About this sermon
Deuteronomy 7 begins and ends with the command to destroy the Canaanites and their idols, and at its center stands the reason: Israel is a people holy to the Lord, chosen not for their number or merit but because the Lord set his love on them and kept the oath he swore to their fathers. Israel was to make no covenant with other nations, for the Lord alone was their king. The God who keeps covenant and steadfast love calls his people to love him and keep his commandments.
Sermon transcript
I invite you to turn with me in the word of God to the book of Deuteronomy this morning, Deuteronomy chapter 7. I once again remind you that this is the inspired word of God. She would give your full attention to it, asking for the grace of the spirit by which that word would be opened to our understanding even today. Deuteronomy chapter 7, this is the word of God.
When the Lord your God brings you into the land where you are entering to possess it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, even nations greater and stronger than you. And when the Lord your God delivers them before you and you defeat them, then you shall utterly destroy them.
You shall make no covenant with them and show no favor to them. Furthermore, you shall not intermarry with them. You shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor shall you take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods. Then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you, and he will quickly destroy you. But thus you shall do to them. You shall tear down their altars, and smash their sacred pillars, and hew down their asherim, and burn their graven images with fire.
For you are a holy people to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. The Lord did not set his love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any of the peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But because the Lord loved you and kept the oath which he swore to your forefathers, the Lord brought you out by a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery from the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt.
Know, therefore, that the Lord your God, he is God, the faithful God, who keeps his covenant and his lovingkindness to a thousandth generation with those who love him and keep his commandments, but repays those who hate him to their faces to destroy them.
He will not delay with him who hates him. He will repay him to his face. Therefore, you shall keep the commandment the statutes and the judgments which I am commanding you today to do them. Then it shall come about because you listen to these judgments and keep and do them that the Lord your God will keep with you his covenant and his loving kindness which he swore to your forefathers.
He will love you and bless you and multiply you. He will also bless the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground, your grain and your new wine and your oil, the increase of your herd and the young of your flock, in the land which he swore to your forefathers to give you. You shall be blessed above all the peoples. There will be no male or female barren among you or among your cattle.
The Lord will remove from you all sickness, and he will not put on you any of the harmful diseases of Egypt which you have known, but he will lay them on all who hate you. You shall consume all the peoples whom the Lord your God will deliver to you. Your eye shall not pity them, nor shall you serve their gods, for that would be a snare to you. If you should say in your heart, these nations are greater than I, how can I dispossess them? You shall not be afraid of them.
You shall well remember what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt. The great trials which your eyes saw and the signs and the wonders and the mighty hand and the outstretched arm by which the Lord your God brought you out. So shall the Lord your God do to all the peoples of whom you are afraid. Moreover, the Lord your God will send the hornet against them, until those who are left and hide themselves from you perish. You shall not dread them, for the Lord your God is in your midst, a great and awesome God. The Lord your God will clear away these nations before you little by little.
You will not be able to put an end to them quickly, for the wild beasts would grow too numerous for you. But the Lord your God will deliver them before you and will throw them into great confusion until they are destroyed. He will deliver their kings into your hands, so that you will make their name perish from under heaven. No man will be able to stand before you until you have destroyed them.
The raven images of their gods you are to burn with fire. You shall not covet the silver or the gold that is on them, nor take it for yourselves, for you will be snared by it. For it is an abomination to the Lord your God. You shall not bring an abomination into your house and like it come under the ban. You shall utterly detest it. and you shall utterly abhor it, for it is something banned.
Thus far, the reading of God’s inspired holy word. Let’s pray together once again. Father, we lift up our prayers to you that the spirit who moved Moses to write these words would now be at work granting us the grace to believe and embrace these words as they are meant to be understood. We pray, Father, that you would be glorified, not only in the reading and the preaching of your word, but in the hearing of it also, that we might hear of your faithfulness to us, and might we prove to be faithful as you move us, O God, by grace through faith to walk in obedience to your commandments. We pray these things now in Jesus’ name, amen.
Reading the chapter of Deuteronomy chapter 7 this morning in its entirety, you certainly are struck by its length and its fullness. But Deuteronomy chapter 7 displays a very careful stylistic structure that may not meet your eye at first glance. It is something of a concentric arrangement, there is a focus, there is a center that can be defined. And this chapter, if you notice, begins and ends, begins and ends with the destruction of the Canaanites and their idols.
