Well, as you remember from last week, the children of Israel were to stand once they got over the Jordan River and stand on these two mountains, a representative from the tribe stand on these two mountains that were close to each other, Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim, which is in the heart of the land. In the valley, which is down below in the area of Shechem or Samaria, and the Levites would be there, the priests. And the people would say, "Amen," to the blessings and to the cursings. "You'll be blessed if you do this and then you'll be cursed if you don't do these things." We left off with really the blessings. It was a good way to end it last week, and unfortunately we pick up with all of the cursings in verse 15 of chapter 28.

But let me draw your attention to verse 9, "The Lord will establish you as a holy people to himself, just as he swore to you, if you keep the commandments of the Lord your God and you walk in his ways. Then all peoples of the earth shall see that you are called by the name of the Lord, and they shall be afraid of you." They were to be a special people set apart for God, called by him, representing him. The name---I'm trying to figure out how I want to get into this---in verse 9, "The Lord," and then again, "the commandments of the Lord your God," and then in verse 10, "the name of the Lord," is a Hebrew tetragrammaton. It means it's got four letters in it. Let me show you what I mean: four letters called the Hebrew tetragrammaton, four consonants. We would translate it Y-H-V-H/YHVH.

It's Hebrew though, it was written from right to left, so it would be yod, hey, vav, hey. And it would be pronounced---we don't know, either Yahweh, Yahveh, Yehvah, Yehovah, whatever. The reason we don't know is because they would often when they came to this name simply say, "the Name" or they would say "Adonai," another term. They wouldn't say God's name that he gave at Mount Sinai, because the Jews thought the name of God was too sacred. Now there's a lot of people who make a huge issue out of God's name Jehovah or Yahweh. This morning I had a knock on my door. I thought it was just a neighbor kid. I was studying and I opened the door and it was two nicely dressed adults [laughter] with Bibles. Great.

So she opened up her Bible and she started quoting, you know, "These are the last days and people will be lovers of money and haters of God and lovers of pleasure," da, da, da, da. And I've had a little experience with them before, and I knew how they introduced the spiel. and how they go through it Scripture to Scripture. And so she said, "What do you think about that?" I said, "So far I agree with you." "Oh, uh, and do you have a religious background?" I said, "Well, [laughter] I do believe in Jesus Christ." "We believe in Jesus Christ." I said, "I know that you believe in Jesus Christ, but I think we believe differently about Jesus Christ. You see, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God"---"We believe Jesus is the Son of God." "---and God the Son, the second person of the Trinity."

"Well, that's where we have a difference," she said. I said, "I know we have a difference there." And they are Jehovah's Faithful Witnesses they call themselves. So I said, "Now, just a minute. Let me get my Bible." And as soon as I said that there was one young gal with the older one and the older one signaled to her friends across the street, because, I don't know, to get some of the---as soon as I said "get my Bible," they thought, "Uh-oh, we better get somebody else here." So they doubled up on the troops and [laughter] sent this young girl who was in training with the others, not to be a part of it. She was definitely being mentored or trained on how to do this door-to-door evangelism. So I got my Greek New Testament and I said, "Turn to John, chapter 1. That's a good place to start."

And so she turned to John 1 and I started kind of explaining it. And she said, "Okay, now in the Greek . . . ," and she started telling me the Greek. And so I opened up my Greek New Testament, not to intimidate her, but I wanted to show her what I knew she was going to say and why it was wrong. So she kept saying, "The Greek says . . . ," and "The Greek this . . . ." So I opened up my Greek New Testament and I said, "Well, then read that." She said, "Well, it's Greek. [laughter] I can't read Greek." I said, "Well, I can read Greek." I'm not a Greek expert, I'm not a scholar, but we read John 1 [reads in the Greek]. And she said, "Well, theos, or God is without the article and any time a noun in Greek is without the article, it's an adjective."

I said, "I don't know where you learned that, but that's very wrong. When it's without the article, it gives emphasis as the subject rather than as the object. And you can't be any clearer. What John is saying literally is 'God was the Word,' rather than the Word was God. 'God was the Word.' 'In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and theos, God, was the Word.' " And she said, "You've had this conversation before, haven't you with Witnesses?" [laughter] I said, "Well, yes, I have. And I appreciate your zeal, but when you, in the name of God, go from door to door and say things that are that wrong about Jesus Christ, you know, my antennas go up. And I'd love to talk to you about it." And she said, "Well, rather than bantering us Jehovah's Witnesses"---I said, "Now wait a minute, you knocked on my door. [laughter]

"And I haven't raised my voice. I haven't been mean with you. You brought up questions and I've answered your questions in a very intelligent manner. And I'll discuss and I'll keep discussing these things with you." "Well, now turn to Acts 8. Well, now turn to . . . ," you know, and she wanted he to turn. And I said, "Before we turn to any other passages of Scripture, since you bring up a text, let's understand what that text means. Anybody can go text hopping and find what certain things---put a spin on them and try to lead me along into a mode of thinking. I know you could---anybody could do that. When you bring up a text, let's deal with it in language and in context." Well, she was getting a little frustrated and she said, "Well, you know that God's name is Jehovah."

