Faithfully Sovereign

Passage Introduction

Turn in your copy of Scripture to the book of Deuteronomy chapter 2. Our text for this morning will be Deuteronomy 2:1-23.

Our passage for today carries us into the next portion of Moses’s history lesson with which he opens his address to the people of Israel as they prepare to enter and conquer the promised land, according to God’s command and promise. Last time we saw Moses’s reminding the people of their parents’ failure to believe God, and what it had cost them. Now Moses jumps over about 40 years of history, because this history lesson is highly selective! And now, having built the negative case against doubting God, he begins building a positive case for trusting him.

Let’s pray for the Spirit’s help to see and understand how he does that.

Sermon Introduction

What does it take to be a trustworthy person?

You could answer that question simply by saying, “Keep your promises.” But I think we can go one level deeper. Because there are, I think, two major things that can contribute to your being someone who does not keep your promises. On the one hand, you could be in the habit of making promises that don’t intend to keep, or that you may have intended to keep in the moment but then you change your mind about because you’re rather fickle. On the other hand, maybe you never make promises and then change or mind, or that you never meant to keep in the first place, but you have a bad habit of making promises that you just can’t keep, or at least can’t guarantee. But if you’re someone who always means what you say without wavering from it, and someone who only promises things you’re able to do, and if you’ve proven that by the way you’ve lived, well then, I can know that you are someone worth trusting!

The Bible has much to teach you about God, but one of the main lessons that God is driving home throughout the whole Bible is that basic lesson that he is a God worth trusting. And in order to teach you that lesson, countless stories of God’s faithfulness to keep his promises, and countless stories of his sovereign power by why he is able to do anything, are recorded for you in Scripture.

And what Moses recounts here is getting at both of those truths about God—just in a way you might not have predicted! But that is Moses’s main point, that God is worth trusting, because he is both willing and able to keep his promises to you. Trust that God really is willing and able to keep his promises.

We’ll consider each piece of that in turn, God’s willingness and God’s ability, and see how it emerges from our text.

I. God is faithful.

When it comes to God’s willingness to fulfill his promise, that is here shown to you in light of God’s faithfulness. God is willing to keep his promise, because he is a faithful God. And what Moses tells you makes that clear in a number of ways.

Probably the clearest way you see that here is with regard to God’s ongoing care for Israel. You see that in the way this passage opens, with the LORD telling the people they’ve spent enough time in the wilderness of the hill country—now it’s time to turn north once again, north toward Canaan, so that God can finally fulfill his promise to them! And then of course, you also see it when Moses reminds the people how God has prospered them, even in the wilderness, such that it should be no big deal to them to have to pay for food and drink as they travel through the territory of Esau’s descendants (whom I’m going to call Edomites for the most part, because that’s the other way the Bible refers to them, and that’s simpler!). God has done more than merely preserve his people; he has abundantly supplied them! This ongoing, abundant care is just astounding, given Israel’s rebellion the first time they went to Kadesh-barnea, and given the numerous times they’ve rebelled against God since then, even recently, as you find out in the book of Numbers!

But really, that’s not what’s most prominent in these accounts, or common to all three of them. The focus is on God’s dealings with three other nations. And what Moses has to say highlights God’s faithfulness in a rather surprising way, because it is faithfulness to the Edomites, the Moabites and the Ammonites.

As Israel passes near the territory of each of these three peoples, God tells them not to bother them, not to provoke them to war. Why? Verse 5, “For I will not give you any of their land, not even a foot of it, because I have given Esau the hill country of Seir as his possession.” Verse 9, “For I will not give you any of their land as a possession, since I have given Ar as a possession to the descendants of Lot.” And verse 19, “For I will not give you any of the Ammonites’ land as a possession; I have given it as a possession to the descendants of Lot.” You see, whether or not God had made any explicit promises to the Edomites, the Moabites, and the Ammonites, the fact is that he gave them their land, had at least implicitly promised it to them, and he had no intentions of reneging, even on such an implicit promise.

