Deuteronomy chapter 31. Let's read the first six verses
and look at them this afternoon. Deuteronomy chapter 31, beginning
in verse 1. And Moses went and spake these
words unto all Israel. And he said unto them, I am a
hundred and twenty years old this day. I can no more go out
and come in Also the Lord hath said unto me, Thou shalt not
go over this Jordan. The Lord thy God, He will go
over before thee, and He will destroy these nations from before
thee, and thou shalt possess them. And Joshua, he shall go
over before thee, as the Lord hath said. And the Lord shall
do unto them as He did unto Sihon and to Og, kings of the Amorites,
and unto the land of them whom he destroyed. And the Lord shall
give them up before your face, that you may do unto them according
to all the commandments which I have commanded you. Be strong
and of a good courage, fear not, nor be afraid of them. For the
Lord thy God, He it is that goeth with you. He will not fail you
nor forsake you. Now it says up here in verse
1 that Moses went and spake all these words to the children of
Israel. Now we're not for sure how he
done that. Now he did that because no telling how many, thousands
or hundreds of thousands and maybe even some speculated well
over a million of these people, the children of Israel. So how
he went and gathered them together and spake to them, we don't know.
We don't know if he did it with several thousand at once and
then got some more together and repeated that. We don't know.
But he did speak to all Israel. I remember one time when we were
down in Merida, Cody and Walter took some of us down to, it looked
something like an old football field. It was something way back
in the days of Mayan Indians. But on each side it had a wall. And you could stand on one end
of that field and talk just like I'm talking now. And you could
hear somebody very well on the other end of the field. The acoustics
were that good in that place. So who knows how the Lord arranged
this? None of us know. But the thing
is that it says here that He gathered all Israel together. And how touching this was. You
can just imagine to see him standing there and hear Moses say, he's
old now, and he says, I'm 120 years old. This old prophet,
this old faithful man of God was talking to him and telling
him his age, 120 years old. Three divisions of his life is
very interesting. The first 40 years of his life
he spent down in Egypt. That's where he was raised, down
there under Pharaoh. He was taught in all the wisdom
of Egypt. Then when he fled that place,
he went to the back side of the desert to Median. There he met
his wife and two children and had it pretty rough there. There's
where he saw the Lord in the burning bush, remember that?
And he sent him back to Egypt to deliver his people. And then
for the next 40 years he was in the wilderness. For 40 years
he was in the wilderness with the children of Israel. So his
life is divided up in these three 40-year spans. And now he comes
to the end of his life and he says, I'm an old man. I'm 120
years old. And then he says, I can no more
go out and come in. Now, it wasn't because of his
weakness, his feebleness. It wasn't because his eyes were
dim and his ears were hard of hearing. Look over here in the
34th chapter. We know that because this is
said after he died. Look over here in the 34th chapter
in verse 7. And Moses was not a hundred and
twenty years old when he died, his eyes were not dim, nor his
natural force abated. He was still like he was a young
man. And that's amazing when you consider especially the 80
years of this man's life that he spent in the backside of the
desert and then the burden that he bore with the children of
Israel for 40 years. And yet he's like a young man.
His natural forces are not abating. His eyes have never gone dim.
Even Isaac went blind, didn't he? But not this man. I remember
two times he fasted for 40 days. Remember that? He did that twice.
And you would have thought this man, the very burden that he
bore for this people, he'd have been wore out. But here it says
that his natural forces, was not abated, his eyes were not
dimmed. I imagine what he means here
in our text in verse 3, the reason he could not anymore go out and
come in was for what he tells us here. In verse 2, the Lord
hath said unto me, Thou shalt not go over this Jordan. It was not because he could not,
but the Lord says you will not. You will not go over this Jordan. You will not take this people
into the land of promise. And He tells them that year,
and can you imagine this people as they hear this, how their
heart sinks. I mean, this is their prophet. This is their mouthpiece, God's
mouthpiece to them. The greatest prophet probably
that ever lived was this man right here until John the Baptist
came on the scene. The scripture says, ìThere arose
not a prophet since in Israel, like unto Moses, whom the Lord
knew face to face.î And how many times, I wonder, did this man
save the children of Israel by his intercession? Remember the
time the Lord said, ìLet me alone, that Iíll destroy them. Iíll
make of you a great nation.î And he said, ìLord, if you blot
out their names, blot out mine.î Boy, He made intercession for
them and saved this people. This was a great man of God.