I said, "Well, not really. [laughter] I said his name may be Jehovah or it could be Yahweh or Yahveh," you know, I went through the tetragrammaton. Well, she was quickly trying to wrap up her Bible and say, "Good day," but she'd say, "Now why do you guys make such a big deal about the name of Jesus?" I said, "Well, again, I didn't bring it up, you came out of the blue saying, 'The name is Jehovah, not anything else but Jehovah, and you should always call him Jehovah,' and now you're saying, 'Why make a big deal about the name?' You just made a big deal about his name." It was an interesting conversation. The truth is, how you pronounce the name is unimportant. The Jews didn't give us the pronunciation. We have the tetragrammaton.

We don't exactly know how they pronounced it; probably it was Yahweh. That was probably how it was to be pronounced. But, again, it was ineffable. They thought that they were unworthy to say it. But what God is saying is this: "I am God. How you pronounce my name is irrelevant. I want you to be a people that reflect my name and my glory to all the earth. That is the real issue, that you will be known as a people of my name." " 'That all peoples' " verse 10, " 'shall see that you are called by the name of the Lord, and they shall be afraid of you.' " So blessing upon blessing upon blessing to those who not only have the Word, have the law, quote the law, quote the Word, but do it, obey him. As Jesus said, "If you love me, you'll keep my commandments."

And so the blessings were enumerated and after each blessing the people would say, "Amen." And then in verse 15 we have now the curses on those who are disobedient. Before we jump right in and continue in chapter 28, I want to give you just a little bit of where we are. We're at an important part. There's a transition about to take place. Chapter 28 ends one of Moses' speeches. Basically, Deuteronomy is a series of four talks that Moses has with the new generation on the plains of Moab, and he covers their past, their present, and their future. And so on the plains of Moab there was the first speech in chapters 1 through 4. The past is covered: "This is who you are in relationship to what God has done for us in the past."

And then there was a second speech, you remember, from chapters 5 through 26. The salient points of the law were given: "This is what God expects Israel to do in the present. This is the covenant that I have established with you in the present." The third speech, we're currently in that, chapters 27 and 28, is what God will do for Israel in the future upon their obedience or upon their disobedience; or I should say when they disobey, not if. God, in fact, in chapter 28 predicts their disobedience. And then, finally---and we may get into it tonight, sneak in a verse or two---the fourth speech: what God can do for Israel through his covenant, what God can do through his covenant as a covenant is given in a summary form in chapter 29 and chapter 30.

You're going to notice something as we go beginning in verse 15 to the end of the chapter that, first of all, the curses are four times longer than the blessings. That's not a good sign. It's not a good sign because as we move into this chapter, God isn't fond of giving negatives, giving the curses. The reason it's four times as long is we're entering into prophecy. God is anticipating that his people will fail. God understands them. He understands they are flesh. He understands they are weak. He understands that they will fail. He understands that they will flatly disobey, turn from him, and even follow after other gods. And he is warning them of the trouble that this will get them in. At first it sounds like God is just saying, "If you do this, if you do this, if you do this, this is what's going to happen."

But then some amazing, gory details are given of their future as if to anticipate, "Wow! This is really going to happen. It's not just a possibility, it is a reality." It is interesting to me how whenever we deal with Scripture, we're dealing with---well, it's a divine document. I know that's a gross understatement, but because God is God, he can write history in advance. That's what prophecy is. He will predict the future in graphic detail as if it has already happened. It's as accurate as if it already has happened and you're writing about it after the fact. One of God's calling cards is predictive prophecy. One-third of the Bible is prophetic. It has to do with prophecies about nations, about the nation of Israel, about individuals, about captivity, about Jesus Christ---a third is prophetic.

It is God's calling card that would set him apart from every other God, false God. There is no other true God and all other gods are false gods. And so in Isaiah, chapter 46, God plainly declares without apology, "I am God, and besides me there is no other; there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that will take place." It's God's calling card. And so much prophecy is about Jesus Christ. We've seen in the book of Revelation, chapter 19, that "the testimony of Jesus is the Spirit of prophecy." And there's incredible, in this chapter, predictions of what will happen when the Babylonians come in, the Assyrians come in, the Romans come in, the siege that will take place around the cities of Judah and Samaria, and God will predict what will happen when they disobey him.

The reason God gives prophecy is not only to warn, but so that when it happens, we'll remember, "Wow! God told us this before it happened. He is God!" And that will wake you up to turn back to God so that he can restore you and bring you back to a place of blessing, that you'll know it was God who has spoken. Dr. A. Cressy Morrison who was a professor of the New York Academy of Sciences gave a little experiment one evening to an audience. He said, with ten pennies in his right pocket, "Suppose that I could mark these ten pennies one through ten, put them in my pocket, take my hands out, and then I'd make a prediction to you as the audience. I would say, 'I am about to reach my hand in and select penny marked one.'

