It's time to derive your worldview from the Bible

Rather than reading the Bible through the eyes of modern secularism, this provocative six-part course teaches you to read the Bible through its own eyes—as a record of God’s dealing with the human race. When you read it at this level, you will discover reasons to worship God in areas of life you probably never before associated with “religion.”

by Charles Clough
The concept of the Biblical Framework; avoids seeing the Bible as a collection of disconnected stories; connects biblical truths with actual history; and views all biblical truths as interconnected. The Bible is a unique library of many books and letters, written by many different authors in many different life situations. Yet it has an internal coherence. The kingdom of man contrasted with the kingdom of God: foundations, goals, beginnings, ethics, and leadership. Review of sanctification.
Series:Chapter 5 – Conquest and Settlement: The Disruptive Truth of Israel’s Holy War
Duration:46 mins 58 secs

© Charles A. Clough 1997

Charles A. Clough
Biblical Framework Series 1995–2003

Part 3: Disruptive Truths of God’s Kingdom
Chapter 5 – Conquest and Settlement: The Disruptive Truth of Israel’s Holy War

Lesson 63 – Review of Sanctification

25 Sep 1997
Fellowship Chapel, Jarrettsville, MD
www.bibleframework.org

We’re on Lesson 63 and this is the beginning of a new year, so we’ve had a new year of Bible study here on the Fall, and we left off last June with Lesson 62, and you’ll remember that Lesson 62, it’s actually chapter 5 in the notes, we concluded that with a review of the Doctrine of Sanctification. See we’ve come all the way from Creation, the Fall, the Flood, the Covenant, the call of Abraham, the Exodus, Sinai, the Conquest and Settlement, and if we had had time last year we would’ve finished this, chapter 6, which is the beginning of the monarchy and the rising reign of David, but we didn’t have time, so we’ve had a big hiatus here in the summer months since we got together for chapter 5 which was a review of the Sanctification; of the events prior to the rise of David.

So I want to remind you what we did back then in June was that we reviewed the Doctrine of Sanctification and we went back all the way back to the Tower of Babel; why the Noahic civilization that started after the Flood become corrupt, and why God had to call Abraham out to start a new counterculture. I reviewed several of the key ideas that we need for everyday sanctification.

Remember I went through how God brought Himself into relationship with the human race through contracts, and we spent some time reviewing that, and so I exhorted you to think of your personal growth, your sanctification, relying on an over-objective historic demonstration of God’s faithfulness; that He gave these covenants out and He promised certain blessings, He promised certain cursings, and He was faithful to do that. You have to read the Old Testament in the light of this contractual background.

That’s why there are different places in the Bible that seem to be a waste of time: they’re giving land, real estate boundaries, they’re talking about genealogies of who ultimately descended from who, but all of that is basically to show that God was faithful to what He said He was going to do; that was the big idea we left off with the back in June.

Now what I want to do is I want to remind you as we start now in the Fall (autumn), I want to remind you about the concept of the Framework. The problem, remember I said way, way back when we started this course, that there are three basic problems that we Christians have, and one is that we learn the Bible through a chapter here and a chapter there as we read. You can’t perceive or grasp the whole Bible in one worldview at one time. You have to sequence through the Bible and that’s fine, we all have to do that, but one of the dangers is that we are left with a collection of disconnected stories.

So it’s like, I’ve use this illustration before, it’s like beads and a necklace; beads can be scattered all over the top of the table, but when you thread them through in a certain pattern into a necklace, a well-constructed necklace, you have a pattern on that necklace of the individual beads, and that’s one of the objectives of the Framework is to point people to this pattern of the whole Bible.

The second problem that many believers have is that they separate doctrinal truths from actual history and the danger of this is that you can know doctrine but if the doctrine hasn’t been rooted in actual real-time history, how do you know that it’s not just an idea? After all we all are living our lives within time, in the physical universe, inside the flow of history, but if doctrine isn’t linked to the place where we live then it’s kind of surreal and it doesn’t strike us with all of its intended power.

The third problem that we’re grappling with the Framework is that we need to see that the doctrinal truths that are in the Bible, themselves are all interconnected; they depend on each other and so that’s where we get the word “framework,” it’s like building a house. You have the rafters but the rafters need support from the walls, the walls need support from the foundation; you can’t take a piece and say that’s the house. The house or the building is the entire thing with all the parts mutually strengthening one another.