And you know the other generation before this, they didn't think
too much of Moses as a whole, but this generation loved him.
They loved him. And now He's saying to them,
I'm not going over this Jordan with you. And man, I can see
their hearts sinking when He tells them that. You know, we
can find scenes like this in other places too. You go over
in the book of Joshua, and next to the last chapter, and Joshua
probably took this from Moses, but he gathered Israel together,
and this is what Joshua said when he got ready to die. He
said, I am old and stricken in age, and behold, this day I am
going the way of all the earth. And he died, and they buried
him. And you remember another place I thought of over in Acts
chapter 20 where the Apostle Paul got the Ephesian elders
together and was leaving them and said, You shall see my face
no more. Remember that? This was Christ's
Apostle. He was a faithful friend of those
elders there at Ephesus, good preacher, And he said, You'll
see my face no more. And man, they all got on their
faces and wept. Goodbyes, saying their goodbyes. You'll never see my face anymore. I've sometime told you the story
about John Fawcett. He was a man there and pastored
a church in northern England. But something I just recently
learned about him, I didn't know this, and Brother Larry would
be interested in this. He was a convert of George Whitefield.
When he was sixteen years old he heard George Whitefield preaching
and the Lord saved him and called him to preach and he was preaching
to a very, very poor congregation in northern England and the great
John Gill, Dr. Gill died there at his church
in London and they called John Fawcett and said, Come and pastor
us. Him and Mary, his wife, loaded
up the wagon and got ready to leave. And Mary looked at him
and said, John, I don't see how I can go. And he said, Sweetheart,
I don't see how I can go either. So they unloaded the wagon, and
he wrote that famous song that I love so well. And here's what
it says, Blessed be the tithe that binds Our hearts in Christian
love, The fellowship of kindred minds is like to that above. And the last verse says this,
when we asunder part, it gives us inward pain. That's what we
see here, isn't it? That's what we see in these examples
that I've given you. But we shall still be joined
in heart and hope to meet again. But boy, these stories I give
you, there was no hope to meet again in this life. Paul said
you'll not see my face anymore. And Joshua said, I'm going the
way of all the earth. And they buried him. They never
saw him again. And Israel went over Jordan without
their great prophet and shepherd. Never saw him again in this life. So this was painful. Pardon. Wasn't it? I thought too about
the apostles of our Lord. He told them something like this.
And he said, I go away. And where I go, you cannot follow
me. But then he made a statement
to them that said this, but you shall see me again and your heart
shall rejoice. You shall see me again. They
never saw Moses and never saw Joshua and they never saw Paul
again, but the Lord said I'm going away for a short while
and I'm going to return and you're going to see me again and your
hearts are going to rejoice. All God's children, We suffer
losses, don't we? Sometimes we have parents that
we love and we know what it is to lose one of them. We have
a spouse. We know people who have lost
their spouses and are still grieving over it. Maybe a child, a precious
child. Sometimes we have a hope a hope
of some temporal thing that we've nourished and brought up. And
boy, it's died. That hurts, too, doesn't it?
That's a loss, too, isn't it? Died never probably to be resurrected.
But Moses is going to tell the children of Israel something
here that's going to help them when their hearts are heavy over
the loss of Moses. And here's what he tells them
in verse 3. Look in verse 3. The Lord thy God, He will go
over before thee, and He will destroy those nations from before
thee. Now that's encouraging, isn't
it? Here's a promise. Moses, your great prophet, the
one you've depended upon, he's not going with you. You'll never
see his face again in this life. but the Lord your God, He will
go over before thee and destroy those nations, and you shall
possess them." How encouraging this must have been to these
people before they went through every battle. Can you imagine? I mean, they've got their spears
out, they've got their sword buckle on their side, they've
got their shield, and they're ready to go into battle. And
you know something that encouraged them? My God has already been
here. Ain't that wonderful just to
think about that? My God has already been here. And they could
face every enemy with that assurance. I don't think it's presumption.
