A High Standard No.4 National Disgrace

I'm going to give you a short introduction to the Christmas. If you're interested in hearing me sing it, you can find the link in the description below. I'm going to sing the song for you.

God is with you. Be bold. Be strong.

For the Lord your God is with you. I am not afraid of you. I am not ashamed of you.

Honor won't defend the victory. Honor won't defend the victory. For the Lord your God is with you.

Be bold. Be strong. For the Lord your God is with you.

Be bold. Be strong. For the Lord your God is with you.

I am not afraid. I am not ashamed of you. Honor won't defend the victory.

Honor won't defend the victory. For the Lord your God is with you. Hey, Rascal, wasn't that a lovely song? Yeah.

It did go very well with the story I told you this morning. Wonderful. Yes.

Yeah, that's true. You remember the story then? Yes, it was about God. Yes.

And about Gideon. Yes, that's right. Gaza? About Gaza? It wasn't about Gaza.

We're talking about real heroes. Yeah, I know he's a football hero, but... No. No, that was the town of Gaza.

Well, yes, Samson went there as well. And look what trouble he got into down there. It was terrible, wasn't it? No, Gaza.

Yes, that's a town. Well, some people say it's in Israel, but it was really in a part that was occupied by some other people, wasn't it? Occupied by the Philistines. Is that right? You thought the story was about the Midianites.

Well, yes, it was about the Midianites. They used to come from the west of the country and go right across to Gaza, and everywhere they went, what did they do? That's right. They ate all the food they could.

That's right. And they took away all the food they could. Yes, that's right.

And what they couldn't eat or couldn't take away, they burned. You've got a very good memory. You're a good boy this morning, aren't you? Yeah.

Well, that's nice to know. Yes, it did all this work, all this destruction, and, of course, poor Israelites had nothing to eat. And I was telling Rascal this morning that Gideon, a very brave... Well, he wasn't to start with.

He was a very scared young man. He was only young, and he was from a family that didn't count for much. He wasn't very important.

And then all of a sudden one day he heard, Gideon! And he looked around, and what did he see? Well, I said a man, but you say an angel. All right then. He saw an angel, that's right.

But he looked like a man, didn't he? Oh, that's all right then. So this angel came and spoke to Gideon and said, Gideon, you mighty strong hero. And Gideon said, who, me? You're a mighty strong hero, aren't you? Yes, all right then.

Yes, me? And God said, yes, you. God spoke to him through this angel, you see. He said, I want you now to go out and to... What did you say? There's a little girl down there not paying attention.

Oh dear. Oh, she's looking at you. Oh, I see.

Oh, that's all right. We don't mind that. So God spoke to Gideon and said, I want you to rescue Israel from these wicked Midianites.

Gideon said, well, I can't do that. God said, well, you start off in a small way. Well, to me it's small.

Well, Gideon said, well, what is it? And God said, well, what I want you to do tonight, because I know you're scared. You won't do it in the daylight. Tonight, I want you to go and... What did he ask him to do? That's right.

Pull down the altar of Baal. What's that mean? Well, Baal was a great, big, nasty, ugly looking idol. No, not like Gaza.

He's a football idol. No, he's got this great, big, ugly idol. And he has an altar.

And people put sacrifices on the altar. Offerings, gifts to this God. And, of course, the God couldn't eat them.

He couldn't see them. He couldn't even hear the people coming, because he was made of stone. But people worshipped him.

Yes, it is a bit daft, isn't it? Yeah, that's right, yes. Yes, they worshipped this idol. But God said, I want you to do that tonight.

So get your father's biggest, strongest bullock, and go and tie it up with ten of your friends, up to that altar, and then move the bullock out, get the ox goat out, and stick it in him, until he pulls that idol down, and breaks that altar, and then, then, said Gideon, then I'll be in trouble. Because the Midianites worshipped Baal, and the people of Israel are worshipping Baal, and they'll probably kill me, and me mum and dad, and me brothers and sisters. I'm scared.

