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The Lord Fights for You
The Lord Fights for You Deuteronomy 20:1-20 Key Verse 20:4 “For the LORD your God is the one who goes with you to fight for you against your enemies to give you victory.” Thus far, in our study of the book of Deuteronomy, we have learned several wonderful things about the nature of God and we have seen how the nature of man falls far short of God’s ideal. In spite of our own failure, Bible study always encourages us seek God and His desire for us to live the life He created us to live. Today’s passage is no different. It deals with a subject that we all wish we could avoid, and an emotion that we all desperately try to hide. Yet we can’t avoid either of them, we simply have to face the fact that we must face them both and conquer them every day. The subject is war and the emotion is fear. These two things are a fact of life for every human being, every day of their life. The questions then become how can we win the war and overcome the emotion that wants to paralyze us and make us lose. The answer to these questions can be found in today’s passage. In the passage, we can also see God’s plan for the Israelites to set themselves apart as a holy people – a people who should not be corrupted by the people around them. The issues covered in today’s passage are very difficult to face, but they are also issues that must be faced and overcome everyday by God’s people. May God bless our study of Deuteronomy 20 and help us to find the victory in Jesus. First, when you go to war do not be afraid. (1-9) These first 9 verses deal with two topics that none of us like to give much thought to. In fact, most people simple try to ignore the fact that we cannot escape either them at any time in our life, and we certainly can’t do it on our own. Let’s look at verse 1. “When you go to war against your enemies and see horses and chariots and an army greater than yours, do not be afraid of them, because the LORD your God, who brought you up out of Egypt, will be with you.” This first verse brings up both of those topics and gives us the solution to overcoming them both. As I said in the introduction, the main topics for today are war and fear. Verse 1 begins with the word “When,” not with the word “If.” This indicates that war is inevitable. It is coming and, in fact, it is here every day. Most people today don’t like to think that they are in a war every day. They want to think that they are living in peaceful times and all is well. Here in Korea, the threat of war is ever present. At times, like right now, it seems that war is right around the corner, and yet, if you look around, people are all doing their best not to think of it. What they don’t realize, or they simply refuse to see is that they are in a war each and every day of their lives. We all are. There is simply no escaping this fact. Paul tells us in Ephesians 6:12 that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” This is a war that we can choose to ignore if we want, but that does not make it any less real. In fact, if we choose to ignore it, it simply means that we have admitted defeat. None of us want to be on the losing side of this war because it has eternal consequences. With this in mind, the question becomes how can we win this war? Let’s look again at verse 1. “When you go to war against your enemies and see horses and chariots and an army greater than yours, do not be afraid of them, because the LORD your God, who brought you up out of Egypt, will be with you.” First of all, we must realize that our enemy, the Devil, seems to be much better armed than us. It seems that he has all the weapons he needs at his disposal to completely defeat us. He seems to have all the horses and chariots, bows and swords, and shields and armor while we have nothing. But this is a complete lie. It is really us, the weak little Christians, who have everything, while he has nothing. What is the one thing that we have that he will never have. We have the Lord our God with us. We have the one who has the power to do anything with us. Not only is he with us, He promises something even more. Let’s skip down to our key verse now and look at verse 4. “For the LORD your God is the one who goes with you to fight for you against your enemies to give you victory.” God goes with us not just to hold our hand and give us moral support, He goes with us to fight against our enemies. We have to march out and take up our battle positions in this war, but it is God who is fighting for us. In Romans 8:31, Paul asks a very profound question “If God is for us, who can be against us?” Who can stand and fight against God? No one can. This means that our victory is assured. However, there is one thing that can stand in our way. Let’s go back and look at verses 2 and 3. “When you are about to go into battle, the priest shall come forward and address the army. He shall say: ‘Hear, Israel: Today you are going into battle against your enemies. Do not be fainthearted or afraid; do not panic or be terrified by them.’” Our real enemy is not the devil and all his vast forces aligned against us in this battle. Our real enemy is within ourselves. It is our own fear. I want to take a few moments and really think about this. I think most people spend much of their lives trying to ignore this, but they simply can’t do it. People end up living their life in fear while all the time they are trying to pretend to others that they are not fearful. How many of you here today are fearful? I would hope that all of us could say with 100% accuracy that we have no fear, but is that really true? If all of your sins in just the past 24 