"The odds would be one in ten that I couldn't do it. If I reached in, did it, put it down, and you all applauded, it's a great, great thing I could do. And then I say, 'Ladies and gentlemen, now I'm going to reach in my pocket and select penny number two, marked number two.' Now any odds decrease exponentially to one in a hundred. And thus it goes till you get to somewhere close to one in ten million. If I could sequentially select pennies one, two, three, four, five, all the way to ten," Dr. Morrison said, "if I pull that off and amazed you as my audience, your first inclination would be that it's a trick. You'd say, 'He did something. He put a little marking on each one so he could feel it. The game is somehow fixed.' "

The idea when God fulfills prophecy is that when that things start coming to pass that God predicted, that we might say, "H'm, I think the game is fixed," in the sense that we're dealing with a Being who knows what will happen before it happens, who has foreknowledge and foresight and can speak what will happen before we even know what's going to happen, before we're born. And so God told Abraham, "You and your descendants will be in a foreign land captive for four hundred years." They went down to Egypt for four hundred years and came out. The Babylonian captivity was predicted for seventy years; after seventy years they returned.

The name of Cyrus was written about by Isaiah the prophet two hundred and some-odd years before Cyrus was even born on the earth, so that we might go, "The game is fixed. God is God!" And so there's a tremendous example of this in chapter 28 of Deuteronomy, but not a good transition after lots of blessings. " 'It shall come to pass, if you do not obey the voice of the Lord your God, to observe carefully all of his commandments and his statutes which I command you today, that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you: Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the country.' " You see how that's the flip side of the coin that we read last week: "If you obey, blessed shall you be in the country, and blessed shall you be in the city."

" 'Cursed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. Cursed shall be the fruit of your body and the produce of your land, the increase of your cattle and the offspring of your flocks. Cursed shall you be when you come in, and cursed shall you because when you go out. The Lord will send on you cursing, confusion, and rebuke in the all that you set your hand to do, until you are destroyed and until you perish quickly, because of the wickedness of your doings in which you have forsaken me." Now the two words that are important to note: "destroyed" and "perish"; shamad and abad in Hebrew. It doesn't mean that you will be obliterated or annihilated, but that you will be crushed. The terminology is used in reference to that generation occupying the land at that period of time.

"If you blow it, that generation will perish," in terms of their relationship to the land, and we will see that happen. The generation that forsakes God will eventually be taken captive, be taken out of the land. The covenant will be wavering at that point, because the law---remember the law of Moses?---is a conditional covenant. The tenure of occupying the land is conditional. The land itself is an unconditional covenant. So, eventually, they'll come back and occupy the land. But the generation that sins, God pronounces a curse on them. " 'The Lord will make the plague cling to you until he has consumed you from the land which you are going to possess. The Lord will strike you with consumption, with fever, with inflammation, with severe burning fever, with the sword, with scorching, and with mildew' "---ugh! [laughter]---" 'they shall pursue you until you perish.

" 'And your heavens which are over your head shall be bronze, the earth which is under you shall be iron,' " speaking of famine conditions, no rain, no fertility in the soil. " 'The Lord will change the rain of your land to powder and dust; from the heaven it shall come down on you until you are destroyed. The Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies; and you shall go out one way against them and flee seven ways before them; and you shall become troublesome to all the kingdoms of the earth.' " In one sense that little sentence in a nutshell has been the history of the relationship of the Jews to the people around them, "troublesome."

Nations that have attacked Israel in the past---be it Babylon or Assyria or Antiochus Epiphanes and the Syrian troops or Rome or Alexander and the Greeks---all noticed that the Jewish nation was the most stubborn group of people they had to contend with. You see, usually when the Greeks would come in and overtake the land, they come in with such might or the Romans would come in with such a better program for the land, for taxation, building roads, providing benefits for the people, that the people would love Rome to conquer them. "Sure, take us over, man. We want all of your benefits." Some would even willingly ask Rome to be subject: "We want to be subjugated by you, O Rome." But every nation that came to assimilate the Jews into their culture met severe opposition.

The Jews were stubborn. They would always say, "All of your gods are pagan. We don't like your images in our land. We worship Jehovah or Yahweh, God, singularly. We will not worship any of your pagan gods and we will not be involved in any of your practices." So it created a little bit of trouble. Now it's interesting if you look at Israel today, what a precarious position. You've got a nation surrounded on all sides, except the Mediterranean, which is the place all of the people would love to push the Jews. You've got a nation surrounded by enemies. On any of their borders you've got other people who would love to see their destruction, their annihilation, and yet they exist very profitably, and in an advanced culture they exist. They're troublesome. What are the headlines almost daily somewhere in any newspaper about Israel?

It's interesting that populationwise Israel is about one three-hundredth the size of China. And, yet, it has thirty times the amount of headlines given to it than China. Let's peek ahead for just a moment. Go to Zechariah, chapter 12. Keep that verse tucked in the folds of your gray matter for just a moment; Zechariah, chapter 12. " 'You shall become troublesome to the kingdoms of the earth.' " We know that in the last days they will not only become troublesome, but that God will make it so for his purpose. Zechariah, chapter 12, "The burden of the word of the Lord against Israel. Thus says the Lord, who stretches out the heavens, lays the foundation of the earth, forms the spirit of man within him: 'Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of drunkenness to all the surrounding peoples, when they lay siege against Judah and Jerusalem.

