Dennis Tuuri

Sermon text is found in Deuteronomy 23, verses 1 to 8, and you know I am going to read actually through verse 14 even though the sermon is just found in the first eight verses. So Deuteronomy 23 we’ll actually read through the end of these verses 14 because this is the conclusion of Moses’ sermon, the section of his sermon in Deuteronomy on the seventh word, and these two sections are bound together. I only plan on preaching on the first verses 1 to 8, but the last few verses have relevance, so let’s read those two. Okay, let’s attend to God’s word and hopefully you have the handout or you can just listen. Deuteronomy 23:1-8.

“He who is emasculated by crushing or mutilation shall not enter the assembly of the Lord. One of illegitimate birth shall not enter the assembly of the Lord, even to the tenth generation. None of his descendants shall enter the assembly of the Lord. An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter the assembly of the Lord, even to the tenth generation. None of his descendants shall enter the assembly of the Lord forever, because they did not meet you with bread and water on the road when you came out of Egypt. And because they hired against you Balaam the son of Beor from Pethor of Mesopotamia to curse you. Nevertheless, the Lord your God would not listen to Balaam, but the Lord your God turned the curse into a blessing for you because the Lord your God loves you.

You shall not seek their peace nor their prosperity all your days forever. You shall not abhor an Edomite, for he is your brother. You shall not abhor an Egyptian because you are an alien in his land. The children of the third generation born to them may enter the assembly of the Lord.

When you are encamped against your enemies, then you shall keep yourself from every evil thing. If any man among you becomes unclean because of a nocturnal emission, then he shall go outside the camp; he shall not come inside the camp. But when evening comes, he shall bathe himself in water, and as the sun sets, he may come inside the camp. You shall have a place outside the camp, and you shall go out to it. And you shall have a spade with your tools, and when you sit down outside, you shall dig a hole with it and turn back and cover up your excrement, because the Lord your God walks in the midst of your camp to deliver you and to give up your enemies before you. Therefore, your camp must be holy so that he may not see anything indecent among you and turn away from you.”

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for your word. Help us to understand it by your Holy Spirit. Help us to understand its application to our lives and as a reflection of who you are and help us to see our identity in this text. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen. Please be seated.

Okay, we got all the difficult verses out of the way in one reading. I was joking with some folks this morning. I hope I don’t die today because preaching a sermon on crushed testicles on Super Bowl Sunday will be the last thing you remember of me. That’ll be my legacy.

Well, we’re in the midst of going through a thorough revision of RCC’s constitution, including the church covenant statement. And we know we’re not sure the wording how we’re going to replace it yet, but we know we’re going to replace some of the sections of the covenant that talk about the application of God’s law to us. And texts like today are good ones to help us understand why we want to do that.

Right now, I think the language is something like any Old Testament standing law is still abiding on us unless it’s been changed or modified in the New Testament. And this is problematic. What’s a standing law? That kind of language assumes that the scriptures, even in the portions we’re reading, for instance, in Deuteronomy, are some sort of law statute book, but they’re really not. This has to do with the whole view of how the Bible is presented to us. How do we think about texts like this? Clearly, we can’t just cut and paste out of them. And so people have tried to come up with categories. Well, there’s moral laws, there’s judicial laws, ceremonial laws. What do we have here? Is it moral, judicial, ceremonial? Well, like so many laws, there seems to be aspects of all three of those things woven together.

The ceremonial aspect is because certain animals, sacrificial animals, also could not, if they had the same physical abnormalities described in the first verse, were inappropriate for sacrifice. So it seems like there’s some relationship here between sacrificing animals specifically and then these exclusions from the assembly of the Lord.

To understand how to apply this verse though, we then have to understand what it means and commentators are not sure about some of the most significant terms as we’ll talk about in a couple of minutes. So you know, God could have written a statute book and he could have written it in terms with a dictionary that explained all the terms and he just decided not to do that. Now, he’s most wise, he’s most sovereign, most powerful and we have to say this is the perfect revelation of what God wants us to know about a lot of things about all of life, right? So we don’t complain about these texts.