God said, I'm with you. I'm with you. All right, said Gideon.

That makes a lot of difference. But he wasn't very, no, he wasn't very happy, was he? And so off he went, to pull down this altar. Now God said he would be with him, but when he looked round, he couldn't see God.

It was dark anyway. So he couldn't see God. So you know what he did? He did exactly as he was told, and prayed that God was watching.

And the next morning, the people got up, they got their sacrifices, their offerings, their presents to bring to God, Baal, the idol Baal, and they brought them to him, and there was no altar to put them on, and when they looked for him, there he was, lying on the ground, a great big pile of stones. That's all that was left of him. And the people got angry.

People do that, you know, when you talk against their idols. When you've got something better to talk about than their idols, they get annoyed about it. And they got really angry, and they went running, all round the town, looking for who's done this.

Then somebody said, I bet it was Gideon. You know, Gideon means the man who chops down trees. And they said, I bet it's him that's chopped down our altar, and chopped down our God.

I bet it's him, because he was always talking about this other God, Jehovah, the great God, the creator, the one who can hear and see, and speak. I bet it's him. So off they came to Gideon's house, and Gideon was looking out the window, and he saw this crowd of people come in, and he thought, oh dear me, what are they going to do to me now? And what are they going to do to mum and dad? And they came, and they banged on the door, and they said, Joash! That was Gideon's dad.

Joash! Bring Gideon out here, we're going to kill him. And we'll kill you too, if you don't bring him out quick. And you know, God was with Gideon.

He really was, because he did something in Joash. Joash came out, quiet, calm, stately, and he looked at the people, and he said, I thought you said Baal was a God. If he's really a God, if he's really powerful, he can look after things himself.

He doesn't need you to kill my son. You don't even know it was him. It might have been somebody else, but if it was, and if Baal's great, he can kill him.

Let's just wait a few minutes, and see what happens. And they all waited, and waited, and waited, and nothing happened. And Gideon said, Hey, God is with me, and God does want me to obey him, and God does want me to call the people of Israel together, to overcome the Midianites, and the Amorites, and the Malachites, and all the other bits and bytes.

He wants me to overcome them all. Isn't that wonderful? I'm going to be a great leader, just like he said. So thank you God.

So that chorus was just right, wasn't it? Israel, Israel, you are now about to cross the Jordan to go in and dispossess nations greater and stronger than you, with large cities that have walls up to the sky. The people are strong and tall, Anakites, you know about them. And I've heard it said, who can stand up against the Anakites, but be assured today that the Lord your God is the one who goes across ahead of you like a devouring fire.

He will destroy them, He will subdue them before you, and He will drive them out and annihilate them quickly as the Lord has promised you. After the Lord your God has driven them out before you, do not say to yourself, the Lord has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness. No.

It is on account of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is going to drive them out before you. It is not because of your righteousness or of your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land, but on account of the wickedness of these nations. The Lord your God will drive them out before you.

To accomplish what He swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, understand then that it is not because of your righteousness that the Lord your God is giving you this good land to possess. For you are a stiff-necked people. Remember this and never forget how you provoked the Lord your God to anger in the desert.

From the day you left Egypt until you arrived here, you have been rebellious against the Lord at Horeb you aroused the Lord's wrath so that He was angry enough to destroy you. When I went up to the mountain to receive the tablets of stone, the tablets of the covenant that the Lord had made with you, I stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights. I ate no bread and drank no water.

The Lord gave me two stone tablets inscribed by the finger of God on them and then were all the commandments the Lord proclaimed to you on the mountain out of the fire on the day of the assembly. At the end of the forty days and forty nights the Lord gave me the two stone tablets, the tablets of the covenant. Then the Lord told me, Go down from here at once because your people whom you have brought out of Egypt have become corrupt.

They have turned away quickly from what I commanded them and have made a caste idol for themselves. And the Lord said to me, I have seen this people and they are a stiff-necked people indeed. Let me alone so that I may destroy them and blot out their name from under heaven and I will make you into a nation stronger and more numerous than they.