And it wouldn't have been on their part to say this. God has
already defeated our enemy. Listen to how David said it in
Psalms chapter 44 and verse 2. He said, ìWe have heard with
our ears, O God, our fathers have told us what work thou did
in their days in the times of old.î And he talked about this
time. How thou didst drive out the
heathen with thy hand, and you planted your people in the land?
How thou didst afflict the people, and you cast them out? For they got not the land in
possession by their own sword, neither did their own hand save
them, but thy right hand and thy arm saved them." Moses said,
I'm not going. but God's going over before you.
He's going to face the enemy even before you get there, even
defeat them. What encouragement it is to us
to remember that our incarnate God, even Jesus, our forerunner,
has gone before us. He's endured every temptation.
In all points He was tempted like as we are. He faced persecutions
and trials and hardships and overcome them all. And He destroyed
him that had the power of death, that is the devil. And He even
destroyed the works of the devil on our behalf. Has He already
did that? The Bible says He's already did
that. He's already gone before us.
Here's what He's told His disciples. In this world you shall have
tribulation. But be of good cheer, I have
overcome the world." Before you ever made war against the world
and the world against you, Jesus Christ on your behalf had already
gone before you and overcame the world. In our sorrows, our
fears, our losses, our crosses, in all our battles, If you and
I will look closely, we'll see the footprints of our Savior,
that He's already been there. He's already waded the river
of death and made it shallow for us. We'll go through it,
but the reason we'll go through it is because He's went before
us and faced death on our behalf. and every child of God will ascend
up that hill to the celestial city because our forerunner has
entered that place on our behalf. He has indeed, our incarnate
God, gone on before us and has faced and has defeated our enemies. I don't know how this works,
I'll be honest with you, and I've told you this before. I
don't know how this works, but it does. by believing in the
Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, that He has gone before
us and bore our sins in His own body on the tree, and that He
died with those sins in His body, that He was buried and put those
sins away, and He has risen again for our justification and ascended
to the Father, and believing this It frees us from the dominion
and the condemnation and the rule of sin over us. I don't know how that works,
but it works. It works. Who is He that overcometh the
world and all that entails? What does it entail to overcome
the world? Man, that's a lot, ain't it?
Who is He that overcomes the world? Now this is what I call
the victorious life. I don't know what some people
call the victorious life. The victorious life to me is
not running around shouting hallelujah. The victorious life is overcoming
the world and sin and temptations and death and all other enemies. And who is he that overcometh
the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God,
who came into this world, and went before us, and defeated
all our enemies? It's the same with us, brothers
and sisters, like it was with them. The Lord God said, I'm
going before you. I'm going to fight your enemies
before you ever get to them. I'm going to fight them. And
wasn't that encouraging when they faced their enemies then
to say our God's already been here? Let me give you a good
example of that, and I think this is a perfect example. Hold
that passage there and look just over to your right in the next
book in Joshua chapter 2. In Joshua chapter 2, it's on
page 261. This is where Joshua was still
on the eastern banks of the Jordan River. He sent two spies over
to Jericho and to the land of Canaan. And they came to the
harlot Rahab's house. And she hid them upstairs from
the king's soldiers. And now she goes upstairs and
she is going to tell them how their enemies feel about them.
She is going to tell them the whole attitude of their enemies.
And I want you to look at this. This is very interesting. In
verse 8. And before they were laid down,
she went up unto them upon the roof. And this is Rahab the harp. She said unto the men, I know
that the Lord hath given you the land, and that your terror
is fallen upon us, and that all the inhabitants of the land faint
because of you. But we have heard how the Lord
dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out
of Egypt. And what you did unto the two
kings of the Amorites that were on the other side of the Jordan,
Sihon and Og, whom ye utterly destroyed, and as soon as we
heard these things, our hearts did melt, neither did there remain
any more courage in any man because of you. For the Lord your God,
He is God in heaven above and in the earth beneath." Now what
made them think this? What was it that melted their
heart and zapped their strength? We don't read that a single solitary
Israelite had went over there and preached to all these people.