So many pastors because of these difficult things we just read—why would you preach through Deuteronomy to begin with? What’s that all about? Well, you know, because it’s God’s inspired word and it’s important for us.

There was a recent thread on the BH list about thinking Hebraically. And I wanted to mention just a few things that were shared by one of the fellows on the list, Michael L. He said to think as a Hebrew and he listed some things. I won’t read all of them; we’ll read a couple. One: the Hebrew Bible is full of poetry and singing, not just logical points written in engineering lingo. There are some engineering lingo things going on, but basically the scriptures are written poetically, particularly the Hebrew Old Testament. So what we have here is not a blueprint diagram written in engineering lingo with all kinds of numbered points. What we have here is a portion of the song of the Old Testament and it’s poetic and we have to understand that poetry doesn’t mean light. By the way, this is dark poetry. This is strong, powerful poetry, right? But it’s poetic in the language, and we’ll look at that in just a minute.

He says secondly it follows a typological theme in order to understand it. Okay, so there’s certain typological things going on here that you have to understand as well. He also says that it’s trinitarian and so constantly allows for the one and the many, for things to be seen from different perspectives. So there are particular applications, perspectives on these texts, and this one is one of those things.

And it’s written—it’s the kind of song that you don’t just hear it once and you got it. It’s the sort of song, you know, some songs are like that. Next week we’ll talk about Psalm 45 and the enthralment of the king with the beauty of the bride. But you can sort of get that right away, what it means. This text we’re not sure what it means. And so you have to think about it. You’ve got to listen to it a number of times. You’ve got to keep hitting the repeat button on your stereo there. Make the thing keep playing over and over again. Meditate on it. Try to understand the poetry of it. It’s difficult. It’s got various perspectives that are going on.

It also—this man said—follows the theme of dominion, holy war, and redemption instead of just redemption. That’s so important. Not just redemption, but the Hebrew Bible follows the idea of dominion and holy war.

I read the last few verses because this is a unit, right? This is the seventh word. This is about adultery. And at the conclusion of that portion of the sermon, Moses says, “If God sees these indecent things, he’s going to turn away from you. Violate the seventh word and all its broad implications and God won’t be with us.” And where won’t he be with us? In the war camp. We’re supposed to see ourselves in the war camp.

Right? So the Christian church is not just a hospital. It is that. But the gathering on Sunday, the assembly of the Lord today, is connected textually here to the war camp. And that’s important, and you know a lot of theology has left that out. But if you continue to read a lot of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, you recognize that this dominion and this kind of warfare mentality is big in it. And then you understand how a lot of things we read in the New Testament have to be seen differently. They’ve got to be seen in the same context of that. It’s not two words; it’s one word.

So the idea of warfare, you know, this whole section here began with a reference to men who have been emasculated and then it talks about the war camp and success in the war camp. Now you know, right there we could stop without doing any exegesis of the text, looking at any of the structures, and talk for a long time about effeminacy in the American church in the 21st century, couldn’t we? How many pastors stand up and they appear to be effeminate? That’s just my perception, my observation. It’s an important text that these pastors never preach about. But it’s important for the congregation to recognize that our identity as a people in the assembly of the Lord has to do with going out and into battle in the week. And it identifies us—all men and women—as strong, courageous, powerful warriors.

Now, now we’ve done just the opposite. And we’ve turned men into a supposed effeminate imagery. But it really isn’t effeminate either, because in the Bible, the great women of the Bible are strong women doing all kinds of cool things and powerful things. So somehow we’ve ended up with the worst of all worlds here. In trying to avoid the macho man thing that we’ll see on display this afternoon, and trying to avoid that, we’ve turned up with a vision of feminism that’s just wacky. That really has nothing to do with what the Bible says.

The Bible says we all can see the application of this to ourselves. We all should have a strong, you know, virile assessment of who we are as part of the body of Christ. We’re all headcrushers, and when we come to worship, we should sing like that. We should sing songs that reinforce that in us. We should be manly in terms of what we do in worship as a congregation, rather. Okay?

