Here is a summary of another of David Pawson’s great sermons, “God Keeps His Promises.” Before that, a word of caution:
As a Christian, you may not feel the Jews are relevant, or you may not like to study them, even when their journeys through life are ¾ of our Bible. God has these stories for a reason. They are not just for your children to build moral character; they could have a like effect on you, too. But they tell the truth about their failings, and how God relates to their failings. We are, after all, a sinning people, and no better source than the Bible to tell us the absolute truth about how God reacts to our wayfaring behavior.
The worst mistake we could make is to assume God has changed in the New Testament, and is merciful, compared to His angry shedding of blood in the Old. Keep one thing in mind: Jesus, our New Testament model, is God. God has an integrated personality in all three Persons of the Trinity. The Son has a role in the Old Testament. Let's say, the Father is angry about his sinning people's actions in the Old Testament. There is no way that the Son, or the Holy Spirit, are not angry too. Their reactions may be different. But there is no way the Son is thinking, "The Father was too harsh; I will offer compassion and a way for a sinning man to get in His good graces again." He is the same in the Old and the New. Many pastors are giving us the happy side of Jessus, the Son, to keep a good mood flowing in sermons; he does not let us learn the discomfort and leaving the church, taking our tithes to another church. They never talk about hell, but Jesus is basically the only source for the truth about hell, and talks in length about it, and what we need to do to escape it. Too many people assume the merciful God of the New T could not send them to hell, that the Gospel is “believe it, I’m saved.” You need to read the sermons in Acts. People who take the easy believism route given by pastors, the too often studied truth is, their lives change little. There are excessive warnings in the NEW testament about how many people will be shocked about God judging them to hell. Only a small percentage will be saved, according to the CLEAR word of a New Testament book, Matthew 7:13-14. We must develop a loving obedient relationship with God in life, or we are likely sent to hell; that's what Jesus says, many times--consider the NEW Testament in John 15:5-6. These are not hyperboles. These are the cold facts. Do you want to know how God demands that you examine whether you have the faith, demands that you strive for holiness, without which we will not see God, or how bad sin is to God? You won’t hear it from most pastors. Ignorance of the Bible is no excuse. You must in fear seek the real God in Scripture. Now Mr. Pawson, in this sermon, will relate how God reacted to the Jews, but first one more thing: He made a covenant with them, it was not unconditional, it was bilateral, and was broken by sin—which meant curses would come to His people. Despite the covenant, their behavior meant God agreed that the covenant for their deliverance in that time period was off the table. God treats us the same way. Keep that in focus. Now let’s do the very educational sermon.
About 200 years ago, Frederick the Fifth, the king of Prussia, asked his philosopher friend, “Give me one proof of the existence of God.” The answer he got: “Your majesty, the Jews.” Considering how the Jews were scattered on the face of the earth at the time, and in danger of assimilation and losing their identity, that was an amazing answer—but the Jews still exist today, a proof of the existence of their God. Given their history, historians expected they would have died out. After all, they began with an old man of 90 who left a place that was, according to archaeologists, made of brick, had running water, central heating, and there were two story houses in abundance. He left there and lived in a tent the rest of his life because he believed God. God promised him a nation, countless descendants, including kings, and blessings for the whole world as his inheritance. Yet his wife was barren, a shame in that society, and it looked like the family line would come to a dead end anyway. The land God told him to go was, at the time, less than fertile, and subject to famines too frequently. But he went.
At times the patriarchs (Abraham, Issac and Jacob) had to travel to the breadbasket of the area, Egypt, to assuage hunger. But God kept the desire of their land burning within them. For Abraham, as a result of his faith in God’s promises, he became great in the eyes of God, so much so that He even presented His name in Scripture as “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” In a miracle, his wife bore a child at age 90, and he ultimately became the father of millions. Years later, God provided another blessing for this tribe—Joseph, one of his great-grandsons, was sold into slavery by the brothers who hated him. He even spent time in prison on a false charge, yet he became prime minister of Egypt, second only to the Pharaoh. Egyptologists have found Joseph’s home and his burial plot. It had been broken into, and the body moved. Which makes sense, as Joseph was a Jew, and directed his brothers to move his bones back to Canaan, their future homeland, since he wanted to be in the land God promised. Scripture, you see, is not telling fables—it’s telling history. They had faith to believe His Word.
However, genocide came to the Jews while they were in Egypt, the first of many. Later pharaohs made the Jews slaves. When the Pharaoh worried about their growing population, he commanded that boy babies should be slaughtered at birth. Here’s a proof-fact: A professor of London has found a cemetery in Goshen, Egypt, where all the skeletons are female. The only one of its kind in the entire world. Why? Almost all the boy infants were killed and not buried; they were thrown to the crocodiles in the Nile. But not Moses, God’s deliverer.
