Dennis Tuuri

feel like these trees are closing in on me. Yeah, just in case you’re wondering, you know, we deliberately only lit one.

Today is the first Sunday in Advent, and in the providence of God, the text today actually talks about trees. The text today is Deuteronomy 20. I’ll be reading the whole chapter, verses 1 to 20. And you’ll see the trees figure as the text comes to its concluding comments. And thanks very much to those that are decorating for us this Advent season.

We’ve kind of gone big on the Advent wreath. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Deuteronomy 20, all 20 verses.

When you go out to battle against your enemies and see horses and chariots and people more numerous than you, do not be afraid of them, for the Lord your God is with you, who brought you up from the land of Egypt. So it shall be when you are on the verge of battle that the priest shall approach and speak to the people.

And he shall say to them, “Hear, O Israel, today you are on the verge of battle with your enemies. Do not let your heart faint. Do not be afraid, and do not tremble or be terrified because of them. For the Lord your God is he who goes with you to fight for you against your enemies to save you.

Then the officers shall speak to the people, saying, “What man is there who has built a new house and has not dedicated it? Let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle, and another man dedicate it. What man is there who has planted a vineyard and has not eaten of it? Let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle, and another man eat of it. And what man is there who is betrothed to a woman and has not married her? Let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle, and another man marry her.

The officers shall speak further to the people and say, “What man is there who is fearful and faint-hearted? Let him go and return to his house, lest the heart of his brethren faint like his heart. And so it shall be when the officers have finished speaking to the people that they shall make captains of the armies to lead the people.

When you go near a city to fight against it, then proclaim an offer of peace to it. And it shall be that if they accept your offer of peace and open to you, then all the people who are found in it shall be placed under tribute to you and serve you.

Now, if the city will not make peace with you, but wars against you, then you shall besiege it. And when the Lord your God delivers it into your hands, you shall strike every man in it with the edge of his sword. But the women, the little ones, the livestock, and all that is in the city, all its spoil, you shall plunder for yourself, and you shall eat the enemy’s plunder which the Lord your God gives you.

Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far off from you, which are not of the cities of these nations. But of the cities of these people, which the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance. You shall let nothing that breathes remain alive, but you shall utterly destroy them: the Hittite, and the Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite, just as the Lord your God has commanded you.

Lest they teach you to do according to all their abominations, which they have done for their gods, and you sin against the Lord your God.

When you besiege a city for a long time while making war against it to take it, you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an axe against them. If you can eat of them, do not cut them down to use in the siege. For the tree of the field is man’s food. Only the trees which you know are not trees for food, you may destroy and cut down to build siege works against the city that makes war with you until it is subdued.

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for Deuteronomy 20. We thank you for this exposition by Moses of the sixth word. We thank you, Father, for instructing us in the meaning of the sixth word and its relationship to life. Bless us now, Father. Give us the good gifts of knowledge and understanding of your word. Transform us by it and make us courageous in Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

How’s battle? How goes the war? I remember the first time I ever heard that expression after I became a Christian, my brother Mike asked me how goes the war one day. And I thought that’s a strange way to put a question about how’s it going, which we normally say. How goes the war? Not a bad greeting to give to one another.

This text is a text about war and it sounds kind of foreign to our ears on one hand. But when we remember that the scriptures tell us that all these scriptures talk about the coming of Jesus and who we are in him, the text becomes important to our understanding of who the Lord is, to look for what this text is telling us about Jesus, and as a result of that, what it’s telling about us as well.

Now this text is particularly poignant for me and maybe a few others. When RCC started up in the early ’80s, we basically grew out of a Bible study going through Gary North’s book Unconditional Surrender. And in Unconditional Surrender, at some point in the eschatological section, Gary talks about this particular text. The title of the book Unconditional Surrender is taken from this text in Deuteronomy. So evangelism by way of extension is us going to the cities of the nations around us and calling them to submit to the terms of the peace agreement that Jesus offers to all men.

But that agreement is unconditional surrender. The only way to avoid destruction on the part of the cities round about Israel as its future was being described here was to submit to unconditional surrender. Those were the terms. You have to become servants of the representatives of Yahweh. And so this book and the title of this book kind of gave us a sense of who we were in relationship to what God was calling Reformation Covenant Church to be.

And probably some people would say that was an unfortunate thing to happen to us when we were young. And other people would say, well, that was a very interesting thing to happen. And the question is, do we still believe it? And what’s the relevance of this particular perspective to us today?

Now, we come to this text, as I said, really on the first Sunday of Advent. I began to talk about Advent last week, and we come in the context of this holiday season. And of course, holidays are weird for us and they get weirder year by year because the culture moves further and further away from the meaning of holy days, right? Holidays were holy days and holy days were sort of sabbatical days. And now commerce has the whole Black Friday thing has morphed into I don’t know what you call it—gray Thursday or something. And so even the holy day of Thanksgiving is becoming now more and more consumer oriented.

My son Elijah wrote a blog post about, “Hey, you know how tough is it to stop shopping one day in seven?” Well, you know how tough is it for a drunkard to stop drinking one day in seven? It’s tough. It’s hard. And there’s a sense in which our culture embracing the god of mammon—really, you know, it’s hard for the culture not to shop. It’s hard for the culture to remember to give thanks.