I ask you to compare just briefly verses one through five with verses 16 through 26. Just let your eyes scan across them, verses one through five, and then verses 16 through 26. The first thing you notice is that that last section, 16 through 26, is about twice as long as the first section, one through five, but both sections are devoted to the destruction of the Canaanites and their idols. of the destruction of the Canaanites and their gods as Israel is about to go in and occupy the promised land. So you have a beginning section, you have an ending section, and then you have the middle section, which is verses 6 through 15. 1 through 5. 16 to 26, and then you have a center, which is six through 15.
And the heart of the chapter then found in those verses is the covenant relationship that the Lord, the God of Israel has established with his people. Having loved them and having set them apart as a holy people in the Exodus, in accordance with the oath, which he had sworn to their forefathers. So at the heart of the chapter is the covenant, the covenant that God made with Israel, the God that he made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that he remembered and fulfilled in the Exodus, that he renewed at Mount Sinai, and that he has established this people that are about to occupy the promised land.
And as you look at that center section, I ask you to take just a moment with me to scan those verses six through 15. And first of all, I want you to notice in those verses, the frequency of the mention of love. There’s a love chapter, not like 1 Corinthians 13 to be sure, but a love chapter nonetheless.
Verse seven, the Lord set his love on you. Verse eight, because the Lord loved you. Verse nine, speaks of the Lord’s loving kindness. And so does verse 12. And verse 13 says, and he will love you. As I count no less than five instances of the mention of the Lord’s love for this people at the heart of Deuteronomy chapter seven. And now pass through those same verses again with me. And let us highlight the oath, quote, which he swore to your forefathers. The oath, quote, which he swore to your forefathers, unquote.
We see it in verse eight. We see it in verse 12. And we see it again in verse 13. So we have love. And we have the oath that God swore to the forefathers, the covenant oath. And then looking carefully, we can see in this center section at the very core of this section, the core of this chapter, the center upon which this chapter hinges is found in verses nine through 11. Here we see the basis for Israel’s elect status and for her blessings. Here at the root of her calling to be a holy people stands the Lord himself as the bedrock on which all else rests. Look and listen to the words of chapter seven, verses nine through 11.
Know therefore that the Lord your God, he is God, the faithful God, who keeps his covenant and his loving kindness to a thousandth generation with those who love him and keep his commandments, but repays those who hate him to their faces to destroy them. He will not delay with them who hates him. He will repay them to his face. Then notice emphatically, therefore, I’m calling this the hinge verse in this chapter. Therefore, you shall keep the commandment and the statutes and the judgments which I’m commanding you today to do that.
Israel does not stand in her own strength, nor on her own merits. The commandments and the statutes and the judgments are not adequate to constitute a people. It is God, the covenant keeper, who causes Israel to stand. Who causes Israel to stand in the power of His might, and in the grace of His loving kindness. So at the center of this chapter, the hinge upon which it turns, is God in His covenant faithfulness, His power, His glory, His loving kindness toward this people, and the command that arises from it, therefore you shall keep. the commandments and the statutes and the judgments. It is God who establishes his people and calls them to his covenant loyalty to be a holy people. God, the covenant keeper, who causes Israel to stand in the power of his might and in the grace of his loving kindness, who establishes a people, calls them to covenant loyalty to be his own.
It is instructive, I think, to observe this formal structure of the chapter, especially as we face the challenges the chapter presents to us. As we mentioned earlier, the chapter begins and ends with the command to exterminate the Canaanites, to eradicate the sinful people and their idols. to destroy all physical evidences of their religion to be found in the land. And that very sober and very abrupt command, if you will, is wrapped around the central teaching that Israel is to be a nation that must be distinct and exclusive. And yet when we reach the heart of the chapter, It’s not so much the wrath of God that cries off the page, but the love of God for this people that cries out to us, to God’s covenant people. I’ve loved you, I’ve established you, I call you to be my people, a holy people, bookmarked or bookended by the command to do business with the Canaanites who inhabit the land. When we reach the heart of the chapter, we might say, we find it beating with the passionate love of God expressed and emphasized. Ironically, almost paradoxically, divine love and grace stand at the core of a chapter commanding total destruction.