So we could talk about those things, and it’s so important to remember when we force ourselves to do this, to continue to preach through a text of scripture, Deuteronomy and the Ten Words, we’re going to come across texts that are difficult. We wouldn’t choose them ever. I’d never choose 23:1 to preach on. But there it is. And it’s for our well-being. We take it thankfully from God. And it transforms us. It gives us an identity of who we are. We’re not some emasculated church that’s always giving way—”yes, yes, yes.” No. We are the dominion church of Jesus Christ. So that’s a theme here, and that’s a theme in this text.

Another thing Mr. L said is he said it attaches great significance to numbers and the structure of passages. And I know you’re some of you don’t like me talking about this. Well, in order to understand what’s here, you have to sort of look at it. And if you have the handout, okay, if you look at that handout, you know, you have these repetitions of terms. The assembly of the Lord, the assembly of the Lord, the assembly of the Lord. That’s important. And then right in the middle of a section that has two groups either side, right? the Ammonites, the Moabites, and then you’ve got the Edomites and the Egyptians. And right in the middle of that is a three-fold repetition of “the Lord your God.” And it’s the only place in the text that it is. That’s significant. This is a poem. This is a powerful poem, but it’s a poem nonetheless. And to understand it properly, to understand the Hebrew Bible, you don’t look at it just linearly, one little thing after another. You know, it’s not a logical presentation in that sense. It is more like poetic imagery that you have to meditate on. And what a glory to meditate on these things. It’s delightful. So there’s a reason I do it. It’s not just a hobby of mine. It’s because I think the Bible’s written that way. And in order to understand it, as he says, you have to pay attention to structure.

It’s rich in storytelling. This is sort of storyike, right? But it’s storytelling to a purpose. Postmodern churches, missional churches, they’re into big storytelling things now. But at the end of the day, after all the cool stories are over, it’s still always about redemption and never about dominion and conquest. That’s odd because the stories aren’t really like that. So story—I’m glad, praise God, that stories are getting emphasis again in the church of Jesus Christ—but let’s keep them in the right context. Let’s not just take a feminine dispensational or millennial theology and layer onto it storytelling to make it cool. No, if we look at the stories of the Bible and the stories that are told and reminded of in this text, right? We look at the story of the Ammonites and Moabites and what happened. If we know that story and if we know the story of the Edomites and the Egyptians, then we’re going to understand this text better. We’re going to understand the text.

And finally, he said it never goes backwards. It acknowledges that history moves forward. Here it is right in our text. It ends with the seventh word with war camp imagery. You’re out there. You’re on the offensive. Okay, that’s the whole point of, you know, keeping away from adulterating your life, your community, your nation, your ruling officers, as we’ll see today. You know, if you keep from adulterating that, then you move forward in history. Then you’re that successful, powerful group of people. It’ll change the world. And if God sees indecency, adulteration—we can say, and we’ve talked about a lot of implications of that over the last four or five sermons—if God sees that, see, he turns away from us. He’s sovereign, and so it’s bad for us.

So we don’t look at this as a presentation of a law code that has abiding validity for us unless it’s been altered. You know, we don’t do that. We couldn’t do it. Number one, because it’s hard to understand some parts of it. And number two, it was never intended to be that. You have to take what the Westminster Confession refers to as the general equity of the Mosaic traditions, right? The equity of them and have them inform us.

There’s two ditches. Some of us used to be in the dispensational ditch. “Who cares what it says? It’s not for us anymore. It was just something to kind of make people always feel guilty. And we don’t feel guilty because we’re safe.” And the other ditch is saying, “Oh, no. That’s our law code now. And that’s got to be the law. We’re going to do some bill in the Oregon legislature to say that nobody who’s been castrated or has been mutilated, he can’t be a citizen of the United States.” See that? It may be that where you end up at, but you don’t do it that way. You’ve got to understand the law and then apply it in this part of redemptive history.

You know, another problem is, as I mentioned, ceremonial laws, sacrificial laws. You have to look at the change that’s happened with the coming of Jesus Christ. Jew and Gentile kept separate by the Mosaic law are now united in the person of Jesus Christ. And so this text has to be understood in that way. We know that Isaiah 56 talks about what a great thing the eunuchs that keep my Sabbaths and covenant have—a great name in the house of God—and we know that the Ethiopian eunuch is one of the earliest converts recorded in the book of Acts. So you know all that stuff has to come into this in some way and help us be informed so we don’t apply it. But on the other hand we do look at it as law.