Just like our own slaves in the South, the Egyptian economy was so dependent on the Jews, that they would fight and never release them. In addition, the Jews had no weapons to get free. But God found a way, through Moses, to obtain their freedom without a single battle. When, after a series of devastating plagues that God created through Moses, the Jews were set free, God steered them away from the most accommodative route—fleeing up the eastern border of Egypt. Canaan was so very close that way. God knew, though, if they went that way, that Egypt had a line of fortifications on the eastern border of the Mediterranean, to guard against invaders—and to keep slaves from escaping. There was no way that their three million Jews could sneak away. So God sent them south! But then they went between the deep Red Sea and the uninhabitable Saharan desert; He seemed to want them trapped. Close on their trail were the chariots of the biggest army in their world. Egypt was all set to recapture these slaves. Yet despite the unreality of their placement, Moses didn’t blink an eye. He knew God was good for it. He knew the promises God made to the Jews, despite living in Egypt most of his life. His mother had given him faith when he was young. So God again acted on his faith, opened up a path in the Red Sea, closed it at the right time—and it was the Egyptian army at the bottom of the sea, not the Jewish slaves.
Then they were wandering in the desert, without food and little access to water. It was a miracle that any of them survived. Did you know that in 1973, when Egypt went into war with Israel, they had to travel by that desert in the Sinai peninsula to pull a surprise attack? Within three days on the desert they were dying of thirst, and some surrendered. So it was a miracle that many Jews in those fleeingyears sur vived. God kept the apple of His eye, and His promises, alive; and He was present in a tall pillar of cloud or fire, leading their paths. He did a miracle by never allowing their clothes to become unusable. He provided for this huge refugee population at every step. No one else could have done it, especially with corrupt enemies all around who saw them as a threat, even giants (descendants of the Nephilim, see another blog). They were, indeed, attacked. But God gave them the victory. When they hit the Jordan river, the border of their land that He promised, 12 spies were sent to suss out the promised land on the other side, and 10 of them returned with a bad report; the walls of the cities were too high, and there were too many giants. But two of the spies said, as it were, “we will go in on God’s shoulders, so we will be taller than they are.” But the people lost faith. Now think how God could be upset, after He had done many miracles right in front of them, to get them right to the edge of the land He promised. So, in His disappointment, God turned them back, and made sure that their travel to the outskirts of Canaan took 40 years instead of the usual 1; it could have been a short straight distance, but He made sure all the unfaithful would die and their bones ended up in the wilderness, not in the promised land of Canaan. The kids were spared, though, and grew up hardy, and ready to fight. God told them He would give them the victory. When they finally arrived, their very first challenge across the Jordan was the large city of Jericho; it was huge and had high walls. God took down the walls—another miracle--and they won that battle, the first one in Canaan. They had their land—for awhile.
Speaking of survival against odds, did you know that Israel is in an earthquake zone? It’s on the biggest crack in the earth’s surface, called the Great Rift Valley. Agriculture was chancy, there, too: they were totally dependent on a westerly wind—that is the only thing that brings rain. The vines depend on the dew that rolls off Mr. Hermon, coming off the snow and down the valley where it misted on the vines. Locust swarms, the kind that makes the sky truly black, occasionally strip all green from the land, even eating bark. Even buzzing through at 10 miles an hour, it took an hour-and-a-half for millions to leave and you could see the sun again. So Israel is a very precarious country to live in. It’s also a dangerous crossroads. They were a narrow corridor between the Mediterranean and the desert. It links Africa to Europe, and Europe to Asia; everybody traveling from one continent to another, or sending an army against an enemy, had to travel through Israel, most likely through a singular gap in the mountains to get to the Sea. That gap goes through a hill called Megiddo, or Har Megiddo—which is also a crux in the future. It is known famously in Bible prophecy as Armageddon—the last battle before God’s Final Judgment. Israel is surrounded by hostile neighbors, and it has been invaded and occupied and attacked, almost without relief, for centuries. When the Jews first took over the land, they had two superpowers nearby; each of them had generous supplies of water—the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates (Assyria). When any nation wanted the water of either, Israel was right in the middle. Collateral damage was the guaranteed result. Plus, Solomon’s sons began a civil war, which usually wipes out a nation. But they realized they had to stick together to preserve the Jewish line that God gave them. They decided to have an armistice. They lived, uneasily, side by side, and let live—though they had different objectives. One probable result of that is, Israel now has over 60 political parties, and no singular group or individual can rule alone, but must join a coalition with a party that has different goals. Which means few new laws get done, even when urgency calls for it. All of this seemed perfectly designed to have a short life as a nation.