So I turned and went down from the mountain while it was ablaze with fire and the two tablets of the covenant were in my hands. When I looked I saw that you had sinned against the Lord, your God. You had made for yourselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf.

You had turned aside quickly from the way that the Lord had commanded you. So I took the two tablets and threw them out of my hands breaking them to pieces before your eyes. Then once again I fell prostrate before the Lord for forty days and forty nights.

I ate no bread and drank no water because of all the sin you had committed doing what was evil in the Lord's sight and so provoking Him to anger. I feared the anger and wrath of the Lord for He was angry enough with you to destroy you. But again the Lord listened to me and the Lord was angry enough with Aaron to destroy him.

But at that time I prayed for Aaron too. Also I took that sinful thing of yours, the calf you had made, and burnt it in the fire. Then I crushed it and ground it to powder as fine as dust and threw the dust into a stream that flowed down the mountain.

You also made the Lord angry at Tibera, at Massa, and at Kebroth-hatava. And when the Lord sent you out from Kenesh-ba-nir He said, Go up and take possession of the land I have given you. But you rebelled against the commandment of the Lord your God.

You did not trust Him or obey Him. You have been rebellious against the Lord ever since I have known you. I lay prostrate before the Lord those forty days and forty nights because the Lord had said He would destroy you.

I prayed to the Lord and said, O people, and said, O sovereign Lord, do not destroy your people, your own inheritance that you redeemed by your great power and brought out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Overlook the stubbornness of this people, their wickedness and their sin.

Otherwise the country from which you brought us will say, because the Lord was not able to take them into the land He has promised them. And because He hated them, He brought them out to put them to death in the desert. But they are your people, your inheritance that you brought out by your great power and your outstretched arm.

At that time the Lord said to me, Chisel out two stone tablets like the first ones and come up to Me on the mountain. I don't know whether you agree with Lloyd-Jones in the quote that we placed at the top of our bulletin. I guess if you don't then you've got some problems in terms of bringing out a case that would argue against his pronouncement.

There are still some people who think of this country as a Christian country. What an utter nonsense. There is no such thing.

There never has been a Christian country. In fact you could perhaps go on and say even in retrospect of Old Testament times there has never been such thing as a holy nation. Now if you were to read the parallel account that we've taken from Deuteronomy in the book of Exodus you would find that God actually constituted or it was His wish for the nation of Israel to be constituted as such in the desert and they were to be ideally a holy nation.

A royal priesthood. A peculiar treasure standing out amongst all the nationalities as the people who especially had the mark of God upon them. But what happened? Well, almost before God had got the pronouncement out of His mouth, so to speak, the nation newly formed disgraced itself.

And that it seems to me was repeated time and time again in Old Testament history. And it doesn't matter what nation you line up in more modern times, exactly the same thing happens. They disgrace themselves.

When the founding fathers of the United States of America had moved from Europe on the honourable task of creating a society in which there would be religious freedoms, one of their early presidents had to say in regard to that society that they were going to establish one nation under God and they would birth the idea of government by the people, to the people, and for the people. And it's to the credit of the United States that actually there is more reference made in their legislative houses to the person of God than you will find, generally speaking, in the House of Commons or in the House of Lords. But the history of America, like the history of our own country, has been one of disgrace in terms of implementing the ethic of the Old and indeed of the New Testament.

You find in no less a paper than the Guardian this week a secular journalist who has as her project last week the interviewing of Shirley Williams. And the thing that strikes this journalist with all her purple journalist way of reporting is that astonishingly Shirley Williams keeps making reference to God. Now it's not what she has to say about God that takes the imagination of Joanna Coles.

It's the rather unusual habit that she has of making mention of the Lord, which again underlines what I have just been saying, that here in the United Kingdom reference to God or to the Lord or to the Bible is unusual rather than regular. And the tabloids this week seem to me to add to this concept of a nation that constantly disgraces itself when encouraging support for the international football match last Wednesday between Germany and England. It plundered the language that was rife at the end or in the middle as well of the Second World War as though that wasn't a horrific enough war in itself.