"And it shall happen in that day that I will make Jerusalem a very heavy stone for all peoples; all who would heave it away will surely be cut in pieces, though all of the nations of the earth are gathered against it. In that day,' says the Lord, 'I will strike every horse with confusion, and its rider with madness; I will open my eyes on the house of Judah, and will strike every horse of the peoples with blindness.' " Look at verse 8. " 'In that day the Lord will defend the inhabitants of Jerusalem; the one who is feeble among them in that day shall be like David, and the house of David shall be like God, like the Angel of the Lord before them. It shall be in that day that I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem.' "

Further on in chapter 14 of Zechariah, "Behold, the day of the Lord is coming, and your spoil will be divided in your midst. For I will gather all the nations to battle against Jerusalem; the city shall be taken, the houses rifled, and the woman ravished. Half the city shall go into captivity, but the remnant of the people shall not be cut out of from the city. Then the Lord will go for and fight against those nations, as we fights in the day of battle. And in that day his feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, which faces Jerusalem on the east. And the Mount of Olives shall be split in two, from east to west, making a very large valley; half the mountain shall move toward the north and half toward the south. Then you shall flee through my mountain valley, for the mountain valley shall reach to Azal. Yes, you shall flee as you fled from the earthquake."

Now, we studied the book of Revelation and we saw how the nations of the world will come against Jerusalem and Jesus Christ will return and put his feet on the Mount of Olives. A week and a half ago I stood on Mount Zion overlooking the Kidron Valley, the Temple Mount on the left, the Mount of Olives right in front to the right. And I thought of this whole scenario in my mind's eye what it would be like to see Jesus putting his footprint on that mountain, watching it split in two, and all of the nations who have made a conspiracy against Jerusalem in the last days to be confounded as Jesus returns to set up his kingdom. But here's a seed thought for you back now in Deuteronomy. " 'You shall become troublesome to all the kingdoms of the earth.' "

Now that's part of a cursing that seems to hound them throughout history, but in the end it will become a blessing, because just as all the nations are ready to annihilate it, that's when their Messiah will return. So, I get really excited when I start reading about headlines in the Middle East and the frustration with the peace talks. Not that I'm excited that there's no peace, don't get me wrong. I pray for the peace of Jerusalem. I want there to be issues settled. But I see the day approaching as I see men frustrated, unable to make peace in that region, and the wires getting thinner every day. And Jesus said, "When you start to see these things, look up, your redemption draws near." So that which is predicted as a curse eventually will turn even in their favor in the end of days.

" 'Your carcasses [plural] shall be food for all the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth, and no one shall frighten them away. The Lord will strike you with the boils of Egypt, with tumors, with the scab, and with the itch, from which you cannot be healed.' " There were prominent diseases in Egypt. God promises that those diseases that God heretofore protected them from, that they'll be subject to them. Epithelioma was one, elephantiasis was another one, severe symptoms accompanied them. Dysentery was another one. " 'The Lord will strike you with madness and blindness and confusion of heart.' " Now that verse has gotten scholars thinking what could it possibility mean when it talks about madness and blindness, because those are symptoms---especially when there was no antibiotic, no treatment---that described syphilis.

Now, we know that syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease, and, perhaps, scholars think, this is a prediction of the outcome of Israel who will get involved in the sexual fertility cults of the nations around them. There was a worship of Baal as we mentioned last week. Here's a depiction of this little god. They looked at this little image while they were having sexual intercourse with prostitutes or male prostitutes and they would be praying to this image, saying, "O Baal, even as fertility is taking place right now between us, will you be faithful to bring fertility to my family, my crops, my land, my animals?" And because of the promiscuity involved in the worship system of the Baals and the Ashtoreths, syphilis was rampant among them.

" 'And you shall grope at noonday, as a blind man gropes in darkness; you shall not prosper in your ways; you shall be only oppressed and plundered continually, and no one shall save you. You shall betroth a wife, but another man shall lie with her; and you shall build a house, but you shall not dwell in it; you shall plant a vineyard, but you shall not gather its grapes. Your ox shall be slaughtered before your eyes, but you shall not eat of it; your donkey shall be violently taken away from before you, and shall not be restored to you; your sheep shall be given to your enemies, and you shall have no one to rescue them. Your sons and your daughters shall be given to another people, and your eyes shall look and fail with longing for them all day long; and there shall be no strength in your hand.

" 'A nation whom you have not known' "---that would be a nation other than the ones directly around them---" 'shall eat the fruit of your land and the produce of your labor, and you shall be only oppressed and crushed continually. So you shall be driven mad because of the sight which your eyes shall see.' " This literally happened. The last king of Judah was named Zedekiah, and a horrible thing happened to King Zedekiah. He was captured by the Babylonians, tied up, Zedekiah's sons were brought before him and were killed before his eyes. Imagine a father watching his own sons die a torturous death at the hands of his enemies. And after his sons were put to death, then they took Zedekiah's eyes, this is under Nebuchadnezzar, and put out Zedekiah's eyes, so that the last image that would be in his mind would be that of the death of his sons.