Here’s another quote. This is from a great guy, Tim Keller. I hope he just misspoke or something, but a quote came across again on the BH list. He said, “A Christian says though I have often failed to obey the law, the deeper problem is why I was ever trying to obey it. Even my effort to obey it is just a way of seeking to be my own savior.” We want to distance ourselves from that. Hopefully, he misspoke or he’s taken out of context or something. But as an illustration, that’s the other ditch you can fall into. “Oh well, we don’t understand Deuteronomy 23 and we don’t know how to apply it. Just forget it. Because if you even try to apply God’s law to our lives, we’re being legalistic. We’re trying to work our own salvation through law, not grace.”

Now this is what a lot of people think. But the law is not given to affect salvation, right? In the Mosaic law, it’s given to save people. It’s given to tell them how to live their lives. And so of course we want to understand the truths in this law so that we can obey them. Okay? So let’s do that. Let’s turn to this text and try to understand a little bit.

A couple verses real quickly before we get there. Leviticus 22:24. In case you’re wondering, this is the text that says, “You shall not offer to the Lord what is bruised or crushed, maimed, or torn or cut.” And it implies in the genitals here, “nor take any offering of them in your land.” And it’s interesting because verse 25 of Leviticus 22 says this, the very next verse, “nor from a foreigner’s hand shall you offer any of these as the bread of your God because their corruption is in them.”

So what does it do? It uses the crush stuff about sacrificial animals and then it talks about foreigners. And what does our text do in Deuteronomy? It talks about the crush thing and then it talks about foreigners, right? Edomites and Moabites and Ammonites and Egyptians. So there is a relationship of our text, you know, to the sacrificial language and we have to take that into account as we try to figure out what are some of the underlying principles we can apply in the context of our lives.

So let’s try to do that. Let’s look first at the text before us and try to glean some help to understand what it’s saying in the particular emphasis. And then I have four short comments after we overlook the text. Okay.

And you know, we see first of all—there is this. If you look at the handout that I’ve provided, there is this structure, and I don’t again know that I’ve got it right. I’m not you know paid full-time to analyze the structures of the Old Testament. I am paid and I joyfully delight in studying the scriptures, studying what other people have written about it. This happens to be my own outline. Again, most of the times it is because you just don’t see that much analysis of this. But it seems kind of obvious to me that we have this kind of movement.

There’s a general statement first of all of the exemption from the assembly of the Lord for those who are unable to procreate. So people that are unable to procreate—males specifically, not females—are excluded from whatever this assembly of the Lord is. And then the whole rest of it seems to be various kinds of ill-begotten procreation. Okay? Or at least the next section is.

So the next exemption is, well, anything that’s misbegotten. In the King James I think it says “bastard.” I don’t know, but you know, illegitimate birth. Again, it’s a weird word. It’s only used twice in the Old Testament. It’s hard to understand what it means, but it certainly means the product of conception somehow. So the opening two verses say, you know, you have to be able to have a future orientation in procreation and then you have to go about doing that correctly. All this is seventh word stuff.

And then it gives, I think, a specific example of misbegotten offspring. Because then we move in an application that’s parallel to that—tenth generation, tenth generation misbegotten—and then the Ammonites and the Moabites. So they’re parallel. Okay, they’re linked up with that. And the Ammonites and the Moabites are the product of incestuous relationships. It’s Lot’s two daughters. He leaves Sodom and Gomorrah. His wife has turned to a pillar of salt. And in that story, his daughters then—and we don’t know why, maybe they thought it was the end of the world. I don’t know. But they, you know, he gets them drunk or he’s drunk. And so they have these kids—his two daughters do. And the Moabites and the Ammonites are the direct descendants of an incestuous, misbegotten offspring, the two fathers, Ammon and Moab.