hours were to be revealed right now to everyone in this in this service – I’m not just talking about your actions, I’m talking about all those sinful thoughts that have gone through your head in the past day – would you still have that same confidence in your fearlessness. If you really take time to think about it this is where fear really comes from. We must all realize that in our fallen state, there is nothing good in us. In our fallen state we should be in a constant state of fear, because we must stand before that judgment seat of God, where all of those hidden sins will be revealed and we must pay for them. But this fear shouldn’t paralyze us. It should turn us back to God and lead us to His wonderful grace in Jesus. ON our own we cannot face the armies of Satan. On our own we have tried and each of us has failed, but God did not leave us in our failure. Think about the Israelites that Moses was speaking to. God had performed might deeds right before their own eyes. They had all seen those acts of God with their own eyes, yet time and time again, they grumbled against God and they even built idols and engaged in detestable acts of pagan worship. However, God never gave up on them. At this point in the book of Deuteronomy, they were about to enter the promised land, and in spite of all of their failures, God was there promising to be with them and to fight for them. God is faithful to His promises. His promises are not contingent upon man’s goodness, they were made in spite of man’s failures. They are promises that should give us hope in ultimate victory. God doesn’t want us to be defeated by our sins and the fear that they bring, He wants to fight for us and enable us to win the victory over sin and Satan. Fear is not only destructive to the individual that experiences it, it is like a fast-moving disease or cancer that spreads rapidly through the body. Look at verses 5-8. In these verses, God first makes provisions for those who have good things waiting for them, but who haven’t had time to enjoy those things. God’s wants them to go home and enjoy those small earthly pleasures. God does not want them to fight with the rest of the men who have already enjoyed those pleasures because they might die in battle and never get to enjoy the good things God provides for us here on earth. Even in this we can see God’s great concern for His people. God doesn’t want us to live miserable lives here on earth. He created us to enjoy the life and the good things He has given us. This doesn’t mean that the focus of our lives should be on finding pleasure, it simply means that God wants us to enjoy the life that He has given us. However, when we get to verse 8, Moses again turns to the great enemy of God’s people. Look at verse 8. “Then the officers shall add, “Is anyone afraid or fainthearted? Let him go home so that his fellow soldiers will not become disheartened too.” In this verse, we learn a truth about fear that, again, most people don’t want to face. Fear is like cancer. It spreads and the more it spreads, the faster it spreads. I see this truth almost every day in the world around us. At times it seems to me that the people of the world just simply can’t live without fear. If it is not the fear of North Korea getting the atomic bomb and leaving South Korea defenseless, then it is the fear that South Korea will get the THAAD missile system and be punished by China for trying to protect themselves. If it is not the fact that man-made global warming will melt the polar caps and the oceans will engulf huge quantities of land and kill millions of people, then it is the fact that man-made global warming will bring on the next ice age. If cancer and AIDS aren’t bad enough there is always the risk of a global outbreak of the bird flu. There is always something in the news to keep human beings in a constant state of fear. Satan uses this and so do governments. If you doubt this, read the book 1984 and then take a look around the world and tell me what you see. This all comes back to the fact that fear is the greatest enemy of God’s people. When in reality, God’s people have absolutely nothing to fear, because He has promised to be with us and to fight for us. So the next time any of you feel fear about anything at all, I want you to stop whatever it is you are doing and simply ask yourself, “If God is fighting for me, who or what can defeat me?” The answer to that question is no one and nothing. As Christians, we simply cannot live lives of fear. I mentioned before that we all have reason to fear because of our sins, but God has also given us a way out of that fear through Jesus. Jesus loved us so much that He took the wages of our sins upon Himself and paid off that price for us. Now we no longer need to live in fear because those sins are not counted against us. Zachariah says in his prophetic song of praise that Jesus came “to rescue us from the hand of our enemies, and to enable us to serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. Again, John says in 1 John 4:18, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” Fear is our greatest enemy as God’s people and we must conquer it. The only way we can conquer it is to turn our eyes away from the world and focus all of our attention on God and what He has done for us in His Son Jesus. This doesn’t mean that we will be taken out of the world, it means that we will be able to love the world through Jesus who first loved us. It means that we will be able to defeat the fear of sin and Satan in this world because Jesus has already fought the battle and won the victory for us. Second, fight to keep yourself pure in God’s sight. (10-20) The last half of