I'll tell you what had happened. The Lord had been over there.
The Lord had opened up their hearts and they began to think
somebody's parted the Red Sea and they drowned in all of Pharaoh
and his army. And now they've come over here
and they were scared to death. And doesn't that tell us something
about our enemies? If you and I believed and understood
as we should, then we'd see that every enemy that we have to face,
at least most of them, are temptations. You face your temptations and
I'm telling you, they're trembling in their boots. The devil is scared half to death. You know he is. The Lord has
defeated him once and he's made him to know it. And now he's
scared to death every time he tries to attack us. He knows
when we believe that the Lord Jesus has already gone ahead
of us and defeated our foe, that makes our temptations melt before
us. That makes this world and all
of its trials and all of its losses lose all courage when
it comes against us because we earnestly believe that Christ
our Savior has gone ahead of us. He's faced the temptations
beforehand. He's already endured the persecutions
and the trials and the losses and the crosses. He's done it. He's already been there. The
next time you're tempted to sin and the temptation is powerful
or it's sudden or it's prolonged, just think about this. That enemy
really is shaken in his boots. He is shaken in his boots. Our
enemies are weak because our Lord has gone ahead of them.
It's the Lord thy God who will go before thee. He will go before
thee. Now look what else he says. Look
back over here in our text again in chapter 31. Look what he says
here. I remember there's another passage
of Scripture over in Isaiah 52. And this is what it says. This
is an amazing thing when we think about this. For ye shall not
go out with haste, nor go by flight, for the Lord your God
will go before you, and the Lord your God will be thy re-reward."
He's going to be behind you. The re-reward means He's coming
behind. He's bringing up the rear. So
we got the Lord that's gone before us, and we got Him coming behind
us. David said, Goodness and mercy
shall follow me, didn't he? all the days of my life. Isn't
it a wonderful thought that the Lord's gone before you and now
the Lord's behind you? His goodness and mercy is following
you all the days of your life. But there's one other thing here
that Moses mentions to the children of Israel. And look down in verse
6. Be strong and of a good courage,
fear not, nor be afraid of them, For the Lord thy God, He it is
that goeth with thee. He will not fail thee, nor forsake
thee." He got just a little bit ahead of himself, didn't he?
He has gone with you. He was before us, and now he
said he's gone with you. And that's why when the children
of Israel got ready to cross the Jordan River, those folks
were scared to death of their presence. It's the Lord who went
before them. and defeated their enemy, weakened
them. Then He turns and He says to them, I'm going with you.
I'm going with you. And buddy, when He's with us,
our enemies, whoever they are, they best tremble. He defeated
them in His own person to start with and now He's going to whip
them again in us. Greater is He that's in you. He's with you and He's in you.
And greater is He that's in you than He that's in the world.
They better fear, haven't they? You read Bunyan's Pilgrim Progress
of one time, Apollon attacked him, that ugly Apollon. And man,
he's getting the best of him, but Christians said he got to
noticing that Apollon kept looking behind him. And he kept wondering
what he was looking for. He said he was looking for his
heifer. He was looking for Christian's
heifer. He said he was fearful that the
Lord was going to show up for his help. And that He did. That
He did. The Lord will go with us. He's
before us, He's behind us, and He's with us. Can you ask any
more for that than that? The living God going before you.
the living God going with you, and the living God bringing up
the rear. We can't ask for any more than that, can we? How encouraging
that is, no matter what you've lost, no matter what temptation,
no matter what cross that you have to face. Convince yourself
of this, and we often have to do that. We have to just get
a verse of Scripture like this and look at it and look at it
until the Holy Spirit is pleased to grant us grace to believe
it. But to believe that our Lord has gone ahead of us, to believe
that He is behind us and to believe that He is with us, if we lived
by the faith of that, brothers and sisters, nothing would get
us down. No sickness, no trials, no persecutions, no afflictions,
nothing would get us down. And then He adds to this, He
adds to this, He will not fail thee, nor forsake thee. Now, if He forsook them, He felled
them, didn't He? If He didn't go in front of them
and before them, then He's really felled them. If He don't bring
up the rear, then He's felled them. If He isn't always with
them, then He's felled them. If He ever forsakes His children,
then He shall fell them. He'll never forsake His children.