Then he was led blind into captivity always remembering that the last sight he saw was his enemies, the Babylonians, killing his sons before taking him captive. " 'The Lord will strike you in the knees and on the legs with severe boils which cannot be healed, from the sole of your foot to the top of your head. The Lord will bring you and the king whom you set over you to a nation which neither you nor your fathers have known, and there you will serve other gods---wood and stone.' " Now the Babylonians came and took them captive. The Assyrians took the northern kingdom captive several years before that in 722 BC. The Romans did the same thing. Verse 37, " 'You shall become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword among all the nations where the Lord your God will drive you.' "

The curse would be so bad that as a people group God is saying, "You'll be a saying. You'll be a term of derision." I find it interesting that there are people who have in their hearts a hatred, an animosity toward Jewish people. You know, if you ask them why, they couldn't give you a good reason. They really don't have a good reason, they just---they just don't like Jews, a deep-seated anti-Semitism. I believe it is part of the result of disobedience, but more than that I really believe it's part of the enemy, because God does have a plan for the nation of Israel in the future. The thirtieth chapter bears out their restoration. And anything that God loves and has a plan or covenant with or for Satan will attack, and I believe anti-Semitism comes from the pit of hell.

And people will say, "Dirty Jew." Or they'll use it in a slang: "What, are you trying to Jew me of this?" as a term of derision, of scorn. It's become a reputation, very sad. " 'You shall carry much seed out to the field and gather little in, for the locust shall consume it. You shall plant vineyards and tend them, but you shall neither drink of the wine nor gather the grapes; for the worms shall eat them.' " A lot of curses, aren't there? " 'You shall have olive trees throughout all of your territory, but you shall not anoint yourself with oil; for your olives shall drop off. You shall beget sons and daughters, but they shall not be yours; for they shall go into captivity. Locusts shall consume all your trees and the produce of your land.

" 'The alien' "---this is not outer space, Roswell types. Don't start thinking, "Oh, there's . . ." No. That's aliens that are going to land in Israel. [laughter] " 'The alien who is among you shall rise higher and higher above you, and you shall come down lower and lower. He shall lend to you, but you shall not lend to him; he shall be the head, and you shall be the tail. Moreover all these curses shall come upon you and pursue and overtake you, until you are destroyed, because you did not obey the voice of the Lord your God, to keep his commandments and his statutes which he commanded you. And they shall be upon you for a sign and a wonder, and on your descendants forever. Because you did not serve the Lord your God with joy and gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things.' "

Now, wouldn't you think that all of the blessings that God had given to them in the past, the promises God had for them of blessing in the present, once they're in the land, they've crossed over the Jordan, they're inheriting it, they're enjoying all of the produce, that all of that blessing would cause their hearts to move toward obedience? Wouldn't you think that they would say, "God, you've been so good, I can't help but serve you and love you even more"? However, when you are in a place of abundance, it's sometimes more dangerous. In fact, I think it's almost more dangerous than when you don't have that, when there isn't abundance, when there's lacking and you just have to trust and cling to God.

You come to a place of abundance and things get a little bit easier now and you sort of rest in your laurels and you start forgetting the God who gave you those things. It's a danger. And then you start looking back and rewriting your history, revising your own history. Now, I really do see a parallel between ancient Israel and modern America in the sense that when our forefathers landed on this country on Plymouth Rock, they didn't have free enterprise running through their veins. It wasn't all done in the name of free enterprise, but in the name of freedom from the dictates of the state, so that they could worship God according to what they felt God put in their heart. They wanted to serve God without the state intervening like they had back in England.

And there was a struggle, but even people from England and France like Alexis de Tocqueville and G. K. Chesterton who visited our country---G. K. Chesterton noted in one of his famous papers about America, he said, "America is the only nation on earth founded on a creed. And that creed is clearly and theologically set out in their Declaration of Independence." And he was referring to the second paragraph: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that are among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Now, in our abundance we're rewriting history. The pen of the revisionists is changing that which this nation is founded on and saying, "It's because it was founded on free enterprise."

The great god of mammon has done this, and moving us to a mind-set of secular humanism rather than spirituality that this nation was really founded on. So God is predicting: "Rather than serving the Lord your God for the abundance of all these things, you didn't serve him." " 'Therefore you shall serve your enemies, whom the Lord will send against you, in hunger, in thirst, in nakedness, and in need of all things; and he will put a yoke of iron on your neck until he has destroyed you. The Lord will bring a nation' "---now it's "will" " 'The Lord will bring a nation against you from afar, from the end of the earth, as swift as the eagle flies, a nation whose language you will not understand.' " It's interesting that Babylon was depicted as an eagle.

And it's interesting that when Daniel had a vision in the night that God gave him, he saw a lion, and attached to the lion were wings as of an eagle, speaking of this speedy flight from one place to the other. Then it's also interesting that Rome bore the insignia of the royal eagle on their banners wherever they marched. And no doubt when Judah saw over their walls the Babylonians marching toward Jerusalem with the insignia of the winged lion, the eagle, or the Romans coming in years later, AD 70 and before, they looked over and maybe remembered this and thought, "This is it. This is it. It's come true." And so the prediction that they would be taken from a nation afar. " 'A nation of fierce countenance, which does not respect the elderly nor show favor to the young.