So what we have then is this movement from a specific case we could say about warning against the kind of children that were produced and its relationship to the assembly of the Lord by way of specific story—a story he calls upon in the Old Testament. And then as that story develops, there’s this discussion of these reasons given. Now, you know, the reasons given are two more reasons. It doesn’t—the word, how it’s translated—sometimes it says “because,” we think that’s the reason. But I think he’s already given us one reason of the incestuous relationship, and now he adds on a couple more reasons. And again he refers back to a story we’re supposed to know. And we’re supposed to know that you know, when they came through the wilderness, the Moabites and the Ammonites weren’t kind to Israel. There was an omission, a sin of omission. They didn’t give him bread and water. And then he wants us to know that the other part of the story is they then hired covenantally hired Balaam. And Balaam was supposed to curse God’s people.

But at the center of that discussion, so the overall story—nobody who’s been castrated, and then no ill-begotten birth, and then the illustration of these two peoples, these two tribes, Ammonites and Moabites—and they’re then matched up. So you’ve got this structuring going on to Edomites and Egyptians—two more groups, comparison and contrast. They’re also excluded but only to the third generation. So there’s a comparison and contrast going on that links those together.

At the very center of that structure is that God turns the curse into a blessing because he loves us. Because he loves us. So you know, the center of the thing, the way it’s laid out, is this three-fold repetition of “the Lord your God.” So at the middle of all of this, in addition to looking at the laws involved and the sacrificial stuff and trying to glean some moral lessons from what we read, the focal point where God wants us to focus is his sovereign love and care for us in opposition to men who think they can determine the future. Right?

So we’re going to hire a guy to curse Israel—the Moabites and Ammonites saying they’re going to hire Baal or Balaam. And so you know, they think that history moves according to the decisions of people. They think that God can be manipulated by their actions to change history. Now, now think about that. Just meditate about that a little bit. They believe that they paid this guy. He was supposed to be good at this. He’s supposed to be able to do certain things, and those things have an impact on God who will then change what he wants to do in terms of a particular people. Okay? They’re not, you know, they’re not atheists; they’re theists. But they believe that God can be manipulated by men’s actions. That’s kind of, you know, that’s what God turns around.

The center of the text is a reminder that that’s ridiculous. Now we say, “Well yeah, we all know that’s ridiculous.” Well, we don’t all know that’s ridiculous. U.R.J. Rushdoony makes an application to our Arminianism in this text, because our Arminianism says ultimately what happens in the affairs of men is the result of what men do—not leaving God out of the equation, but what men do to change God. That God is this thing, this power, this person who can be changed by what we do, what we decide, our actions we choose. He hasn’t sovereignly chosen us.

So there is this, I know it seems like a stretch and you don’t want to tell your dispensational friends or Armenian friends rather that they’re like Balaam, you know, you don’t want to do that because it isn’t really true. But people who are really devoted, who have thought through that theology and think that God is subject to the whims of the people of the earth—you see, that’s what these people were. And God wants us to know, you know, that’s what we all think in a way in our sinful state.

And God, at the center of this text, wants us to know that he loves us and because of his love for us and because he is sovereign, he can turn that kind of ridiculous thing into not just having no effect—the curse not lighting, as Proverbs says—but he turns it into a blessing. So at the center of this text that you know we’d probably want to steer away from because of the, you know, mixed company and all that stuff and you know, can’t uncomfortable for guys—you know, we would lose the great message at the heart of this thing: the sovereign God who turns cursings into blessings.

Now that’s sort of a theme. I think I don’t know this, but you know, maybe that’s part of what we see emanating from the center of this text. And maybe this is why we have texts like Isaiah 56 that says the eunuch has a better name in the house than sons, and why the Ethiopian eunuch is presented as a model of conversion and salvation, and why Ruth, a Moabitess, right—excluded forever to the tenth generation, whatever it is—why she becomes part of the lineage of our Savior. Or why David the tenth generation (as it turns out, I’m not sure that’s significant, but tenth generation down from another incestuous kind of thing—an ill-begotten son that we talked about a few weeks ago, Perez, the son of Tamar by Judah, specifically prohibited in the laws, and the way it was conceived is bad).