Even, you know, when my family gathered on Thanksgiving, I asked people, “What are you thankful for?” And then I read a post on BH by Jim B. Jordan. You know, well, you’re not supposed to give thanks on Thanksgiving. You’re just supposed to be thankful—have a warm, fuzzy thankfulness about all the good gifts and the friends and the family. Well, no, it’s not that, is it? That was Jim’s point. He was being ironic. Thanksgiving is about giving thanks to God who provided all these blessings.

Another blogger pointed out how even Rush Limbaugh, you know, gets it so wrong when he talks about Thanksgiving and he turns it into thanksgiving for capitalism. “You know, well, they were communistic when we came over—the original planters of the nation were—and they were starving to death, and then along comes capitalism and saves them.” Well, in point of fact, of course, if you know that story at all, there were a number of providential acts by God. These Indians just happen to appear out of the mist, right? Under the providence of God. Thanksgiving is about not giving thanks for a particular economic system. There’s some of that involved, of course, but it’s giving thanks to God for what he has done for us and what he has accomplished in our lives, for his providential acts.

So we move through Thanksgiving into now this season of Advent. And Advent, you know, it’s kind of important that we think about Advent a little bit each year and not kind of get slid into the culture around us where the Advent is becoming the advent of the holiday season. You know, the terrorist plot—Friday night, against the holiday tree—right, know, against the Christmas tree—but it’s become a holiday tree now. And these are holidays, and so everybody’s included. And the big thing is just shopping again. It’s important for us to remember that Advent is the coming—the coming of Christ in particular, time celebration of his coming, his incarnation.

But what does that mean? The world can still celebrate the coming of Jesus because, like that guy in that racing comedy, you know, he likes baby Jesus. He likes to pray to baby Jesus ’cause baby Jesus is fun. And the culture loves baby Jesus. They love Jesus in that crib. They like that sentimental version of who Jesus is. And sometimes it’s important for—and there’s wonderful things to like about that. I mean, it is such a mystery and a beauty to it that of course we celebrate that. But sometimes it’s good to sort of step back a little bit and remember who Jesus is.

And during this Advent season and the providence of God, in my own decision, I decided not to go to traditional Advent sermons, but just to stay on the text we were expounding—the sixth word—and to look at Advent that way. And I felt sort of justified this week again. Jim Jordan made a joke on the BH list. They were talking about what’s the BH version of Advent. And Jim says it starts with the first week is “headcrusher Sunday” based on Judges 5—Jesus the headcrusher. And then “blood spatter Sunday” based on Isaiah 63 is the second Sunday of Advent. And then “boy toaster Sunday” from Leviticus 10, the third Sunday of Advent.

You know, that’s Leviticus 10, where Nadab and Abihu brings strange fire and God toasts them. You know, he toasts these sons of his in his presence. So God’s coming as Advent was boy toaster and he’s blood spatterer and he’s headcrusher. And you know, a little of that can go a long way. But that’s sort of what I want us to do with these texts. We’re looking at Deuteronomy 19 through the first eight verses of 22 are pictures, snapshots, implications of the sixth word. But in these texts we look for the Lord Jesus Christ in them. And so in today’s text, we want to do the same thing.

We sort of want to think about what is this about. If we think about what the text tells us about Jesus and then celebrate Advent today based on what it is—who Jesus is, the advent of who is Jesus, what was he meant to do, how is he in the particular text? And that’s what we’re working through here in these series of Advent sermons. They’re a little weird. Sorry that they’re weird, but it’s just what I think is the right thing to do.

And we’re just going to continue going through Deuteronomy 19-22 through Advent. This first Advent message really, I think the place where we see Jesus is this priest who comes to prepare God’s men for war. So the advent of what the Jews called the anointed one of the war. So a priest is an anointed person. It’s singular in the text—the priest, the anointed one of the war—is what the Jews referred to this person in history. A particular priest was the anointed one of the war to prepare the troops and essentially then to set up officers and captains and heads to lead the congregation into war.

So where is Jesus in this text? It’s the advent of the anointed one of the war, reminding us that from one very real perspective, the Christian life is warfare. Your life is a battle. It’s a battle that if you stay strong and don’t get weak, you’ll do great at because God is with you and he’s promised us victory in Jesus Christ over all the nations of the world. So we’ll talk about that more in a little bit, the picture of Jesus in this text.

But let’s just sort of talk about what the text does. And the first thing the text tells us is it tells us that war is in our future. So we’re the nation of Israel, right? The church is Israel now and all that stuff. And he says war is in your future. That’s what he says. He doesn’t say “if you go out to battle against your enemies.” He says “when that happens”—when it’s time to go out to battle against your enemies, here’s what you need to do.

So first of all, the inevitability of the Christian life—metaphorically and in some cases literally—being a life of warfare. This text will inform us about statecraft, about what it is, what kind of war policies should we have, and then we can take and apply those as good Christian soldiers who are moving onward, right? We can envision ourselves as an army. And RCC, when it began, had a great notion of unconditional surrender. We’re the army of God and we proclaim peace to the world around us. But if they don’t listen to that peace and the judgments of God come upon them, that’s all a very good vision for what a church is. We’re an outpost, we’re a bivouac station to go into the world proclaiming the gospel and to engage in that kind of warfare.

