Deuteronomy 9: 1 – 29
Pre-game pep talk
9 “Hear, O Israel: You are to cross over the Jordan today, and go in to dispossess nations greater and mightier than yourself, cities great and fortified up to heaven, 2 a people great and tall, the descendants of the Anakim, whom you know, and of whom you heard it said, ‘Who can stand before the descendants of Anak?’ 3 Therefore understand today that the LORD your God is He who goes over before you as a consuming fire. He will destroy them and bring them down before you; so you shall drive them out and destroy them quickly, as the LORD has said to you. 4 “Do not think in your heart, after the LORD your God has cast them out before you, saying, ‘Because of my righteousness the LORD has brought me in to possess this land’; but it is because of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is driving them out from before you. 5 It is not because of your righteousness or the uprightness of your heart that you go in to possess their land, but because of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD your God drives them out from before you, and that He may fulfill the word which the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 6 Therefore understand that the LORD your God is not giving you this good land to possess because of your righteousness, for you are a stiff-necked people. 7 “Remember! Do not forget how you provoked the LORD your God to wrath in the wilderness. From the day that you departed from the land of Egypt until you came to this place, you have been rebellious against the LORD. 8 Also in Horeb you provoked the LORD to wrath, so that the LORD was angry enough with you to have destroyed you. 9 When I went up into the mountain to receive the tablets of stone, the tablets of the covenant which the LORD made with you, then I stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights. I neither ate bread nor drank water. 10 Then the LORD delivered to me two tablets of stone written with the finger of God, and on them were all the words which the LORD had spoken to you on the mountain from the midst of the fire in the day of the assembly. 11 And it came to pass, at the end of forty days and forty nights, that the LORD gave me the two tablets of stone, the tablets of the covenant. 12 “Then the LORD said to me, ‘Arise, go down quickly from here, for your people whom you brought out of Egypt have acted corruptly; they have quickly turned aside from the way which I commanded them; they have made themselves a molded image.’ 13 “Furthermore the LORD spoke to me, saying, ‘I have seen this people, and indeed they are a stiff-necked people. 14 Let Me alone, that I may destroy them and blot out their name from under heaven; and I will make of you a nation mightier and greater than they.’ 15 “So I turned and came down from the mountain, and the mountain burned with fire; and the two tablets of the covenant were in my two hands. 16 And I looked, and behold, you had sinned against the LORD your God—had made for yourselves a molded calf! You had turned aside quickly from the way which the LORD had commanded you. 17 Then I took the two tablets and threw them out of my two hands and broke them before your eyes. 18 And I fell down before the LORD, as at the first, forty days and forty nights; I neither ate bread nor drank water, because of all your sin which you committed in doing wickedly in the sight of the LORD, to provoke Him to anger. 19 For I was afraid of the anger and hot displeasure with which the LORD was angry with you, to destroy you. But the LORD listened to me at that time also. 20 And the LORD was very angry with Aaron and would have destroyed him; so I prayed for Aaron also at the same time. 21 Then I took your sin, the calf which you had made, and burned it with fire and crushed it and ground it very small, until it was as fine as dust; and I threw its dust into the brook that descended from the mountain. 22 “Also at Taberah and Massah and Kibroth Hattaavah you provoked the LORD to wrath. 23 Likewise, when the LORD sent you from Kadesh Barnea, saying, ‘Go up and possess the land which I have given you,’ then you rebelled against the commandment of the LORD your God, and you did not believe Him nor obey His voice. 24 You have been rebellious against the LORD from the day that I knew you. 25 “Thus I prostrated myself before the LORD; forty days and forty nights I kept prostrating myself, because the LORD had said He would destroy you. 26 Therefore I prayed to the LORD, and said: ‘O Lord GOD, do not destroy Your people and Your inheritance whom You have redeemed through Your greatness, whom You have brought out of Egypt with a mighty hand. 27 Remember Your servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; do not look on the stubbornness of this people, or on their wickedness or their sin, 28 lest the land from which You brought us should say, “Because the LORD was not able to bring them to the land which He promised them, and because He hated them, He has brought them out to kill them in the wilderness.” 29 Yet they are Your people and Your inheritance, whom You brought out by Your mighty power and by Your outstretched arm.’