So maybe in all these things, part of the message is that we’re all under the curse because of our actions. But the Lord God sovereignly moves things to bring us into relationship with himself. And he turns the curse, his judgments against us, into blessing. And of course that statement is true. That’s what Jesus came to do. They take upon himself, you know, the full force of the curses due to us—cursed hanging on a tree—and becomes the sin bearer for us.

So surely the beating heart of this strange, obscure text from Deuteronomy is a repetition of what the gospel message is all about. But it’s not just that. If that truth emanates out from the center of the love of God and reversing the curses of people that are under the curse—all of us, we’re all misbegotten in a sense, right? We’re all born in sin as David confesses in the Psalter—if that redemption message emanates into the rest of the text, surely we can see that message. Since it’s not just redemption, right? It’s about conquest and dominion. It’s about the positive preaching and proclamation of the gospel. It’s about exercising stewardship over the earth and beyond that, the created order. Then surely we can see that there’s more here than just the message of redemption. And let’s talk a little bit about what that more is.

Well, we have to deal with this term: the assembly of the Lord. What is it? I don’t know. Commentators are not sure what it means. It’s used only thirteen times in all the Hebrew Bible, all the Bible, and the majority of those occurrences are right here in the text before us. And it doesn’t explain what it is. Now we can—we know what it isn’t. We know that all kinds of you know, Moabites, Edomites, Egyptians, Ammonites, eunuchs, you know, incestuous products of incestuous rule—we know that all kinds of people can come to saving faith and did in Yahweh in the Old Testament. That’s not what’s going on here.

I mean, David was the tenth generation, but his dad wasn’t, and his dad was apparently a successful businessman and all that stuff. So this isn’t about exclusion from relationship with God or this is not salvation. The assembly of the Lord does not refer to all people that are saved in this particular period of time. It can’t mean that because we have too many examples where it just isn’t true.

It seems like the assembly of the Lord probably has to do with official convocations for legislative purposes, for war councils. And that’s an attractive option because that’s immediately what goes on to be talked about—the camp of the Lord. And so the camp, the host gathered, has been sent out by the legislative assembly into warfare. And so there is this relationship—just because the texts are next to each other, in the conclusion of this sermon on adultery—you know, that’s an attractive option.

Or it could mean, you know, the governors of the sacrificial system, right? So priests are excluded. Israel was a priestly nation. And so as a priestly nation, you know, you might be part, linked to Israel’s God, but not be part of the priestly sacrificing nation because of these defects or because of lineage stuff.

So I think the best association of the assembly of the Lord would be to office holders in the civil government or in church government. And in fact the early church councils dealt with this in two different councils. They dealt with what happens because the opponents of the church knew Deuteronomy 23:1 was here before you did. Before you know, they used to know what this stuff was. And so what the opponents of the church did for a while in early church history was they would take priests and just crush their testicles. They make them unfit for office. And it was a way of controlling the priesthood.

And so after all that had settled down, the church councils had to deal with what do we do with these pastors who don’t meet the requirements of Deuteronomy 23:1. And you know, they said well, you know, if it’s self-mutilation they’re demoted; they’re removed; they can’t be pastors anymore. But if it was forced upon them, it’s not their fault, and they actually can still continue to be pastors. So the church took these texts seriously, and not in terms of who could be a Christian or not, but in terms of who could be a ruling authority in the church or in the state.

Okay. So it seems like that’s going on here. It seems like these are exemptions from ruling authority. And if we take it in that light, you know, it seems like the general equity of these Mosaic judicials have something to say to us. The early church thought it did. They took church councils to decide actions involving Deuteronomy 23:1. And it seems like this may be the origins, for instance, of one of many controversies surrounding our present president—the birther controversy in America.

You can be a citizen; you know, you can do what you want to do. But you know what? Not everybody can be president. That’s a big fat lie they told you in school. You’ve got to be what is it—35 and you have to be a natural-born citizen. You have to have been born to a citizen of the United States. You can’t just be somebody who was born here and granted citizenship because of your birth if your parents weren’t citizens. Okay?