So the question isn’t whether we’re going to have war or not. It’s always present in one sense, and it becomes important for Christian nations as well to literally go to war against enemy nations. This tells us that the sixth commandment doesn’t prohibit all forms of intentional killing.

From Deuteronomy 19, we saw the sixth word certainly means that we should be careful not to take life—innocent life—unintentionally. But here God actually tells us there’s a time when you’re intentionally to kill people, to kill other people. So intentional killing is part of what this is. And it tells us that’s okay at times. And again, it’s not just at the conquest. They’re getting ready to go into the land. The provisions that I just read weren’t just for the nations that you’re going in to dispossess. It was for the future when you would do battle against other nations around your borders, okay?

So it isn’t just the conquest. The Christian life is warfare. And sometimes physical war will be in the future of God’s people. It’s when, not if. We are a community that’s gathered to scatter, right? We come together. We rest on the Lord’s day. We take great joy in that. But then we’re supposed to go out into the world and in a very real sense those commissioning statements by our Savior in the Gospels are all about sending out warriors—right?—warriors to proclaim his Gospel, to call men to submit unconditionally to serve the Lord Jesus Christ. And if they fail to do that, to announce the judgment of God to them.

Our desire is peace, but the people that we’re approaching with peace will not always want peace. Their heart will be for war. They make war, or we make peace.

Look at verse 12. It’s interesting how this is worded here. Verse 12 says, “Now, if the city will not make peace with you, but wars against you, then you shall besiege it.” So you’re really not going to war. You’re going to spread peace, the presence of Christ, and the blessings of his community. But when they resist that, they make war against you. And when they make war against you, here’s how you go about doing war. We’re for peace, but the opponents of Christ are sometimes for war.

Again, in verse 20—where is verse 20? Excuse me, piece of paper. Well, it’s got to be here somewhere. Yeah, here we go. Verse 20: “Only the trees which you know are not trees for food, you may destroy and cut down to build siege works against the city that makes war with you until it is subdued.”

So in other words, even in this text talking about warfare and its inevitability, the inevitability is not because God’s people desire to make war, but it’s to deal with the resistance of those who are not hearing the proclamation of peace and being called to serve Yahweh, okay?

So war is inevitable both in terms of metaphorical the Great Commission. But then sometimes there are literal wars as well.

Secondly, we have victory assured to us here. The text says when you go out, here is what you’re supposed to do. And when you follow these things, there’s great assurances given that the Lord God will be with you and he’ll grant you victory and blessing. That’s what the text goes on to say in verse one. “Don’t be afraid. The Lord your God is with you who brought you up from the land of Egypt.” So he’s saying understand that if you go about obedience to me, then victory will be the end of what you’re doing.

Conversely, we can say when we don’t have victory in battle, there’s probably some things that are wrong—there’s some impediment. The assurance of victory is not just because we’re more right than the other guy. The assurance of victory is given to people with the instructions about how to engage in biblical warfare. So, and these instructions—so first, war is inevitable. Secondly, victory is assured. And third, the instructions that will assure victory includes the need to be hard-hearted.

You know, you always hear the warnings: don’t be hard-hearted, right? But this text actually tells us that hard-heartedness is a good thing at times. Now, we’ve seen that already, haven’t we? In Deuteronomy 19, we’re to be kind of hard-hearted, not pitying a false witness who attempts to kill somebody with his tongue. We’re supposed to not have pity upon them—people, those people, somebody who intentionally murders somebody. We’re not supposed to have pity. We’re to be hard-hearted toward them.

And he tells them the same thing here by way of implication. He says four times: don’t be fearful. He says you’re going to see people around you. Don’t be afraid of them. The Lord your God is with you, okay? And so you’re going to naturally be prone to be fearful. But God will be with you. And here’s what the priest says to him in verse 2:

“Hear, O Israel, today you are on the verge of battle with your enemies. Do not let your heart faint. Do not be afraid. Do not tremble or be terrified because of them.”

God uses four different words here relating to fear. And the first one is a word that means don’t be soft-hearted. Don’t let your hearts melt within you. Don’t have a soft heart as it approaches war. Have a hard-heartedness to you to go about doing things in a brave, courageous sort of way. There’s a time to be hard-hearted.

One of the first things—well, in fact, the very first thing the priest does, the anointed one of the war does, is he encourages the people. He gives them courage for the battles they’re to be in. And he does that by giving four different words that are related to the concept of fear and assuring them that God will be with them.

Fourth, after he does this, after he goes through and encourages the people, then the people are actually organized for battle. Verse 5: “Then the officers shall speak.” So the priest has spoken words of encouragement and now the officers speak to the people. And what the officers are doing is they’re getting the people ready to organize them for battle. And the first thing they do is they say, “Well, if all men who meet these conditions, go on back home. If you can’t be courageous, then leave. If you’re newly married, if you’ve newly planted a vineyard, if you’ve built a house and not consecrated, leave. We want the men who are who are able to go into warfare according to God’s words, God’s plan. Only those people can be mustered together. And then after they all leave, then the officers make captains over the troops. You can’t do it beforehand because you want to make captains over the troops that are left.

So there’s military organization that the officers do. Now, this is really a lot. There’s direct application to our church. The deacons, after a couple of years of not doing it, are once more going to be starting up household visitations. And part of the job of household visitation on the part of the officers of RCC—this term “officer” in the Old Testament is probably, I think, very much akin to deacons in the New Testament. Without getting into the explanation of that, that’s just what I believe. And this particular office called officer here is like our deacons.