If you are a sports fan like me then I think you would agree that the month of September is a great month. You have the summer sports such as Baseball and NASCAR that have undergone the dog days of Summer and are now ever so close to the post season play and the new seasonal sports are just beginning. My favorite is football [American version not soccer] especially college football.
With the start of games, comes the start of the “Pre-game” speeches. What do coaches say to their teams to get them in the best possible mental state of mind? Do you go over situations? Do you yell and scream and get them excited? Do you try to give a Knute Rockne speech? Or how about an amazing motivational speech like Gene Hackman made in the movie Hoosiers?
Unfortunately, what we see in too many sports coaches who try to do too much before the game. We see coaches who feel that they have to give the “Hoosiers” speech every game. It might work once but this approach gets old real fast. We often see coaches who want to go through all of the possible situations that their team may face. After a few minutes, probably even seconds, their team isn’t listening or they are simply overwhelmed with the amount of information as well as the amount of energy and excitement.
Here are some proven guidelines to make a “pre-game” talk more productive.
First of all you have to realize that players and coaches are excited. As the leader a Coach needs to be calm. They need to take a few deep breathes to settle down before addressing the troops.
Do not just wing it with a pep talk. You need to know what you want to say to your team. Also, keep what you say short and simple. Give them something specific to focus on - Something for their extremely short-term memory.
Make sure you pick the right location. Make sure there is nothing behind you as you talk nothing that would distract your team. Therefore, don’t stand in front of your bench and talk while the other team is warming up behind you.
Reinforce their strengths. Too often coaches remind players of their weaknesses right before games which defeats the purpose of getting them mentally fired up.
Today we are going to listen in to Coach Moses give an inspiring pre-game speech. It must have been pretty good because it has been written down and others have discussed it for thousands of years.
In our present time it is rare for a team to pray before they take the field. But way back in Moses time it was still okay to do. So, although it is not written down for us, I would like to add a possible prayer that Moses prayed before he sent his team across the Jordan River.
Dear Adoni Yahweh Father God,
Thank you for all the gifts you have given us. Help us to enter into this Promised Land with love, wisdom and strength in our hearts. We pray that Your people would look to You in awe and worship. May Your children put into practice all that they have learnt in our training, and bring to mind all the skills and planning from our preparation times. May each son and daughter be aware of Your goodness in their lives, and may this goodness pour out as a witness to Your endless grace. You Lord are our inspiration, our teacher and our protector.
May our trust be in You today and always. Amen!
The thought of their forgetting Yahweh and taking the credit for themselves about their possession of the land and its wealth (8.17) and turning to graven images is now taken up. He fears lest when they have taken possession of the land they will convince themselves that it was because of their own righteousness that they had received the land, and become self-satisfied and heedless of God’s voice. Thus let them ‘Hear, O Israel’ and take note of what the real truth is.
9 “Hear, O Israel: You are to cross over the Jordan today, and go in to dispossess nations greater and mightier than yourself, cities great and fortified up to heaven, 2 a people great and tall, the descendants of the Anakim, whom you know, and of whom you heard it said, ‘Who can stand before the descendants of Anak?’
Israel must listen well. As they know, they are passing over Jordan in the near future, and it is in order that they might dispossess nations greater and mightier than themselves, that they might face cities great and fortified up to heaven (with high walls), and that they might face the spooky Anakim, a people great and tall of whom they have heard the proverb, ‘who can stand against the Anakim?’
As a good coach please note how Moses boasts about the difficulties the army might face. They bring no concern to his heart, for He knows the might of Yahweh. And he has already pointed out how both the Moabites and the Ammonites have already defeated the equivalent of the Anakim because their land was given to them by Yahweh because they were the sons of Lot (2.10, 21). Why then should Israel fear who have the promises made to their fathers to rely on?
3 Therefore understand today that the LORD your God Is He who goes over before you as a consuming fire. He will destroy them and bring them down before you; so you shall drive them out and destroy them quickly, as the LORD has said to you.
Therefore this day they were to know and recognize that it was Yahweh their God Who would go before them as a devouring fire. All their enemies will be burned up before Him. He Who had put His pillar of fire between them and the mighty Egyptian army, will send the same fire before them. He had spoken to them from the midst of fire and this time it will be a devouring fire. This vivid illustration would speak significantly to them.