Set over against one another. We are challenged by such placement of the holy words. to think of the ethical and the theological implications. The people who are here being instructed to have no mercy on the nations in Canaan in terms of their idolatry are the very people through whom we are told God intends to bless the nations. Think of the promise made to Abraham. He’s going to bless the nations through you but I’m sending you into Canaan and I want you to eradicate the idolatry that you find there. The paradox is quickly apparent.
If the covenant made with Abraham was meant to bring blessing to the many nations of the earth, well, what about the Canaanites? Has that universal promise of blessing inherent in what was spoken to Abraham somehow here been suspended or overlooked? And beyond that, we might ask, what are the implications for us in the new covenant era? as the Church of Jesus Christ. And I ask that we would keep those questions in mind as we proceed, and I suspect we’ll not answer them to their entirety this morning. We will continue to deal with this in the pages of Deuteronomy to come.
But clearly the emphasis in this chapter, right up until the final instructions that come at the end of the chapter, is placed upon God’s own action in bringing Israel victoriously into the land that lay ahead of them. There’s a command to be sure, but notice in the text that it would be God who would cause Israel to enter and possess the land.
It is God, look at the early verses, one and two. It is God who will drive out the nations. It is God who will deliver the nations into Israel’s hand. The same God who loves Israel and has made covenant with them is the God who will bring them victory in the wars in Canaan.
To emphasize the need for divine initiative and action, notice in verse one that the many nations are emphasized there. The many nations that are listed seven, are included in the text and others are referred to, are a people who are described as greater and stronger than the Israelites. So not only are there many of them, but they are greater and they are stronger. And this is a perspective that the Lord through Moses and Deuteronomy is keen to stress in order to deflate in Israel, among Israel, any arrogance on their part. with the intention of exalting instead the power and the initiative of Yahweh, the Lord.
We’ll note in the text that the Lord had not chosen Israel. I believe this is verse seven. The Lord had not chosen Israel nor set his love on them because Israel was better or stronger or more in number than other nations. In fact, verse seven says they were the least. They were less than the other nations. They were nobody.
But even so, when Yahweh had done his part in delivering the nations into their hands, verse two, Israel was to smite them and to defeat them. And, quote, utterly destroy them. Utterly. Completely. Israel’s duty to the Lord was absolute and all inclusive. Everything was to be devoted to him. In fact, the word that is translated utterly might be translated devoted in the sense of being devoted to the Lord. But this was this was a holy activity devoted to Yahweh, to his glory, to his honor, to the accomplishment of his purposes.
And thus Israel was to make no covenant with the idolaters. They were to show no favor to the idolaters. But Israel was to absolutely and irrevocably renounce idolatrous things and persons, and so refuse to take any gain or profit from them. Thus, in obedience to this command, things or persons could be renounced, indeed, set aside, renounced without necessarily being destroyed. In fact, that explanation would provide a context in which the instruction that follows about prohibiting treaties and intermarriage with the inhabitants of the land would make sense. In other words, if you killed everybody, there’s no one to get married to, but the Lord says, don’t marry, intermarry with them and don’t intervolve in them with treaties and covenants. In other words, this idea of utterly devoting them to the Lord is certainly pressing away the idolatrous character of the nations that lay before them and bringing them under conquest for God’s glory and God’s honor. If the local people needed to be destroyed absolutely, then verse three would be rather unnecessary since everyone would have been exterminated at the very outset.
The major challenge of the verses two through five is that the Israelites were to be utterly distinct from the nations whose land they would enter. And as you read those verses two through five, we can identify three specific aspects of this crucial distinctiveness that are listed here. The first is a political distinctiveness, The second is a social and a personal, and the third is religious. Verses two through five, three specific aspects in which Israel was not to identify with the pagans, with the idolaters. At the end of verse two is the political distinctiveness to which Israel was called.
They were commanded, quote, you shall make no covenant with them and show no favor to them. the covenant or the treaty that is operative between Yahweh as the great king of Israel and Israel as his vassal subject people required, as did all such sovereign vassal type treaties, the total exclusion of being allied with any other. I’m your king and no other is your king. And so the vassal was not at liberty to go out and make other arrangements with other kings having taken on this particular sovereign. Well here Yahweh, God, the Lord is sovereign over Israel.