And the deacons, after receiving instruction in the congregation from the priests, the elders, the pastors, the deacons then organize the church for warfare. And our warfare involves all kinds of different things. It involves benevolence ministries. It involves local and global evangelism. It involves educating the people in the word of God. It involves worship—liturgical warfare in the context of worship. There’s all kinds of equipping tasks that the church of God needs to be organized for.

And one of the reasons the deacons are going to do family visitation this coming year is to say, “Well, what are you doing? What would you like to do? And what are some things you’d like to see us doing? What are some ministries that—how could we better equip you as an ‘onward Christian soldier’ sort of person? And what role can you play in helping equip others?”

So, after the priest encourages the troops, then the officers come along and they tell everybody to get in line. We’re going to organize you, we’re going to help you, we’re going to make you a good fighting force for the Lord Jesus Christ.

So that’s kind of what happens. And then there are some rules for actually how you go about doing warfare. Now, it’s very important as we consider this coming of Christ—to be the priest who gets his army ready—and as we consider a text dealing with the sixth word—that’s what Moses is doing here—to think about why he’s having a whole chapter on war and death. But in this chapter on war and death, and I’ve already pointed out a little bit of it, in actuality, if you take just a step back from that, you’ll see that even in the context of the application of the sixth word to warfare and intentional killing, life has primacy.

Life has primacy. And you can see this. We said earlier, really they’re not going out to make war. They’re going out to make peace. They’re going out to tell people how to live better lives, successful lives as servants of the Lord Jesus Christ. They’re offering terms: unconditional surrender of service to God. But as a result of that, people get to live even better lives than they had before.

So first of all, life has preeminence because they’re not really being equipped to kill people. It’s a mistake to think of the Old Testament as a period when conversion happened through military might, forced conversion. That’s really not what’s going on. They’re really going to people and encouraging them to be servants of Yahweh and to, you know, give up their active rebellion against Yahweh.

So first of all, the text tells us in a couple of different places that while you are going to war, if people resist or if they’re attacking you, in reality, you’re for peace. You’re for life. And it’s the people that oppose the preaching of the gospel of Christ that really are the ones who are creating war.

So there’s one evidence of the priority of life in the context of this text. But look at the rest of these things—these military exemptions. One is for being, you know, a coward, for being faint-hearted. And so what does this tell us? This tells us that God wants violence. He wants everyone to be involved in Christian militia, unless they’re fearful because the text tells us they’re going to make other people fearful. They’re going to create death in the army of God by their presence. We don’t want people that are fearful of battle.

Now, to help take care of that, we send the priest out. We send the pastors out to preach and encourage people. But if that doesn’t take a particular person, they get an exemption from military service—no questions asked. Well, how could an army be successful if it let anybody leave who wasn’t—all he had to do is say they were frightened? Well, you see, God doesn’t rely upon numbers. Gideon actually does this. He cuts back the troops by this exemption for cowardice or whatever it is. And then God says, “Well, there’s still too many of you left. I really want to do this thing with only several hundred men. That’s what I want to do to show how great a warrior I am.”

God says God isn’t into numbers. What he wants is an illustration of courageous, powerful Christian men who are going to be powerful in presenting terms of peace and if necessary, backing it up. And so he sends home cowardly people. But even that is to the end that we would see more life because we don’t want other people getting frightened by their fear and as a result losing their life.

But the other three exemptions, look at what it says. They are things about life. He says, “What man is there who has built a new house and has not dedicated it? Let him go and return to his house.” Matthew Henry has a funny comment about this.

So the exemptions are: new house, a new vineyard, and a new wife. And Matthew Henry terms of this house thing says, “Well, you know, the thing is people are pretty attached to their houses for a while. Then they sort of, you know, if they’re if they go off to war and they haven’t really lived in their house much, well, they’re going to think about their house—his house is all they’re going to think about. And if they live in their house for a while, they’ll see that material things aren’t that great and they’ll want to go off to war.” Matthew Henry’s a great commentator, but man, he’s got that one all wrong.

And fortunately, he doesn’t apply that same rationale to the wife exemption. I don’t think that’s what it is. In fact, I think it’s just the reverse. What God says here is: when you buy, when you build a house, you’re supposed to dedicate it. Number one, that’s what’s behind this, right? Did you dedicate your house? Probably not, but you know, we should do it. This word “dedicate” is the same word that David uses in Psalm 30 for the dedication of the house of the Lord.

And so, just by using this word here—little tiny thing we could focus on for just a moment—you’re expected to dedicate a house the same way you’re expected to want to drink wine from your vineyard. The same way you’re expected to consummate your marriage. You see, you’re expected to dedicate your house and your house is seen in relationship to God’s house, right? So the temple gets dedicated and your individual house gets dedicated. That means your individual house is a temple. It has this relationship to the temple.

So we dedicated this church building when we began using it. We initiated it. We started it up with prayers that God would bless us in our use of it. And that’s what we should do with homes. Now it’s not too late, right? I mean, maybe you didn’t do it. Maybe you should. Maybe you should go home today and this evening. You know, one way of responding to the sermon is just to pray about your house, seeing it as an outpost, as part of the temple, as part of the dwelling place of God and his people.