And more complaints were received by the Press Council as a result of those headlines in the Sun newspaper and in the Daily Mirror than on any other recent occasion. You see, the fact of the matter is that when you look at the Western nations they constantly seem to do things which are against the laws of God and as a result they come under His censure, under His condemnation. Now here is Moses and you'll see where I'm getting to in a moment if you bear with me.

Here is this old man Moses and what you get in the book of Deuteronomy is basically his swan song. If you like, Moses is a pastor, he's a shepherd. A shepherd of a rather large and difficult flock.

And what you get in the book of Deuteronomy is his recall of the early years of him pastoring this congregation and you also get his reminiscences at the end of his life because he's not going to enter the Promised Land. And so he gives what in effect in the Old Testament is the nunc dimittis, like Simeon in the New who at the point of departure has the infant Christ in his hands and he says, Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace? So Moses addresses his people and as he does so he reminds them of the providence of God. He reminds them of the problems that they brought to God and he also reminds them of the prayers that he entered into on their behalf.

The providential dealings of God, the problems of the people and the prayers of the pastor. Now the interesting thing is that when you open up this chapter as Moses is reminiscing on past experiences he identifies God's providential intervention with the whole history of Israel. He's saying in effect, You can't understand what has happened to you outside the fact that God is a living God who has shown his interest in us over these last forty years particularly.

In other words, Moses, not just a pastor but also a politician will do what is rarely done today. He reviews recent history and he sees God in it and he recognizes that apart from God his nation would not have got to the point of being able to enter into the Promised Land. Look at the first verse.

You are now about to cross the Jordan to go in and dispossess nations greater and stronger than you. After verse four, The Lord your God has driven them out before you. Do not say to yourself, The Lord has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness.

No, says Moses, as he assesses the spiritual condition of his people. He said, You lack righteousness. You lack integrity.

Your possession of Canaan has nothing to do with your merit. It has only to do with the abundant grace of God. Now you see how Moses in the Old Testament therefore stands in striking contrast to the majority of leaders that we have nationally in our country in the West and in the United States today.

Moses will interpret Israel's history as he sees the interventions of God. And when he thinks in terms of the nation's integrity, of the nation's solidarity, of the nation's future, he realizes that the nation has no future at all. It has no integrity.

The only way that there can be optimism as far as the generations to come are concerned is if the Israelites, as they move into the Promised Land, will stay close to this God. Happy is that nation whose God is the Lord. Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain that build it.

So you see for a nation to be God's nation, for a people to be God's people, they have to recognize what is significantly missing in modern political commentary today. They have to recognize the providential dealings of God and His great power. Now, this of course is not new to the Christian.

I mean here we are, we stand before the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ and we know that our salvation comes not by our merit, not of works that we have done. Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to His cross I cling. You remember Augustus Toplady's great words, one of the great preachers of yesteryear.

It's all as a result of His grace. It's all as a result of what He has done. So Christian people here, you can appreciate the reason why Moses is making the comments that he does.

These Anakim, these great giants of a people that will terrorize you. You will not be able to enter into the Promised Land and subdue them in your own strength. And neither Christian people will you be able, as well you know, to subdue the power of Him who is against you outside the providential grace of our Lord Jesus.

So Moses reminds these people that it's not because they are morally better than those who occupy the Promised Land. It's rather because God is with them. God in His grace has favored them.

And now he leads you into the problems. Remember verse 7. Remember this and never forget how you provoke the Lord your God to anger in the desert. Moses will use eleven different adjectives.

I haven't time to go through them. To describe negatively the condition of the Israelites during the whole forty years that they wandered from Egypt to the borders of the Promised Land. It does not give a very pleasant picture.