this passage is very difficult for many non-Christians. They cannot understand how a loving God could tell His chosen people to fight and kill everything that breathes among the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. They can’t understand this, for several reasons. The first, and most important, reason is that they take verses 16 and 17 completely out of context. In fact, they usually don’t give it any context at all, they just quote it on its own and leave it at that. But let’s take a step back and look at these two verses in the context that they were given. Let’s begin by looking at verse 10-15. In these verses Moses instructs the people in how they were to engage people who lived outside of the nation of Israel in war. I must have read this chapter at least fifteen times in my life before studying it this week. I never noticed these verses. Moses instructs the Israelites to first offer these people terms of peace. This doesn’t happen in the world we live in. No one goes and offers peace before they fight, they just go and fight. But God wanted the Israelites to offer peace first so that war could be avoided and no one would have to die. Then, if the peace was rejected, the Israelites were instructed to carry out the war and kill all the men who participated in that war, but the women and children were not to be killed. They were to be counted as part of the plunder of the battle. Most people would probably say that this is still very cruel and barbaric, but again, we must be careful not to try to impose our standards on a people who lived 4000 years ago. The world was a completely different place, and yet it wasn’t all that different. In war today, we still try to kill all the men who are fighting on the other side and we still try to prevent the loss of life to the innocent women and children of our enemies. If one side wins the war, the women and children that survive are still put in the care of the winning side. War really hasn’t changed all that much in 4000 years. The one thing that seems to have changed is God’s offer of peace before the fighting begins. Of course, some people do make this offer these days, but I know of no people who were obligated to do this by their God except the Israelites. Now we must move on to verses 16 and 17. “ However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the LORD your God has commanded you.” As I said before, most people who don’t want to accept God as God, simply take these two verses out of context – in fact, they will simply take them with no context at all as I have presented them here. How can a loving God command his people to do such a thing? No one today would think of killing everything that breathes among their enemies as a proper way to conduct a war. That is what we would call genocide and it is an international crime. But again, that time was not this time and the Israelites were God’s chosen people. In this case there are two reasons why God would command this. Way back in Genesis 15, about 400 years before these events recorded in this book, God told Abraham, “In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reach its full measure.” In the Bible, God often uses one nation to punish another nation for their sins. Most dramatically, he used the Assyrians and the Babylonians to punish Israeli for their sins. In this case, God was using His chosen people to punish the people of the land of Canaan for their sins, which were so great that God called them detestable. That was one reason, but the second was even more important and it can be found in verse 18. “Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the LORD your God.” This verse in itself may still not put verses 16 and 17 in enough context to justify them for many people. However, we have been studying the book of Deuteronomy from the beginning and we know that it is very clear that God wanted the Israelites to be a people set apart for His glory. They were to be a people that were completely different from the people around them so that they could reveal God’s glory to the world. God could not risk them being corrupted by the detestable practices of the people whose land they were to live in. In order to keep their purity before God and before the other people of the world, they had to live holy lives. This means that they couldn’t let those people live among them and potentially corrupt them. It is really the same for us today. Of course, we are not commanded to go and kill all the unbelievers around us, but we are commanded to live holy lives. When I became a Christian, I had to give up all my worldly friends who didn’t want to follow the same path. I didn’t kill them, but I did completely separate myself from them. I stop hanging around them and I began associating with other Christians. As I’ve said many times before, we are God’s chosen people in the world today. Just as the Israelites of Moses time had to guard against the corrupting influence of the people around them, so we too have to be very careful about the corruption of the people around us. Today we learned that there is a war going on that we cannot avoid. We have to choose to stand up and fight it, or we have already lost. The problem is our enemy is much stronger than we are and he has much more powerful weapons than us. His greatest weapon is fear and we must overcome this. On our own it is impossible, but today we learned that God will go with us and He will fight for us. In fact, He has already won the battle for us in Jesus. All we must do is keep our eyes focused on Jesus. Fear will be driven out and the victory will be our. |
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