For Israel to enter into treaties or covenants with pagan Canaanite nations would therefore in the first place be an act of disloyalty to the covenant that God has made with them, you see. To their own covenant commitment to Yahweh. Throughout Israel’s history time and again you will recall how Israel was prone to seek alliances with other nations. We think of the prophets rebuking Israel because they wanted to go down in Egypt and depend on Egypt again or make an alliance with Assyria or seek the help of those other nations rather than trusting in the Lord and how the prophets would rebuke Israel for such disobedience. Treaties with such nations would also require not only a disloyalty to the covenant, but some recognition of the gods of those nations, the idols that were occupied and recognized among those people. Idols and gods that would be intolerable for Yahweh who has said plainly in the commandments, you will have no other gods before me in my presence.
So here is a call to the exclusivity of the covenant of God with his people, calling them to that faithfulness as they go into the land. So we see then this particular political distinctiveness. But if you look at verses three and four in our text, You see a second specific aspect, not only were they not to adopt a covenantal relationship, but they were not in the social realm, the Lord says to Israel, furthermore, you shall not intermarry with them.
Now this prohibition was not on purely ethnic grounds alone. In other words, because of their place of birth, Mixed marriages, you might know, were not in themselves out of bounds for Israelites. Moses himself had a Kushite wife, for example, Numbers 12, 1 tells us. And later law in Deuteronomy itself allowed an Israelite to take a wife from among captives of war.
So it’s not saying you can’t marry a foreigner per se. What was ruled out here was the kind of intermarrying that involved the social bonding of families that also included with it the joining of religious ritual, you see, that joined with it the idolatrous as well as the godly religion, you see. Any type of marriage that would involve compromise with idolatry was banned in the critical days of the settlement in the land. You were to marry in the Lord.
Put it in Paul’s language. And so there are the first two, political, social. Now we see a third in chapter seven, verse five. A third aspect of Israel’s distinctiveness is the religious per se. And we’ve alluded to this already in the first two. But the third is a command, you shall tear down their altars and smash their sacred pillars. You shall hew down their Asherah, their totem poles, so to speak, and burn their raven images with fire. Here lies the crux of the matter. The moral justification for the destruction of the Canaanites will be expressed later in terms of the wickedness of their society.
But in the context of where we are here, in the context of the last three chapters, in which the demands of the first and second commandments of the law have been so thoroughly laid out before us, the primary object of Israel in Canaan must be the eradication of Canaan’s idolatry.
You’ll have no other gods. I will not hold him guiltless that takes my name in vain. The polytheism of many altars and idols cannot coexist with the God of the Shema, Israel’s God, the Lord is one. The lifeless emblems of lifeless gods was an affront to the true and the living God whom Israel was to serve and love with all their heart and soul and might. The Shema, chapter 6.
The actions then commanded in verses 1 through 5 were intended to protect Israel’s distinctiveness as God’s covenant people. The basis of that distinctiveness is that the Lord, their God, Yahweh, had chosen them Verses six and seven, look at the text, constitute one of the clearest statements in Deuteronomy, indeed in all of scripture, of Israel’s election. But it is carefully interwoven with phrases that immediately recall the key declaration of Exodus chapter 19, in which these are identified as a holy people for God’s own possession. out of all the peoples. Compare verses 6 and 7 with Exodus 19. The stress here again is on Israel’s distinctiveness. In the midst of the many other nations they were to be holy to the Lord, that is set apart, different, belonging exclusively to Him, His own special treasure, His covenant people. So as we follow this rather complicated, but somewhat simplistic chapter, we have moved from the instruction of the Israelites, what they were to do, verses one to five.
We go to the basis of those instruction, namely Israel’s identity as the wholly chosen and treasured people of Yahweh, verse six. You’re gonna do this because you’re my people, because you’re distinct from those other people. Israel’s status is grounded in the action of God in such a way as to remove any possible claims on Israel’s part that their chosen status reflected their own superiority in any way. Where is the cause for Israel’s boasting?