So coming back now to understand what we’re doing with the Framework, the Bible, you must think of, not just as one book. It’s easy to think that way because our Bibles are one volume, but if you think more deeply, the Bible actually is a library of many books and of many letters, and not only is it a library of many books and many letters, but it’s a collection that was written over thousands of years.

Not only was it a collection written over thousands of years, but it was written by many different authors in many different life situations, and some of the authors were lowly business people, small business owners; Peter was a fisherman, others were kings. David; you have Melchizedek, King of Salem, you have wealthy business people like Abraham, you have people who are in between, e.g., shepherds. You have people who worked with governments, like Daniel. So you see you have authors who themselves occupied many different positions in society. They spoke three different languages; some parts of the Bible are in Hebrew, some parts of the Bible in Greek, and a little bit in Aramaic.

So let’s think about what this means to us. It means that the Bible is sufficient to every good work. Why? Because I may have this position in life, you may have another position in life, but there are people who have written somewhere in the Bible that have similar positions to you and have similar positions to me so we can identify with its authors.

And we all face different situations; not only do we have a station in life we have various trials, various opportunities, in our lives, and that’s the same with the authors of the Bible. They came from different locations socially, but they also encountered different life situations. Think of Job with his medical suffering, with his spiritual suffering, with his economic suffering. Think of Abraham with his wealth, doing business, able to supply others with his graciousness. Think of Daniel with the struggles he must’ve had in that powerful government bureaucracy that wasn’t at all friendly to the Word of God.

So I just go back over that folks because I want you to see the treasure that you hold. The Bible is the most unique library in the history of man; there is nothing like it; written over thousands of years with dozens of authors from many, many different life situations coming from different social positions. And here’s the thing: all this diversity, but there’s a unity in the Bible, it has an internal coherence. All of this library of revealed literature has an internal coherence because it is actually the work of our Creator God revealing Himself in space, time, history, and God is consistent in His thinking. Therefore His message, even though given over thousands of years, is consistent because it’s the same omniscient mind revealing Himself to our finite and often fallen minds.

The other thing I want to review with you, and it is a theme, and we’re going to see this this Fall as we get into the rise and reign of David, and I want you to think in terms of “kingdoms.” The present civilization began with Noah and his family, and the Bible, if you look up in a concordance, the Bible mentions a rise of something called a kingdom; that was Babel, and this kingdom was the kingdom of man; it was man trying to solve his problem. Genesis 11 says, remember we covered this, what is verse four in Genesis 11 saying? We will make a name for ourselves.

So you have a kingdom; you have the divine institution of the civil government given by God to Noah and his family to begin this new divine institution; the only divine institution that is post-Fall, and the function of this institution was to restrain sin so that the Word of God could reach people; it would minimize social chaos.

But here’s the problem: no sooner had Noah and his family begun civilization, spread out, multiplied, that you have apostasy now beginning. Here’s sin rising with its ugly head once again, and what sin does to the divine institution of the state or civil power is, it turns it from a restrainer of evil, a preserver of society, into something different, something for which it was not designed, and that something is redemption.

So the struggle from now on in history, and we are experiencing today, the struggle we are experiencing is that fallen man wants to redeem himself independently of God, and he will pervert, and he will corrupt, this divine institution of civil authority to force. It’s like salvation by force because you have certain people gain power in the government and think they are morally superior to the rest of us and they are going to impose their plan, their program to “progress in history.”

It’s always the idea: We are making progress; we are making progress; we are defining history. We are not going to listen to the revealed, transcendent, objective Word of God because we are smart, we don’t believe the authority of the Word of God. Therefore, we are going to replace it with our dreams of the future; with our ideas of how society should be structured; so that I call that the “Kingdom of Man.”

Now, opposite to that, because remember the next event after Babel was the call of Abraham, so after the kingdom of man began at Babel, you have a second situation where God intervenes and He establishes a counterculture that will be redemptive; that will be on submission to His authoritative Word; that will be the custodian of His Word down through the corridors of time. We call this the “Program of the Kingdom of God.” Now obviously God, in one sense, He’s always been King of all things because He is the Creator and Sovereign, but we’re not talking about that kind of rule.

What we’re talking about is that on earth the original purpose of man to dominate the world, to manage it, that will be fulfilled in a godly way, not in a perverted ungodly way, and when it happens, of course we now know it’s going to happen to the Lord Jesus Christ on His return; that is going to be the Kingdom of God program; we are not in the Kingdom of God today but we will be when Jesus returns. Today we’re doing the work necessary to bring in the kingdom of God so Jesus, in the Book of Revelation, can break open the scroll, begin the judgment, and set up His kingdom. But He can’t do that if He doesn’t have a body of believers from every people group speaking every language.