When the Jews were conquered and exiled by the Assyrians and the Babylonians (about 600 BC), it should have been the end. But Medo-Persia later defeated the Babylonians, and were kind enough that for 200 years they allowed the Jews to set up a province in Israel if they wanted to return home. But only a few thousand returned to the land; their faith in God was dying out. They were later occupied by Syria, Egypt, Greeks, and Romans. Of these, the Greeks tried to assimilate them the most, which would obliterate Jewish identity and culture. Antiochus Epiphanes was the worst; among other things, he banned their language, forcing them to learn Greek. As it turned out, that was a huge blessing to mankind; Jews later wrote the New Testament in Greek, a perfect language for communicating the Gospel. Every advanced nation could read it. Many of the Jews were willing to be “Hellenized.” But not enough of them to obliterate their identity. God wanted them to be different, to bear God’s testimony and His Word for the world to see. Keep in mind, there were many gods. There was always the question, which god was real, and could protect his worshipping nation? Ideally, if the Jews copied His character, and became prosperous through His blessing, they would be a showcase of their God, and other nations would want Him as their god too.
Then came the visit of God in the flesh, Jesus the Christ. The Jews were given an opportunity to recognize Him as God, and be saved—but they killed Him instead. They began rejecting God 100 years before, and had lost freedom in their land as a result. Now, by rejecting His Son, curses would begin raining down.
When the Jews did too many insurrections, the Romans, in 70 AD, were tired of it, and wiped out Jerusalem, killing perhaps a million, and they destroyed the Temple. But the Jews, despite the loss of their culture’s greatest icons, still did not give up their identity. Persecution by Nero and others also drove them out. Their land was, in 135AD, renamed “Palestinia.” (There are anti-Semitic preachers today that say Jesus was a palestinian. False, since the name postdated Christ). Some of the Jews, though, held onto 3 things that stood out in their identity: circumcision, the Sabbath, and a kosher diet. But they lost their language.
But they hung onto hope, even when the Crusades, ostensibly to win holy sites back from the Muslims, killed every Jew they saw on the way, especially through France and Germany, who wouldn’t protect them. In Spain the Inquisition forced the Jews either to convert to Christianity or be tortured to death. Spain finally kicked them out in 1492; they had to flee to remain Jewish and stay alive. I’m sure it was “circumstance” that in that same year, Columbus discovered the New World, which later became a refuge for the Jews to flee to. They were even killed in England; in 1291, at York, when the remaining Jews were trapped gathered in a castle, they committed suicide rather than being run through by English soldiers. Later there were Russian pogroms, severe persecution in Poland (that’s why Hitler put most of his death camps there). And we can “understand” why Hitler wanted to kill them all; the Jews had their brightest people running banks, the theater and the arts, while Hitler was asserting the Aryans were a superior race.
But they’re here today, after a series of miracles; and every year, at Passover, the few religious Jews celebrate how their nation began with a miracle. They could see Acts of God, but the faithful people played their part too. Since their new nation in 1948, they have defended many times against Muslim onslaught and hatred, which were funded by Russian money and weapons. One of the many scenes of bravery was their capture of the Golan Heights in 1967 from the Syrians. Russian artillery controlled the top of the mountainous Heights, and were in a militarily impregnable position, aiming down to fire at the Israelis, whose every move was open. Fish in a barrel. But they built a road up the side of the steep hills, foot by foot, under heavy gunfire--with the help of many soldiers who gave their lives to simply run the bulldozer up the tall hill another hundred yards before he would be shot. They knew they would die, and still volunteered. Then they could march up and overwhelm the enemy
The Jews will still be around at the end time, not only in their nation, but in rebuilding a temple (Mark 13:14). There will be a huge revival; God will open their eyes to see Jesus in a new way; many of them will be saved.
But here’s another question, whose answer we don’t want to know: why has God allowed them to be defeated and persecuted? He hasn’t done a great job of protecting them. This is a side of God that gets ignored by most modern pastors and observers. It comes down to a hard fact: God loves people, but He also hates people. He not only heals, but He kills. He blesses, and He curses. We should ask people, not just, “do you believe in God,” but “what kind of God do you believe in?” His written Word—Old as well as New Testament, give His character and response to our actions and thoughts in great detail; and, frankly, in certain circumstances, He is harsh. But we have been brought up on a sentimental, not a Scriptural, understanding of Him.
The following remarks are God dealing with nations. He deals with people differently.