And more than that, he highlights five different occasions when they rebelled against the Lord. The one that is known most is when Moses finds himself at the top of Sinai and following the injunction from the Lord that the nation is to be a special nation, Moses goes up to receive the legislature from God Himself. And at that period when the Hebrews should have been in the valley adoring and praising this God, you remember what happened? They brought Melemaus, Teran to the forefront.

They pulled together the gold and the silver that they brought out of Egypt. They produced this golden calf and they started to give obeisance as though they were just pagan, ignorant people. And when Moses comes down the mountain, he sees that what is happening is not the sound of the people rejoicing, nor is it the sound of armies that have gone out to war.

You'll find in the parallel chapter in the book of Exodus how he describes these people who in a bout of sinfulness have rebelled against the Lord. Verse 12, In this rendering they have turned away quickly from what I commanded them and have made a caste idol for themselves. And as Moses spies the scene, verse 15, I turned and went down from the mountain while it was ablaze with fire.

And as he looks on the sinfulness of his people, symbolically he takes those two tablets with the ten commandments written on them by the finger of God and he dashes them onto the ground and they break into pieces. Now, you say, what has this got to do with the United Kingdom? Well, I argue it's got everything to do. All right, we've not been up on Sinai, we've not heard the volcano erupt and seen the molten lava, but nonetheless we have the consequence of God's revelation to Moses with us, even now in front of us, those of us who have Bibles, we have the ten commandments.

We know what is right, we know what is wrong. I was listening to my good friend Steve Chalk earlier this morning as he gave a sort of Christian gloss on the news and as he was interviewing certain personalities who came into the ITV studio and he had the challenge of trying to demonstrate to one particular man along with the interjections from Tony Higton who is with me at London Bible College trying to demonstrate that there is no way in which you can make out a case for homosexuality. There is no way in which the church can ordain people who are practicing in this particular sin.

Now, when a nation refuses to admit what is the revealed will of God, don't you see it dispossesses itself of any claim to being a Christian nation, a spiritual nation? For a holy nation has by very definition its willingness to obey the laws of God. And there is more than one way to take those ten commandments and to drop them on the ground. And what you have seen in past history and alas in more recent days is the violation by the authorities in our land of certain aspects of this legislature.

So blasphemy is no longer an offence. And you can use the word of God with any particular connotation, the name of God, you can take it and you can use it, you can blaspheme, you can affix it to obscenities and nobody seems to do anything about it whatsoever. Yet the ten commandments says that you're not to take God's name in vain.

We here at the tab were part of the vanguard as far as the movement Keep Sunday Special is concerned. But what do we discover now? That the old Sunday has been lost. Probably irretrievably.

And I think that's not only a spiritual tragedy. I feel it is a social tragedy. These are the days through which we are going.

And if you have any sense at all as you read Scripture you cannot but be struck by the contemporary nature of our reading as it fits certain fallouts in terms of behaviour today. So here is Moses and he tabulates not once, not twice, not three times, not four times, but five times these Hebrews going against God, refusing to do what God would have them to do and coming to a crisis point at Kadesh Barnea when they lead a rebellion against the Lord and wish that they had been back in Egypt, the land from which God took them in the first place. So what you've got in these opening verses are Moses' recognition of the providence of God but over against that you've got Moses' recollection of the problems which the people brought to God.

In the first few verses he's saying as far as providence is concerned, give God the due. In the next few verses as far as problems is concerned he's saying these are dire. So what does a leader do when he has a concept of the providence of God and on the other hand the problems that the people are presenting this God? Well, he doesn't pull the shutters down and go off on his own saying a plague on all your houses.

Rather he remembers the power of prayer. And this I say is a chapter which describes Moses at his peak of spirituality. Having told us that he took that sinful thing of yours, the calf you had made, verse 21, and burnt it in the fire and crushed it and ground it to powder as fine as dust, threw the dust into a stream that flowed down the mountain.