4 “Do not think in your heart, after the LORD your God has cast them out before you, saying, ‘Because of my righteousness the LORD has brought me in to possess this land’; but it is because of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is driving them out from before you.
Once this has happened they must not say within their hearts, ‘Yahweh has brought me in to possess this land because of my righteousness.’ The reason that He is intending to drive them out is not because of their righteousness, but because of the Canaanites’ extreme wickedness. Yahweh alone Is deserving of the land. It is of His graciousness that they will be allowed possession so that they can prove whether they will be faithful or not. Indeed if they become self-righteous they will shortly be heading for expulsion. Both God and Moses were well aware of the dangers of self-satisfaction. All needed to constantly recognize that their dependence was on God.
5 It is not because of your righteousness or the uprightness of your heart that you go in to possess their land, but because of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD your God drives them out from before you, and that He may fulfill the word which the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
It is not because of their righteousness and their uprightness of heart that Yahweh is doing this, it is due to the facts;
1). Because of the depraved lives and idolatry of the inhabitants,
2). So that He might establish His word given to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
This revelation is important. In what He is doing He is acting as both moral Judge and faithful covenant God, punishing the evil and responding to the good. It was not an act of favoritism against an innocent people, but a revelation of both the righteousness of God in the face of evil and the faithfulness of God to those who had faithfully followed Him. So let them be aware that all this is not because of their righteousness. They enter the land, not as those who have achieved righteousness, but as those who, having been delivered from bondage must begin to reveal righteousness in their lives, by obeying His statutes and ordinances. They must seek righteousness. If they seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness all things will be added to them (Matthew 6.33). But if they become self-righteous they will be lost.
The idea behind this is not that they were being given permission to be unrighteous. They were expected to be righteous. But the point is that their required righteousness could only come from the Righteous One. They must not look to themselves for righteousness, for it was not there in them as their past makes clear, they could only look to Him. It was only by response to Him through the way provided through sacrifices and the shedding of blood, and through continual dependence on Him, that they could hope to fulfill the righteousness that was required of those who would dwell permanently in the land. Yes, He did require them to be righteous if they wished to remain in the land, but let them recognize that this would not come from what they were in themselves. It would come as they looked in faith and trust to Yahweh and as they obeyed Him fully.
6 Therefore understand that the LORD your God is not giving you this good land to possess because of your righteousness, for you are a stiff-necked people.
What our Holy and Gracious God Is doing is offering them a new kind of deliverance, a deliverance from the slavery of sin and obstinacy. Moses thus brings out what God was planning for them. It was a transformation of His people within the land as they responded to the covenant to which they had bound themselves. God had provided the means; they must respond to it and cease being stiff-necked.
The implications of this statement are huge. It is saying that it is not anything in them that brings them within Yahweh’s purposes; it is all of His mercy. He has chosen them because of His love for their fathers and because of His sovereign love. That is why they are acceptable before Him, and that is why He Is bringing them into the land. It is all of His grace, His positive and unmerited love in action towards the undeserving. They have been delivered from Egypt by His gracious act, and they are entering the Promised Land by His gracious act. All He requires of them is the faith to respond. Nevertheless the result must be that they become righteous in response to His love. That is the purpose of His bringing them into the land, and if they do not they will be thrust out of the land.
We too must recognize that if we are to experience His saving work it will not be by our claiming to be righteous, but by admitting that we are aware of just how unrighteous we are. Then He can supply us with the righteousness of Christ and begin to work righteousness within us as a result of His grace, His undeserved love in action. But the result must then be obedience to Him, for that will be the evidence of the work that God has wrought in us (Philippians 2.13).
Calling them ‘stiff-necked’, which signified the unwillingness to turn the head, the unwillingness to deviate from their own chosen path, probably seemed to them a harsh way of speaking, so he spells it out in detail.