In this vein, it’s also worth considering who these nations were. For one thing, each of them is of rather … unsavory parentage. Esau is not a positive figure in Genesis, or the rest of the Bible. Remember that God says, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.” He’s a violent man who thought little enough of the inheritance of what God had promised that he sold his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of soup. And more directly relevant to his descendants, two of his three wives were pagan Hittites. As for the Moabites and Ammonites, well, we read about their forefathers a few weeks ago, each conceived by the unholy union of Lot and his daughters.

Can you imagine why it might comfort the Israelites of the present generation to know that God has dealt well with these three nations in spite of their sinful parents? After all, they’re only one generation removed from the people who rebelled against God’s command because they failed to trust him, only one generation removed from the people against whom God set his wrath, to make sure they died in the wilderness.

But on the more positive side, these nations have another thing in common: they are all related to God’s covenant people, however distantly. The Edomites are descended from Abraham, too, and Moses seems to emphasize that they are Israel’s brothers. And even the Moabites and Ammonites are descended from Abraham's nephew, Lot, who also experienced God’s favor to a degree by virtue of his relation to Abraham, which has extended to generations of his descendants. And what Israel is supposed to see in all this is that, if God can show such favor even to those on the fringes of his covenant, how much more will be remain faithful to those who are the heirs of the covenant and its promises!

You see, when you put all of this together, it shows you just how perfectly faithful God really is. He is abundantly faithful, doing far more to fulfill his promises than what seems strictly necessary. He is graciously faithful, keeping his promises not because he somehow has too—especially since he never had to make the promises in the first place! He keeps his promises because that’s what he delights to do, and he does it even in spite of your sin, even in spite of great sin, if you are forgiven in Christ! God is faithful even when you are faithless! And God is also exhaustively faithful. His faithfulness extends even to those who have not directly received an explicit promise—which surely tells you that he takes special care to keep those promises he has explicitly made.

And that’s still the kind of God he is! He’s never changes! You know, this makes me think also of what God said after the Great Flood. He established a covenant with Noah, but really not just Noah, with all of creation, that he would not destroy creation again by such a flood. And when you consider all redemptive history, God’s working to save his people, you realize that the primary purpose of that covenant was to preserve alive a people for God to save, and a creation-stage on which to save them. But all people since Noah’s day have benefited from that covenant, and many have benefited abundantly, especially in our day! I mean, God doesn’t have to so bless the earth, or to keep so many rebellious people alive, but he does!

And when you think of how abundant, gracious, and exhaustive God’s faithfulness is, how much more ought you who are in Christ to expect God to be good and faithful to you? To lavish the riches of his grace upon you, to meet your every need, to carry you through every trial, to forgive your every sin for Christ’s sake, to work unceasingly to eradicate every sin in you? How confident ought that to make you in the face of every difficult obedience to which God calls you? How willing ought you to be to take a risk for Christ? How trusting ought you to be in the midst of every trial?

II. God is sovereign.

But of course, all that is only true if God is more than just faithful; being willing to keep his promises does little good if he’s not able to keep his promises. Thankfully, God is as able as he is willing. That is, he is most able, and the events that Moses here accounts show that to you by showing you God's sovereign power. You can know that God is able to keep his promises because of God's sovereign power.

For one thing, you God’s sovereignty here in the fact that he is clearly presented as Lord of all nations. The ancient pagans tended to think of the various gods as fairly provincial deities. Each nation had its own god or gods that hardly concerned themselves with other nations, except in war. But the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is no provincial God. He is the sovereign Lord of all people everywhere, because he is the creator of all people everywhere.

And that is why he is the one who has assigned a homeland to the Edomites, the Moabites, and the Ammonites. He is the God who raises nations up, and the God who brings them down. Just as he established boundaries for the sea, and said to it, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther,” so has he done for the nations—all the nations. And yes, Edom and Moab and Amman have some connection to God and his covenant, even if a very loose one, but in assigning them their place he had to drive other nations out. Plus, at the end of our passage you get this seemingly random note about the Caphtorim, a more ancient name for the Philistines, and though Moses does not directly say that God assigned them their place and drove out the original inhabitants, that is heavily implied by the context—they, too, inhabit their land only because God has granted it to them.