He shall not fell. The Bible says in Isaiah 42,
4, He shall not fell nor be discouraged. Some people think, because God
does not save everybody, that He has failed. One man even made
this awful statement. He said, ìHell stands as a ghastly
monument to the utter failure of God.î Isnít that awful? Hell stands as the ghastly monument
to the utter failure of God. God has never failed. Some think
because He does not save everybody, He is a failure, because He is
trying, you see. A man quoted that passage of
Scripture where the Lord said, How often I would have taken
you under My wings as a hen does her brood, and you would not.
And he said, There is the failure. There is no failure in that.
The Lord Jesus laid down His terms of salvation and life eternal. And he says to them, you can
have me on my terms. And they said no. And he let
them have his way. And he destroyed them. But he
didn't fail. He has a purpose, doesn't he?
And he'll never fail in his purpose. He'll never fail to save one
of his little children. He'll never fail to save one
last believer. If he failed to save one believer,
just one, it wouldn't have to be a bunch. Just one believer. If he lost one believer, then
he fails, and therefore he is a failure. And he is not God
any longer, is he? And you know something else?
If he failed to bring judgment upon one ungodly person, then
he is a failure. He will save the righteous and
he will punish the wicked, and he will not fail and either of
those causes. He will not. He didn't save Sihon and Og and
those people. But He destroyed them. But He
saved Israel. And in both of those cases, He
was not a failure. You and I can both boldly say
this. If He fails to save one believer,
then He's not God. If he fails to judge and destroy
one single ungodly person, then he has failed as God. But He says here, He will be
with thee, and He will not fail thee, nor forsake thee. Now verse 7, and we will close
just by making a quick comment upon this. And Moses called unto
Joshua, and said unto him in the sight of all Israel, Be strong,
and of a good courage. For thou must go with this people
unto the land which the Lord hath sworn unto their fathers
to give them, and thou shalt cause them to inherit it." What
an example this man is to all of us. Did you notice when he
makes this statement, you don't get a sense of any bitterness
from this man at all. Wouldn't it have been easy to
be bitter? He bore these people as it was in His own bosom. For
40 years He bore with their manners. And now He's come to the border
of the land of promise. And the Lord says, You can't
go over. Here you stop. And He has no bitterness about
it. He's perfectly content. He's perfectly submissive to
the Lord's will. Lord, Your will be done. Wouldn't
you love to have such a submissive attitude as that? The Bible says
of all the people of the earth, there was no more humble, a meek
man as this man Moses. The Lord give us grace to that.
And I'll tell you something else we see about this man. There's
no jealousy in him. No jealousy at all. This young
Joshua was raised up under Moses. And here he takes Moses' place.
And what does Moses say? Be strong, young man. Be of good
courage, young man. The Lord is going to take you
and use you to lead this people, this great nation, into the land
of promise. No jealousy, no envy whatsoever. Joshua came to Moses one time
when some people were preaching. The Spirit of the Lord came upon
them and they began to preach. And Joshua came and said, Moses,
stop them. And Moses said, Why? Are you
jealous for my sake? Do you think I'm jealous because
God's men are preaching? He said, I wish all God's men
were preaching. I wish all God's children could
prophesy. We've got no reason to be jealous,
have we? Larry's not jealous of Wayne, and Wayne's not jealous
of Larry, and nobody's jealous of me, and I'm jealous of nobody.
It's the Lord's work, isn't it? As long as His name is exalted,
we bless Him for it. We bless Him. I hope that was
a help and a blessing to you. We'll pick up there in verse
8 in our next study.