Why? Well, because they understood that rulers of nations and governments and stuff, you know, they have to have kind of a proven loyalty to the country that they’re serving. They understood the relationship between the past and the future. They thought more than just “what are our rights today and what can we do today and let’s give everybody all the rights in the world.” Democracy is certainly excluded by the text before us. I mean, if we think of democracy as everybody having the same rights as everybody else, and we might be tempted to think that, well, the poor guy, you know, he was born weird. Or these Ammonites, from Moabites—that was a long time ago that, you know, Lot had that relationship with his two daughters and they’re down here now. What’s the deal with excluding those folks? And Egyptians and Edomites to the third generation. Well, they get in, but it takes three generations.

How fair is that? That’s not fair at all. Well, then what we have to do is understand that our system of justice is based on the scriptures. The scriptures aren’t there to, you know, either inform or to validate our view of what’s fair. It’s interesting that in none of these circumstances, unless you take the first case as a man who had done it to himself, which I don’t think is the meaning (just like the animal, the sacrificial animal who was wounded in the genitalia—it’s not their doing. No animal does that to themselves), so in each of these exemptions, God is telling us something about something we had no choice over.

I didn’t ask to be born this way. I didn’t ask to be born to this particular family. Okay? I didn’t ask to be born into the Edomite people who were even worse than the Ammonites and the Moabites, to God’s people in the wilderness. They made war on him. And I didn’t ask to be born an Egyptian who, while at first welcoming Israel with hospitality, eventually turns against Israel and persecutes them.

But God says, well, you know, in spite of all of that, when you’re talking about ruling, when you’re talking about the assembly of the Lord ruling in church and state, you have to go beyond just “are you a good Christian?” You have to look at somebody’s lineage. That’s required in our Constitution because it’s a Christian Constitution, and this is required of early church councils. There’s a relationship to it.

It’s odd by the way that now one of the largest churches in the world—you can’t be married and have marital relationships, and you can’t even be a priest anymore if you’re that. So that’s strange in light of the text before us. But you know, that’s an important point, and I don’t know, you know, about our current president. But you know, I do know a couple of things. One, I know that most people in the United States—pretty confident of this—if it was proved that he wasn’t a natural-born citizen, but was just a citizen, they’d say, “So what? Change the Constitution or ignore the Constitution. It doesn’t make any difference. We just jettison it.”

This text tells us not to do that. This text says, “Wait a minute. Think about it a little bit. God says there’s value to excluding people for period of time until you sort of know more about them.” Proverbs warns us about when fools become rulers and the sort of damage that is done. And so what it’s telling us is there isn’t necessarily anything bad with a ruling class of people who come from and have been educated for rule and authority. Now, there’s nothing necessarily that says you have to do that, but it leans—this text leans that way a little bit. It says there are certain exemptions from ruling in the assembly of the Lord based upon lineage.

Most Americans would not see any point to that constitutional requirement anymore. And I know, and I also know this pretty well, that most Americans would say if a person is misbegotten, if they’re illegitimate birth, if his parents weren’t married, you know, why would that be an exclusion? 40% of kids, as I understand it, are born outside of marriage. Now, so the whole culture is in violation of Deuteronomy 23:2, you know, as a whole, because we no longer see the relationship, the importance of a child’s roots, where he came from. Was there marriage or was he illegitimate? Was the marriage good or was it incestuous?

You see, we don’t even let ourselves think that way because we’ve swallowed this idea of the demos, the people, as the voice of God, right? And everybody’s got all these rights. It’s interesting, you know, the medieval kings thought they were divinely placed where they were. And because of that, they thought all this stuff from Deuteronomy about sexual relations wasn’t abiding on them. It wasn’t confirmed to be obeyed by them because they were divinely appointed. They were like God. They could do whatever they wanted to do. And so incest is common, etc. And then as things changed and monarchs received less power, the academy received more power in history, that kind of lifestyle was now taken up by the artists and by the intellectuals. And now artists and intellectuals, well, yeah, we know for the common people, you know, they shouldn’t sleep with their sister and stuff, but we’re going to. And we don’t care about all those regulations because we’re the voice of God.

