did not start out as precious. They were chosen by the LORD and as a consequence they became God’s treasured possession. According to one commentary, “possession” “is a technical term from the economic sphere indicating a very valuable property, or treasure like gold or silver”. God had every nation of the earth at his disposal but he chose just one nation, the nation of Israel, to be his precious possession. This choice put Israel in a position of both privilege and great responsibility.
We may well ask why God chose that particular nation and not some other one. What made Israel worthy of such a high status in the sight of God? The answer is in fact that Israel had nothing in herself to make her worthy of that honour. If it was not a quality of Israel, then what was the reason?
“It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the LORD loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt” (vv 7-8).
First of all, the passage states what the reason was NOT. It was not because Israel was a large nation. In fact they were small in number. The sort of reasons that someone might find to esteem one nation over another would include might and power, or the sheer number of citizens within it. But Israel had none of these things. They were simply a downtrodden people, subjected to slavery in a nation much more powerful than they. The nations around Israel – Egypt, Babylon, Assyria and Aram – were far greater in power and number than she was. Yet God set his love on Israel.
“Set his love” is the Hebrew word ḥašaq. This is different to the ordinary word for love. It is used in Gen 34:8 and Deut 21:11, where it refers to the strong physical desire of a man for a beautiful woman. In Deut 7:7 God expresses a desire for Israel that we would normally expect to find in the sphere of erotic sexual love. In other words the LORD had a very strong desire for Israel to be his people. The only reason given for this desire is that the LORD loved them. Here the ordinary word for love – ’aheb – is used. We must conclude then that Israel’s election is based squarely in the love of God rather than anything that they have or are.
The second reason given for the LORD’s choice of Israel was because of the oath the LORD swore to their fathers. It was God’s intention from the beginning to have a people for himself. God’s process of election began in Eden. He made humans for his glory and to be in fellowship with them. They sinned, but there is always a righteous line. When Cain killed Abel, God gave Eve another son, Seth, and his line is the one which goes to Noah. After the flood, humanity was just as sinful as before. But God chose Abram to be the one through whom the Messiah would come. Abraham had nothing to intrinsically recommend him. He was an idol worshipper like everyone else (Josh 24:2). But the call of God to Abram brought about a response of faith (Gen 12:1-4).
God made many promises to Abraham and God is faithful to those promises. Because of those promises, he increased the number of Israelites in Egypt and ultimately delivered them from bondage there. Now when we get to Deut 7 we see those promises about to be fulfilled. The people are going to receive the land. Israel would enter the land only because of her election by God, not because the people of Israel are amazing or numerous or any other thing residing in themselves.
Having laid the foundation of the election of Israel as a nation, we can now go back to the beginning of the chapter and consider why Israel was commanded to destroy the seven nations in the Promised Land.
“When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than you, and when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them” (vv 1-2).
There is no doubt that the LORD will give Israel victory over the nations that live in the land, and when he does this they must devote them to destruction. ḥorban means utter destruction. The way the Hebrew reads here is very emphatic. There is no room for hesitation. The inhabitants of the land must most definitely be destroyed completely. There are to be no covenants, no treaties, with these people. Israel must not show mercy to them at all.
This seems to our ears to be very harsh. Why did God command Israel to ruthlessly destroy seven nations? The answer lies in the nature of Israel’s relationship with God. As God’s holy nation, in exclusive covenant relationship with him, nothing and no one was allowed to come between Israel and their God. Any covenant with the nations of Canaan would have been a breach of their exclusive relationship with their God. Indeed, the very existence of these pagans in the land would compromise the purity of Israel and therefore they had to be eradicated.
Two truths help to soften the harshness of this situation. First of all, generally speaking, the people of Israel did not have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. They had no strength to live within the midst of pagans and still be faithful to their God and his commands. The truth of this statement is evidenced over and over in the history of the nation. Secondly, God is a God of mercy, slow to anger (Exod 34:6), and he was slow in bringing judgement on the wicked nations that lived in the land. God’s patience is demonstrated by the words he spoke to Abraham in Gen 15.
“Then the LORD said to Abram, ‘Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. 14 But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. 15 As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. 16 And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete’” (Gen. 15:13-16 ESV).
Thus by the time Israel had arrived at the edge of the Promise Land, God said that the sins of the Amorites were filled up. It was time for God to bring judgement on these nations. But he had waited hundreds of years before bringing that judgement. And because of that judgment, Israel had to be separate from the people of the land.
So we return to Deut 7, verses 3-5. “You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the LORD would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly. But thus shall you deal with them: you shall break down their altars and dash in pieces their pillars and chop down their Asherim and burn their carved images with fire.”