Okay, let’s think now back to the material we’ve already covered: the kingdom of man and the kingdom of God. Let’s contrast the two and let’s look at about five or six points of comparison and contrast. We’re using this so we can mentally categorize where we’ve come so far in Scripture. Let’s look first at the foundation.

What is the foundation of the kingdom of man? What is the foundation of the kingdom of God? The foundation of the kingdom of man, remember, is the fact that there is no Creator/creature distinction. There is only a continuity of being; that everything: the rocks, animals, plants, people, angels, and whoever else exists are all one spectrum; one thing; all of it is one. There’s only one level of existence and everything is part of that level of existence.

In contrast, the kingdom of God starts with two levels of existence. There always has been an eternal level of existence in the Creator; the personal, infinite Creator, and that He chose to create, external to Himself, this universe. So now we have two levels of existence: we have the Creator and we also have the creature.

Now here’s the fundamental difference, and remember we went over this and reviewed it earlier: you can’t have both these views mixed. Either we have a Creator/creature distinction, or we don’t. And in paganism or unbelief, basically, you have everything is the same. The gods and goddesses may be more powerful than man, but they’re still limited themselves.

So what we do now is we look at the kingdom of man as far as his moral structure, and what was the event right after Creation? Remember? We’ve gone over the sequence of events and the sequence of doctrine. After Creation what was the next event? The next event was the Fall. So now the kingdom of man, as far as his foundation, you have a continuity of being, and since they don’t believe the Bible, they don’t believe the historical record, they have no Fall. Well if there is no Fall what does that do to good and evil? If it didn’t start at a point in time that it must always have been here so in the unbelieving, pagan way of thinking, both good and evil have always been as long as the universe has existed good and evil have also coexisted.

And what that means, and this is a profound difference between the kingdom of man and the kingdom of God, what that means is is that evil is normal: it is normal to have human evil, it is normal to have natural evil, it is normal to have disease, it is normal to have storms, it is normal to have tornadoes, it is normal to have war. In other words that is part of normal existence, it always has been, always will be. You see there is no basic hope here.

But if you come to the kingdom of God then it’s different. Not only do you have a Creator/creature distinction, but you have an innocent, evil-free creation when it left God’s fingertips. He said it was “very good;” no death, no sorrow, no suffering.

Then we have the Fall brought on by man’s rebellion; listening to Satan and rebelling against God, and God judges. He judges the ground, He judges the woman, He judges the man, He judges the serpent. So you have zoological judgments, you have botanical judgments, and you have judgments on man. The result is that evil begins at a point in time.

On the other end of the evil situation not only does evil begin at a point in time, but it’s going to end as far as its existence among those who are seeking God. There will be an eternal quarantine into the eternal state, resurrected free of sin, and resurrected to suffer the Lake of Fire forever and ever.

So we have Heaven and we have Hell as it were. People think, and they shy away from talking about Heaven and Hell and the Lake of Fire, but if you back off, relax, take 10 deep breaths and think about this, it’s precisely the Fall on one side and the existence of Heaven and Hell on the other side that bracket evil. In the Christian biblical worldview, evil is abnormal, it is not normal, it has not always been, and it will not always be, at least for those resurrected to the presence of God. So that’s the foundation … two kingdoms: the kingdom of man and the kingdom of God have utterly and completely different foundations.

Let’s look at another point of contrast between these two kingdoms. I’m going over this because as we go further in the Bible we’ll see that the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man are in total conflict over and over and over again. So we want to have a grasp as we think about this about where the conflict is.

The conflict starts with the foundations being utterly different. The second thing is: what is the goal, the end goal, of both kingdoms? Well, we learn from Babel that the goal of man is to dominate. It is for autonomous destiny by and for man. The goal of the kingdom of God is to have a relationship with our Creator, and that of course was originally defined in the Abrahamic contract when God said, “I’m going to set up a counterculture and it’s going to have this goal,” and one of those goals in that Genesis 12 passage is that, “I will bless the world.” So you have two different goals: the kingdom of man, man will redeem himself, and the kingdom of God, God will redeem man and it will be a perfect redemption.