Particularly here, numerical superiority is rejected as even remotely possible. Why God should have loved them. They were the fewest of all people. And we know certainly from the scriptures that it was not Israel’s moral superiority that moved God’s love to love them.
The bottom line remains, as it always does in the Old Testament, is that the choice of Israel is in the inexplicable self-motivated love of God. having decided to love Israel’s forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, because he chose to do so, and having made to them specific promises which he swore on oath because he freely chose to do so, God proved faithful to that promise in the Exodus, and God set his love on Israel. in accordance with the covenant into which he had so freely, freely entered with Israel. He loved Israel because he loved Israel.
Period. And so we come today, thus far, to the core of our chapter, affirming Yahweh as God and affirming God’s character as Yahweh. the Lord who brought his people out of Egypt according to promise. In the final analysis it is because Yahweh is God as well as being your God and because Yahweh is the faithful God who keeps his covenant and his loving kindness, again the core of this intersection, that God acted as he did toward Israel. Because God is God and because he made covenant and because he keeps covenant Because of that action, Israel was constituted a people committed to preserving a distinctiveness among all the nations. You’re my people, he says. And on that basis, they were to make no compromise with the perversion, the idolatry of the Canaanites. Who is the true God? and Israel’s God, and our God, the God who proved His claim in faithfulness, the God who demonstrated His integrity, the God who committed Himself to love, the God of liberating, ransoming power.
It is that God who does and must do right. He judges justly. Indeed, He must judge justly. He is, after all, a jealous God, visiting judgment upon those who hate him, visiting loving kindness upon thousands of those who love him and keep his commandments. He visits judgment on those who hate him, for he can by no means leave unpunished those who take his name in vain, those who deny him. See the context.
Oh Israel, called to perfect holiness, called to meet out perfect justice. Oh Israel, what hope do you have that you will keep the commandment and the statutes and the judgments which the Lord your God commands you? That’s the statement of verse 11. This is what you’re to do Israel. And I’m asking Israel, what hope do you have to do that? What hope do you have that the covenant and the Lord’s loving kindness will remain? You who so obviously and repeatedly break that covenant, Israel. How dare you hope, Israel? Reminding you have a hope. Israel.
And in turning that to our new covenant context, what hope do we have of this perfect God who calls for perfect holiness, who calls for perfect commandment keeping, who is a God of justice, who will by no means clear the guilty. What hope is there for us? The Lord who demands your distinctiveness, your perfect distinctiveness from the nations, that distinctiveness based on His electing love, based on His covenantal promise of old made to the fathers, based upon His covenant keeping. What hope have you?
And the answer, that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. Your hope, beloved, of being a covenant keeper after all, is the covenant keeper himself. Your hope of keeping the covenant is the God who kept the covenant. Israel’s hope for keeping the covenant is the God who kept the covenant with Israel.
His name is faithful and true. He is the seed of Abraham. David’s greater son, Jesus Christ our Lord, born under the law, kept the Lord’s commandments, perfectly separated himself from sin and idolatry, perfectly gave himself in the place of sinners as a perfect, spotless, substitutionary lamb, and he became sin for us, bearing the curse that a just God had to mete out. for us the curse that we deserve by hanging on the tree there to endure the very covenantal wrath meted out against sin. And in covenant faithfulness, he rose again according to promise again from the third day for our justification to all who would receive him and believe in him.
Beloved, know therefore that the Lord your God, He is God, the faithful God, who keeps covenant and His loving kindness to a thousandth generation with those who, by grace through faith, love Him and keep His commandments. The Covenant Keeper, our God, and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Let’s pray together. Father, we thank you for this word. We thank you for your own holiness and the call of your people to be a holy people, to be set apart, distinct from the nations, distinct from the world, distinct from the idolatry that is all around us. What hope do we have that we can be that people, oh God, that we can keep your commandments, that we can do the works that you prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them? It is according to the power of your deliverance, according to what you have done, according to your covenant faithfulness, that we are made able, that we are called out of darkness into light and from death to life, to be your people as you would intend us to be in every realm of life. Our Father, we pray that you’ll hear our prayers, that as we make our supplications in the name of Jesus, be merciful to us. May we know your loving kindness as revealed in Christ. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.
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