But God’s sovereign power is shown a still more vivid way, when you look carefully at what God did to settle these peoples in their territories—it’s exactly what he’s promised to do for Israel. He drove out the original inhabitants. It doesn’t say God drove them out, but it does say that God gave them their lands, so you do the math! For the Edomites, he completely destroyed the Horites, just as he would do for Israel to the Canaanites. And what kind of people did he drive out before the Moabites and the Ammonites? The Emim and the Zamzummim, both of whom are said to be like the Anakim—that is, they were all giants.

Remember, it was because the Anakim were in the land that the Israelites were so afraid to obey God and conquer Canaan 40 years ago. “We were like grasshoppers in their eyes,” they said. So what is Moses telling Israel now? “God always fulfills his purposes, giants or no giants.” After all, he’s the Creator of the giants, so he can do to them as he pleases; it’s a small matter to such a mighty God! He’s dealt with them before, for Gentiles. There’s no question that he can and will do it for his own people!

On the one hand, it’s strange that Israel needs to be reminded of this yet again. I mean, they’ve seen the power by which God can do this; some of them, surely, are old enough to have been there when God wiped out an entire army by bringing a whole sea crashing down on them. And they’ve all seen God in his glory cloud and pillar of fire! Why do they need to be told of how God has dealt with other nations, with outsiders, to be reminded of God’s power?

On the other hand, this isn’t terribly surprising. Israel is prone to forget. You saw that last week. They forgot all that God had done for them, and so they didn’t trust him to deliver the land to them, as he had promised. And then there’s the fact that, as strange as it may sound, sometimes you just kinda get used to the way God works with you, and with the stories you’ve heard time and time again, and so even though personal experience should be the most powerful thing, the most powerful memories, sometimes you need something a little, unusual, to really bring home to you the full reality of God’s power.

But perhaps even more than those things, don’t forget that God has called Israel to something hard! He’s calling them to eradicate nations far stronger than they are! He’s calling them to keep trusting and obeying him their whole lives, and then, as a nation, for generations to come! From a human perspective, God is calling them to impossible things! So really, Israel could use as much reassurance as they can get!

And as I’ve said before, the situation isn’t all that different for you and me! God has called us in Christ to a difficult life. “In this world you will have trouble,” Jesus said. That’s not just because this world is broken, but because the world, and the one in power over it, hate you for Jesus’s sake, and are set against you, and you are called to a life a sacrifice and service while you withstand the world, keep trusting God and striving to obey him more and more, and do your part to accomplish the mission of the church, the Great Commission, to make disciples of all nations. And so you need all the reassurance you can get, that God is able to carry you safely through everything and fulfill all his promises to you.

Speaking of the Great Commission, do you remember how Christ actually begins it? “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” Jesus Christ is that same God who was, and is, Lord of all nations, Lord of all in heaven and on earth and under the earth. You need to know that, and to believe it! You need to remember than anything that happens to you while you are in his service happens under his watchful eye! He won’t let you drown, no matter how high the floodwaters rise around you. He won’t call you to bear or to suffer anything he can’t handle, and bring you through. And whatever he’s bringing you through, you can bet that he’s brought others through it before. And all that is true whether we’re talking about sacrifice, persecution, or even just “ordinary” suffering.

Conclusion

Dear Christian, you serve a God who is worth trusting. Do believe that? Does your life show that you believe that God only makes promises he intends to keep, and never changes his mind about them? Does it show that you believe that God is perfectly capable of doing whatever he has purposed to do, that nothing can stand in his way? Do you believe that the Jesus who saved you, who gave himself for you and who now prays for you at God’s right hand, is that same faithfully sovereign God?

Let us pray that we really would believe those things, more and more.