But the point is here, you’re supposed to do that. And if you haven’t done that, that takes precedence. Normal life—building houses and enjoying material places to dwell in—that takes precedence over war. And then he says, if you’ve planted a vineyard and you haven’t got to enjoy the fruits. Takes a while for a vineyard to grow. You’re supposed to stay home. You don’t get to go to war. Now, that again—the vineyard produces wine, the joy of life, right?

So we have the protection and sustenance and the dwelling of God in the midst of our homes. That’s life. It takes precedence over warfare. We have rejoicing time together with wine. That takes precedence, God says, in his rules for war over physical combat. And then third, if you’ve betrothed the woman and haven’t consummated the marriage, stay home. And we’ll see later in Deuteronomy, there’s a year exemption for men. This—you don’t know how long this is supposed to last, him staying home and getting married and all that stuff—but we find out later on in Deuteronomy in another section that it’s actually a year’s exclusion.

So what does it mean? What it means is one thing: it means life. Even in a section on intentional killing, God wants you to intentionally kill under certain conditions. And you’re not violating the sixth word. You’re actually applying the sixth word. When you intentionally kill a foreign enemy in the kind of war that God says you should wage in the way that he says to wage it, you’re actually being told here this is an application of the sixth word. It’s ultimately defending life. It’s ultimately defending life.

And to make that point very clear, God says that life dwelling in a home, rejoicing life, rejoicing with your new bride—these things have precedence over warfare. So it’s very important to see here in a text that can kind of throw us off and make us wonder what’s really going on—it seems a strange thing to try to apply to the army of Jesus Christ, the church. It’s not strange. It tells us the same thing: it tells us that, you know, as much as it was important for you to get involved politically in the last months—you know, there are things that are more important.

There are things that are more important because those are the very things you’re actually getting involved to defend. You want to have the ability to buy a house and dedicate it, live in it as a Christian. You want to be able to get married and provide for a wife. You want to be able to enjoy, not just sustain—you know, have life sustaining means. You want to rejoice in your life. And God says, you know, the establishment of those things take preeminence over other activities, whether it’s evangelism, political action, whatever it is.

There’s something else quite important that these three things do as well. And we’ll see when we—well, we won’t get to Deuteronomy 28. That’s really outside of the sermon on the ten words. But in Deuteronomy 28, those of you that know your Bibles halfway well, you know, that’s the chapter that is all about all the curses that come to a people that aren’t obedient, that don’t love God.

And these three things are three of the curses. These three things—you know, it says that well, if you don’t obey God and you don’t love him and you don’t try to serve him, then you’re going to build a house, but somebody else is going to occupy it. You’re going to plant a vineyard, but somebody else will drink that wine. And you’re going to betroth yourself to a wife, but somebody else is going to take that wife rather than you.

That’s important, too, because what it tells us is, you know, you can’t just say we’re going to perform these obligations and as a result have rejoicing life before God and extend life into the world through the proclamation of the crown rights of King Jesus. It’s not just doing the things. It’s actually having a relationship with God that is at the center of the whole thing. The curses of God in Deuteronomy 28 attend to a people who only want to obey externally or not even obey externally.

So, you know, what do we expect God to do in terms of capital punishment when we won’t have churches that fulfill the requirements to move in terms of church discipline, suspension, and excommunication? What good does it do to pass a law in Salem, reinstituting or making sure all the impediments to the death penalty are removed? It doesn’t do any good. What good does it do to go evangelize people if we’re not really obeying him ourselves?

God says that the very attempt you’re going to make is pointless apart from your relationship to God and in terms of being submissive and desirous of following his law. If you don’t have personal obedience and personal holiness, then all the metaphors of political action or of military action—rather political action, evangelism, or going to war—they’re all going to fall. They’re all going to fail rather.

You’re all going to fall down, all your efforts, because these same three things that show the preeminence of life show that life is only entered into upon the blessing of God—the blessing of God. But in any event, this text tells us then, again, as we’ve seen in the last couple of sermons in Deuteronomy 19 about life: this is life in wartime. And life in wartime itself instructs us in the primacy of life in the context of the sixth word.

One other thing I think we can draw from this for statecraft before we move on to the last couple of points here. One other thing is, you know, if you step back and think about this a little bit: men were mustered into full adult responsibility and militia obligations at the age of 20. And most men, you know, they start—they build a house, they get married in that range between 20 and 30, right? So there, somewhere in that time frame, is when people are doing this stuff. Usually between 20 and 25.

What that means is the sort of army that God ends up with going off and doing when necessary physical combat is not a bunch of 18 to 25-year-old drafties. Everybody’s supposed to volunteer. It’s not a professional army and it’s not an army that’s dominated by young people, by teens. It just isn’t. They couldn’t be mustered until they were 20. And even then, an awful lot of the 20 to 25-year-olds would be either building a house, planting a vineyard, waiting a couple of years to drink its wine, or getting married. And they were all exempt.

In the way we do it today, first of all, everybody doesn’t take responsibility for a war. A professional class does, and that’s got its own thing going on, and we could—there are other things in scripture to talk about than this text. I’m not saying it’s always wrong to have a professional army, but this text envisions a militia. But what it does tell us is whether it’s a militia or a professional army, you don’t want to rely upon, you know, soldiers who are primarily—as ours are—an awful lot of ours are between 20 and 25.