Then we have the beginning, in a physical, political sense, of the kingdom of man, and the beginning, in a physical, political existence, of the kingdom of God, and that began, of course, in the inauguration, with Babel, and it was a beginning history course with the subsequent civilizations, battle in Egypt and so on; they’re all basic, local versions of the kingdom of man. But the kingdom of God was inaugurated at the Exodus in Mount Sinai in the Conquest. Ancient Israel in the Old Testament, as we’ve said before, is actually a local version of the kingdom of God; it’s limited to a geographical area. It’s sort of a four-dimensional drama of what the ultimate kingdom of God will look like. Of course, it has sin in it because sin hasn’t yet been purged, but if you can see through the sin, of the intent and the goals, you’ll see that it was a localized version of the kingdom of God, the presence of God being there.

We’ve looked at the foundational difference between the kingdoms; we’ve looked at the goal difference between the kingdoms. We looked at how they started; history in the sense of where we could actually see it functioning.

Now we have the ethics of the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man. The ethics of the kingdom of man is just what people think ought to be, having living, or having the situation of having to live in a universe and a life filled with people. So in that situation what is right and what is wrong and how do you know that?

That’s the dilemma of unbelieving ethics; there’s no final arbiter. For example, if I were to come to you and say, “I have my way of looking at right and wrong, you have your way of looking at right and wrong, and if I say to you that I think your way of looking at right and wrong is wrong, who decides our argument?” See there’s no ultimate court of appeal, just everybody doing his own thing and I call that “opinion poll ethics.” Of course, God addresses that in Romans 3 where Paul points out, “Let every person be a liar and only God be true.” That’s Paul’s answer to “opinion poll ethics.” It doesn’t matter how many people think something, it matters who the transcendent authority is, which is God.

Okay, the ethics of man, now the ethics of God. Historically you can see it in Mount Sinai because when He called into existence a localized, physical, political version of the kingdom of God, God had to establish policies and Mount Sinai was where these policies were given and it’s ironic. I think if you think of your life, think back to your education. Can any of you remember as you grew up, as you went through kindergarten, went to 1st grade, 2nd grade, all the way up to junior high, high school, and even college, can any of you think at any time did you ever have any teacher, in any class, in the classroom or out of the classroom, ever discuss Mount Sinai as a real literal, historic event? Most of us would say no that we’ve never seen that happen, never heard it. And isn’t it ironic we’ve never seen it, we never heard it, and yet the ethical principles of Mount Sinai have been borrowed and applied in Western law. So here you have the foundation of Western law and it’s never discussed in class. Interesting.

Okay, we looked at the foundational difference. The goals were different, the beginning of these kingdoms in history in a physical, political sense, we’ve dealt with the ethics problem, and if you look at the Conquest and Settlement there was the expansion of the kingdom. The kingdom was to go all the way out to the limits of the land that God gave. The expansion of the kingdom of man is always by imperialism; of taking over as many areas of land as you can.

Finally, and this is what will be doing this semester in the Fall here when we’ll get into the rise and reign of David, and that is the leadership of the kingdom of man. I hope as we go through that I can bring to you the differences between how kings behave and were expected to behave in Egypt, in Assyria, and roundabout Israel versus, and in contrast to, how the king was to behave in Israel. You’ll quickly see the difference, and it’s so important you see this in order to think correctly about what’s going on in our day.

The kingdom of man is a perversion of civil government where government becomes redemptive (attempting) it really doesn’t ever get there, it just usually screws things up, but government is thought to be within the kingdom of man as a tool of redemption; a tool to force the human race to progress: Communism being an example, Sharia Law and Islam being an example, even Western progressive secularism is another example.

So you have these examples of the expansion of the kingdom and how they work, but they have to have leaders compatible with that nature, and so you will see the tyrants and how they reigned in Egypt, how they reigned in Mesopotamia, And we’ll contrast that with how David, in particular, acted as king of Israel; a very rich study. Of course, the ultimate leadership of the kingdom of God will be the Lord Jesus, and that explains a lot about His ministry on earth, why He set priorities for His ministry, and why He addressed the human heart more than He addressed the political issues, and obviously that tells us something there.

So that’s the background that I want to review before we start this Fall. Now one of the things that I did do last Spring was I ended with Lesson 62. I went over the mental struggles we face in sanctification and I showed how our physical brains, now that they’ve been studied and looked at with electrical patterns and others. It turns out that the term “flesh”, which the Apostle Paul uses often, is not just a theological, spiritual term. I believe that flesh refers to the actual flesh; the actual matter of our bodies. Yes, it has a spiritual component but here’s the thing: think of a pianist; think about a top athlete. How does the pianist train his fingers and his mind to produce wonderful music? Does that automatically happen or is it produced because he practices and practices and practices? Think of an athlete; how does an athlete become really, really good? Does he just do it the first day or does he grow by repetition?