And now where we’re at is in America—people are God. The voice of the people is the voice of God. And we’re all divinely, you know, kind of connected to God. And so the rules don’t apply to any of us anymore. Marriage—who cares? It doesn’t make any difference. Now, praise God that there’s Christians involved in trying to bring out statistics and help people to think about that. But this text has to do with why that is such a departure from Christendom, from Christendom, and we should take these things seriously.

Let me say one last thing about this text because this is true. What I just said—there are things that happened to these people in Deuteronomy 23:1-8 that was completely out of their control, and yet it affected their ability, the kind of function they could have in the commonwealth of Israel. Now, that is a truth. This isn’t just law saying “this is the way it should be.” It’s a truth, and we each have been given particular things sovereignly by God. We have a particular state. Okay. And if you were an Egyptian, a second generation Egyptian fully sold out for Yahweh, right? You went to all the music stuff, and you were out there, you know, preaching in the streets and stuff. You still couldn’t be a ruler. And you know what? You were fine with that. You were down with that because you understood, because of these laws, that there’s certain stations in life that I can attain to and other ones that I can’t. Maybe my grandkids can attain to those stations. I can’t.

Each one of you has been given certain limitations, restrictions that mean you can’t do this, that, or the other thing. I’m never going to play pro. I won’t be in the Super Bowl ever. And there was never a chance that I could have been, right? And there’s all kinds of things like that in our lives. In fact, most of the things in our lives we have very little control of.

God says, “That’s okay. Trust me.” Because at the center of this text, he turns curses into blessings. Why? Because he loves you, and he’s made you a second generation Egyptian sold out for Jesus—not able to be a pastor, okay? In that life, in that world back then. And so he’s saying, you know what, don’t just, you know, be okay with that. Rejoice in the station that I’ve given you. I am most wise. He says I’m most powerful. I’m most, you know, sovereign. And this is the important part: I am most loving. And in my love, I’ve given you a particular station to fill. Don’t talk about what you can’t do. Think about the station God has called you to do, and man that station. Man that station.

And when we man our stations, and when we, you know, issue indecency in our lives, then we’re the conquering assembly of the Lord. We’re the army of God. We’re going forth to exercise dominion, to bring people to faith in Jesus Christ, to announce, yes, his curses on some people as well. That’s another point here. He tells them don’t ever seek the prosperity or peace of particular people here. Now, we’re told in Jeremiah to seek the peace of the city. Well, you know, we sort of take the verse like that and we ultimatize it and say, “Well, we’re supposed to seek the peace of everybody in the world.” This text says explicitly, “Don’t seek the peace or prosperity of certain people”—the people that hired Balaam against you—”ever.”

Now, I don’t know who those people are today. But what I do know is the word of God tells me that manning my station doesn’t mean I’m necessarily going to seek the peace and prosperity of every last person in this country. There are people absolutely committed to bringing a curse upon your head. And God does not command you to seek their peace and prosperity. In fact, he says to seek the peace and prosperity of avowed God-haters is a violation of the truths of Deuteronomy 23, and that will be ineffectual in the army of the Lord.

God tells us to man our station. Don’t have unrealistic expectations of who you are in your identity nor in what your calling is to do. Understand your station, and that your station involves—yeah—seeking peace and prosperity for a lot of people, but not everybody. Don’t give yourself an unrealistic task. Don’t take an unrealistic task upon yourself that you’re not really called or qualified to do.

How do you figure that out? Well, I don’t know. That’s a wisdom thing. That’s what each of you has to do. You know, I certainly don’t want to have anything I said encourage laziness or sloth, thinking, “Well, it’s not my calling to do this or that.” Have a calling. Man your station as a Christian. Know what it is. Discern what it is. Get advice and counsel from others. Do it well. And understand that is what God will use to bring blessing upon the people of God and upon his world.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for this text. We thank you, Lord God, that at first blush it seems intimidating to us and uncomfortable, but thank you that there’s so much riches hidden in it. Lord God, help us, Father, this week to man our station. Help us, as some of us watch those football players, to think of ourselves as comely, you know, manly people, Lord God, filled by your Holy Spirit, a headcrushing bride of yours. And may we sing, Father, as if we believe that is our identity in Jesus Christ. Help us to point to the future and to see our station in accomplishing that future. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen. Amen.