Thinking back, His “marriage” to the Jews in Exodus was a bilateral covenant. He said “I will” to many blessings He named—then He asked the Jews (at Sinai), “now it is for you to say, that you decide if you will keep all My commandments through your lives”? They said “we will.” That response completed the covenant as bilateral, and could be broken; it was not unconditional. Well, Israel broke it; they became an adulteress, as it were, to God, worshipping other gods and defying His rules. God had simply wanted a people who would demonstrate to the world how to love Him and be obedient to Him, and how, as a result, they could be blessed more than anybody. But the agreement also specified: If they broke the covenant, and ignored a relationship with Him, and went the ways of other corrupt cultures, He would curse them more than any other people. As you can see by their history, you know which way they went. This is a new way of saying, “God has kept His promises,” because cursing them was also keeping His promises too. He would do this even though He loved them.
Deuteronomy 28 has many of those blessings in vv1-14; and the curses in vv15-68. (A note for future sermonizers: God spends 4 times as much listing curses as He does the blessings. He knew that everyone assumes innocence, that they will be blessed; it takes a repeated knock on the head, lots more verses, to make them see the possibility of curses too). When you read the curses (see more in Leviticus 26), it’s a description of the holocaust, actually. If the Jews knew God, they would see that that was the ultimate of curses for their 3000 years of disobedience—capped by doing their part in killing their Messiah.
As reminders, Moses asked the people that for the next several days, and on occasion thereafter, go to two mountains named in advance with good acoustics. From one mountain, the Levites would shout the blessings. From the other, they would shout the curses. The people should hear that God is both love and holy. Speaking of the holocaust again, that horrible disaster was the reason why they re-obtained their nation. The blessing would not have come without the extreme persecution preceding it. Because the compassion of the world after the holocaust turned the world’s hearts into granting permission. Such are the ways of God.
So the reason for their change of fortunes is not because God is capricious. That’s Allah. Our God has a plan for our good, always. He can be trusted to stick to His word. One of the main messages of the Prophet books of the Bible to the wayward kings of Israel and Judah was, “Go on like this, and you’ll qualify for the curses.” His response, as always, was based on their decisions to obey or disobey.
Their prophet Jeremiah told them of the potter and the clay. A lump was started for a beautiful vase. But the clay was inflexible and would not respond under the potter’s hands. The potter was forced to make the clay into an unattractive pot for the kitchen. Who decided its destiny? The clay. God then told Jeremiah, “If that nation will repent and turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them.” (Jeremiah 18-19) But there was another lesson. When the clay could not be used for a better purpose, the potter smashed the crude pots into pieces, and threw them into Hinnom (a trash pit where fires burn continuously). Hinnom is the word source later picked by Jesus for the word Gehenna, which is properly translated Hell. Jesus told many stories of hell. No one in Scripture talked about it more than He. Consider that when you see the next sentimental painting of Jesus; that’s not the whole picture of Our Lord and King whom we are to fear and love.
God wants to see a nation worshipping Him, having people like Him, full of His mercy, eager to abide and enjoy relationship with Him. When you sin or forget Him, you should feel the relationship’s loss, and are eager to ask His forgiveness, and truly repent, because you are desirous of knowing Him more. By reading His Word, you also find out about His character, His glory, what it means to fear Him--and you want to put His character in your own lives too. You want to be more like Him. But curses come upon you, and hell at the end, if you rebel against Him, think only of getting ahead in the world, or if you have no desire to know Him better. Either way that your choice goes, you will still demonstrate that He is God, the Keeper of blessing and curse promises.
Remember that (after initial salvation) relationship with Him is demanded to enter our promised land--heaven. That is His abundant blessing. But few make it there (Matthew 7:13-14), because few love Him enough to even think about knowing Him or staying away from the things He hates. Look at history as proof. His blessings to people came in Genesis 1, but His curses came as early as Genesis 3. That’s how fast mankind learned to sin and rebel. It pleased God to make Creation; He called it “good.” Man was the height of God’s creation. But men quickly divided up into two groups, godly and godless. Such a division even happened to Adam and Eve’s two sons, Cain and Abel. Murder was early in the human race. A disgusted God not too long later, with the incredibly violent effects of the evil Nephilim, wiped out mankind, except eight righteous, and He started over. How can He do that to a people He loves? It’s the curse side of God. “Without holiness, no man shall see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14). When we are initially saved, we have a new nature; but the old sinful nature doesn’t want to give up the throne of our lives. Which nature we feed tells us if we see heaven at the end of our time.