" 'And they shall eat the increase of your livestock and the produce of your land, until you are destroyed; they shall not leave you grain or new wine or oil, or the increase of your cattle or the offspring of your flocks, until they have destroyed you.' " Now, in these next few verses, we get a description of what a siege was like. You know, today when you have a war, it's pretty antiseptic in the sense that it's quick. We have incredible weapons of mass destruction. The Gulf War, I mean, look how massive and how quick that was. It was just these strategic strikes for a period of weeks and then it was over. In ancient times you would besiege a city over months, months, even years. And so you'd come in and you'd build a wall, a siege wall around the city, of protection.

And you'd have camps around the siege walls, so that nobody could escape. If they escaped over their walls, they have to go over your wall and there would be people stationed at your wall to kill them. Then since people lived within walled cities, but all of their flocks and all of their crops were outside the wall, you would take over because you're now surrounding the city and you take over their food supplies. And now they're in the city starving to death, relying upon only what food they have taken and what water they have taken within the city walls, and so it's a long, slow, starvation and dying of thirst. Now, I'm going to show you a couple pictures to get to idea. These are the modern-day walls of Jerusalem. They're Turkish walls. They're modern. They're only about a thousand years old.

There are some parts of the wall that date back a couple thousand years and even before that. But the idea is if you have people living on the other side of this wall inside, you got to get to them somehow. You just don't walk right up and knock on the door and say, "Hey, we're here to besiege you." They'll pour oil down or rocks or whatever. And so you gotta get through those walls. So you build your encampment around the city, you take over the vines, you take over the livestock, and now they don't have fresh supply of food. And then next you have to breach these walls. So usually what is done is siegeworks or siege machines are built. Often times a ramp is brought up to the wall, and then, if you can see, this is a battering ram, inside were men.

It's a massive device that is stationed at the wall and this huge ram, chunk of wood, poles of wood tied together with leather would swing back and forth. And the more it swings the more momentum you get until it can poke through the walls of the city. And once you can breach the walls, men can get through it. The next thing to do is, since you're looking up, you're down on the bottom looking up at people on the walls, is you got to get a lot of the fortifications in the city. And so catapults were built and stones were hurled from beneath and outside the walls to the inside to remove the troops from the walls so that you could get in. That's a picture of Masada that I'll mention in just a minute as we get through here. All right, with that in mind, let's see how this is described.

Verse 52, " 'They shall besiege you at all your gates until your high and fortified walls, in which you trust' "---he's predicting there's going to come a time in your prosperity, in your abundance you're going to look around and go, "Look at this great nation that has been built by our ingenuity and our free enterprise. Look at our massive walls. They'll protect us." God will say, "You're trusting in those walls? Watch what happens." " 'Shall come down throughout all your land; and they shall besiege you at all your gates throughout all your land which the Lord your God has given you. You shall eat the fruit of your own body, the flesh of your sons and your daughters whom the Lord your God has given you, in the siege and desperate straits in which your enemy shall distress you.

" 'The man among you who is sensitive and very refined will be hostile toward his brother, toward the wife of his bosom, and toward the rest of his children whom he leaves behind, so that he will not give any of them the flesh of his children whom he will eat, because he has nothing left in the siege and desperate straits in which your enemy shall distress you at all your gates. The tender and delicate woman among you, who would not venture to set the sole of her foot on the ground because of her delicacies and sensitivity, will refuse to the husband of her bosom, and to her son and her daughter, her placenta which comes out from between her feet and her children whom she bears; for she will eat them secretly for lack of all things in the siege and desperate straits in which your enemy shall distress you at all your gates.' "

God is saying, "This is what's going to happen. You're going to disobey me. You're going to forsake me. You're going to start worshiping other gods. You're going the start trusting in yourself, your own capabilities, your own capacities. And you'll be fine. You'll have beautiful cities with great walls, but then your enemies will come from afar. First of all, they're going to build those walls around the city they're going to start taking your flocks and your oil supplies and your water supplies and your food supplies. And then you're going to rely upon the food that you have on the inside of the walls, but you're going to run out and you'll be starving. And day after day you'll hear their taunts outside the walls as they are hammering to get in. And it'll wear on you, you'll be discouraged, and you'll be starving to death."

And God predicts: "It's going to be so bad you will be even eating your own sons and daughters." Now that has got to be the lowest possible form of living that there is. You say, "Well, that could never really happen." It's interesting in book of 2 Kings, I believe, chapter 6, Ben-Hadad of Syria has attacked Samaria. The famine has gotten so bad it says "a donkey's head sold for eighty shekels of silver." and "one pint of dove droppings sold for five shekels of silver." That's bad. Now, I remember as a kid my parents would feed me some odd things and try to say, "Oh, these are special foods. These are delicacies." I remember the night they put cow brains on the table. Now, hey, a ten-year-old, convincing him that those are delicacies is a long shot. [laughter]