What you want, and think about that a little bit, what you want are men going off to war who have something to fight for back home. They’ve got a house. They’ve got a wife. They rejoice in their vineyard. They don’t want to keep fighting. They want to get that done and they want to do it quick and they want to be hard-hearted about it in a way. Then they want to go home to enjoy all that again.

What we have is we send off a bunch of young guys who haven’t really formed into what will be their full life and then we wonder why they come back kind of like, you know, wounded, having troubles, and stuff. I think that’s part of it. That’s part of it.

So anyway, this text tells us that life is primary even in a section on the sixth word that’s dealing with intentional killing.

One other aspect that shows the primacy of life is this strange regulation at the end of the chapter about fruit trees. So you go off and you got some trees there as you’re going to war against a city. And usually the way wars were waged then were sieges. You would put a siege work against a wall. That’s what a city was. A city had a wall. You’d have to wait there for a while. You’d have to build siege works to break down the wall. All that stuff. And so what you would do is you’d have to cut down some trees to make the siege works. You wouldn’t carry them with you, of course. But God says that don’t cut down trees that are fruit trees that have food on them. Don’t cut down those trees.

Now, the text is a little hard to decipher the reason for it. It says, “Well, you know, our trees—our text, the King James Version says they’re man’s food and therefore you can’t cut them down.” Other texts may be interpreted or translated as “they’re not a man. You’re not making siege against the trees.” So it limits the principle of warfare against the true source of evil in a culture, which are apostate men, men in rebellion against God. We’re not supposed to war upon the created order. The created order isn’t cursed. It’s cursed in reference to man, but in and of itself, it has its purposes. And very specifically, life has primacy over war, and that you have to leave those fruit trees up to produce more fruit.

Now, that’s a part for a whole. And I think you could legitimately infer from that you’re also not, for instance, usually to make war against water, which is also man’s food—his life. Don’t war against man’s life in terms of his source of food, the source of his water, or his power. So I really wonder about the application of this text to our modern wars where we go in and completely destroy sewer systems, water systems, power systems. Is it any wonder that, you know, innocent people, non-combatants, get upset with people who have come in and cut down all the fruit trees, cut down all the food?

So the text again—it’s one more evidence that life has primacy over death. The sixth word properly applied is extending life, even if it’s necessary to engage in intentional killing of men—not killing of trees.

I think, too, that this is sort of what we could say if we’re going to have a discussion about Christian principles of stewardship. This has to be in there. This means that we have an obligation to see these fruit trees stay alive. It means that in your walk in life, you shouldn’t, through carelessness or disregard, end up destroying things in the context of the environment. You know, the kind of radical environmentalism we have today, which is sinful to the core and statist to the core—again, they can only really happen in a Christian culture that sees the responsibility that man has to exercise proper stewardship over things. And it’s real easy for us to react against, you know, the horrific statism and all that stuff to saying, “Who cares about the created order?” We want to avoid that like the plague.

This text on the sixth word tells us that even when we’re involved in intentional killing—that God says is good for the extension of life—we’re supposed to not do damage, as much as we can avoid it, to the things that are life-giving to men.

So the primacy of life is given to us here.

Finally—I want to not quite finally, but the last two points I want to make have to do with this phrase that I’ve used a little bit: the advent of the priest, the anointed one of war.

Last week we talked about the advent of vindication. Deuteronomy 19 says that innocent blood will be avenged. Ahab gets killed. Jesus comes to provide vindication to free his people. And you see this in the songs of the church given to us in the scriptures. And today’s text is: God comes as a warrior. We just—the choir just sang a beautiful version, I think, of Psalm 24. And Psalm 24 identifies the king of glory as a man of war, a warrior.

And this is seen over and over again in the scriptures. During Advent and Christmas, you know, one of the wonderful things is song. I preached last year a sermon about songs and Christmas for our Christmas day sermon. And we always like to talk about the songs. I think we’re going to have responsive readings of all four songs from the Gospel of Luke.

And two of these songs I want to just mention briefly here. The Benedictus, right? “Blessed is the Lord God of Israel. He has visited and redeemed his people. He has raised up.” See, he’s redeemed his people. Remember that Deuteronomy 19 says the avenger of blood is the redeemer of blood. It’s he’s the kinsman redeemer. So the coming of the kinsman redeemer put in the sort of terms that the sixth commandment wants us to think in terms of is that God redeems his people—yes, by paying for our sins, yes, for buying us out of servitude—but also by being the avenger of blood, bringing to pass vindication for those of his people who have been murdered or slain.

“He’s raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets who had been since the world began that we should be saved from our enemies, baby Jesus comes to save us from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us. God was placing these people in the promised land and the nations around them would hate them and they’d want to make war against them. And God says that the anointed one of the army comes to prepare them to give them the blessing of the advent of Christ in that particular situation as the anointed one of the army so that they could be saved from the hand of all those who hate him.

And then in verse 74 to grant us that we being delivered from the hand of our enemies might serve him with fear.” The service to Christ that’s talked about here is put in the immediate context in the Benedictus—one of the great Christmas songs of the New Testament. That’s put in the context of deliverance from enemies by God making war against the enemies of the church.