Many readers of Genesis, especially, do not like God of the Old Testament. They think that mass drowning of the Flood is the peak of barbarism, and it must be a fable, He couldn’t kill everyone through the whole world—that can’t be God. So, you think that some of His Word is a myth? Or that there are really two gods, one capricious and eager to strike people dead, the other merciful and forgiving? Or do you think God mellows out between Old and New? Or that the Old Testament should be ejected from the Bible, that it teaches fairy tales and is only good for moralistic teaching for children? (many pastors believe that today). There is a saying that you may doubt, but you should agree by objectively reading Scripture: “God loves righteousness more than people.” If you feel its opposite is true, you don’t truly understand the two sides of God, or the Cross. If God loved people more than righteousness, He never would have allowed His Son to experience the horrors of substitutionary death. He would have just forgiven and forgotten, without the Cross. But righteousness demanded a payment for sin; His blood was the price for our sinful lives. (Ed: I disagree with Pawson in his Anselm argument for atonement, see my other blog). For proof, read Romans 1; its summary is, when men give God up, God eventually gives man up. Romans tells of the increase in unnatural sex, the breakup of families, the breakdown of law and order in society. Like in America. Curses are coming in our nation when we disobey His laws. We should have learned that lesson by reading in Scripture about Israel. As an example, God loves us all to provide food to feed all the people in the world. But wars, genocides, corrupt politics, and greedy, or people unwilling to share their wealth prevent that from happening. That’s not His fault—it’s ours. This is the most effective argument against cynical atheists who want to blame God for everything. They make these charges assuming we are all innocent, good people, so God must be guilty of hurting the innocents. Your response could be, do you think you don’t deserve premature, violent death? Well, we caused Jesus’ death on the Cross; a premature, violent death--that was the claim on us for our sin, until Jesus substituted for us. God is holy. We deserve hell; we should thank God Who gives any mercy at all towards us. Jesus was equally blunt when discussing the towers of Siloam, which fell and 18 died. In Luke 13:4-5, He speaks:
….those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse sinners than all other men who dwelt in Jerusalem? 5 I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish.”
I am not speculating on this aspect of God. He can be harsh. But we all need to live in His rules. We need to repent of our sins, not just once at initial salvation. The disasters are reminders of how unpredictable our time on earth is, and we should always be ready to meet Him. Even the uneducated cannot doubt God’s active existence. Even though they know nothing of Jesus, He has given us Creation and our conscience. So we know He exists and pretty much what’s right. Though we know right from wrong, most still choose wrong too often. All who have lived are accountable to Him for sin. But Jesus’ blood can free a repentant sinner—if they want to form a continuing relationship with Him, obeying Him, wanting to learn more about Him from His Word, and cease the worldly continued practice of sin.
God is dealing with the nations, even today, on the same basis as He dealt with ancient Israel; did you know that there are interesting parallels between the two? One-third of the Jews died in the holocaust. Likewise, according to Revelation 9:18, 1/3 of the people will die in that great persecution. Today, few of the Jews have turned to God. In Revelation, likewise, few in that future time will repent. In fact, when the worst plagues are upon those living at that future time, most people will curse God (Rev. 16:9). In another comparison, God’s curses rained upon the Jews in 1940s. But in the same decade, they went from bad fortune to good fortune; they also obtained future safety in their own new nation. Likewise, as Revelation predicts, God curses the earth with shaking and devastation, and many martyrs, that has never been seen—but this will be followed by the just reign of Jesus in His kingdom, and peace on the earth.
As I have proved, He is the same God in Old and New Testaments—a God to fear and to love, defining “love” in proper Greek. Our Christian Bible is ¾ Jewish, and ¼ New. The Old Testament dominates for a reason; it should still be studied; we learn about the other side of God, active even today. We also learn from the Jews’ history, how they were brave and heroic occasionally, they were close to Him, and so they were blessed; and also how they ignored God and took on the ways of the world’s corrupt culture. And were cursed. We learn that He is good, and He is righteous, and demands holiness. He never breaks a promise. Israel, despite its stiff neck, can still be forgiven by God in the future. They are God’s chosen people—because they will finally choose Him in the end times. Many of them will be saved, many become righteous. In parallel once again, the church, which is now weak, with a weak gospel and testimony, and often compared to lukewarm Laodicea, and is lazy about God. With God’s help, many Gentiles will revive; many will be saved, and be courageous in their testimony in the last days. Like Israel of old, our duty as God’s “church” (we’re not speaking of a building or denomination; it means “called out ones”) is to demonstrate what God is really like, that if we obey Him, He can forgive despite our past. Like the Jews. All saved at any time are the visible body of Christ (I Corinthians 12) to the world. Our acts, not just our words, should be patience and mercy, and compassion. We should bless, we should heal by forgiving. God help us to learn through history, and know Him, and demonstrate His character traits.