See what I’m saying is that God has created us, people with our bodies, the electrical impulses, the muscle tissue, the coordination of our bodies, so that it adapts to where we want to go with it. We may have goals in our life, and as we pursue those goals, our body is made to respond. It’s like if you had a computer and those of you engineers appreciate this, computers have circuit boards in them, or at least they used to, now there’s even smaller stuff, but think of the old-fashioned green circuit board. A circuit board has circuits on it that are fixed. They can be intelligent, decision-making can happen and so forth, but the Bible says man has a higher level of engineering in him. It’s like our brains are circuit boards that are self-adapting to what we want to do. But the circuit board doesn’t have any conscience, it just is programmed to adapt to what we want to do.

So as we fear, as we are angry, as we worry, whatever our favorite sin pattern is, the more we let it dominate our lives, the more our body is responding and makes it easier to do that. It’s almost like in one sense, all sin is addictive, it’s just that with different people there are different directions of the addiction, and that requires sanctification. Last Spring we went through some of the concepts of sanctification.

Now I want to review these because we’re going to get into this with David. In the Psalms that David wrote he deals with his own sanctification and the sanctification of the nation. We’re going to get a lot of that with David. Let’s first distinguish the dimensions of sanctification. The Abrahamic Covenant promised Abraham and his regenerate seed to have a position before God. The contract gave Old Testament believers a position from which they would not drift, they could not—think of it as a legal situation. They are legally declared to have this position in their relationship with God.

Now come after the Abrahamic Covenant to the Mosaic Covenant. In the Mosaic Covenant, Israel has a relationship with God but it’s conditional in the sense that if they want to be blessed, they have to do certain things that please the Lord. If they don’t do the things that please the Lord, God is going to discipline them. The Mount Sinai Covenant is a revelation. In one sense think of it this way: it’s a revelation of how parents raise children. The Abrahamic Covenant put believers within God’s family, but God is not a permissive parent. A godly parent, an effective parent, is going to be interested in training their children for the real world ahead—the real world that includes the return of the Lord Jesus; the real world that has an absolute, transcendent ethic; the real world that is right now in a fallen state where there is going to be suffering, sorrow, obstructions, and so forth.

Every parent knows this. Everyone here who has children, we’ve all gone through this, and that is when our children disobey, when you see them doing something stupid, you have to decide, where do I impose discipline? Do I back off, let them make a mistake so they’ll learn from their mistakes, or do I intervene to prevent them from suffering? And every parent has this ambiguity. On one hand you need to have certain authoritative structure, and by the way, child psychologists have shown that children, especially when they are very young, the twos, the threes, the four-year-olds, if there’s not a structure there, those children grow up insecure. See their heart is made in the image of God and we all cry out to know Him. God has structured us to be sensitive to His character. We get security from knowing that we are secure because He’s our Creator. There are structures He’s created, we haven’t created them, we can’t change them, we submit to Him by submitting to the way He’s made us.

So parenting is a parallel. As parents we have certain standards. Sometimes these standards are not biblical, tragically, but if we’re prayerful parents we’ll try to have basically biblically friendly standards, and that means that we have to enforce those standards. Every parent quickly learns that you can tell a kid to do something but to enforce them to do it and deal with it when they don’t do it takes up 95% of your energy. It only took 5% to tell them, it takes 95% to follow it up. Today parents are harried; you have the mothers working because of the economy and all the rest of what’s going on. Dad comes home, he’s tired; she comes home, she’s tired, and they just don’t have the energy to keep after the kids for doing certain things: chores around the house, assume responsibilities, and it’s tough, and we have to pray and support our parents.

God in Mount Sinai is demonstrating what He wants for His son, Israel, and He’s going to spank them if they disobey. He’s going to be faithful, He’s going to be predictable. See that’s where we get security. Today, if we know our Bibles, when we face life and the rough places, and the suffering, and the tragedies, it’s so important that we grasp that He is faithful. Our security comes from being secure in the Lord. He is secure and He has demonstrated that by His parenting program of Israel. Israel is sort of a mini-localized version of the Kingdom of God, and by reading the history of that nation, we obtain our security by realizing how God is so faithful to what He has said.

Well that’s the dimensions of sanctification; there’s the positional truth of the Abrahamic Covenant and there’s the conditional day-by-day relationship truth through the Mosaic Covenant.