Taking up from verse 6 he now establishes that they are a stiff-necked people. It may be argued that the sins which will now be described were mainly of their parents, and that is true, but some of them were certainly willingly involved as youngsters, and they would not have denied their collective responsibility for the sins of their fathers, which tended to be reproduced in themselves. Furthermore they knew that they were just as capable of grumbling themselves, and behaving in the same way as their fathers had, as the two incidents at places given the nickname ‘Meribah’ make clear, for one was at the beginning and resulted from the attitude of the first generation and one was at the end of the forty years when the first generation had nearly died out.
Moses now reminds them of the incident of the molten calf, and of how Yahweh had determined to destroy them, at the time when he went up to collect the completed covenant from Yahweh. For even when they were on the very point of receiving the confirmation of the covenant in stone they had rebelled against Yahweh.
7 “Remember! Do not forget how you provoked the LORD your God to wrath in the wilderness. From the day that you departed from the land of Egypt until you came to this place, you have been rebellious against the LORD.
Let them then remember and not forget, (a double warning), how from day one they had provoked Yahweh their God to anger in the wilderness. Why, from the day when they left Egypt to this very day they had continually been rebellious against Him. For the sad story of this see Exodus 20 onwards and Numbers.
8 Also in Horeb you provoked the LORD to wrath, so that the LORD was angry enough with you to have destroyed you.
Yes, they had even provoked Yahweh to wrath in Horeb before the very mountain where they had trembled before His revelation of Himself and had pleaded to be hidden from it. Even there they had deliberately and almost unbelievably quickly disobeyed the covenant, so quickly had they forgotten what they had seen. They had worshipped a graven image.
A lesson for all of is that all who cling to experiences forget that the effect of them soon passes away. It is the heart set on God that perseveres.
9 When I went up into the mountain to receive the tablets of stone, the tablets of the covenant which the LORD made with you, then I stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights. I neither ate bread nor drank water.
He reminds them that this was when he had gone up into the mountain to meet with God (as they had requested) in order to receive the tablets of stone containing the covenant, the very covenant that Yahweh had so recently made with them, and to which they had promised obedience.
He had remained there for ‘forty days and forty nights’ (Exodus 24.18) neither eating bread nor drinking water. He had endured the hardship of that period but it was they who had been worn down by it, for they had had little to occupy themselves with and their faith was small.
10 Then the LORD delivered to me two tablets of stone written with the finger of God, and on them were all the words which the LORD had spoken to you on the mountain from the midst of the fire in the day of the assembly.
During that time Yahweh Father God had given him the two tablets of stone on which had been written by ‘the finger of God’ the very words which Yahweh had spoken to them on the mount out of the midst of the burning fire in the day when they had assembled before the mountain.
11 And it came to pass, at the end of forty days and forty nights, that the LORD gave me the two tablets of stone, the tablets of the covenant.
At the end of this period of waiting on Yahweh, God had given him the tablets to take with him. Here was a precious gift from God indeed. Here were two permanent ‘witnesses’ guaranteeing the fact and certainty of the covenant, and that it was now ratified and witnessed. How grateful the people would be, he must have thought.
12 “Then the LORD said to me, ‘Arise, go down quickly from here, for your people whom you brought out of Egypt have acted corruptly; they have quickly turned aside from the way which I commanded them; they have made themselves a molded image.’
Moses goes on to say that the news that was given to him at the same time was not good. It was that the people that he had brought forth from Egypt had corrupted themselves already (Exodus 32.7). With almost unbelievable speed they had turned aside from the way that God had commanded them to walk in. They had made themselves a molten image All that Yahweh had done for them was forgotten. They had so quickly turned from obedience to His words.
13 “Furthermore the LORD spoke to me, saying, ‘I have seen this people, and indeed they are a stiff-necked people. 14 Let Me alone, that I may destroy them and blot out their name from under heaven; and I will make of you a nation mightier and greater than they.’
Our Holy God Yahweh had been so affected by their sin that He had wanted to destroy them, and he offered instead to fulfill His promise to Abraham to give the land to his seed by raising up descendants to Moses. But Moses interceded for the people and Yahweh spared them for his sake.
15 “So I turned and came down from the mountain, and the mountain burned with fire; and the two tablets of the covenant were in my two hands. 16 And I looked, and behold, you had sinned against the LORD your God—had made for yourselves a molded calf! You had turned aside quickly from the way which the LORD had commanded you.