The greatest Christmas song, of course, is the Magnificat—Mary’s wonderful song. And you know this, but let me just read it to you. Mary says, “My soul magnifies the Lord. My spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior. He has regarded the lowly state of his handmaid. For behold, henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. He who is mighty has done great things for me and holy is his name. His mercy is on those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm. He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent empty away.”

Clearly in this great Christmas song of Mary’s—the Magnificat—we see the elements that the advent of Jesus, the coming of baby Jesus, was to vindicate those who had been oppressed unrighteously and also to execute war against the proud in their thinking, against kings who didn’t use their kingship for the cause of Jesus but used it instead to work against Jesus and to work against his people.

Jesus came as the anointed one of the army. He came as the great priest, the high priest. And the high priest’s job was to prepare his people for victory, to call them to go forth as their captain into victory.

Now, these echoes in these New Testament songs are simply echoes of other portions of scripture.

Exodus 15—another great song. We’ve tried to sing a version of it. We can never get it down well enough to do it in worship, but I really encourage you to learn Exodus 15, the song of Moses, at least for use in your homes. It begins to tell us, you know, we always read these texts that Jesus is the greater Passover, the greater Exodus, right? And God always points the people. He has—in this text here, he says, “Have courage in the present for the battles that’ll happen in the future because God has been with you in the past.” And the with you in the past in the text today is he brought you out of Egypt, okay?

So to wage war correctly and courageously—either through evangelism, political action, or God forbid but occasionally necessary actual fighting wars—to do that successfully, we have to have courage. And the courage in that battle comes from remembering what God has done in the past at Passover. And if we restrict the Passover to just sort of a warm fuzzy sense of being redeemed out of sin and everything’s okay now, we sort of missed the point of the illustration.

Here’s what Exodus 15 says about the Passover. “Moses and the children of Israel sang this song to the Lord and spoke, saying, ‘I will sing to the Lord. He has triumphed gloriously. The horse and its rider, he has thrown into the sea. The Lord is my strength and song, and he has become my salvation. He is my God, and I will praise him. My father’s God, I will exalt him. The Lord is a man of war. The Lord is his name. Pharaoh’s chariots and his army. He has cast into the sea. His chosen captains also are drowned in the Red Sea. The depths have covered them. They sink to the bottom like a stone. Your right hand, O Lord, has become glorious in power. Your right hand, O Lord, has dashed the enemy in pieces. And in the greatness of your excellence, you have overthrown those who rose against you. You sent forth your wrath. It consumed them like stubble.’”

And the song goes on. When we sing about the advent of God and the advent of the greater Passover in Exodus, when we sing about the advent of Jesus, we’re singing as well about Jesus the man of war, the warrior man who will war for his people.

And as I said, in Psalm 24, who is this king of glory? “The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle—in battle. The Lord” of Deuteronomy 20 is the one whose advent we sing of—that we just sang of this morning from Psalm 24. When we hear Psalm 24, when we think of the procession into the courts of God and the coming of Jesus to be with us every Lord’s day, we should be reminded that part of who he is—he’s the coming, the advent of the anointed one of the army. He comes to prepare us for battle. He comes to prepare us to conquer the world through the preaching and the proclaiming of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And we forget 1 Samuel 16, the great picture of Jesus in the Old Testament. Jesus is the son of David. Well, we know David was a good musician. But we forget early on in the story, in 1 Samuel 16, in verse 18, you know, Saul says, “Well, I need somebody who can play music good.” And the men come back and they say, “Well, we’ve seen the son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, who is skillful in playing, a mighty man of valor, a man of war, prudent in speech.”

David, before he faces up with Goliath, is already known as a mighty man of war. And the son of David, Jesus Christ, is a mighty man of war.

Isaiah 42, verses 1 and following. Remember, this is this side of the great Christmas song, Isaiah 40: “Comfort ye, my people. Her sins have been atoned for, double. Her redemption has been accomplished. Comfort ye, my people.”

So this side of that, Isaiah 42: “Behold my servant whom I uphold, my elect one in whom my soul delights. I have put my spirit upon him. He will bring forth justice to the Gentiles. He will not cry out nor raise his voice, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street. A bruised reed he will not break, and smoking flax he will not quench. He will bring forth justice for truth he will not fail, nor be discouraged, till he has established justice in the earth.”

The coming of the great comfort, the consolation of Israel that we sing about at Christmas, is also the coming of the anointed one of the war who now prepares his people for battle. And they go in and he won’t be satisfied. His job isn’t done until he brings justice to the whole earth.

“Sing to the Lord a new song.” It says in Isaiah 42: “His praise from the ends of the earth.” This is the new song—the New Covenant song—is supposed to be sung. And here’s part of what it says: “The Lord shall go forth like a mighty man. He shall stir up his zeal like a man of war. He shall cry out, yes, shout aloud. He shall prevail against his enemies. I have held my peace a long time. I have been still and restrained myself. Now I will cry like a woman in labor. I will pant and gasp at once.”

He’s going to bring forth justice to the world. And that’s just what we see. And this is the same message that Paul told the men that he was preaching the gospel to—pagans who are superstitious. He says, “Well, up to now he’s held his peace, but no more. Jesus has arrived. Jesus is the anointed one of the army. And he’s in the process now of executing his justice in the context of all the nations. And he won’t stop until justice has filled the world.”