Now let’s look at another aspect that we want to prepare for as we come to David. What is the aim of sanctification? It’s interesting because we live in a fallen universe. We often think the aim of sanctification is to have victory over evil. But here’s a question: in the Book of Hebrews that says Jesus “learned obedience” and He was “sanctified”, the question is, why did Jesus need sanctification? If sanctification deals only with overcoming sin, what were the sins that Jesus had to overcome? Well obviously He didn’t have sins. So since He didn’t have sins doesn’t that say that had there not been a Fall, and just Adam and Eve, say they were obedient, but they had tests, of course they failed their test, but they did have tests, and the tests were an opportunity to become sanctified; to become strengthened in their obedience.

So the aim of sanctification ultimately, even though in our lives this side of the Fall it’s 99% dealing with sin, the aim of sanctification is loyalty to God. Jesus had to learn that. He was a child, He had to grow up, He had to learn what it meant to be obedient to His Father. We all read in the Gospels the agony of the prayer in Gethsemane the night before He was captured to be crucified the next day, and that praying that Jesus did is a revelation of the struggle of sanctification that He had.

There are a few concepts of sanctification that we go over, but again I just want to mention these and we’ll come back to these as we approach the rise and reign of David. There are different parts to sanctification; we’ve already covered the positional part and the experiential part. We’ve covered the purpose of the aim which is loyalty to God, and now let’s think about the means that God uses to help us be sanctified.

Actually there are two broad areas and we have to be careful because these two means to sanctification often get intermixed and confused. In one sense there’s law. Now it’s true that in the Church Age we’re not under the Mosaic Law, but we are under the laws of ethics that are repeated—as Dr. Charles Ryrie has pointed out, 9 of the 10 Commandments are given in the New Testament Church Age.

So revelation, God’s imperatives, you know the verbs with the imperative mood, the commands, those are one means. Just like parents, the child is not going to know it if you don’t say it and make clear that you are supposed to do X or you are supposed to do Y, that’s a means of sanctification. But we quickly learn we don’t have the internal spiritual strength to overcome our flesh, our flesh doesn’t want to go, and so we have to subdue the flesh and the only way we can subdue it is not with operation bootstrap, not with human discipline—it is to look to the Lord for empowerment, and that empowerment comes not because we deserve it, but it comes, if we are saved, it comes because He is gracious.

So the two broad categories of means of sanctification are (1) law in the sense of God’s revealed imperatives, and (2) grace in the sense of God’s enablement. Then we also have the dimensions of sanctification and we’re going to get into that. Then we have the enemies of sanctification: the world, the flesh, and the devil, and with respect to the enemies.

Remember when we went through the conquest and settlement I pointed to the fact that God seems to use an indirect strategy rather than a direct one and I referred you to some writings by a strategist, Liddell Hart in particular, and the idea that this military scholar learned by studying thousands of years of history and asked the question, which strategies won and which strategies tended to lose?, and he came to the conclusion that if you have a direct strategy where you’re striking directly, think for example of the charges across the fields in the Civil War, a direct charge against the other side; the casualties were awful. World War I was the same thing, just awful bloodshed so quickly, so many men lost their lives by the tens of thousands in battles; that was direct strategy.

In contrast, World War II was more maneuver rather than strike directly; they would have a flanking maneuver. So let’s apply that spiritually; to fight the world, the flesh, and the devil, we may be tempted to have a direct strategy but we’ll quickly find that direct strategies aren’t too successful because if we’re not loyal to the Lord, if were not looking to Him, we simply don’t have the enabling power to deal with the world, the flesh, and the devil.

The devil is a genius; he can outmaneuver our little creature thoughts. He’s a creature, yes, but he’s apparently a more brilliant creature than any of us are so he can outmaneuver us. But what he can’t do is when we look up and we look at the Lord and we look at His Word and we ask for His help, then we can be successful against the world, the flesh, and the devil. That is the indirect approach; we don’t directly attack the world, the flesh, and the devil, but we indirectly attack by going through the Lord first; claiming the great truths of Scripture first, and then we excel and we have freedom.

Okay, what I’ve tried to do now is to prepare us for the Fall and next time we meet we’re going to have an exercise sheet. I’m going to hand you a sheet and we’re going to have a little matching exercise and a few other points to get in shape for what we’re going to do in the rest of the Fall. I hope you have a godly time and if you’ll look with anticipation for next week we will get started on the rise and reign of David.