And as the account in Exodus puts it, he caused the people to actually drink of the powder and of the liquid of the amalgamation of the water with the powder. Rather, as Matthew Henry says, if you sin the devil will cause you eventually to drink your own brew. Moses gives them a taste of the consequences of their folly.

But then he remembers. He remembers that this people is His people and that the brother of His Aaron who God will have annihilated because of his lead in these people's folly. Moses comes before the Lord and he prays, verse 25, I lay prostrate before the Lord those forty days and forty nights because the Lord had said He would destroy you.

You see, this is a man who knows something of the providence of God and the problems of the people. This is a man who still has an affinity to his own brother and he cannot live with the idea of his brother coming under the condemnation of God. So what does Moses do? He has recourse to prayer, the second bout of prayer, the second time that he's spending forty days on the mount before the Lord.

On what basis can he pray? He cannot pray as far as his brother is concerned. Well, look at what he has done in the past because what he's done in the present has obliterated all the good of the past. He cannot pray on behalf of the people and the bravery with which they left Egypt for all the bravery that there was and all the credits that perhaps could have been chalked up towards them have been wiped out by the folly of this blasphemy and idolatry.

So what do you do when you come before the Lord for your nation and you haven't got a lever to pull at the human level? You pray within the context of your knowledge of the character of God. Oh, sovereign Lord. That's the word that Abraham used when he also interceded before God.

Moses has an idea that although God is a God of judgment, although God is a God who will rebuke the sinner and punish the sin, He's also a God of great mercy. What is more, He's a God who has given heaped up helpings of kindness to these people yesteryear. Oh, sovereign Lord.

Do not destroy your people, your own inheritance that you redeemed by your great power. Lord, here is the dilemma. You have given the option to me that from my loins you will raise up a greater people than this people.

But Lord, this is not the option for which I would go. My concerns are not for my aggrandizement. My concerns are for you.

Lord, within your heart there is mercy. Lord, from your bowels have come gracious acts towards these people. Yesteryear has all this to be wasted.

And what is more, Lord, you brought little Israel out of Egypt and you brought us together as a nation in Sinai. And what has happened is known throughout the whole of the world. Lord, if you annihilate these people, then your glory will be eclipsed.

They will say of you, he couldn't do it. They will say of you, you were not powerful enough. Now you see my point.

Christian friends, here is Moses and he's arguing. He's arguing at a dire time in the history of this people. And he cannot argue from the point of view of their achievements.

He can only argue on the basis of the mercy of God and what God has done through this people to this point. And don't you see, that defines how the church is to react in our particular time of history. We look back and see the providential dealings of God.

Many of our politicians blinded to them, but we are not. We see the enormity of the difficulty of the contemporary situation. And then we recognize the power of prayer and realize that the providence of God through prayer will meet the problems of the people.

And don't you see, that's the reason why you can hold all your evangelistic campaigns and have your biggest celebrations. You can bring together your spring harvests and your Keswiks and your stonely conferences. I'm not speaking against them.

You can do all this. But the thing that will change the face of our nation is the church. That prayer.

Moses is prostrate and God within His providence has made allowance for Moses' prayers to change the situation. And at the end of forty days, even though God has said that He will destroy Aaron and these people, the gracious voice of God comes to Moses. Chisel out two stone tablets.

Light the first ones. Come up to Me on the mountain. Moses will start again.

We'll have another run at it. And this is the mercy of our God. He's prepared to start again.

To show His mercy towards you as an individual. To show His mercy towards our country as a whole. The providence of God.

The problems of the people. The prayers of the leaders. And the latter through the former was to affect the middle as it was then.

So it is now. Thus my point at Worthington that you can take your elders' meetings and you can take your deacons' meetings and you can take your staff meetings and you can take every other meeting and put them together and I tell you they do not mount to the value of a half-night of prayer. The coming together of people before the Lord to pray for the individual, to pray for the church, to pray for the nation.

The only answer to national disgrace is a church before God on its knees. We stand here still for the angels, still for the glow that's shining all around me. We stand here still for the angels.

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