This is the Jesus that we sing of. And we look forward to his coming in our day and age—his coming in worship, but then is coming to bring justice to our day and age as well. And we can look forward very confidently.

Jesus sent out his people as sheep in the midst of wolves. He sent them out two by two, right? And he told them to go door to door. And if they persecute you in this city, flee to another. So he’s sending them out against cities just like the anointed one of the army sent them out against cities to do battle. And Jesus says, “Don’t fear those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul. Rather, fear him who is able to destroy both body and soul in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a copper coin, and not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father’s will?”

Now, see, that’s a verse that we always really like to hear about—that God’s providence extends to the very hairs of our head. But the immediate context for that is he’s assuring people who are going to go out to battle. He’s sending them out to proclaim the gospel of the kingdom. And he says, “If they won’t hear you, shake the dust off your feet. I’ll take care of them.” He says, “I’ll have other armies to bring into them. He’ll bring judgment in different ways.” But he wants us to be assured of his providence and care for the individual elements of who we are—even the hairs of our head—but only to those. That assurance only goes to those who are being summoned forth into his presence, into his royal throne room, to be sent out to be victorious warriors and proclaimers of the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So the Gospels are replete with the same message of the Old Testament.

Revelation 19. Do I have to read it? Probably not. But what does it say? It says that Jesus, right, he’s on that white horse. He’s charging out. He’s got a sword in his mouth. He’s the anointed one of the army. He leads us forth into battle and we ride behind him into battle.

Now that’s what formed Reformation Covenant Church—a concept that the church militant on earth will also be victorious on earth because of the promises that we celebrate from the old covenant fulfilled in the great Christmas tidings: the advent of the anointed one of the war.

Christmas is a wonderful time of rejoicing—not just you know for whatever God has given us in our immediate context, but because we know that when baby Jesus came, he came as the anointed one of the army. The anointed one of the army has a black-robed regiment. This is what the colonial church used to call the preachers of the churches that prepared them for war against England. This country was birthed by having to do the things that Deuteronomy 20 speaks of. And they did it in this way.

The anointed one of the army spoke and then the officers of the church—the pastors of the church—proclaim forth the implications of Deuteronomy 20 and other texts, calling God’s people to be aware of the fact that within their union with Christ, they’re part of the army of God that he sends forth into all the earth. And the Black Robed Regiment were those preachers that did that.

And that’s what we need today. We need today preachers who will proclaim forth, organize God’s people for the sort of service to the kingdom that actually accomplishes the extension and proclamation of the gospel. And that’s what’s going on. That’s why the deacons will be visiting you this coming year. That’s why the elders are praying about what we do as a church. We are understanding our vision—originally formed—is still our vision today that we want to see ourselves using our freedom not to goof off.

There’s a time for enjoying the house. There’s a time for establishing the marriage. There’s a time for drinking wine. And the clear implication of that is there’s another time when some of that stuff’s got to be put aside for a while when we enter into the sort of task that God calls us to do.

1 Peter 2:16 says, “Regard yourselves as free, yet not using liberty as a cloak for vice, but as bondservants of God—as bondservants of God. You see, you were one of those people in those outer cities away from Israel. You were one that God in his providence had somebody come to the door of your house and call you to submit unconditional surrender to the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords—to be a bondservant of his. That’s freedom. Freedom is not doing whatever we want. Freedom is living life to its fullest. And life is connected to the source of life: the Lord Jesus Christ.

Warfare may look like something other than freedom, but it is exactly the point of how we all got to the freedom that we have. And God calls us now to serve in the context of that freedom.

Peter Leithart in his recent book Defending Constantine says freedom is not the ultimate good, and restraining freedom can be good when the freedom is being used to do evil. Freedom is not the ultimate good. Now it is for our political establishment. We want to bring freedom to this or that country—freedom so that they can decide what they want to do. If they want to worship Satan or you know, be Muslims or what—no, we don’t want that. Freedom is being used to do evil, not good.

And what the Bible says is freedom is not the ultimate goal. Freedom is a means that’s accomplished only when we submit ourselves as bondservants to the Lord Jesus Christ. And what a wonderful thing happens.

The Gibeonites, you know, they’re an application of Deuteronomy 20. Yeah, they were close. So they were supposed to be annihilated. But they pretended to come from far away ’cause they knew that if they came from far away, the army of God had to give you peace terms first. And that’s what happened. The God’s people were fooled. They offered peace. If they become servants—the Gibeonites became servants, bondservants, slaves. What a crummy job. But you know what they ended up doing? They ended up being hewers of wood and drawers of water for the very temple servants of God. That’s us! And we love it!

Better to be a doorkeeper, a hewer of wood, a drawer of water in the temple than out there somehow thinking life is bowing down to bugs and critters and down to ourselves and doing whatever we want to do. It’s a wonderful life when our freedom is controlled and constrained by being bondservants of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Yes, he’s made us free. He’s given us the will and determination to make choices, and he calls us today in Deuteronomy 20 and in the rest of the scriptures to use our liberty not for license but rather as good bondservants of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Intentional killing—a text that deals with intentional killing in the context of expounding the sixth word—becomes a great emphasis and source of life-giving knowledge to us as we look at its deeper implications, as we look at what it confirms to us: God is a God of life. Jesus came to earth to bring life, and in part of that role is his role as the anointed one of the army. You’re the army. Let’s pray.

Father, we…