And they knew this, so they just said, you know, "Here's your food." And it looked like scrambled eggs, [laughter] and so I started eating them. Now, it's interesting, some of you have gross looks on your face right now and some of you are going, "Ewww, yeah." You know, I said, "What are these things?" And my mom said, "Oh, they're just eggs." And my brother let the cat out of the bag, he said, "It's cow brains." And I said, "That's it! I'm not eating them." And my parents said, "Oh, but they're delicacies." "I don't care if they're delicacies, I ain't eating them." [laughter] "The head of a donkey"---"Hey, it's on sale, only eighty shekels of silver." "Well, listen, down at Smith's I got this great, you know, pint of dove dung for five shekels of silver." "Wow! "Get two at that price." [laughter]

The famine overtook the entire city. One day the king of Samaria is walking on the walls and he hears a woman crying out, "King, help! King, help!" And he says very lethargically, "Listen, if God can't help you, where can I give you help from? from the winepress? from the threshing floor?" They're dried up. "And he said, "What's the problem?" He was curious. The woman said, "This woman promised that if we would eat my son today, that we would eat her son the next day. And so I killed my son and we ate him yesterday, but she has hidden her son and I'm hungry." At that the king tore his garments and he said, "May God do so to me and more if by the end of day I don't have Elijah's head taken off his body," because Elijah predicted that this would happen, there would be a famine in Samaria because the northern kingdom had turned from God.

And this is now the result of that famine. " 'If you do not carefully observe all the words of the law that are written in this book, that you may fear this glorious and awesome name, THE LORD YOUR GOD, then the Lord will bring upon you and your descendants extraordinary plagues---great and prolonged plagues---and serious and prolonged sicknesses. Moreover he will bring back on you all the diseases of Egypt, of which you were afraid, and they shall cling to you. Also every sickness and every plague, which is not written in the Book of the Law, will the Lord bring upon you until you are destroyed. And you shall be left few in number, whereas you were as the stars of heaven in multitude, because you would not obey the voice of the Lord your God.' "

When Judah was taken captive into Babylon and when the northern kingdom of Samaria was taken captive into Assyria, they made it their practice to leave the few sick, poor, feeble folks to just sort of tend the land and maintain it. They left them "few in number." " 'And it shall be, that just as the Lord rejoiced over you to do good and multiply you, so the Lord will rejoice over you the destroy you and bring you to nothing; and you shall be plucked from off the land which you go to possess. Then the Lord will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other, and there you shall serve other gods, which neither you nor your fathers have known---wood and stone. And among those nations you shall find no rest, nor shall the sole of your foot have a resting place; but there the Lord will give you a trembling heart, failing eyes, and anguish of soul.

" 'Your life shall hang in doubt before you; you shall fear day and night, and have no assurance of life. In the morning you shall say, "Oh, that it were evening!" And at evening you shall say, "Oh, that it were morning!" Because of the fear which terrifies your heart, and because of the sight which your eyes see. And the Lord will take you back to Egypt in ships, by the way of which I said to you, "You shall never see it again," and there you shall be offered for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but no one shall buy you.' " I'm glad we're finally getting into chapter 29. Unfortunately, we'll have to save that for next week. But this is where the covenant is renewed and the blessings are reviewed. After the severe warning, now Moses will say, "Cling to God with all of your heart. Cling to God with all of your heart."

Now, the description that we have just read, as gross as it is, has been the history of the attacks, whether it's Assyria, Babylon, the Seleucid Empire, Greece, Romans. They have besieged the city and some of these things that we have read took place in AD 70 when 1.3 million Jews were killed in Jerusalem; 586 BC when the Babylonians overtook Judah and Jerusalem with three sieges; 722 BC when the Assyrians took over the northern kingdom. These are the series of events that happened. Because of this, in AD 70, when the temple in Jerusalem fell to the Romans and Jews were killed, a group of Jewish Zealots fled to this place, the place of Masada down by the Dead Sea, which was Herod's hangout, one of many. It was a virtual city on top of a mountain.

It was a great place to be in the winter, but you don't want to be there in the summer. Well, they were there for a few years after the fall of Jerusalem until the Romans came in and built---as you can see the remains here of the walls and the encampments---started camping around Masada and built this wall all the way around the mountain of Masada and just stayed there, so that nobody could go out or come in and waited it out and waited it out. And, eventually, they built huge siegeworks. They built a huge ramp, you can still see it today, and put that battering ram that I just showed you and the catapult and started working their way up. It took a couple years to do it. The tenth legion of Rome was very, very persistent, and orders came from Rome: "Whatever it takes, get Masada."

The Zealots, under a guy by the name of El'azar ben Yair their Jewish leader, knew what would happen if they would surrender to the Romans. Already they looked down and saw their fellow brothers, fellow Jewish slaves being tortured, killed, beaten as they use the slaves to build the ramp and make the catapults. And they even took live people and catapulted them up against the walls and splattered them, Jewish brothers. And they said, "Look, we know what will happen. If we surrender to the Romans or if we let them take us over, our wives will be raped, our children will be slaves, we as men will be killed or be taken slaves. We can't let this happen." And so a night came, the ramp had been built, they knew that this next morning or during the night the walls would be overturned and the Romans would make it through the wall and overtake Masada.