The description is very much abbreviated and he passes over the danger to his own life as though it had not existed. Rather he contrasts the two scenes, on the one hand the mountain still burning with holy fire (a personal reminiscence not previously mentioned) and the two tables of the covenant in his hands, and on the other the molten calf and their turning aside to their own way. The mountain was afire continually with the living presence of Yahweh, a fire that they dared not approach, while in contrast the molten calf having been shaped in fire, was now void of fire, and was nothing to be afraid of. It was a hollow pretence. Yahweh was where He chose, on the Mount, not on the calf which was where the people chose. And while the tablets had been in process of preparation in the Mount in order to finally seal the covenant, the people had been in the process of rebelling against it.
17 Then I took the two tablets and threw them out of my two hands and broke them before your eyes.
All this had been too much for Moses and he had hurled the tablets to the ground and smashed them in front of their very eyes. No better way could have been found of indicating that their actions had made void the covenant. The destruction of a treaty document regularly followed severe breaches of a treaty. Thus this act now invalidated the treaty. Let them see what they had done. They had invalidated the covenant that they had so recently confirmed. It would humanly speaking take the intercession of Moses to bring about the establishment of a new treaty.
He makes no mention of the trials he went through as the people challenged him. He is prepared not to bring that against them, even though it would have strengthened his argument. Rather he moves straight on to what a dangerous position the people had been in.
18 And I fell down before the LORD, as at the first, forty days and forty nights; I neither ate bread nor drank water, because of all your sin which you committed in doing wickedly in the sight of the LORD, to provoke Him to anger.
For in order to spare them from the destruction that they had deserved and to avert the Lord’s anger, he had gone back into the Mount to plead with God. Indeed he had done what he had previously done on the earlier time of forty days and forty nights in the Mount. He had not eaten bread or drank any water. He had fallen down before Yahweh and pleaded for them, because of all their sin which they had sinned in doing what was evil in the sight of Yahweh, provoking Him to anger.
19 For I was afraid of the anger and hot displeasure with which the LORD was angry with you, to destroy you. But the LORD listened to me at that time also.
Indeed Moses had recognized the depths of Yahweh’s anger, and so was filled with a great fear. He had been afraid of what Yahweh would do. He had been sure that Yahweh had intended to destroy them. And so, he says, he had pleaded, and Yahweh had listened to him that time as well, and had spared the people as a whole even though some had been smitten (Exodus 32.28, 35).
20 And the LORD was very angry with Aaron and would have destroyed him; so I prayed for Aaron also at the same time.
Yahweh had also been very angry at Aaron as well, and had intended to destroy him. But by his intercession Moses had averted both the sentence on the people and that sentence on Aaron as well.
This occurrence is not mentioned in Exodus, but a little thought will reveal that it was inevitable. What Aaron had done was ‘unforgivable’. The wonder is not that we find it here, but that we do not find it in Exodus. It suggests that that section of Exodus was written when Aaron was still alive so that Moses had wanted to spare his brother the agony of knowing that he was going down in history as a renegade but it does serve to explain the severity of Aaron’s punishment later when Moses was spared over the incident at Meribah for Aaron it had been one grave sin too many, and he had to die.
21 Then I took your sin, the calf which you had made, and burned it with fire and crushed it and ground it very small, until it was as fine as dust; and I threw its dust into the brook that descended from the mountain.
Moses had taken ‘their sin’, the calf, and burned it with fire, and had then taken the resulting gold, and had stamped on it and ground it very small ‘until it was as fine as dust’. Then he had cast the gold dust into the mountain beck that came down from the Mount. There he also made them drink of the water. They were drinking their god! The point, however, here is that sin had soured the blessing that came from God’s mountain.
22 “Also at Taberah and Massah and Kibroth Hattaavah you provoked the LORD to wrath.
Then Moses briefly reminds them of other incidents where they had been stiff-necked, at Taberah when the fire of Yahweh burnt among them because of their complaining (Numbers 11.1-3), at Massah when they became belligerent at the lack of water (Exodus 17.1-7), at Kibroth-hattavah where the people failed to restrain themselves and revealed their greed in gathering too many quails which had died (Number 11.31-34). In all these places they had ‘provoked Yahweh to anger/wrath’ by their behavior.