Any kind of comingling with the people of Canaan would turn the people away from the true God. If there was intermarriage there would be apostasy. Marriage involves compromise and before they knew it there would be children brought up with half pagan, half Israelite religion. This leads to half-hearted worship and little obedience to the true God. So instead of living side by side and enduring the temptations that presented, Israel was commanded to devote all the people of Canaan to destruction and also to destroy all the vestiges of the religions of Canaan: the altars, the Asherim, and the carved images. It would be useless to leave either the people or the false religions intact. If the religious stuff was destroyed and the people left alive, then those people would just build more religious artefacts. On the other hand, if the people were gone and the religious stuff remained, it would be easy to take up the religions of Canaan or their ways of worshipping, even if the justification stood that the people of Israel were worshipping the true God with these religious artefacts.
The way in which we apply this passage to us as Christians is a little indirect in some regards. I must say right at the outset that the instruction to slaughter the inhabitants of the land was a very specific command to a specific nation for a specific time in history. It is not a command which can be generalised in a literal fashion for Christians. There is no New Testament command to kill people.
The primary reason not to kill the pagans living around us is because of the cross. The Son of God has taken all that is evil and godless and idolatrous to the cross. Every aspect of paganism and false religion was borne in the being of the sinless one, who was made sin for our sakes so that we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor 5:21). The Israelite nation were commanded to kill all the wicked and burn and destroy all their religions. But now wickedness has been judged completely in the cross. Christ has taken the death of the wicked upon himself. He has carried all our idol worship and anger against God. He has carried all the false beliefs and enmity against the true God in his body on the tree. Since Christ died for all, God does not command the wicked be put to death by Christians. Instead God has given us the ministry of reconciliation. We are to proclaim the truth that “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ” (2 Cor 5:19). As a consequence, the church is now God’s chosen people, and the church is made up of people from every tribe, tongue and nation (Rev 5:9). There are no nations from which the people of God are not called. We therefore could not devote any nation to destruction.
What then can we take from Deut 7:1-8 as applicable to us as Christians? The centre of this passage is the election of Israel as God’s holy people and precious possession. This is echoed in the New Testament and applied to the church. “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light” (1 Pet. 2:9 ESV).
Because the church is now God’s precious possession, a people holy to him, we must understand the New Testament view of election. First and foremost is the truth that Jesus Christ is the Chosen one, the Elect of God. When Jesus was on the mount of transfiguration God the Father spoke. “And a voice came out of the cloud, saying, ‘This is my Son, my Chosen One; listen to him!’” (Lk. 9:35 ESV). Elsewhere Christ is called the stone rejected by people but chosen by God as the precious cornerstone (1 Peter 2:4-6). “He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you” (1 Pet. 1:20 ESV). Jesus is the seed of Abraham, through whom every nation of the earth will be blessed (Gal 3:7-9; 14-16). Before there were any people elected by God for salvation, there was the eternal Son of God elected to be the Saviour of all people (1 Tim 4:10; 1 John 4:14).
Because of Christ, the church is now God’s chosen people. Each one is elected in Christ, who is himself God’s elect. As Eph 1:3-5 tells us, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will.” This is stated again in Titus 2:13-14 – “waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.” Our election is not on the basis of anything we have done or any characteristic we have. Just as Israel was elected because of God’s love, Christians are elected by God because of God’s love for his eternal Son. Our salvation is because of God’s choice alone.
We are God’s precious possession and there are responsibilities which go with that call and election. Holiness is not optional for the church. How does that work out? We cannot destroy religions, religious artefacts or people. This is not how the church remains holy. Instead we are cleansed by the blood of Christ and filled with the Holy Spirit that we might be fully sanctified, that is, set apart for God.
Ezekiel 36:25 promises, “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you.” The result of Christ bearing our sins and idolatry is that he gives a new heart and new spirit as part of the new covenant (Ezek 11:19; 36:26). There is a transformation which occurs when the Holy Spirit indwells believers and those same believers walk in the Spirit. Pauls reminds us: “For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him” (Rom. 8:5-9 ESV). This is how Christians live in the world and yet are not of it (John 17:14-16). We have no need to destroy people, because the Holy Spirit sanctifies God’s people in Christ. He gives us power to love God in the midst of the idolatry of our culture.
The devotion that Israel was expected to show towards their God was absolute. We are also to devote ourselves fully to the worship of God and him only. Israel had to destroy the false religions and their idols and altars. Christians cannot do that. We live among the pagans. But there is a clear instruction in the New Testament to be transformed rather than conformed to the world (Rom 12:2). We are commanded to put to death something but not someone. “For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Rom. 8:13 ESV). “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (Col. 3:5 ESV). Our warfare is not against other people but against the wickedness that lies within the human heart. “For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, (2 Cor. 10:4-5 ESV).
What should be our takeaway from all of this? Given that God has chosen us to be his people because of Christ and for his own glory, we must never congratulate ourselves for being Christians. God’s choice was based on his love rather than anything we have done. Our task then is to live in such a way that our lives are completely and fully devoted to the glory of God. The culture will pull us here and there, but we have only one path to tread.
Let us pray.