They knew that the Romans would take over their stronghold the next day. What do you do? That evening El'azar ben Yair assembled the people, nine hundred and some-odd people together, and gave them a speech, gave the men the speech, and then they were to take the speech and kind of recite it to the women and the children. And I just want to close tonight with this speech and close the evening off with an application. This is the night before Masada fell.

He said:

My loyal followers, long ago we resolved to serve neither the Romans nor anyone else but the Lord our God, who alone is the only and true righteousness Lord of men: now the time has come that bids us prove our determination by our deeds.

At such a time we must not disgrace ourselves: hitherto we have never submitted to slavery, even when it brought no danger with it: we must not choose slavery now, and with it the penalties that will mean the end of everything if we fall alive into the hands of the Romans. For we were the first of all to revolt, and shall be the last to break off the struggle. And I think it is God who has given us this privilege, that we can die nobly and as free men, unlike others who were unexpectedly defeated.

In our case it is evident that daybreak will end our resistance, but we are free to choose an honorable death with our loved ones. This our enemies cannot prevent, however earnestly they may pray to take us alive; nor can we defeat them in battle.

Let our wives die unabused, our children die without knowledge of slavery: and after that, let us do each other an ungrudging kindness, preserving our freedom as a glorious winding-sheet. But first let our possessions and the whole fortress go up in flames: it will be a bitter blow to the Romans, that I know, to find our persons beyond their reach and nothing left for them to loot. One thing only let us spare---our store of food: it will bear witness when we are dead to the fact that we perished, not through lack, but because we resolved to do so at the beginning, we chose death rather than slavery.

If only we had died before seeing the Sacred City utterly destroyed by enemy hands, the Holy Sanctuary so impiously uprooted! But since an honorable ambition deluded us into thinking that perhaps we should succeed in avenging her of her enemies, and now all hope has fled abandoning us to our fate, let us at once choose death with honor and do the kindest thing we can for ourselves, our wives, our children, while it is still possible to show ourselves any kindness. After all we were born to die, we and those that we brought into the world: this even the luckiest must face.

But outrage, slavery, and the sight of our wives being led to shame with our children---these are not evils to which man is subject by the laws of nature: men undergo them through their own cowardice if they have a chance to forestall them by death and will not take it. We are very proud of your courage, so we revolted against Rome: now in the final stages they have offered to spare our lives and we have turned down the offer. Is anyone too blind to see how furious they will be if they take us alive? Pity the young whose bodies are strong enough to survive the prolonged torture; pity the not-so-young whose old frames would break under such ill-usage. A man shall see his wife violently carried off; he will hear the voice of his child crying, 'Daddy!' When his own hands are fettered.

Come! While our hands are free and can hold a sword, let them do a noble service! Let us die unenslaved by our enemies, and leave this world as free men in the company with our wives and children.

That night lots were chosen, the men went in after this speech, each head of the household killed his wife and children with the edge of the sword. And then lots were chosen as to what one man would kill the other men, slit their throats, and then eventually kill himself, so that when the Romans came in the next day, they would find 967 Jewish men, women, old people, children, who had killed themselves rather than be slaves, be taken to Rome. The fortress went up in flames, the food was spared, and thus they refused to submit to the Romans. Every year at Masada officers are taken on top of this hill and are sworn into the Israeli army. And they all cry out toward the end of this ceremony by fire at night, "Masada shall never fall again!"

That's a background on a little bit of where the Jews are today after their history, something that has been their history throughout many generations. With that in mind, "Masada shall never fall again!" they're making a statement: "We realize we're surrounded by enemies. We realize the Islamic mujahideen, the PLO, and others would love to push us into the Mediterranean and have us compromise, and they may even attack us, but we're never ever going to let what happened to Masada happen again. We're not going to be forced into a situation where we're just going to collapse and kill ourselves. We're going to go down fighting anyone who comes against us. And so with great patriotism they defend their country to this day.

That's the mind-set of one of players in the Middle East conflict, because of their past conflict. And so remember in the Gulf War when Iraq was shooting missiles into Israel, and the United States went ballistic? They said, "Oh no! What do we do?" Do we start talking to Iraq?" No. talk to Israel, because if Israel retaliates, Iraq will be nothing, toast. I mean, they're going to go nuts. They're just going to wipe everybody out. And so we got open arms because we thought Israel is being attacked, we better start negotiating with Israel and just, you know, shooting the missiles out of the sky. Because, you know, you start attacking that nation . . . We know with their capability of nuclear weapons what that could mean.

So in the future as you see the peace treaties, the treaty that's out on the table, and you see the nations being gathered together against Israel, know the mind-set of Israel, but also know the mind-set of God, that once God brings them back into the land, which he has, that God has a plan now to reach out to them and then eventually in the end of times defend them. So the blessings and the cursing were given to the nation of Israel. And now in chapter 29 we'll continue next week as they rehearse their law and Moses says, "Spare yourself these miseries," even though God had revealed to them that it's going to happen. It was the idea of start obeying God.

For more teachings from Calvary Albuquerque and Skip Heitzig visit calvaryabq.org.