23 Likewise, when the LORD sent you from Kadesh Barnea, saying, ‘Go up and possess the land which I have given you,’ then you rebelled against the commandment of the LORD your God, and you did not believe Him nor obey His voice.
The same had been fatally true at Kadesh-barnea when they had refused to obey Yahweh’s command to go up and possess the land because they were afraid at the report of the scouts. They had rebelled against His command, an unforgivable crime for soldiers. It was mutiny. And they had refused to believe Him and would not listen to His promises. That was sacrilege.
24 You have been rebellious against the LORD from the day that I knew you.
Moses sums it all up in one sentence. There had never been a time when they had not been rebellious, from the first moment when he had arrived in Egypt. Ever since he had known them they had been continually open to being rebellious.
25 “Thus I prostrated myself before the LORD; forty days and forty nights I kept prostrating myself, because the LORD had said He would destroy you. 26 Therefore I prayed to the LORD, and said: ‘O Lord GOD, do not destroy Your people and Your inheritance whom You have redeemed through Your greatness, whom You have brought out of Egypt with a mighty hand. 27 Remember Your servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; do not look on the stubbornness of this people, or on their wickedness or their sin, 28 lest the land from which You brought us should say, “Because the LORD was not able to bring them to the land which He promised them, and because He hated them, He has brought them out to kill them in the wilderness.”
Please notice how the analysis reveals that he saw this prayer as one whole. It was so serious that it could not be used in order to follow a literary method. Every phrase was telling in his battle for their lives.
So he reminded them again how it was only through his intercession that God had not destroyed every last man of them, Aaron included, man, woman and child. He had had to deeply humiliate himself. It had been a long and persistent and costly intercession. And what had been the basis of his prayer? Not the deserving of the people, that was certain. He was praying that they would not get what they deserved. No, the basis had been twofold, the maintenance of Yahweh’s reputation among the Egyptians and all who knew of these events, and for the sake of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
He had reminded Yahweh that they were His people and His inheritance because they were descended from the patriarchs, that He had used His own greatness in order to redeem them from Egypt, and that He had exerted His mighty hand to that end. So He must remember that they were the people whom He had delivered. Furthermore he had pictured Egypt who had suffered under His activities as interested in their progress and waiting to gloat, and he had pointed out that if news came back that Israel had perished in the wilderness it would speak evi on Him. They would have impugned both His ability and might (‘Yahweh was not able’), and His covenant loyalty (‘it was because He hated them’). They would have deemed all His actions a mean-spirited trick, and a sign of Someone who had promised more than He could perform.
He has no false conceptions about Israel, and does not hold his punches. He prays, ‘Do not look at their stubbornness, nor to their wickedness, nor to their sin’. He does not question that they deserved to be destroyed. Indeed he painted them as black as could be. He was concerned only for God’s holiness. Nothing could have more brought out to them that they were far from righteous.
29 Yet they are Your people and Your inheritance, whom You brought out by Your mighty power and by Your outstretched arm.’
His final plea was again that they were His people and His inheritance, and that He had demonstrated this when He had exerted His great power and His outstretched arm in order to bring them out. Whatever they had done, he had pleaded, surely He must be faithful to what He had promised to Abraham, for it was because they were Abraham’s descendants, at least in principle that they were His people and His inheritance.
What no doubt pleased God was the heart of Moses? Here was one whose sole concern was Yahweh’s honor and glory. It was doubtful if He Himself was too bothered about His reputation for doing what was absolutely just as far as the Egyptians were concerned but He was delighted that Moses cared so much. We are left to recognize that Moses’ prayer was successful. But the point of bringing all this out here was to disillusion the people about their own righteousness. Through God’s grace He had accepted them as His people. But it was not because they deserved it. If it had been left to their righteousness they would not be there. Let them then take to heart that they deserved nothing. They were not worthy. It was all of grace.
We all can take to heart the same lesson. There is no righteousness in us. The reason we are made righteous is because of the Precious Holy Innocent Lamb of God Who gave His life and shed His blood for us. Our Holy God Yahweh looks at the pure and Holy blood of His only begotten Son and declares us as righteous because His Son Is Righteous. Thank you Lord Jesus.
